Thursday, January 21, 2021 at 4:41:00 P.M. EST
TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Born to Kill (1947) with Lawrence Tierney doing his psycho shtick, Claire Trevor as the female lead, featuring Walter Slezak, Elisha Cook Jr., Audrey Long and Esther Howard, and directed by Robert Wise.
Film Noir Guide: “This one is all Tierney. He’s outstanding as one of the most violently disturbed psychos in all of film noir, giving even Robert Ryan in Crossfire a run for his money.
“Trevor, a recent divorcee, is a visitor to Las Vegas [sic; Reno] who discovers the body of a man and a woman in a Reno rooming house—two bodies left by you-know-who in a fit of jealous rage. Without contacting the police, she leaves for home but, coincidentally, ends up on the same train with Tierney, whom she had been ogling in a casino that evening.
“The hard-to-swallow plot develops slowly, with Tierney eventually dropping Trevor to marry her wealthy half-sister (Long). Soon he’s suffering from the delusion that he can run his wife’s newspaper (something he wants to do so he can crush other people’s lives) and is hurt when sister-in-law Trevor won’t support his dream.
“Trevor, meanwhile, is becoming more and more attracted to Tierney, and the sexual tension is almost unbearable for her.
“Tierney’s pal (Cook) is the only controlling influence in his life, and even HIS hold is tenuous.
“Slezak plays a portly, Bible-quoting P.I. hired by Howard to find the murderer of her only friend.
“Born to Kill, also known as Deadlier than the Male, has become a cult classic thanks to the excellent performances of Tierney and Howard and Wise's brilliant direction."
David in TN: In his intro last week to Witness to Murder, Eddie Muller again said, “The greatest actress ever, Barbara Stanwyck.” This is something few would dispute.
Eddie went on with “It may have more resonance today, especially with women.” And “a proto-feminist slant." He then said:
“I might argue that. Frankly, I’m afraid Stanwyck would come back and sock me, if I did say it. She had no use for politicized interpretations of her work.”
Oh, Barbara Stanwyck would sock Eddie Muller, all right. She was right in line with the views of her then-husband Robert Taylor and Robert Montgomery on the subject of Communists.
See Barbara Stanwyck’s Wikipedia entry.
N.S.: So many of these people who set themselves up as movie scholars are shameless. There’s a movie blog whose name escapes me. A couple of years ago, the lady (if memory serves) proprietor wrote an essay on Stanwyck, in which she asserted, the facts be damned, that Stanwyck was strictly a lesbian, whose marriages were sexless facades.
As for Barbara Stanwyck’s greatness, I am a huge fan of hers. However, over the last few years, I have re-discovered Bette Davis for myself and, for my money, I’d presently give her the nod for greatest movie actress ever.
Claire Trevor is another actress whom I’ve come to admire more and more.
An actress whom I’d like to see a lot more of is Giulietta Masina, aka Mrs. Federico Fellini, who played “artichoke head” in La Strada (1954).
Masina played a human archetype, the person who is pure emotion. (The other two protagonists were played by Anthony Quinn, as the brutal strongman, who has no feeling or humor, and Richard Basehart, as the clown, whose life is all laughter, while it lasts.) Fellini, who had been a clown, and had a lifelong love for clowns, was at once attacking fascism (which by then required no courage), and depicting the three faces of human nature.
(Kurosawa had done something similar in 1950 in Rashomon, which depicted several types of human being. Rashomon was misrepresented by fashionable literary philosophers of the time, e.g., William Barrett, as arguing that there is no objective truth. Unfortunately, the false interpretation has stuck.)
Masina’s greatness is, on the one side, the empathy which leaves her character emotionally defenseless against the strongman’s brutality, and the technical virtuosity, with which she seamlessly melded the styles of silent and sound film acting. In La Strada, she may have given the greatest movie performance ever by a lead actress.
TCM's Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:30 and 10 am ET is Don Siegel's The Killers (1964), with Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, Ronald Reagan, John Cassavetes, and Clu Gulager.
ReplyDeleteThis was on TCM a few months ago. Supposedly based on the Ernest Hemingway short story, Don Siegel wrote in his autobiography, "The only Hemingway in it is the title 'Ernest Hemingway's The Killers.'"
The plot resembles the 1946 film which started with Hemingway's story and constructed a aback story of why Burt Lancaster's character wouldn't run when he knew hit men had come to kill him. John Cassavetes has this role. Marvin and Clu Gulager play the hit men. Lee Marvin's character is the philosophical criminal you see in movies.
Angie Dickinson plays the Ava Gardner character. To me, Angie is an improvement. Ronald Reagan plays the only Bad Guy of his career in his last film. He did some Death Valley episodes after.
The Killers was supposed to be the first ever made for TV movie, but was deemed "two violent" and was released in theaters.
During filming, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Angie Dickinson, according to Siegel, went into hysterics upon hearing the news.
In his outro last week, Eddie Muller indicated he would use the future president as the bad guy to do some Reagan-bashing. Two years after The Killers came out, Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California by nearly a million votes.