5 Against the House (1955)

Directed by Phil Karlson; produced by John Barnwell and Stirling Silliphant

Four law school friends (Guy Madison, Brian Keith, Kerwin Mathews, Alvy Moore) spend a weekend at Reno, where they witness an attempted robbery at a casino. Prompted by a security guard’s boast that stealing from the casino ‘can’t be done’, one of the quartet devises a plan successfully to do so. The others eventually agree to the scheme, which will actually carry out the theft – to prove an academic point – but result in the money being returned. One of the four, however, has a different intention for the cash.

5 Against the House may be one of the earliest movies depicting a heist, as opposed to a simple robbery. Perhaps prompted by The Asphalt Jungle, it in turn may have influenced other casino-heist films. As such, it is interesting, but the robbery itself is disappointing. The scheme is one unlikely to succeed even under ideal conditions; it relies on a gimmicky hidden ‘fifth criminal’, and a get-away that makes use of the railway that runs right through the centre of Reno. The possibility of such an escape route must have been realised by the police for years.

The real entertainment of the script – the first he wrote for a film by co-producer Silliphant, who went on to pen screenplays for In the Heat of the Night, The Poseidon Adventure, and other movies – is the dialogue among the four friends. It is light-hearted and genuinely funny, and gives the impression that these men are good pals. The part of the movie preceding the heist has little to do with the crime, which is being planned in the background, as it were; instead, we get to know the characters. They are interesting enough to make the robbery seem almost a detour. As well, one wonders how much these students are paying attention to their classes: Mathews states that, as long as the money is returned, there will have been no crime committed; these are would-be lawyers, remember.

The acting is good, especially by the always casual Keith, who nonetheless gives an edge of explosive menace to his character. (If he and Madison seem old for students, it should be noted that they play Korean War vets, who are probably going to university on a G.I. bill.) Moore is fun as the most comical of the four, while Kim Novak, in one of her earliest rôles, is convincing as the marriage-shy girlfriend of Madison’s character. Also seen is William Conrad in a surprisingly small part, and Kathryn Grant (Bing Crosby’s second wife) is uncredited as a former girlfriend of Keith’s character.

The direction is adequate but without tension in the climax. Karlson was a competent man behind the camera, responsible for directing such movies as Kansas City Confidential, Kid Galahad and the tv movie Alexander the Great, starring William Shatner. Prolific and competent, he worked principally on B-movies, though it’s perhaps satisfying to know that a decent, if unrecognized, Hollywood toiler at last hit it big with his penultimate picture, Walking Tall (which made him wealthy, as he had a stake in it.)

By and large, though, 5 Against the House is a likeable, largely forgettable film, remarkable only for the leading lady who went on to bigger things.

Eastern Promises (2007)

Directed by David Cronenberg; produced by Robert Lantos and Paul Webster

On a rainy night in London, a teenager dies in childbirth. Hospital midwife Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts) tries to find clues to the dead girl’s family in her diary; its words, written in Russian, and a business card from a Russian restaurant, lead her to Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who shows an unsettling interest in the dead girl’s jorunal, and in Anna’s background. The more Anna learns of the teenager’s past, the deeper she finds her involvement in sordid crimes and deadly underworld politics.

A violent and involving movie, Eastern Promises is a rare look into the machinations of the Russian mob in Britain; if it is not accurate in its depiction, then it is close enough to serve its purpose. The plot is a good gangster story, with twists and turns. It is detailed, but doesn’t give away all its secrets at once; when they are revealed, the reasons for them are compelling enough to keep the viewer watching.

As well, some of what occurs is explained only later or by inference; the audience will have to think about much of the plot. Some aspects are left up to the viewer to guess, such as why Semyon, who voices his dislike of London at one point, is living in Britain at all, though his respectful fear of the KGB’s handling of organised crime in the old USSR might give a clue. That the writing takes advantage of such dialogue to illustrate character may be seen in Semyon’s contrast with another, younger Russian, who opines that a child is better raised in England, than in Russia.

The main characters are interesting and diverse. Anna is straightforward; she is trying to do the right thing by the baby who survived her young mother’s death. She is trusting, to a point. She follows her instinct when Semyon seems rather too generous in wanting to drive her home one rainy night. Semyon, for his part, is driven by power, and, if he seems to want to protect his son, Kirill (Vincent Cassel), it may have more to do with being seen to do what he must, than with love. Then there is the enigmatic Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), who appears decent, within the confines of his criminal world, yet might be playing his own game.

The other characters are less full, and are used mainly to move the story. Kirill is the type we’ve seen before in gangster movies: the second generation mobster who isn’t too bright or disciplined. Anna’s mother (Sinéad Cusack), evidently an Englishwoman who married a Russian, is a foil for her daughter, while Anna’s uncle (Jerzy Skolimowski), represents the old Soviet ways. One wonders, in contrast to Semyon, how he and his brother ended up in England.

The acting is first rate, especially from Mortensen and Watts. While the latter has more scope for the interpretation of her character, the former must create a three-dimensional person from the limited expressions his environment allows him to make. When too much information or perceived weakness could lead to tragedy, one doesn’t say or show too much. Yet Mortensen manages to make Nikolai a real person. Mueller-Stahl acts a fine line: he must deliberately make Semyon too clear in his deviousness – but only enough to make it seem that Semyon is the bad actor, not Mueller-Stahl himself.

Putting the acting and the writing together is the direction. I am neither a fan nor a detractor of Cronenberg, but I can write that in Eastern Promises, he gets it all right. What the movie wants the audience to note is sometimes very subtle, a script of short pauses, and slight movements. On the other hand, bloody violence is not eschewed. It’s interesting that, being set in Britain rather than the United States, Eastern Promises involves no firearms. There is, however, liberal use of knives, razor blades and, in a thrilling and memorable fight in a public sauna, linoleum cutters. This is not a film for the squeamish.

For those who like gangster flicks, especially with an exotic atmosphere, this story set in a modern London filled with immigrants from all over the world should do more than satisfy. Eastern Promises will likely rate highly on their list of mob movies.

 

To Be or Not To Be (1942)

Directed and produced by Ernst Lubitsch

Josef and Maria Tura (Jack Benny, Carole Lombard) are the leading lights of a successful drama company in 1939 Warsaw. Josef is having trouble with his parts, distracted because he fears Maria is romantically involved with a young military pilot (Robert Stack). As well, the company’s new play, satirising the Nazi leadership in neighbouring Germany, has just been banned. Their personal and professional problems, however, are submerged in a vastly greater disaster when the world war starts with the bombing of their city. It seems a simple - and complicated - few steps from there to the couple’s involvement with the Polish underground, and a plot to stop a traitor. All the while, Josef keeps hoping to play Hamlet…

Believe it or not, this is a comedy, a daring and black comedy, from a time when the subject brought few smiles. Of ‘service comedies’, there were many in the 1940s, but actually wringing laughs from a military invasion, from treason, destruction and wholesale executions, is another matter. It sounds like the pinnacle (or nadir) of bad taste. That To Be or Not To Be is instead a classic of cinema – and cinema comedy - is due to the screenplay by Edwin Justus Mayer (original story by Melchior Lengyel), the direction, the cinematography (by Rudolf Maté), and the acting of Lombard, Benny and the rest of the cast.

An indication of the quality of this film – and Lubitsch’s work in general – comes in a scene in which Maria is told something that makes her believe that Josef has been killed; a few seconds later, she realises he has not. The script has her feel two opposing emotions in almost as many seconds; the direction demands that she show the audience both while conveying only one to the other character in the scene; the acting makes it possible.

It’s unlikely that the viewer will find any scene uproariously funny; the humour is, however, constant and genuine. It’s intelligent humour, too, clever, that sometimes requires a little thought from the audience. As an example, an actor named Greenberg denigrates a fellow thespian by commenting, “What you are, I won’t eat.” On another occasion, Maria, fretting that Josef’s ego denies her just due as an actress, bemoans, “If we had a baby, you’d want to be the mother!” To which, Josef, suspicious of his wife’s fidelity, replies, “I’d be satisfied to be the father…”

But the humour fits the occasions. In darker moments, it is sardonic, rather than amusing. The remarks made while the actors are hiding in a cellar, their city being destroyed above them, reminded me of the manner in which comments were made during surgeries in the tv series MASH, spoken without an accompanying laugh-track.

Lombard is a mistress of comic acting, while Benny, a success on radio and, later, on television, had not impressed many in movies until To Be or Not To Be. He perhaps needed the famed ‘Lubitsch Touch’. The other actors contribute handily, especially Stanley Ridges, scarcely recognisable in facial hair, as a silkily sinister traitor, and Sig Ruman as a Gestapo officer. (Look quickly at a brief depiction of his schedule: just after Maria Tura’s appointment is one for someone called Schindler. Probably a coincidence, but it would not have surprised me at all if Lubitsch, famous for his meticulous detail, had heard of the-then obscure Oskar Schindler in some capacity and had used the name.)

The plot is more complicated than in most comedies, with impersonations, misunderstandings and crises cleverly building on each other. Particularly good is the sequence in which Josef, disguised, must persuade the Gestapo that he is really whom he claims to be, and the real man the imposter, while, unbeknownst to him, his friends are hatching a plan to help him by revealing him to be the fake.

The setting for To Be or Not To Be was, I think, unprecedented at the time. Humour in war-movies would be included in a line or two, here and there, maybe a character for comic relief, but to place a whole comedy in a time and place of death and oppression was unheard of, and the movie was handled roughly by many critics at the time.

What they failed to realise was that humour is one of mankind’s most potent weapons. Comics have paid for their jokes with their liberty and their lives. Yet they make those jokes – and tyrants punish them for it – because both know the power of humour. It can be a shield against terror and a bludgeon against evil; that’s how Lubitsch uses it here. Everything works in To Be or Not to Be.

Jigsaw (1962)

Directed and produced by Val Guest

The inexplicable robbery of some leases from a realtor’s office leads detectives (Jack Warner, Ronald Lewis) to a seaside house where the partially dismembered body of a woman is found. From then on, the mystery deepens with too many clues, not enough suspects and the inspector in charge annoyed that he missed an important football match.

What for the first ten minutes seems to be the beginnings of a film noir becomes instead a police procedural. The switch was fortunate, I think, as the initial sequence appeared rather too self-consciously ‘noirish’, whereas the procedural is involving and entertaining, well-written with an eye for detail and accuracy. This is not surprising as it comes from a novel by mystery-writer Hillary Waugh, who specialised in such stories.

Jigsaw is transplanted from the Connecticut of the book to Brighton, on the Sussex coast. The decision to set the movie in the seaside town was a good one, probably prompted by the desire to replicate in the movie the small city feel of the book. Once in Brighton, the hotels and resorts of the tourist are eschewed for the work-a-day shops and flats of the permanent residents. This gives the environment a rather worn, lived-in look.

The script is brisk, detectives coming and going all the time, being given orders by superiors, despatched to neighbouring towns, calling in to report, popping in to offices with their latest findings. This creates not necessarily a sense of urgency - since there is no intrinsic deadline to the investigation - but a feeling of action, even in what could, in the hands of, say, Agatha Christie, have been an armchair mystery. The banter among the coppers has the authenticity derived from a good author.

This is partly due to the direction, which, after the slightly heavy hand of the first ten minutes, serves the movie well. Some interest is created by converting what might have been monotonous dialogue into other forms. For instance, the dead end of one clue is described by teletypes messages, alternately showing questions and answers, respectively, from the Brighton and Manchester Police forces. Tension is created in another scene when every change of camera-angle is expected by the viewer to reveal a body, but that is withheld for later. Also of advantage are, as mentioned, the differences given the setting by scenes shot in small streets of oft cinematically neglected towns.

The cast is very good, for the most part. Warner, as the detective inspector, was 67 at the time of Jigsaw’s release and, though he mentions retirement in the film, was in only the seventh year of his twenty-one year run as the title character in tv’s Dixon of Dock Green. Though a most capable actor, he doesn’t need to exert himself much to give a fine performance here. Ronald Lewis plays a sergeant, the inspector’s nephew. While this relationship is not necessary, it adds familiarity to the pair. It’s fun to hear them switch from the formal to the informal means of address, depending on who else is in the room.

The supporting cast is almost all commendable, whether playing suspects, victims, witnesses or police officers. The exception is Yolande Donlan, who portrays a girl involved in the crime. Her acting is not up even to the standard of the bit players, and her English accent is marginal; she was an American. It may be no surprise to learn that she was married to the director. More surprising is that Laurence Olivier brought her over to Britain specifically for one of his plays. Perhaps she translated better on the stage than the screen.

All in all, Jigsaw is a neat little police procedural combined with a whodunnit, with a satisfying conclusion.