#723
Post
by therewillbeblus » Thu Nov 23, 2023 3:39 am
The Thief: While not a le Carré adaptation itself, this film is proof that the oft-silent and solitary anxiety of a spy translates better on the written page. I wouldn't want a gimmick of only internal one-sided dialog either (unless topped with an ironic punchline vis-à-vis Fincher's The Killer), but the nonverbal exercise shoots itself in the foot with its commitment to silence. The self-seriousness isn't the problem, but there are times where omitting verbal cues feels like forced suppression, and throwing in some sparse language would more effectively communicate the realism of it all -especially as a signifier that accentuates the agony of introverted silence in between (e.g. a detail like the soldiers screaming when the tank runs over their foxhole in The Big Red One); for Milland's breakdown at the end isn't enough to make up for the lacking insinuations of anxiety. It's all a decent idea that's not formally poor, but still deposits a flavorless slog. It also feels like cheating to provide Milland's dream sequence, putting pieces together and relaying the prints for his final act, when the entire idea of the film has been to alienate us from intimate prompts in favor of a more behaviorist study.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Sci-fi invasion classic with heavy noirish overtones in style and narrative structure, at least in the first act as McCarthy and Wynter investigate the scattered pattern of conspiracy presented. It's intermittently engaging, but cops-out on the fatalism - Yes, the film gives us plenty of close-ups on McCarthy's traumatized face in the last act and ends on it for the final frame, in what can be read as a surrender meditated on with a sense of permanence - but only after he's believed and action has been sprung by the feds, with no indication that they, too, are doomed to a similar fate. The idea was bested by Kaufman and Ferrara, particularly in how that noir concept spread beyond the small community into the world at large, which signaled a more interesting theme: That we are much more insignificant and powerless than we'd like to believe. This one gets at the base of that idea - disrupting McCarthy from his smug status as the town's(/His World's) celebrated doctor- but doesn't take it far enough. The concurrent invasion devalues the egocentrism of My Community being the prime target of importance, and is key to the fatalistic sense of surrender these films are trying to create - wonderfully uttered by Meg Tilly in the most frightening version.
Tierra: Okay, so this is a gigantic stretch to categorize as neo-noir (and it's patently not capable of being devolved into such a genre), but I've been on a Julio Medem kick lately and he's the first artist in a long time whose work I just can't bring myself to write about - yet the noir concepts borrowed here stood out. There's a deliberately cryptic strategy in how Medem communicates how insane and chaotic one's relationship to feelings are, especially regarding personal identity, social engagement, and love, manifesting as the nebulous but enthralling potential of the world at large.. but Medem's inclusion of a femme fatale as Death(?) here is inspired, and upends expectations by remaining ambiguous in his attitude towards fatalism, which may be just as sublime as any other part of life to this heavily-disillusioned protagonist. The plot is, essentially: A man who may or may not be crazy engages with a milieu that may or may not contain mysterious and magical material, as love, lust, empathy, and animal magnetism swirl around ideas of fate and free will. So it's an Almodovarian heightened melodrama, neo-noir, magical realist romance, dark fantasy, etc. - but Medem seems to be recontextualizing the noir elements into something more spiritually and corporeally relevant; at least to modern audiences grappling with the challenge of expressing deep feelings with limited tools available.
Kansas City Confidential (Revisit): The first two-thirds of this are pretty great, especially the middle section where our disappointingly-uncharismatic protagonist hunts down leads. But once the elements are strung together for the finish, it all falls apart. Not because it's bathetic, per se, but the sincere heft, close-ups, and theatrical expressions afforded to those final interactions in the climactic set piece are obnoxious and unearned, with no space left for dramatic irony. There's an unevenness to this pic that doesn't appear to be part of its intended design, so we get a half-cocked web of Man-on-a-Mission narrative, with a few impressive highs and forgettable lows sewn in, ostensibly to satisfy a wider audience demographic. Unfortunately, that safe T-crossing reeks of insecurity, so the film ends on a note of softness after wearing the mask of a hard-boiled attitude for it’s stirring middle. Still recommended, and a film I'll probably continue to watch every few years for its simple pleasures of provocative games within a road-movie structure.
Dial 1119: Now this is what I'm talking about - a lean, sharp, astutely-conceived and detailed execution of tension, tactfully constructed as isolated moments of building discomfort strung together. Even if the endgame is laid out, the intra-narrative activity is full of small surprises - not twists, but a series of set pieces where the tone of insecurity and dread is milked to a witty conclusion, which then spills into the next one. I love how the chaotic but controlled economy -in how the edits stitch together a bunch of participants thrashing around in attempts to locate or best the unhinged asylum fugitive- mirror his own internal mental state: regulated composure, under a logic that's abnormal and objectively unstable in relation to the rest of the milieu. While most of these swift maneuvers occur in the first act, the calculated precision of how this all unfolds is way spicier and successful than The Thief's bland attempts at a similar build - and proof that imbuing a touch of unnerving POV shifts in familiar terrain can reshape the skeleton and its contents into a novel form. Thompson plays a good psychopath, leaning into the scary side of stoicism with a gleam in his eyes that denotes a kind of depersonalized catatonia. The group of patrons under siege are colorful - the always-reliable Leon Ames and histrionic Virginia Field in particular - and their attempts at swaying Thompson range from clever to absurd, but that also feels about right to an under-pressure situation.
The psychiatrist-patient dynamic threatens to undo a lot of the film's merits with its condensed explanatory didacticism (which also hints at familiar noir themes in disillusioned war vets returning, with the twist that a man in the Greatest Generation feeling inadequate for being disqualified from that experience produces the same kind of deranged displacement from his milieu as those who did serve and return!) but this also ends with a shockingly abrupt, violent silencing act, which effectively revokes that sentimental aim. And then everything just crackles from there - fast and messy and jolting enough to work in step with the general spirit of the film. Brutal, disquieting, yet wildly entertaining stuff.
Desperate: Mann concocts a wrong-man-on-the-run thriller with a deft, whetted approach that stings in all the right places. The script establishes characters well early on, and Mann shoots it all in a manner that reflects stakes, urgency, and thrills even in rare moments of calm. It's not a complex noir, but it is one of the more impressively eclectic - in such a short runtime, we're sucked into the innocence, the evil, personal morality in friction with systems, organic romanticism, and crafted horrors. The tonal diversity works to support the value of concerns threatened within the atmosphere: The lovers on the run, and their experiences with one another and the fellow innocents they encounter, are allowed to exist as exhibitions of why a moral life really matters; a 'sunny side' not covered enough in noirs to demonstrate what there is to lose. And the cruelty of Burr only exacerbates the need to desperately hold on to that romanticism. Brodie's emasculation is pervasive - he's objectively weaker than Burr, can barely protect his family without lying and running scared, and can't even succeed at getting the attention of civic officials with half-cocked moral impulses. His scattered, overwhelmed response to the insurance salesman near the end is amusingly communicated by Mann with humorously-rapid editing. The meeting is both thematically and narratively relevant, producing an act of despondent surrender to that emasculation that's practically elided by the forward momentum Mann rigorously upholds. Brodie's performance might appear steady, but the ways he copes with responsibility as ideologically-tied to masculinity fluctuates in response to stressors, and it's exhilarating to watch him attempt to exercise composure with a surging lability as he faces up against threats to his personhood.
Cornered: Decent-enough vengeful road trip with Dick Powell. The most interesting aspect of the film isn't its attempt at a 'Round-the-World convoluted plot, but how Powell seems to be playing his character straitlaced and confident like a wannabe-Bogart, yet Dmytryk directs and frames him as an average man with an odor of pathetic, that most men in noir worlds exude. This friction makes his performance feel all the more conflicted, withered, and real. Though it’s funny how strongly emphasized the effects of Powell’s triggers for shell-shock trauma were here, as if these intrusively-issued spells are the integral to understanding his character - when we actually empathize and get at his essence just about every minute outside of these. Not a memorable picture, but not a boring one either, even if it is way too long.
Armored Car Robbery: I'm glad this one was short, but it's frustrating whenever such a lean thriller leaves its viewers wanting in either the material or thrills departments. This just can't drudge up enough content to comprise an hour of runtime, and what it does bring is mostly the same 'ole contrivances we've seen over and over on both the cops' and criminals' sides. I think I've actually seen this before, but couldn't pick it out in a line-up even a day later, so I'll let it walk.
Backfire: Interesting set-up and promising cast are diluted by an unnecessarily-busy script of Russian doll flashback storytelling. There's a fair amount of potential in the pitch for a GI, with nurse in tow, to clear his buddy's name as all three cope with their individual traumas shaped by postwar ills. The underappreciated Virginia Mayo and always-reliable Edmond O'Brien are given underwritten parts, and some of the relationship dynamics tied together remain unconvincing while serving as key motivators for the labyrinthine plot. Still, when not drowning in its own stringy web of dull mystery, the proficient craft behind the camera allows most scenes that don't feel rushed to work, usually the more spacious present-day snooping bits.
Deadline at Dawn: One of the better post-blackout mystery noirs, far more involving than the lame Black Angel but without the thematic or formal wit of The Blue Gardenia. The careful script enriches the central couple's dynamic generously beyond where it needs to be, and Hayward in particular gives a nice range to her character that refuses to be pigeonholed to binary assessments of either aloof suspicion or intimately knowable ingénue, immediately when she enters into the mix. Williams's youthfully innocent persona is reminiscent of John Sweet in A Canterbury Tale, though not nearly as pronounced, and the film's best moments are in the playful detective work they engage in, which emulates the base of that film's fantastical spirit. The seemingly-random aid of an unexpectedly-resourceful cabbie/existential guardian Angel only complements the airy glee of this Nancy Drew-vibed genre entry that concurrently operates as romantic fairy tale, and keeps action propelled along at a steady pace while still allowing rest stops in detailed moments of blossoming chemistry. The film loses steam in its back half and could’ve used some trimming there (this would’ve fit the lean hour-long noir framework well) and the ending feels pretty dumb and tacked-on, but it’s not often that we get such approvingly light and entertaining fare in the darkness of noir, and this checks most boxes without sacrificing much style or acidic text.
No Orchids for Miss Blandish (Revisit): A messy, overstuffed -yet somehow still vacuous- piece of pulp fluff, that nevertheless delivers its designed pleasures in neat little packages for audiences willing to acclimate to its wavelength without asking too many questions. The film takes place in a world so far removed from any logic we may subscribe to, and then has the audacity to bar us from scoping its blueprints! I suspect that's because the filmmakers don't even know what to make of its ill-fitting contents: Impulsive, cruel shenanigans traded by persons who are superfluous in a milieu which reflectively cares as little about mankind, so their presences are treated as distinctive as the acts of violence perpetrated. I can get behind a Cormac McCarthy-ethos noir, though the pocket of twisted romance that's somehow birthed within this filthy vibe could not be any less convincing - but maybe that's how this world operates: Nothing has meaning or makes any rational sense, but everyone is taught to trust their instinctual drives, so lust brewing in an isolated kidnapping charade is diagnosed as love by both parties trapped there? I doubt I'll ever find a cohesive reading to better appreciate the film through, but the film doesn't invite it, so why exert the effort - It's an episodic domino effect of weird and curt activity, and I'll meet it on those terms every few years.
Johnny Eager: Robert Taylor's borderline-sociopathic lead is a peculiar vehicle to build a film around, given how slippery the film holds a consensus on his character, but that also opens up the possibilities of amoral surprise which makes for some fun mischievous interplay (i.e. the various stages of the fake murder-blackmail con-job). Like the previous film above, I feel like a world has been created without a pulse on its barometer for human constitution.. and so the Van Heflins of the world, who possess even a hint of emotional sensitivity, fit in even less than they would in ours and turn to drink and halfhearted one-liners about friendship as a tangible motto to hang the remnants of their tarnished hat on. Taylor's monotonous demeanor can taper rather than inspire engagement, and the batting avg of actual amusement isn't high enough for its liberal runtime - though the final shootout is a doozy of inventive and unexpected technical choices meshed with sharp brutality, and threatens to save the picture. I also experienced a weird viewing tic, where I kept noticing how good Lana Turner was at dramatizing whatever state her character was in, and yet the range was so full of stock-emotions that the character itself felt false. Like, she's doing a certain kind of scene better than most actresses in these noir roles every time, but there's something vapid about a person who spouts a grab bag of radical mood swings without enough connective tissue between them, and this created a kind of paradoxical effect that's absorbing and alienating. I delighted in that, even if it's just a 'me' thing.
The Man with a Cloak: Enjoyable Agatha Christie-type mystery peppered with juicy performances and a gothic ambiance taken as noir expressionism. I smiled at the pitch-perfect casting of Caron and Stanwyck as polarized versions of what a noir woman can be, and the whole escapade is executed with a similar kind of low-key digestibility as Knives Out where the flaws are excused by humble aspirations - well, relative to the self-conscious stretching of material inherent in these kinds of web-spins.
Pitfall (Revisit): Coarse melodrama spotlighting the nightmarish possibilities of following through on the gander towards exotic urban deviance from the safety of domesticity. Powell is a bored family man caught between two threats: one soft - the torpor of the nuclear system that desensitizes one into a fate of existential lobotomy; and the other loud - the stimulation of surprise found in crevices unexplored and morals undefined. There's something attractive about unfixed values from a rigid hierarchy, which fantastically permits such an ideologically-vacuumed vehicle to entertain id impulses, and de Doth methodically draws us into this spell through minute alterations in Powell's routine, the consequential bright lights escaping through his instinctual smile communicating so much without overstating anything. As others have already named, this is a film about men in personal crises using a woman as their target of hope against a lonely, consuming culture, but they're mostly oblivious to the lack of kinetic reciprocity occurring around this dream. All competing fantasies by competing men are laid out side by side, antithetical and emasculating to the dreamer - as de Toth refuses to grant greater value to any one preferred narrative than the others in an objective framework. Instead, they're painted as coercions to illusions, with the only difference being the type of aggression issues against Scott to allow the man to hold onto that mirage of catharsis.
The ease at which even the most socially-conservative, institutionally-devoted male can surrender his conditioned morals for a shiny object is definitively cynical, and while this is unquestionably a noir, it also executes the themes of domestic melodramas better than most classics not yet conceived of. De Toth's view of societal depression is translated by presenting us with a bunch of isolated souls trying to connect around contradictory delusionally-skewed ideas, with very real consequences and no awareness of the problem's root. There are two devastating moments that stand out here: The first is the optimal example of male delusion (so incredibly pessimistic for being the most honorable and least harmful of all the discharges of toxic masculinity on display): Powell's speech to his family about the trouble with the world being a lack of contentment with what one already has, spewed out just as he's concurrently acting as the poster-boy of that problem. And then his ability to evade the same outcomes as his peers, just by being slightly less pathetic rather than providing a revelatory or empathic act beyond self-serving mechanics is icing on the cake - as if detouring his id to tuck his son into bed makes him edge towards being a mensch at heart, with the Scott affair as an innocent vacation. So while de Toth ensures that objectively we see each man's narrative as equitably gross in their selfishness, he also derisively demonstrates that only through a manipulated and construed narrative path can Powell emerge the moral victor - reflexively mocking the Hollywood Code as he leans into its trappings.
The second devastating moment is when Scott visits Barr in prison, and he projects his jealous and accusatory narrative to summarize her psychology without her consent, to which she softly replies that 'it might not be true'. She isn't a femme fatale, but a desperate woman looking for any man to deserve her, with the bar set at the ground level of simply being believed -or, rather, leaving the door open that maybe, just maybe, she could be telling the truth. Without even a fraction of willingness to give her that benefit, well, she's fucked. And so are the men trying to fit the square pegs of their overbearing desires into round holes of practical limitations in other wills, variables sought for self-preservation, etc. The camera's magnetism towards Powell's narrative in the end is another formalist snub to Scott - devaluing her with the weapon of the medium. Powell gets to try again with his wife, and even if her mental state is fragile and potentially irreparable, at least he is welcomed back into his role of the breadwinner. The way he leans back, relieved, with the cheery score sending us off into the 'happy ending' of the picture, indicates no real lesson learned. Powell will return to a state of complacency, while his wife and Scott will continue to wrestle with their emotional tragedies independently. See you in the starring roles next decade, ladies.
The Red Squirrel (Revisit): Okay, so Medem really enjoys his application of noir devices, which are even more obvious here. A disillusioned protagonist spins webs of deceit to escape his old life, where he's been deterministically irrigated to consider death as his only way out; tricking an amnesiac woman into submitting to his idea of her, and then becoming agitated when she shows base signs of autonomy. His reactive accusation diagnosing her duplicity is cheekily rich, labeling her a femme fatale without ever spelling those words, and contributes to the larger subtextual commentary. This is actually an interesting double feature with Pitfall - though per usual, Medem transcends genre constraints to liberate his characters toward shared eccentric realities not conceivable to the isolated mind, and only possible when encountering the spiritual experience of novel love, however muddled the circumstances birthing it. Love is allowed to be messy and people are allowed to be flawed, because there's some kind of reciprocal acknowledgement of dignity and worth by the principals, actions of service divorced just a tad from pure selfishness. If relationships are games, and both participants want to provoke the other within the air of mystery present, why not - in fact, it's probably more honest to accept that inescapable enigmatic quality - as long as the overarching sense of safety is cultivated to authenticate play.
So the film is a weird, enthralling, candid tale of the boundless possibilities of passion, which rarely subscribes to a predictable or effable internal logic. Thank god for this medium to help erode those false, self-constructed barriers and enter an exclusive dimension to yield fruits previously invisible in our stringent public. Medem is the real deal - a melodramatic surrealist who evades the pitfalls of melodrama or surrealism with a gentle deftness, demanding untethered engagement from anchoring signifiers to achieve sublime in the elliptical. However, it's not lost on him that a noirish escapade attempting to get away with altering one's identity toward a preferred narrative, without the force of reality returning for a shoulder-tap unwinding the 'That Was Easy' button, is folly - even if it's a necessary step toward the humility required to reshape one's schema of what love can 'be'. Perhaps it's even a synonymous experience to losing one's memory and pushing through instinctive barriers to trust strangers in order to build it back again!
Murder, My Sweet (Revisit): An efficaciously literary noir that immediately establishes itself as a walking defense mechanism, rather than convincing brand of Cool. The hardboiled-ness of Powell et al’s demeanor and verbiage feels deliberately condensed into sharp attitudes that simplify information as a protective layer against the horror of displacement from one’s milieu, and perhaps in response to an irreversibly lost ethos binding humanity together. I love how, right off the bat, he muses on the separation between the outside world’s traffic and his ‘self’, as if the “silence of the office building” signifies both his superior resilience in and pathos of coping with this alienation. He sizes up people as concisely as possible - on an assignment to find a client’s love interest, he tries to "picture" the guy being in love, can't, and so he must not be! That’s all the rope he can afford to people in an apathetic world, where only currency -curbed by one’s sense of self-preservation, as needed- defines action.
The capitalist individualism is so nakedly portrayed (i.e. the argument between Powell and the lead detective about who helped who 'more' on a murder, for how quickly it devolves into a competition about who wants to end their workday to retire to a solitary existence and who hate humanity more than the other; b) after Powell and Shirley finally kiss, his first words are still selling himself - "I'm a pretty good kisser" - at probably the one time he doesn't need to, yet still feels compelled.. and then he goes off on a rant about his business plans and interactions instead of just kissing her again!) that I imagine this film has repelled many: The dismissed stiffness is often framed as deadpan theatrics (I’ve heard complaints about the absurdity of some performances' affect and thin characterizations, but it fits when these are all complex people disallowing themselves to be more than thin as a shield of persona, putting on performances for each other as they sell their pitch-of-the-moment to the crowd)- but even when it does hold that line, it’s obsessive focus on ‘process’ succeeds under the environmental conditions that the film wisely doesn’t attempt to puncture. I’d love to get a Fincher commentary, and wonder if this is a key noir he’s used to help shape his formal exercises borrowing noir conventions - plus this picture is a model of precise economy, though again, perhaps too much for some.
Powell plays a good Marlowe - mostly due to his innate tenderness barely hiding beneath the veneer of grit that helps create an identity of fortitude. Though it’s transparent that he used to be a much different, likely happier man, not too long ago, and I appreciated how passionate he could become with a bellowing voice (or nightmare-induced scream) to show those parts of his emotional identity amidst the orientation of a laconic, placid temperamental-mask. He does a few selfless-seeming things, but even the charity to Moose gave himself a boost of ego to be in a position to condescend. The dialog is properly pronounced with flair, but also elastically spun in interloping narration; the plot turns cause whiplash as airtight episodes exploding like bombs into the next spot we land; and the stylistic touches are handled with clever technical prowess that’s unobtrusive until there’s space to take off the leash and play around. Maybe this doesn’t live up to a pedestaled reputation, being one of the First Noirs and all.. but it’s a strong example of how to film a story enmeshed with mood, and not much other fat worth chewing on, which does fit the worldview after all. A reflexively superficial film, and intoxicating on those fumes.
Dragonwyck (Revisit): This one’s probably considered a noir by most for its aesthetics, and rightfully so, but it’s hard to shake the (incredibly relevant to the current zeitgeist) observation of how fatalistically weak a wealthy white man is to God’s Takebacksee of a male heir he put in little effort to create to begin with. I already wrote some thoughts on this element before, but Price’s self-protective philosophical determinism, applying the Moral Model of justice to explain his own wealth and prosperity (yet pitched away from his self and towards the negative, i.e. the handicapped as morally deserving of their maladies due to divine intervention) despite putting in no work to earn it, is a brilliant little touch - especially if we entertain his own bias as a formulation for the finale!
Amantes: If you rolled your eyes at the inclusion of Medem's genre-defying works in this post, you may direct yourself towards this more explicit qualifier from his Spanish peer, Vicente Aranda, although it's not nearly as good as the two more eclectic Medem masterpieces. This is even more brazenly engaging with eroticism and stars Victoria Abril and Maribel Verdú, so it's a bit puzzling how dull it feels in motion. Aranda is smart enough to cast Abril as not just the femme fatale, but the central figure of interest in the first half of this otherwise unspectacular neo-noir, and so we get some mileage out of her focal point conniving and emoting all over the place as Sanz' vapid protagonist falters at rousing the picture with any value from the not-so-'innocent' (more like pathetically naive and aimless) perspective. When Abril is offscreen, Verdú is on, and her arc is mildly amusing to watch in its early stages, before her character reverts back to One-Note Ball & Chain. The film's best scenes are when she's grappling with her antithetical religious morals and competitive desire to keep her man, unconsciously choosing to evolve to meet the amoral world on its terms in sleek noir tradition, which briefly makes her come off as a 'fatale' if only in the switch to a confident sensual attitude! But there can only be one - and watching obsessive-compulsive passion produce tragedy isn't nearly as exciting as it has been in countless other melodramas. The minute behavioral idiosyncrasies from the two female leads are the only reason to watch this, and even then it's not enough. For a movie all about sex, it's frustratingly insufficient at stimulating much feeling, neither deep nor cosmetic.
Lady in the Lake (Revisit): Although arguably bested in many ways by Dark Passage's bifurcated approach -which had the audacity to attempt to squeeze multiple framing devices, inclusive of both the subjective gimmick and a pivot to conventional objectivity, within the same picture- this POV noir is still excellent on its own terms, and manages to tonally separate itself from the Daves despite sharing genre DNA. Robert Montgomery shows off his directorial intellect by committing in full measures to a puckish reflexivity with noir material and its smarmy delights, as side characters are coerced into being sized up and down by Montgomery hiding behind a camera, and so by extension, us. It's a gift of omniscient pleasure to the audience fueled with different aspirations than Daves' film, for we yearn for the anxious reactivity of those caught in a conversation with Montgomery and his camera, rather than experiencing it ourselves as most noirs demand. This could've gone south only too easily, but Montgomery is fully aware of the possibilities and limitations of the medium and opts for a feather-light good time over Bogart's journey of hypervigilance, which is drenched in a cyclical pattern of being presented with threats and manipulating the environment with critical thinking skills to evade them on the lam. This one’s comfortable wearing pajamas in every scene. It’s also a Christmas movie with all the ironic iconography! - a joke, but rather fitting, as it would be a perfect flick to throw on in the background on Christmas morning. That might actually be the best way to describe its artfully campy temperament, and while I would never try to persuade anybody that it’s a better movie than Dark Passage, depending on my mood I may prefer its consistently gratifying treats.
Night and the City (Revisit): What is there to even say about a noir pitched as a rollercoaster of sensations that peak and dip, until you're riding the highs and lows of Desperation right with everyone else. I could fawn over each detail present in the mise en scene, visual style, and performances, but it would feel disrespectful to the spirit of the film, as all these elements and more don't stop moving for an instant; they swirl into a relentless exhibition of fatalistic reptilian impulses, a frenzied cesspool of losers. It's incredible how lovable this film is - that it's even possible for a man to enjoy watching his own nightmare unfold without a shred of glamour. Hell, the Safdies loved it so much they remade it, twice.
The Lady from Shanghai (Revisit): Guileful comedy in the skin of tragedy, worn so tightly that they become inseparable feelings. What starts out as a pretty straightforward series of comic bits transforms into a mood piece crafting a dark, bent vision of a dark, broken world; and then bends further into twisted humor now based on that recognition of, not just the death of a collective morality, but the death drive of that moral collective. Welles poetically differentiates the bookended comic tones across a sea or noir grammar - the first innocent and naive, and the final seasoned to death. Of all noirs, it’s the most beautifully horrifying because of how wonderfully bizarre it is - veneers of degrading ironies peeled back to reveal a progression of permanent dooms. Each dramatic lyric is undercut by a gag in some form - anything as obvious as a group of kids laughing at a romantic embrace, or as subtle as an insurance exchange after an abrasive car accident (which is surrounded by a similarly humorous formal tinkering with aesthetic transitions in a scene where one man cartoonishly cackles at another now trapped in unexpected absurdity but around a bitterly-framed, baldly unfunny deed) while other dramatic scenes are just shot weird as comedy against the alleged gravitas of the action (i.e. the fistfights during the escape being edited as slapstick, or Welles' narration in the funhouse when he gradually amps up the Irish accent to the point where it's overblown and the hamminess distracts from the content -where plot's mystery is literally solved, or the nonchalant sap assumption that he'll be cleared in the next chapter, because things tend to go well and expected for ya, huh?); a jarring indication of fatal distance from the material we were just suffocated with moments ago. Can anything be taken seriously, and if not, what will act as the foundation or supports in this world?
Diva (Revisit): I could name a bunch of reasons why this movie is so cool, but they'd all be spoilers for a work that wears its essence on its sleeve this proudly.
That might have to do it for this year