Moontide

A strange early Noir entry, directed by Fritz Lang for about two weeks before he quit in disgust over the French mega-star Jean Gabin, who was making his first American movie appearance in this one.

Gabin plays the ridiculously named *Bobo,* a hard-drinking French dockside drifter, burdened with a faggy leech of a *friend* named *Tiny* (played by It's A Wonderful Life's Uncle Billy). As best as can be determined from Moontide’s obtuse script, Tiny once helped Bobo escape from a murder pickle, and now out of blackmail-tinged gratitude, Bobo lets Tiny use him as a kind of one-man dock worker temp agency—Bobo works, and Tiny gets a nice cut of the pay to finance his E-Z barfly life.

Moontide features one of the most bizarre scenes in Hollywood history, with faggy Tiny shown in a lockerroom sadistically snapping a towel at a nude Claude Rains, with nothing before or after to explain this arbitrary glimpse of the pseudo-homo nightmare world.

There’s another weird scene early in the film. Bobo is on a bender, and his descent into an alcoholic blackout is rendered in a surreal montage, featuring clocks with wildly spinning liquor bottles for the hour and minute hands. Salvador Dali was hired to do the scene, but his ideas were found too disturbing for use, so a watered-down Hollywood version was substituted.

Moontide’s rather thin plot revolves around the murder of an old rummy named Pop, with Tiny showing up every now and then to darkly hint Bobo did the killing during his drunken blackout.

This non-mystifying murder mystery quickly takes a backseat to the romance between Bobo and Anna (played by a scrawny-looking Ida Lupino). Bobo saves Anna as she tries to drown herself in the Pacific Ocean. Why is Anna suicidal? Who knows? Who cares? Certainly not Anna, who regains her will to live with astonishing alacrity after meeting Bobo. In fact, Anna marries Bobo three or four days after her suicide attempt, and there can be no finer testimony to the joys of living on a bait barge with an alcoholic French drifter.

Tiny, now broken-hearted in addition to being faggy, turns up one last time to nearly spoil the newlywed’s fun, but is eventually forced by Bobo to take a long walk off a short pier. And so Bobo and Anna can live happily-ever-after selling chum together.

Because this thing started production shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, with the resulting Pacific Coast-wide fear of further Jap mischief, no filming could be done on location at the San Pedro harbor, so a bait barge set had to built in a studio—thus all the waterfront scenes look loopily artificial, further adding to the already kooky vibe of this eccentric Noir exercise. Worth a look only for the sake of curiosity.

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Observe And Report

If one were to interpret this movie literally, as just the story of fat, vulgar, lunatick mall rent-a-cop Ronnie utterly failing to function rationally in society (and likewise for his bizarre associates and his drunkard mother), one would become quickly irritated with the tedious crudity and obscene humor of this 21st century *screwball* comedy.

But if one can accept this grotesque farce as a parable of our contemporary American times, one can appreciate its apocalyptic take on the vanishing American Dream. Set in the mall, the retailverse is the perfect microcosm of materialist America, and Ronnie, therefore, stands as the American Everyman, chasing a Dream he can never catch, and for which he is not fit.

Unstable Ronnie answers the trivial frustrations of his mall patrol with potty mouth profanity and violence, and thus serves also as a larger symbol of the irrational American empire, an empire unable to process the complexities of other cultures (this is allegorized in Observe And Report in the subplot involving Ronnie’s personal war with a Middle Eastern mall merchant), only able to lash out with its military, seeking to solve all the empire’s problems (real and imagined) through violence.

The supporting characters are similarly archetypes of ruined Americans. There is Brandi, the oblivious cosmetics counter slut, who thinks nothing of exposing most of her young white flesh in tiny tight skirts and titty revealing tops, yet who then is somehow scandalized by a male flasher who trolls the mall.

Observe And Report also features a supposed *good* girl, Nell, who works at the mall pastry shop. She’s presented as one of America’s vague new megachurch *Christians,* a reformed tramp who fancies herself a *born-again virgin.* Yet just as American Christendom rejects Christ’s call to resist not evil, and to love, bless, pray for and do good to them that hate you by condoning America’s endless wars, *Christian* Nell rejects the Savior’s teachings as she embraces Ronnie’s brutal assault on her manager, a Napoleonic dimwit who had been cruelly teasing her.

Of course, I may be guilty of reading too much into Observe And Report. It may simply be just a cinematic exercise in the dumb and the coarse, and in that regard, the natural fruit of America’s rotten culture.

One other fellow who seems perplexed as to how to interpret Observe And Report is the film’s supporting actor, Ray Liotta, who plays Ronnie’s real cop foil. Liotta appears befuddled in most of his scenes, and unsure whether to go for the broad laughs of a stupid comedy, or play it more subtle, as if in a dark satire, so he stumbles dumbfounded throughout most of the picture.

Celluloid garbage of no redeeming social value? Or blistering parable of decaying America? Or, perhaps, one and the same?

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Detour

This thing looks about as cheaply made as an Ed Wood film (and supposedly it was shot just as fast: six days), and features the most preposterous *twist* of fate in film history, yet it remains weirdly memorable sixty-six years later. Why? Because this is an S&M film, and perversion is timeless.

In Detour, Tom Neal’s Al is the masochist, a lounge piano player with Carnegie Hall ambitions, a man of exceptional self-pity, born to frown and whine and pout over the continual kicks ‘fate’ will send his way.

Hitchhiking from New York to California to see his girlfriend, Al gets a ride with a self-aggrandizing gambler, who has a heart attack and then falls out of the car and hits his head on a conveniently placed rock. Life’s whipping boy Al assumes he’ll be charged with murder, so he hides the body, then rides off in the dead man’s car.

At an Arizona gas station, lucky Al spots a female hitchhiker, Vera (played by the appropriately named Ann Savage). There’s something about Vera:

She was young - not more than 24. Man, she looked like she had been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world! Yet in spite of that, I got the impression of beauty, not the beauty of a movie actress, mind you, or the beauty you dream about with your wife, but a natural beauty, a beauty that's almost homely, because it's so real.

That’s Al’s description of Vera. The key line: not the beauty of a movie actress, mind you, or the beauty you dream about with your wife. Ha. That’s 1940s speak for the kind of dirty girl you don’t marry, but pick up, finger and then throw in the gutter. But our boy Al is no match for Vera, a snarling sadist the like of which has never been seen on the screen before or since. As it turns out, she knows about Al and the gambler, and quickly has Al under her greasy thumb, and friend, Al doesn’t really protest too much, or try too hard to get away from her.

Ann Savage’s Vera is the wildest, most over-the-top femme fatale in all of Film Noir. She’s got dirty hair and a dirtier mouth and an even dirtier mind. And it’s all very tempting to our boy Al. If you watch this thing and break the 1940s code, you can almost hear Al begging for Vera to piss on him. . .

A cheap, absurd little film, barely an hour long, yet a grimy masterpiece of human baseness. Lit up by Ann Savage’s crazy star turn, it will shine forever in the B-movie firmament.

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In A Lonely Place

Our Lord once observed:

If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

Such is the state of Humphrey Bogart’s character Dixon Steele in the Noir epic In A Lonely Place. Steele is a fading screenwriter, a bitter, paranoid, violent barfly with a hair-trigger temper. When his devoted agent offers him a chance to rejuvenate his career by turning a trashy best-selling novel into a script, Steele grudgingly agrees. He then invites a restaurant hatcheck girl who has the read the book to his place to tell him the story, so he can avoid the hassle of having to read the crappy book himself. Alas, the hatcheck girl is murdered a couple hours after leaving Steele’s apartment, and Steele becomes the prime suspect in the killing. The closest Steele has to an alibi is his new neighbor, Laurel Gray, who happened to see the hatcheck girl leave Steele’s apartment alone. The murder mystery quickly takes a backseat to the relationship that develops between Steele and Gray.

My favorite scene in In A Lonely Place is the one in which Steele summons the nerve to go to Gray’s apartment to ask her if she’s decided whether or not she wants to start a relationship with him. Bogart’s Steele is a hand-wringing nervous wreck. He’s fallen hard for Gray, who is played by Gloria Grahame. Grahame’s Laurel Gray has snapped Steele out of his cranky crash to the bottom. Infatuated like a blushing schoolboy, Steele imagines a new beginning with Gray. Gray is his last chance to escape his lonely descent into oblivion. Bogart is completely convincing as the sweating, fretting Steele, desperate to know if Gray will commit to him. Up to this point, Grahame’s Gray has been cool and coy, keeping Steele at a distance, but when she agrees to begin a romance with him, Steele is instantly transformed. “I know your name! I know where you live!” he says in a non sequitur of malignant triumph, his hands around Gray’s neck as he is about to kiss her.

By the end of In A Lonely Place, it is Laurel Gray who is the hand-wringing nervous wreck, terrified nearly out of her wits she is just one ruffled Steele feather away from having the shit beat out of her. And the hatcheck girl murder is mere afterthought compared to the mystery of Steele’s sick psyche.

In A Lonely Place has one of the great unhappy endings in film history, as Steele trudges wearily and alone to his apartment, undone by his damaged soul. He’s the precursor of the modern American wife-beater, a slave to his emotions, unable to control his behavior, and a helpless witness to his own destruction. Bogart is no Johnny One Note tough guy, here. He has to play the divided soul, and he gives a top-notch performance as man whose better angels lose out to the bitter angry angels of his dark nature.

As much as I like the naughty Noir nymph Gloria Grahame, it must be said the role of Laurel Gray is a little beyond her usual cheap tramp range. She’s a little too toying in the beginning, and a little too melodramatic at the end. But this is only a minor distraction from an otherwise early masterpiece of Obsessive Love, American Domestic Violence Style.

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Sudden Fear

Sudden Fear: An aging Mommie Dearest stars as a rich playwright who fires ugly-and-weird-looking Jack Palance from her latest Broadway production because Palance, being ugly-and-weird-looking, is too ugly-and-weird-looking to play a romantic lead. Later, Mommie Dearest meets ugly-and-weird-looking Jack Palance on a train, and ugly-and-weird-looking Palance charms the panties off the old-and-no-doubt-sexually-frustrated-Mommie Dearest bag. Ugly-and-weird-looking Palance may be ugly-and-weird-looking, but his sweet-talking and his fawning attention, and no doubt his youthful bedroom vigor, soon make him seem to old bag Mommie Dearest all an old bag of a woman could want in a man, no matter how ugly-and-weird-looking.

Of course, for Mommie Dearest it certainly is too good to be true. Ugly-and-weird-looking Jack Palance is still bitter over being fired, and, more importantly, he smells the old bag’s money, and it is an intoxicating scent, indeed—fragrant enough to cover the stench of coital relations with Mommie Dearest, who really is nearly old enough to be his Mommie, indeed.

Noir Super Hottie Gloria Grahame plays the ugly-and-weird-looking Palance’s real object of desire, and the odd-looking couple scheme to murder Mommie Dearest. . .but Mommie Dearest discovers the odd-looking couple’s vile plans, and seeks to turn the tables on her much-younger tormentors.

Flicks like Sudden Fear are made-to-order for Grande Dame scene-chewing actresses like Joan Crawford, and Mommie Dearest didn’t disappoint here, putting on enough of an over-heated thespian display of love, fear and hate to earn her last Academy Award nomination. This is good old-time movie fun.

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Out Of The Past

One from the Film Noir pantheon, featuring the quintessential Robert Mitchum experience. Mitchum plays, in trademark fashion, a character supremely underwhelmed by everything and everybody around him—with one fatal exception: attractively adorned pussy. Mitchum’s character throws his life away, and without much anguish, because he realizes he’s not tossing out much of value, anyway. He’s aware of his imperfection, he’s aware he’s a loser. In the end, all that seems truly important to him is to maintain the illusion he can lose by doing it his way.

Out of the Past features a trio of old school hotties: Rhonda Fleming, Virginia Huston and Jane Greer. Greer’s character is one of the most amoral femmes fatales in screen history. Her allure, remarkably, is due more to her sociopathy than her fleshly charms. Her nearly demonic deviousness prompts Mitchum’s character to utter the classic line:

You’re like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another.

But her appeal is so powerful, Mitchum’s character is more than willing to follow her gutter-to-gutter. Greer’s character neatly summarizes their relationship:

You're no good, and neither am I. That's why we deserve each other.

Virginia Huston plays the ‘good girl,’ about the only character not totally enslaved to carnality. There’s really no place for her in the dark world of Out of the Past, and in the end, she must believe a lie in order for her to make the compromise necessary to keep on going.

Made over half-a-century ago, Out of the Past is an icon of post-Christian America, a land of the double-minded, for whom one thing is just as good as the next, and for whom moral distinctions are not worth troubling over. Timeless.

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Joe Stack. Pioneer?

AP, 19 February 2010: A software engineer with an apparent grudge against the government crashed his small plane into an office building with nearly 200 Internal Revenue Service employees inside, killing himself and at least one worker. Before flying his single engine Piper PA-28 into the hulking black-glass office building Thursday morning, A. Joseph Stack III apparently posted a rambling screed on a Web site in which he railed against "big brother," the "unthinkable atrocities" committed by big business and the governments bailouts that followed. In the note, signed "Joe Stack (1956-2010)" and dated Thursday, he said he slowly came to the conclusion that "violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer." In the self-described "rant," the author fumed about the IRS and wrote, "Nothing changes unless there is a body count." "I have had all I can stand," he wrote, adding: "I choose not to keep looking over my shoulder at `big brother' while he strips my carcass."

My first reaction to events of this kind is always amazement we don’t have more.

In a nation populated overwhelmingly with pseudo-Christian baptized materialists, sheeple devoted solely to the pursuit of treasure on earth, I live in expectation of a great wave of *domestic terrorism,* as the sheeple’s credit wealth evaporates in the wake of America’s economic collapse.

But then, considering the craft of the Military Media Complex, my amazement ceases, as I watch the story of the *lone nut* replaced by coverage of more important news events, such as the *apology* of the perpetually erect Tiger Woods, or the latest crash of a female skier at the Olympics, or the most recent weep-fest from a dismissed American Idol wannabe.@@@

I must concede the American masses remain hypnotized by the *broadcast reality* created by the Media wing of the Military Media Complex. Much like terminal cancer patients die in a medicated state of unfeeling, the sheeple die painlessly, over-dosed on the gross *entertainments* of their televisions and other assorted electronic gadgets.

Poorly and shallowly educated, raised on the brain sugar of the boob tube, the American is unaware he/she is the product of mass manipulation.

Still, one wonders how long the electronic opium can continue to placate the sheeple. We are still only in the very earliest stage of America’s economic ruin. Perhaps a day will come when the new reality of poverty breaks down the electronic barrier of the *broadcast reality,* and more and more sheeple will make the same discovery as Joe Stack:

It made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie. It also made me realize, not only how naive I had been, but also the incredible stupidity of the American public; that they buy, hook, line, and sinker, the crap about their 'freedom' … and that they continue to do so with eyes closed in the face of overwhelming evidence and all that keeps happening in front of them.

Joe Stack. Pioneer?

@@@Unlike the story of the famous Detroit airport *underwear bomber,* who only managed to singe his own pubic hairs. Yet that *terrorist’s* story was *big news* for days, as it served the Military Media Complex’ interests to keep the sheeple frightened their *broadcast reality* might be threatened by the other. . .and that fear, of course, keeps the *defense* budget sacrosanct. But we can’t have the sheeple fretting over *domestic terrorists*--that truly hits a little too close to home, and threatens to break the electronic trance which molds the sheeple.

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