Salty

Tucked into the crevices of Raoul Walsh's most prodigious decade, Salty O'Rourke doesn't boast the crackling pace or deft mood shifts that characterize so much of the great director's work from the period, and while it will likely never be talked about in the same breath as a White Heat or They Drive by Night - which is probably fair enough - it still stands perfectly well on its own as a coherent piece of personal expression, with a set-up as pure Walsh as anything you'll find: Alan Ladd as the title character, a passive, cunning gambling man whose past has caught up with him in the form of a deep debt to Bruce Cabot's gangster (Cabot, as amiable as ever and all the more malevolent for it), and who naturally comes up with a quick and supremely over-the-top plan to raise the needed scratch: buy an untamable horse on the cheap, hire an ostracized, uncontrollable jockey, and win the biggest handicap of the year.

Walsh was of course an avid horse owner/bettor throughout his life, and it's no surprise that he would request a loan out from Warner Bros. in order to do this modest project for Paramount, a chance to harmonize two of his greatest passions. Appropriately it's one of the more intimate Walsh films I've seen to date, leaving behind much of the capacious visual experimentation he was engaging with at the time in favor of a somewhat more pointed and inhibited form, comprised often of closed spaces and medium shots observing folks entangled in all sorts of duping and wooing, and in that respect it winds up coming out closer to something like The Strawberry Blonde than, say, the more superficially similar High Sierra. The deep focus and open spaces here are reserved for the glory of the horse track, where the bustling, indifferent masses that so often pack the background of Walsh's frames - a compositional motif established as early as The Big Trail, and an integral part of his art from thereon - are for once united by the energy of a central spectacle.

There are certainly some issues abound. The screenplay, for one, is kind of a double-edged sword, loose in structure as much of the best Walsh is, but also rife with the kind of deathly trite dialogue that any actor would be hard pressed to do a damn thing with. And the nicest possible thing to be said for Ladd, whose stone mug here seems to evaporate on-screen time and again before he can barely get a word out, is that he's just no Bogart. All in all though, Salty O'Rourke is a pleasant treat for those willing to plumb the depths of 40s Walsh - relaxed, peppered with personal touches, and displaying instances where it feels like Walsh just couldn't be having any more fun, such as Stanley Clements (something of a poor man's Cagney, nevertheless equally epitomizing what Farber called Walsh's "little big shot") fluffing his pillow in frustration only to have it puff out dollar bills, or a woozy late-night montage which vigorously carves through assorted New Orleans hotspots, or what is easily the biggest hoot in the film, and probably the most honest moment as well: the introduction of the first racing horse, the shot opening on its enticingly crossed front legs, before a sexy pan up to fill out its figure. Not even a Lupino or Mayo ever received such an entrance.

Strange Loves

top: No Time for Love (Mitchell Leisen, 1943)
bottom: The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira, 2010)

All of this has happened before...

From Erich von Stroheim's first directed feature, Blind Husbands. The intense floridity and exacting detail, the madness, hadn't set in quite yet, and so while some see fit to dub this "minor von Stroheim" and move right along, it's still an extraordinary film, and if it's not at least occasionally mentioned alongside the likes of Breathless and Badlands et al. as far as directorial debut coups go, it should be. The melodramatic crust is fairly thick, yes, but there is also something haunted and elemental floating around the center of this story, which climaxes with a pair of men dueling over a woman atop a mountain where decades earlier, according to lore, a pair of men dueled over a woman; a death game played out in a state of perpetuity, like Vertigo or HBO's Carnivale (our avatars here - a doctor and a lieutenant), people running around with impulses they can't explain, looking a thousand years old, trying to break the chains and seemingly succeeding until an unknowable pair of hands yanks a few strings and things fall where they must, ensuring that the shadow of death and its necessity hangs over our happy ending.

Day Is Done

The images above are from Frank Borzage's lovely contribution (one of three he would make) to the "Screen Directors Playhouse" series, entitled Day Is Done (1955). As so often in Borzage, we are presented with a simple love story, played out over a hazy, perilous social backdrop. The backdrop in this case being the Korean War, and the love story being, atypically, not of the romantic male-female variety with which Borzage is so commonly associated, but rather the love of music that is shared by and binds together two male soldiers: a distant, dispirited sergeant (Rory Calhoun) and a green, eager-eyed private (Bobby Driscoll). The pair, each a musician before entering the war, find a bugle on the body of a slain Korean soldier while out on reconnaissance patrol one night, and as they each take turns with the instrument, eyes become glazed over, piercing time and flooding them with memories from what might as well have been a previous life, memories that literally melt onto the screen as the sergeant fondly recalls the crisp pride with which the job of the bugler was once carried out, and it becomes clear that the music produced from the bugle is providing for these men an intimate refuge no less than that of the apartment in Seventh Heaven or the hovel in Man's Castle. 

It would make sense to assume that the restrictions of the half hour television format would do no favors to a director who by this point was considered (barring Moonrise) long past his prime, but this is very much a deeply felt piece of Borzage, with his spare, compressed mise-en-scene, his commitment to foregrounding human drama at the expense of supplemental space translating pretty much untouched, as does, more surprisingly given the length, the air of unhurried leisure with which moments and events are normally allowed to play out in his worlds. Though in this world, alas, the reality of the situation does not ultimately give itself over to the transcendent; here a death is a death is a death, with grief finding expression only through a weary, impromptu performance of "Taps", both an act of solemn farewell and the solidification of another memory.

Niagara

There's something poignant about a movie that sees fit to acknowledge the death of its own aesthetic. Such is the case with Niagara, the frothy 1953 Technicolor noir not so much directed as assembled by Henry Hathaway. Assembled, literally, around an icon in the form of Marilyn-just-as-she-was-becoming-Marilyn; assembled in the sense that the chief stylistic preoccupations on display -- hot, lurid colors in movement and ever-furtive window slat shadows; a simultaneous rebuke and embrace of genre -- are barely allowed to exist without her presence. She is very much the engine for these elements, the sole expressive nexus that swirls them together, giving the film so much of its visual personality. And even if Marilyn wasn't much of an actress at this point, she still slinks around the dusky crevices of this world in her bright pinks and yellows (even shifting into pure shadow at times) with every bit the force and presence of the natural wonder that provides the backdrop, while the likes of the great Joseph Cotton and Jean Peters struggle to do a damn thing with their lots, and it's very difficult to say that the movie does not belong completely to her.

And so after the sheer ludicrousness of the script has guided Monroe's character to the top of a bell tower*, and after she's been murdered by her husband in said location, we are given the relatively loaded compositions shown at the top of this post: the aesthetic spirit of our film, now lifeless, bathed in the features that constantly surrounded her, except now given a decidedly mournful appearance. Giant slat shadows within a splayed container of light that may as well be an exaggerated coffin. An outfit one might wear to a funeral. Color in the form of a bright yellow kerchief, which Monroe had absurdly held onto and flailed throughout her final doomed chase. The kind of kerchief that one could clutch in their hand as they wave goodbye to a loved one. And that's what this moment is, a movie waving goodbye to itself. Sure, there's another act left to go, with Cotton and Peters perilously trapped aboard a gasless boat drifting towards the edge of the raging falls, but the movie's style as it had been established --- having already been given a proper farewell -- all but evaporates, giving way to dingy brownish earth tones and misty, bland blues and a general blah atmosphere of predetermined redemption. This stretch may have more "action" and "closure" than anything that preceded it, but it feels at best like a forced and prolonged coda, and at worst like something stripped from some other, far less interesting film. We have already been given the real climax, and it's easy to sense that the movie agrees.

*The matter of the bell tower, along with a handful of other shared cues, has led some to ponder the possibilities of Hitchcock drawing upon Niagara for inspiration while conceiving Vertigo. I don't see much there personally, but who knows. It is more than a tad interesting to think of Hitch's masterpiece and its boundless obsession as being, in some subconscious measure, a reaction to Niagara and the frank treatment given to the murder of its blonde femme fatale, its sober formal acknowledgement of the loss and of what it means.