The Dark Corner

I’m guessing that if someone else besides Mark Stevens played the detective in “The Dark Corner” (1946) it would be better known today. Nothing against Stevens, who is fine but comes off a bit bland. Cast someone with an interesting face like Dana Andrews or Richard Conte in the role, and you would have a noir for the ages.

Stevens isn’t a total demerit however, and what we have is really nifty little noir, filled with enough colorful characters, gloriously moody black and white photography and on-location shooting to make it a prime entry in the post-war noir sweepstakes.

Stevens plays Bradford Galt (a terrible name for a detective, don’t you think?), who years before had taken the rap for his former partner Anthony Jardine (Kurt Kreuger). Jardine is now a big-time lawyer carrying on an affair with Mari Cathcart (Cathy Downs), younger wife of Hardy Cathcart (now that’s a name!), the city’s most prestigious art dealer.

 

 

Cathcart is played by Clifton Webb, who I will happily watch in anything. It was first role after his star-making turn in “Laura” (1944) and his Hardy Cathcart possesses as keen a wit as Waldo Lydecker, if not as barbed. Waldo had to bow to no one, but Hardy has to make nice to his customers. But he’s still the magnificently superior Clifton Webb we all know and love. Some people have said how it was an honor to have been insulted by Groucho Marx. Me, I would have liked to have been sneered at by Clifton Webb.

It looks like Jardine is looking to ensnare his old partner in another web of murder and deceit, with the help of Stauffer (William Bendix), an ex-detective with a penchant for white suits. Galt has a loyal secretary Kathleen (Lucille Ball) who helps clear him of a murder charge.

 

I’ll admit to not seeing all of Lucy’s movies, but I’ve never seen her as warm as she is here. She’s not the manic Lucy we all know, but a quiet, working girl possessing lots of street smarts. Her honest working girl character stands in strong contrast to all the upper class duplicitous characters here.

Galt also keeps a bottle of booze which he keeps in his bottom desk drawer, which is one of my favorite staples of detective fiction. I had a grin a mile wide when he pulled out that bottle. All detectives should have a bottle of rye in their desk drawer. I’ve thought about becoming a detective just so I can keep a bottle of rye in my bottom desk drawer, and I don’t even drink.

Director Henry Hathaway rarely made a film that I haven’t liked. He may not be a critic’s favorite – not enough of an “auteur” - but his films move with nary a wasted scene. His films are always so unfussy, and I mean that in the best way possible. Hathaway had scored a monster hit the year before with “The House on 92^nd Street”, a semi-documentary film, based on a true story about how the FBI cracked a nest of Nazi spies in the early years of World War II.

“The House on 92^nd Street” was celebrated for its use of on-location shooting, a rarity at the time, and in “The Dark Corner” Hathaway and his camera crew returned to the Big Apple’s streets for some fascinating on-location photography, even a car chase through the busy downtown streets. I’m not talking “The French Connection” here, but pretty good all the same.

I don’t want to talk too much about the plot, because there are some intriguing twists to be had here. Without giving anything away, what I liked about this movie is how tight the script is. So many mystery movies feel there has to be a never-ending series of twists and revelations that sometimes the story’s main focus gets lost. Here, everything happens for a reason and makes sense. It’s not contrived and one can see how the events could happen as they are playing out. 

A good script, taut direction, moody photography, a fine cast and the always watchable Clifton Webb make “The Dark Corner” a real winner.

Pawsome Pet Picture: Lucille Ball.

Personal Quote:

 "Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead."

I love Lucy episode with a young Barbara Eden.

I love Lucy episode with a young Barbara Eden playing visiting cousin "Diana", who all the men pay attention
to and the women get jealous.


  

Lucy's Character Actors and Actresses

Always on the lookout for a new approach to writing about one of my favorite subjects in classic movies—character actors and actresses—I recently came up with one that combines my love of character performers with another of my loves: the television series I Love Lucy. I first started watching the show as a child during summer vacations. Every morning at 9 a.m. I would be plunked in front of the TV set to watch Lucy come up with another outlandish scheme that involved Ethel, Ricky, and Fred. Over the years I've seen all of the Lucy episodes, some many times.



When Lucy went to Hollywood during seasons 4 and 5 of the show, each week she featured a big-name guest star like William Holden or John Wayne who played straight man to Lucy for the privilege of plugging his or her latest movie to Lucy's huge TV audience. But before this Lucy often used familiar character actors and actresses not as guest stars but in their well-known capacity as character performers. One thing I began to notice as I rewatched I Love Lucy after becoming more familiar with American movies from the 1930s-1960s was how often these former studio character actors appeared in episodes of the show and how much they contributed to it.



There are several reasons for this. The 1950s were the decade in which these people were transitioning from working for the movie studios, then in decline, to working in television. Most of the established studio character performers had second careers in which they became regular fixtures of the Westerns, mysteries, anthology series, and sitcoms that were the staple programming of television in that decade. Lucy was well known as one of the great social networkers of Hollywood. She had been in the movies for twenty years before getting her own TV series, working her way up from bit parts, often uncredited, to supporting roles at RKO and finally landing a contract at the most prestigious studio in Hollywood, MGM—the culmination of years of unflagging ambition and patient hard work. During those years Lucy had worked with many of the character actors who appeared in her show, and it's likely that she personally knew most of them. Lucy and Desi owned Desilu, which produced not only her own show but many of the TV series of the 1950s—everything from sitcoms like December Bride to adventure series like Whirlybirds. Many of the character actors who worked on I Love Lucy also worked in other Desilu series and later appeared in the two Lucille Ball series that followed I Love Lucy.



I've chosen fifteen character actors and actresses whom I recall from episodes of I Love Lucy, many of them episodes from the years before Lucy Ricardo went to Hollywood. A few of these I've written on in a more general way in previous posts (I've provided links to those posts), so I'll deal with them first.



•Edward Everett Horton. He appeared in season 1 in the episode "Lucy Plays Cupid" as Mr. Ritter, the grocer Lucy tries to fix up with her elderly neighbor (a hilarious Bea Benadaret, actually Lucy's first choice for Ethel Mertz, here playing a character much older than she really was). The only problem is that Mr. Ritter mistakenly believes Lucy is hitting on him for herself and wants to leave Ricky and elope with him, forcing Lucy to get up to various shenanigans to disabuse him of this notion. The comfortable rapport between these two consummate professionals was quite apparent in the many scenes they had together. Lucy had previously appeared in three movies with Edward Everett Horton, the first of which was the Astaire-Rogers musical Top Hat (1935), in which Lucy played, uncredited, a clerk in a florist's shop. Click here for more about Edward Everett Horton.



•Elizabeth Patterson. The first episode she appeared in was "The Marriage License" in season 1. In this episode Lucy believes that an error in her marriage license means that she and Ricky aren't legally married, and she and Ricky return to the justice of the peace who married them to get remarried. Elizabeth Patterson plays the wife of the justice of the peace. The two actresses had never appeared together before, but Lucy must have liked her work because she later gave her a semi-regular role as the Ricardos' neighbor Mrs. Trumbull, and she appeared as that character in ten episodes between 1952-1956. Click here for more about Elizabeth Patterson.



•Elsa Lanchester. In season 6 of the series, Elsa Lanchester plays the bossy woman who drives Lucy and Ethel to Florida after Lucy loses their train tickets in the episode "Off to Florida." After finding an axe in the trunk of the car, the pair become convinced that Lanchester is the notorious axe murderess who has just escaped from prison. Lanchester had never worked with Lucy before but did later appear in an episode of Here's Lucy. Click here for more about Elsa Lanchester.



•Strother Martin. In the same episode Elsa Lanchester appeared in, Strother Martin plays the waiter/cook at a greasy spoon where the women stop on their way to Florida. When Martin appeared in that 1956 episode, he had played small parts in movies like Kiss Me Deadly (1955) but would become really established as a recognizable character actor later, especially in Westerns like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and The Wild Bunch (1969). Perhaps his best-known film role is as the Captain of the chain gang in Cool Hand Luke (1967).



•Charles Lane. Often considered the quintessential character actor who most classic movie fans instantly recognize but not many can actually name, Lane (1905-2007) appeared in an incredible 350 movies and television shows, including four episodes of I Love Lucy. My favorite is the one from season 5 called "Staten Island Ferry," in which Lucy and Fred fall asleep on the Staten Island Ferry after taking too many seasick pills in preparation for their ocean voyage to Europe and barely make it to the passport office in time to get their passports. Lane plays the officious passport clerk who refuses to keep the office open late for them. He had appeared with Lucy in seven movies in the 1930s and 1940s and later would appear in six episodes of subsequent Lucy series.



•Jack Albertson. The only Oscar winner among this group (best supporting actor for 1968's The Subject Was Roses). Albertson has more than 160 movies (look for him as the mail sorter at the very beginning of Miracle on 34th Street) and TV series in his résumé, everything from The Twilight Zone and Dr. Kildare to Bonanza, but dozens of sitcoms, many produced by Desilu. He was a regular in 88 episodes of the Freddie Prinze series Chico and the Man (1974-1978). In season 5 of I Love Lucy in the episode "Bon Voyage" he plays the helicopter dispatcher who saves the day when Lucy misses the boat to Europe and has to be airlifted to it. I've always wondered if this episode used stock footage of helicopters from the Desilu series Whirlybirds.



•Charles Winninger. This veteran character actor played Fred's former vaudeville partner Barney Kurtz in the episode "Mertz and Kurtz" in season 4. Highlights of the episode include Lucy pretending to be the Mertz's maid to impress Barney and as a finale an elaborate old-time vaudeville show with Winninger and the entire cast performing at Ricky's night club. Lucy had worked with Winninger in one movie in the 1940s. His most famous role was as Cap'n Andy ("HAPPY New Year!") in the original Broadway production and 1936 movie version of Show Boat. He also had memorable parts in Destry Rides Again (1939) and as the tipsy Dr. Downer who misdiagnoses Hazel Flagg (Carole Lombard) in Nothing Sacred (1937).



•Allen Jenkins. With his aquiline features, nasal voice, and Brooklyn accent, he appeared in nearly 150 movies and TV shows, sometimes as a menacing hoodlum, more often as a slightly dim comic cop or gangster. He played both of these many times as a Warner Bros. contract player in the 1930s but worked in all genres, even Westerns and musicals. One of his most memorable roles was as a sinister thug named Hunk, gangster Humphrey Bogart's crony in Dead End (1937). In the early 1940s he played George Sanders's comic sidekick "Goldy" Locke in the Falcon series. He and Lucy were both in the RKO picture Five Came Back (1939). He appeared in three episodes of Lucy in seasons 1-3, each time playing a policeman with whom Lucy has a run-in.



•Ellen Corby. Later famous as Grandma Walton on the TV series The Waltons in the 1970s (she won three Emmys and one Golden Globe for the series), Ellen Corby played in more than 200 films—everything from Laurel and Hardy movies to classics like It's a Wonderful Life, Shane, and Vertigo, often uncredited—and TV shows. She received an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress for I Remember Mama (1948) and won the Golden Globe for that performance. She had worked with Lucy in two films in the 1940s. In season 6 she played Lucy's former high school drama coach in an episode called "Lucy Meets Orson Welles" in which Lucy unwittingly becomes Welles's assistant in a magic show. She later appeared in two 1962 episodes of The Lucy Show.



•Will Wright. A familiar face with over 200 acting credits, Will Wright had appeared with Lucy and William Holden in Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949). Probably his best-known role was as the house detective in the Alan Ladd-Veronica Lake film noir The Blue Dahlia (1946). He was in two episodes of Lucy. The one I especially remember is "Tennessee Bound" from season 4. On their way to California, the Ricardos and Mertzes make a detour to visit their old friend Tennessee Ernie Ford and are caught in a speed trap in a small town and thrown in jail. It turns out that what the sheriff (Wright) really wants is an audition with Ricky for his chubby, petite twin daughters Teensy and Weensy, who end up performing "Ricochet Romance" for Ricky before Tennessee Ernie shows up to rescue them. After Lucy et al. finally reach California, she slips in a plug for the actor's Beverly Hills ice cream parlor—located across the street from Lucy's onetime home studio, RKO, which Desilu bought in 1957—when in one episode bored Lucy says to Ethel something like, "Let's go to Will Wright's ice cream parlor and try the other 30 flavors."



•Eduardo Ciannelli. Born in southern Italy, he trained as a doctor before turning to acting. With more than 150 acting roles to his credit, he specialized in ethnic, especially Italian, roles, often of unsavory characters. He and Lucy (unbilled) appeared together in Winterset (1936). Two of his most memorable roles were as the sadistic mob boss in the Bette Davis movie Marked Woman (1937), a character supposedly based on the gangster Lucky Luciano, and as the fanatical leader of the Thuggees in Gunga Din (1939). In the 1950s he divided his work between Italy and the US. He appeared in season 6 of Lucy in the episode "Visitor from Italy" playing Mr. Martinelli, the owner of the pizza parlor where Lucy substitutes as a pizza chef and performs one of her most memorable bits of slapstick trying to perfect the art of tossing pizza crust in the air.



•Hans Conried. His eccentric manner and speech made him instantly identifiable. Probably best remembered as the mad piano teacher in The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953), he was credited with more than 200 roles dating from 1938, including The Big Street (1942) with Lucy and Henry Fonda. He had a continuing role as Uncle Tonoose in Danny Thomas's Desilu-produced sitcom Make Room for Daddy. He actually appeared in two episodes of Lucy, but the one I vividly recall is the one from season 2 called "Lucy Hires an English Tutor." Filmed while Lucy was pregnant, the premise is that Lucy wants her baby to speak English perfectly, so she hires a pernickety speech tutor (Conried) to coach her. The rub is that the fussy academic actually wants to be in show business and only took the job as a way to get an audition with Ricky.



•Mary Wickes. The gawky, buck-toothed actress worked in movies and TV for sixty years, from 1935 to 1995, and is probably best remembered for one of her earliest parts, as the nurse tormented by Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941). She was in the season 1 episode "The Ballet" as the demanding French ballet instructor Madame Lamand, whose class Lucy attends when she wants to get a part as a ballerina in Ricky's show. The episode gave Lucy another opportunity to indulge her penchant for physical comedy. Wickes had never worked with Lucy before this, but the two must have gotten along well because she later appeared in seven episodes of The Lucy Show and nine episodes of Here's Lucy.



•Olin Howland. He was in more than 200 movies and TV shows between 1918 and 1959, the majority of his movie roles so small they were uncredited, often playing hicks or bumpkins. I saw him not long ago in Nothing Sacred (1937) as the laconic railroad station agent, the first person Fredric March meets in the small New England town where he has gone to interview Hazel Flagg. In season 4 of Lucy he plays George Skinner, the owner of the isolated motel/cafe in Ohio where the Ricardos and Mertzes are forced to spend their first night on the way to California in the episode "First Stop." The way he switches hats as he switches roles from desk clerk to cook and back again is hilarious. Of course, their room turns out to be miserably uncomfortable, with lumpy mattresses and trains thundering past just feet from the window every couple of minutes. Yet Skinner behaves as though his establishment is the Hilton as he shamelessly overcharges his hapless guests for everything.



•Madge Blake. The petite actress with the mellifluous voice was 50 years old when she appeared in her first movie, playing Spencer Tracy's mother in Adam's Rib (1949). Probably her most famous role was as the chatty gossip columnist Dora Bailey, who emcees the movie premiere Gene Kelly and Jean Hagen attend in Singin' in the Rain (1952). On TV she played Aunt Harriet in 88 episodes of Batman and had continuing roles in The Jack Benny Program, Leave It to Beaver, and The Real McCoys. She appeared in two Lucy episodes, the one I recall more vividly being the season 3 episode "Ricky Loses His Temper." That's just what he does when Lucy develops an obsession with buying hats. The result is one of those bets that so often formed the premise of an episode: Ricky bets Lucy he can avoid losing his temper longer than she can resist buying another hat. Lucy, however, doesn't take into account the persuasive sales technique of kindly hat store owner Madge Blake, who maneuvers her into buying a new hat on the sly, confident that Ricky will lose his temper before he finds out about her illicit purchase.

Brief Reviews: Film Noir, Am&#233ricain et Fran&#231ais

THE DARK CORNER (1946) ***
If you've ever yearned to see Lucille Ball in a film noir, this movie, directed by Henry Hathaway, will give you the chance. Lucy plays Kathleen Stewart, secretary to a P.I. who has just opened an office in New York City, Brad Galt (Mark Stevens). In no time at all Galt tangles with a crew of weird, menacing characters. One is his former partner, Anthony Jardine, who had Galt framed in San Francisco and sent to prison. Jardine is now a lawyer and one of his clients is Hardy Cathcart (Clifton Webb), the owner of a ritzy art gallery, whose much younger wife is having an affair with Jardine. We know this because in their first scene together the radio in the background is playing "The More I See You (the More I Want You)." In fact, the movie is filled with ambient sound—music from orchestras or juke boxes heard through open doorways of night clubs and bars or on radios and phonographs in rooms, and street noise of all kinds, including traffic and the rumble of subway trains, heard even through open windows when the action moves indoors. In a moment of bizarre contrast, a lovely version of Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo" plays while a brutal murder is taking place.

Galt is framed for the murder of his former partner, and Lucy, who has fallen in love with Galt, must help him find the real killer before the police find him. I love Lucy, but she doesn't seem ideally cast here. She handles with aplomb the wisecracking banter with Galt as she deflects his sexual advances at the beginning of the movie, but after that her character becomes a bit bland and she doesn't really get the chance to shine. Stevens doesn't have enough heft as an actor to put across his cynical lines, which sound like they come directly from a Raymond Chandler novel. They really need somebody more forceful, like Humphrey Bogart. Webb is delightful, spouting arch witticisms like "The enjoyment of art is the only remaining ecstasy that is neither illegal nor immoral" (actually a variation on a quip by Robert Benchley).

But the whole movie has an air of familiarity, from the predictable plot to the well-worn characters, including Webb, channeling his Waldo Lydecker from Laura, and William Bendix, playing a thuggish P.I., who seems to be reprising his role in The Glass Key. One element, though, dominates the movie: Joe MacDonald's astonishing cinematography, a perfect exemplar of the film noir look. I've seldom seen a movie shot with such high-contrast lighting. This is a black-and-white film in the most literal sense, a film with virtually no tonal gradation: the blacks and shadows are as dark, and the whites as bright, as imaginable, with few shades of gray in between. This extreme lighting, along with the use of mirrors and windows as recurring visual motifs, gives the film great visual appeal. One final note: the set decorators should be commended for their audacity in furnishing the Cathcart Gallery. It is as full of art treasures as the National Gallery in London or the Louvre, filled with Rembrandts, Gainsboroughs, Van Goghs, even Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.

BORN TO KILL (1947) ***½
A few months ago, in his blog Maximum Strength Mick, San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle asked his readers what they would present as guest programmers on Turner Classic Movies. I chose four undervalued genre pictures from the studio era, and for my film noir I chose this movie. Directed by Robert Wise in a less genre-influenced style than his later near-classic The Set-Up (which I previously reviewed at The Movie Projector), it nonetheless has several effectively atmospheric sequences, especially one that takes place on a foggy night in a remote area of the dunes at the beach. Despite Wise's restrained direction, the movie's plot and characters unmistakably make it a noir.

It opens in Reno, where Helen Trent (Claire Trevor, in an atypically posh role) is just completing her divorce. On her last night in town, at a casino she encounters a man, Sam Wild (!) (Lawrence Tierney), whose good looks and sexual charisma spark her interest. Little does she know he is a paranoid psychopath dating another resident (Isabel Jewell) of the boarding house where she has been staying and that later that night he will savagely murder both Jewell and the man she has been two-timing him with. When Helen discovers the bodies in the kitchen of the boarding house, she calmly walks around to the front door, enters the house, and calls the train depot to reserve a seat on tomorrow's train to San Francisco, where she lives. Later she explains that she didn't call the police because "it's a lot of bother." Within ten minutes the tone of the movie has been established by the gory double murder, and the corrupt nature of its two main characters clearly revealed by their roles in it. When Wild boldly picks up Helen at the train station the next day and follows her back to San Francisco, we can see where the plot is heading: it is inevitable that these two forces—he all uncontrolled impulse and she all cold calculation—will collide like matter and anti-matter, creating an explosive reaction that after minor detonations along the way will end in mutual annihilation.

Along for the ride is a great supporting cast. Esther Howard, who had small roles in seven films directed by Preston Sturges, plays the blowsy, beer-guzzling landlady of the boarding house in Reno. Walter Slezak plays the sly P.I. she hires to track down the killer. Best of all, Elisha Cook, Jr. plays Wild's best friend, Marty, for five years his roommate and protector. After finding out about the double murder in Reno, he patiently tells Wild, "You can't just go around killin' people when the notion strikes you. It's not feasible" and explains exactly what must be done to avoid getting caught. To say that there is an implicitly homoerotic element to the relationship between these two would be an understatement.

We can predict how the movie will end but not the twists and turns it will take on its way there, and watching the scenario play out to its inevitable end—witnessing the thrust-and-parry relationship between Trevor and Tierney as she attempts to control an essentially anarchic force—provides an hour and a half of immensely satisfying entertainment, especially for lovers of the genre.

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1955) ****
Although nearly unknown in the U.S. until recently, the French director Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) has long been recognized in Europe as a precursor of, and major influence on, the French New Wave. Traces of his style and sensibility are easily recognized in early works by Godard and Truffaut, especially Breathless (which incorporates references to the plot of Bob le Flambeur and even features a cameo by Melville) and Shoot the Piano Player. In fact, a convincing case could be made the Bob le Flambeur is actually the first movie of the New Wave.

This is a heist movie—a type of film considered by many a sub-genre of film noir—in the vein of The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing, but I would say that as good as those movies are, Bob le Flambeur is even better. Even though it is a heist movie—the object is the casino at Deauville—the plan for the heist isn't hatched until well into the movie, and the (naturally) unsuccessful heist never actually happens. The movie clearly occupies film noir territory with its almost exclusively nocturnal action; its cast of petty crooks, hustlers, gamblers, and gendarmes who keep tabs on them; and its settings in bars, night clubs, card rooms, race tracks, and casinos both legal and illegal. The whole movie has an aura of life lived on the edge, outside of conventional society and in an atmosphere of risk and unpredictability. Over all hangs an air of fatalism, of men and women driven by internal forces to behave in ways that will inevitably lead to their doom.

Movies of this type invariably have an ensemble cast of colorful characters, but here it is the main character, Bob Montagné, the flambeur or compulsive gambler of the title (he even keeps a one-armed bandit in a small closet in his living room just to amuse himself with), who lifts the story into the stratosphere. As portrayed by Roger Duchesne, Bob is a slick, sophisticated man, a middle-aged ex-con who enjoys the good things in life—a quality wardrobe, a snazzy American Plymouth convertible, and a cool bachelor pad with a loft and picture-window view of the Sacré-Coeur—and maintains his comfortable lifestyle through the tireless pursuit of all sorts of gambling coupled with an unshakable belief in his own good luck. For the first part of the movie, his good fortune always seems to hold. But around midway through, his luck turns and, broke, he is forced to devise the scheme to rob the casino. His plan, so complex and so intricately engineered down to the least detail, clearly indicates a formidable intelligence and organizational ability that channeled into legitimate pursuits would probably have made Bob a very rich businessman.

Melville directs with the flair and personal authority that would later come to be considered hallmarks of the New Wave directors. As well as the conventional flat cuts, dissolves, and fade-out/fade-ins, he revives transitional devices such as iris-ins, iris-outs, horizontal wipes, and at one point even a vertical wipe—just the kind of retro flourishes later used by Truffaut and Godard in their early films. He and his cinematographer, the great Henri Decaë, film the deserted early-morning streets of Paris and the dives frequented by his characters in a near-documentary way that makes the viewer feel like an observer of reality. Melville, who also co-wrote the movie, gives Bob a concisely revealed backstory and places him in situations—such as his avuncular interactions with both Paulo, his young protégé and the son of his former partner-in-crime and Anne, a foolish, uninhibited, but charming teenager living on the streets—that succinctly limn a fully developed, fascinating, and sympathetic character.

In typical noir fashion, the movie ends in irony: waiting for several hours in the casino for the robbery to begin, Bob whiles away the time gambling and manages to win a fortune. He doesn't really need the money any more and feels his self-confidence restored, yet he still carries through with the robbery even though he knows it is destined for failure. I can think of no other movie that so obviously acts as a transition between the American films noirs of the 1940's and early 50's and their offspring, the French New Wave films of the late 1950's and early 60's.

BREATHLESS (1959) ***
After watching this movie—one of the seminal films of the French New Wave—with friends the other night, I asked one (not a cinephile, just an ordinary movie watcher) what he thought of it. His answer: "Merde." I wouldn't go quite that far myself, but I must say that afterward I felt a distinct sense of letdown, a sort of cinematic petite mort. I have to confess that I have never been that fond of Jean-Luc Godard, the film's director. Although I had never seen Breathless before, I have seen several of the movies that immediately followed it. In each of those movies I found some things to like, but with the exception of Weekend (1967) and possibly Contempt (1963), they never struck me as unified works of art or even film narrative. And I always felt that they were keeping me at arm's distance, almost as though Godard was daring the viewer to tolerate his idiosyncrasies.

In Breathless, Godard has an annoying way of taking a stylistic quirk and repeating it ad nauseam. A couple of examples: 1) Those vaunted jump cuts. Exactly what was their purpose? Just to show that he could defy the conventions of film storytelling if he wanted to, as if he could by the power of his ego turn a flaw into a virtue and exhibit his individualism by a refusal to stick to the rules, even when there is a perfectly good reason for the rules? I could understand the cuts that covered major ellipses in the narrative to speed things along, but I found all the small jump cuts (or maybe jumpy cuts would be more accurate), when just a second or so of action was missing, to be distracting. 2) Belmondo's tic of rubbing his lips. Those are magnificent lips—in a way they are the real star of the movie. Is Godard trying to show what a narcissist Michel (the character Belmondo plays) is? The time he did this in front of Patricia's (Jean Seberg) dressing table mirror, I actually thought he was putting on some of her lipstick. These examples beg the question: At what point does novelty become tedium, cleverness become self-indulgence, hommage become pretension? The answer provided by this movie is, around the tenth repetition. But don't worry, you'll get the chance to see this answer confirmed by another ten or so repetitions.

So why watch Breathless? I can offer three reasons (hence the *** rating): 1) The film is historically important. Breathless is—along with The 400 Blows and Hiroshima, Mon Amour—one of the three earliest full-blown examples of the French New Wave, a movement that had tremendous impact on the history of film. 2) Several dazzling extended tracking shots by cinematographer Raoul Coutard, including a 360-degree shot of Seberg circling the room that is repeated a second time, then repeated again with Belmondo circling in the opposite direction. 3) Jean-Paul Belmondo. His performance is as revolutionary as Marlon Brando's in A Streetcar Named Desire—unique, charismatic, and completely riveting. From little more than a sketchy case study of a self-absorbed young man with severe personality disorder, he creates a compelling character. If you can stay with this movie—considered by many Godard's most accessible work—to the end, you might want to seek out more of his films. But as Breathless attests, be prepared to accept the inevitable annoyances and excesses of Godard to enjoy his moments of inspiration.