Jules Dassin | Elia Kazan | John Cromwell | Ida Lupino | John Sturges | Crane Wilbur | Terry Morse | Edward Buzzell | George Amy | Frank McDonald
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Dassin's The Naked City (1948) deviates in several ways from the Henry Hathaway tradition. For one thing, it is a whodunit mystery. In most of the Hathaway school, the villain is a well defined organization or individual. There are mysteries in Hathaway sometimes: who is the top dog whose shoes are only seen throughout most of The House on 92nd Street, for example. Still, even in that film, the gang of Nazi spies is perfectly well known to the audience. By contrast, Dassin's film keeps the audience guessing. It follows mystery film traditions. It has an extraordinarily complex script, with new layers of truth that keep getting peeled away and revealed.
Everything in Dassin's film is much more "ordinary" than in the Hathaway series, too. It is ordinary in two ways: the villain in the Dassin is not some superman or superorganization of crime, unlike most Hathaway school films. No, the villain is just some ordinary murderer. Secondly, the police are not shown as some extraordinary, high tech institution. The film focuses on a real group, the New York City police, but they are lacking in the military discipline, inhuman efficiency and high tech skills of the cops in the previous Hathaway school films. They are shown as a collection of shrewd, honest, but much more human people. The police tend to be married, and have functioning bonds with women. No one's closest relationship is with a partner. No one on the police seems to be deep in military discipline as a life style.
Shots in The Naked City include the mirrors and staircases so familiar in the films of Fritz Lang, and which spread from him to film noir as a whole. The villain's room at the end contains both a mirror, used for many shots, and a window through which we get a deep focus exterior of the New York streets. Even in interiors we see the city. Later, we get a shot straight down the staircase in the villain's building. Once on the streets, the shop windows are treated as "mirrors", so we see both what they contain, and the reflections of the street in the glass. Such reflection shots are popular in poetic documentary and city symphonies, from Dziga Vertov's The Man With a Movie Camera (1929) to Stan Brakhage's Wonder Ring (1955).
The Naked City has astonishing photography of New York City. Cinematographer William Daniels won an Oscar. The photography reaches its peak during the great climax on the Williamsburg bridge. This is in the semi-doc tradition of finales on great industrial or engineering structures.
The streets of New York virtually explode with life here. The finale is full of children playing, including the little girls skipping rope that used to be such a feature of American life.
Dassin's Brute Force (1947) reveals the direct influence of Roberto Rossellini's Open City (1945). The dictatorial prison in Brute Force recalls the horrors of Nazi occupied Italy. It is somewhat less plausible than in the original. After all, the people in Open City are just innocent civilians, whereas the convicts in Brute Force are all criminals. Depicting them, as Dassin does, as just a swell bunch of ordinary guys, seems fairly unbelievable. The blow torch scene in Brute Force also invokes the one in Open City.
Night and the City (1950) seems like a minor work to me. This is partly because the characters seem so nasty and unappealing. Also, I wished for a view of London on the same scale as the portrait of New York in The Naked City, but it didn't happen. There are thematic links back to the previous work. Here the hero is a cheap but smooth talking hustler: just like the Howard Duff character in the earlier film. And Night and the City takes place in the world of wrestling: another villain in The Naked City was a wrestler, and makes some pointed remarks about that profession, as well as essentially "wrestling" with one of the cops during a big struggle. Far and away the best scene in Night and the City is the impromptu wrestling match. The film comes astonishingly alive at this point, in a way it didn't before.
Several of Elia Kazan's films are related to the undercover, semidocumentary paradigm. Boomerang (1947) is a true crime story. It was actually produced by Louis deRochemont, who previously produced Hathaway's semi-documentaries. It is set not in an underworld, however, but in Connecticut suburbs; in my judgment it is very dull. It is shot on the authentic locations, and takes us inside prosecutor's offices. It has little of the look inside great institutions of the other films, however, being very low key and suburban.
Panic in the Streets (1950) is a major work, however. This films tracks down crooks who are unconsciously spreading plague. The hero is a disease control worker, played with his usual tremendous vitality by Richard Widmark. Like the other semi-documentaries, this takes us inside his government institution. This group has a quasi military feel in the film, just like the FBI, the Treasury Department, and other crime fighting units of previous movies. Although he is a medical worker, the hero wears a military uniform, carries a gun, and has police enforcement powers. There is a great deal of both action and suspense in the film. It features location photography on the streets of New Orleans. Cinematography is by Joe MacDonald (The Dark Corner, The Street With No Name). The film is oddly anticipatory of the virus hunter melodramas of the 1990's, such as the TV show, The Burning Zone.
One type of location shot in Kazan's crime films shows a frieze like expanse of building. This fills the shot from the left to right hand side of the screen. The building wall is parallel to the frame of the film. There are openings along the top of the wall, such as windows or balconies, that are smaller and more regularly repeated than any opening below. All of these building walls tend to have a "monolithic" look. They appear to be huge rectangular slabs that dominate their environment, and any people in it.
Panic in the Streets emphasizes both long take and deep focus staging. Kazan prefers to avoid cutting wherever possible in a scene. Consider the shot at the apartment house. It opens with an exterior shot, a huge panorama of the apartment building and its occupants, taken from an upper floor. All the people in this shot are very tiny figures, seen from a distance. The camera turns around nearly 180 degrees, to show a series of steps leading up to the second floor. Policemen climb these stairs, eventually getting larger and larger in the frame. Then they start moving along the second floor outdoor passageway, moving toward the foreground. Eventually two performers are right in front of the camera, with their heads in medium close-up, while they have a dialogue scene. All of this is in a single unbroken take. It is typical of many shots in the film that mix close-ups, medium shots and long shots all in a single take, with both the characters and the camera in motion to accomplish this.
Some of the long takes are organized into stages. For example, in the scene at the coroner's office, first we see one room, then the camera and the characters move into another, then into a third room. Each room is a different stage of an intricately choreographed movement. Similarly, the stunning scene at the opening across the rail road tracks moves from right to left through several different areas near the tracks.
Several of Kazan's films show a similar collection of themes and characters. The hero is a highly intelligent and educated man, with progressive ideas based in science and modern thinking, who works for a government agency, or other major institution. He sets out to convert a backward, primitive society to his approach, and he encounters massive resistance from this tradition oriented, ignorant group. Such heroes include the disease control specialist of Panic in the Streets, and the Tennessee Valley Authority representative (played by Montgomery Clift) in Wild River (1960), who has to battle change-resistant locals. In both cases, the people he meets are suspicious of all scientists, and determined to resist cooperating in every way possible. Both films are made on location, and both emphasize the exotic nature of their locale: the dock-side culture of Panic in the Streets, and the river people of Wild River. Both locations are near water, and center on it for their economy and culture. The hero in both films is a man of modest financial means. Although he is highly educated, he is by no means a representative of the upper crust, at least financially. The lead in these films is played by a major movie star type, while everyone else tends to be a more realistic looking character actor. This too gives a contrast to the hero, and underlines how different his background is from the people he meets. The hero of these films keeps reasoning with people. Reason is his main tool, and his main orientation in life. He keeps thinking and thinking, and he keeps challenging other people to think, too. They simply want to follow tradition; the hero wants them to think, and to take an informed, reasoned course of action.
Kazan's films can be compared with a number of literary works, that also deal with outsiders who try to change a society's beliefs. Henrik Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People (1882) also deals with a doctor who uncovers unpopular truths that his society does not want to face. However, it deals more with the persecution of the doctor by society, while Kazan's films tend to be about the education of society by the informed outsider. His struggle might be titanic, but he usually succeeds. Ursula K. Le Guin's science fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) deals with a single man, literally an alien, who has to try to persuade a whole planet of tradition oriented people to change. Like Kazan's heroes, his entire approach is reasoning with people. The comic book writer Edmond Hamilton also often dealt with social outsiders who had important but non-traditional messages for society.
Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement (1947) is not usually regarded as a member of the semi-documentary police series, and with good reason: it is a fictional tale not about a policeman, but about a magazine writer who does an expose about Anti-Semitism. However, this classic film, which won the Oscar as Best Picture, has many elements in common with the semi-documentaries. It was produced by the same studio, Twentieth Century Fox, as Hathaway's films, The Street With No Name, and Kazan's other semi-documentary works. It features a hero who goes undercover in a new identity to fight a major social evil. Here the undercover work consists of telling everyone he is Jewish. As in T-Men, this undercover work exacts a much higher price from the hero than he would ever have guessed at the start of the film. The hero is backed up by a powerful institution: in this case not a government agency, but a major national magazine. There is much location photography, in this case, in New York City and environs, and in all scenes there is an attempt at documentary like realism. Arthur Miller's photography has much more gloss than those of the typical crime film of the era, and is definitely not film noir in style. However, the film is a faithfully realistic look at the lives of the upper middle class WASPs who promoted Anti-Semitism, and a certain amount of gloss was considered appropriate to illuminate their milieu.
Gentleman's Agreement has a similarly highly educated hero as in Kazan's other semi-documentary films. Once again, this man attempts to convert a resistant traditional society to his way of thinking, in this case, the WASP culture of the United States. Although our hero is much better informed than the people he meets, once again, they feel they have all the answers, and fight him every step of the way. Kazan is deeply suspicious of tradition. In his films, it promotes anti-Semitism (Gentleman's Agreement), disease (Panic in the Streets) and poverty (Wild River). He also shows what a struggle it is to change such traditions, and what an effort has to be made.
Kazan gives his hero a personal life, as well as a professional struggle. Both the doctor in Panic in the Streets, and the writer in Gentleman's Agreement, have a small son with whom they have a warm relationship.
John Cromwell's The Racket (1951) has some features in common with the semi-documentaries. It has policemen heroes. The film emphasizes their military discipline. It has a gang of villains. The villains are ruthless, well organized, and have much social power. One big difference from the semi-docs: no one actually goes undercover.
The costumes of the police and bad guys have a similar iconography with the semi-docs: the gangsters are in exceptionally smart but flashy clothes; the police are plainly dressed when they wear civilian clothes, but they have sharp uniforms. Robert Ryan plays an out of control, violent gangster of the old school. His clothes are spectacular: he is completely uninhibited about flash, and is always dressed to the teeth. His dressing gown is one of the most elaborate in film history, and his later pin stripe suit is almost as dramatic. One wonders if men in the early 1950's really dressed this way, or if his clothes have been heightened for the movie screen. The film's costume designer, Michael Woulfe, made a major contribution to its ambiance.
The smooth mobster played by Don Porter is also well done in terms of clothes and accouterments. Porter's character is supposed to represent a new generation of organized crime in America, one that runs crime as a sophisticated, well organized business. The mob has disguised Porter as a business executive. He has a spectacular executive office, that looks like all the new command centers of the newly affluent 1950's corporate America. It has a huge wooden desk for Porter, elegant leather furniture, and is located high in an office building overlooking the city he "runs", to quote the film. Porter is always superbly well dressed, in a series of double breasted suits. He looks like an affluent businessman, suave and powerful. All his stationary states that he is the Chief Executive Officer of various respectable sounding corporations. While he always looks extraordinarily affluent, he never seems other than utterly respectable, a member of the upper middle class. Unlike Ryan, who looks like a mobster, Porter looks like a social leader, someone who represents the monied element in town. We have said that Porter is disguised as a businessman, but in fact, we never see any honest businessmen in the movie. Perhaps all the businesses in this city are as mob controlled as this one.
Cromwell's film noirs tend to deal with civic corruption. The villains in them are not merely gangs, unlike the other semi-docs. They are gangs that have usurped civic power. The fight against them is also a fight against corrupt authority. There is an element of social protest in these films. Cromwell's historical drama, Son of Fury (1942), also deals in similar themes, even though it takes place in 18th Century England: here wicked aristocrat George Sanders has cheated poor Tyrone Power.
The Racket has been around for a long time. It started life as a play, then was made into a 1928 film, directed by Lewis Milestone. In the 1920's, it would have been considered a "gangster film"; here it is refurbished in the early 1950's as a "film noir". Both versions had Howard Hughes involved as a producer. The 1928 version starred a youthful Helen Hayes as the heroine. Milestone's films also are full of social protest. His The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) also centers on the intersection between business, corruption and civic power, with the lines between all of these institutions becoming deeply blurred.
The Racket has elements that anticipate Fritz Lang's later The Big Sleep (1953). Its embattled police hero going after powerful mobsters is similar to the later film. So is some of the violence in the picture. The character played by Lizabeth Scott, an underworld girl friend who later turns state's evidence, also anticipates Gloria Grahame's character in Lang's film.
Porter's office is open in its design, high above the city, and with a clear view through its windows of an equally open parking lot below. By contrast, the police station is a warren of turning corridors. Rooms open into other rooms. There are no clear lines of sight, and finding one's way around in this maze must be a challenge. It has little view of the outside world, and seems like a chthonic burrow compared to Porter's command tower. While everything in Porter's office is brand new, up to date, and redolent of the 1950's affluence of corporate America, the police station is a relic survivor of earlier times. One scene shows Mitchum's introduction to his men, just after being transferred there as the new Captain of the precinct. The uniformed men are lined up with military precision, just as in such contemporary war movies as Twelve O'Clock High (1949). However, the corridors of the police station are too short to contain them all in one straight line, so they are bent 90 degrees around a corner in their lineup. It is a vivid visual metaphor for the limitations civic corruption places on honest cop Mitchum. Just as he has to cope with the confining precinct building in his attempt to run his squad, so too does he have to cope with corrupt superiors in city government who do not want the mob investigated.
Ida Lupino's The Hitchhiker (1953) has some features in common with the semi-documentary films, and some differences. It has much realistic location photography, like them. It has a generally "realistic" tone, one that is almost documentary like. It follows a real geography, apparently, through Mexico, although I am not expert enough on Mexico to tell if it is fully non-fictional. It contains an elaborate depiction of a "realistic" police manhunt for its villain, a manhunt that makes up much of the plot of the film.
However there are some differences as well. The police in the film, while sympathetic, are not the central characters in the movie. Instead, the protagonists are two ordinary guys who happen to pick up the vicious hitchhiking criminal of the title. These guys never become any sort of heroes in the traditional macho sense. The bad guy has a gun on them, and they just have to do what he says throughout the film. In fact, some of the film's viewers get mad that they never fight the bad guy or stand up to him. This film of Lupino's is the only film noir ever directed by a woman, and perhaps she is exposing the myths of male heroism here. After all, what can these guys do? The film is quite realistic in this depiction, but it is clearly violating traditional filmic depictions of heroic protagonists. However, the heroes of the film are not bad guys either. The film is careful not to suggest that they in any way deserve what is happening to them. The film seems to suggest that we should root for them to try to survive. They are Everymen, and their typicality makes us identify with them.
The film has remarkable outdoor landscapes of Mexico. Filmed on location, they are visually striking. They form much of the mise-en-scène of the film.
Lupino is a great actress. She is a member of a theatrical family that dates back to the Renaissance, one that is centuries older that such famous modern dynasties as the Barrymores, the Macreadys, the Redgraves or the British family that includes Ellen Terry and Sir John Gielgud. When I was a kid, I loved her comedy The Trouble With Angels (1966). This film was most unusual at the time in that it was made entirely by women. In addition to Lupino as a director, it had a woman scriptwriter, and an all woman cast, taking place at a convent school for girls. I remember how excited my Mother was when this came out, to see a film made by women, and she took us kids to see it immediately. Today's women rarely seem interested in films by women directors - I wonder why?
John Sturges' Mystery Street (1950) stands at the confluence of two mystery traditions, one cinematic, one literary. Its cinematic influence is The Naked City (1948). It is a semi-documentary mystery film shot on location of a big city, in this case Boston, and it shows honest policemen solving a murder case through step by step laborious police work. As in that film, there is no sign of the Hathaway - Mann tradition of undercover assignments; the police work strictly as detectives, and their lives represent 100% normalcy. The police are hard working and intelligent, but do not form any sort of military style institution. This police work recalls the police procedural school of prose crime fiction.
The literary influence on Mystery Street is R. Austin Freeman and his inverted detective stories. As in Freeman, first we see the murder in detail. Then we watch the police use scientific means to reconstruct the crime, and find the guilty party. Just as in Freeman, there is a great deal of emphasis on the disposing of the body, and scientific methods use to reconstruct the remains of that body. Here the police are aided by scientists from the department of legal medicine of Harvard's Medical School, just as the crimes in Freeman's books are solved by Dr. John Thorndyke, a specialist in medical jurisprudence. The Harvard doctors use the techniques familiar to us from Freeman's novels to reconstruct the corpse, and deduce facts about its origin and fate. Some of the Harvard scenes are shot on location. It is perhaps typical of MGM and its emphasis on gloss and sophistication that even its doctors are from Harvard! No lesser schools for the MGM lion. The film does some innovative things with superimposition of projected photographs. These are a purely visual technique, highly suited to the film medium, and to the best of my knowledge are not found in Freeman's work. They are in a semi-documentary tradition of projected, magic lantern images that goes back to the work of Fritz Lang, such as M (1931).
The film has a complex attitude towards its central character, the policeman played by Ricardo Montalban. He does a great deal of creative detective work himself, in addition to the scientific detection performed by Harvard. He is also honest and sincere. However, in one long sequence of the film, he goes tooth and nail against a man whom circumstantial evidence makes look guilty, but whom the audience knows is innocent. This is a reminder that the police are fallible. He is not a Superman of detection, merely an officer doing his best. The audience does not stop respecting Montalban during these sequences, but they sure know he is wrong, and it reminds us that even the best policemen need checks and balances on their work. There is a democratic message to these sequences.
Mystery Street benefits greatly by photography by John Alton. It is not as baroque as in his work with Anthony Mann or Joseph H. Lewis, but it is always beautiful and creative. Scenes at the police station where each desk is bathed in its own circular pool of light from its desk lamp are especially beautiful. So are some of his nocturnes on the streets of Boston. The film has a big finale in a train yard in Boston; such finales in photogenic industrial areas were common in films of the period. The film is not quite as gung ho about showing Boston locations as was Naked City in New York. This is perhaps a matter of economics: such location shooting must be expensive. Boston locations are extremely rare in movies; it must be the least photographed of any major US city of its stature. One notes that the police in this film work not for the city of Boston, but for an outlying community. This makes it different from the many semi-docs showing the New York City police.
Sturges was relentless critic of racism in his films. Here, the lead police officer is played by Ricardo Montalban. His dignified Hispanic officer has a memorable encounter with the film's old WASP family murderer, one that offers some pointed comments on immigrants.
This film manages to get to those two favorite film noir locations, the lunch counter and the sleazy bar. These are the work environments of two of the women in the movie, and the one is as respectable as the other is tawdry. Women in noir never seem to work in offices: it was left to Alfred Hitchcock to show two of the most depressing offices in film history in The Wrong Man and Psycho, as Jonathan Rosenbaum has recently pointed out.
Ice Station Zebra (1968) has an unusual quality. It takes place on studio sets representing the Arctic. These are obviously unreal. But they are also beautiful looking and charming. In addition, the characters all wear Arctic protection gear that looks like nothing else the viewer is familiar with. Watching this film is like entering a dream world. Under its surface realism, it is as strange as Alice in Wonderland. The viewer is transported to an artificial reality, one as strange as the films of Melies. Everything is very charming, upbeat and pretty here. Unlike modern films, which often seem gloomy and designed to horrify, this one is designed to give the viewer happy thoughts and a pleasant escapist experience. Watching this film had a calming effect on me. It helped me feel sleepy and get a terrific night's sleep afterwards. The film is in brilliantly bright color. One of the art directors, George W. Davis, also worked on the spectacular sets for Byron Haskin's The Power (1968). These too were eye-poppingly colorful. Both sets suggest high tech, and a 1960's optimism about the technological future. There is a similar high tech charm to his work on Frank Tashlin's The Glass Bottom Boat (1966).
Crane Wilbur's Canon City (1948) is an atypical member of the semi-documentary school. Most semi-docs focus on government agents fighting crime, often undercover. By contrast, Canon City shows the story of a prison break. The leads are the convicts planning the break, with little emphasis on any government men or police. The documentary elements here are strong: the film recreates a real life prison break of December 30, 1947, and is shot on the actual locations of the events it depicts, at the Colorado State Penitentiary and surrounding locales in Canon City, Colorado. The warden of the prison plays himself, and many of the prisoners shown in the film are actual inmates of the prison - something that legal issues would surely prevent today.
The mini-documentaries in the film are far and away its best parts. The film opens with an extended documentary about the city and the prison. This has interest as a time capsule of another era. Both the warden and the prisoners talk directly to the camera, telling their real life stories. This reminds one of the opening of Phil Karlson's Phenix City Story (1955), a film to which Crane Wilbur contributed as a scriptwriter, although that film's opening documentary sequence is much longer, as well as more clearly delimited from the fiction film that follows it. After the prison break halfway through the movie, there is another brief, interesting documentary look at the town. Finally, one episode later shows the funicular near the city, reminding one of the industrial finales of many semi-docs - although it surprisingly turns out not to be the actual finale of the picture, breaking all semi-documentary tradition.
The narrator of the film starts out as a pure voice over, in standard film tradition. Suddenly, in the scene at the warden's office, we are given to understand that he is an actual if unseen person, physically present with the warden in his office. The warden even shakes hands with him, reaching off screen and shaking. The tone of his voice does not change, however. The warden's voice is recorded live, while the narrator is still plainly doing a voice over. It is a strange effect, and unintentionally zany. It reminds one of all the gags about the narrator in George of the Jungle (1997). The narrator is Reed Hadley, whose ringing masculine tones were virtually de rigeur in 1940's semi-doc narrations, especially those of Henry Hathaway and Anthony Mann. This adds to the oddness of the effect.
The dramatic aspects of this film are zero. Since these dramatic scenes form perhaps 80% of the picture, the film is terribly rough sledding, and is definitely not recommended. The film suffers from its lack of sympathetic characters or goals. I've never liked Crane Wilbur as a director, finding his work hopelessly stiff, dull and lifeless. He is inoffensive. His concerns about prisoner rehabilitation are humane and deserve commendation.
The Patient in Room 18 (1938) is a whodunit mystery co-directed by Crane Wilbur and Bobby Connolly. Connolly is mainly a choreographer. He created the dances for around 25 movies, mainly in the 1930's, the best known today being Flirtation Walk (1934) and The Wizard of Oz (1939). The film is based on the 1929 novel by Mignon G. Eberhart. It is the first of seven books and a few short tales Eberhart would write about Sarah Keate. The book sticks fairly closely to the plot of Eberhart's novel. But it replaces its tone of emotional melodrama with light hearted comedy and mystery. The film is one of the most pleasant of 1930's mystery films.
The Patient in Room 18 opens with a non-mystery sequence, introducing us to the detective team of private investigator Lance O'Leary and nurse Sarah Keate. This humorous opening is done in a style recalling 1930's screwball comedy. Lance O'Leary's big sleep walking sequence reminds one of the "Follow the Yellow Brick Road" number soon to come in The Wizard of Oz. It begins with a sleepwalking Lance putting on his bed room slippers, just like Dorothy putting on the ruby slippers. Larry is dressed in loud pajamas, and soon moves to the street, where everyone is in suits. He follows a long path down the apartment and into the street, just as Dorothy follows the yellow brick road. Everywhere he goes he collects a crowd of people following him. Like the munchkins who follow Dorothy, this crowd laughs, chats animatedly to itself, and comments excitedly on everything the protagonist does. Both films employ steep overhead camera angles, showing the protagonist in front of the shot, and a crowd of following people behind him. The 45 degree or more overhead angle allows us to see every member of the crowd as an individual. Each person in the crowd is well characterized, and a lively individual cameo.
After this, the film takes us to the private Thatcher hospital, and a whodunit mystery. The film has the typical screen whodunit construction at this point, showing us all the motives the various characters have for the forthcoming murder. Similar "motive sequences" have appeared in hundreds of whodunit films. This sequence in The Patient in Room 18 is gracefully done. It is made up of a series of very short segments, each one revealing some new fact or relationship among the characters. Each new fact gives one or more of the characters another motive to commit the crime, the crime we all know is soon forthcoming. In many whodunit films, this section of the film has exposition problems, and can be difficult to follow. Not here. One difference: in The Patient in Room 18 we have already met many of the characters during the opening comedy sequence. We know their names, faces, positions at the hospital, and something of their personalities. So we are already completely familiar with the characters. All we have to do is absorb the new facts about their motives.
The script also underscores its structural functions here, by some clever approaches. One sequence ends in the middle of a character's sentence; the camera suddenly cuts away. We have already learned what we need to know about motives here - why wait for anything more, the script seems to be saying. It is an effect whose import is easily understood by an audience, yet which is pleasantly avant-garde in its approach.
One nice shot here is of a scale model, showing us the doctor's house and grounds. Such models were frequently employed in 1930's films. They remind one of model trains, and the elaborate model landscapes people often built for them. The model here is no where as elaborate as some of those created for the films of Alfred Hitchcock or Roland West, but it is still full of charm. Gordon Douglas' whodunit film The Falcon in Hollywood (1944) takes us backstage in a Hollywood studio (actually the RKO lot in Hollywood); one fascinating sequence shows us the model shop at the studio, where such scale models are built.
Next comes the murder. The murder sequence is the best in the movie. It takes place on a "dark and stormy night", to use words employed right in the film. The cinematography here is very creative, by the silent film veteran James Van Trees. Much of this sequence is a play of light, with lightening, flashlights and a pulled power switch plunging the hospital in darkness all having their effects. The constant movement and change of light here recalls a dance or a symphony of light.
The Patient in Room 18 (1938) is a whodunit, not a film noir. It was shot two years before the faintest stirrings of noir emerged in 1940. Its characters are good natured, romantic and upbeat, and have little relationship to the obsessed figures of noir. The whole tone of the film is completely different from the doom-laden feel of noir.
Despite this, the film has visual stylistic features that anticipate film noir to come. These include: the night and rain that dominates the murder sequence; the heavy use of elaborate shadows produced by Venetian blinds; other elaborate shadows cast on walls by trees; deep focus shots, showing scenes outdoors from inside through large open windows; prominently featured clocks; wire bed frames; complex open staircases; spiffy double breasted pin stripe suits, tuxedos and elaborate dressing gowns (provided by costume designer Howard Shoup); powerful, glamorous women characters; a focus on communications technology, including intercoms, number boards, buzzer systems and telephone switchboards. Most of these features relate to visual style and imagery. It results in a film that frequently looks like noir to come, even as its plot and characters are squarely in the whodunit and screwball comedy traditions.
The venetian blind cinematography is especially beautiful. It occurs not only at night, but also during daytime sequences featuring bright sunlight. One outstanding daytime shot depicts Uncle Frank Warren (Edward McWade) in his hospital bed. A large triangle of light is formed on the wall over him, formed out of slanting bars of light and shade. Strongly contrasting with this large triangle on the right of the shot are verticals on the left, formed by the window, its curtains, and his standing nephew Jim (John Ridgely). The blinds cast striped light all over both the curtains and the nephew's elegant black suit. The whole effect is striking and visually pleasing. It reminds one of John Alton's phrase, "painting with light". This is one of the prettiest shots in a film loaded with the creative use of light. The striped light in the triangle, and the striped light on the suit and curtains, seem to echo and balance each other on two sides of the image.
The film is happy in its set design. The Art Deco sets are presumably by Art Director John Hughes, a prolific Warner Brothers designer from the 1920's on. Most of the hospital sequences are tied to one large corridor set, which has many rooms branching off it. The set provides a unifying force. We are always linked to firm geometric coordinates, no matter which hospital room or part of the corridor we are in. Connolly and Wilbur feel free to shoot anywhere along this corridor, and from any direction. They show all parts of the corridor from both directions. This means that the camera will sometimes point in one direction along a corridor, and sometimes another. This adds visual excitement to the scenes. The directors are like Fritz Lang, in that they try to exploit the architecture to create as many different views of the set as possible. Like Lang, they try never to stage any two shots in the same way, always trying to find some fresh angle or approach to film each new scene. This gives as much visual variety to the film as possible. It also helps create a surprising variety of mood and tone for various scenes, each of which have their own visual perspectives in the corridor and rooms, and their own individual style of lighting. Connolly's dance numbers in The Wizard of Oz are also staged on giant, unified sets.
The corridor is built in the form of a large T. It is really two corridors, which run perpendicularly to each other. They meet at the nurse's station, an open rectangular area which is the central location of both the corridor and the movie. At one far wall of the bar of the T are a pair of glass doors leading to the outside, used as an entrance by Sarah Keate during the big rain storm sequence. At the other far end is a staircase; the corridor continues past it, terminating in a wall with a door leading to Dr. Harker's apartment (Edward Raquello in a good performance). Along the top or outer wall of the T is an X-ray room with an opaque glass door flanked by two opaque glass windows; under the right hand window is a bench. Next to the right of the bench are two swinging glass doors, leading to the main entrance to the hospital; beyond this is the staircase. Along the opposite, inner wall of the bar of the T are a number of features. Starting at the far end of the corridor, the one containing Dr. Harker's door, we come to two doors; the second one leads to the basement staircase and the power switch. Next comes a corridor parallel to the bar of the T, we never get more than a glimpse of this corridor. Next comes what seems to be a small room walled off by opaque glass; immediately following it is the nurse's station. Next comes the main stem of the T, forming a corridor; there is just a blank wall on the other side, leading shortly to the wall containing the exterior exit to the hospital.
The stem of the T is also full of rooms. Along the left hand side, looking down from the join of the T near the nurse's station, are the opaque glass doors and flanking opaque windows of the "Laboratory Pharmacy", we frequently see the inside of this room. Deeper along the left hand side is room #16, out of which Dr. Balman (Charles Trowbridge) emerges in one scene. Along the right of the T stem corridor are four doors. The nearest to the join of the T is the nurse's room, a kind of lounge; followed by three patient's rooms that play a major role in the film, #13; a room we never see beyond its door; and finally #18. The T stem corridor ends in another perpendicular corridor, with a big clock on the wall; we never see down this corridor.
The main entrance is itself a set, with a lobby and its own corridor with an admitting room. There are two tall plants near the admitting room entrance. Although one can see this corridor from the T set through the glass doors, the directors never stage a scene where someone goes through the entrance, through the doors, and into the main hospital. Lance O'Leary enters through this lobby and goes to the admitting room near the start of the movie. There is also a brief shot during the murder sequence showing the wall with plants and sinister shadows on it. This set is perpendicular to the bar of the T, and in the opposite direction from the stem of the T. Perhaps the set should instead be considered as a giant X or cross.
Tear Gas Squad (1940) is the utterly misleading title of a little film about the police. The film opens and closes with gangland action, but mainly this is a musical comedy about aspiring policeman Dennis Morgan. The songs in this film are worked into the plot "realistically": they all consist of Morgan's character singing to his friends, professionally, or as part of a police choir. Nobody just bursts into song in the full film musical tradition.
I tend to think of semi-documentary pictures as starting with Henry Hathaway's The House on 92nd Street (1945). But there was an earlier tradition of semi-docs, many of which were made a Warner Brothers in the late 1930's and early 1940's These were not basically crime thrillers, like the later works. Instead, they tended to concentrate on the training of young recruits. Wings of the Navy (1939) depicts aspiring Naval aviators learning their craft at Pensacola in Florida; it is intermixed with much real life footage of airplanes, training flights, and aerial sequences. The whole film is like a documentary about Pensacola, but starring fictional characters. There are no crime elements in this film at all, but it is a genuine "semi-documentary". The later, film noir semi-docs, will also often feature elaborate scenes of recruits being trained and inducted into government institutions, although these are usually crime-fighting units like the FBI or the Secret Service.
Tear Gas Squad is more or less in this Warner Brothers tradition. Much of the film is about the training and initial work of new police recruit Morgan. The training scenes are quite elaborate, and give a complete picture of the training of New York City policemen. They have less location footage than Wings of the Navy or The House on 92nd Street, however. The tone is largely comic, as well, unlike the usually grim semi-docs. The whole film reminds one of Code Two (1953), the LAPD training film directed by Fred Wilcox. For that matter, there are scenes here that anticipate Top Gun (1986), especially at the end when the hero reconciles with his rival after saving his life. The two men have similar personalities in both films: the hero is a smart aleck who has trouble obeying orders, while the rival is a stickler for procedure.
All three of the films Tear Gas Squad, Code Two, Top Gun make a huge deal out of the heroes' uniforms. Milo Anderson was the costume designer here in Tear Gas Squad. He specialized in making Warner Brothers' male stars look classy. He did most of Errol Flynn's costume dramas, for example. He also worked with Dennis Morgan. He was responsible for Morgan's posh white tie and tails outfit in Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943), for instance. Here he has gone absolutely to town on the police uniforms worn by Dennis Morgan and John Payne.
Director Terry Morse had a long career as a film editor, from the 1920's to the 1960's. Periodically, he would break out and start a short-lived career as a director, directing around fifteen films all told. None is well known today. Tear Gas Squad shows a fairly conventional editing style. A long shot master set-up will establish a scene, showing all the participants and their spatial relationships. Then Morse will cut into a series of medium-to-close shots of the characters. These close-ups will forcefully convey the emotions of the people involved, as well as their physical appearance. Morse will alternate among the characters. He might show character A, then B then C, then back to B, then A, then C again, and so on. A typical scene might cut five or six times to each character. There is much rapid alternation among the shots; this cross cutting is Morse's main way of adding movement to a scene. There is a propulsive or dynamic quality to these many alternations among the characters. Once Morse has settled on a camera set-up for a character, he sticks to it throughout a scene. For example, all the shots of A above will be from precisely the same point of view and angle. Similarly, all of B's will be from another, fixed angle. Morse will often include two or more people in one of these medium shot series. For example, a series of shots might always show characters D and E. Morse does not use this editing effect to convey conflict among his characters. Unlike many directors, he does not typically show fighting among everybody. Instead, the idea is to convey that each character is in a private world. One character might be full of romantic bliss, another of apprehension, another of skepticism. Each character's emotional state will be the subject of a series of close-ups of them.
Morse occasionally uses camera movement as well. One sequence starts up with a close up of a police badge, then tracks out to show all the characters and their environment. This is a common approach in Hollywood. More interesting are his sweeps down the line of recruits in the training scenes. One saw such tracks down military formations in Sternberg's The Last Command (1928), for instance. Morse is less dynamic and sweeping than Sternberg, but he has a related idea.
The Get-Away (1941) is a crime thriller from the dawn of the film-noir era. While this film is completely forgotten in film history, it is surprisingly entertaining and exciting. It has a plot that anticipates the undercover cop pictures of the late 1940's. Here a policeman is sent in undercover to a prison, where he is instructed to make friends with a gang of robbers. Eventually he falls in love with the gang leader's sister (Donna Reed in one of her most sincere performances), jeopardizing his mission. The film is fast moving; only parts take place in prison, it includes many other kinds of police versus criminal adventure elements.
The film has some similarities to Tear Gas Squad (1940). Both of these early films have plenty of exciting adventure. Both have a major raid on a gang hideout as a big climactic scene. Both are about very young officers, on early cases. Both initially do things that cause their superior officers to disapprove of them. Both then make an extra, heroic effort, and manage to bring in the bad guys after all. The issues they face are simpler than those of such noir era films as T-Men (1947). The biggest problem either one could have is not doing a good job. Once they succeed with their arrests, everything is fine. By contrast, the hero of T-Men has to watch his partner be murdered before his eyes; he is almost killed himself. Pleasing authority figures is not the key issue in his world. One of the later scenes in The Get-Away does have a noir like moral complexity, when the hero's boss pits him against the heroine.
Is The Get-Away a film noir? Should it can be considered as a very late gangster film instead? While the criminals here form a gang, they do not rule a city the way the early 1930's gangsters of Little Caesar and Public Enemy did. Instead, they are a gang of thieves who hide out in obscurity, only coming out in public to commit their crimes. This is closer to the role of gangs of crooks in film noir.
In addition, there are some noir like elements. The hero is dressed to the teeth in the sharp suits of the 1940's; so are the other detectives. These are some of the best dressed figures in any crime film. This sort of urban polish strongly recalls film noir, which takes place in an urban paradise. Such urban scenes as the dance hall where the finale occurs also have a noir like feel. Many key scenes take place at night. The personal involvement of the hero with the gang leader's sister also involves a noir like intensity of feeling.
Gambling on the High Seas (1940) is a remake of William Keighley's Special Agent (1935), one of several films Keighley did about undercover agents infiltrating mobsters. The original had newsman George Brent, mobster's secretary Bette Davis, and mobster Ricardo Cortez; this remake has Wayne Morris, Jane Wyman and Gilbert Roland in the same roles.
When one thinks of crusading newspapermen in the movies, the name of Wayne Morris does not immediately spring to mind. Morris specialized in roles where his young man was essentially a big, playful, overgrown kid. He was always a nice guy, a bit of a rough neck, and full of goofy, good-natured boyish charm. The film makers have done everything to tailor this role for Morris. They have tried both to preserve his on-screen personality, and to make him believable as a reporter. His boyish enthusiasm is now directed to his reporting job: he can't wait to jump on a story, follow up a lead, accompany an arrest, or phone in a hot breaking story. He does all this as if he were a kid with a new set of toys. Such enthusiasm fits in with Warner Brothers' gung-ho approach to melodrama, as well. Costume designer Milo Anderson, always a specialist in making male stars glamorous, has given Morris a ton of sharp suits here. They are always quite dressy, being double-breasted or pin striped or both. They give Morris a bit more of a grown up or responsible look than he sometimes had in films, without sacrificing glamour. Morris usually keeps his hat on, the standard movie shorthand for "reporter" in that era. Morris never appears in a tux, even when the mobsters on the gambling ship are decked out in them. He always sticks to his suit and hat, clothes that are the professional requirements for a reporter. Anderson has not stinted: Morris seems to change his suit every few minutes for each new scene. Morris is also frequently shown with a typewriter or a camera, and his boss on the paper expresses admiration and total support for him. Movie editors tended to be gruff and condemnatory, at least to traditional screen reporters like Pat O'Brien or Lee Tracy, but here the filmmakers clearly thought his boss' approval might help give Morris credibility as a reporter.
George Amy was a top editor at Warner Brothers who occasionally got a chance to direct. Terry Morse was also an editor who occasionally directed; clearly, editors had a chance for this sort of job opportunity at Warner Brothers.
Frank McDonald was an extremely prolific director of Westerns, both in the movies and television. He occasionally did crime films as well, including adaptations of such hard-boiled writers as Frederick Nebel and Geoffrey Homes.
Frank MacDonald's Gunfight at Commanche Creek (1964) is a late survival of the semi-documentary film in an odd genre: the Western movie. Like many semi-docs, this is a film about an undercover agent. But the whole plot has been transposed to a Western setting. The film's story is especially close to William Keighley's The Street With No Name (1948), but there are elements that recall Anthony Mann's T-Men (1947) as well. Perennial Western hero Audie Murphy plays a detective who goes undercover in a band of outlaws. This is the main plot idea of the two 1940's crime films. In Street, the gang recruited crooks to join their gang, then sometimes killed them if they became inconvenient or threatened their interests. The gang in Gunfight at Commanche Creek does this systematically: their whole modus operandi is to break crooks out of jail, exploit them as front men in robberies, then kill them and turn them in for the reward money.
Just as The Street With No Name took us inside the FBI, so does Commanche Creek give an inside view of the National Detective Agency, a fictitious private detective group located in Kansas. Both organizations are depicted as being full of trained, highly competent professionals, who have great espirit de corps. At the headquarters, agents of both organizations wear sharp, elegant suits. In the field, they dress like their surrounding environments: here the agents are in cowboy garb.
In both films, the undercover hero is assigned a second agent to watch over him, trail him, and to attempt to protect him from bad guys. This second agent is a major character in both works. He is also the ancestor of the Uncle Mike character in the 1980's TV series Wiseguy. In all three works, this agent uses the highest tech media of the day to stay in contact with the head office of the agency, functioning as the hero's life line to the home office. There are also pre-arranged ways for this guardian agent and the hero to surreptitiously communicate with each other. These have their ingenuity as well. In Commanche Creek these hero-guardian agent scenes also have their high tech flavor, and are some of the best scenes in the movie. I think such guardian characters fascinate us, because most of us would like to have someone looking after us. It's a big and frightening world, and some help from a guardian person would be very welcome. Also, they represent caring about other people and goodness. These guardian agents are the human equivalent of guardian angels.
Other elements that recall Street: a detailed narration, apparently by Reed Hadley, although I have been unable to confirm this through credits. Hadley was the authoritative sounding narrator of Street and other 1940's semi-docs. The narration starts right at the beginning of the film, and is full of facts about dates and places. This is similar to the fact-oriented narrators of the semi-docs.
Gunfight at Commanche Creek was written by Edward Bernds. Bernds was a prolific writer and director of low budget comedy films, including many of the Three Stooges' best shorts, such as Micro-Phonies (1945). Most of the plot ideas I've discussed above seem to be more a product of Bernds' script than McDonald's direction.
In one way this film is NOT like the earlier semi-docs: those were shot on real locations, and showed real institutions. This film's agency is fictitious, and there are no "real" locations to shoot. It is just as fictional as any other Western.
The movie looks and feels like a 1950's Western. This style of Western filmmaking was also on its last legs in 1964, and the film itself seems a bit old-fashioned for its era.
In the tradition of 1950's Westerns, this film has a beautiful color design. There are aqua railings, red walls, green tables, and vividly colored costumes, such as the bright blue satin dress worn by the heroine, and the aqua vest and green aprons worn by the croupiers. Virtually every wall and every piece of decor is painted some earth-tone like but intense color. These tones often have some bright color added to achieve maximum vividness: a gray wall will have a shade of blue mixed in it; bricks will be bright yellow. 1950's Westerns tried to take their viewers into a world that was a sea of bright color. Apparently, people tended to accept this, at least in the name of escapism. Many of today's Hollywood films seem so desaturated and colorless, by contrast.
In another way, the film seems ultra-modern, and very much part of the mid 1960's. The agency reminds one of the good guy spy organizations of the period, and the agents of James Bond. This is reinforced by having Audie Murphy's character being a great success with women, and having him being introduced in the film in bed with a woman. This is much more like James Bond than traditional Western heroes.
Because we first see the agents in sharp suits, when they later appear in cowboy clothes, the cowboy outfits seem more like costumes the agents are wearing for their undercover work, than expressions of their natural status as Western heroes. This is especially true of the guardian agent (played by Jan Merlin). The gray suit he wears at the opening seems like his natural garb. His cowboy clothes, which are a beautifully coordinated series of golds and light browns and yellows, seems like a disguise he is wearing. The cowboy costume is a little to fancy to be considered as authentic wear. He stands out from the crowds of people he meets out West. It is like he is wearing a special outfit, one designed to make him radiate color and light. The fact that he is playing an angel figure seems underscored by the luminous nature of his outfit.
The suits that the agents all wear back at agency headquarters are all color coordinated, in various shades of gray. They too seem like something the agents are wearing for deliberate effect. It makes them all look part of a team, as if they were a sports team all wearing identical clothes. The guys seem conscious of the effect they are creating, as if they are trying to look as sharp as possible. The suits seem oddly modern, very close to something that could be worn by contemporary, 1960's men on the street. They convey the sense that the detective agency is part of modern times. Together with its spy like features, this gives the agency a feel of something out of the 1960's. When the agents subsequently put on their cowboy clothes and go out West, the feel is as if they have stepped back into an earlier era of time.
The next year the TV series The Wild, Wild West would create a similar fusion of James Bond and the Western. Nearly all aspects of popular media in the mid-1960's were strongly influenced by the spy craze.
The film has some beautiful locations. Particularly outstanding, are the rock formations above the cabin wear the guardian agent waits. These are made into a series of fine shots. The great cinematographer Joseph Biroc does fine color work here.