Night and the City (1950)

Night and the City is a classic film noir based on the Gerald Kersh novel with Richard Widmark as Harry Fabian, a two-bit hustler scheming to become a big-time fight promoter in London.

Widmark is superb in what may be his best performance. He brings to mind James Cagney at times, but he’s actually more like Bugs Bunny, full of bravado and nervous energy.

And let’s not forget Mike Mazurski as the Strangler, as brutish as he was playing Moose Malloy in Murder, My Sweet but with a hint of more intelligence, and portly Francis L. Sullivan, a “fat man” in the style of Sydney Greenstreet, but more tragic. Herbert Lom, Googie Withers, and Stanislaw Zbyazko, once a real star of Roman-Greco wrestling, are also excellent. Gene Tierney, however, is superfluous as Widmark’s girlfriend, and Hugh Marlowe, who plays the sort of bland role he was often assigned in 20th Century Fox films, has little to do but express his disapproval for Fabian’s way of life.

The look of the film is one of its strengths with scenes cast in a luminous black contrasted with almost ghostly whites.

Dismissed as lurid nonsense about undesirable characters when released in 1950 (Variety chimed in with one of the few positive reviews), Night and the City is a masterpiece that hasn’t dated a bit. It has a modern sensibility that makes it more contemporary than its 1992 remake (with Robert DeNiro in Widmark’s role).

© 2009 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey

As I write this, the year 2001 is a mere seven years away. Unless there are some truly astounding changes in store between now and then, Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey will remain science-fiction. This frequently fascinating, sometimes tedious, two hour and 19 minute film, advertised as “The Ultimate Trip” when re-released in 1974 (no doubt, in an attempt to appeal to those still trapped in the drug culture of the previous decade), portrays space travel as a mundane fact of life, and computers as thinking bodies independent of human thought. It’s a cold, dry impersonal world, and 2001 is a cold, dry film depicting a future that I am not impatient to see arrive.

The “stars” of the film, Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, are not stars at all, so the special-effects are the most commanding presence. Chief among them is the sinister, lisping machine known only as HAL, voiced by Douglas Rain. As for the plot, there is a skimpy one, but it’s not very important. This is a film to experience, not as a story, but for its remarkable visuals and music score (one of the first to utilize previously recorded music, composed by the likes of Beethoven and Strauss).

2001 doesn't really seem to be “about” anything, which means the viewer is free to interpret it in any way he likes, in which case it could be the most meaningful or most pointless film ever made. It is justifiably a landmark in cinema, one that will leave you inspired, bewildered, or both.

© 1994 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Sorry, Wrong Number

Sorry, Wrong Number is a near perfect thriller, less so for Lucille Fletcher’s story (which is very good in itself) than for its atmosphere and mood.

With the aid of some fine camera work by Sol Polito, director Anatole Litvak captures the sense of lonely desolation that marks the lives of the characters quite well. At the center of it all is Barbara Stanwyck’s Leona Stevenson, the bed-ridden heiress who overhears a telephone conversation between two men plotting what she will discover is her own murder. Then there’s Burt Lancaster’s Henry Stevenson, whose anger that his marriage is thwarting his ambition leads him into a more dangerous trap when he agrees to arrange his wife’s murder so he can pay off his debts to the gangsters he has betrayed.

And there’s Harold Vermilyea's Waldo Evans, the chemist who becomes a drug thief, hoping the money can finance an idealized retirement on an English horse farm but instead plots his suicide to escape arrest by the police.

As in many noirs, flashbacks dominate Sorry, Wrong Number to suggest the characters have no escape from their fate. Many scenes are memorable for their visual qualities alone: the rain descending on the dark street when Henry Stevenson offers Waldo Evans a ride home, a gesture offered only to lure the chemist into his illegal scheme to steal drugs from his father-in-law’s company; the lonely beach on Staten Island where Sally Ford (the lovely Ann Richards) follows her detective husband to an abandoned house where the drug ring will be uncovered; the menacing shack is also the setting when Stevenson and Evans are confronted by Morano (William Conrad) and his men, the gangsters they betrayed by striking out on their own; and the darkened Manhattan hotel room from where Evans, seen only in silhouette, calls Leona and explains the events that are leading to her husband’s downfall.

The climactic murder is also imaginatively presented with the emphasis on the mystery more than the mayhem with a shadow ascending the long and winding staircase in the Stevenson home where the victim awaits in her bedroom.

A good show from start to finish.


© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock

Anthony Hopkins drawls his dialogue and wears a fat suit, but it’s not his fault that he sounds and looks nothing like Hitchcock, the legendary Master of Suspense.

Covering the period when the portly director was making 1960’s Psycho, you have to wonder how much is true and how much was fabricated by screenwriter John J. McLaughlin and director Sacha Gervasi. This is the stuff of a great documentary, but might require some tweaking for a dramatic film.

Based on Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, the film suggests that everything was at stake, including the revered director’s reputation, as he becomes fixated on making a low-budget, black-and-white shocker from Robert Bloch’s novel, inspired by the true story of killer Ed Gein. Paramount, the studio with which Hitchcock was aligned, had already issued Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo, but studio head Barney Balaban was not pleased with Psycho’s grisly subject matter, and the studio agreed only to distribute the film providing Hitchcock financed it himself.

Some of the tweaking is kind of silly, such as having Gein’s ghost appearing to Hitchcock. It brings to mind True Romance in which Christian Slater gets helpful hints from the spirit of Elvis Presley. Since Elvis was probably at Paramount preparing for G.I. Blues at the time that Psycho was being edited, why wasn’t he given a cameo? He could have popped in to congratulate Anthony Perkins on his version of “Moonlight Swim” a song that the Psycho star had recorded (on one of several albums issued during his “teen idol” phase) which Elvis later covered in Blue Hawaii.

A lot of the drama relates to Hitchcock’s relationship with his wife, Alma, played by Helen Mirren. Was she having an affair with a hack screenwriter? Hitchcock suspects as much. Would she give her full support to Psycho? And what about Hitchcock’s weird obsession with his leading ladies, those cool blondes like Janet Leigh, very convincingly portrayed by Scarlett Johanssen, or Vera Miles (Jessica Biel), who he had been grooming for the lead in Vertigo, but who “betrayed” him by getting pregnant and choosing her family over stardom?

Hitchcock is good fun for film buffs, and, perhaps, a slice of movie history for the younger viewer, though some of what they’ll learn is not the truth. In the film, Hitchcock’s agent boasts that “I made a millionaire out of Jimmy Stewart with Winchester 73 and that film was a dog.” Hardly. Winchester 73, directed by Anthony Mann, is one of the great westerns, and, like his collaborations with Hitchcock, among Stewart’s best.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Steve McQueen is Tom Horn

Steve McQueen is said to have found Jesus during the period, after 1974’s The Towering Inferno, when he turned his back on Hollywood, let his normally trim figure grow fat, and grew his hair long and shaggy. We can only guess as to whether or not Tom Horn, whose true story formed the basis for McQueen’s next to last film, was as fortunate.

Mortality and judgment cast a heavy shadow over this western which McQueen is rumored to have directed himself (after firing several directors, including Don Siegel), but which the credits tell us was helmed by William Wiard, a veteran of TV’s The Rockford Files. McQueen was already ill with mesothelioma, the fatal lung disease linked to asbestos exposure, during production, although he wouldn't be diagnosed until completing his next film, The Hunter. By the time that Tom Horn was released in spring 1980, McQueen was denying rumors (reported by The National Enquirer) that he was deathly ill. Watching the film now, one notices that McQueen moves stiffly at times. When he appears short of breath during a chase scene, he seems to be genuinely suffering.

Tom Horn suffered, too, and there’s a sadness that lingers over this beautifully photographed film. Horn, a man of the old, untamed West, who rode with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and helped capture Geronimo (whom he praises in an early scene), is hired to protect a town’s cattle from rustlers, but his violent efficiency is at odds with the tamer society emerging at the turn of the century.

There are several episodes depicting Horn’s unforgiving nature. When a rustler makes the mistake of killing his horse, Horn blasts the guy into eternity and continues firing long after the culprit is dead. In light of this and other incidents, political forces decide that Tom Horn must go.

The supporting cast includes such welcome faces as Slim Pickens, Richard Farnsworth, and Elisha Cook, all of whom perform ably, but this is McQueen’s show all the way. This is one of the superstar’s finest performances, filled with equal parts fury and melancholy.

Tom Horn may not have been popular with critics or audiences, but this is a small masterwork, and a fitting tribute to a screen legend.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Family Plot: Hitchcock's last

Family Plot, released in 1976, was Alfred Hitchcock’s final film. During production, he informed one of his assistants that he would be retiring because he no longer had the physical energy necessary to lead a film crew.

Family Plot suffers from a lack of energy at the beginning. It starts out slowly, too slowly, I thought, but soon picks up speed and is enlivened by a terrific cast. You’ve got Bruce Dern, dependably loony as ever, as an unemployed actor working as a cab driver hooked up with kooky Barbara Harris, a spiritualist whose powers turn out to be greater than she thinks. She’s been hired to track down the sole heir to a fortune, but the heir supposedly died years ago in a fire at age 17. Funny thing, though: his grave is empty.

The villains are played by William Devane who looks and sounds enough like Jack Nicholson that it probably hurt his career as much as it helped it, and Karen Black. There’s a “chase” scene involving an out of control car that should put you on the edge of your seat, and a lot of subtle humor.

Family Plot isn’t great Hitchcock, but it’s a respectable swan song for the great director.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks


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The Christine Jorgensen Story

In the capsule review in his Movie and Video Guide, Leonard Maltin’s chief complaint about 1970’s The Christine Jorgensen Story is that the lead actor, John Hansen, looks more feminine as George Jorgensen and more masculine after the sex-change that transformed him into the famous Christine. As George, Hansen is fey and wispy. He’s mistaken for a homosexual by the female models he photographs, one of whom, Elaine Joyce, mocks his limp wrist and calls him “queer.”

According to the story, Jorgensen is not “queer.” Jorgenson is a woman whose physical body does not match her true gender. Today, in these more enlightened (or more confused) times, Jorgensen would be classified as transgender.

Whatever the gender of the film's lead character, The Christine Jorgensen Story is not the movie to consult for enlightenment. Directed by Irving Rapper whose credits include such respectable films as Now, Voyager and 1950's The Glass Menagerie and produced by Edward Small (Frankie and Johnny with Elvis), it is a cheap exploitation film (inexplicably released by United Artists) that lures the viewer with its leering approach to a controversial subject. Like George after he transitions to Christine, the movie lacks balls.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks


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