Eye on Movies: Noir City 15: Ten-Day Crime Spree

Alright, I’ll talk! Stop! Don’t hit me no more! I’ll tell ya everythin’ I know. Get that light outta my eyes, will ya? I can’t think!

It was Eddie and his gang. The Film Noir Foundation. Yeah, you coppers know them heisters. Chumps like me are scrapin’ the gutter for peanuts, while Eddie and his FNF gang are breakin’ into film vaults all over the world and makin’ off with the crown jewels of sixty years of crime flicks. He’s made crime pay alright damn him while I’m stuck in the middle of Oaktown watchin’ reruns of Midway on AMC!

Yeah, yeah, I’ll tell ya where. Put my arm back in my socket first, will ya? And take that thumb outta my eye!

Eddie and his pals are showin’ off the goods at the fifteenth annual Film Noir Foundation’s Noir CityFilm Festival, held at San Francisco’s legendary Castro Theater and hosted byEddie. The fest is runnin’ from Friday January 20 thru January 29.

What’re the movies about!? What the hell d’ya think they’re about, flatfoot? Heists! Big heists! Big steals that wind up screwin’ the pooch . . . jus’ like they’re always goin’ wrong with me. Well, how the hell was I s’posed to know them rocks belonged to the Kardashians!?

No, I don’t know all the jewels, but I seen a whole bunch of ‘em, some of ‘em a long time ago. Yeah, they’re beautiful all right . . . lemme tell ya . . . .

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The first gem from the vault is the Robert Siodmak-directed Criss Cross from 1947, starring Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner, both ashine with resplendent youth. Like many a noir, it’s about the things a guy will do for love. Lancaster is the love-befuddled sap to Gardner’s femme fatale, who’s attached to that perfectly slimy piece of toast Dan Duryea. You may find the ending a little weak as I did, but the build-up is terrific.

Better yet, the festival tops off its opening night with what some call the crown jewel of all heist films, The Asphalt Jungle (1951). From a W.R. Burnett novel, it’s true to its title as there’s not a whiff of nature to be seen anywhere until the unexpectedly moving ending in another of director John Huston’s many masterworks. I also like how it portrays the human violence unfolds in real life—randomly, stupidly.

The first Saturday matinee brings a little treat for fans of the character actors of the 1950s and 1960s in Kansas City Confidential (1953). Directed by Phil Karlson, it’s the story of a poor mug (John Payne) framed by criminal mastermind Preston Foster for a robbery he didn’t commit. Once out of the can, Payne tracks Foster down to a Mexican resort to get his justice.

The film’s best fun comes from the casting and performances by Foster’s gang of hapless miscreant mugs in the background: growling block-headed Neville Brand, sweaty, wall-eyed Jack Elam and, best of all to some, Lee Van Cleef, dispensing a bit with his great reptilian sneer to cheerfully play a self-styled Valentino named Tony Romano with humor, charm and skill. (You can read more about Van Cleef’s work in this film here and in my recent two-part profile of the actor in Filmfax magazine.) No doubt about it, it’s Bad Guy Heaven. Be seeing you there!

Winding up that Saturday afternoon is Violent Saturday, an offbeat thriller from 1955 about a gang of bank robbers (Lee Marvin, another angel from Bad Guy Heaven, of course; Stephen McNally; and J. Carroll Naish) attempting to rob a small-town bank while trying to avoid entanglements with its troubled residents—sort of Peyton Place meets Richard Stark. Directed by a master craftsman, Richard Fleischer (The Narrow Margin) the film’s violence is quite brutal for its era. And Ernest Borgnine as an Amish farmer seems some sort of peak in oddball casting.

While some pick The Asphalt Jungle as the best heist film ever, others will nominate Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955) in that eternal debate. Dassin directed this after his exile from the United States during the Red Scare. French filmmaking benefitted thanks to the bringing of American skill and sensibilities to their genre movies. The heist sequence is the most exquisite ever as it unfolds without a word of dialogue, a perfect example of what Hitchcock called “pure cinema.” This or The Asphalt Jungle? It’s enough to split a guy’s heart in two.

The following Monday, January 23^rd, brings The Killing, directed by a young Stanley Kubrick, from a script he cowrote with Jim Thompson (The Grifters). In addition to the terrific cast (Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook, Jr., Timothy Carey, Vince Edwards et al), you can also get an early look at Kubrick’s unique sense of space in widescreen format. Bay Area horse racing fans will also enjoy the scenes of long-gone Bay Meadows racetrack.

Tuesday night, the 24^th, brings one of the best comedies in any genre The Ladykillers. (1955, which seems to be a peak year for the heist genre) Produced by Ealing Studios and directed by Alexander Mackendrick (A Fish Called Wanda), it concerns a band of thieves who rent a hideout in which to plan their next heist. Unfortunately, they fail to account for their exquisitely caring and very nosy landlady. There’s Alec Guinness (with the greatest set of bad teeth ever), Peter Sellers and the underrated Herbert Lom. But all of them crumble before the adorable force of nature that is Katie Johnson. You owe yourself this one.

I haven’t seen The Sicilian Clan (1969) in years and due to the late hour of the screening (late Wednesday, the 25^th), I’ll be missing it again. It’s a very good example of the crime thrillers Europeans started turning to as the spaghetti western craze played out its freaky string. This one features Alain Delon, Lino Ventura, and Jean Gabin and was directed by the Turkish-born Henri Verneuil, the director of another nifty Euro-thriller called The Burglars. At their best, these films are as sharp and entertaining as any B-crime picture from the 1940s and 1950s. And there’s Ennio Morricone’s score, one of the best of his huge catalogue. I may not have seen this one in a long time, but I know its music by heart (and good luck at finding the soundtrack).

For crowd-pleaser of the festival, I nominate 1974’s The Taking of Pelham 123, one of the best New York thrillers ever, filmed against the gloriously scuzzy backdrop of 1970s Gotham. It features hangdog Walter Matthau, chilly-eyed Robert Shaw, Jerry Stiller and a winsome Martin Balsam in a tale of a violent subway hijacking that comes down with a URI. It’s a perfect blend of laughs and thrills and is pure New York down to its bawdy bones. But hey . . . what d’ya want for twenty-five cents!? Take my word for it: see this with an audience!

Matthau returns yet again on the last Saturday matinee in Charley Varrick (1973), directed by genre legend Don Siegel (Dirty Harry, still a good movie even if you don’t like its politics). It’s a good two-fisted thriller: Matthau’s knockover of a small-town bank lands him in even deeper waters after he finds the bank was owned by the Mob. Good tough stuff as only directors like Siegel could pull off--the kind Hollywood studios cannot make anymore, even if they wanted to.

Immediately following Charley Varrick, comes Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, an offbeat tale of two crooks (Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges) and their lives on the lam. It's another I haven't seen in years, but it plays well in the memory. It’s one of the films credited with raising Eastwood’s profile among serious filmgoers, as well as Jeff Bridges' profile, who’s also terrific here. The film was directed by Michael Cimino, whose subsequent work (The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate) seems to provide weight to the adage that success can ruin a man.

If you’ve ever wondered about the secret face of Mahatma Ghandi, you may get a real clue with Sexy Beast (2000), featuring the film embodiment of Gandhi himself, Ben Kingsley, the soul of yin and yang. He plays Don Logan, a mob enforcer of rabid ferocity who barks his way into the sunbaked retirement of ex-thief Ray Winstone, dragging, pushing and shoving him into pulling one more heist. Tense, funny, disturbing, seedy and stylish to a fault it, it also features Ian McShane as the big boss, a few years before his triumphant turn as Al Swearengen in Deadwood.

The festival closes with the last film in the distinguished career of Sidney Lumet, Before the Devil Knows Your Dead. It plays like a chamber piece, sort of The Asphalt Jungle meets Long Day’s Journey Into Night, as two brothers (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) concoct a harebrained scheme to rob their parents’ jewelry store. A genuine air of pathos and tragedy suffuses the film, making it a fine coda to Lumet’s career. And, of course, any excuse to see the much-missed Mr. Hoffman is a good one.

Copyright 2016 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel will appear this Spring 2017. His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark won the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies Now Speaks the Devil, and Dracula: Endless Night (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, Scribed, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal, The Strand magazine and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Snake in the Alley: Lee Van Cleef's Film Noir

Very bad, very big trouble;
probably a publicity still
from Guns, Girls, and Gangsters

[The following was contributed to a blogathon hosted by Ferdy on Film for a Film Noir Foundation Restoration Drive:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=LAWFPAB4XLHAW


All fans of movie villains know—or should know—the name and the face: Lee Van Cleef, the veteran character actor who snaked through over 90 movies and 100 TV appearances. One of the movies’ most enduring and endearing bad guys, he’s mostly remembered for starring in spaghetti westerns, especially his superbly creepy turn as Angel Eyes in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—his terrorizing of the poor farmer at the opening remains one of the most unnerving portrayals of stalking evil I’ve seen on screen.

If snakes could walk, they’d all strut like Lee Van Cleef.

For awhile after, Van Cleef became a big star in Europe, his high-boned sneer appearing in movies of varying—and declining—quality. In the years before stardom, though, Van Cleef enlivened many a crime drama with his handsome reptilian coil and low menacing growl. His steely presence and hawk-like visage lit up even the worst movie or TV show. The camera simply loved him, even though bigger stardom never really came his way, like his many fans—including me--hoped it would. (Even David Thomson writes a fond tribute in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film.)

Two of Van Cleef’s most notable roles were in two famous noirs from the 1950s: The Big Combo (1955) and Kansas City Confidential (1953).

In The Big Combo, Van Cleef plays Fante, one of a pair of gay hit men (the other, Mingo, is played with puppy-like winsomeness by Earl Holliman). The two perform wet work for gangster Mr. Brown (Richard Conte), who, in turn, is being obsessively pursued by Lieutenant Diamond (Cornel Wilde).

(In an interview some years ago—and I’m working off memory here—Holliman admitted he and Van Cleef were well aware of Fante and Mingo’s relationship, even wearing each other’s pajamas.)

Fante and Mingo are relatively small prey in this cat and mouse game, but both Van Cleef and Holliman are helped by Phillip Yordan’s script, Joseph H. Lewis’s direction and, maybe, best of all, John Alton’s superb black and white cinematography. Alton—who also shot  the main dance sequence of
An American in Paris—created one of the starkest palettes in film noir, shooting in high contrast black and white in nearly every scene, especially the violent ones—absolute black shadows cut with white light and blasts of smog. The whole film smells like a an alleyway garage. (Visit this site to see some of his striking work).

Alton marvelously exploits Van Cleef’s unique presence. In some scenes—especially in the torture scene involving poor schmo Brian Donleavy—Alton lights him to look like exactly like an alley rat. Van Cleef is such a strong personage, we’re a little sorry to see him killed, as he mostly was in picture after picture.

Van Cleef had a much chewier—and more delightful role—two years earlier in Kansas City Confidential, a crime drama starring John Payne, Preston Foster and Colleen Gray. Confidential is a trip to what I call Bad Guy Heaven, because two of Van Cleef’s accomplices in this heist-gone-wrong picture are bulldog-faced Neville Brand and sweating, wall-eyed Jack Elam, two other fine villains from that golden
era of character actors. All three make for a perfect Three Bad Stooges.

Van Cleef has easily the best role as the wonderfully sleazy Tony Romano, one of the three thieves hired by chief bad guy Foster to pull off a heist and then hide out at a Mexican resort to divide the loot there. Tony Romano is a romantic manqué: an idiot drenched in the delusion that he’s smart and sexy
catnip to the ladies and cleverer than both his treacherous boss and good guy Payne.

It’s a delightful role for Van Cleef—the best from that period in his nearly 40-year career--and he plays this cheerfully brutal moron like he was born to it, while cinematographer George Diskant never misses a chance to frame the actor’s handsomely cruel face to full advantage. (Visit his fan site and take note of the large number of women who post there).

While a limited actor, Van Cleef is such fun in this movie, it’s frustrating to realize it didn’t immediately open the door to bigger things—say in Zachary Scott-type roles as fiendish romancing cads. Much too soon, he fell to the back row with his fellow character villains, sometimes in support of lesser players in boring movies. 

Lee Van Cleef was more professional actor than ambitious star-artist, a man who went where the jobs were and always tried to do his best, the most professional of actors and one of those I most love to hate.


Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield's contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark will be published this Spring by Ambler House Publishing. Other essays and postings can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. He can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.