The Act of Looking: Otto Preminger's The Moon Is Blue

I'm a Creep

If David Lynch did in fact - as Jacques Rivette once posited - create the creepiest set in the history of cinema with Dorothy's apartment in Blue Velvet, then he designs the human counterpart in Wild at Heart with Willem Dafoe's Bobby Peru. With the worst face in the history of anything, Peru straddles the line between the more abstract Lynch villains (Bob, Mystery Man) and the corporeal ones (Frank Booth), because he has a human enough name (after a country no less) and a somewhat sketchy bio (he was in the marines), yet he hails from nowhere (or "all over" as he tells Dern), laying claim to no land, and he for all intents and purposes still might as well have materialized out of thin air, or maybe more appropriately a subconscious.

Bobby is compared by others to a natural disaster, obese porn stars laugh at him as he walks by, and in a room with a puddle of fly-covered puke on the floor, Bobby is still the least attractive option. In short, he just doesn't fucking belong anywhere. "He has a way" Pruitt Taylor Vince's anonymous cowboy hat-donning trailer patron puts it, and that's the understatement of the century. And what separates Peru from Frank Booth - probably the only Lynchian creation that can give him a run for his money - is that Booth still, you know, had friends, and even if they were only cavemen and weirdos who sang into lights, they still moved him, and there was always a communal aspect with Frank, a sense that he would actually feel it were he not surrounded by these people. And so while, at one point during Blue Velvet, Frank drives down the road doing well over 100 completely wasted out of his mind, he at least has it in him to eventually put the brakes on. Bobby Peru, on the other hand, drives the gas tank off the edge of the cliff the first possible moment he can, taking everyone with him into hell and laughing his twisted ass off the entire time.

Ten

♫ ...but I'd give the world to be where I used to be ♫

The above image, which brought me a great chill recently, is from Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties (1939). Ten minutes later in the same film, in some anonymous dive, Gladys George's character gives a quiet, touching performance of In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town. Slowly circling the place, she momentarily pauses by the weary, ragged, fallen shell of James Cagney, gently taking his hand into hers and giving it a hopeful squeeze, as if to say hang in there, keep your head up, things will get better.

Five from a Favorite - Murder, Obliquely (Alfonso Cuarón, 1993)

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Fallen Angels was a short-lived noir anthology series that aired on the Showtime network in the early 90's. Tapping an impressive array of talent both in-front of and behind the camera, the series as a whole was rather uneven, its primary shortcomings stemming from its knack for overly-convoluted screenplays, as well as the hiring of celebrity directors (among them Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks) who far too often struggled delineating the complex crime plots, and who favored a rather uncreative and on-the-nose approach toward the genre's signature visual and atmospheric qualities.

There were however a couple of utter triumphs buried within this curious series, and my favorite among them is probably Alfonso Cuarón's haunting episode Murder, Obliquely, based on a Cornell Woolrich short story and starring Laura Dern and Alan Rickman. The story takes place in the 1940's, and centers around Dern's character Betty, a timid, attractive and single store clerk whose main hobby is socializing with her married friends and wallowing in her own self-mythologizing sense of elusive love. A perpetual fifth wheel, Betty seems bound to the idea of sitting in a quiet corner like a ghost and watching passion play out in front of her, until one night at a small gathering she meets and obsessively falls for the brooding, wealthy Dwight (Rickman), an equally wounded romantic with a dark streak in a troubled marriage. The idea of love for Betty is portrayed as an illness with no cure - she even wishes for an "antibiotic for love" at one point - and her disembodied, foreboding narration throughout lends a tragic weight to her increasingly slavish infatuation.

Impressively directed by Cuarón and shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (The Tree of Life), the immensely striking visuals (borderline miraculous by the television standards of the time) are rich in their attention to lighting, color, composition, and the smokey textures of the period. Dern as always makes the most of an interesting role turning in a subtly intense performance, and Rickman is operating in a particularly intriguing mode, blurring the lines between the romantic lead and devious villain-types he was so often flip flopping between in the late-80s & early-90s period. Murder, Obliquely clocks in at only 27 minutes, but it is a carefully crafted mini-masterpiece of stylish, fatalistic romance that warrants rediscovery.

Walsh & Wind

One thing White Heat tells us: that Walsh would have made a damn fine Val Lewton picture. Specifically in the scene where Virginia Mayo and Steve Cochran are holed up in a big empty house, having just received the news of Cagney's prison escape. Mayo stands poised against the wall and fidgety, eyes darting and ears tuned in anxiously to every harsh, tiny house sound. Thorny editing creates an ambiance of paranoia, sinister radio music hums at a low level, and all of a sudden we are in the middle of a monster movie ("It ain't just like waitin' for some human being who wants to kill you...Cody ain't human!") Mayo retreats to her room, only to bolt up out of bed with terror-filled eyes and make a doomed break for a car parked in the barn, her jaunt through the shadowy, tempestuous yard playing as a mini-version of the famous stroll through the reeds in I Walked With a Zombie. Walsh insists on wind in both audio and visual terms all throughout White Heat, and it is almost always bound to the volatility of Cagney's iconic sociopath Cody Jarrett. Cagney is in fact most menacing in this masterful sequence of suggestive horror, where he's largely absent and yet still very much present, abstracted into wisps of pure mania whipping through the trees.