Busting up the boys, singing those skeletal blues, a MacGyver of improvised bikinis: the inimitable Ida Lupino graces two of the finest Fox noirs

Man, oh man, Ida Lupino. Just one of her loaded little wordless hms is worth more than reams of dialogue from most other actresses. She was born in Brixton, schooled at RADA, but like so many of the elements that fed the best of American movies of the 1940s, and film noir in particular, her outsider's, specifically European perspective seemed only to heighten her contribution to the deep, strangely poeticized Americaness of her on-screen presence. Émigrés helped nurture what would eventually be tagged—the by French, of course—as the noir sensibility, its fatalism and chiaroscuro stylistic economy, but Lupino never seemed less than American in her toughness and resilience, her fundamental vulnerability and make-due-with-what-you-got glamour. If you didn’t know better, you’d believe that she, Gloria Grahame and Barbara Stanwyck all came from the same little town—and all three of them anxious to escape.

Moontide (1942), one of three new releases in the ongoing ‘Fox Noir’ series, and a major discovery for most of us, was a proto-noir especially informed by European tastes. Fritz Lang was its first director before the more utilitarian Archie Mayo took over, and Lang’s moody aesthetics remain very much intact. The film was the US debut of French superstar Jean Gabin, familiar to contemporary cineastes, if not the average American moviegoer, from his roles in films by Jean Renoir, who’d also crossed the Atlantic to work in Hollywood. Ever vigilant regarding his image, Gabin was exactingly involved in the script’s development, and apparently much to the project’s betterment. There was also a delirium sequence initially designed by Salvador Dalí, though it seems little of his ideas made it through the censors. But perhaps the most European thing about Moontide had nothing to do with the personnel at all: after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the West Coast location shoot was cancelled and the production moved into the studios, where the luminous artificiality of the sets, the foggy docks especially, endowed the film with its sublimely dreamlike atmosphere, which only increased the story’s already considerable air of dread and romance.

Based on actor Willard Robertson’s pulp novel, deemed unfilmable by many on account of its being too sordid, and adapted by novelist John O’Hara, Moontide begins with a night of expressionistic alcoholic oblivion, with dockworker and working class bon vivant Bobo (Gabin) emerging from his ominous blackout in front of a bait shack. A murder’s been committed, and Bobo can’t be completely sure he didn’t do it. Bobo’s pal Tiny (Thomas Mitchell), to be found that morning, get this, snapping towels against the naked ass of the flamboyantly monikered Nutsy (Claude Rains in an interesting but smallish role), suggest the pair skip town, but Bobo’s usual wanderlust is suddenly overwhelmed by his fascination with Anna (Lupino), a waif with a background too painful for her to share. He fishes from the sea one night during a suicide attempt, keeping the fuzz at bay by pretending to be her husband. Anna threatens to domesticate Bobo and bring his alliance with Tiny, apparently forged in blackmail and repressed homosexuality, to a grinding, ugly halt.

Moontide is drenched in neurosis, swarming with damaged psyches and astoundingly loopy romantic gestures—at one point Bobo gives Anna a prostitute’s dress as a symbol of his affection—yet its never less than buoyant thanks to the profound charisma of its leads: Gabin’s sensuous gaze, his easy, gypsy hedonism and rather chauvinistic optimism—he has a magnificently callous speech where he extols the virtues of breakfast as a balm for suicidal depression—matched by Lupino’s aching sense of weary regeneration, her unspoken recesses of darkness and immensely touching surrender to love, at one point caressing Gabin's fleshy face like a precious stone. The film in its way looks forward to In a Lonely Place (50), one of my all-time favourite noirs, in its tender, brooding study of a fragile connection between a younger, secretive woman and an older, violent man that no one seems entirely safe around.

If Moontide has spent most of its cinematic life unknown or under-appreciated, Road House (48) has remained something of a legend, rather difficult to see but now finally appearing on DVD, only months after the death of the great Richard Widmark, whose appearance here formed yet another triumphant follow-up to his unforgettable debut in Kiss of Death (47). Curiously, it finds Lupino again coming between a seemingly untamable virile type and a seemingly more civilized, well-heeled associate, oddly matched male buddies whose friendship is tainted by compromise. When Midwestern rural roadhouse proprietor Jefty (Widmark) comes back from his travels with “a new attraction from Chicago” named Lily (Lupino, suddenly blonde though looking only more like some strange creature from elsewhere), his intentions are clearly more than professional. But Lily, the picture of feminine independence, seems utterly disinterested in romance, her response to all of Jefty’s increasingly intense come-ons being little more than barely softened brush-offs or some variation of those wonderful little shrugging hms of hers. She remains impenetrable until she suddenly sets her sights on Jefty’s manager Pete (Cornell Wilde), and that's when all hell breaks loose.

Watching Lily and Pete’s courtship shift from mutual antipathy to desire—he’s anal about tidiness while she chain smokes and leaves her butts burning everywhere—is supremely pleasurable, even sort of surprising despite the conventions. It's nearly as pleasurable and surprising as Lily’s debut as the road house chanteuse. As Lupino unceremoniously plunks herself down at her mini-upright we hear bowling balls still knocking about in the background. But by the time she starts singing her stark blues number in that seductive, gravelly, idiosyncratic voice—has Cat Power, a.k.a. Chan Marshall, seen this movie?—there isn’t a single person in the joint who isn’t under her peculiar spell. The scene is magic, visibly stoking a flame within both the already swooning Jefty and the much cooler Pete.

The love triangle as originally conceived in the first versions of the script, something much discussed in the disc's supplements, strikes me as the source material for Blood Simple (84), though I've never heard the idea brought up elsewhere. But the story as it emerges here is at once more conventional and more emotionally pointed that was originally intended, building up to a last act that bristles with betrayal, manipulation and Jefty’s masochistic, maybe even suicidal mania. Indeed, Widmark steals the show in the final scenes, though there would arguably be no scenes to steal without Lupino’s  singularly beguiling presence charging every scene with attitude, conflicted desire and on-the-spot ingenuity—you’ll be amazed at what she can do with a few scarves during the scene where they go to the beach sans bikini. All of these qualities would come to shape Lupino’s groundbreaking work as a director: she was one of the first women in Hollywood to bust up the boys. But, as is evidenced in these films, she had already been rehearsing for that job for years.

What becomes of the brokenhearted... when they emigrate? Wong Kar-Wai goes in search of America

Strewn throughout My Blueberry Nights are certain carefully chosen mementoes, fetishized objects charged with maintaining the simmering fevers of the brokenhearted, who pretty much constitute the entire populace of this swooning New York to Memphis to Nevada and back road movie, a sort of love letter to American folly and wanderlust that marks the English language debut of beloved Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai. The objects include unclaimed keys, unpaid tabs, poker chips, videotapes and postcards. Each signifies what is very much an idea of longing. I could describe one to you, that is, the idea of one, entirely apart from the context of the movie itself, and you’d likely feel charmed.

Yet the affection bestowed upon these tokens of lost love is indicative of a larger tendency to embrace the flatly tokenistic in My Blueberry Nights, a movie whose characters all seem to be the lovingly contrived product of one or two charming ideas: the cop with the absconded wife he first met when he stopped her for drinking and driving, who now gets drunk every night in celebration of his last night of drinking before driving precariously home; the transplanted Brit who came to the US to run marathons but now just runs an all-night diner; the spunky young gambler who’ll stake everything at the tables but can’t trust her mentor/father enough to believe him when he calls to say he’s dying. This is great raw material for stirring little four-minute soul songs or country songs or Tom Waits songs, but not quite the stuff of richer, more involving movies, of conflicted emotions and accumulated experience transformed into some sort of story that resonates as an impression of life.

My Blueberry Nights debuted at Cannes 2007 to, at best, lukewarm reception. The disappointment was no doubt enhanced by the tremendous praise usually showered upon Wong, whose intoxicatingly melancholy, formally sumptuous In the Mood for Love so dazzled even the most jaded filmlovers—the evidence includes its cracking of the top 20 in filmmaker/critic Paul Schrader’s recent and much-discussed film canon, the only movie from the last 30 years to do so. (And you can read Schrader's remarkable piece on canons here.) As one of his legion of admirers, long before I was able to see it I started to kind of dread My Blueberry Nights, as the notion of a masterful stylist from foreign lands coming to the US to make a mythical American road movie where everything feels like empty kitsch Americana sounded way too much like the formula that’s made legendary German director Wim Wenders’ later work (ie: The End of Violence, The Million Dollar Hotel) so hard to take. (Like Wenders, Wong even uses Ry Cooder as his composer.) I guess I wasn’t alone in this dread, since despite the star power of Jude Law to boost its profile, My Blueberry Nights took a full year after its debut to play theatrically in North America, and died a quick death once it did. It’s now available on DVD, and while some of that dread was merited, while the movie is indeed far from Wong’s best work, it’s hardly as bad as it sounds.

Shot by Darius Khondji, with editing and production design from Wong’s steady William Chang, the movie is above all a wildly beguiling construction of imagery. Wong’s predilection to shoot through mirrors and windows is in full effect, with the heavily etched windows of the Soho diner helmed by Jeremy (Law) functioning as a palimpsest, its abundant neon providing a palate of gorgeously blurred garish colours to play with, colours echoed in the flash cuts to close-ups of melting ice cream streaming rivulets of vanilla through a landscape of gooey purple pie. There are countless couples in My Blueberry Nights, but the only one with any sort of future is the pairing of Jeremy and Elizabeth (singer Norah Jones). The actors don’t exude much chemistry, but Wong conveys their potential romance almost entirely through tableau and montage. It doesn’t completely work, but it is, well, extremely beautiful.

Elizabeth meets Jeremy just as she’s getting ditched by another guy, so whatever desire Jeremy ignites in her is put aside while she takes buses all over America in search of herself… and a car. She works in old man bars, greasy spoons and musty casinos in various locales trying to save up enough bread for some wheels, but the people she meets along the way provide the real mileage, like the aforementioned boozer cop (David Strathairn) and his luscious, reckless ex (Rachel Weisz, a older, sexier, more interesting kind of double for Jones) and the card shark/little girl lost (Natalie Portman). Straitharn and Weisz, superb actors both, are kind of stuck with a storyline that sinks into maudlin theatrics pretty fast, while Portman, blonde, full of sass and vaguely reminiscent of a young Jessica Lange, is actually quite fun in the first part of her episode. It’s too bad that the performance linking them all together is Jones’, whose face just seems too girlish and pouty and whose (over)active listening can get annoying. If Wong’s purpose was to get a unique, textured performance from a young American singer, he might have switched Jones with Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power, who besides acting as music supervisor for the movie also enjoys a brief appearance as Jeremy’s ex. I have no idea whether or not Marshall can develop a complex character, but she’s got far more screen presence. 

Co-scripted with crime novelist Lawrence Block, My Blueberry Nights emanates all of the basic elements that make a Wong movie so special, not just with regards to the visual aspects but also his irreverent approach to text (i.e.: tossing it out the window at a moment’s notice) that allows for a more organic-feeling narrative, one encouraged to breathe. The problem arises when these stray elements don’t really add up to something entirely cohesive or emotionally convincing. It would be hugely unadvisable for newcomers to introduce themselves to Wong through this movie, but those already predisposed to his aesthetic should give it a whirl, since for all its flaws it is very much of a piece with his ongoing body of work—which is in itself more cohesive than any single movie enveloped by it.