Five Reasons to Live by Charles Lieurance

1. Freddie Bauer Would Very Much Like to Quit/Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1948)

Picture Robert Crumb acting as the catalyst of doom in a pinko film noir penned by Franz Kafka & that's Freddie Bauer, as embodied by character actor Howland Chamberlain. In a world where the "good guys" only exist on the other end of phone conversations & in newspaper headlines where an invisible District Attorney crusades to eradicate the numbers racket, nebbish accountant Freddie Bauer is the feeble conscience. When the ostensibly benevolent numbers parlor for which he tallies is taken over by a syndicate, Freddie wants to quit. He only wants to be the bookkeeper for an illegal organization if there are no police raids & the boss -- in this case, the 40s version of Zero Mostel, Thomas Gomez -- seems like a nice guy. In other words, he'll only act dishonestly if he can completely overlook it on a day-to-day basis. Otherwise, forget it. Unfortunately, the syndicate can't really let a parlor's main accountant quit, so Freddie begs, asks some potent philosophical questions (imagine Kafka's Man Before the Law as a chronic pesterer) & finally brings the whole shebang down around his (and everyone else's) ears. All because Freddie wants to quit his job. He just wants to quit. And he wants to quit in that kind of jostled Bowery poetry popularized by pinko playwright Clifford Odets:

Bauer: Just like Doris, Mr. Morse, I'm quitting. I just wanted to tell you so you could get somebody else for tomorrow. This place makes me sick...Mr. Morse, what did you put me into? Did you put me into this without me knowing or saying, did you do a thing like this to me?

Joe Morse (John Garfield): Mr. Bauer, I'd like to straighten out whatever trouble there seems to be here, if I can.

Bauer: There's no trouble, I just want to quit. 

Morse: Is that fair?

Bauer: Maybe it isn't, but that's what I want to do.

Morse: But why go out of your way to make trouble for yourself?

Bauer: What do you mean?

Morse: Well, we're reorganizing the whole business now. We need every man's loyalty at this time.

Bauer: You can't make me stay. You can't. How can you make me? What are you gonna do?

Morse: I want to be friends with all you people. I'm looking ahead to where we can work on a nice friendly basis. I don't believe in an employer who has to say to his people, 'You've GOT to'. I like an employer whose people do things by themselves, because they like to, because they're loyal to the business.

Bauer: If I go now & walk out of here, how're you gonna stop me? How -- if I say I won't stay & walk out of here -- how are going to stop me?

Numbers Parlor Clerk: Well, I'm gonna quit just the same. It frightens me to work here.

Bauer: What are you talking about? We can't quit, they won't let us. You heard them, they said they'd kill me if I quit.

Clerk: They said they'd kill you, Mr. Bauer. You're the head bookkeeper here, they need you. They don't need us.

Waiter: Your friend didn't show yet.

Bauer: What's the matter, are you in a hurry for the table? There's no one here, you're not losing any tips letting me sit!

Leo Morse (Thomas Gomez): I'm glad you called me Freddie. I'm glad you thought it over to listen to me, to calm down & listen to me, so I can help you. I know how bad you feel Freddie. It was a wicked, foolish thing to do to put a gun in my brother's hand for him to kill you. That's what you wanted to do, that's what it was. I know how it feels to try to find someone to kill you, to finish you off, to take the crimes of your life on his head, in his hands...

Bauer: Please, Mr. Morse, all I want is to quit. That's all, nothing else. They won't let me quit & I want to quit. I'll die if I don't quit.

2. Captain Hauptmann Koenig & the Leipzig Suicides/Edge of Darkness (Lewis Milestone, 1943)

With its odd casting of Errol Flynn & Ann Sheridan as Norwegian freedom fighters, Milestone's Edge of Darkness occasional suffers from an undertow of ridiculousness, but in the end the film is too brutal & well-mounted not to be taken seriously. The opening prologue, in which Nazi soldiers arrive at the fishing village of Trollness after the bloody battle detailed in the movie proper, is so tragic, cold & littered with corpses that it turns the battle of wits between the townsfolk and the Nazis into a kind of sacred Dreyer-esque Passion Play. The use of miniatures &  iconic tableaux enhance the feeling that we're watching a story whispered down from generation to generation, about an innocent Nordic fairyland corrupted by incomprehensible evil. 

While heroism & comic swashbuckling abound in Edge of Darkness, it's the morose scenes that really grab you & the one in which Nazi Captain Koenig (a strikingly handsome & not inordinately despicable Helmut Dantine) is cornered by the rebels into taking his own life reminded us instantly of the classic photographs of Nazi suicides in Leipzig taken by Lee Miller & Margaret Bourke-White in 1945. There's a sinister, almost Catholic, morbid ecstasy & stillness to these photographs & the ritualistic details of Dantine's death in Edge of Darkness serve as the mystery moments on either side of those famous Life Magazine pictures. Dantine is driven into his office by the resistance & stands expressionless before an overbearing portrait of Hitler. He sits at his desk & pens an absurd note to his brother which begins as a patriotic manifesto, the degenerates into a sarcastic raspberry to all he's held dear. He unholsters his luger, pushes back his luxurious dark forelocks with the barrel & stares into the void. The hair falls back across his forehead & that is death. During the film's prologue, when he's found still sitting up in his chair by his fellow soldiers, they unceremoniously shove him onto the floor & compose a memo to headquarters. One comrade taps his black boot distractedly on the Captain's wrist, making the luger locked in his dead hand bounce just a little. 

Photographs of actual Nazi suicides by Lee Miller & Margaret Bourke-White

3. The Bad Lieutenant's Day Off/The Prowler (Joseph Losey, 1951)

To be accurate, he's only a beat cop, but the reference was irresistible. 

And, before you know it, the vacation's over & it's back to blurting out entirely inappropriate double entendres to lonely Bel-Air housewives. 

4. Oversized Novelty Booze Bottles/Private Hell 36 (Don Siegel, 1964)

It would surprise me a little if James Ellroy hadn't used LA detectives Cal Bruner (Steve Cochran, a bit of a revelation here) & Jack Farnham (Howard Duff) as inspirations for his corrupt, but strangely vigilant LA Quartet detectives Bucky Bleichert, Lee Blanchard, Buzz Meeks, Danny Upshaw, etc. Don Siegel's dank, soulless (in a great way) Private Hell 36 is the very model of moral  atrophy. You get the feeling Bruner & Farnham would really like to solve crimes but have no goddamn idea why it's even in their blood. To them it's just a virus they can't shake & it has nothing to do with high concepts like good or evil. In their minds, the detour they take into corruption & violence has nothing at all to do with their worth as cops. And they are relatively effective cops, in that LAPD Who Gives A Shit? way. They can do police work in their sleep, but getting some trim, tucking away some cash & actually enjoying life seems like rocket science to them. So, of course, they take a stab at it & fail in a dingy, humiliating fashion. But what can you expect from two guys whose idea of a swell place to bring a street-smart doll like Ida Lupino is a bar cleverly decorated with oversize liquor bottles? Who wouldn't want to be flirted with by two unbelievably cynical cops in the shadow of a huge Pabst Blue Ribbon bottle?

5. Edward Arnold Trims His Nose Hair/Three on a Match (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932)

Five Reasons to Live by Charles Lieurance

1. The Skull Clock - The Lawman (Michael Winner, 1971)

Occurring where it does in the Western cycle (Post-Peckinpah & Penn) & featuring a cast heavy with established character actors, The Lawman could easily be mistaken for Blazing Saddles as you're rummaging through cable, but it is, in fact, the last "real" Hollywood Western & its fucked-up death-knell.  If you can conceivably resist a cast that includes Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, Lee J. Cobb, Robert Duvall, Sheree North, Ralph Waite, John Hillerman, J. D. Cannon, Lou Frizzell, Richard Bull, Robert Emhardt, Albert Salmi, John McGiver, etc., you're a sturdier man than I. If you look up any of these names on IMDB, you'll recognize them instantly. But The Lawman plays out like a self-destruct device for the genre, complete with a High Noon-style clock embedded into the butt-end of a human skull. The skull clock sits on the Faro table/desk of the highly literate Old World dandy/saloon-keep (brilliant theater actor Joseph Wiseman) & it ticks off the hours while Cobb, his family & their ranch-hands decide whether or not to turn themselves in to Marshal Burt Lancaster after an old man is killed during the drunken tail-end of a cattle drive. The townsfolk, a staggering gallery of fine bit-players, are cowards to a man & the town's sheriff, Robert Ryan, is a bought-and-sold drunk who knows he can't possibly cross Lancaster in a gunfight. It's crucial that the Western iconography is so stacked & centralized here, because while The Lawman adheres to -- nay, amplifies -- every gesture of the genre, it has the same merciless drop-bottom as a scaffold. Because of the trappings, it takes a while to notice that the skull clock is counting down to a complete betrayal of the genre, with so many of its most innocent guest stars swept away in the storm. Watching all the townsfolk from Blazing Saddles look on while Burt Lancaster commits the ultimate Western transgression is as good or bad as it gets. Make way for the Anti-Western. While it was a little late in coming, it's good director Michael Winner threw the funeral.  

2. Simone Chapeaux/Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939)

Just beneath Lubitsch in my infuriatingly adjustable pantheon of comedy directors is Mitchell Leisen & this sophisticated deco farce is one of his best. For those who insist that film progresses in sophistication as our society becomes more open-minded, I refer you to Lubitsch & Leisen, whose films, while beguiling in that eternally silvered manner of 1930s Hollywood, are never afraid to present love, friendship & lust as a heartbreaking melange forever confounding intentions, good or bad. They never judge the characters for supreme romantic confusion & they never resort to the cute expression on a dog's face or a fart when the complex situations finally overtake the punch lines. Of course, poverty is a fantasy state in screwball fare from the 30s (moments of Preston Sturges aside), but if you were living through the Great Depression, real poverty was probably something you didn't necessarily need to see when you'd spent your last nickel on a matinee. 

I won't go into the blend of mix-ups & star-crossed dalliances that lead to this hilarious send-up of Coco Chanel, except to say they're well worth your time if you haven't, um, been. Elaine Barrie is fantastic as Simone/Chanel & she plays the queen of style with a pretty stone-faced authority, as a person who may be secretly bent on making her uppercrust clientele more grotesque than they already are. While she never entirely gives the game away, the shop decorations have the halved & quartered appearance of Dadaist objets d'art & if I'm not mistaken, that is one of Giorgio de Chirico's nightmare streets of the subconscious pretending to be an innocent wall mural. 

3. Paris Commune Cookbook/Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1942)

While chatting with the Nazis who've invaded her lovely little British hamlet in Alberto Cavalcanti's WWII film of encouragement, one sly, matronly village aristocrat offers up this amazing volume from the Paris Commune. While the Paris Commune of 1871 began as one of the world's great experiments in working class empowerment, it ended in anarchy, violence, starvation & well, the cooking of zoo animals. This book features recipes for elephant cutlets, parrot pie, roast leg of bear, antelope steak & tiger casserole. The hostess/hostage explains to the Nazi how her grandmother, who gave her the grisly cookbook, got by during the ugliest days of  the Commune: "Horseflesh was unobtainable after the first few weeks. Rats were quite a delicacy apparently. I believe hyena was too much for her though. She was ill for weeks afterwards."

4. The Fink Steals the Phone/Macao, L'Enfer Du Jeu, AKA Gambling Hell (Jean Delannoy, 1939)

Once the incense & opium-clouded credits of this war-shattered film begin roiling over an elaborately conjoined series of  orientalist wooden panels, it's difficult not to feel a Von Sternberg film coming on, but instead we get a brilliant curio by the unfairly maligned French director, Jean Delannoy. While Gambling Hell is certainly in the Von Sternberg bailiwick, Delannoy is able to mix rollicking adventure with moody exotic misapprehension with a deft touch all his own. While the film is rendered with all the dark, smoky, amoral corners of an old world made sinister by shaky late-period European colonialism, Delannoy also choreographs an incredibly witty chase scene through a dusty bazaar, several top-notch shoot-outs & the kind of loopy derring-do one associates with Monogram serials. Strangely the film's tone -- veering as it does between languorous inscrutability, inevitable tragedy & Sailor Steve Costigan shenanigans -- doesn't inflict whiplash at all. Delannoy's film seems all of a piece & an elegantly crafted piece at that. 

In Gambling Hell, Erich von Stroheim plays an arms dealer forced by warlords into an arms exchange he hasn't the cash to pull off.  Before sailing off to certain doom in Macao, he saves cabaret performer Mireille Balin (more on her later) from a firing squad & falls in love with her on the way to his personal Waterloo. Once in Macao, already dire matters become lethal as Von Stroheim grates against gangster/casino-owner Sessue Hayakawa. And that's enough of a sketch to get us where we're going in this post. The rat-fink/petty thief pictured above is the fine French actor Henri Guisol (Ophuls' Lola Montes, Renoir's Crime of Monsieur Lange) & as he's in the employ of anyone with fifty dollars, deco-ensconced Hayakawa seems to have fifty dollars more often than anyone else in Macao. Guisol enters the film declaring, "You are really lucky to meet me. As you can see, I'm a kind of lucky fetish. You touch the top of my spinal column three times & you win at every game. Twelve dollars for the artistic comments & fifty if you win." Guisol spends the film trying to hamstring Von Stroheim's arms dealer at the gangster's behest, though his job performance is less than exemplary. 

While I've loved Gambling Hell for ages, I only recently latched on to this bit of business with the phone. Guisol, reporting the movements of Von Stroheim, Balin & a parade of other characters who become enmeshed in the film's modal brocade, forgets for the moment that the public phone is not the wallet of an easy touch fresh off the boat & attempts, out of pure animal reflex, to pocket the damn thing. Beautiful. 

Of course, what's most-known about this wonderful little film is its backstory, which is so monstrously CAPITAL R REAL that it threatens to obscure Gambling Hell altogether. The movie was made in 1939, but, once the Nazis captured France, was re-shot with Vichy favorite Pierre Renoir taking over for Nazi bugbear Von Stroheim. The version featuring dickbag Pierre Renoir was released to uncomfortable Parisian silence in 1942. The leading lady, Mireille Balin, fell in love with an SS officer & was beaten, raped & incarcerated by the French resistance while trying to escape to Italy with her lover after the Liberation. Upon being released she was not allowed to work as an actress for a year as part of her "probation" & eventually succumbed to alcoholism. Once she was able to attempt a career again, she contracted a disfiguring disease & after an operation to repair her face failed, she went into hiding & died in 1968. 

So, isn't it funny how he tries to steal that phone? Hilarious. 

Mireille Balin

5. Wooing Jean Harlow/Bombshell (Victor Fleming, 1933)

"Today & tonight will live forever in my heart. I'll lie awake all night on the pillow of its memory. I've known you in every ripple of moonlight I've ever seen, in every symphony I've ever heard, in every perfume I've ever smelt. Your hair, your hair is like a field of silver daisies. I'd like to run barefoot through your hair. Lola, my dearest, your mouth is like a gardenia opening in the sun...Poor, tired little flower! You're just an orchid that dropped & bloomed in a swamp. I'm going to take you away from all that sham & cheapness. I'm going to transplant you. We'll be married, dear heart & go together to Utopia. Around the universe. To the moon. I'll put the ring of Saturn on your finger. We'll sleep on Venus & the Milky Way shall be our coverlet."  

-- Gifford Middleton (Frachot Tone) to Lola Burns (Harlow), while Machiavellian puppet-master "Space" Hanlon (Lee Tracy) looks on.