Cry of the City (1948)

Directed by Robert Siodmak; produced by Sol C Siegel

When cop-killer Martin Rome (Richard Conte) barely survives a shooting, Lieutenant Candella (Victor Mature), who knows Rome from the old neighbourhood, is convinced the criminal is responsible for another brutal robbery and murder. Conviction may depend on finding the elusive Teena Riconti (Debra Paget). But those who are guilty of the robbery also want to find the girl, as leverage to force Rome to confess to their crimes. When Rome escapes custody, Candella must re-capture him before either he or his rivals locate Teena.

A fairly complex story complements excellent direction and acting in this film noir of two strong characters each with a great effect on those around them. The script allows for plenty of development, not in Candella and Rome’s personalities, but in what we see of them.

In many movies, the characters change with events; in Cry of the City, they remain constant, but we get to see what they are really like as the story unfolds. Rome seems a likeable guy, jaunty in his illegal activities and friendly; Candella comes across as dour and humourless, weighed down by his profession. How the audience sees them at the movie’s start and at its end may be quite different.

The acting matches the story. Mature famously put himself down as an actor and, indeed, some critics agreed with his own assessment. It may have been because he did not view acting as the life-and-death struggle that many in his line did. Whether he took it seriously or not away from a movie’s set is immaterial; in front of the camera, he did good work, and the example he provides in Cry of the City is a very good one. Conti is largely forgotten now, I think, but he is very persuasive as the smooth career crook.

Equally convincing are the supporting players, especially Shelley Winters as a former girlfriend of Rome’s, roped in to help him one more time, and Betty Garde, as a nurse, emotionally seduced by the killer. But credit goes most to Hope Emerson as a masseuse whose blandly expressed evil is truly scary and who deserves to be remembered as a great screen villainess, especially considering the small amount of time she is allotted in the movie.

Minor characters, most inhabiting the dirty, twilight world of semi-crime and corruption: an attorney who defines the term ‘criminal lawyer’, an unlicensed doctor, a bullying prison warder, a simple-minded convict. They are all played convincingly by the actors.

Robert Siodmak had a string of solid crime drama hits in the late 1940s. Cry of the City doesn’t have the starkness and fatality of The Killers, but to make up for this, it has atmosphere and setting. There are some good location shots, showing less seen parts of New York, such as industrial/retail neighbourhoods propping up the elevated train lines, and neon-lit streets at night.

Cry of the City is a movie in which everyone involved is at his best, one of the foremost products of the decade of the film noir.

Orders to Kill (1958)

Directed by Anthony Asquith; produced by Anthony Havelock-Allan

As the invasion of Normandy nears, Allied Intelligence believes that one of its agents in France (Leslie French) is a turncoat, and needs to be eliminated. With their regular operators unavailable or unsuitable for the task, young air force officer Gene Summers (Paul Massie) is brought in to do the job. He is eager and ready, but his inexperience and immaturity may prove problems, not just for the task at hand but for himself.

Orders to Kill has a fine premise behind it; it deals largely with the psychological aspects of assassination, and both how it affects the assassin and how the assassin affects the assassination. Unfortunately, the premise’s execution, if you will, is needlessly cumbersome, and the premise itself causes some issues in the story.

The prelude to the mission itself, involving Summers’s recruitment and training, satisfactorily depicts the man’s inadequacy for the duties he’s given. The army psychiatrist who interviews him is pressured into clearing him for action, and throughout the training, Summers’s attitude is one almost akin to a high school boy getting ready for a friendly football match.

The process of training, however, is not shown well. One can’t help comparing it to scenes from earlier movies, those filmed during the Second World War, which show not only how rigorous the training was, but how the trainees progressed. The scenes in Orders to Kill are almost leisurely; there surely must have been some urgency in getting Summers to France - otherwise an inexperienced novice would not have been chosen for the job - but this is not conveyed in the first third of the movie.

Summers’s boyish blundering is shown, but not his subsequent improvement - as improvement there must have been. He seemingly is taken straight from a failed practical examination to an airfield, from which he is flown to France. There is no convincing creation of a successful operator.

Once he arrives in France, Summers’s moral dilemma is more involving. He demonstrates that he still does not think as he needs to in such a situation, allowing himself to doubt his assignment and himself. This is shown in great contrast to his contact in occupied Paris (Irene Worth), who has steeled herself to carry out her role, compartmentalising the various aspects of her life.

Indeed, the secondary characters are all more compelling and interesting than Massie’s. The sympathetic training officer (Eddie Albert), the deceptively jovial instructor of unarmed combat (James Robertson Justice), the detached, even apathetic, manager of agents (John Crawford), are all well handled. There is a telling scene in which Albert’s character asks Justice’s to make training less of a game for the recruits; the answer is that it must be that way, in order to keep the recruits from realizing the horror of what they will be called upon to do.

Part of the problem may be that Massie isn’t as good an actor as these others. Lillian Gish in the unnecessary part of Summers’s mother has a short time on screen, yet capably shows her superiority to the movie’s star in their shared scenes. Ironically, it is also the success with which Massie’s character comes across as the superficial adolescent that he is meant to be, that makes him annoying and irritating. He is so deeply in over his head that the viewer may want him killed off, for the sake of the Allied war effort.

The moral problems at the heart of Orders to Kill are worthy of a movie but, with an uninspiring lead actor, portraying an unsympathetic protagonist who has gone through an unconvincing period of training - this isn’t the movie.

Night and the City (1950)

Directed by Jules Dassin; produced by Samuel G Engel

Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) is a small-time hustler with giant dreams. He scrapes by as a night-club tout but, to the disappointment of his girlfriend, Mary (Gene Tierney), always has a scheme brewing to get rich quick. His latest involves controlling the wrestling game in London, though his plan has a few flaws. One is a lack of cash, for which he scams his boss (Francis L Sullivan); another is the gangster (Herbert Lom) who already runs the wrestling game. But Harry Fabian doesn’t worry about problems like these - even though he should.

Not quite film noir, not quite crime-drama, Night and the City is a superb film, no matter its genre. Unlike Harry’s plans, it has few flaws, though its centre-piece is Widmark and his immaculate performance. No one mis-steps here, the closest to a weakness being the casting of Tierney. She doesn’t do a bad job; there just isn’t much for her to do. Her character is superfluous; indeed, in the 1993 re-make of Night and the City, Mary is excluded all together.

Widmark made his debut in 1947’s Kiss of Death, playing the psychopathic Tommy Udo. A lesser actor would have been typecast, and indeed Widmark had a bit of trouble expanding his roles for a while afterward. But Harry Fabian is quite a different kind of villain. He doesn’t think of himself as particularly bad. But he cheats, lies, steals and betrays to get what he wants.

Despite his self-proclaimed ‘brains’, Harry is not a smart man. In fact, almost everyone in the movie is smarter. Widmark’s Harry is a manic child, swinging from elation to anger in an instant, depending on whether his latest idea is being supported or thwarted. The breathless, fast-paced, ‘gotta-have-it-now’ performance is the prefect portrayal of a loser who is never satisfied.

There are reviews of Night and the City that describe every character as loathsome or unredeemable, but that isn’t exactly true. There are those who have decent qualities, though one must look hard. Witness Lom’s pride and love as he watches his father in one particular scene, and one can understand Sullivan’s despair, as he pines for the affection of his wife in a marriage of convenience. But the world in which Harry Fabian moves is nonetheless dirty and ruthless, filled with congenial back-stabbers.

The plot is a good one. It’s not spoiling the story to write that there is little suspense in whether Harry’s scheme will succeed. What is fascinating to watch is how his superficial and momentary victories are constructed on the most brittle of thin ice. The suspense is in trying to determine how Harry will fail, how big he will fail and who he will take with him when he fails.

The direction is excellent. It moves into film noir in many instances, aided by Max Greene’s cinematography, but is always spot-on, whether in claustrophobic close-ups of Harry’s desperate face, or in wide shots of a fugitive scrambling over the still prominent ruins of the Blitz. It almost creates sympathy for Harry, even while he does nothing to earn it.

An example of how different elements in Night and the City (in this case, writing and directing) combine to create a masterpiece is the lengthy, tense scene involving a wrestling bout between an aged champion (Stanislaus Zbyszko) and a younger performer (Mike Mazurki). The interesting thing about it, aside from how involving it is, is that, unlike many games or sports matches in movies, it doesn’t really matter who wins; it will propel the story, in one direction or another, regardless. The match is integral and important to the plot.

Night and the City is the result of everyone involved using all their skills, a movie that is compelling, involving and entertaining.

Bodyguard (1948)

Directed by Richard O Fleischer; produced by Sid Rogell

Los Angeles police detective Mike Carter (Lawrence Tierney) is fired for gross insubordination and assaulting his superior officer. A new job isn’t too long in coming, however, as he is hired by a man (Phillip Reed) to protect his aunt (Elisabeth Risdon), owner of a meat-packing company, who has been receiving death threats. None of her family makes Carter’s job easy, however, and he is soon mired in private conspiracies and police corruption.

The most interesting thing about Bodyguard is that Tierney’s character is probably quite close to his own. Carter has a bad temper which continually gets him into trouble; he’s impulsive and a brawler, and he blames his problems on drinking. Other than that, Bodyguard is a little worse than average.

Much of the trouble is the script. This may be surprising (or not, depending on one’s opinion of the writer) as it was co-authored by Robert Altman. The story starts out with Carter being hired as a bodyguard, as the title suggests, but that is quickly forgotten. He spends most of the movie investigating the chicanery centred on a meat-producing factory, while the woman whom he was hired to protect is left defenceless; this, despite an attempt on her life hours after Carter is hired.

That attempt is itself a puzzle. Who was behind it is never explained. The most likely suspect, the only one, really, was much better off not drawing attention to the family with whom Carter becomes involved.

Indeed, everyone connected wth the woman in danger, herself included, has more reason to avoid notice - and that means the paying of a bodyguard, too - than creating it. Carter’s initial employment as a minder is rather pointless. There isn’t much of a mystery to occupy the rest of the movie. It’s pretty straightforward.

The acting is good. Tierney, for all his off-screen scandals (all of his own making), is an engaging performer, but he gives no special effort here. Wasted is Priscilla Lane, as Carter’s girlfriend. Bodyguard was her final motion picture and if all her other offers at the time gave her as much scope as this one, I can see why she retired.

The film lasts a mere sixty-two minutes. When Strangers Marry, reviewed a couple of weeks ago, ran for about as long, but put much more into that hour and a bit, in terms of writing, acting and directing. Bodyguard fills its time, and leaves one unsatisfied; not very bad, it nonetheless has little to offer the viewer.

Le Samouraï (1967)

Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville; produced by Raymond Border and Eugène Lépicier

Jef Costello (Alain Delon) is a young assassin-for-hire. His latest job, involving the murder of a night-club owner, goes as planned; he isn’t concerned that is seen by witnesses, as he will depend on their statements' unreliability, and the conflict among their testimony. But one witness, the club’s pianist (Caty Rosier), sees him too closely. Despite this, she clears him with the police of any involvement. He doesn’t know why, and his attempts to discover the truth behind his assignment lead him into unaccustomed danger.

A highly respected and memorable movie from 1960s France, Le samouraï has held up well. It is a good example of a minimalist approach to movies, or at least to what the audience can see and hear. The dialogue is sparse through much of the movie, most of it spoken by the investigating policemen. Exposition is scanty.

There is a problem with Le samouraï, and it is the very light story. It is pretty straightforward. What isn’t explained is left to the viewer’s imagination to fill in. This is not necessarily a bad thing. But the movie then creates a compelling character for its protagonist, and the viewer wants to know more about him, and is deliberately frustrated in this. That is, perhaps, the point of the style, but it may leave some people dissatisfied.

Also a problem are aspects which suggest that not a lot of thought went into reconciling style with substance. For instance, Costello has a large ring of keys that allows him to operate any Citroën car that he cares to steal. That’s a neat idea on the surface, but very impractical. It could take hours for him to find the right key to start his stolen automobile. I suspect that’s why professional car thieves simply ‘hot-wire’ a vehicle in some fashion. As well, Costello is given his firearms by a mechanic-contact; these he uses without, so far as we can see, determining if the ammunition in them is live, or if the weapon works properly. That’s not good preparation for a life-and-death situation.

Delon is excellent in the lead. The epitome of cool, Costello seems always to have been in control of his assignments, of his emotions, and when things go wrong, he fights to maintain that control. He is not entirely successful, yet continues to do things his own way. Rosier fashions a suitably enigmatic foil, equally obscure in motive and thought, while François Périer portrays the top cop on the case as a determined and ruthless law-enforcer.

It is the characters and direction that make the movie, even if much, especially about the protagonist, is left unexplained. We first see Costello lying on a bed in a sparsely furnished room. The fact that there are no books, no radio, no television, no dishes or food, suggest, especially after the viewer spends some time with him, that Costello has no life beyond his periodic deadly assignments.

He has a caged bird; it inadvertently saves his life later, and the few seconds in which Costello looks at the bird as he leaves his apartment says much about the man. There aren’t many people who would assuredly acknowledge a debt in such a silent fashion, and it is a tribute to the acting and direction that the viewer knows immediately that Costello feels more affinity for the bird than for any human in the picture.

While the scanty plot and sparse dialogue may turn some off of Le samouraï, and others will dislike the implausibility of such a hit-man staying alive for long, the movie has enough style and suspense to carry it to its conclusion. It justifiably cemented Delon’s career and, as far as style is concerned, is worth remembering.