Thief: (1981. dir: Michael Mann) There is magic in this. Mann somehow makes even the darkness bright and shiny; it's hypnotically beautiful without feeling contrived (contrived ala Miami Vice, I mean). The cinematography is breathtaking. Who will ever forget the angle of perspective when Robert Prosky is giving his last, terrifying, damning tirade at the prone Caan? or the mesmeric force of the sparks from the machinery as the heists are performed?
I can't fault the performances, either, but the weakness of the film is that I don't give a crap about any of these people. Caan's courtship of Tuesday Weld is supposed to be endearing in its ultra-toughness, I suppose, but it's only absurd. Weld gives it a game try but her character is a plot device, a mere symbol of a single aspect of the American Dream, as is the baby, purchased like a commodity, a baby silent and trouble-free. When Caan orders Weld to set out on her new life without packing anything, I wanted to laugh. With a newborn child? Have you ever tried to go ANYWHERE with a baby, even just up the street, without packing anything?
So the downside is that I didn't give a crap about these folks; the upside is that even in spite of that, I was electrified by the finale, when Caan reboots his inner robot and takes ruthless control. There's a shot of Prosky, waiting half-hidden behind furniture with a gun in his hand, silent and ready, that was just about as perfect as a shot can be.
He Ran All the Way: (1951. dir: John Berry) My expectations were high for this. It was John Garfield's last picture: blacklisted for his leftist politics, hounded by McCarthy and refusing to turn rat, his heart gave out at the age of 39.
This is the story of a young hood (Garfield is too old for the part, but he excels in boyishness) whose tragedy is that he cannot trust. The beginning is wonderful: we watch as Nick Robey is tormented by nightmares in his tiny brownstone bedroom, then tormented by his blousy, drunken mother (Gladys George). Out on the street, he is accosted by a weaselly bad guy (Norman Lloyd) who conscripts him into a payroll robbery. Robey protests, tries to tell his nightmare, keeps repeating that he knows he has no luck that day, that they should wait. It's a wonderful set-up, like a baleful prophecy, setting the doomed tone for the rest of the picture.
Like clockwork, best-laid plans implode, and in the aftermath of the fouled-up heist Robey ends up getting his hooks into Peggy (Shelly Winters), who takes him home to meet the family. For the next few hours, everything slowly goes south, as southward as possible, as you'd imagine in a John Garfield crime noir. Every mistake he makes, the script makes it clear, is because he does not know when, or, indeed, how to trust. He's been so battered around by everyone in his formative years that he has no firmament on which to stand, and feels he must take everything by force.
The bulk of the picture unfolds in the family's apartment, and it's a decent unfolding. Unfortunately, it's too easy to project what you know of Garfield's real life onto the picture, and feel his paranoia too acutely to enjoy it. It's gorgeously shot, of course, by James Wong Howe: from the early moment when we see Garfield waiting to attack the payroll guard, half his face in shadow, the other sweating in full light, to his last stagger in the water-filled gutter, nobody ever shot anything better than Howe did. Howe and Garfield work beautifully together to show us a boy tormented by doubt, and consequently, by hopes: look at his face in the back as Shelly Winters tells her father she is going away with Robey, a face torn between incredulous hope and cynical dread, or the climactic trip down the staircase, masterfully shot, while Garfield gives in entirely to his lower nature, forcing her at gunpoint before him, barking, "Garbage! Garbage!"
It's a good movie, but hard, in context, to enjoy.
the Lusty Men: (1952. dir: Nicholas Ray) This is Ray's rodeo movie, and it's a good one, if you use it for that purpose. By that I mean that if your heart jumps in anticipation when you read the words "rodeo movie", then you'll like it. It's got a lot of footage of the sport itself, some cameos by real names from the day, and a convincing feel for what the "circuit" might have been like back then.
As far as the women are concerned, it's not just another slog through the misogyny that was the '50s. I mean, it is, but it spends some time examining it. This is a place where Susan Hayward has to settle for being spunky and feisty in her hard-fought stand-by-her-man because she's simply not allowed a second choice. We hear her cooking complimented several times, and we watch her doing housework and fighting a no-account buckle-bunny for rights to her man's attentions. He is a burgeoning rodeo star played by Arthur Kennedy, an actor who somehow manages always to seem a little untrustworthy, no matter how clean they scrub him behind the ears, and the older cowboy who takes him under his wing is the far sexier Robert Mitchum in a role that's just as untrustworthy. (After Hayward opens up to Mitchum --about how she's going to stand by her man, of course, --he watches her go with a certain Mitchum dreamy-eyed quality, then muses to his hoss about why men always prefer a redhead, since they all have such hellion tempers? Gawd.)
Still, Hayward's character is full and real, and she makes it clear that, springing from a family of migrant workers, there was only one choice she was ever allowed in her life, and that was who she'd marry. She took her time and made it carefully, but she was fooled into thinking he really meant what he said when they were courting. There are other women around the rodeo: mostly wives, torn between worrying about their husbands knocking their heads open and where the next day's groceries are coming from. There's one particularly strong and unusual woman: Maria Hart plays a trick-rider who, although locked out of the main competitions, has created her own niche on the circuit.
It's not a bad movie; it's a good one. Even so, I'm grumpy. It's not Ray or this movie I hate; it's the fifties in America. What a godawful time.
The best moment in the whole shebang belongs to Mitchum, naturally. It's his last and it's filmed particularly well.
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