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Reviews
Alias Nick Beal (1949)
playing on your paranoia: a masterful noir
"In every man there is an imperfection, a fatal weakness," Ray Milland intones at both the beginning and the end of the movie. He's talking about what makes human beings easy prey for the Prince of Darkness, but he might as well be restating the essential premise of film noir. 'Alias Nick Beal' is a Faustian film about a principled DA who compromises his way to the governor's chambers - and the devil who makes him do it. Nick Beal's devil doesn't cast spells to get his way; he merely persuades with common sense, a firm stance and seemingly unlimited funds. As Beal, Milland is dapper and sleek and sinister; in a characterization that, in retrospect, seems decades ahead of its time, he's the most smooth talking of lobbyists: the force behind every politician too admirable to understand the corrupting nature of compromise, yet too ambitious to resist it. Milland reduces his body language to a minimum, asserting the authority of stillness; the few times he erupts in anger are all the more unsettling. As the seductress dispatched to ensure that rising politician Thomas Mitchell sells his soul, Audrey Totter excels as vixen and victim and everything in between; the film is further buoyed by supporting turns by George Macready (cast against type as a man of the cloth) and, as Mitchell's wife, Geraldine Wall, in one of her few film roles worthy of her talents. Screenwriter Jonathan Latimer knows just how to work the issues that plague Mitchell's politician: in particular, the way he comes to accept that the end justifies the means, and the resulting, self-inflicted damage to his soul. It's a film that's only grown more nuanced, relevant and complex in the last 70 years. 'Alias Nick Beal' asks: if you're the only candidate actually fighting for the people, do you have a moral obligation to ensure you win? Mitchell's opponent is out for himself; Mitchell can get elected only if he aligns himself with a shady figure who controls a sizable bloc of votes. Isn't it worth briefly abandoning his principles? Doesn't that serve his constituents better than running a noble campaign and losing? Director John Farrow and cinematographer Lionel Lindon work a powerful magic: not just with the standard noir tropes (shadows and fog, tilt angles and forced perspective), but through their use of Beal himself. Beal never enters a room; instead, a door closes, and he's behind it - or a person steps away, revealing him. Or the camera shifts to one side, and he's just there - as if evil has been present all along. Farrow knows how to play on your paranoia.
The Accused (1949)
wildly underrated noir
A feminist response to the misogyny that overran the film industry in the 1940's. The premise is pure noir. Loretta Young's psychology professor is sexually assaulted by a student; in defending herself, she accidentally kills him. And then like so many noir protagonists, she's left having to cover up her crime - and not merely cover it up, but lend her expertise to the investigation. But here's the twist: before he died, her student penned a personality profile of his professor that's likely to expose her: the sexually frustrated female of many a Forties flick (e.g., Young's own 'The Doctor Takes a Wife'), who hides her fear of intimacy behind glasses she doesn't need. Young realizes that to avoid detection, she'll need to forge a more outgoing persona, and though it starts out as a ruse, she soon grows comfortable in her own skin. She discovers she enjoys this new game of cat and mouse, toying with witnesses who don't recognize her because she's figuratively and literally let down her hair. In time she reclaims the upper hand that women on screen had routinely enjoyed a decade earlier. 'The Accused' is eager to expose how '40s films have pigeon-holed women, and fittingly, screenwriter Ketti Frings lays the blame squarely at the feet of men. The film's two male leads - one of whom (Bob Cummings) ultimately wins her - ogle and leer at Young as if it's something women should not only be used to, but enjoy. (When she dresses up for a dinner date, Cummings notes approvingly that her "brains don't show.") It's hard enough in this environment for a woman to get by. A woman in academia? She hasn't got a chance. Small wonder that Young has receded into a repressed version of herself; it's an act of self-preservation. Frings' screenplay not only explains why so many post-war women on screen have lost their sense of liberation, but makes it clear that no men are going to swoop in and save them; they'll have to save themselves. Although Frings receives the sole script credit, at least six other writers at Paramount had a hand in it, but it never feels like a hodgepodge; the touchups and rewrites result in energy, bite and an abundance of good lines. Heck, 'The Accused' even manages to make that problematic staple of film noir - "the police will never believe it's an accident, I'll have to cover it up" - entirely convincing. Young is vibrant throughout.
Say It in French (1938)
great forgotten screwball
It culminates in a high-speed chase in a motorized soapbox cart, but the whole film zooms along so speedily, it clocks in at just 70 minutes - seesawing merrily between chaos and common sense. When pro golfer Ray Milland, fresh off a European tour, brings home a French bride (Olympe Bradna), his plans to introduce her to his family are forestalled by their impending financial ruin; while they implore him to marry his rich ex-girlfriend, Bradna finds herself mistaken for the new maid. The bare bones of the plot (adapted from Jacques Deval's play 'Soubrette') sound tedious, but director Andrew L. Stone's execution is not. His anarchic spirit occasionally calls to mind Paramount Pre-Code classics like 'Million Dollar Legs' and 'Monkey Business'; good lines and clever bits fly by so fast that you're still catching them the second and third times through. The extensive location shooting means that every scene feels populated, whether Milland is in Central Park fending off his faux fiancée's advances, or at the Rainbow Room watching her down a platter of shot drinks in response to news of his marriage. No one is allowed to scheme or shame themselves without hordes of onlookers; the screen is filled with bit players whose faces and reactions register. The film is unusually explicit (Milland sleeps with his new bride in her quarters, in a single bed), and the lovers are uncommonly practical, coming clean about their secret marriage whenever they feel it would be absurd to continue the charade. But their candor only contributes to the confusion. Milland - in only his second top-billed role - earns his star status; his energy seems boundless, his commitment unquestioning. (He's a particular marvel making a lengthy exit from a restaurant with an unconscious lady slung over his shoulder.)
I Love Trouble (1948)
the most delicious of hard-boiled detective films
Franchot Tone is Stuart Bailey, a gumshoe who keeps finding himself surrounded by stunning women (Janet Blair, Glenda Farrell and Adele Jergens, for starters). Pretty much every time he leaves one, another is waiting for him - and they all know how to toss him a good line. (It's not just the leads; it's the bit players too. When he enters a nightclub and asks the hatcheck girl, "Hey, if you wanted to find Mr. Keller, how would you go about it," her comeback is also a come on: "Well, my way wouldn't help you.") Writer Roy Huggins based the screenplay on his own novel; it was his first, and he conceded that he taught himself to write by studying and mimicking Raymond Chandler. And indeed, about a dozen plot points are borrowed from Chandler's 'Farewell, My Lovely,' a fact that has caused some noir experts to decry or underrate the film. But if you're going to start disqualifying film noirs for being derivative, you'll end up with about three left. Huggins would go on to a long and successful television career, creating some of the medium's most popular series (including 'The Fugitive,' 'Maverick' and 'The Rockford Files' - and Bailey himself would reappear as the lead of '76 Sunset Strip'), but even at this early stage of his career, he understands how to write for the camera. If stylistically he borrows from Chandler - and he's very much in command of that sense of menace that links Chandler to the noir tradition (not every hard-boiled detective story, it must be noted, is a noir) - thematically he seems more in debt to Woolrich and Hughes. Issues of identity and duality are very much in play here, as is the impossibility of outrunning the past. As Bailey, Tone has an unruffled intensity that's undeniably appealing. When he meets up with a woman, you can't tell if his first instinct is to butt heads or lock lips; maybe he'll give both tactics a try, sometimes within seconds of each other. It's a world where every chauffeur is a bodyguard, and every bodyguard a goon. Every doorway is the entrance to a nightclub, and every alleyway is the setting for an ambush. The dialogue is full of great quips, but the zingers aren't there for their own sake. The film is populated with people who are too smart for their own good, who take risks the rest of us wouldn't dare - and occasionally, that proves their downfall. 'I Love Trouble' has got my favorite reveal in all of noir, and it's not even the reveal of the killer (that comes 10 minutes later); it also has my favorite ending line, which is about the end of a line.
Summer of Rockets (2019)
another marvel from Stephen Poliakoff
Sometimes I watch TV and think there are two kinds of dramas: the ones from Stephen Poliakoff - and everybody else's. As I was binging Poliakoff's Summer of Rockets, I was sampling BBC One's World on Fire, which had viewers buzzing on social media. Of course it did: the characters were familiar types designed to dictate a predetermined response, and the situations were the manipulative staples of soap opera. It was well done, but there was nothing about it that you couldn't see coming a mile away. The other writers, I sometimes feel, write TV; Poliakoff creates art. Summer of Rockets, which touches down in 1958, is his most personal story to date: the lead character, Stephen Petrukhin (Toby Stephens, outstanding) is a Russian-Jewish émigré, an inventor and a designer of hearing aids - like Poliakoff's father. The Petrukhin family - Stephen and his wife Miriam, descended from Jewish aristocracy; their daughter Hannah, a reluctant debutante preparing for "the season"; and their young son Sacha, being packed off to boarding school - are all striving to fit into an unyielding British society, and in the opening scene, their outsider status is highlighted as they're questioned before being admitted to the royal enclosure at Goodwood. ("I think you'll find we're on the list," Stephen insists, as his family hides their shame. "Every year this happens," he adds, as if hoping to transfer his embarrassment onto those who are detaining him.) But fortune takes an unexpected turn when Sacha goes missing, and one of the posher attendees, Kathleen Shaw (Keeley Hawes, exquisite), retrieves him. Petrukhin - keen to assimilate himself into English life and customs - is thrilled to make her acquaintance, and that of her husband, MP Richard Shaw. And from there, the worlds of these two very different families intertwine, as Stephen - caught up in Cold War espionage - is charged by MI5 with insinuating himself into the Shaws' lives, while Kathleen ensnares Stephen's children in a more personal agenda. There wasn't a plot point I saw coming, not a character who didn't feel fresh, not a denouement that didn't convince and occasionally surprise - and in the character of Hannah (newcomer Lily Sacofsky, enchanting), Poliakoff caught exactly what it was like to grow up at the dawn of the Atomic Age: when young ladies had nightmares about weapons testing, but also about etiquette classes.