Killers, coffee, last dying words: Columbia Pictures Film Noir on DVD

Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics, Volume One collects five fascinating studies—four of them previously unavailable, each on its own separate disc—in how this thing we call noir developed throughout the 1950s, when the style/genre/sensibility was first named and catalogued. It was also the decade that saw the end of the classic noir cycle, partially as an inevitable effect of its newfound self-consciousness.

The Sniper (1952) opens with Eddie Miller (Arthur Franz) carefully assembling his rifle and taking aim from his bedroom window at a woman as she climbs the stairs across the lane. No rounds are fired. For now, Eddie’s still satisfied with rehearsal. But how long before Eddie snaps, before he needs to release his charge, before some poor singer had to die, her stricken body shattering the glass that encased the poster announcing her gig? Eddie’s a walking time bomb, and the chilling thing about this picture, among the first to attempt a serious portrayal of a serial killer, is that Eddie’s the protagonist.

Women really piss this guy off. Everywhere he goes they torment him with their mere presence, even little girls. It’s painful to watch Eddie attempt to chat up pretty ladies in bars or in their homes when he delivers their laundry. He’s upset when a strange woman doesn’t believe that he’s an engineer and that he built a bridge between two Hawaiian islands. He’s tormented and lonesome, yet, in one of the film’s little masterstrokes of social critique—this was an early Stanley Kramer production—the ostensibly normal men and women who might offer consolation consistently express this casual misogyny that only confirms the acceptability of Eddie’s vilest compulsions.

Edward Dmytryk directs with ingenious economy throughout, a superb example of his approach being that scene where a hot burner illuminates the ceiling and is overshadowed by Eddie’s hand as he presses his palm against the burning coil—a pretty awkward cry for help. Yet The Sniper’s most memorable imagery comes from Dmytryk’s dramatic use of San Francisco—unnamed yet unmistakable—whose vertical, maze-like topography feels eerily aligned to Eddie’s agitated psyche. The disc features a commentary from the “Czar of Noir” Eddie Muller (not Miller), a life-long Franciscano and a fountain of knowledge pertaining to both the film and its location.

Glenn Ford plays a rogue cop trying to annul a marriage between city officials and organized crime in The Big Heat (53). He has the moral high ground, his single-mindedness is transfixing, yet what of the fact that his crusade results in the torture and killing of three innocent women? It’s a revenge film, but not an unreflexive one. Women are collateral damage, but they’re also the most compelling, most richly detailed, smartest characters in the movie, especially Gloria Grahame, unnervingly sexy and sassy, and finally scarred by lanky Lee Marvin as a marvelously oafish gangster with a child’s feeling for stupid sadism. Grahame gets him back in the end, and I always wonder if he could smell the coffee boiling before she threw it in his face. Fritz Lang orchestrates scenes with restrained menace, the camera hanging back and then pouncing like a cat.

5 Against the House (55) finds college boys planning a prank heist in Reno with Kim Novak, here a lounge singer. This “field experiment in psychology” is strictly caper material, with lots of smart alecky gags, some nifty casino insider bits, Novak as luscious eye candy, and one weird-ass robot valet service that deserves its own documentary. Smartly directed by Phil Karlson, it’s consistently entertaining, if somewhat out of place in this collection. The sole noir element comes from Brian Keith’s Korean vet, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, ready to explode, his eyes bulging and body shaking, the hidden, writhing violence lurking beneath this film’s relatively placid surface.

A ship’s porter tosses some luggage into a cab, the cab zooms away, the cops follow, the cabbie’s shot, the car crashes. A cop’s killed in the chaos. No one understands what just happened. That’s the first 60 seconds of The Lineup (58), a San Francisco procedural based on a Dragnet-like TV show. It’s prime Don Siegel: clean, taut, lucid, and bracing. Siegel exemplifies the evaporation of the romantic fatalism of 1940s noir and the emergence of something more visceral and nasty. Less than a third of the way through the bad guys arrive from Florida to collect a shipment of heroin and completely take control of the picture. Eli Wallach plays a killer named Dancer, offing a guy in a bathhouse during a sequence baldly driven by latent homoeroticism. Bodies fall from great heights, limbs a-flopping, one of them onto a skating rink—the old Sutro Baths complex is brilliantly used. Robert Keith plays the dapper chief heavy, rather humorously trying to refine Wallach, and revealing himself to be a collector of people’s last dying words, which strikes me as a pretty apt metaphor for noir in all its emotionality, enigma and morbid fascination.

The Lineup also features a commentary track with Eddie Miller, but Miller spends most of his time fending off James Ellroy, who repeatedly goes rabid and indulges some of his most incoherent, far-right, pro-police brutality pet topics. Ellroy has been a welcome contributor to commentary tracks on the Zodiac (07) special edition and the recent Crime Wave (54) DVD, but here he proves far less illuminating and far too easily distracted.

Was Murder By Contract (58) already neo-noir? It certainly exudes a sly knowingness about noir convention and, being the story of a guy who becomes a hitman so he can buy himself a nice house on the Ohio River, it lends itself to being read as consumerist satire. It is in any case a low-budget wonder, brimming with brilliantly quirky characterizations and scenes in which killer Claude (Vince Edwards) kills time playing mini-golf, deep sea fishing, and going to the fucking zoo when he’s supposed to be killing a woman set to testify in a high profile trial. When he’s informed that his target is female he recoils, not because he’s squeamish about having to murder a woman but because he should have charged double—women, he claims, make undependable marks. At one point Claude embarks on a nihilist rant when a waiter brings him a coffee cup with a lipstick stain. But he’s most of the time Zen-like, obsessed with efficiency, and doesn’t like guns—he’s the evil version of a Jim Jarmusch protagonist.

Elegantly photographed with the barest of resources by Lucien Ballard, who’d later collaborate with Sam Peckinpah, smoothly directed by Irving Lerner, and enveloped in a quiet, insistent, all-guitar score by Perry Botkin Jr., Murder By Contract is deeply creepy, darkly funny, and totally engrossing, perhaps the premiere discovery from what’s looking like the best multi-title DVD release of the year.

Spanish stratagems: Timescrimes, King of the Hill

It is the province of smarter science fiction makers to invest as deep if not an even deeper sense of wonder in the simplest, most familiar apparatus as they would the monolithic machines of elaborate fantasy. In Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímines), a pair of binoculars becomes just such a vessel of intrigue. When Héctor (Karra Elejalde), having recently moved into his country house with his wife Clara (Candela Fernández), begins to explore the peripheries of his property with his binoculars, it is as though the bizarre, mind-boggling journey he will soon set upon has already begun. And of course, it has already begun.

The mysterious phone call; the sight of a pretty girl undressing in the woods; the upturned dumpster and abandoned bike by the side of the road; the mute, scissors-wielding maniac whose face is obscured by a pink bandage: all of these items which pull us so deftly into this story are luring the curious, casually voyeuristic Héctor into a trap whose genesis will prove unusually elusive, even by the standards of more synapse-sparking sci-fi. The chain of causality in Héctor’s spiral into misfortune, injury and alienation from his own existence remains to the very end impossible to trace back—though god knows Héctor himself tries arduously to figure it out.

Before I confuse you too much, let me clarify that Timecrimes is, as you might guess, a movie about time travel. (And before you read on, I'll warn you that it's kinda hard to decide what a spoiler is in Timecrimes, so read as your own discretion.) But rather than hurl its protagonist centuries into the past or eons into some far-flung future, Spanish writer/director Nacho Vigalondo’s pretty ingenious and hugely sinister little feature debut tosses hapless Héctor a mere couple of hours back, which results in tremendous havoc. He catches sight of his own double doing everything he did two hours ago. He’s told by the mysterious lab technician (Vigalondo himself) who got him into this nightmare scenario, whose own motives are kept pretty obscure by the sweaty urgency of the story, not to interfere with what is, so to speak, deigned to pass. So Héctor, clumsy, middle-aged, overweight and easily exhausted, must run around frantically setting up reenactments of things that haven’t happened yet. Suffering from a persistent disconnect between seeing and being, he becomes tangled in a loop. The craziest part of it is that the avalanche of weird shit that got him into this mess is now rendered as echoes of their own internal continuum of events.

Newly out on DVD from Mongrel, Timecrimes is all action and often chillingly hilarious, a hybrid of an especially well-oiled The Twilight Zone episode and some especially physically taxing silent comedy. It manages to stay compelling even when you can see exactly where it’s going. Naysayers could make a case for it’s being a movie about little more than its own geometries. There’s talk of an American remake, and with the right talent—Cronenberg has been rumoured—I could certainly see how Vigalondo’s premise could be imbued with some darker layers of psychology. But you could just as easily laud the film for this very same sort of purity. It sets up an intricate network of activities that need to be fulfilled and deposits the utterly committed Elejalde into the thick of it like some poor, out-of-shape gerbil in some cosmically forbidding exercise wheel.

Like Héctor, Quim (Leonardo Sbaraglia) is an errant Spaniard who stumbles into the wrong place at the wrong time and winds up caught in a stratagem whose design or purpose is obscure. King of the Hill (El Rey de la montaña) begins with Quim getting robbed by some hot young babe (Maria Valverde) in the washroom of Spain’s most desolate gas station. At first it seems like he might be finding himself the antihero of some sexy, fatalistic rural neo-noir. He should be so lucky! By chasing after the girl and getting lost in some unpopulated mountain range, he’s actually slipping into a rethink of Deliverance or Duel, the randomly selected mark of some unseen maniac hunter with a rifle, scope, pooch and predilection for tormenting his prey.

King of the Hill is out on the Dimension Extreme DVD imprint, though I’m not sure what’s all that extreme about it save for a few particularly nasty looking wounds. Directed by Gonzalo López-Gallego from a script by Javier Gullón, the film shares Timecrimes’ unfussy, action-oriented rigour but lacks its wit and eye for odd detial. López-Gallego uses the bleak location well and cranks up tension with his insistence on tight shots that fragment the action and disorient the viewer at precisely those moments when we’re grasping for some visual context. But while its simplicity can be read as a virtue, the film is so miserly with exposition that it risks long stretches given over to not much more than scrambling around, panting and crying out in pain and desperation and not much else. We do eventually get some hints at what sort of twisted creature has fixed Quim in its sights, but the little we do learn winds up feeling rather trite. Maybe it would have helped if Quim could have gone back in time and wound up with Don Siegel, or maybe John Boorman or Walter Hill in their 1970s prime as his puppet master.