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Cisco Pike (1971)

Minimalist, semi-anthropological tour of LA at a major crossroads. Its itinerary is both geographical and sociological, with the death of 60s idealism clearly reflected in the narrative and the city's invisible communities of non-glamorous workaday/ethnic communities privileged at the expense of bourgeois suburbia, which is a mercifully absent. There's real star power here starting with a baby-faced Kris Kristofferson but the list is long; the young Karen Black is outstanding, but all are great, with Harry Dean Stanton especially given enough oxygen to hang around. The film charts a true outsider's insider perspective, with attacks on studio suits, cops (100% bent) and music industry hypesters (Texas roots rock star Doug Sahm's long cameo is either inspired or vapid - some say both!). Informed by European/New Wave sensibilities, Cisco Pike was a film that probably got made by accident, falling in that brief post-Easy Rider Hollywood window when it was acknowledged that nobody knew anything and anything young and different got green-lighted, baby! And the final shot, where our protagonist lights out for the territory in yet another reprise of the archetypal Hollywood ending, brilliantly subverts the Huck Finn original by freezing the frame just as Cisco drops completely out of sight, submerged from our vision like a sunken mariner...

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HIGH NOON (1952)   Dir. Fred Zinnemann

This film is the zenith of rugged individualism. Gary Cooper's Cain (ahem... ) lionises an inflexible old dinosaur, selfishly dragging the community into his personal feud. The first sign that something's not right comes early, in the foundational scene of his marriage to Grace Kelly. Just look at them! He's old enough to be her (grand)father - it's icky and uncomfortable, a feeling reinforced by the utter lack of chemistry between this wooden old man and her tightly bound ingenue. No doubt this pairing flattered the ageing men of Hollywood and postwar America, but it has not travelled well. Despite all the ersatz-liberal praise heaped on High Noon, a genuinely left-leaning, community-centric narrative would have had Cooper's ex-sheriff stick to Plan A, which means retiring to his home, from which sanctuary whatever arrangements for protection he wishes to make are his business. But no, he insists on entangling the townsfolk, plainly against their will, putting them - women and children, drunks and incompetents alike – all at risk from the collateral damage of the crossfire he's determined to provoke. To advantage himself, and to hell with the inhabitants, when the gunmen arrive he cleverly deploys guerilla tactics in the backlots and warrens of the town he knows so well, and starts to mow down the baddies, maximising advantages presumably not available to him on his own, harder to defend, ranch. The final betrayal of anything approaching true liberalism is the film's undermining of Cain's baby doll wife, whom we see cast aside her Quaker beliefs to shoot a now unarmed (bullet-less guns) outlaw in the back! This allows ex-sheriff Cain, our paragon of Western (pun intentional) manliness, to have the final coup de grace (pun unintentional) himself and threaten nobody's male-centred ideology. High Noon is hardly analogous to the HUAC witch hunts, as everybody has settled into believing, but it does help explain Vietnam a lot better.

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Alex Keller - The Infancy of Atomic Physics: Hercules in his Cradle (1983)

When Stephen Hawking hit the best seller lists with his brief A Brief History of Time, I joined the multitudes and attempted to read it. This was a very weird experience. Comprised of short, simple sentences, I found it entirely incomprehensible. Never have I come across so much ostensibly plain writing that stubbornly refused to yield meaning.

Which helps enhance and explain my pleasure in winding through the exciting story of the intellectual pursuit of one scientific holy grail in Alex Keller’s The Infancy of Atomic Physics: Hercules in his Cradle. Keller knows his technical stuff, but clearly revels in the humanity that energised the quest to control the atom. Without any of the contrivance we see in so much wannabe popular non-fiction, Keller uses his comfort with the science to help share with us the excitement of the hunt. Yes, it’s a chase thriller!

Too many attempts to popularise science fail the ‘red-bloodedness’ test, and read like po-faced quasi-textbooks requiring a good high school pass to understand. Not so Hercules, and Keller’s evident ease with the material is effortlessly communicated. Not that it’s another The Right Stuff level of adrenalin, but this admiring tale of the monumental effort, hunger and passion of the people behind the discoveries is a rare and welcome treat. Hunt this one out.

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Damon Algut - The Impostor (2008)

Adam, an Anglo South African, hits an early onset midlife crisis, and tries to retrace the steps of his past to the moment in his 20s when he was riding high as a published poet. Retreating to a remote tar paper shack held as a futile investment by his corporate shill brother, Adam seeks to rekindle not just the muse but his entire lifeforce. The unexpected intervention of an alleged school chum whom Adam truthfully doesn’t remember leads to a triangle of deception, spiritual revenge and environmental destruction in an impossibly beautiful tract of rainforest under threat of commercial development.  

I found The Impostor rather muted. Throughout the book the protagonist was subjected to some very powerful stimuli, but his reflections on their impact lacked richness. There was a steady build of tension but the novel’s resolution belied it. Quotidian real life wins the day, and the growing intensity of the narrative isn’t done justice. Perhaps the verdant rainforest compound, where desire was sated and bizarre behaviour the norm, and was rich in symbolism like the trapped lion, is allegorically a dream paradigm? It certainly seemed that disconnected from the poet’s reality, and is the only way I can reconcile the two scenarios that weave in and out of this story.

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The Burnt Orange Heresy (2019)

Crime writer Charles Willeford didn't live long enough to enjoy the accelerating critical revival of his work now underway. His 1980s novels of downbeat Miami were distinguished by protagonist, Detective Hoke Mosly, spending as much time worrying about his household budget and putting food on the table, since he wasn't corrupt, as he did in solving crime. And who can't relate to that? But Willeford’s 1971 novel The Burnt Orange Heresy is a whole 'nother thing.  On screen the movie version of The Burnt Orange Heresy (2019), set in the mega-rich world of Italian villas and high end art dealers has a point to make about artistry (reception versus inherent quality) and it does this so repeatedly that it becomes a theme. The argument it makes is nothing new and will only matter to a tiny cross section of the population. The film experience of BOH is entirely middle class and very middle aged. Richly photographed, in its first two thirds the pace is just the wrong side of moribund and could have used some tightening, though that's not fatal. It's hardly a thriller, and that doesn't matter either. Mick Jagger is wonderful, leveraging his ancient reptilian sleaze, young Australian Elizabeth Debicki has real presence and Pierce Brosnan can sue the male lead, Claes Bang. Donald Sutherland's pseudo-Texas accent annoyed. I doubt BOH will find its true audience at first but it will be seized upon years from now for retrospectives about the art world, and possibly even paired with Sutherland's comparable role in Don't Look Now (1973). 

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I’d never heard of Memphis 70s popsters Zuider Zee, and I’m the kind of musical obsessive who counts that city’s Tommy Hoehn as a household name. This all changed with the 2018 issue of Zeenith, an album’s worth of posthumous outtakes that supplants this band’s one and only in-situ LP, Zuider Zee (1975, Columbia). Despite power pop doyen Rick Neilsen being an early fan (and writing ZZ a mash note to this effect), the rap for the new release is that the young Zuider Zee erred in judgment when, being signed to big bad CBS Records, they left the real quality stuff behind in the vaults. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? They’ve got a posthumous album to sell. But it’s rubbish. The eponymous 1975 LP is truly a lost gem of baroque pop, and a quirky beast at that. Several cuts, such as The Last Song of Its Kind, would make The Left Banke proud, and it’s to this earlier band’s resident genius, Michael Brown, that the ‘75 Zuider Zee LP most closely tips its hat - not to Brown’s original 1960s hitmakers The Left Banke, but rather his initial effort of the 70s, Stories, whose first two LPs essayed a very similar cross-hatching of white boy funk with Beatles-leaning George Martin soundscapes of glistening, irresistible brilliance. Like some baroque pop cathedral, the eponymous Zuider Zee’s songs have light, they have air and they have joy. (I don’t know Queen’s LPs, but imagine they could sound like the complex arrangements and quickly shifting time signatures of some of the debut platter’s songs, like Zeebra… ) The new collection, Zeenith, is OK, full of straightahead, often Lennonesque rockers. But these are the safe cuts, rightly overlooked for the adventurous debut LP. And when it’s so hard to find the (never reissued) original album, easy revisionism like Zeenith’s PR is a cheap trick – just ask Rick Neilsen.

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This is my latest musical pleasure, the album ‘Adventure Lit Their Star’ by Black Sedan. It’s highly tuneful 21st century pop with spare elements of techno and funk rather than Merseybeat echoes, but still utterly white. Very melodic, its sound can best be described as creamy smooth. But before you start thinking more bloody ‘yacht rock’, the album is broken by spoken word pieces interspersed throughout, starting most dramatically with Charlie Chaplin’s epic plea for world peace lifted from his 1940 film ‘The Great Dictator’, set against a lush tide of sound in opening track ‘Love on Love’. The spoken word device pops up elsewhere, albeit with less legendary language, and the impact is to open up and add a sense of air and lightness to what is already a pretty bright collection. Overall, it put me in mind of the Monkees’ psychedelic swansong ‘Head’, which sported a similar co-mingling of gorgeous pop tunesmithery mixed with eccentric spoken word snippets. Not a bad neighborhood to be in!

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Among the rain

And lights

I saw

the figure 5

in gold

on a red

fire truck

moving

tense unheeded

to gong clangs

siren howls

and wheels rumbling

through the dark city

 What I don’t know about art would fill a book (to paraphrase the late, great Robert Hughes when dissing Tom Wolfe - also late and great) – and it has. The book is Modern Art in America: 1908-1968 by William C. Agee (2016). What’s particularly special about this work is that Agee starts from the premise that typical histories of art have imposed a structure that blurs the truth of their subject. The usual neat, sequential chapterisation buries and overlooks many great artworks and creators that don’t conveniently fit into the academy’s timeline. Yes, this volume is a rescue mission.

Agee resists many critics’ trap: playing the (hu)man, not the ball; his assessments spring from the works of art, and work purposefully outward. An important advantage of Agee’s coverage is his comfort - indeed pleasure - in moving beyond the canonical painters to spend time on comparatively obscure artists. One such (to me at least) is Charles Demuth, whose 1928 work I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold is above. The witty Demuth’s cleverness was too expansive to be contained within the boundaries of his canvas, and frequently spilled over into his titles, words and concepts. So it is with Figure 5, which Delmuth devised as an homage to, and extension of, lines from his close friend, poet William Carlos Williams, in the latter’s work The Great Figure (1921). In this poem Williams records his impressions and reactions to a red firetruck (Engine No.5) speeding past him in the rain. As Agee prompts us (p. 123), we need to read and see the two works above together: when we do the result is a pre-technological multimedia experience, powered not by electricity or digitisation, but by the wizardry of sheer artistic chutzpah.

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                                            THIS GUN FOR HIRE  (1942)   

Starring Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, Laird Cregar; dir: Frank Tuttle. 

A landmark film, This Gun For Hire lays down the blueprint for the ‘existential lone hitman’ strand of thrillers we’ve been seeing on screens for years, through obscure pulp like 1958’s Murder By Contract right up to latterday excursions like Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (1999) and even unexpected variants like Coppolla’s The Conversation (1974).

What’s most striking about This Gun is how completely we become complicit with this contract killer.  We empathise with Ladd and that’s hugely groundbreaking.  His character, Phillip Raven, is instantly established in the opening sequence as being shut down emotionally, blankly wreaking havoc on sundry humans while pausing to set out a dish of milk for the cat (a trope to be repeated by Richard Basehart’s psycho-killer in 1948’s He Walked By Night and countless other thrillers to come).  The hint of Raven’s latent humanity is just as neatly sketched when he briefly considers – but rejects – plugging the crippled young girl who witnesses him absconding from the first hit.  It’s the painstakingly slight opening of these emotional shutters through the course of the film that provides one of its key audience satisfactions. 

Ladd is definitely the outsider looking in, with shots of him looking through window frames such as the dress shop and train carriage into ‘real life’ as a sanctuary from his remoteness.  As Carlos Clarens says (in his book Crime Movies), “a few hints of [Graham] Greene’s ‘vast desolation’ remained in the psychological landscape of the characters”.  No wonder Ladd clicked with the WWII public as a Romantic anti-hero.  Serendipity in the film’s timing may also have yielded a resonance with wartime’s need for young men to become killing machines, emotionally shutting down in order to survive.

The Graham Greene novel A Gun For Sale on which the movie is based is said to bridge Anglo/Euro and U.S. crime writing.  Both book and film have a strong undercurrent in the then-fashionable psychological angle (Raven’s psychosis stems from his childhood killing of an abusive relative).  Yes, this psychoanalysing feels crudely grafted on but it’s in essence from the book, which also blames society for producing this automaton. Greene really captured something of 20th Century anomie with his ‘entertainment’ by making one of the ultimate crimes just another cog in the wheels of modern life, a mere commodity with a price tag. 

Echoing this economic-oriented thread, an industrialist figures as a target in both book and film.  Reinforcing the chemical background to the plot’s momentum (a smuggled formula functions as an early McGuffin), the gasworks finale is superb looking, prefiguring T-Men and White Heat (not to mention later thrillers like 1997’s excellent City of Industry).  The film version of Gun attempts to extend this by having Veronica Lake’s character convince Raven to transmute his drive for revenge into patriotic fervour (this was 1942, after all) to the same end, by snuffing the industrialist whom we learn is guilty of collaborating with the enemy.  If this seems far-fetched, note that in 1943 Standard Oil was the subject of Senate hearings accusing it of colluding with German company I.G. Farben.  Such a fusion of left wing polemics and noir seems inevitable considering the screenwriting was shared between hardboiled ace W.R. Burnett (Little Caesar, Scarface, High Sierra, Asphalt Jungle, etc) and soon to be Hollywood Ten blacklistee, Albert Maltz. 

For its era This Gun For Hire has incredibly dark visuals for a major studio film, even one that hovered around ‘B’ status.  By contrast, Veronica Lake’s entrance, for sheer kilowattage, is comparable to Rita Hayworth’s in Gilda (and that’s saying something!). Lake’s role seems quite empowering and not diminished by the period context which usually transformed the stereotypical invisible housewife into the ‘Rosie the Riveter’ of the war effort.  Nevertheless the script’s characterisation is heavily overloaded – Lake as spy/magician/sex-bomb/chanteuse/cop’s fiancée plus Laird Cregar as industrialist go-between AND nightclub entrepreneur!  Cregar is superb as always (reminiscent here, in his dandyfied large man ne’er do well persona, of Raymond Burr in B-movie stalwart Edgar G. Ulmer’s Ruthless).

There’s an awful lot of coincidence too.  She’s engaged to the cop chasing the bad guys just as he (the fiancée) is secretly engaged by the government to spy for them; the fugitive Ladd sits next to Lake on a train, etc.  But we get swept along, in time honoured Hollywood fashion as all the elements fire together. 

It doesn’t always fire though.  There’s some unintentional hilarity when Ladd disguises himself using a purloined gas mask like some bad Get Smart routine (stretching coincidence, the building is having a gas attack drill that very afternoon!).  A bigger miscalculation comes when the film veers into ‘old dark house’ territory (complete with clichéd ‘Igor’ role in Cregar’s chauffeur/minder Tommy) around the middle.

Still This Gun For Hire made Alan Ladd (to become famous for Shane, The Great Gatsby and even Botany Bay!) a star.  He would be quickly re-teamed with Veronica Lake in Dashiel Hammett’s The Glass Key (’42) and Chandler’s The Blue Dahlia (’46).  Well before the regrettable 90s telemovie remake with Robert Wagner, This Gun was initially remade in 1957 by James Cagney (in his only directorial stint) under the marvellously pulp title Short Cut To Hell.  You know Martin Scorsese must have seen This Gun a few times.  The cat/milk scene reappears in Taxi Driver and the scene on the train in This Gun where Ladd says “you talkin’ to me?” is a real pre-homage, if you get my drift.  Come to think of it, that young de Niro and Ladd…

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The whole Alterna-Country push was such a 90s phenomenon.

Its pitch was irresistible: white American roots music the way the Stones (a la Mick Taylor era) re-imagined it. Raw but faithful - not ‘country rock’ like the Eagles brigade, or even so-called Outlaw Country. It was grounded in rock’n’roll, and that brought RnB’s DNA into the mix: Ray Charles, not Charlie Daniels.

And ‘Alternative’ was a sign of the times. This genre would genuflect to Kurt Cobain. It hit the road…

The Jayhawks and Uncle Tupelo were the earliest superstars, and the latter’s 1993 Anodyne actually delivered on that post-Exiles promise: country the way Mick’n’Keef would have done it, making this a landmark, desert-island – whatever - all-time classic album.

Uncle Tupelo’s Glimmer Twins were Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar, and their fates were not joined – whatever combustible chemistry existed, they soon cleaved off: Tweedy as Wilco and Farrar as Son Volt.

I abandoned Tweedy and enjoyed Jay’s trail, even if it was clear that Farrar’s dour, dark earthiness missed the sparkle Tweedy brought to the mix… oh, well. Son Volt was real and solid and satisfying.

And finally, in 2017 they came to Australia.

Live, Jay Farrar’s voice is amazing – he’s got that neo-Western, high lonesome/train whistle/prairie wind thing down effortlessly – this is Son Volt’s  greatest asset.

On stage their melancholy recorded sound is tougher, and hearing them wind through their back catalogue in concert not only reminds us of the early CDs, but now it’s possible to identify some of the more diverse textures they display on stage. One of these - a real highlight for me - was straight out of the desert-metal Western Gothic playbook: It's Always Midnight in Hell. But Jay hasn’t forgotten his heritage, and the encore of Anodyne’s guttural rocker Chickamauga was a major, major, life-affirming treat.

As I walked out smiling, ears ringing, eventually I realised why - their impact is like a country biker band - a honkytonk Steppenwolf!

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What’s in a name? For short-lived New York City police series The Unusuals, a lot – but not enough…

The Unusuals (2009) was a drily funny crime-drama TV series set in contemporary Gotham that focussed more on the precinct members’ idiosyncrasies than whether or not crime ever pays.

A two-disc DVD set compiles all the history and enables complete immersion. Although stand-alone, each of the ten one hour episodes maintains and builds continuity through an elaboration of characters who start off as believably eccentric and develop incrementally from there. Constantly fresh and inventive, it’s their out-of-round backstories, and the subsequent interactions, that yield the show’s exceptional chemistry. Unpredictable case trajectories grip and maintain tension too; the underbelly’s realm of crims and weirdoes is just as original as their pursuers.

So - what’s so great?  The Unusuals is a masterclass on how to make surfaces do the heavy lifting. Externalities are all. Everything you need is made available here without these actors (a couple of whom turned up soon after in the first series of Fargo) pretending to be icebergs. Their bulk is below our sight lines; these are ciphers that work.  

Not at all prurient, The Unusuals is frankly sexual – and sexy as a result. The NYC cinematography – especially the linking interludes –also adds a layer of the exotic through their streetwise, warts and all avoidance of the touristy commonplace. It neatly underlines the narratives’ freshness by echoing their originality. Imagine Barney Miller without the 70s stoner haze, or an updated M*A*S*H without the smugness.

Now about that name: when I replaced the DVD on my shelf next to The Untouchables, a penny dropped. Such a clunky, unattractive name as The Unusuals was clearly an attempt to parody Robert Stack’s venerable black & white classic of TV crimebusters… but apparently no one at the studio looked at a word like ‘unusuals’ in isolation...  

No matter. Whatever its creation story, what’s relevant is that this great, unheralded series can be enjoyed on DVD, and belongs up there in the exalted company of its forebears.  

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The apex predators of rock'n'roll get a bio-pic whose quality probably surprises even them. Clearly a labor of love, Jarmusch wisely stays behind the camera but his sensibility shines through, especially in the cartoon-y bits, which perfectly capture Jim's (that's Osterberg to you) eternally childlike deviltry.

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Edward Hopper: 'Valley of the Seine' (1908) - top

Giorgio de Chirico: 'Melancholy and Mystery of A Street' (1914) - bottom

  Two of my favorite artists are Giorgio de Chirico and Edward Hopper. Stylistically they don’t have much in common so it’s nice when they inadvertently intersect, as here.

In his early work, Valley of the Seine (top), painted in America in 1908 from sketches he’d recently made in France, the neophyte Hopper afforded primary interest to a motif that de Chirico would shortly develop into one of his enduring trademarks: the colonnaded white archway.

It’s nothing more than a coincidence: Hopper’s 1908 painting was two years and one ocean away from the first of de Chirico’s ‘metaphysical’ series, 'The Enigma of the Hour' (not shown), so neither could have viewed the other’s work.

But there’s something about seeing them both make those pale arches march off into the horizon…

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BORDER INCIDENT - (1949)

Starring Ricardo Montalban, Howard da Silva, George Murphy; dir; Anthony Mann An extremely tough, powerful thriller, Border Incident is also an interesting milepost in the careers of its makers. Director Anthony Mann came of age in the late 1940s with a series of grimly violent, embattled urban crime thrillers, the best of which – Raw Deal and T-Men – cemented a timeless filmmaking partnership with cinematographer John Alton, who also shot this film. When MGM bought Border Incident mid-production, Alton followed Mann across to finish it and then stayed with the studio, going on to become Vincente Minnelli’s Director of Photography for whom he won an Oscar in 1951 with An American In Paris. Border Incident was also Mann’s last film noir before the series of Westerns he made for MGM, mostly starring Jimmy Stewart. As if anticipating this, the opening action scenes and Border Incident’s climactic sequence are pure Western (and bring the narrative full circle as they use the same dramatic location – the Valley of the Vultures) – as hapless individuals, dwarfed by an imposing, ancient landscape, are led into a life or death confrontation of elemental purity – good and evil, knuckles and brawn, shotguns and cunning. These framing scenes’ distinct qualities are clearly delineated in the corresponding shifts of setting and action: hand to hand, Western-style in the Valley of the Vultures, but more coordinated, as cogs in a complex machine (multi-national law enforcement) for the central contemporary thriller-style scenes, where modern industrial society forms the backdrop. Yet far from a typical Western’s sense of freedom, Border Incident shares with T-Men that film’s inky, submerged visual quality. These are ‘wide’ but not ‘open’ spaces, as Alton’s beautifully registered grey-toned but grim visuals make the distant horizons as closed as the American border. The constant presence of vulnerable, innocent peasants adds a poignancy to Border Incident, raising the stakes from the destiny of a mere two police agents to that of an entire underclass.

As in T-Men, likewise topped and tailed by a Federal Government, ’50s-style voice-of-authority narration, long stretches of Border Incident take place indoors in incongruously luxurious settings, which in T-Men were used to portray gangland as a corporate battlefield. But Border Incident is no Tijuana T-Men. The central scenes around the lavish ranch house conform more to standard Hollywood visions of ‘Mexico – land of extremes’ than any cultural reality. According to Alberto Dominguez’s 2000 documentary on Latin Americans’ portrayal by Hollywood, The Bronze Screen, the production of Border Incident expressed ‘subversive’ leanings by adopting a non-racist, even-handed approach to its portrayal of the two nationalities. This reflected the status of much of its crew being victims of the McCarthyist black list. Yet there is an evident symbolic distinction in Border Incident between day (good/white) and night (illicit/Mex), a dualism reinforced by the prominence of New World (American) technology contrasted with the stone-age primitivism of the Old World. We see the U.S. police fleet, guided by radio, roar out in formation in bright sunshine, while south of the border swarthy peasants huddle clandestinely at night exchanging secret codes via their lapel buttons. Driving this home, there’s no shortage of eyeball-popping ‘stupido’ Mexican caricatures among the villains. Emphasizing these conflicting views of the two nationalities is the camera. Its tendency to adopt a subjective point of view has the audience looking down ‘over’ the peasants – the Uncle Sam paternalistic viewpoint towards the needy which fit the liberalism of the time just as snugly as its anti-McCarthyism. It all makes an interesting comparison with Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958): the action in both similarly hovering around the border ‘aperture’, that porous grey area where identities blur, inhibitions (if you’re white) melt away in tantalizing marketplaces of forbidden sin, while unattainable opportunities for prosperity (if you’re Latino) seem just a step away. Whereas Border Incident, particularly through its framing Federal government propaganda messages, ostensibly toes the line of postwar conservative prosperity, Touch of Evil, with its overt cynicism, revisits these contrasts with a polar opposite, truly subversive agenda.

There’s also a mimicking structure of bilateral ‘cooperation’ falling short. Welles’ American police honcho futilely sets up elite Mexican crimefighter Heston for a fall, while Montalban’s Mexican Fed watches inertly as George Murphy’s G-Man goes down - quite savagely - under a bulldozer. This event, a scene of immense violence – physical and psychological – is the most memorable thing about Border Incident and seers its image into the memories. In his noir films Mann repeatedly staged scenes of barbaric cruelty (thankfully shot in somewhat oblique fashion), most notably Raw Deal’s flaming liquid to the face and T-Men’s suffocating steamroom murder. But numerous postwar ‘B’ films noir (Dillinger [1945] with a broken glass to the face; The Big Heat [1953] in which Lee Marvin’s boiling coffee scarred Gloria Grahame’s face for life; The Big Combo [1955] where a hearing aid became an aural drill) took sadism in ‘imaginative’ new directions. What’s striking about the grouping of such scenes is their quotidian quality (echoing their precursor, Cagney’s assault-by-grapefruit in 1931’s Public Enemy), as if they could happen anytime, any day. Honorable mention must go to the highly effective music in Border Incident by André Previn and the villainous turn of Howard da Silva, who is very believable as the ruthlessly exploitative ranch owner. Also excellent is Ricardo Montalban – ‘dashing’ is not too strong a description for the young star, seen to equally sharp effect as a detective in the Detour-like Mystery Street (1950 – also shot by Alton), who, like Dick Powell, transformed himself from a smooth dancer to an urban tough guy – notwithstanding his soft hands! *

( * a minor plot point early in Border Incident, which gives him away as a non-labourer)

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The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder

by Daniel Stashower

Edgar Allan Poe’s many feats include being credited with the invention of the modern detective story, in which it was the strength and suppleness of the inquisitor’s deductive reasoning and skill in observation and interpretation that could win through. We see in The Beautiful Cigar Girl by Daniel Stashower that Poe had a rather desperate career, often living hand to mouth and usually hopelessly in debt. It fits then, that when a gruesome, unsolved celebrity murder had 19th century America’s east coast literati in its thrall, Poe would seek to exploit this for the benefit of his own literary status by attempting a semi-fictional solution. We learn much about Poe the man here from an intimate perspective as we follow him through various phases surrounding the project that would see light of day as The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842). We also learn much, whether desired or not, of the mid-century urban eastern seaboard America where the human transactions that produced much of its literature occurred. Fatally attracting those cities’ denizens, the murder in question had an air of prurience and hypocrisy to stir into the enigma of its mystery, rendering it irresistible to the era’s chattering classes. A highly attractive ingénue by the name of Mary Rogers had, it seemed, gained fame by word of mouth merely through staffing the counter of a well located cigar emporium in New York City. Under the pretence of entering her humidor, suitors and gawkers came from far and wide to ogle this dazzling beauty. Her barbaric murder was attended by soap opera circumstances and the ensuing shenanigans of several suitors, none of whom came away from the crime’s aftermath covered in glory. Even more shameful, as this book’s novelistic recreation based on newspaper accounts makes clear, are the back-biting rivalries of gaslight New York’s gutter press. From these promising ingredients Stashower has crafted a steadily interesting, always accessible read. With only the vaults of expired newspaper morgues to go on for information, unsurprisingly the book gets bogged down on occasion by the tedium of exploitative editors’ internecine wars. Ultimately Cigar Girl is a decent read, with an interesting dénouement of its own, and enriches fans of Poe the master with copious, often sad, insights into his demeanour and the struggles he lived through to deliver his genius.

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PRETTY POISON

 (1968)  - Anthony Perkins, Tuesday Weld; dir: Noel Black

Pretty Poison is a rare treat.  This 1968 Hollywood outlier is oddly reminiscent of Australasian films of the late 20th century like Proof (1991, Australia) and Sweetie (1989, New Zealand). Like those films it has a surface naturalism and seemingly modest scope, but extends their askew outsider perspective through an emphasis on dreamlike symbolism. Image versus reality, perception versus substance is the axis around which much of Pretty Poison revolves. The opening images, framed in long shot, of the high school marching band on lush green playing fields radiating innocence and pure Americana foreshadow Robert Altman a decade later circa Nashville.

Anthony Perkins knowingly plays on his Psycho persona, cleverly inverting that signature role’s nightmare trajectory of false innocence gradually unpeeled.  Here his jittery and often very funny progression moves from manipulative to a serene state of near-heroic martyrdom.  (Another Psycho resonance pops up in the film when a key character meets a bloody end at the head of a stairway… ) Tuesday Weld gives a great performance, all perkiness personified: toothpaste-bright, but remarkably free of icky aftertaste, giving her later evil all the more impact.  Best of the supporting roles is an excellent portrayal of her no-longer-married mother by Beverly Garland, played with a cynical edge that rings true.

Looks are important here. Color deployment (mostly red, natch) manages to underline plot linkages, such as when Perkins’ handling of chemicals at work triggers flashbacks conflating his arson, the high school’s drum majorettes and industrial pollution of the river. The lushly photographed (by David Quaid) bucolic richness of this river’s edge town heightens the contrast with the pettiness of its inhabitants.  Their brittle suburban facades in this idealised small burg strongly remind us of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.  The ‘68 film is uninflected where Lynch’s is mannered, ironic where his is surreal, but they spring from the same well –psychosis behind the white picket fence.  It’s not surprising that Pretty Poison screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. would go on to write 1973’s Parallax View, helmed by Alan J.Pakula (of Klute fame), one of the best in the early 70s cycle of conspiracy theory thriller.

Pretty Poison is a rarely seen film that was misunderstood by its studio and barely shown.  Championed by critic Pauline Kael, it went on gain cult status, not unlike Harold and Maude a few years later, with which it shares other similarities of taboo-breaching and an unselfconscious curiosity about life’s marginal players.  Today it seems at least twenty years ahead of its time. 

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As kids in the lower middle class suburbia of Long Island, in 1969 we watched our carport’s population suddenly swell from its longstanding fleet of one – a succession of Rambler American 2-door sedans bought new in stripper spec: 3-on-the-tree, bench seats with only one option, an AM radio - to something different.

Forget about Neil Armstrong – the landing that mattered to us that summer was the arrival of a brand new 1969 Chrysler Town & Country wagon in the 9-passenger, 3-seat configuration with air and cruise, standard Torqueflite auto and 383 2-bbl. Finally, the only Australian family on the block had arrived.

But this only surprised the neighbors - we’d been shuttling around dealerships all year to dream, at first, and then put a deal together. But what surprised even us kids was the arrival that autumn of a companion steed in the form of the wagon’s (slightly) downmarket sedan equivalent – a Chrysler Newport, the entry level Pentastar, still with base 383/auto but sporting a black vinyl roof to offset its daffodil-yellow flanks – and blackwall tires to underline its entry level status amongst this rarefied cohort.

Wow – what a team! Perhaps it was advertising like this that prompted our ever-optimistic father to believe that he too could have a share in the American dream in the space that he understood best – cars.

(While I know these are ‘71s pictured, the annual facelifts were minimal, and this brace of fuselage-body Chryslers certainly powerfully captures the impact of that legendary summer on our driveway... )