Angel Heart (1987)

Angel Heart (1987): adapted by Alan Parker from the William Hjortsberg novel Falling Angel; directed by Alan Parker; starring Mickey Rourke (Harry Angel), Robert De Niro (Louis Cyphre), Lisa Bonet (Epiphany Proudfoot), Charlotte Rampling (Margaret Krusemark), and Dann Florek (Herman Winesap): A once-popular singer named Johnny Favorite (born John Liebling) disappeared from a rest home some time between 1944 and 1955, the latter being when Angel Heart is set. A mysterious fellow named Louis Cyphre hires New York private eye Harry Angel to track Favorite down. Cyphre says that Favorite owes him for helping jump-start his career back in the day, before a war injury left Favorite a catatonic, badly burned mess.

Angel Heart may be better if one hasn't read the novel on which it is based. Or maybe not. Even the internal evidence of the film suggests that Mickey Rourke is really about ten years (or more) too young to play Harry Angel, and way too handsome. Johnny Handsome, one might say.

Adapter-director Alan Parker moves the second half of the story from New York to Louisiana because Voodoo! There's voodoo in New York in the novel. But we all know voodoo only works in and around New Orleans. And shooting in Louisiana allows Parker to indulge his fetish for the American South. It also makes the second half a compendium of locational movie cliches as related to voodoo (or voduon), Southern rednecks, and African-Americans in the South dancing and writhing around voodoo campfires in the bayous. The movie may not intend to conflate Satanism and voodoo, but it pretty much does. Oh, well. Who's keeping score?

The move to Louisiana also discards one of the book's thematic points (that evil goes on anywhere, in any level of society) and its homage to hardboiled detective films and movies set in New York. So it goes. Alan Parker is not a subtle film-maker. A guy gets murdered by being drowned in a giant, boiling vat of gumbo, for God's sake. And as soon as you first see that giant vat of gumbo, you know that Alan Parker is going to drown someone in it. It's that simple. It's Chekhov's gumbo.

The plot works better -- or at least more mysteriously -- than that of the book because Angel Heart eliminates the book's first-person narration by Harry Angel. This allows for certain things to remain hidden until the climax. That it also makes a major plot revelation seem practically ridiculous may not be noticed until one thinks about the film afterwards.

Make no mistake, though -- Rourke is terrific as Harry Angel. He may be too pretty, but he's still capable of conveying toughness, horror, and compassion in a convincing fashion. People forgot for about 20 years what a fine actor he was, and that was Rourke's own doing. Then The Wrestler brought him back. Then Iron Man 2 sent him away again. All I'll add is that he'd be a more faithful-to-the-book Harry Angel now rather than in 1987.

Robert De Niro is solid (though wildly overpraised at the time) playing the manipulative, sinister Mr. Cyphre. Really, the entire cast is fine with the exception of Lisa Bonet. Bonet, in her flat monotone, doesn't exactly embody New Orleans. Or acting. But it's her lengthy sex scene that caused controversy at the time.

Towards the end of the film, Parker goes with an image (twice!) that he shouldn't have gone with. Two different characters manifest yellowy cat's eyes for a moment, seemingly only seen by Harry Angel. Alas, the video for Michael Jackson's "Thriller" (and Weird Al's "Eat It") made this visual bit unusable in a serious horror movie in 1983. It inspires a laugh the first time, a groan the second time -- and really kills the mood of horror.

While you're watching Angel Heart, you may eventually ask yourself, 'What is the deal with all these portentous, menacing shots of electric fans? Are the fans the real killers perhaps?'. There is a double pay-off to Parker's visual motif, though it's a bit of a damp squib when it comes. SPOILER ALERT! There was a window fan in a window during a key moment in Johnny Favorite's past! And that pulley-wheel on the top of an old-timey elevator looks sort of like a spinning fan when the elevator is moving! Chekhov's gumbo, indeed. Lightly recommended.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

Shadow of a Doubt: adapted by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville from a story by Gordon McDonell; directed by Alfred Hitchcock; starring Teresa Wright (Charlie), Joseph Cotten (Uncle Charlie), Macdonald Carey (Graham), Henry Travers (Joseph Newton), Patricia Collinge (Emma Newton), and Hume CRonyn (Herbie Hawkins) (1943): Perhaps Hitchcock's most nuanced and humane exploration of human evil, Shadow of a Doubt casts its shadow forward on similar explorations of small-town America that include Blue Velvet, Fargo, and many other seriocomic films and television shows.

Joseph Cotten, cast against type as a monster, does great work as Uncle Charlie, a serial killer who returns home to his older sister's house just one step ahead of the law. Once there, his 'twin' -- Teresa Wright as his niece Charlie (Charlene), named in honour of him -- swiftly moves from hero worship to growing horror at what she gradually perceives her uncle to be. Wright is also excellent as the increasingly horrified Charlie who nonetheless must weigh what to do about her uncle as she fears what the monstrous allegations would do to her mother, who adores her baby brother.

There's a tremendous breadth to Shadow of a Doubt. Comic scenes with a young Hume Cronyn and Henry Travers offer commentary on an audience's love of thrills and murder. Hitchcock and his writers also examine the somewhat stultifying family dynamic of the younger Charlie's household. As is common in Hitchcock films, the law is a step slow and a day late throughout the film. The final confrontation will be between the two Charlies and no one else. Highly recommended.

Tombstone Blues

A Walk Among the Tombstones: adapted by Scott Frank from the novel by Lawrence Block; directed by Scott Frank; starring Liam Neeson (Matt Scudder), David Harbour (Ray), Adam David Thompson (Albert), Dan Stevens (Kenny Kristo), and Brian 'Astro' Bradley (T.J.) (2014): It looks like one thing the American box office doesn't want is a movie starring Liam Neeson that doesn't suck. Oh, well. Adapted by screenwriter-turned-director Scott Frank from one of Lawrence Block's hardboiled, modern detective novels featuring world-weary ex-NY-cop Matt Scudder, A Walk Among the Tombstones is refreshingly old-school noir in its sensibilities.

And such grim sensibilities, with little of that bang-bang, pop-pop revenge crap Neeson's been doing so much of lately. As Scudder, Neeson takes punishment but only reluctantly dishes it out. Frank lets Scudder loom in certain shots, taking full advantage of Neeson's over-sized presence. And the actor occasionally known as 'Astro' throws in a solid performance as T.J., the smart-ass street kid who decides he wants to be a private detective because Neeson makes the whole enterprise look sorta cool.

The case involves unlicensed P.I. Scudder being hired by the brother of a fellow A.A. member to hunt down the kidnappers-turned-rapists-and-murderers-and-dismemberers of his wife. But this isn't one of those movies about loveable innocents being screwed over by a harsh and uncaring world until Shane rides into town. The brother is a dealer in hard drugs ("A trafficker, if you understand the difference," he tells Scudder). And it turns out that the kidnappers have been targetting the families of other mid-level drug dealers because the dealers won't notify the police.

Remembrances of Scudder's own sins form a structural element in the film, used to good effect especially in the climax, which is brutal and messy and jarringly realistic. Like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe (both of whom T.J. namechecks), Scudder walks down the mean streets mostly alone, but not quite. The characters he meets will be colourful, to say the least (when one asks Scudder how he figured out that he had something to do with the murderers, Scudder tells him, "You're a weirdo."). And the depiction of the violence is unsettling, never moreso than in the opening credits. 

Frank situates much of the action among decaying streets and cemeteries and houses and rooftops in Brooklyn, with a few forays into the high-toned habitats of highly successful drug dealers. Set in 1999, the film uses the Manhattan skyline and the planes flying over it as a pre-9/11 commentary on cultural doom in some scenes: "People are afraid of all the wrong things," one of the killers notes, amused by the Y2K fears that dominate the newspaper headlines. It's a smart, faithful adaptation of the novel, and a fine addition to cinema's hardboiled detective films. Highly recommended.

Violent Knight

Get Carter: written and directed by Mike Hodges, based on the novel Jack's Return Home by Ted Lewis; starring Michael Caine (Jack Carter), Britt Ekland (Anna) and Ian Hendry (Eric) (1971): Brutal, great film about a ruthless, amoral English gangster (Caine) who returns to his decaying wasteland home city of Newcastle to investigate and avenge his estranged brother's death.

Caine plays Jack Carter as an almost pure sociopath -- even his 'love' is really just a reason for violence, though he becomes vaguely sympathetic when contrasted to the mobsters he ends up fighting (mobsters just like the ones he works for, of course). It's a mostly soulless, shark-eyed performance, and one of Caine's very finest. This isn't the performance of an actor (or the film of a director) looking to charm the audience with rogue-ish gangsters and their wacky ways.

I'd call this movie kitchen-sink noir -- it's got the grimy, disintegrating backdrop and characters of the British kitchen-sink dramas of the 1960's and the murky, rotten moral landscape of all good noir. In some ways, the plot resembles the 1940's noir classic, Robert Mitchum vehicle Out of the Past. But the film world of Get Carter can show what a 1940's film noir can only imply.

There's no evident soul-searching on Carter's part as he uncovers the personal effects of the violent, impersonal world he's worked within for so long -- just ever-increasing violence that never provides the vicarious zing that a lot of violent revenge dramas do. There are simply men and women doing terrible things to terrible people and innocent people alike.

The sudden bursts of violence still have the power to chill 40 years after the picture's release -- Hollywood may have remade the movie in the oughts with Sylvester Stallone (!) in the Michael Caine role, but the movie's grim, anti-cathartic world isn't something a major studio would ever try to portray today. It would be too dark and too honest about violence. It would cut into the box office. Highly recommended.

The Face That Must Diet

Dark Passage, written and directed by Delmer Daves, based on the novel by David Goodis, starring Humphrey Bogart (Vincent Parry), Lauren Bacall (Irene Jansen) and Agnes Moorehead (Madge Rapf) (1947): Enjoyably loopy film noir sees Bogart play a San Francisco businessman wrongly imprisoned for his wife's murder. He escapes from San Quentin. Shenanigans ensue. And for the first 45 minutes or so, we get first-person camerawork from Bogart's perspective, seeing his character only fleetingly in a newspaper photo.

I'm guessing film cameras got smaller some time after the end of WWII, as first-person POV shows up in a couple of other films of the time, only to be abandoned because, frankly, it's annoying as hell. And you can't see your star. Though here the POV serves the story -- Bogart's character gets plastic surgery to change his face, and once he's got that new face (Bogart's normal face) the POV switches to the traditional third-person. Got all that?

Coincidences drive the plot. Lauren Bacall's character is obsessed with Bogart's character being railroaded. Luckily for him, she's driving around near San Quentin when he escapes so she can pick him up. Luckily for Bogart, the first cabbie he hails later in the film knows a good plastic surgeon who makes a living operating on criminals and the wrongly accused innocent. Unluckily, there are so few characters that the revelation of the real murderer's identity lands with something of a dull thud. Really, who else could it be?

Nevertheless, it's all quite a bit of fun, with the level of coincidence and accident reaching a crescendo so as to resolve pretty much everything. Lauren Bacall is cute as a button, and Bogart stretches a bit here, playing a guy who's definitely not cool under pressure until the last few minutes of the film. Not a great film, but worth watching. Recommended.

Blue Steele

In a Lonely Place, written by Andrew Solt and Edmund North, based on the novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, starring Humphrey Bogart (Dixon Steele), Gloria Grahame (Laurel Gray) and Frank Lovejoy (Detective Nicolai) (1950): An enjoyable and atypical vehicle for Bogart, who gets to play a protagonist whose guilt or innocence related to a murder is only one of the questions about him.

As screenwriter Dixon Steele, Bogart alternates between Bogartian charm and nearly psychotic menace as he woos next-door neighbour Grahame while simultaneously being investigated for the murder of a hat-check girl he hired to summarize the plot of a novel he'd been hired to turn into a screenplay.

Yes, he's lazy too, at least when it comes to reading things.

The movie gradually reveals Steele's troubling history. He was a good C.O. in World War Two, and he was also a good screenwriter before his military service. Now he stinks -- and he's got a history of violence towards women, and violence towards anyone who annoys him, that's hard for the police to ignore. Can love save him? And why is he so damned angry?

While offering a fairly cynical take on early 1950's Hollywood, the movie also seems more modern at times than one expects. Steele really is an anti-hero -- one could see Jack Nicholson playing the role if this were the 1970's -- and the film doesn't necessarily answer all the questions one has about the character. Nicely shot by Nick Ray (Rebel Without A Cause) and solidly acted throughout, this is an unusual film for Bogart and for the time period. Recommended.

Harper

Harper, based on The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald, screenplay by William Goldman, starring Paul Newman (Harper), Lauren Bacall (Mrs. Sampson), Julie Harris (Betty Fraley), Arthur Hill (Albert Graves), Janet Leigh (Susan Harper), Pamela Tiffin (Miranda Sampson) and Robert Wagner (Allan Taggart) (1966): The Ross MacDonald novel this film adapts first appeared in 1949 and starred MacDonald's recurring private eye, Lew Archer. The film changes the PI's name to Harper and updates the setting to the go-go sixties, but Newman still embodies the tarnished virtues of Archer/Harper. The movie also bounces a number of ideas and characters off noir classic The Big Sleep, making Harper play sometimes like the missing link between The Big Sleep and The Big Lebowski.

Hired to find a missing millionaire, Harper soon finds himself neck-deep in weird California shenanigans, from aging starlets and wheelchair-bound misfits to cult leaders, cult financiers, and trafficking in illegal immigrants. Harper takes a lot of punishment along the way, and dishes some out, while trying to put the pieces of an increasingly bizarre mystery together.

William Goldman's screenplay is sharp and funny, the sort of writing one doesn't get a lot of from Hollywood any more. Harper, another wounded knight errant, really does take an astonishing amount of physical punishment -- like Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, he takes so many blows to the head that he should probably start wearing a helmet.

A subplot involving Harper's soon-to-be-ex-wife (Leigh) offers some character depth, though it could probably have been jettisoned to streamline things a bit more -- in this sort of film, it's the twisty plot and weird characters we want more of, not the domestic travails of the hero. Newman is charming as ever. Harper chews gum with such violence throughout that one one wonders if he's quitting smoking -- or if Newman was. Followed by an inferior sequel, The Drowning Pool. Recommended.

Chinatown 2: Electric Boogaloo

The Two Jakes, written by Robert Towne, directed by Jack Nicholson, starring Jack Nicholson (J.J. "Jake" Gittes), Harvey Keitel (Julius "Jake" Berman), Meg Tilly (Kitty Berman), Madeleine Stowe (Lillian Bodine), Perry Lopez (Lou Escobar), Richard Farnsworth (Earl Rawley) (1990): This much later sequel to the much-praised neo-noir Chinatown sees Jake Gittes ten years older (it's now 1948) and much more successful as the head of a private detective agency specializing in cheating husbands and wives. It was a critical and commercial dud at the time, though it now looks pretty good: it only suffers by comparison to Chinatown.

Nicholson's direction (this is either his third or second directorial effort) is solid but unspectacular, though the golden and brown hues of the cinematography make the whole thing go down pretty smoothly. Robert Towne, who also wrote Chinatown, returns here, in good form.

You can follow the plot of The Two Jakes without having seen Chinatown, but I wouldn't recommend it. A lot of the emotional heft of this film comes from its connections with the events of the first film, in which Gittes was inexorably pulled into a wide-ranging scheme with both personal and professional repercussions.

The always welcome Richard Farnsworth gets shoehorned into this film as a sort of substitute for the awful antagonist of the first film (played with jolly, sinister menace by John Huston), but ultimately has nothing to do. This leaves Nicholson and the other Jake, Harvey Keitel, with a lot of heavy lifting to do as actors, and they do it well.

A somewhat overstuffed cast of characters keeps things interesting (Tom Waits's cameo as a cop is pretty funny), and the plot actually does make sense, though red herrings and reversals do make the scheme behind all the other schemes look more complicated than it really is. Keep an eye out for an anachronistic ATM in one shot. Recommended.

Out of the Darkness

Darkness at Dawn: Early Suspense Classics by Cornell Woolrich, edited by Francis M. Nevins, Jr. and Martin H. Greenberg (1934-35; collected 1988): Woolrich's contemporary fame rests pretty much on the fact that he wrote the novel that Hitchcock's Rear Window was based on. A prolific writer of suspense short stories and novels, Woolrich was one of the first American pulp writers to be lionized in France for his noirish work (The Bride Wore Black remains Woolrich's best-regarded suspense novel).

By the mid-1930's, Woolrich had already published two well-regarded but light-selling realistic novels of the Roaring 20's, gone to Hollywood and failed there as a screenwriter, and finally returned to New York, where he would live and write until his death in 1968. All that, and he was a tortured homosexual in an America that shunned sexual difference. Whee, what a great fucking time the golden hued past was! Let's get back there as soon as possible in our Conservative time machine!

While Woolrich would write across all genres early on in his third career as a writer, his strengths lay in suspense oriented around a flawed or even murderous protagonist -- some stories parallel the efforts of fellow chronicler of the urban and suburban damned James M. Cain in 1930's suspense classics that include The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.

Woolrich's prose was never the equal of Cain's, or the slightly later starting Jim Thompson's. But he had a flair for propulsive action and for telling detail which we would now call period detail, though of course Woolrich lived in that period. The Depression-haunted streets of New York, marathon dance competitions, the interior of the Statue of Liberty, a high-end gambling resort just across the Mexican border -- all these locations and more make Woolrich's stories sing when it comes to establishing a potent and dark sense of time and place. These aren't great stories, but they are compelling portraits of a lost time and place submerged in exterior and interior darkness. Recommended.

Ministry of Fear

Ministry of Fear, written by Seton I. Miller, based on the novel by Graham Greene, directed by Fritz Lang, starring Ray Milland, Marjorie Reynolds and Carl Esmond (1944): The film opens with Stephen Neale (Milland) being released from a mental asylum where he's been incarcerated for two years after being convicted of mercy-killing his terminally ill wife, though his wife actually dosed herself with the poison he'd purchased. Because this is a thriller, there's a Nazi spy ring at work in the carnival opposite the train station Neale goes to after being released. In a case of mistaken identity, he's given a cake intended for a spy within which is hidden what Hitchcock would call the McGuffin -- the thing everyone in the thriller is chasing. Hilarity ensues.

It really seems as if Paramount was trying to make Ray Milland into a poor man's Cary Grant at this time, possibly because of Milland's odd mid-Atlantic accent. Milland's tour-de-force performance as an alcoholic in Lost Weekend was still a couple of years away; here, he's a sort-of dashing Hitchcockian 'Wrong Man' trapped in a thriller plot somewhat resembling that of The 39 Steps.

The whole thing with the cake is handled with right amount of drollness, and there are some really lovely set pieces cooked up by director Fritz Lang, he of German film classics M and Metropolis and a number of classic films noir once he fled Nazi Germany in the mid-1930's.

This is indeed a 'dark film' in terms of photography, though incongruously light-hearted much of the time -- a comic-relief private detective is something of a botch. A gun fight in an English field being bombed by the Nazis looks terrific for something obviously done on a sound stage, and there are a number of other scenes in which the play of light and shadow creates an aura of menace the script can't quite maintain -- the narrative starts and stops a number of times, something quite odd for a film that's less than 90 minutes long. But Lang, strong on visuals, always seemed to be a bit weak on narrative momentum. Recommended.