So while everybody else was celebrating Scary Movie Season, I was mostly at AFI\u2019s Noir City DC festival. This year the theme was \u201cmarriage\u201d so you know that it was like they got chocolate in my peanut butter.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s start before the festival, though, with 99 Homes<\/em><\/strong>. The plot here is that evil developer Richard Carver (Michael Shannon) personally supervises the foreclosure of beleaguered working-class single father Dennis (Andrew Garfield). Then the rapacious rich man, who is named Rich Carver because that\u2019s how we roll here in 99 Homes <\/em>(they call him \u201cRick\u201d but that\u2019s a thin veil), offers Dennis a job: Ride with me as I foreclose on your fellow workingman, and you can make enough money to buy back your house. The relationship between the two men goes from antagonism to grudging respect, and maybe some kind of personal connection, call it Stockholm Syndrome\u2026.<\/p>\n Yeah, so what I wanted from this film was maybe \u201cWhiplash<\/em>, but for the housing crisis,\u201d or \u201cSweet Smell of Success<\/em> meets Wall Street<\/em>.\u201d This movie never quite got there. Rich Carver (wocka wocka) has some intriguing shades, starting from very early on when he complains, \u201cMy world\u2019s upside down\u201d\u2013he\u2019s a man who thinks he never wanted<\/em> to sell his conscience, but the market made him do it. But Dennis remains fairly one-note, without enough personality to stand up against Rich Carver (womp-womp). Also Tim Markatos points out<\/a> that these are real Floridian housing-crisis victims playing many of the extra roles, and hey look, lots of them are black or Latino\u2026 so the fact that the only hard-luck stories we actually hear enough of to care about are the stories of white men feels pretty cheap.<\/p>\n There are some very effective images (the dad\u2019s table covered with paperwork, you feel exhausted and terrified just looking at it) and sharp lines (\u201cThere\u2019s plenty of homes in the sea\u201d). The line, \u201cMa\u2019am, please don\u2019t escalate,\u201d when a desperate woman starts to plead and sob. The poor man\u2019s real cigarette vs. Rich Carver (\u201cRick\u201d) with his e-cig. The fact that there is simply no findable line between the government and the bank. The exchange about Noah\u2019s Ark. Now that I\u2019m looking back over my notes I\u2019m wishing the overall arc and the final confrontation had worked better for me. IDK, if you buy the dynamic between the two men this movie will work for you a lot better than it did for me, I think. But even then I think you\u2019d find the back half lecture-y, and this is yet another movie that ends right when it gets interesting<\/a>.<\/p>\n Night Has 1000 Eyes<\/strong><\/em>: Edward G. Robinson (yes!) as a lovelorn psychic (\u2026eh). Lovely cinematography, awful music. The leading lady (Gail Russell) has huge sad eyes, and a lovely musical soft voice. The Dead Zone<\/em> but with an overcomplicated puzzle-box ending, and too much explanation. Costumes by Edith Head! Why can\u2019t I have a gauze gown with gigantic fur cuffs? I need one, for lounging.<\/p>\n This is the first of two films in this post where we see the Angel\u2019s Flight<\/a> funicular up Bunker Hill.<\/p>\n Crime of Passion<\/strong><\/em>: The intro for this film suggested that Barbara Stanwyck plays a proto-feminist. She is indeed an independent career woman who hates suburban married life. She\u2019s also self-centered and entitled, and betrays or judges every single other woman in the film, so no thanks, Jack. Like, she gets her big career break via basically the opposite of that Susan Glaspell short story, \u201cA Jury of Her Peers<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n None of these \u201950s suburban housewives have children. Why? Children raise the stakes.<\/p>\n Raymond Burr and Barbara Stanwyck have good chemistry but her character is just so loathsome! She flat out Lady Macbeths, \u201cI want you to be<\/em> somebody! Not for my sake, but for yours!\u201d Yeesh.<\/p>\n The Reckless Moment<\/strong><\/em>: I really enjoyed this. Joan Bennett plays a wife and mother who is genuinely content in that life, but then poor choices by her undergraduate daughter bring her into contact with criminal lowlife heartthrob James Mason. A tense, doomed romance blossoms as we learn how far a mother will go to protect her child. Mason is swoony, they kiss with their consciences<\/em>, Bennett does a perfect noir stare-and-stalk. How can you be a noir heroine when you have children and aging parents constantly underfoot? This is \u201950s duty vs passion done right, so satisfying.<\/p>\n The Underworld Story<\/strong><\/em>: This was restored by the Film Noir Foundation<\/a>. The intro was all about the horrors of the blacklist, since many of the people associated with this film ended up on it. Ah Hollywood, churning out fifty self-comforting blacklist narratives for every one<\/em> film about the experience of people in actual Communist countries. The intro did note that a black character is played by a white woman in order to make the story more palatable, even though so much of the character\u2019s situation is about racial hatred.<\/p>\n Anyway the movie itself is a mixed bag. There\u2019s an exposition opening: Our antihero is Dan Duryea as a sleazy reporter who broke a big story that allowed a gangster to knock off an informant. He gets banished to small-town New England\u2013he\u2019s blacklisted! for, you know, getting a man murdered by the Mob\u2013but he is a charming little slimeball, and he wins the favor of the local press lady. I think this kind of character works because he\u2019s honest about his sleaziness, and in fact we can guess that he\u2019s a little better than he\u2019d admit to himself, and because he is so shamelessly intent on impressing the woman. There\u2019s a submissiveness in that. He wants to win her favor, not to cow or overwhelm her.<\/p>\n The villain is also very fun, Howard da Silva as a jolly killer. There\u2019s some of that noir snap: \u201cTimes are tough all over. Soon a man won\u2019t be able to sell his own mother.\u201d Or the insult and shrugging comeback: \u201cYou\u2019re a weathervane!\u201d \u201cSoooooo\u2026 the wind changed!\u201d There\u2019s a very<\/em> contemporary \u201chow the media covers the media\u201d angle. There\u2019s one truly classic noir scene, the one in which the white men discuss how they\u2019ll get the framed black maid to plead guilty: under the barred window, in front of the gleaming radiator.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t trouble your pretty little head too much about the plot, tbh, nobody detects anything or reports any news.<\/p>\n Kiss Me Deadly<\/strong><\/em>: THIS IS GLORIOUS. Holy cats<\/em>. Made by the man who brought you Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?<\/em> and boy will you believe it.<\/p>\n So this same intro guy basically warned us not to expect this movie to have anything so bourgeois as a coherent plot, or to make what the philosophers call \u201csense.\u201d And yeah, this is a phantasmagoria, a nightmare carnival. It opens with a genre horror scene: the naked woman, wrapped in a coat, running barefoot down the highway screaming. Mike Hammer, P.I. picks her up (sure why not) and hides her from the cops (roll with it) and they\u2019re both captured by the people pursuing her. There\u2019s some torture obscured by aggressive camera angles (more horror as a cruel man\u2019s voice intones, \u201cDo you know what \u2018resurrection\u2019 means?\u201d) and somebody uses the word \u201cwoo-bait\u201d! There\u2019s a Greek chorus of cops and the whole movie is kind of a carousel of ethnic stereotypes. That one cop Pat Murphy (what other name could he have?) is fabulous, played by Wesley Addy<\/a>, sardonic and a little bit slithery.<\/p>\n