Category Archives: Film Capsule

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)

I first watched this film in the Kabuki theater on New Year’s Eve 2012 then went for a mediocre ramen in Japantown. Over ten years later, my second screening, on a late afternoon as my braised chicken bubbles in the oven, granted me a fuller appreciation of the film’s analeptic structure as well as its accomplished cast. Imagine: Tom Hardy! Stephen Graham! Mark Strong, Ciaran Hinds, Toby Jones, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Simon McBurney, David Dencik, John Hurt (!), and Gary Oldman (obviously). Yes it’s a sausage party, but who could ask for a more riveting ensemble?

For me, the most alluring aspect of TTSS is its mise-en-scène, its socio-temporal setting. Nobody uses a cell phone, thank christ. There appear to be no computers. And thus the tactile, sensual world of analog technology prevails. Every press of a button or flick of a switch produces an audible click. Examined intelligence files emit the quiet rasp of paper against fingertips. This is a world most of us yearn to inhabit.

I was never a Le Carre fan and I frankly don’t care much about late-Cold War, gray-faced spook-bureaucrats. But the diegisis of TTSS– its textures and ambience– is seductive.

 

Report to the Commissioner

Yaphet Kotto, easily the most compelling African-American actor of the 1970s, plays Crunch Blackstone, a brutal Black NYC policeman who came up before the Civil Rights Era. He’s been partnered with that absolute freak of law enforcement, the fabled hippie cop. Michael Moriarty, playing Det. 3rd grade Bo Lockley, sweats a lot as he agonizes about the institutional indifference to human suffering. This film distills the racial antagonisms and utopian yearnings of a long gone era.

Double Jeopardy (1999)

A bad film with a great premise, Double jeopardy could have taken its audience deep into noir territory with a few alterations in character and motive. Ashley Judd plays rich mom Libby Parsons, who is married to an arrogant financier (Bruce Greenwood). Waking in the middle of the night aboard their recently acquired yacht Libby finds herself covered in blood and her husband missing. Convicted of his murder, she’s sent to a surprisingly mild prison where she works out a lot and meets new people, eventually learning by chance that her late husband Nick is actually alive, living with the woman she thought was her best friend. Years pass and Libby is released on parole to a halfway house, under the supervision of former law professor turned PO Travis Lehman (Tommy Lee Jones)– a man with his own tragic past and a relatively low key drinking problem. Having learned in prison that the principle of double jeopardy forecloses the possibility of being tried for the same crime twice, Libby violates her parole to collect her son and get payback.

Two aspects of the film are particularly noteworthy. First, Double Jeopardy is an early example of the Internet Thriller, featuring suspenseful search engine queries which require Libby to get other people to use their computers to answer vital questions. Second, a couple of fairly over the top action sequences pad out the pursuit of her son and treacherous husband. But the most perplexing vagary of the film is its reluctance to delve deeply into the dark side. It’s almost as if the Production Code was still in effect, insisting that the characters embody uncomplicated moral stances rather than embracing the dissolution and ambivalence of the noir mode at its best. If Travis were crooked, for example, willing to exploit Libby for his own gratification, the dangers she runs would have been compounded and the story made more thrilling. Wounded by the death of a daughter roughly Libby’s age, a sleazier version of Travis could have been manipulated by her in a vaguely incestuous manner, summoning some of the Oedipal energies that animate film noir at its most uncompromising. In fact, Double Jeopardy is far too cop friendly, confident in the good intentions of the institutions that have helped to destroy Libby’s idyllic, affluent life. Had her prison experience been harsher, she might have become harder and less appealing, perhaps even repelling her son at their reuinion. In the final struggle between Nick and Libby, we get the retribution we’ve been led to expect but it’s justified as an act of self-defense rather than as a cathartic crime of vengeance. For all the blood, action, and fleeting nudity in Double Jeopardy, it’s a conservative story unwilling to relinquish an exhausted Code-era template of moral clarity.

Greed (2020)

This sunny, profane satire centers on the 60th birthday party of a ruthless yet sporadically charming fashion industry billionaire, Sir Richard “Greedy” MacCreadie (Steve Coogan). David Mitchell plays Nick Morris, a shy, self-effacing but ultimately contemptible writer hired to act as Greedy’s hagiographer. The build-up is promising, layering flashbacks to Greedy’s rise into the oligarchy with Morris’s information gathering and the preparations for the party, an elaborate affair set against Greece’s pristine shores.

Greedy’s staff struggles to pull it off, particularly with regard to the decidedly unscenic presence of Syrian refugees camped out nearby. The fact that all of Greece’s beaches are public makes it ultimately impossible to legally eject them. This is but one obstacle among others, including a nauseated lion, EU labor regulations, and the reluctance of certain coveted celebrities to attend the celebration.

Without giving too much away, at the story’s climax writer/director Michael Winterbottom satisfies one of the audience’s vengeful desires only to pull his punches, denying us the knockout blow. This lackluster denouement has as much to do with the limits of realism in representing the enormity of global capitalism as it does with the film’s liberal politics, which are capable of condemning injustice while ultimately doing nothing about it. In this sense Nick Morris is Winterbottom, clearly aware of the savagery of the people and economic forces he describes yet lacking the wherewithal to intervene decisively against them.

A story of underclass vengeance against the system that fattens the .001% at the expense of the health and dignity of workers would necessitate a leap into the surreal, some means of representation that could give commensurable form to the incommensurable totality of the Free Market. Even so, Greed is funny and dark, and definitely worth watching. 

 

The Suspect (1944)

This gaslight noir tells the story of a likable if fairly passive accountant (Philip Marshall, played by Charles Laughton) married to an absolute harridan, who finally snaps and commits murders. Remarried to a charming and age-inappropriate friend (Ella Raines), Marshall seems to be having a stroke of good fortune until an irritatingly persistent Scotland Yard detective begins a campaign of low-grade harassment. When the sinister, wife-beating drunk next door (Henry Daniell, incidentally one of the best Moriartys in the Sherlock Holmes film canon) attempts to blackmail Marshall, the temptation to snuff out a looming threat and an everyday villain proves too appealing to resist. Featuring an oddly procedural reconstruction of the first crime The Suspect is fundamentally noir in its sensibility even if, in the end, the Production Code ensures our sympathies are frustrated.

Impact (1949)

Brian Donlevy stars as Walter Williams, a successful businessman whose faithless wife (Helen Walker) sets him up to be murdered by her sleazebag lover. Bludgeoned unconscious and left for dead, Walter catches a ride in a moving van and discovers that his assailant was killed in an accident immediately afterward. Finding a body burned beyond recognition, the authorities initially conclude that the dead man is Walter, who pauses awhile in a small town in Idaho, working as a mechanic and meeting a local girl (Ella Raines). When his wife is charged with murder he returns to his old life only to experience a sudden reversal. Charles Coburn– whose screen persona is a thousand times more appealing than his real-life political convictions– plays the Irish-American detective on the verge of retirement whose instincts and energy help solve the riddle.

Story of a Love Affair (1950)

In the absence of action or dynamic camerawork a film often depends on dialog to engage its audience. Unfortunately, a combination of tinnitus-inducing sound quality and often near-invisible subtitles render Michaelangelo Antonioni’s adaption of James M. Cain’s seminal hard-boiled novel The Postman Always Rings Twice extremely hard to watch without becoming a bit impatient. If you’re interested in Italian versions of that story it might be best to go with Visconti’s Ossessione.

Four Ways Out (1951)

This exceedingly Italian noir begins with a soccer stadium robbery before following four thieves who’ve scattered to escape the police. Both deterministic and humanistic, Federico Fellini’s (et al) script not only addresses some of the social forces leading to crime– above all, poverty– but guarantees that none of the titular four ways out actually leads to a successful exit. Gina Lollabrigida receives top billing but it’s Cosetta Greco who does most of the heavy lifting as Lina, a resourceful young mother whose husband Luigi is clearly out of his depth.

Drunken Angel (1948)

An alcoholic doctor (Takashi Shimura) treats a young yakuza for tuberculosis only to see him stumble back into his old life. A very rakish Toshiro Mifune plays the doomed Matsungana, whose weakening health makes him vulnerable to his former criminal associates. Abandoned by his glamorous girlfriend, set up by his boss, his death ultimately serves little purpose. Takashi’s Dr. Sanada, the drunken angel of the title, is a curious figure, irascible, unsentimental but not callous, and pretty much disgusted with the yakuza hoods who run the show, calling them a relic of the feudal mentality. There’s a bit of art house in this movie, as with Matsugana’s fever dreams or his epic fight with the reptilian Okada. This is a fantastic early-ish film by Kurosawa.

Rolling Thunder (1977)

Operation Rolling Thunder was an almost four year bombing campaign by the United States that killed hundreds of thousands of people, rendered parts of Vietnam uninhabitable, and scattered unexploded ordinance across the country. It was probably a war crime.

John Flynn’s 1977 neo-noir– scripted by Paul Schrader– presumably takes its title from that long series of events. Its protagonist, Maj. Charles Rane (William Devane) is an Air Force pilot who was a POW for 7 years and has returned home to San Antonio, Texas. He was tortured during his captivity, his wife wants to divorce him so she can remarry one of their old friends, and his son has no idea who he is. The relative equanimity with which he responds to these developments initially seems admirable, but it soon becomes apparent that part of him is missing. As he works to adjust to his new situation he is maimed and his family is killed during a home invasion. It’s pretty clear where things are headed.

There’s so much to recommend this movie, but of particular note is an impressive performance of Linda Haynes who brings a carefully calibrated sense of authenticity to her role as Linda Forchet.