Durbin gives a pretty interesting performance because she seems so stiff and lifeless as she’s introduced singing this song, it’s kind of creepy. But when she meets him and starts telling her story we go to a flashback where she seems normal and human, expressing emotions, etc. And you realize that she’s just miserable now and her face can’t hide it. It’s kind of like what Naomi Watts did in MULHOLLAND DRIVE, actually. At first I honestly thought she was bad in the role but then when things switched up and I realized what was going on all along I realized she was brilliant in it.

The Lieutenant seems to be going along with it just to humor the drunk and kill some time, but maybe he has some illusions of filling that new opening on his dance card. If so there are several points where he should have realized it was time to say he had to take a shit and then climb out the restroom window and never come back.

1. When she said she changed her name from Abigail to Jackie because “I thought it would be best after the trial.”

2. Right after that when she explained that her husband is in Angola for murder.

3. When he goes to church with her anyway and then she just starts bawling and doesn’t stop for the entire service.

On the other hand, within the flashback story she has a long list of reasons to run like hell before marrying her husband, including when he brings her for “one last time” to hang out where he meets with his bookies, but especially when her future mother-in-law tells her “Between us we will make him strong.” Whuh?

There’s alot of music in the movie. She sings at the club a couple times, there’s the music in church, and they go to a symphony. They also attempt to dance together, but the Lieutenant cuts it off and says he’s not a very good dancer. This is interesting because we know from the poster that Jackie’s incarcerated husband is played by Gene Kelly. Not to be too controversial here, but in my opinion Gene Kelly was known as a pretty good dancer. So when her substitute man-friend is not a good dancer this is kind of a joke. In fact, it’s what we now would call a meta joke, isn’t it, because the joke only has to do with our outside knowledge of the actors in the movie and not anything that takes place within the movie? Everybody considers this meta business to only exist now, but here it is in ‘44. It’s pre-postmodern-postmodern.

Gene Kelly doesn’t dance, but he does make a decent bad guy. His character is a smooth-talker and a desperate guy who can’t help but constantly dig himself into holes he can’t climb out of (except for Angola, which it turns out he is able to escape from). For most of the movie he just seems like a shitty husband, but when he returns as a jealous, possessive fugitive he’s actually pretty threatening.

But really this is more of a tragedy than anything else. She really loves the guy, and he doesn’t get it. Just like the Lieutenant and his ex-fiancee.

The movie has a pretty impressive pedigree. The director is Robert Siodmak, who did the ‘46 version of THE KILLERS as well as SON OF DRACULA. We film loving individuals would probly talk about him more if we were confident in our pronunciation of his name. This one’s based on a book by W. Somerset Maugham (THE RAZOR’S EDGE and all that) and adapted by Herman J. Mankiewicz, who worked on a few fairly well known movies like THE WIZARD OF OZ and CITIZEN KANE, things like that.

I have to say though, my reason for watching it was as a Christmas crime movie, and you do get a little bit of crime, but not a whole lot of Christmas. It does take place then but it’s not all that crucial to the plot which holiday he has a break for, and it doesn’t have alot of Christmas imagery or music in it. So you could watch it at other times of year, if you wanted to, it wouldn’t bother you that much.

This is one of those movies I wasn’t sure about watching but then the opening was so great it could’ve turned into a round table discussion of agriculture subsidies and I probly would’ve kept with it. It starts with two out of town assholes walking into a diner and giving the proprietor a bunch of shit. They sit there in their coats and fedoras, ridiculing the menu, the policies, the customers, keep calling everybody “bright boy” and ask them condescending questions. It soon comes out that they’re not there for the steak sandwiches, they’re hired killers waiting for “the Swede” (Lancaster) who works at the gas station across the street to come in for lunch so they can ply their trade on him. (That means kill him. They are killers.)

He doesn’t show up, though, so the killers leave, and the “bright boy” customer who happens to work with Swede races to his house to warn him. But the Swede already knows, and he just lays in bed, resigned to his fate. So they show up and kill him.

So there’s your hook, there’s your mystery. Who had him killed, and why? We would ask the Swede, he obviously knew the answer, but the whole thing is he’s dead, so that doesn’t work. The movie follows a smart insurance investigator named Jim Reardon (Edmond O’Brien) who figures out there’s some unrecovered job money involved in this and won’t let go of the case. He talks to the Swede’s co-workers, the old woman he left his insurance money to (a chambermaid he barely knew), the officer who arrested him once (also a childhood friend), one of his old girlfriends (the officer’s wife), his cellmate. They all tell stories about Swede and a picture starts to come together of a boxer who couldn’t fight anymore and fell into crime. Then Reardon starts to find clues about the Swede’s last heist, who was involved and what might’ve gone wrong. And he goes after the money.

Ava Gardner plays the girl whose charms Swede can’t resist, makes him put his brain on standby and switch over to “dick” mode. She doesn’t seem like a terrible person, but I guess technically she’s still a femme fatale, because she’s laying on a bed as bait while the men convince Swede to come in on a payroll robbery. She’s kicking her pantyhosed feet around like a kitten pawing at a ball of yarn. She knows what she’s doing.

She’s actually pretty smart about finding excuses to just be laying around all the time, so men don’t have to imagine what she looks like horizontally. It’s pretty over the top but at least she’s not bending over to pick things up or doing the Sharon Stone leg-spread or anything like that. I wonder if she had to do any furniture re-arranging though?

“Well, see you later Kitty, we have that hat factory payroll robbery to plan.”

“No, stay here, you guys can meet in my bedroom.”

“Well, that would be weird. Not enough room in there. Besides, we were gonna go play cards at Colfax’s, that’s a good place.”

“Well, is there a bed I can move into the living room?”

“Uh, I guess.”

Come to think of it, the Swede chooses to face his maker laying in bed, it might be an homage to Kitty. Or this might just be a movie about beautiful lazy people.

The cinematography is real good, very film noir. One of the extras on the DVD says it just looks like TV, but man I didn’t think so. Subtle things like when they’re at the coroner’s office and the room is bright so there’s a light background, but the light’s not on the people so they’re a dark grey. It looks good and very moody, not your usual shine-a-light-on-the-actors-and-shoot-them approach.

Apparently Richard Brooks and John Huston worked on the script, but it’s credited to this guy Anthony Veiller. I guess the opening 20 minutes comes straight from Hemingway’s story and the rest is made up. It’s a good mystery, even if it never matches the strong mood of that opening scene, with those guys talking down to everyone because they know nobody’s gonna mess with The Killers.

But it ends on a fun note. I like how it’s not a cop or private eye on the case, or even a guy who needs to solve the mystery. In fact, Reardon’s boss doesn’t care what happened and tries to move him on to something else. He just becomes obsessed, it’s like a puzzle to him and he doesn’t want to give up on solving it. When he finally has it all figured out, having gone far beyond the call of duty, he goes home for the weekend. Then he’ll be back Monday for some other case.

[ratings]

Like

Unlike