Film Noire

On one of my regular web reads a writer enthused something about American Idol. Apparently I was on Mars or some such place as that's where he thinks someone would have to be to be unaware of the Idol show. I dumped my TV years ago and I have never regretted it, and so I have never seen an episode of American Idol. Perfectly content in my innocence, I was blissfully ignorant that some sort of climactic event was due that night. From what I've heard about the program it should be called "American Idiot."
No, I wasn't on Mars. I was in 1947 in rapt wonderment at how good a movie could be. That was the year RKO released "Out of the Past," with a cast of stars who were in the early stages of their careers and last night I had the pleasure of viewing it for the first time. What a treat. This film has been consigned to the 'film noire' by the artsy fartsy intellectual class but at the time of its making it was just a low budget thriller intended to make money for the studio. All these films have lurid titles to draw in the rubes. That doesn't mean it was tossed off in a slovenly manner. Far from it. This is a work of art. It makes even the best movies of today look sick. Kirk Douglas played the crooked big shot who lived in a palatial residence overlooking Lake Tahoe and Robert Mitchum played Jeff Markham/Bailey, the private detective who had crossed him years ago and was now leading a quiet life as a gas station operator in a small town on the edge of the Sierras. In the opening scene his bucolic existence is disrupted when one of Douglas' thugs informs him that the boss wants to see him.
It's not necessary to adumbrate the typically byzantine plot complexities, which are delicious. I would simply like to rave over the quality and intelligence of the production. First of all, what wonderful acting. This film was made before Stanislawski ruined the American acting fraternity. Then acting was still a craft but how did they learn it? The characters in this film are not passive sufferers of life's iniquities. They are struggling and striving, they have complexities that are revealed under the pressure of the struggle. This is what drama is about. There are five death scenes in the movie but nowhere are we regaled with the gory details. It's not about blood, it's about right and wrong. and the sometimes fine line between the two. There are no sex scenes except one that was implied but sex played a central role in the subtext of the film, more particularly the relationship between sex, love, and power...in a word, passion. Sex is about the genitals, and sometimes I think nature has played a cruel joke on us by locating the organs of reproduction in the same place as the organs of elimination. Passion is not identical with sex but is concerned with it. In this film, the passion Kirk Douglas has for Jane Greer is more closely akin to the desire to own things. He himself seems rather sexless. But between her and Mitchum passion triggers sex, not the other way around. What moves her never becomes clear. Does she love Mitchum or is she just using him for some purpose that not even she knows? In many ways the film illustrates my dictum: women use sex to get power and men use power to get sex.
How is it possible to for a mere 97 minutes of film to evoke so many levels of meaning? I don't know but it's a trick that can only be accomplished by a team of pros at the top of its game, and I know that the product is what we mean by a work of art.
The other day I ran into a friend of mine who writes poetry for children. We stopped to talk in the entry of the Bay Centre and in the window of one of those hip fashion shops hung a poster of a young couple barely dressed. They were both dark and thin in the tired old James Dean manner. They looked feral, as if they were contemplating some gruesome crime they had just committed. Another poster showed a young blond girl dressed a little like Barbarella staring up into the sky. She was pretty but also had that feral look. They weren't at all sexy to my way of thinking but were obviously meant to be. My friend pointed to them and said to me, "It doesn't look like any of them has ever read a book, does it?" And I had to agree. As much as possible I try to avoid any contact with the celebrity culture all young people seem to admire but it's impossible to go through a checkout line without one's eyes lighting on the latest escapade of whoever it might be. Is there even the slightest hint of any intelligence at all behind all the slathered on make up? None that I can detect. And how can an unintelligent woman be attractive? Not to me. I will admit that Paris Hilton is pretty. She has a lost little girl look about her that no amount of degradation can seem to erase. But there is also a blankness in the eyes, a deadness, as if some essential human ingredient was left out when she was made, as if all the time spent in a vain alcohol- and drug-fueled search for self gratification left her with no time to really taste the wonder of life.
What a contrast with the beauties of 1947. Jane Greer, who I had never previously heard of, was the female star, the femme fatale. It was her Kirk Douglas sent Robert Mitchum to find. The trail led to Acapulco and a seedy bar where Robert Mitchum sat drinking a beer. Then one day she "walked in out of the sun," and immediately we see why Kirk Douglas wanted her back. My jaw goes slack, she is so beautiful. It's not her physical appearance that draws this response. It is a presence. There is the intensity of her eyes, the expressiveness of her mouth, which seem to endow her with some sort of ageless wisdom combined with innocence. She has a noticeable feral quality, too, but no. Feral means a domestic creature gone wild. She is just the opposite, a wild thing who hasn't been fully tamed. And every single scene reinforces those initial impressions. She has complexities. She has thought deeply about things. She knows herself, not in that phony self regarding way of modern celebrities, but because she looksat the world and herself with unblinking honesty. Rhonda Fleming is another beauty whose small part later on in the film shows an entirely different kind of beauty. Hers is more buxom and fecund, more fully sexual. And somehow she is able to convey the essence of her character to perfection.
None of this would work, of course, without a first class script, and I'm afraid writing like this is a lost art. Too bad.