ward bond film festival: evening four

The Maltese Falcon: (1941. dir: John Huston) The thing about this film --other than the extraordinary fact that this masterpiece of nastiness marks Huston's debut in the director's chair-- is the claustrophobia of it. Much of it plays out in crowded little rooms: Spade's seedy office, Gutman's rich, overstuffed living room where Spade gets slipped the old mickey, and then everyone squeezes for the night into Spade's coldwater flat to await the delivery of the rara avis and to strip metaphorical pieces of flesh off one another. Huston's camera angles add greatly to the air of suffocation and vileness. Rarely do we look straight across at someone: it's up or down, giving a sinister feel of distortion, and groups of threes tend to be cramped together and hunched over, like caged beasts.

As a kid I disliked the film because of Mary Astor, who seemed to me about as fatale as the overworked waitress down at the corner bakery. She gets announced in the first breath of the film as "a knockout", but instead this pinched, nearsighted woman with hair simultaneously mousy and insane walks in and proceeds to hyperventilate and overemote for two hours. In retrospect, I can see that the character herself never once relaxes, never stops acting; that we never do see a moment that we're certain is the real girl beneath the masks. I'm willing to concede that it may be quite a feat, and I may owe Astor an apology; I'll get back to you when I'm certain.

Bond is Detective Tom Polhaus, the benevolent half of the Good Cop/Bad Cop plaguing Spade, and he gets photographed mostly from the side or back so we watch Bogart instead, but I'm fond of this character. I love the low-key delivery, the solidity of this man amid the jackal-pack of crooks and half-crooks, a decent man in a place where no one ever says exactly what they mean unless they know it will hurt someone. I love the optimism of him, as when he says of the dead Archer, "It's tough him gettin' it like that, ain't it? Miles had his faults like any of the rest of us, but I guess he must have had some good points, too, huh?" To which Spade can only grimace, hesitate, and reply, "I guess so," in a tone that really says, "No, and I knew him as well as anyone did."



Hitler -- Dead or Alive: (1943. dir: Nick Grinde) Whoa! Buckle up for a wacky, hamfisted little war-time film about gangsters fresh from Alcatraz who hijack a plane into Germany to assassinate the little guy with the moustache for a million dollar reward. A lot less fun than Inglourious Basterds while every bit as bughouse-unbelievable in its plot-turns, it does boast a more satisfying means of offing the Fuehrer, but very little else. Bond is the head gangster and gives a strangely over-the-top performance, like he's imitating a Cagney mobster, missing what's good about it and just skimming the cheese off the top. He's got a few satisfying scenes, like teaching the newbie prison etiquette or (my favorite) the time the Countess turns on the ice when she hears he's just doing it for money and he comes back with, "Is it a crime for a guy to make a couple of quarters?"



Dakota: (1945. dir: Joseph Kane) Walter Brennan has one funny moment in this decidedly unfunny comedy/action oater. He's trying to deny that two people have been murdered: "Maybe it's one of them suicide pacts where one person says to the other, 'Hold on a minute while I blow your head off.'" Doesn't really look funny on the page, but he makes it so, and that's about it for the humour. John Wayne and Vera Ralston are nobody's George and Gracie, and in fact the script plods every time Ralston walks onscreen. It's hard to say who's more annoying: Vera herself or her character, a ditzy blond who brings trouble with every decision she makes. I suppose she was supposed to be in the tradition of Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, but the two names shouldn't be spoken in the same sentence. Ward Bond is entirely in his element as a smooth land-grabber out to cheat everyone in Fargo, but we never get to see him fight the Duke, always a disappointment for me.



Blowing Wild: (1953. dir: Hugo Fregonese) Love triangle amongst oilmen in Central America. Hard to miss when your triangle consists of Stanwyck, Cooper and Quinn, but this one comes pretty close. The directing feels shabby and loose, and there's no palpable chemistry between the supposedly mutually-obsessed Stanwyck and Cooper. The heat comes from Anthony Quinn on the odd-man-out point of the triangle; he throws himself full-force into the passion as a hot-blooded man in love with his wife and unable to punish his best friend or to live with the truth of it. Stanwyck is a goddess and can play this role hogtied and blindfolded, and she does, she plays it into the ground, but I'm tired of seeing her stuck in this same dead-end role of the woman who's too strong to live. Bond is Cooper's sidekick again, this time kind of a thick and hangdog one, who disappears into the hospital after a half hour and so gives the Cooper character his excuse to stick around town long after he says he wants to leave.

ward bond film festival: evening three

Unconquered: (1947. dir: Cecil B. DeMille) Flat and uninspired frontier epic by that master of the genre who seems to have been tired in this particular year. We all walk into an epic with certain expectations of thrilling grandeur, and in return we are willing to sacrifice certain beloved qualities: subtlety of acting, for instance, and any semblance of historical realism. And those things ARE sacrificed in this, but where's the pay-off? Where's the burning of Atlanta? or the fire hailing against the marble at Yul Brynner's sandaled feet? the eerie green effluvia reaching down to choke the first-born of Egypt? Anne Baxter with her over-chewed but somehow adorable "Moses, Moses"? where's the chariot race, or at least the lepers? Nowhere to be found.

Even the plunge over the great waterfall, which I suspect was meant to be the grand centerpiece of the film, feels rote and decidedly unthrilling, and who among audience-members has ever for a moment bought that particular escape from death? Groans of disbelief all around. The one set-piece that does come off well is when the Indians attack the fort at night with flaming arrows -- always a crowd-pleaser, -- but even that doesn't match up to its counterpart in Drums Along the Mohawk, when the settlers are furiously trying to stop the live immolation of a friend and Ward Bond gets a flaming arrow right in the shoulder. It's a brilliantly vibrant shot, and how in hell did they do it? without actually shooting Ward Bond in the shoulder with a flaming arrow, I mean?

In place of grandeur DeMille's given us lots of colour, and, as anyone who's been reading lately knows, I'm big on bold colour use right now, but this is random. Bright colors randomly placed do not provide the aesthetic pleasure of the well-used palette, so I offer him no cigar for that. The script is incredible both in its plot-turns and in the choices its human characters make. Of course it's politically incorrect as far as the Indians go, that's expected from the time; even worse is the dull use to which they are put. All the Indians are two-dimensional, thick and sanguinary, and wholly fixated on the white man.

Not that the white men are any further fleshed out. Ward Bond is relegated to a maiden-auntish role, fussing over Gary Cooper and doing little else. Paulette Goddard is utterly dreadful and talks though her nose. Is she always this bad? Is it really possible this woman was considered for Scarlett O'Hara? I have to watch the Women; perhaps she's skilled in dark, snarky comedy, but any talent she might have got lost under the sofa cushions at home or something while she was shooting this.

And in what era of history were slaves ever this well treated? When in the history of the world did a guy ever buy a beautiful woman off an auction block, slavering with lust, then say, "I will not force you. I will wait until you come to me of your own free will." PLEASE! There's historically incorrect, and then there's crazy Maybe-On-Some-Distant-Mary-Poppins-Planet la-la-la Pollyannaism.



Park Avenue Logger: (1937. dir: David Howard) Unpretentious, low-budget and badly-preserved little comedy about a rich man sent by his father to learn toughness by helping to deforest Oregon. It's not funny, but it's got a certain charm, and feels ten years older than it really is. The blocking is stage-bound, the sound is bad, and there's a lot of heartbreaking stock footage of really huge trees being ruthlessly downed. Ward Bond is young and handsome and playing the heavy, but one with a conscience. George O'Brien, a strong-man who started in stunts and got his first break when John Ford cast him in the Iron Horse, is easy in front of the camera, the very antithesis of vain.



The Night Key: (1937. dir: Lloyd Corrigan) Unassuming and surprisingly entertaining Boris Karloff piece about an electrical genius whose lifework is stolen by big business, so he teams up with a small-time crook to get his own back. Complications ensue when more serious mobsters get involved; there's a beautiful daughter to be kidnapped, and a handsome security guard to fall in love with her. Karloff may have the most interesting face and the most photogenic eyes in the business, and just contrasting this mild-mannered, nearsighted boffin with the Indian war chief he played in Unconquered is clear testament to his considerable adeptness and flexibility. Bond plays a version of the mobster heavy he came to know so well during his career, but it may be the only time he ends up electrocuted in an easy chair while reading a magazine.

the ward bond film festival continues

the Long Voyage Home: (1940. dir: John Ford) My God, what Gregg Toland and John Ford can do together. The space that Ford gives his actors to move around in, he gives that to Toland as well; he doesn't clutter the images up with words without a decent reason. Let's be clear: this is a b&w seagoing adventure pulled together from several short plays by Eugene O'Neill, and I have a short temper where O'Neill is concerned. I like him, and I'd watch all six hours of Mourning Becomes Electra if given the chance (and it looks like I never will be), but I have no patience for any of his myriad plays about people whose only joys come in drunkenness and their only problems from an inability to walk out of a bar. It's probably one of those things like the Grateful Dead or smoking cigarettes: either you get it or you don't. Personally, I never got the Grateful Dead, and listening to O'Neill's characters mewl and puke about how they've had to give up everything for the bottle makes me drum my fingers and yawn and look at my watch.

Luckily, O'Neill is not why you watch this. Officially, it's a John Wayne film, the Ford/Wayne follow-up to Stagecoach, but really it's an ensemble piece spearheaded by Thomas Mitchell's customary cute-but-clever Drunken Irishman. Wayne has never been more gorgeous or more sensuously photographed, but it's a pretty-boy role, it's got no heft to it, and he's hobbled by a fairly awful Swedish accent. But none of that is why you watch it, either.

The movie starts with a ship in harbor. Everything is still, stagnant, except on the island shore, where native women writhe in heat while their mysterious native drums beat. There's a beautiful shot of a sailor silhouetted atop the massive dark hulk of ship lighting a cigarette, then we go in close to see it's Ward Bond, blowing smoke rings and gazing to shore. Duke joins him for a moment, then stretches in good-humored frustration and goes away to lie across a bulkhead and look at the stars. It's a beautiful, strange opening, setting up shipboard existence as a sort of anti-life, a suspended animation into which these sailors keep placing themselves because they haven't got the stones to rejoin the world, spoken of warily as "the Land". When on The Land, although they talk wildly of escaping the harsh and fruitless imprisonment at sea, they go immediately into a bar until they've drunk up their money, then use that as an excuse to escape back to sea.

But you don't watch this movie for O'Neill's insights into life or suffering or even drunkenness. You watch it for the artistry of its making. Look at that gorgeous framing, shot by shot. Fan as I am of a strong narrative flow, I have to admire that Ford seems to make his pictures first and foremost to give us a taste of living Someplace Other: in a Northeastern farming community during the Revolution in Drums Along the Mohawk, or in the heat and dirt of the Depression in Grapes of Wrath, or, in this, on a dark fortress of a steamer caught all around by ocean. Even in those films of his which employ the strongest narrative line, it's never the greatest thing. The greatest thing is his love of these worlds of his own creation, and his patience in showing us their beauties and darknesses.



On Dangerous Ground: (1952. dir: Nicholas Ray) I'm gazing across the shifting ground of time to another era entirely, which tends to obscure one's clarity of vision, but it seems to me this must have felt truly edgy and dangerous when it came out. Like most Ray movies, it's got a cheese factor, and hip teen patois rarely ages well, but it's half in love with its own darkness, and by the standards of its day it may have been the fastest paced noir yet.

The first half follows three cops on their beat around one of the ugliest noir-cities you've ever seen, and Robert Ryan, with moments of true Lawrence-Tierney kind of bad-assed mofo, is so attracted and repulsed by the streets he walks that he's going over to the dark side, slowly petrifying into a being other than human, something made out of rock or maybe cruelty. About halfway through he gets sent north into a rural area to help solve the murder of a young girl, and ends up accompanying the shotgun-wielding, vengeance-fixated father (played by Bond) on a search for the killer. Ida Lupino is the killer's blind sister who winds up melting the ice that's been mucking up the workings of Ryan's heart, but the two of them play hard enough against mawkishness that even I was not opposed to the sentiment of it. I think it's the best performance I've seen from Ryan.



Canyon Passage: (1946. dir: Jacques Tourneur) My love for this movie is inordinate; it licks right up over the edges of reason. First off, it gets some billing as a musical, which I hasten to assure you it is not. Hoagy Carmichael sings three songs is all, and it's got none of that Bustin'-into-Song-as-Soliloquy nonsense; he's just a strange character who walks around town with a mandolin and likes to sing, and folks put up with him. Possibly I love it in part because it was set and filmed in my neck of the woods (Jacksonville, officially, and you can see weird old Mt Thielsen crooked in the background of the cabin-raising scene, and when the Indians are on the war-path, the war-path goes right along the rim of Crater Lake). It opens in Portland, back when it was a dirt-laned port-town. "1000 people and raining," the Dana Andrews character describes it. If you step off the ramp in the street, you fall waist-high into mud.

Mostly, though, my love is roused by Jacques Tourneur. My God, the colors in this thing! Being Tourneur, he uses shadows like a master of the art, but I never knew he was a master of technicolor as well. (It reminds me some of that other masterpiece of colour, Drums Along the Mohawk, in which Ford takes the breath clean out of your lungs with the boldness of his palette. His indoor nocturnal scenes are done up in what I can only describe as Dario Argento reds and blues, emphasized by deep pockets of shadow.) The world he creates is fascinating down to smallest details.

The story is compelling without being extraordinary, but the dialogue stands a rung or two above your average oater, with some psychological depth. It's got the parallel extremes of sweetness and darkness, that crucial factor which separates the stallions from the eunuchs in the Western genre; it's got a solid cast, with Ward Bond giving a note-perfect performance as the town bully, haplessly named Honey Bragg. There's a fight scene in the middle, when Bragg calls Dana Andrews' Logan Stuart out, that is one of the best filmed I've ever seen. Bragg is already waiting at the high-ceilinged bar when the whole town converges, bringing Stuart like a lamb to slaughter ("He had an arm like a chunk of oak," he'd said earlier of Bragg), and you see shadows of their heads fall against the far wall until all the sunlight is blocked out. Once the fighting starts, it's Bond's Bragg who is the focus of both lighting and camera. Lit and shot at extreme close range to emphasize the blood and sweat, his fall is like that of a bull in the ring. It's a vicious fight, relentless, nothing pretty about it. "Yellow dogs," he barks at the cheering townsfolk as he stumbles away, beaten and humiliated, brought to the nadir from which he will single-handedly incite the local Indians to destroy the bulk of the white populace.

There is darkness shot all through this bright, sweet film, like poisoned veins: murders and nihilism and Mammon-worship. Reminiscent of Tourneur's films with Val Lewton, there's a beautiful raven-haired proto-Goth woman. The Brian Donlevy character, a compulsive gambler, is obsessed with her, and she is married to a man in black who owns an ongoing card game and a bad cough and who says he calls friend "...any man who believes like I do that the human race is a horrible mistake." Whenever someone is about to commit a murder, Tourneur shows us their eyes as they decide to do it, then fades out on their mid-sections as they walk toward the camera to commit the act, a remarkably effective technique. Horses get shot down in cold blood, folks get scalped; miners are constantly being reported murdered throughout, we assume for their gold, as is the one we see killed, although it's always the Indians who garner the blame; an Indian girl gets raped (we assume, from the look in Bragg's eye) then murdered. And throughout, there's the nagging sense that just behind the happy community feeling (one new bride gushes at her cabin-raising about how lovely it is that all these people came out to help, and people set her straight: they're doing it because they want new neighbors, and more potential guns against the Indians) there's a rabid crowd ready to turn and string you up, as evidenced by the ongoing incitements from the townsfolk for bloody fights on which they can lay wagers, and on their quickness to jail and plan a lynching for the banker who is accused of killing a miner.

Still, in the end, with the town lying in ashes, farms burned and people slain, there's still a feeling of regeneration in the air. It's the culmination of a cycle, not of the world. Tourneur has balanced the darkness and the light with his usual ease, and somehow pulls off an entirely believable redemptive ending.

second man through the door: ward bond

If you'd said when I was a kid that one day I'd have a crush on Bert the Cop, I'd have said you were nuts. But it happened, somewhere between watching the Big Trail in November and Tall in the Saddle in February, one of those crushes that creeps up and hits you sidelong so you don't see it coming.

Ward Bond, they say, appears in more of AFI's 100 Best Films Ever Made than any other actor, and I believe it. In 1939, he's not in Stagecoach, as you'd expect (rumor has it Andy Devine complained onset that the only reason he got the role was because Ward Bond couldn't drive a six-up), but he shows up that year as a Yankee officer in that other film, the one where Atlanta gets the torch. He's there somewhere in the Maltese Falcon, It Happened One Night, the Grapes of Wrath, Bringing Up Baby, and if you haven't seen him in the Searchers, you're missing a beautiful thing.

Someone ought to write a book. Politically a little to the right of Attila the Hun, he was listed 4-F for the draft in WWII because he was a secret epileptic. This was a man who suffered backlash blacklisting: that is, he was so vociferously involved in the Hollywood anti-communist movement in the forties that in the fifties he could only find work with friends, and it's lucky the ever-powerful Wayne was one such. In the latter fifties he scored the lead in the Wagon Train TV show (I've watched a single ep, which was dreadful, due not to the acting but to a gaggingly awful script) which made him First Man Through the Door for the first time (unless you count Hitler -- Dead or Alive, a strange little propaganda film I haven't been able to find yet, and as far as I can tell the only one in which he ever scored top billing. Even in Wagon Master, the template for the TV show, he got fourth billing after Ben Johnson, Joanne Dru and Harry Carey Jr.). He was a loyal part of John Ford's inner circle from the time he entered the business. He died, after stumping for Nixon, two days before Kennedy took the election in 1960, from a heart attack in Dallas. According to Scott Eyman's Print the Legend, after returning from Bond's funeral, John Ford walked up to Andy Devine and said, "Now YOU'RE the biggest shit I know." I don't know why, but I really hope that story is true.

Only the Valiant: (1951. dir: Gordon Douglas) Gregory Peck is pretty, Gig Young is the embodiment of louche, and Ward Bond is a force of nature in this Ford-like cavalry picture. Had Coach been at the helm, Victor McLaglen would've played Bond's role, and that'd've been too bad, because Bond has a scene at the beginning in which the camera hardly glances away while he whirls around a barracks, talking to the men, sneaking a drink, unseating a fellow from a card game who's holding an enviable hand, delivering exposition in so deft and engaging a manner that it's a pleasure to be in his company. Even the drunken Irishman act doesn't gall me the way it normally would because his chops are so flawless. That is, he's not just any drunken Irishman, but a very particular one; the way he carefully measures out each swallow of the limited whiskey, for instance, makes it feel like we're watching a man whose life extends beyond both ends of the movie rather than a character caught between its frames.

It's not the best cavalry picture ever made, but it's surely one of the more interesting ones. Gregory Peck is unpopular with his men for a variety of reasons, most of them due to an excess of enthusiasm for following orders, but when he's ordered to send his rival in love on a suicide mission he was slated to lead himself, everyone turns against him. He gathers up all the men who hate him most and takes them on another suicidal mission against the Apaches, having to watch his back from all sides as well as the front. There are some great moments: my favorite is the eerie night-time silence while the cavalrymen watch helpless from their fortress as each lantern they've set up in the passageway is shot dark by unseen Apaches. And Lon Chaney plays a mad Arab soldier. Did anyone in those days emote as fully, as unabashedly, as Lon Chaney?

Three Godfathers: (1948. dir: John Ford) This is a tough one. Garry Wills in John Wayne's America (HIGHLY recommend this read) includes it in his list of the best of the Ford/Wayne partnership, but, boy howdy, it's tough. It's shamelessly sentimental, dripping with it, even, and shot right through its very heart with a mawkish Sunday-School religiosity, but the worst of it is that the story is entirely unbelievable on nearly every front. Three barely credible cattle-rustlers turn bank-robber and get chased into the desert by Ward Bond and his posse, where they come upon a woman dying in childbirth who makes them promise to raise her baby as their own. I can only suggest this one to die-hard Ford fans, who'll find the folks they love (Ben Johnson, Dobe Carey, poor Jane Darwell in another of Ford's "let's see how utterly we can humiliate Jane and keep her coming back for more" roles) and some compelling photography. Carey's death-scene is gorgeous, his prone form shot from a sort of Mantegna's-Christ angle while Duke stands holding his hat against the sun to shield the boy's face, and the way the desert storms are shot is the kind of poetry a person can see.

Ward Bond's role as Marshall Buck Sweet is problematic (everything is problematic in this movie), but his first scene (again) involves a truly wonderful bit. The three cowboys have just ridden into town and pause on their way to rob the bank long enough to laugh at the shingle on the fence that reads "B. Sweet". Sweet, a nice guy but a good lawman, senses something ill in their intentions and tries to stall them with neighborliness. When he pulls on his vest with the star pinned to it, they all go quiet and he knows his hunch was right. "I'll be seeing you boys again," he says, still neighborly, but with a serious underscore, "probably." It's not a very well-written scene (it's not a very well-written movie) but Bond gives it just the right turns, just the right inner life. By the rolling of the end credits, his character has faded into two-dimensions, but so has the whole movie, and it's none of his fault.

Tall in the Saddle: (1944. dir: Edwin L. Marin) I love this one, although it suffers from a surfeit of Gabby Hayes (a little bit of Gabby goes a long way indeed, and I think maybe folks had a different sense of humour in those days) and some two-dimensional characterizations. This is a Western in which Duke gets to solve a mystery, which becomes a murder mystery as he goes along. As the big fan of genre-crossing, it's a natural for me. Another thing it's got going for it is the fact that Duke chooses the bad girl over the good one. Bond plays one of the villains, and not his usual unthinking muscleman but a slick, lawyerly type of bad guy. In fact, it took me several scenes longer than it took John Wayne's character to realize that this Judge was trying to cheat a nice girl of her inheritance, since the Bad Judge looked and sounded like Ward Bond and who wouldn't trust Ward Bond if he said sign this paper and I'll take care of everything?

There's some lovely noirish lighting in the night-time scenes, particularly up at the cabin when some unknown foe attacks the Duke unawares while he's (if I remember this correctly) making biscuits. This is also one of those movies where Wayne and Bond have a big knock-down fist-fight (Shepherd of the Hills is another favorite in that respect), and that's always good, because nobody besides Ward Bond ever had both the physical size and personal presence to balance the Duke in a scene. Everyone else seems pale, or emaciated, or just plain dwarfed.

john drew barrymore: an actor without a role

My favorite part of While the City Sleeps, that queer amalgam of jolly Hollywood banter and Fritz Lang creepiness, is a shot of the murderer peering up a staircase, up toward the camera, while his prey goes all unawares into her apartment. His head appears off-center, the framing just off-kilter enough as to be entirely psychologically satisfying. There is something dreamlike about it; it bears something of the silent film's strange grace. The murderer's grimace is something from a nightmare.

The first time I saw it (I missed the credits) I did not know the name of the young actor. In fact, he was the only actor in the thing I DIDN'T know: Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, Vincent Price, George Sanders, Thomas Mitchell, Ida Lupino; this is one stellar cast. And then there's this strange-faced young man, pudgier than you expect from an actor of that period and far less handsome, even for a villain. And there's something else missing: a certain vanity. There are moments when he fails, and his style is often embarrassingly hamfisted, but there are other moments which feel truly experienced in that shocking way that Dean and Brando and Clift were teaching us to know and love. In the first moment we see the killer, a delivery boy, experience the rush of bloodlust that will lead to a murder, Barrymore lets his face go slack-jawed, his eyes go blank and devoid of humanity. In a single moment we have seen him turn from a graceless teenager into a killing machine, and there is no question of compunction or self-doubt or second thoughts. We know for a fact that he will work tirelessly until this lust is sated, and we know it without any dialogue.

It's a strange performance in a strange movie, and I thought little more of the actor until I found myself amazed by a Gunsmoke episode, "One Killer On Ice", in which a charming and hard-drinking bounty hunter rides into Dodge and convinces Matt to accompany him in transporting an infamous prisoner. Like most serials of the time, the regular cast is frozen into two dimensions by the very demands of the series: Festus must always be silly, Miss Kitty's heart must always be golden, Matt must never show sign of weakness, Doc must never tire. It's the guests who have the chance to shine, and Barrymore does just that. The hour-long format gives good, relaxed opportunity for character development, and Barrymore's bounty-hunter gets layers of subtle shading. He's the easy lover of women and speaks in an engaging Southern drawl, a man who seems virtuous and fun-loving in the first half hour and becomes increasingly complex as it continues, until Matt has to take him out. It is an utterly self-assured performance; his choices are strong and fascinating. What won me absolutely were the odd and intriguing moments where he chose to laugh, never where you'd expect. This is the performance that has convinced me, in spite of most of the rest of his resume, that he might have been an important actor.

The trouble is, it never seems to have come fully manifest. After Gunsmoke, I punched up Netflix and found some four or five other entries, none of them promising. Barrymore, it is said, was difficult. Originally slated to play the double-character of Lazarus in Star Trek's quirky first-season ep "The Alternative Factor", he failed to show up for shooting and was replaced by Robert Brown. This was apparently not unusual, and while he did a lot of television throughout the fifties, as well as playing roles like the BMOC/drug-pusher in High School Confidential, he fled during the sixties to Italy to make shlock like Rome Against Rome, an ultra-cut-rate zombie flick in which he plays a one-eyed-goddess-worshipping priest who talks in that strange old pseudo-British studio-speak: "terrible" becomes "teddible", "power" becomes "pahr" and "happen" becomes "heppen".

But then there's this curious little entry in his resume: did you know they remade Winchester '73? It's true. For television, starring Tom Tryon in the white hat and John Saxon in the black. Over the years we've seen a slew of cringeworthy television "further adventures" remakes like the Warren Oates/Mariette Hartley African Queen, or the Timothy Dalton/Joanne Whalley Scarlett, but this is a rough duplicate of the classic Anthony Mann/Jimmy Stewart classic, and so possibly ranks among the most superfluous and ill-advised ventures of all time. Even so, the most misguided projects have happy accidents at their edges and corners, and this one has Barrymore playing one of Saxon's henchmen: gruff-voiced, full-bearded, black-clad and spider-like, he's a preacher sprung from jail. He's also easily the most interesting part of the movie, and has some of the best lines.

But back to While the City Sleeps: perhaps, in retrospect, his most important film. It does not rank among my favorite noirs. Its focus is too scattered, its tone too muddled, and Dana Andrews is certainly not at his shining best in the lead. The parts which do shine are the the parts when Lang can play with the camera: any time there's a staircase, he has a grand time with subtleties of angle and perspective. In the first murder scene, he's put a creak in the landing right outside the victim's door, a small detail, a thing I didn't notice on first viewing, but a lovely one, a builder of subconscious tension. He also knows exactly what to do in the subway: a subway is like a banquet of shadow and light for the likes of him. And for all Barrymore's flaws I know why he was cast: because his crazed expressions are effective pieces of nightmare when suddenly illuminated, and because there's something about his graceful awkwardness of stance which lends itself to Lang's strange angles.

I have a sense, in watching him, that his most important work went into his life and was never captured by a camera. He feels to me like an important actor who never found his important role, or maybe was too drunk or depressed to turn up onset for it.