CHAMPION (1949)

Champion is usually described as a cautionary tale about the bitter price of ruthless ambition. Rubbish. The character of Midge Kelly is heroic, admirable, and downright glorious. A rotten son of a bitch? Certainly. But I envy him, and you should too.

Champion airs from time to time on TCM and has been available on DVD for ages, so this essay assumes that you know the film. Besides, you just can’t dig into this thing without considering the ending — proceed knowing that spoilers await. For those who need a refresher, the story goes like this: Michael “Midge” Kelly (Kirk Douglas) and his brother Connie (Arthur Kennedy) are heading west in search of their fortune when they get rolled and are forced to thumb it. They cadge a ride from a palooka (John Day) on his way to fight a main event in Kansas City. Hoping to earn a quick buck, Midge takes a fill-in spot on the undercard. He’s beaten badly but catches the eye of manager Tommy Haley (that noir-iest of actors, Paul Stewart), who offers to Mickey him into a real fighter. When Midge and Connie reach Cali and discover their prospects vanished they are compelled to find scut work in a roadhouse. Both are attracted to a waitress, Emma (Ruth Roman), who Midge is forced to marry in the wake of a tryst. Feeling trapped, Midge eighty-sixes Emma and scrams for L.A., where he takes Haley up on his offer. Midge’s toughness and ambition make him a natural in the ring, and soon he rates a bout with number one contender Johnny Dunne, the same cat who taxied him into Kansas City. Midge is ordered to take a dive in trade for a legit title shot down the line, but he stuns everyone when he batters an unsuspecting Dunne. Although irate gamblers get their revenge, Midge’s refusal to cheat makes him appear heroic and he gets a title shot anyway, which he wins. Now standing on top of the heap, Midge alienates everyone around him. When he gives Dunne a rematch, he takes a terrific beating — until the jeering crowd and the ringside announcers spur him to final victory. Staggered, leering, and triumphant, Midge returns to his dressing room where he collapses and dies.


Everyone involved scores points for making a great picture about an asshole, but Kirk Douglas deserves the lion’s share of the credit. His Midge Kelly is one the most interesting and complicated boxers in screen history, which is a significant accomplishment considering how droll the character likely would have been in the hands (gloves?) of a lesser talent. Champion was a landmark early Douglas landmark film and justly earned him an Academy Award nomination. Most of what has been written about the movie praises his virtuoso performance or affirms the film’s status as a morality tale. While Douglas is indeed the stuff of legend, the “What Price Fame?” angle just doesn’t wash. Champion is a coldly cynical movie about a hard-as-nails tough guy; made during an era when all the little kids didn’t get a trophy. If it were merely a cautionary tale it would have ended differently: with Midge dead and defeated in the center of the ring. Redemption? No, thanks. An apology tour? Piss off. Midge Kelly isn’t redeemed at the end of Champion — he’s validated. Let’s come back to this later, first Douglas deserves his due.

Kirk Douglas was a great performer who, if nothing else, understood what made him a movie star. He was blessed and cursed with a hyper-magnetic screen presence. Everything about him was just...exaggerated. No actress could wrest the spotlight from him, which is why he isn’t remembered as one of the great romantic leads. Don’t buy it? Next time you watch him in a love scene and things start to heat up, take note of who grabs your attention. It’ll be Douglas. That was his great gift: he was bigger than the story, bigger than his cast, bigger than his directors. His innate arrogance was his greatest asset. He’s cast perfectly here. 

Let’s get back to Midge. Here’s a Depression-era kid who came up tough. His father took a powder in the first round of Midge’s life. And his mother, unable to keep both her sons, sent Midge to the orphanage and kept Connie at home. Midge grew up abandoned and institutionalized, on the losing end of a low-rent Sophie’s choice. Then with adulthood came the war and the bloody hell of combat. This is a guy who’d been rolled, robbed, cheated, chastised, red-taped, taken for granted, swindled, and sent to war. How would you handle it? After Midge mustered out he took on the thankless role of provider for his mother and little brother, and bore no grudge. Sure, he stepped on people along the way, but didn’t he get stepped on first? In spite of it all, he’s probably the most upbeat character in the film. He raised himself out of a hellish upbringing through his own grit to become the champion of the world. All he wanted out of life was the respect of other men offered by success in the ring. Boxing exacts a steep price in exchange for that success, and Midge saw clearer more plainly those around him that he’d ultimately have to pay it. If success left Midge feeling entitled yet emotionally crippled, who can blame him? 

Who does he hurt? The story places Midge in the arms of three different women. First with Emma, the wife/waitress whom he deserts. Of the film’s women, she’s the most deserving of happiness, which she ultimately finds with Connie. Although she married Midge, she understood going in that he didn’t love her. Their mistake causes her much short-term distress, but it was through him that she met Connie and eventually found what she was looking for.* Midge’s second tryst was with the aptly named Grace Diamond (Marilyn Maxwell), a good-timer who treats fighters like Kleenex. She’s an opportunistic user who meets her match. The idea that Midge could hurt someone so despicable is silly. His final girlfriend is Palmer Harris (Lola Maxwell), the spoiled and slumming wife of the crooked fight promoter. Their affair is brief, and ends when Midge agrees to cut ties in exchange for a bigger percentage of the gate. Undoubtedly a cold-blooded choice, but it bears repeating Midge has no idea how to make himself or anyone else happy, especially not a married woman. Midge is a pig, but he never tries to hide it. All the women in the story are well rid of him, but none suffer lasting harm.


That leaves the brother and the trainer. Connie is supposedly the sympathetic conscience of the film, constantly exasperated with his brother, yet he seems to have forgotten who pays the bills—and, for that matter, who grew up in the orphanage. Hell, Connie even gets the girl; what does he have to grouse about? As for the trainer, Haley is the only guy in the picture who knows the score all along. In quintessential noir fashion, he knows that he’ll be dropped him when the bigger purses come, yet he returns to train Midge for his climactic title fight anyway. As he repeats time and again, “I can’t keep away from it, I like to watch a good boy in action.” The idea of a fighter leaving one trainer for another happens as often on screen as it does in real life, a cliché in both worlds. It’s important to realize that Champion is a noir film in which none of the characters come away clean. Dig this most of all: when Midge finally lands that first big fight with Johnny Dunne, both Connie and Tommy want him to take the dive—they want him to cheat. 

If the movie has a flaw it’s that it doesn’t fully depict the grueling physical realities of the prizefighter’s life. The ring scenes (directed by Stanley Kramer rather than Mark Robson, who Kramer said didn’t know enough about boxing) are exquisite, but the narrative’s preoccupation with fight-fixing doesn’t afford any screen time to the everyday sacrifices made by fighters. Midge stacks knockouts way too fast and scores a title shot in no time at all, while in reality the achievement of a world’s championship, or even a spot on the undercard of a championship bout, was a pipe dream for most pugs. The film does include a Rocky-style training sequence, though nowadays it plays for laffs. 

Douglas is miraculous in his final scene. Bloody and victorious, having returned to his dressing room after ferociously pummeling Dunne, he leers and gesticulates at the camera, his battered face a desperate reflection of his maimed but resilient soul. Midge’s life comes full circle with his defeat of the man who opened the door to a life in the ring—a dichotomous life that offered not only the illusory pleasures of fame, fortune, and women; but more importantly, the respect and legacy he craved. Cinematic convention keeps us expecting that he’ll see the light and turn an improbable Ebenezer Scrooge-like corner at the end, yet he never does. Midge’s refusal to compromise or live on anything but his own terms is a worthy valediction. It imbues his life with a strange and moving integrity. It also makes him an iconic hero of film noir. It’s fitting that he should die after he wins the final fight; he has nothing in the world left to prove. Some men are not meant to suffer old age.

Champion (1949)

Director: Mark Robson.

Cinematographer: Franz Planer
Screenplay: Carl Foreman, based on a story by Ring Lardner.
Starring: Kirk Douglas, Arthur Kennedy, Marilyn Maxwell, Ruth Roman, and Paul Stewart.
Released by: United Artists
Running time: 99 minutes

* (Some viewers/reviewers of Champion suggest that Midge rapes Emma late in the film. For the record, after numerous viewings I still don’t read the code in that way, but I’d certainly change my tune (and, of course, my review) if someone were to convince me. This essay is something of a justification Midge’s bad behavior, but certainly not for rape. 

THE CLAY PIGEON (1949)

I tend to celebrate B movies here, and I’m seldom as critical as I could be. But even I have to take my shots at The Clay Pigeon. 

Jim Fletcher (Bill Williams) wakes up in a military hospital with a blind man clawing at his throat his throat. A nurse intervenes, but rather than offering comfort she calls Jim traitor. He soon learns that he’s accused of ratting his fellow POWs out to the Japanese, who then tortured and executed them. After Jim’s convalescence, he’ll face a treason charges. The only problem is that he can’t remember whether he did it or not — he has amnesia! Hoping to somehow recover his lost memories and clear his name, Jim (inexplicably unguarded) escapes the hospital and flees for San Diego — remembering that his best friend from the Navy, Mark Gregory, lives there with his wife Martha (Barbara Hale). Martha is charming as she ushers Jim inside, but when she excuses herself to make coffee Jim notices the headline on her newspaper: “James Fletcher, Seaman First Class, Wanted for Treason! Blamed for Torture Killing of Mark Gregory” Holy Smokes! Jim rushes into the kitchen to explain, and finds Martha frantically attempting to dial 1119. (See what I did there?) They fight! Martha scrapes and claws like a wildcat, but Jim subdues her. He then uses her phone to contact another buddy from the POW camp, Ted Niles, who agrees to help. Dragging a trussed-up Martha along for the ride, Jim takes her Plymouth and makes for the City of Angels. (Now folks, if the baby-faced Jim was actually guilty, this wouldn’t be called The Clay Pigeon, so once Ted gets involved it becomes pretty clear who the real culprit is. If nothing else, this is a movie that just can’t keep a secret.) At any rate, Jim drives; Martha stews. Then, in one of B filmdom’s most mind-boggling leaps in logic, somewhere along the road, and in spite of her being a kidnap victim, Martha accepts Jim’s protestations of innocence and decides, in light of any evidence in his favor, that he can’t be responsible for her husband’s death. For the rest of the hour (this is a short one), she makes like his girl Friday (Hale neatly anticipating her career-defining role as Perry Mason’s Della Street). And in no time at all, everything works out in their favor.

Really?

Richard Fleischer directed The Clay Pigeon for newly minted RKO chief Howard Hughes. Fleischer knew his business (three words: The Narrow Margin), so the direction is up to scratch. This moves quickly and with purpose, the pacing and staging are fine, the acting is competent, it has several stylish scenes (including a nice on location cat and mouse sequence through L.A.’s Chinatown) and more than enough tension in the final reel (especially impressive when the denouement is a no-brainer). The problems here have to do with the script, with the limitations of the running time, and most importantly, with the film’s failure to live up to the responsibility of its premise.

But in terms of competent storytelling The Clay Pigeon is a misfire. Worse than that, it must have been terribly insulting to a large segment of its 1949 audience. Look no further than Martha’s change of heart. Here’s a woman who lost her husband to the war — and not even in combat. Mark was executed in a POW camp after being accused of stealing rations by a fellow American, his best friend. Now that bastard, a traitor on the front page of every paper, is at her front door — making a fool out of her and her husband’s memory. Martha’s fight with Jim is an eyebrow raiser: savage, believable, and utterly appropriate, but her inexplicable and abrupt change of heart mere moments later is the film’s great crime. It does a profound injustice to the postwar audience members who lost loved ones overseas and couldn’t move on quite so easily as Martha does. I don’t mean to suggest that there wasn’t a plausible way to get her on Jim’s side, but rather that the movie’s attempt is pathetic. Surely new testimony from a fellow prisoner who saw the newspaper, or even the early return of Jim’s lost memories might have convinced Martha of his innocence. Instead, she comes to believe in him even before he himself — don’t forget his amnesia — can recall exactly what happened. The next thing the audience knows, they’re shacked up in a beachfront cottage, swimming and cavorting a week away while Jim gets his head straight. It just doesn’t wash, and this is a movie — B or not — that owed an audience with fresh memories of cataclysm a little more respect.

There’s a oft-noted moment however, when it tries to make good, but I say it still comes up short. Earlier I mentioned the foot chase sequence through the (strangely deserted) streets of Chinatown (One of them, at least. Back then L.A. had three: Old Chinatown, New Chinatown, and China City). In the scene, Jim ducks into a building and shelters in the home of a Japanese American woman, who also happens to be a war widow. She covers for Jim when the hoods barge in, and we soon discover that her dead husband earned the DSC as a member of the legendary Japanese-American 442^nd Infantry Regiment. The script expects us to take for granted that she’s too simple to read the newspaper, because although she easily intuits that Jim’s pursuers aren’t the policemen that they claim to be, she’s inexplicably unaware that the man in her back room is the most wanted fugitive in the southland.

Certainly the scene pays homage to the Japanese Americans who fought for their country, an important balancing act given that one of the movie’s villains is the POW camp guard, Tokoyama (Richard Loo), who murdered Martha’s husband and is now hanging around chop suey joints in Chinatown. This all raises an important question: What in the world would a fugitive Japanese war criminal, or even a Japanese American widow, be doing in Chinatown? Weren’t the Japanese responsible for the murder of nearly 6,000,000 Chinese citizens throughout the course of the war?¹ Believe me folks, I dug into this as deeply as I could and all indications are that those of Japanese descent steered clear of Chinese neighborhoods in the months and years after the war. It’s unfathomable to me how The Clay Pigeon postulates that anyone and everyone of Asian descent would make themselves at home in Chinatown.

War is terrible, and some people do horrible things to get through it. In the end, the most troubling aspect of The Clay Pigeon is its failure to grapple with this — treason here is just another plot device, an excuse for Jim Fletcher to run. His amnesia only serves to keep us in the dark for a brief time while the movie builds some steam — until, just like Martha, we get to know him well enough to understand that such a nice, clean-cut boy couldn’t possibly have betrayed his pals. (Go ahead Martha, why not just forget about your dead husband and marry the guy?) Well, in Act of Violence, Van Heflin’s clean-cut Frank Enley doesn’t have the luxury of amnesia. Enley actually committed the crimes that Jim Fletcher is accused of, and he has to live with himself. Act of Violence dwells long and hard on Enley’s guilt — and builds forcefully towards his desperate final act of contrition. There’s a reason why it’s a minor classic and The Clay Pigeon is merely a cardboard exercise “in what happens next?” moviemaking.

What does happen next? They get married, of course.

The Clay Pigeon (1949)

RKO Radio Pictures

Directed by Richard Fleischer

Produced by Herman Schlom

Written by Carl Foreman

Cinematography by Robert De Grasse

Starring Bill Williams and Barbara Hale

Running Time: 63 minutes

¹ http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM

CHINATOWN AT MIDNIGHT (1949)

“You’re a very paradoxical young man.”

Shops closing early! There’s a killer thief on the loose in the Chinatown section of San Francisco, and the cops are hot on his trail. That’s a bare bones plot description if ever there was one, yet it jibes well with Chinatown at Midnight — a rabbit punch of a movie that cashes in on the success of He Walked by Night, the granddaddy of film noir cop procedurals, released to theaters just a year before. It’s a fast paced little movie with just a few cheap sets and scenes glued together by plenty of voice-of-god narration. But it also boasts some solid basic filmmaking; looking good in spite of its meager budget, with some striking photography and a few flashy sequences that belie its doghouse budget. The film is ruined by its sloppy, often nonsensical script, though to its credit it manages to dodge the expected racial stereotypes.

The man on the lam is Clifford Ward, played by Hurd Hatfield, who had a modest acting career after making a big splash as the title character in 1945’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Hatfield seems a little too urbane to be credible as the unbalanced heist man-cum-killer in this film, but the movie does its best to justify his casting by spinning the murderer as a multi-lingual dandy whose bachelor pad landlady raves about his “excellent taste for a young man.” Hatfield’s Clifford is in cahoots with an upscale interior decorator Lisa Marcel (Jacqueline DeWit). She locates expensive pieces in expensive shops; then he shows up at closing time and knocks the places over. Maybe he loves the older woman, maybe he doesn’t — who knows the angles? She doesn’t make eyes at him and she doesn’t pay him off either. We never get the dope on their relationship. Maybe Clifford just likes to takes risks — he certainly has no qualms about killing. Just after we meet him, he visits a curio shop in Chinatown and guns down the young clerk; when the girl in the back room tries to call the cops he blasts her too. In a veer from the expected, Clifford actually picks up the receiver and completes her phone call: “come quick, there’s been a robbery and shooting!” The zinger is that his frantic exchange with the switchboard operator is in fluent Chinese.

So that’s why we get Hurd Hatfield instead of a tough monkey like Charles McGraw or Mark Stevens. Our boy is able to call in his crime with a Cantonese dialect, convincing the cops that their quarry must be Chinese. From that moment onward Chinatown at Midnight is a cat-and-mouse game between Clifford and San Francisco’s finest, led by the pugnacious Captain Brown, played by iconic film noir actor Tom Powers. (His name might not be that familiar, but Powers probably appeared in a million crime films — often as a cop — though he got his bust in the noir hall of fame for playing the ill-fated Mr. Dietrichson in the big one, Double Indemnity.) The procedural aspects of Chinatown at Midnight are handled with care, showing viewers a few of the clever ruses used by the police to ferret out a suspect — the best is when a clever matron poses as a census taker in order to search the flophouses and tenements. The film is divided roughly in half between Clifford’s occasionally witty escapes and the semi-doc cop stuff, but the thing never really gets off the ground until the final reel, when Clifford starts to knuckle under from a nagging case of malaria and the ever-tightening dragnet. He finally takes to the rooftops, automatic in hand, for an exciting showdown with the buys in blue — pity our boy Clifford: they've got Tommy guns.

This is a fairly competent and successful effort for all involved, except the hack screenwriters. The worst moment in the story has to be the most eyeball-rolling example of shoddy police work in the entire canon of B movies — one that altogether sums up the visual strengths and the narrative weaknesses of the film: there’s a sequence in the middle that places Clifford within arm’s reach of justice. Having just killed again to keep the law at bay, he is forced to hide in a darkened room after his shots draw the police. What follows is exciting stuff, well-edited, strikingly filmed, and very tense — culminating in a pitch black exchange of gunfire that brings to mind Henry Morgan’s big moment in Red Light. It’s an exhilarating scene, the sort of thing that draws us all to film noir. Yet after Clifford makes a break for it, shedding his jacket, tie, and .38 revolver in a back alley garbage bin, he attempts to hide by shuffling into a queue of four or five down-and-outers waiting in a bread line. When the dicks come huffing and puffing around the corner a breath or two later, they just give up — tossing their hands into the air without so much as a look around, completely giving up, but not before adding for our sake, “Funny, he didn’t look Chinese to me!” Too bad for them that their rabbit is five feet away, and all they have to do is brace the hobos in order to put Clifford in the little green room at Quentin. They can’t even manage a pathetic “which way did he go?”

Photographed by prolific journeyman Henry Freulich, clearly influenced by John Alton, Chinatown at Midnight is heavily steeped in the noir visual style. The cardboard sets and low rent cast are more emblematic of a poverty row effort than a second-feature from a little major like Columbia, but the studio’s B-roll exteriors of various San Francisco locales almost pull off the illusion of an on-location shoot, and further separate it from Poverty Row. The acting here is merely passable and the script is a bloody shame, but Freulich and director Seymour Friedman give the finished film has a strong visual identity, even if everything else is from hunger.

Chinatown at Midnight (1949)

Directed by Seymour Friedman

Produced by Sam Katzman

Written by Robert Libbott and Frank Burt

Cinematography by Henry Freulich

Art Direction by Paul Palmentola

Starring Hurd Hatfield, Jacqueline DeWit, and Tom Powers

Distributed by Columbia Pictures

Running time 67 minutes.

MANHANDLED (1949)

“Play it smart like I said.” 

“You’re not talking to a cluck Charlie. You’re talking to a guy who knows all the angles.”


The titles roll against a rain-smeared window, the night pushing hard against the glass. Inside, a man sits in a well-appointed chair. We see him only from the knees down; pajamas and slippers: posh. One hand hangs limp, trapping a cigarette burnt down to his knuckles. This is no stiff — dead men don’t smoke — he’s waiting up. The apartment door opens and couple enters. Again, only their legs. They exchange a hushed goodnight, a lover’s goodnight, and then she slinks upstairs while the man in the chair stirs, shredding the cigarette in his shaking hands. She settles at her vanity, admires herself in the mirror — finally we see a face. She’s a doll: all done up and covered in jewels — but no rock on her finger. The sleeper appears in the mirror behind her — dig the flowery pattern on his robe: silly, weak, feminine. He’s a cuckold, a patsy — though an unwilling one. He calls her a roundheels and threatens to kill her. She scoffs. He grabs a heavy perfume bottle and goes to work, his free arm wrenching her up from the chair. A few fevered moments later her lifeless body slumps to the floor, and the camera pans up to his sweaty, overwrought face. The scene melts away, only to reappear in a luxurious, wood paneled office. We see our killer, one hand clasped to his forehead, a bourbon rattling in the other, explaining to his shrink that the whole thing was just a bad dream…


That’s how you open a noir picture. Dark, tense, stylish — and with a murder. The title, Manhandled, shouts hard-boiled, and the poster is a gem: Dan Duryea dangles a flailing Dorothy Lamour from a rooftop, threatening to plunge her into the shadowy alley below, as the flatfoots look up from fire escape. Audiences should have been greedy with expectation when they took their seats in May of 1949, especially after such a tantalizing opening. The problem with Manhandled is that after those great first moments it goes steadily downhill, its grip slackening away to almost nothing. Its lasting impression is of a rote exercise in factory B moviemaking, offering audiences little more than an overly complicated and formulaic story of red herrings and diamond-encrusted MacGuffins — a parlor mystery two-decades old dusted off and resuscitated for the world of film noir. It’s too bad; this is a picture that had a ton of promise and a pair of bang-up actors.


The cast here is conspicuous, but let’s not put the cart before the horse. The story is far too convoluted to waste much time on, but some rudimentary description is apropos. The bluebeard wannabe is Alton Bennet (Alan Napier), an over-the-hill writer used to the high life, though he no longer rates even a modest advance from his publisher. His wife Ruth (Irene Hervey) is of the trophy variety, younger than her husband by two decades, and clearly won when his books were stacked high in the window facing the sidewalk rather than the bargain bin. She owns her jewelry free and clear, and the insurance policy on the stuff now shines a great deal more brightly than Bennet’s literary star. He’s been imagining her murder in his dreams and decides to tell his shrink Dr. Redman (Harold Vermilyea). In the dark about the Dictaphone and doctor-patient privilege, Redman employs transcriptionist Merl Kramer (Dorothy Lamour) to take down every word his patients say. Merl is newly arrived from the west coast. We never learn why, but she’s alone in New York after leaving her baby girl back home with granny. She’s friendly with Karl Benson (Dan Duryea), a low-life private detective who keeps a shabby office on the floor below her. He gets paid sticking a camera through bedroom windows — and over dinner Merl spills the beans to him about Bennet’s dream.


Across town, Dr. Redman invites Ruth Bennet to his office and warns her about her husband's dreams. Her oily boyfriend Guy (Philip Reed) is on his leash right behind her, and he too gets wise, bringing the number of legitimate suspects in her eventual killing to five! Ruth is finally murdered that evening, and while Benson somehow gets his hands on the jewelry, he appears genuinely surprised when his fence tells him there’s a murder rap hanging over the loot. Did Bennet confide in Dr. Redman simply to create an alibi for himself? Or did one of the many possible suspects who heard about the dream decide to take advantage in order to make a big score? 


The following morning dawns at the murder scene, cops swarming around like bees in a hive. Police lieutenant Dawson (Art Smith) and insurance man Joe Cooper (Sterling Hayden) jockey for control of the situation. The rest of Manhandled is concerned with plot — the focus shifting from suspect to suspect, as Dawson and Cooper bicker over the best way to get to the bottom of things. There are twists, turns, double-crosses, and a little romance (all more tedious than it sounds) as we gradually discover the truth. It all leads up to the climactic moment depicted on the poster — the one with Merl on the brink of doom and clawing at Benson for dear life. 


Let’s get back to the cast. Dorothy Lamour’s name is not usually associated with noir — other than a part in 1940’s Johnny Apollo this was it for her. At 35 she was at the tail end of her film career. Following Manhandled audiences wouldn’t see her again for three years, when she was featured in a pair of 1952 films: the notorious Best Picture winner The Greatest Show on Earth and The Road to Bali, one last tired fling with Bob and Bing. Her only other good part came a decade later in 1963’s Donovan’s Reef. Everyone except Duryea is mediocre in Manhandled — though Lamour is the only performer miscast. Outside of her comfort zone and unable to rely on her lovely figure, her singing voice, or her talent for comedy she gets lost, leaving audiences wondering if her casting was solely for marquee value. In that last dramatic scene on the roof she gets the chance to really act — and falls short. Her mouth moves and she spits out the words, but the rest of her face remains dead, especially her eyes. She just wasn’t cut out for material like this. 


If only there were more to say about Sterling Hayden, but in just his fifth film he’s ill-used and frankly, extraneous. He doesn’t surface until more than thirty minutes in, and then he barely registers. One of the lasting lessons of film noir is that a lone, relentless police officer is much more captivating than a gaggle of bickering cops, but the latter is what Manhandled offers. This would be a markedly better film if either Art Smith or Hayden had been written out of the script — preferably Smith, apparently brought in to inject some comedy into the film, each instance of which is just miserable. Manhandled’s few comedic moments, mostly involving a prowl car with no brakes, represent the most oft-cited reason for its failure to score as a significant noir. At any rate, Hayden was on the cusp: his next job would be The Asphalt Jungle, which would cement his big-time screen persona. He’s unsure of himself in Manhandled, giving us a character that is unkempt and upbeat, similar to the newspapermen played by guys like Ronald Reagan earlier in the decade. If a rewrite had strengthened his part while eliminating Smith’s, this thing may have really taken off. Anyone who doubts the ability of the director to draw out a performer should watch Hayden in a double-bill of Manhandled and The Asphalt Jungle. The growth from one picture to the next is stunning.  


Dan Duryea’s jovial, immoral scumbag is Manhandled’s saving grace. His presence goes a long way to keeping viewers invested when the going gets tough. One moment in particular is absolutely phenomenal, and is as powerfully noirish — albeit subtly — as you’ll find anywhere: Karl Benson has just learned of Bennet’s dream, and he stretches out in his office, lost in thought. The sounds of the city creep in through an open window: a woman’s laughter, a car horn. Reclined with one arm behind his pillow, Benson’s head lolls toward the window as he mutters an annoyed “Shaddup,” and “Quiet” to no one in particular. Restlessly chewing a mouthful of gum, his eyes never leave the cheap table at the foot of his Murphy bed, where a pet hamster churns determinedly in the exercise wheel of its cage — around and around, running either away from fate or towards destiny — but really going nowhere at all. It’s a superlative moment in an otherwise ordinary picture, the kind of bit that catches you off guard and reminds you why even low-rent B movies can sometimes take your breath away — thanks to Duryea.


Manhandled could have really been something — maybe even important — had it been executed properly, but for whatever reason things just didn’t work out that way. So many different planets have to align for a picture to come out well it’s impressive that it ever happens at all, regardless of the talent involved. None of Lewis Foster’s 60+ films as a director are significant, though this is the same man who nabbed a screenplay Oscar for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He wrote Manhandled as well, so it begs the question of where in the monumental process of movie-making this came to fall so short of its potential. At best, Manhandled is an uneven yet mildly entertaining film, boasting a decent cast and a few wonderfully evocative moments (including a fantastic man-versus-car chase scene that haven’t the time to get into — the poster hints at it) in a production otherwise lacking a well-constructed noir milieu. In spite of being a “night” movie, it is neither dark nor oppressive, with no pervasive sense of the determinism that characterizes good film noir. Its story is unnecessarily complicated, causing it to feel long at only 97 minutes. It has a good score that often feels clumsy, and photography that vacillates between careful and careless. By the time the thing ends and the killer is unmasked, we struggle not to point a guilty finger at the filmmakers. 


Manhandled (1949)

Directed by Lewis R. Foster
Produced by William H. Pine and William C. Thomas
Written by Lewis R. Foster and Whitman Chambers, based on the novel The Man Who Stole A Dream by L.S. Goldsmith. 
Starring Dan Duryea, Dorothy Lamour, and Sterling Hayden. 
Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo
Art Direction by Lewis H. Creber
Released by Paramount Pictures
Running Time 97 Minutes

BITTER RICE (Riso Amaro) 1949

Giuseppe De Santis’s 1949 film Bitter Rice (Riso Amaro) is powerful, exciting stuff. It’s a bewildering, multi-layered, and voyeuristic experience that borrows from so many different film styles, particularly American film noir, that it defies categorization. While it’s usually easy to red-flag films with multiple writers, this is a rare example where too many cooks did not spoil the broth: Bitter Rice credits a whopping eight different writers, and while this may account for the film’s slight case of schizophrenia, it nevertheless netted an Academy Award nomination for Best Story—and with or without accolades it’s still one hell of a movie. It also features a gloriously charismatic new actress who electrifies the film. There’s so much, on so many different levels, in Bitter Rice worth talking about that description becomes frustrating merely for the lack of a good starting place! One certainty is that this is a movie better seen than read about; so if it weren’t nearly impossible to find a copy I’d happily advise all to stop reading and just go watch.

On a water-cooler level Bitter Rice could be described as a romantic crime piece with undercurrents of Greek fatalism, and that if it has a flaw it’s an admirably pedestrian one: it tries too hard. Instead of the typical boy / girl story we get two of each, comprising a complex romantic quadrangle. Introductions are in order: Walter (Vittorio Gassman) is a thug and petty thief, as greasy as he is good-looking. His squeeze and sometimes-accomplice is Francesca (American actress Doris Dowling), a pretty but bitter thing who could be Ann Savage’s sister. Italian stud Raf Vallone is Marco, a cynical veteran about to drum out of the army after a decade’s service. Finally, there’s Silvana, Bitter Rice’s ball of fire. In the late forties former beauty queen Silvana Mangano made the easy transition to film; this is the picture that made her a minor international sensation. Walter Winchell offered the understatement of the decade when he said, “Silvana Mangano is sexier than both Mae West and Jane Russell.” Winchell didn’t climb very far out on a limb, but his point is well taken; even with her unshaven arms (critics, of course, described her as “earthy”), Mangano has a positively spectacular presence: it’s nearly impossible to take your eyes off her—she simply owns the screen. She keeps her real first name intact here: the character Silvana is an “earthy”(!) peasant girl, one fully aware of her own sexuality and the powerful affect she has on men and women alike.



The character types in Bitter Rice offer its most intentional parallel to film noir, though as we’ll see later the movie channels the style in additional ways. Each of the four represent a noir archetype, though filtered through the prism of a different culture, and more importantly, a culture not dead set on aping American movies. Walter is the stiletto-wielding thug, a schemer always looking out for his next big score. Francesca is an old-fashioned moll, smarter than she lets on but devoted to Walter simply because she has nowhere else to go. (Doris Dowling has a lot more cheek than Keechie, and Gassman is quite a few shades more nefarious than Bowie, but if this were an American product it’s very easy to imagine another Cathy O’Donnell and Farley Granger screen pairing.) Marco looks most familiar to us: the jaded, world-weary combat veteran — but unlike his counterparts from American movies he’s not the main character. In fact, of the four leads, Marco is the least important. This is unmistakably a women’s picture, and Silvana is the femme fatale. The universe of Bitter Rice has at its center this incredible eighteen-year-old — in two key scenes she simply dances what she calls the “boogie-woogie” while a crowd of onlookers cheer her every move; the filmmakers take pause as well, allowing viewers to simply bask in her. It’s the sort of raw moment that could never happen in a studio picture, unless somehow Margarita Cansino had magically been allowed to stand in for Rita Hayworth.

The story itself is novel, though it kicks off (and closes) by putting a fresh spin on the noir trope of voiceover narration. Opening to a black screen and a disembodied voice, in pure semi-documentary style, we are told that although few outsiders know it, rice is grown in the northern part of Italy. Each May trains shuttle women from the south to work in the rice fields. It’s strictly women’s work too — male hands are too large, too clumsy, of no use. The pay isn’t much, but in a country still recovering from war any work is welcomed, and these women are happy to have it; there are plenty of those who would give their right arm for a chance to work the paddies. In time, the disembodied voice coalesces into a face, and we realize that the man speaking is, in fact, a radio announcer at the Rome station, doing a story on the women boarding the train for a season of wet toil under the hot sun of the Po Valley.

Meanwhile, Walter and Francesca are fleeing the cops with a stolen diamond necklace in hand, when they wind up at the train station among the hubbub of the departing workers. Walter slips the jewelry to Francesca and shoves her towards the train: she’s to lay low up north until the heat dies down. She meets Silvana just after boarding, and the pair form an tense friendship after Silvana discovers the secret necklace. Instead of turning her in, Silvana is fascinated enough by the streetwise older girl to help her secure a job alongside the other women. As the film carries us from Rome to the unending wetness of the rice paddies it takes on an entirely different tone. The men are momentarily forgotten as we enter a world that seems pulled directly from the social-realist propaganda posters of the Soviet Union. The large group of women bond through the (positive) experience of toil — hunched under the sun in headscarves and large straw hats — the affectionate Americanism of the film’s opening giving way to something far more in line with Marxism, and the universality of the film’s romantic melodramatics give way to the immediacy of neorealismo, of a singular time and a place.

Throughout the second act the characters of Francesca and Silvana continue to develop while the powerhouse visuals actually get stronger, forsaking gritty social realism for something that at times approaches artfully rendered heroic realism. One scene in particular finds the women carrying on a dramatic conversation through song, the only form of communication permitted while they work. The effect is at once vividly operatic and quite moving. Another expressionistic scene shows the terrible consequences that occur when the women are forced to weed the paddies during a torrential rainstorm. Both scenes blend sound and image in a visceral way that brings to mind the work of Terence Malick.

As Francesca and Silvana get to know each other better the bonds of their tenuous friendship are repeatedly tested, broken, and formed anew. This nature of this friendship provides the film’s most engrossing strand of dramatic tension — particularly when it is threatened by the competing burdens of the necklace and the girls’ romantic entanglements. As the story unfolds Francesca’s and Silvana’s personalities have a transformative affect on each other, and both come to covet what the other has. In Francesca’s case, work and camaraderie with the other woman have helped her grow up. She begins to appreciate the value of a day’s labor, while Silvana becomes something altogether more dangerous — her eyes opened to the possibility of an easier, sexier life with Walter and the necklace, far away from the rice.

Bitter Rice’s final act returns to the roots of its first, as Walter journeys north to brace Francesca and recover the necklace — though he comes bearing an important piece of information that will have a profound affect on the film’s denouement. By its final moments, it becomes practically indistinguishable from American noir. The romantic entanglements are reinvigorated by Walter’s presence, and he tries to manipulate each of the girls to his own ends while keeping Marco safely at bay. Walter dreams up a new scheme, and with the allure of the necklace and promises of love and a life together he convinces Silvana to help him — by betraying the community of rice workers. Before the end titles roll we’ll witness fisticuffs, a failed heist, a gun battle, and a symbolically gruesome four-way showdown amidst hanging beef carcasses in a cold meat locker — events all tragically shepherded by fate’s relentless determination to see justice done. In the end there is tragedy and there are victims, but not necessarily unforgivable ones.

One of the many reasons we are drawn to foreign film in general, and neo-realism in particular, is that such movies can offer a rejuvenating breather from the redundancy of Hollywood studio products and their comfortably predictable stories. Yet Bitter Rice utilizes a surprisingly familiar structure; anyone well versed in the studio-era film noir will identify the plot threads, and how, in pure Hollywood fashion, they ultimately weave together — allowing no character to escape the crushing judgment of fate or the mistakes of their past. And through this conscientious fusion of American idiosyncrasy and Italian style — whether employed as criticism of American values or not — we are met with a film experience that is both viscerally exciting and strangely familiar.



Bitter Rice (Riso Amaro) (1949)
Directed by Giuseppe De Santis
Produced by Dino De Laurentiis
Written by Corrado Alvaro, Giuseppe De Santis, Carlo Lizzani, Franco Monicelli, Mario Monicelli, Carlo Musso, Ivo Perilli, Gianni Puccini. (Holy smokes!)
Cinematography by Otello Martelli
Starring Vittori0 Gassman, Doris Dowling, Silvana Mangano and Raf Vallone
Released by Lux Film
Running time: 108 minutes


8/17