Sun Jul 08, 2012 10:35 am
Kurt Vonnegut often joked, mordantly, that he was the person who benefited the most out of World War II, since he got the book (Slaughterhouse Five) that gave him his career and fame out of it. The Hollywood blacklist did many things to blight lives and careers and perhaps the seriousness of the movies as a whole, and none of this is meant to excuse it in the least, but there were people who were forced into finding new opportunities who did very well as a result.
Joseph Losey and Jules Dassin are almost certainly the two best examples of this; both left Hollywood in the early 1950s (Dassin blacklisted, Losey starting to come under a cloud), struggled for a few years in Europe to find work, but managed to find success just as the art house movement was taking hold, and succeeded in having considerable international success with art house hits like Losey's The Servant and The Go-Between and Dassin's Rififi and Never on Sunday. Their Hollywood movies came to be seen as a lesser prelude to their more important international careers, the presumption being that it took European artistic freedom to give them a real chance to bloom as artists. (Ironically in light of that attitude, Dassin would have to flee his adoptive Greece during the generals' junta in the late 60s; his refuge, naturally, was New York City.)
Not surprisingly, this undersells the quality of their American work and two films in particular which use the then-nascent noir genre for especially striking examinations of American society and character. Both tales could in fact be seen as somewhat leftist and critical of American society and capitalism— the HUAC types weren't hunting where there was no scent at all— which is unusual enough but could also be crude and heavy-handed (as it is, I think, in one of the most famous and overrated blacklistee films, Force of Evil, which is about how everything is rotten in a vision of American capitalism which seems about as believable as Dr. Mabuse's Berlin— I mean, who could believe one megalomaniac could control all of German society to his own crazy ends?) But beyond better and sharper critiques of American business and prosperity, they're also better made movies, about people and things you haven't seen a million times before, and are worth checking out on that basis alone.
Thieves Highway is directed by Dassin from a screenplay by A.I. Bezzerides (Kiss Me Deadly), who draws on his own experience trying to scratch a living out of hauling fruit; it has the ring of truth about a subject you've never seen done before, and if it critiques capitalism, it's on a very gritty, real world basis that it forces everybody to be a sharp-elbowed customer cutting the toughest deal he can. Nobody's trustworthy to any great extent in this movie, and the drama comes when they're pushed to having to make a decisive choice between standing by a pal or squeezing out another two bits a box. Richard Conte is a returned vet ("I swam at a beach in Italy once... called Anzio") whose father was crippled in an accident caused by evil fruit buyer Lee J. Cobb; Conte sets out to get revenge, which involves... hauling and selling fruit to Cobb.
It's not much of a scheme and it isn't helped by the fact that Conte makes a lot of bad choices once he gets there, like shouting out how much money he got to a roomful of guys, or hooking up with obvious waterfront-hooker-slash-Mata-Hari Valentina Cortese. These parts of the screenplay are weak, and so is the obvious studio-imposed ending which makes sure we don't violate the revenge, sleeping-together-without-marriage, or brutality parts of the Production Code. But on the plus side there are well-drawn characters— Cortese is like if one of those noir harpies like Ann Savage in Detour was actually fleshed out as a three-dimensional character; Cobb, far from a one-dimensional thug, seems completely believable and even a bit roguishly likable as a successful sharpie who just happens to cut corners for breakfast every morning; and there are good supporting performances from the likes of Millard Mitchell and Jack Oakie.
Dassin's direction can bog down in studio-based dialogue scenes, where the actors' blocking is too obvious and schematic— you watch them move into new configurations like cars being parked. But he finds a visual equivalent for Bezzerides' deep knowledge of the milieu by filling the highway and the fruit market with constant activity in the frame; both are oppressively overwhelming yet also alive in a way that makes you more involved in wishing for the characters to make it. That's the secret this movie may not even fully realize— the fruit business may be a dirty game, but it makes you want to get in there and score, too. No wonder Conte grew up to be Don Barzini in the greatest of all pro-capitalist movies, The Godfather.
* * *
First, Losey's The Prowler, written by that other famous blacklistee Dalton Trumbo, is not the movie that still, or its salacious title and advertising, suggest. There's a prowler who's practically confined to the opening credits, but the story is about the policeman (Van Heflin) who investigates and then moves in on the lonely wife inside the house (Evelyn Keyes). Her husband is a successful radio personality— which means, cleverly, his voice comes booming into the house but he's never seen, like God or HAL 9000. He is successful and rich, which means Keyes has a nice house, but that's pretty much where the culture of success ends in this movie, which is absolutely about two of life's losers. She's lonely, bored, and childishly self-destructive enough to respond when a homme fatale like Heflin walks into her life. He's a one-time high school star athlete who's convinced that bad luck and other people have kept success out of his grasp, not realizing that it's his own total lack of character and failure to stick with anything— that it's because, basically, there's no there there (how reassuring, then, that he's the representative of society's order with a badge and a gun). They're the worst possible people for each other's self-delusions, and so they can't resist each other, disastrously.
Again we have the feeling of the freshly-minted noir archetypes being fleshed back out into three dimensions— it's easy to imagine the movie in which these characters are types but no, they stubbornly insist on being tragically real human beings. It's also easy to imagine the movie in which they comfortingly occupy some low-rent inner city milieu, like Wendell Corey and his wife in their cheap apartment in The Killer is Loose, but no, this is the postwar middle class dream, the fancy house and fine possessions, being held up as being almost comically inadequate to feed the souls of these characters. Thieves' Highway's America is, in the end, strangely seductive but this movie is as vicious as Harold Pinter in saying that there's nothing there and nobody home. No wonder they chased both Losey and Trumbo out of Levittown.
* * *
Thieves' Highway is in a very crisp DVD edition from Criterion. The Prowler, which was restored by the Film Noir Foundation and UCLA, is on DVD from VCI and will play TCM on August 6.
Joseph Losey and Jules Dassin are almost certainly the two best examples of this; both left Hollywood in the early 1950s (Dassin blacklisted, Losey starting to come under a cloud), struggled for a few years in Europe to find work, but managed to find success just as the art house movement was taking hold, and succeeded in having considerable international success with art house hits like Losey's The Servant and The Go-Between and Dassin's Rififi and Never on Sunday. Their Hollywood movies came to be seen as a lesser prelude to their more important international careers, the presumption being that it took European artistic freedom to give them a real chance to bloom as artists. (Ironically in light of that attitude, Dassin would have to flee his adoptive Greece during the generals' junta in the late 60s; his refuge, naturally, was New York City.)
Not surprisingly, this undersells the quality of their American work and two films in particular which use the then-nascent noir genre for especially striking examinations of American society and character. Both tales could in fact be seen as somewhat leftist and critical of American society and capitalism— the HUAC types weren't hunting where there was no scent at all— which is unusual enough but could also be crude and heavy-handed (as it is, I think, in one of the most famous and overrated blacklistee films, Force of Evil, which is about how everything is rotten in a vision of American capitalism which seems about as believable as Dr. Mabuse's Berlin— I mean, who could believe one megalomaniac could control all of German society to his own crazy ends?) But beyond better and sharper critiques of American business and prosperity, they're also better made movies, about people and things you haven't seen a million times before, and are worth checking out on that basis alone.
Thieves Highway is directed by Dassin from a screenplay by A.I. Bezzerides (Kiss Me Deadly), who draws on his own experience trying to scratch a living out of hauling fruit; it has the ring of truth about a subject you've never seen done before, and if it critiques capitalism, it's on a very gritty, real world basis that it forces everybody to be a sharp-elbowed customer cutting the toughest deal he can. Nobody's trustworthy to any great extent in this movie, and the drama comes when they're pushed to having to make a decisive choice between standing by a pal or squeezing out another two bits a box. Richard Conte is a returned vet ("I swam at a beach in Italy once... called Anzio") whose father was crippled in an accident caused by evil fruit buyer Lee J. Cobb; Conte sets out to get revenge, which involves... hauling and selling fruit to Cobb.
It's not much of a scheme and it isn't helped by the fact that Conte makes a lot of bad choices once he gets there, like shouting out how much money he got to a roomful of guys, or hooking up with obvious waterfront-hooker-slash-Mata-Hari Valentina Cortese. These parts of the screenplay are weak, and so is the obvious studio-imposed ending which makes sure we don't violate the revenge, sleeping-together-without-marriage, or brutality parts of the Production Code. But on the plus side there are well-drawn characters— Cortese is like if one of those noir harpies like Ann Savage in Detour was actually fleshed out as a three-dimensional character; Cobb, far from a one-dimensional thug, seems completely believable and even a bit roguishly likable as a successful sharpie who just happens to cut corners for breakfast every morning; and there are good supporting performances from the likes of Millard Mitchell and Jack Oakie.
Dassin's direction can bog down in studio-based dialogue scenes, where the actors' blocking is too obvious and schematic— you watch them move into new configurations like cars being parked. But he finds a visual equivalent for Bezzerides' deep knowledge of the milieu by filling the highway and the fruit market with constant activity in the frame; both are oppressively overwhelming yet also alive in a way that makes you more involved in wishing for the characters to make it. That's the secret this movie may not even fully realize— the fruit business may be a dirty game, but it makes you want to get in there and score, too. No wonder Conte grew up to be Don Barzini in the greatest of all pro-capitalist movies, The Godfather.
* * *
First, Losey's The Prowler, written by that other famous blacklistee Dalton Trumbo, is not the movie that still, or its salacious title and advertising, suggest. There's a prowler who's practically confined to the opening credits, but the story is about the policeman (Van Heflin) who investigates and then moves in on the lonely wife inside the house (Evelyn Keyes). Her husband is a successful radio personality— which means, cleverly, his voice comes booming into the house but he's never seen, like God or HAL 9000. He is successful and rich, which means Keyes has a nice house, but that's pretty much where the culture of success ends in this movie, which is absolutely about two of life's losers. She's lonely, bored, and childishly self-destructive enough to respond when a homme fatale like Heflin walks into her life. He's a one-time high school star athlete who's convinced that bad luck and other people have kept success out of his grasp, not realizing that it's his own total lack of character and failure to stick with anything— that it's because, basically, there's no there there (how reassuring, then, that he's the representative of society's order with a badge and a gun). They're the worst possible people for each other's self-delusions, and so they can't resist each other, disastrously.
Again we have the feeling of the freshly-minted noir archetypes being fleshed back out into three dimensions— it's easy to imagine the movie in which these characters are types but no, they stubbornly insist on being tragically real human beings. It's also easy to imagine the movie in which they comfortingly occupy some low-rent inner city milieu, like Wendell Corey and his wife in their cheap apartment in The Killer is Loose, but no, this is the postwar middle class dream, the fancy house and fine possessions, being held up as being almost comically inadequate to feed the souls of these characters. Thieves' Highway's America is, in the end, strangely seductive but this movie is as vicious as Harold Pinter in saying that there's nothing there and nobody home. No wonder they chased both Losey and Trumbo out of Levittown.
* * *
Thieves' Highway is in a very crisp DVD edition from Criterion. The Prowler, which was restored by the Film Noir Foundation and UCLA, is on DVD from VCI and will play TCM on August 6.
We should respect the other fellow's religion, but only to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is attractive and his children intelligent. —H.L. Mencken
