double feature from the forties: the set-up and ladies in retirement

the Set-Up: (1949. dir: Robert Wise) After Body and Soul, this is the best boxing movie ever. Robert Ryan is brilliant, his broken face shining with doomed optimism. It's a black and white world set in the ass-end of the city, the part where Hunsecker and Falco never dare to venture, a city carved out of noir lighting. It pulses with sweat and neon, it beats to the sounds of blowsy music spilling from too-bright doorways, punctuated by bursts of too-loud laughter and the occasional train roaring from an unexpected tunnel. It's the kind of world where a girl making out with her beau on a fire escape cackles when she sees you creeping along the alleyway below, callously oblivious to your crumbling world. The camera moves smoothly, and the story moves smoothly, with the feeling of destiny unspooling like malevolent silk.

And a supper of a hamburger, two cans of vegetable soup and two bottles of beer costs a buck sixteen, tax included, at which Audrey Trotter grumbles, "You oughtta throw in a floor-show for that."

Ladies in Retirement: (1941. dir: Charles Vidor) You forget how really good a screen actress Ida Lupino is. She photographs well, and so trusts the camera to pick up on subtleties. This is a play adapted to screen, which is generally a bore, and doesn't work here any better than usual. Still, Vidor ratchets up the Gothic with moments of near-Expressionist use of chiaroscuro, the grotesquerie of extreme close-up to convey unnatural emotion, and the age-old trick of setting the story in an eternally fog-enshrouded cottage on the moors.

The story is moth-eaten: a woman caring for her two nutso but harmless sisters kills the selfish ex-whore who refuses to open her house to the annoying and demanding women, taking over both her house and income. Complication ensues with the entrance of the family's caddish nephew, who susses out the situation and tries to wrest control to his own advantage. Edith Barrett and even the redoubtable Elsa Lanchester are annoying and cliched as the two mad sisters, but Louis Hayward is rather good as the faux-cockney nephew. He's like Dan Duryea, only less so; Duryea would have been slightly more clownish, and therefore also more terrifying in moments of truth.

It's good for visuals; it's good in moments. The old-fashioned story, though, with its outdated morals, barely translates across 75 years' worth of paradigm shift. Is this retired prostitute really obligated to take on unpaying boarders just because she earned her money through looseness of character rather than more socially acceptable channels, like inheriting from a dead husband? Is she really, as the Lupino character posits, responsible for those less fortunate than herself, even when they don't respect civilized boundaries? In other words, does she really deserve to die because she's not Dorothy Day?