While many movies paint broad pictures with large narratives, Film Noir frequently narrows it's focus in order to delve deeper into the characters and the circumstances they find themselves in. The Set-Up does just this, taking place over just one night on a single block in an unnamed city. Directed by Robert Wise, the movie gives us a brief glimpse at the seedy world of boxing, gambling, and the lives they affect.
Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan), is a washed up boxer getting ready to fight the significantly younger Tiger Nelson (Hal Fieberling). Nelson is a heavy favorite, so Stoker's manager Tiny (George Tobias) agrees to fix the fight for the mob. The "set-up" is that Stoker will go two rounds, then get knocked out in the third. However, Tiny is worried that Stoker will screw it up, so he doesn't tell him, confident Nelson can knock him out in the third round. The fight plays out through the middle third of the movie, as Stoker produces the fight of his life, complicating things for himself and Tiny. Further exacerbating matters is Stoker's wife Julie (Audrey Trotter), who wants him to quit fighting and is considering leaving him if he continues. A short movie at 72 minutes, The Set-Up never goes beyond itself, sticking almost exclusively with Stoker and Julie, we see Stoker waiting for his fight, interacting with the other fighters backstage while Julie paces the city, trying to forget about the fight while figuring out her future. The movie gives us a slice of the Thompson's life, a turning point for their relationship and their lives. One of the key themes of the film reveals itself as the fight reaches it's fever-pitch and the fans are screaming for blood: the savagery just isn't in the ring, it permeates throughout the who picture. For the boxers, violence is just their job, but for the fans it is their revelry and to the mob it is their lives. Violence as entertainment breeds violent people. Stoker is justified because he is fighting for his marriage, while the rest fight for their own gain or pleasure.
The Set-Up, without any major stars, feels a lot like a documentary. Wise's camera does nothing to change this, with only one shot (from Stoker's point-of-view, after he is knocked down) varying from a traditional style. Wise went on to direct big Hollywood pictures with huge budgets like The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), West Side Story (1961), and The Sound of Music (1965), but The Set-Up, a little B-movie, stands up with the best he has directed.
Movies allow us a look at things we could never see in real life; historical pictures put us in a time before we lived, science fiction shows a possible future, while Film Noir places us amongst criminals and killers. This is important because it allows us to explore possible motivations for the evil they commit, while also offering the characters a path to redemption. We may not always be satisfied with these answers and outcomes, but that doesn't mean the attempt shouldn't continue to be made.
Though Alan Ladd received the fourth billing in This Gun For Hire, his character, the hitman Raven, is what the movie is really about. Raven is hired to kill a blackmailer, but after doing the job he is double-crossed by his employer Willard Gates (Laird Cregar). Raven is now on the run from the police when he meets Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake) a nightclub performer who is enlisted by Senator Burnett (Roger Imhof) with digging up the dirt on suspected traitors Gates and Alvin Brewster (Tully Marshall). Complicating matters more is Ellen's police detective boyfriend Michael Crane (Robert Preston), who is tasked with hunting down Raven, now on the run with Ellen as a hostage. The movie first shows us Raven as a reckless, psychopathic killer, but through his conversations with Ellen, we learn of his tortured past as an abused orphan, beaten and unloved by his caretaker. He killed his caretaker at 14, and society "slaps a label on him" as a killer, so a killer he becomes. While this may be an unsatisfactory excuse for Raven, he eventually find redemption by sacrificing himself to save Ellen and expose the traitors.
Unlike most crime films, This Gun For Hire doesn't make a caricature of its killer, it attempts to delve into the reason behind the criminal. This isn't surprising since it is based on a book by one of the best authors of the 20th century Graham Greene. His story, along with a performance by Ladd that turned him into a star, and director Frank Tuttle's effective use of Los Angeles locations made This Gun For Hire a hit, and a movie still worth watching today.
The first film version of Raymond Chandler's hardboiled detective novels to feature Philip Marlowe was not The Big Sleep (1946), but Murder, My Sweet two years earlier. Chandler's books, along with those of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, had a huge influence on Film Noir, the situations and plots, but mostly the dialogue. Hardboiled characters alternated from swapping punches to trading wisecracks, and no character epitomized this more than Marlowe. While Humphrey Bogart played the character a little harder and more serious in The Big Sleep, Dick Powell's Marlowe is closer to Chandler's original, equally tough and sarcastic.
The movie is based on Chandler's 1940 novel Farewell, My Lovely in which Marlowe is searching for the old girlfriend of a thug, Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki), who has been released from prison after eight years. He also starts investigating a stolen jade necklace, seemingly unrelated to the other case. Like all of Chandler's stories, it get much, much more complicated. Murder, theft , blackmail, and a myriad of lies get Marlowe in deep with a classic femme fatale, Helen Grayle (Claire Trevor), her step-daughter Ann (Ann Shirley), and a mobster Jules Amthor (Otto Kruger). Both cases slowly begin to intertwine and Marlowe must solve them, while trying to escape a murder rap the police want to place around his own head. As with many hardboiled detective stories, a big theme of Murder, My Sweet is the isolation of the private detective. Pressed in on all sides, by criminals and cops alike, Marlowe lives by his own code of ethics that occasional runs afoul of the law yet in the end, the right just decision is made. Like Sam Spade at the end of The Maltese Falcon (1941), turning in the woman he loves because she is a murderer, Marlowe compromises along the way but in the end does what is right. He does what the police cannot, but crossing those lines leaves him in a place where personal relationships, no matter how much the movie wants us to believe that Marlowe and Ann are in love, can't last.
Though The Big Sleep is a superior movie, Murder, My Sweet is the closest film rendition of Chandler's novels, both in plot and tone, and Powell plays the truest Marlowe. It's shot in a straightforward manner by film noir veteran Edward Dmytryk, letting the twisting plot and Powell's terrific performance carry the picture.
Film Noir is surpassed only by science fiction in the realm of B-movies; they were cheap to make, easy to shoot, and made money, so studios started churning them out. Because of this, there were a lot of low quality Films Noir released that have passed away from memory, however some of those mass produced films transcended their budget and became really good movies. Gun Crazy is one such movie.
The plot follows Bart Tare (John Dall) from young age to adulthood, chronicling his obsession with guns. This passion first drives him to break a store window and steal a gun as an adolescent, an action which gets him sent to to reform school, despite the protests of his sister and caretaker Ruby (Anabel Shaw). After reform school, Bart joins the military and his love of firearms only grows, as does his skill in using them, however after returning to his home town, he starts to get bored with civilian life. Along with his two friends, Dave Allister (Nedrick Young) and town sheriff Clyde Boston (Harry Lewis), Bart goes to a see a traveling carnival. While there, Bart sees the performance of Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins), a sharpshooting, trick-shot specialist. It's love at first sight, and the two get married and drive off the live it up on the road. However, once the money runs out, Annie threatens to leave, so the two begin a string of hold-ups, and fall more in love than ever. At the beginning of the movie, Bart is presented as a good kid who commits a crime, stealing the gun, because of his infatuation with them. Later on, we see the same good person who goes astray again for the sake of his other obsession: Annie. If this movie, so garish and brash with it's moments of passion, both of love and guns, is trying to make a point other than to entertain it is this: the downward spiral brought about by a lack of self-control. Bart can't control his desire for Annie and guns, while Annie is driven to crime by her desire for money. Even though he loved her, Bart saw how wrong Annie was and should have let her leave, no matter how much he loved her, but he is unable to control himself. Like the young Bart who breaks the store window, his lack of self-control leads him to crime and an eventual downfall.
Besides a gripping, fun story, what makes Gun Crazy stand out from other B-movies is the direction of Joseph H. Lewis. Lewis was a second level director according to the studio-system hierarchy, and though he was never given a big picture to direct, he was never content with making average pictures. He added a lot of style and flair to his movies, despite the lower budgets and lack of stars, and the care he takes adds a lot to Gun Crazy.
Orson Welles influence looms large over the film world; particularly Film Noir, where he, along with cinematographer Gregg Tolan, pioneered many of the styles and techniques adopted by the genre in the 1940s. While The Maltese Falcon (1941) is the first Film Noir story wise, Citizan Kane (1941), though not a Noir, pioneered the look in America. Welles would go on to make a number of Films Noir himself, the first of which was The Stranger.
While cities are the usual location of choice for Film Noir, The Stranger is set in rural Harper, Connecticut where Nazi fugitive Franz Kindler (Welles) is hiding out under the assumed name of Charles Rankin. Kindler is teaching at the local prep school and married to Mary (Loretta Young), the daughter of a Supreme Court Justice. His life is complicated when a former Nazi comrade Konrad Meineke (Konstantin Shayne), is released from prison by the UNWCC in order that he might lead them to Kindler. Kinder kills Meineke and buries the woods before Nazi hunter Mr. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson), can discover him. Wilson inserts himself in small town and begins a game of cat-and-mouse with Kinder, which makes up the bulk of the plot. Both Robinson and Welles are titanic personalities and terrific actors on top of their game in The Stranger. Their verbal tete-a-tetes are impressive, especially for Welles, as he changes back from small town teacher into Nazi war criminal. Welles, who also directed the picture, inserts a lot of Germanic impressionist style in The Stranger, and shows us that shadows and atmosphere are just as plentiful, and effective, in the country as they are in the city. The movie reflects the paranoia of post-War America regarding Nazis, which eventually morphed into the Red Scare of the 40s. Another example of how film can capture the mood of a period as well as any medium.
The Stranger was the only film directed by Welles that broke even at the box office, his only hit. It's a gripping drama with a climactic ending and terrific acting. As Welles first Noir, he was was only scratching the surface of his potential in the genre, ideas toyed with in The Stranger are perfected in later films; we'll see more of Mr. Welles later.
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