*BIG SPOILER ALERT*
(1954. dir: Fritz Lang) This may be the coldest noir I've seen. It troubles me.
As good as it is, with the camera making great use of train-yards and hot metal hurtling down tracks, not to mention the bleakness of the little house in the hell that was suburban America in the fifties, as good as Gloria Grahame (stunning) and Broderick Crawford and Glenn Ford are, this film is disturbing to watch.
Part of it is the sugary counterpoint: Ford is a train engineer just back from a stint in Korea, looking for a quiet, stable life (or so he says) and rooming with a Leave it to Beaver perfect family of good friends, a coworker and wife and nubile teenaged daughter who is in love with him and now physically mature enough to be a contender. This saccharine top-coat, with its casually tossed-off truisms about the jealously-enforced proper-placement of women, and with the women themselves spouting the most egregious lines ("All women are the same. We just have different faces so men can tell us apart"), feels poisonous in its browbeating cheeriness. It brings to mind that amazing scene in the original Stepford Wives, when, after Tina Louise gives her heartfelt lament over the sad state of her marriage, the discomfited replicants begin shrilly effervescing over the joys of household cleansers.
Gloria Grahame is our femme, and she is indeed fatale, or heading that way. We hear about her briefly before we see her, but she doesn't show up until a good twenty minutes in, after we've met everyone else and seen the "nice" side of things. When we do see her, it's her gams we get a load of first. She's on her back with one elegant leg stuck languorously into the air, and we know there's going to be trouble. What this noir does differently from every other I've seen is that it shows us her side of the story, shows us how even the "nice" guys mistreat her and mistrust her, and does so while still quite brilliantly keeping her a mystery until her endmost scene. It's a good trick, and well pulled off, and our sympathies abide with her in ways that we never allow with, say, Jane Greer in Out of the Past or Mary Astor in the Maltese Falcon, even Barbara Stanwyck or Lana Turner. In the end, when we at last get that long-anticipated, deepest look inside her psyche, because we've shared her journey, her darkness seems, in the circumstances, strangely reasonable.
I find this ending utterly chilling: Glenn Ford (driving the train as it plunges coldly, heedlessly along predestined tracks) smiles easily as he thinks of the teenaged girl he will take to the dance, waves in a friendly manner to strangers as he passes, and, meanwhile, the woman whom he has so recently sworn he loves is being murdered a couple of cars back on the same train. It took him about five minutes to get over her, with no consequences, no permanent damage. Meanwhile, she's getting dead over it.
Fritz Lang was a damn genius.
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