Miller’s Crossing (1990)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Miller’s Crossing (1990) – J. Coen & E. Coen

I’m a fan of the hard-boiled school from way back. I’ve read and re-read Dashiell Hammett numerous times over the years and I reckon the Coen Brothers have too. Miller’s Crossing takes place in the same sort of lawless burg that Hammett’s Continental Op worked (worked both sides, that is, as in Red Harvest, 1929), although the film also distinctly resembles The Glass Key (1931) with its protagonist, Ned Beaumont, a hopeless gambler who does the thinking for a tough guy political boss. Here we have Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) working for boss Leo (Albert Finney) who makes the mistake of protecting grifter Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro) the brother of his love interest Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) who herself isn’t exactly pure as the driven snow. Unfortunately, another up-and-coming boss/gangster Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) wants Bernie’s head for butting in on a fixed fight. Caspar and his strongman Eddie the Dane (J. E. Freeman) think Tom can convince Leo to give up Bernie to avoid a gang war. But when Leo discovers Tom has been sleeping with Verna, this seems impossible. Tom changes over to Caspar’s side – or does he? Some of the crooked characters make a big deal about ethics but Tom isn’t one of them – he plays his cards close to his chest. In the end, the knots in the plot are tied pretty tightly and they seem impossible to unravel in your head after only one viewing – even watching this repeatedly years apart doesn’t necessarily lead to lucidity. But I can’t think of another film that has successfully captured the hardboiled ethos (and casual violence) of Hammett’s fiction on screen. The Coens (and cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld), with their notorious attention to detail (and eccentric anecdote), have pulled it off with panache.

Decision to Leave (2022)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Decision to Leave (2022) – C.-W. Park

Lovers of film noir (or neo-noir) may feel they’ve seen this film before (in English, if not Korean). There’s the straight-laced detective, Jang Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) not entirely satisfied with his married life (living apart except for the weekends; him in Busan, her in Ipo working at a nuclear power plant). There’s the suspect, Song Seo-Rae (Tang Wei), a Chinese immigrant who may or may not have killed her older Korean husband, who died in a suspicious climbing accident. When they’re thrown together, he finds himself losing his bearings. His other case suffers. She’s clearly attracted to him and him to her. His insomnia gives him the opportunity to stakeout her place and dictate notes to himself on his phone. She tails him too, on hand when he corners a suspect in his other case in a thrilling rooftop chase reminiscent of Vertigo. This isn’t the only allusion to Hitchcock, as the moody symphonic score also harkens back to the Master of Suspense, as does the dangerously obsessive love of the detective for a possibly untruthful woman. Director Park Chan-Wook expertly evokes the genre, luring us in, giving us the sense that we the audience are being played, just as Hae-joon may be. Yet, he’s playful, using creative camerawork and perfectly designed shots to heighten our pleasure, just as he does by guiding the plot through three well-punctuated acts, tantalising us with a build-up of clues and emotion-laden set-pieces that were bound to happen (a rainy visit to an abandoned temple is a highlight) with a recurring musical theme about being lost in the mist, the ideal metaphor. Only when we finally get a scene that does not take place from Hae-joon’s point-of-view do we get jarred out of our dream, scrambling to put the pieces together, wondering now whether we need to rethink all that’s come before. But Park Chan-Wook does not let us noir fans off easy, we can’t have the ending we expect, which sends thoughts spinning in a far more tragic direction. One for the cinephiles.

 

In a Lonely Place (1950)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

In a Lonely Place (1950) – N. Ray

Humphrey Bogart stars as deeply flawed screenwriter, Dixon Steele, who starts the film as a murder suspect after convincing a hat-check girl to come home with him to tell him the story of the novel he has agreed to translate to the screen, which she has read but he can’t be bothered to.  She turns up dead later, after leaving his bungalow. When the cops pick him up, he’s flip and disinterested. Luckily, his new next door neighbour Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) saw the girl leave Dix’s apartment and offers him an alibi.  Having been brought together in this way, Dix and Laurel fall in love – and she supports him as he gets down to the business of screenwriting, looking for his first hit in many years. But he’s a temperamental character with a quick fuse and Bogart knows how to turn off the charm, showing Dix’s neurotic, ugly, and bullying side. The police continue to treat him as a suspect and even Laurel starts to worry about him. Director Nicholas Ray manages this ambiguity beautifully, drawing out believably complex portrayals from Bogart and Grahame (Ray’s soon-to-be ex-wife) as their characters’ emotions become dysregulated, potentially due to the pressure of the police investigation on them. But deep down, the audience (and all the characters in the film) realises that there is something not right about Dix Steele – even if he didn’t murder the girl, he probably could have and maybe he might even have enjoyed it. Gray is probably right to be concerned. Yet we want things to work out for them, for love to triumph despite personal defects. Apparently, the original novel and screenplay ended very differently from the version that we see on the screen; both would have been dark noir conclusions but the deeply sad ending that we do get probably lingers longer and has more reverberating implications for real people then the crime that would have ended the picture. Instead, we’re left to contemplate people stuck “in a lonely place” and what factors, controllable or uncontrollable, have lead them there. A masterpiece.

 

Nightmare Alley (1947)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Nightmare Alley (1947) – E. Goulding

After watching Guillermo del Toro’s remake earlier this year, I decided to revisit Edmund Goulding’s original 1947 version for Noirvember. The surprising thing is just how quickly the film moves and how many ellipses there are in the plot relative to the newer version (which spells out everything rather emphatically). In some ways I feel a bit tainted by del Toro’s version which intruded on this viewing by unnecessarily filling in the gaps (although having read William Lindsay Gresham’s novel probably does the same)! Tyrone Power tried to change his swashbuckling image by portraying Stanton Carlisle who is only looking out for number one. We meet him after he is already working at the carnival, helping Zeena (Joan Blondell) with her mind-reading act and covering for her drunk husband, Pete. Soon, circumstances allow Stan to take over the act, with Bruno the strong man’s partner Molly (Colleen Gray) in tow, using the special code that allows them to communicate from the audience even as Stan is blindfolded. They move their show to fancy nightclubs and attract a much wealthier clientele, including psychiatrist Lillian Ritter (Helen Walker). When Stan discovers that Ritter has been keeping records of her rich patients’ personal secrets, he hatches another plan to bilk them out of their money as a spiritualist. But this being film noir, Carlisle’s hubris eventually brings him down. But how low can he go? The plot takes us full circle back to the carnival. And here things differ again from the remake which was able to end in a much darker spot then the original (which was forced to tack on an unlikely but hollow “happy” ending).  If looked at as a parable about human ambition, or the American dream even, Nightmare Alley is very bleak indeed, positing a world where there are suckers and those who don’t give them an even break. But if everyone is trying to rip everyone else off, it’s only a matter of time before even the swindlers find themselves down and out again.

 

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) – D. Kwan & D. Scheinert

Whoa! I heard the buzz (plus who can go past Michelle Yeoh in a starring role?), so I checked this out (of the library). Starting with the quotidian scenario of a small business owner, Evelyn Wang (Yeoh), doing her taxes (for IRS agent Jamie Lee Curtis), but quickly becoming ridiculous (sublimely ridiculous or ridiculously sublime) when her heretofore meek husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan, previously famous in The Goonies & Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) begins channelling an action hero from another universe (one of the many universes created whenever we make a choice). Soon, Evelyn herself learns to “verse jump”, finding versions of herself in parallel universes across the meta-verse that she can draw on for different strengths (including kung fu skills). It seems that she must do battle with another verse-jumping master, Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu), in order to save the uni-meta-verse as we know it (or don’t know it). Taking cues or paying homage to The Matrix (with its slo-mo or sped up fight scenes) as well as Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (!!!) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (!!!!), the film soon spins from ridiculous to downright insane. Directorial team Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert) don’t hold back and admittedly it might all get a bit much. But at its heart, this is also a family drama about a stressed-out immigrant woman’s relationships with her strict Chinese father (James Wong, now 90+ and in his 8^th decade of film roles), her alienated Americanised daughter (Hsu), and her neglected husband (Quan), not to mention the IRS. Yeoh is amazeballs in the lead role. The film careens from sentimental heart-string pulling (which moved me) to philosophical explorations of the meaning (or lack of meaning) of life to full-strength action, all with a giant dose of absurdity (hot-dog fingers?) and blink-and-you-miss-em jokes and references.  In the end, black bagels are pitted against white googly eyes. You’ll have to watch it to understand. It’s a trip.