Four More Film Noir

It's been a race to try and see all the films leaving Criterion this month that we want to see.  Except for one personal choice each this month we have only been watching films that are leaving Criterion January 31st.  Usually there are half a dozen such films each month we want to see, but January was exceptional.  Mubi does the same thing, but luckily for us hardly any films were leaving that streaming service in January.  The four briefly discussed below are all in b & w and from the 1950s.

 

Cry of The Hunted is from 1953 and was directed by Joseph H. Lewis.  Starring Vittorio Gassman, Polly Bergen, and Barry Sullivan, we watch as a man (Gassman) escapes from prison and heads back to the Louisiana bayou where his wife awaits him.  An obsessed detective (Sullivan) tracks him down, and a tense cat and mouse game plays out in swampy no man's land.  With some strange backwoods people, including an old woman who hangs out at a lonely and abandoned cemetery crying "Raoul" into the dark night, this is an offbeat and pretty effective film.  Oddest of all is that it has a happy ending, something almost unheard of in crime films from the era.  Recommended.

 

Leaving Criterion January 31st. 

 

Next came a 1958 film directed by Irving Lerner called Murder By Contract.  A man works his way up to being a top assassin for hire, but finally meets his match when he is expected to kill a woman.  Men, no problem.  This is the most B of B pictures, kept alive by its lead actor Vince Edwards, as well as a fine and quirky performance by Herschel Bernardi as one of his two sidekicks, put there by the big boss to see that the jobs get done.  The musical score often consists of or two repeated notes on a guitar.  Quite memorable and intense viewing.

Leaving Criterion January 31st.

 

Next came Nightfall, a 1956 film directed by Jacques Tourneur and Starring Aldo Ray and Brian Keith, along with an unglamourous but very effective Anne Bancroft.  Ray and a friend of his are camping in the Wyoming mountains in late fall when they see a car go off the road and down an embankment.  They rush to try and help.  However, the car contains two armed and dangerous bank robbers, who kill Ray's friend.  They accidentally leave their money behind (they pick up the wrong bag).  Ray, who is shell shocked by the murder of his friend, grabs the money and takes off into the bush.  Eventually, back in LA, the two robbers catch up to him.  An insurance detective is also trying to track down the money, and the climax takes place back in the mountains near the campsite.  Ray is great as a low key innocent man caught up in a nightmare, supported by Bancroft after a little mix-up between them when he suspects her of working with the two hoods.  Some great location shooting in snow covered mountains.  The ending is overly dramatic and a bit silly, but overall this is a very decent film.

 

A fine film by Jacques Tourneur, leaving Criterion January 31st. 

 

The Sniper is from 1952 and was directed by Edward Dymtryk.  At the beginning viewers expect to see a film about sex crimes, but it turns to out be a sad case of a guy with some serious mother issues when he was growing up.  Released from an asylum against his will, when he feels urges to kill come on he tries to contact his previous doctor there.  No luck.  Then he purposely burns his hand on a stove element, hoping he'll be put in a psych ward for that.  No luck.  Poor guy.  He tries to fight his urges, but to no avail.  He kills with a rifle and a scope, usually from a distance.   The police are helpless to find him, and the pressure on city hall mounts.  Unlike the assassin in Murder By Contract, this guy only kills women, especially brunettes that remind him of his mother.  She must have been a piece of work.  Good San Francisco locations add to the atmosphere.  This kind of guy is just a bit too prevalent these days, making the doctor's pitch in the mayor's office rather prescient, especially as it falls upon deaf ears.

Leaving Criterion January 31st. 

In weather news, Winter appears to be making an early exit.  Though we still have February to get through, the week ahead looks well above average for temperatures, and not much in the way of winter weather except for Saturday.  We will rebound on Sunday and for the rest of the week.  We had 19 days in January where the temperature did not rise to or above freezing.  So we had many cold days, and many of those were breezy.  The coldest day was the 21st, where the temp only rose to 9 F, and the night dropped to -2 F.  Looking forward to some snowdrops later in February.

Mapman Mike

 

 

Beethoven and Fitness

Mid-December marks 18 months of personal fitness for me, the longest streak since my late teens.  Had I been stranded in New Mexico for the pandemic, I would have hiked virtually any mountain I desired.  There are still a lot of them, plus a few I would love to reclimb.  Treadmill walking is somewhat different from real walking, however.  This past September, when I did a short trail hike and climb with my niece in Sudbury, I found I had to be quite careful walking on uneven surfaces, and that my balance was easily thrown off.  Before undertaking any mountain hiking I would, of course, have to get used to walking on rocky and uneven surfaces again.  But I figure that I am permanently about 4-5 weeks away from what I call "mountain fitness."  So there would be time to get on trails here before heading back into the mountains.  I fervently hope we can travel by Spring to NM, possibly by car.  I know I said the same thing last year at this time.

Turning now to Beethoven, the anniversary of his naming day was Dec. 16th.  We began our massive biographical and listening program just over a year ago.  While I knew that we wouldn't be finished in one year, I didn't realize how long it might take.  We do some listening every evening, and Beethoven comes up every third evening.  So it probably will take a year, as in 365 nights, to complete the project.  We have probably completed 125 by now.  And where are we?  We are still in the early 1800s, around 1802.  His hearing is going, his health is bad, and he has yet to write his 2nd symphony.  But the Op 18 quartets are done, and many fine piano sonatas, along with two piano concerti.  His early works are still trying to please his mainly aristocratic audiences, though he has been poking quite outside the Haydn/Mozart classical tradition many times, too.  We are following the Biamonti numbering system, which goes as close to chronological as possible, and we have just passed the 300 mark (out of about 900).  I am reading ahead in the biography, and penciling in paragraphs for us to read together as we go along.  Sometimes we stop on a certain piece and hear it in multiple versions.  For example we listened to the 1st Symphony four times, all with different orchestras and conductors.  The one we liked best was directed by John Eliot Gardner, using an orchestra much like Beethoven would have had access to.

In movie news, we briefly turned to Prime for a feature film.  Called The Electric Life of Louis Wain, it stars Benedict Cumberbatch as an eccentric and psychologically fragile artist (Britain seems to have been blessed with an ungodly amount of them).  Most famous in his day for his illustrations of cats, the story of his life is told with great sensitivity and detail.  The only son among a family of girls, it is his responsibility to bring home a paycheck, and though he does his best, he is not much of a success.  Cumberbatch is totally brilliant as the increasingly mad artist, and the make up department did a superb job of aging him as the film proceeds.  You do not have to love cats to love this movie.  It is a beautiful film from start to finish.

Showing on Prime in Canada. 

Deb's "going away this month" choice from Criterion was Out of the Past, Robert Mitchum starring as a private eye who crosses his hoodlum customer.  This is a great and classic film noir, fun to watch from beginning to end.  If anyone trusts a dame in a film noir, you know there is going to be trouble ahead.  Mitchum gets into plenty of it here.  Lots of cigarette smoking, too.  It becomes quite obvious watching these old adult movies, especially the b & w ones, that Hollywood was vastly responsible for encouraging smoking.  With he-men like Mitchum, and beauties like Jane Greer smoking up a storm, how could their fans resist doing the same?

Leaving Criterion Dec. 31st. 

My pick of the week was a very strange film, one of the restored ones from the World Cinema Project.  Called Revenge, it was made by a Kazakhstan director working with a writer from Korea.  If that isn't strange enough, then try the film sometime.  A teacher, in a fit of anger, kills a young girl, then flees the village.  The parents are devastated.  When a son is born, he is brought up to get revenge.  While the story sounds simple, it is anything but.  We travel to many different places, and time passes.  At times we almost forget the revenge element, but it eventually comes back, in a haunting way.  The film comes with an 18' interview with the director, who speaks English well and describes his huge respect and fascination with the writer.  He tries to follow the book as closely as he can, but had to make some concessions at the end.  While certainly worth watching, there are some scenes of animal cruelty that are very disturbing.

Now showing on Criterion. 

Turning briefly back to art, and staying on the theme of eccentric artists, here's one from the DIA that comes with no biographical info whatsoever.  And so I will present the image with no words from me.

False Faces, 1953.  Elemer A. Lakatos, American, 1910-1957. Overall: 20 × 24 inches. No more information is available.  

Mapman Mike

 

 

 

 

Day Of The Dead

We paid our annual visit to some local cemeteries.  Usually we go to Woodlawn in Detroit (see last year's post), but this year we visited a few we had last seen on June 21st (see that post), as well as two new (for us) ones along the same Highway #3.  The highway is pretty scenic, as it follows the north shore of Lake Erie.  With a mixture of sun and clouds yesterday the lake looked very dramatic.  However, our mission was cemeteries, so we stayed away from the lake.

First up was the New Glasgow Pioneer Cemetery, which we have driven past many times without stopping.  Virtually all the headstones have Scottish names, with many of the settlers dying in their 30s.  Of course there are always a number of children, between 0 and ten years, also in these old cemeteries.  It was a very cold day, with temperatures averaging what they normally do in early December.  It was also quite breezy, making our stops brief, though very atmospheric. 

 New Glasgow Pioneer Cemetery, along Hwy #3 in Elgin County.

 A broken tomb pinnacle sits under a tree at New Glasgow Pioneer Cemetery.

A second new cemetery for us was the Ford Cemetery.

 Ford Cemetery.

 Abandoned house, autumn.

 Morpeth Cemetery, a personal favourite of ours for many years.

 The Morpeth Cemetery overlooks a steep ravine and creek. 

We also stopped at the Archibald Lampman cemetery, but I didn't use my digital camera there.  The film I was using finally got used up, so I will someday soon have a photo of that cemetery, too.

Back at home we had an evening visit from our young next door neighbours.  They brought over a freshly baked apple crisp.  We supplied beer and coffee!  Amanda was once a music student of mine, both at school and privately.  She was a very decent trombone player.  They also attended my last solo recital here in March.  With everyone leading busy lives, we don't see them all that often, except to wave to out in the yard.

Last weekend was my choice of films for our monthly festival.  I focused on producer Val Lewton.  We watched two of his films, as well as a TCM documentary about him, narrated by Martin Scorsese, as well as one other horror film.  First up was The Leopard Man, directed by Jacques Tourneur in 1943.  An escaped black leopard terrorizes a small New Mexican village, killing young girls.  Or it is really the leopard?  Does the title give anything away?  A suitably creepy tale, with an early, very horrifying scene of a young girl being killed as she bangs on the door of her house, with her mother slow to open it.

This film from 1943 was first up in our mini-festival last weekend. 

Next up was a French film from 1943, and directed by Maurice Tourneur, Jacques son. La Main Du Diable turned out to be an amazing little film, which neither of us had previously seen.  A painter sells his soul to become successful, but ends up fighting against the evil one, played by an amiable (at first) little man in a black suit.  The story is told in flashback, as the desperate man arrives at a secluded hotel in the Alps, searching for a ruined abbey and the grave of the man who started the chain of events in which he now finds him ensnared.  The movie is really quite good, with lots of humourous touches, some very cool surreal scenes, and movie art that isn't too bad to look at.  A sleeper gem.

Also from 1943.  

The 3rd film was called The Curse Of The Cat People, a favourite of ours not seen in a very long while.  All of the prints were pristine that we watched, thanks to the Criterion Channel, which is showing them all.  This movie is a very, very loose sequel to Lewton's Cat People, but is actually based on Robert Louis Stevenson's Aimee and Her Friend.  Lewton wanted to call it that, but the studio forced the current title upon him.  Aimee is in kindergarten and going through some childhood issues.  She invents a friend to be with her and to play with her.  A fascinating look inside the mind of a child, and an overall wonderful picture to view.

A really decent movie about childhood, at least for those of us that never really fit in.

Aimee (right) and her friend.  

Last up was a documentary about Val Lewton, who made some of the greatest b & w films ever.  He never shows the monster, but uses the viewer's imagination to help create suspense and horror.  All of his films are worth watching, and another festival of his works will likely be forthcoming.

 Lastly, we watched this TCM documentary, narrated by Martin Scorsese.  It showed

clips and talked about every film Lewton produced.

We have scheduled a long overdue Detroit day tomorrow, including a visit to the DIA to see the Day of the Dead exhibit.  So I should be reporting again, hopefully Monday evening.  Until then, signing off.

Mapman Mike