Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Ah, double rates for women, indeed! Claude (Vince Edwards) is a swaggering contract killer who is hired to take out a target, but it isn't a hulky man like he's used to; it's not the kind he can envision like an old enemy of war, this time he's hired to kill a woman. Don't let her slight figure and delicate piano playing fool you, the lady's got a mouth like a sailor, terrorizing her police escorts and body guards with degrading tongue lashings. She's one of a handful of women scripted in the story, and it is no wonder she strikes fear in his heart, she's the only one of them with authority and voice. If we are to draw noir characteristics into the analysis of Murder, pianist Billie Williams (Caprice Toriel) is clearly Claude's femme fatale. He brustles past his two male counterpart, veritable babysitters employed to keep Claude on schedule and at ease, hence outings to the beach and to other Los Angeles attractions. On a one-week deadline to complete his mission Claude relaxes most of his days away until it is finally revealed to him that Billie isn't a man. With only two days left he hastily demands $10,000 to complete the job (up from his original fee of $500, I believe); the rate is guaranteed to him without any mention of why his stock suddenly soars so high in the murder market. The poster illustrates just how close Claude comes to his target, and he fails out of unspoken insecurities with women in general. It might have been the singularly oddest post-war picture of maladjusted men, and is clearly a part of an anxiety-riddled theme in Lerner's other films from the 1950s, none of which I have seen, but whose titles speak volumes: Suicide Attack (1951), Man Crazy (1953), Edge of Fury (1958), and City of Fear (1959).Wednesday, November 28, 2007
If Hawks' Red River (1948) is homoerotic, The Big Sky is a confident acceptance of male companionship. Kirk Douglas and his much lesser-known co-star Dewey Martin play two comfortable companions on a fur trade expedition up the Missouri River with "Uncle Zeb" (Arthur Hunnicutt), another amiable character who is employed as the film's gentle voiceover narrator. When the story opens with Boone (Dewey Martin) knocking the lights out of Jim (Kirk Douglas) for no apparent reason, we think the movie will be demoted to a series of macho fights that declare superiority. To the contrary, Douglas's character is too calm mannered to care; he really is a guy resigned to the unwieldy western terrain, but he's rather thoughtfully at peace with that fact. And so, with the typical alpha-male tensions dissolved there's room for the characters to live and breathe together, and they are (as the introductory speaker mentioned; not Rosenbaum, who was out of town at a film festival) quite at ease in one another's company. The voiceover narration by Hunnicutt, in his unpretentious and wise country tone, frames the film with a sense of loyalty and male sentimentality rarely seen in a western.
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