Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s installment of A Movie A Day.
[For those now joining us, A Movie A Day is my attempt at filling in gaps in my film knowledge. My DVD collection is thousands strong, many of them films I haven’t seen yet, but picked up as I scoured used DVD stores. Each day I’ll pull a previously unseen film from my collection and discuss it here. Each movie will have some sort of connection to the one before it, be it cast or crew member.]
We’re back into the regular run of AMAD. I’ll miss you Halloween movies, but we have a good recovery week with an eclectic group of flicks. I’ve also done some work to add in another 100 titles into the pool, many of which are horror films I didn’t get to during October, so there’s even more variety.
We ease back in following the radiant Gene Tierney over from September 30th’s LAURA to 1954’s Fox Noir DVD title BLACK WIDOW.
First thing’s first. Fox Noir needs to actually watch the movies before they put them out under noir releases. There are a couple of femme fatales in the movie, but I wouldn’t categorize this movie as noir.
For one, it’s bright, beautiful Technicolor and super scope. Can you have a film noir shot in Technicolor? I think that automatically cancels out the noir categorization, unless there’s an example anyone out there can throw at me, of course. None come to my mind. I can even see the case being made that any color film can not be film noir, but I wouldn’t go that far. Movies like BRICK play up film noir archetypes and have a muted enough color palate to feel right.
So, the flick’s in color, but it’s also not very hard-boiled. In other words, if it’s a noir it’s a very unique one, atypical of the genre.
When the flick started I thought it was a dramedy, actually. Set amongst the Broadway elite of New York, we meet some colorful characters, including Lottie Martin, a diva of an actress played by Ginger Rogers who seems to delight in being the biggest bitch in the world to everybody. She lets loose some stingers in the first few minutes to unwitting party-goers that were so harsh and snobby that I couldn’t help but laugh.
Van Heflin is the lead of the movie, playing a Broadway producer named Peter Danver whose wife (Tierney) has to go take care of her sick mother, leaving Heflin to go it alone to one of Rogers’ big parties. Heflin intends to walk in and walk right back out again and almost gets away with it, too, before being pulled back in by Rogers’ husband, Brian Mullen (played by Reginald Gardiner).
At the party Heflin meets a beautiful young woman, an aspiring writer who speaks her mind and is adorably blunt. Peggy Anne Garner plays Nanny Ordway. Nanny turns out to be a real social climber and her trick is her ability to appear absolutely honest, straight and non-manipulative.
Okay, I thought about half an hour into the movie. This is a take on the ALL ABOUT EVE story and we’re going to see an unfortunately realistic series of backstabbings as a seemingly forthright and moral girl manipulates her way to her goals without any regard to the people she fucks over along the way.
That had to be it. Heflin was keeping faithful to his wife, but he took a liking to Garner right away and wanted to help her out. He gives her his apartment to use as a place to write, with it’s inspiring view of the New York cityscape, while he’s out all day, which of course starts some gossip since the talkative diva lives in the apartment above him.
But Heflin is through and through a good guy. He’s transparent about his new friendship with his wife, alerting her to it immediately after the first dinner they share.
So, Tierney comes home and they enter the apartment, which is supposed to be empty, but the record player is blaring. They enter to find all of Garner’s shit still there… and then they find her body, hanging from a rope.
What the fuck!?! This is less than 40 minutes into the movie and completely made me throw out my expectations of where this movie was going. And on top of that, it’s a creepy-ass image. Heflin slowly opens the bedroom door and we see the girl’s shadow…
And I don’t know about you guys, but the image of a human hanged really gets under my skin. I know it’s not a pleasant image for anybody, but it’s one that particularly works to unnerve me. I don’t know why that image over other horrific shit I see in horror flicks gets me, but it does. And in this movie they do a particularly disturbing version of the hanging person image. Garner’s head is bent backwards, so the face is staring straight up. Fuck that!
The rest of the movie is Heflin figuring out why Garner died. At first it’s an average curiosity, but the more that gets uncovered, the more he is implemented in her death, which looks less and less like suicide, despite a bizarre suicide note (there’s a drawing of a hanged girl) left on the scene.
How clean is Heflin? Is he dodging the investigative team in order to clear his name like he says or is he trying to find a way to cover up his crime?
It’s a very interesting story and what I like about it is how the layers are pulled back bit by bit, revealing Garner to be quite a different character than we expect. If you’re like me you won’t want to believe that Garner was anything other than the quirky innocent girl she presented herself as.
The acting in the movie is strong across the board, especially where Ginger Rogers is concerned. This isn’t a typical role for her, playing the nasty and mean actress and she really keeps the movie lively. She’s always entertaining and there’s a surprising depth to her character, a certain level of desperation, a motivation for her cruel and cold exterior.
Heflin is great, too, but there’s not much depth to his character and they only briefly touch upon the ambiguity of his character, which I think might have made the movie even better, but as it stands there wasn’t really much of the movie where I questioned if he was as innocent as he claimed to be.
Otto Kruger (who has appeared in previous AMADs MURDER, MY SWEET and THE YOUNG PHILADELPHIANS) plays Nanny’s Uncle who has a very important, but unfortunately small role in the movie. Kruger makes full use of his screen-time, though. George Raft is the detective hunting down Heflin and trying to solve the case and he gets a lot more to work with, crafting a pretty one-dimensional, but solid character.
Unfortunately, I think the big disappoint with me in the movie is that Gene Tierney was given very, very little to do besides sitting pretty on a coach for most of the movie. The foundations are there for some great, tormented work for her character… how she slowly loses confidence in her husband and has to make the decision to either believe him or believe the growing pile of evidence that contradicts him. There’s a lot of meat there, but that’s not what the movie is focused on so Tierney is left with relatively little to do.
BLACK WIDOW was directed and co-written by Nunnally Johnson, who wrote the adaptation of THE GRAPES OF WRATH in 1940. Visually, he knows what he’s doing. There are a few shots that really stand out in my memory already here, mostly playing with shadows. There the one moment I mentioned earlier with the hanging woman and then there’s another shot where a character responds to a knock at a door and when he opens it Heflin’s shadow falls upon the open door, even though he’s hidden from the camera. It’s unmistakably Heflin… he pauses before entering the room, letting his shadow be our first glimpse of him in this scene. Really cool.
All that goes to my theory that if Nunnally Johnson had made this a black and white film and really played with the shadows like he tinkers with here then it would have taken this movie from being a really good flick, a solid mystery piece to a great movie. And I love this era’s cinemascope IB Tech eye-popping colors, but in this case I think the story and tone would have been better served with black and white photography and a smaller frame.
Final Thoughts: BLACK WIDOW stands apart from like movies and I found it to be surprisingly unique, even if sometimes that hurts the story we’re left with a film that definitely keeps you guessing. Nice photography, solid direction and acting all round out the picture and keep it firmly in the recommend category.
Here’s what we have lined up for the next week:
Sunday, November 2nd: THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR (1947)
Monday, November 3rd: THE FLYING TIGERS (1942)
Tuesday, November 4th: EXECUTIVE ACTION (1973)
Wednesday, November 5th: THE BUSY BODY (1967)
Thursday, November 6th: IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD (1963)
Friday, November 7th: LIBELED LADY (1936)
Saturday, November 8th: UP THE RIVER (1930)
In the coming week we have quite a few different kinds of films, as you can see. Comedies, political thrillers, dramas… interesting variety. See you folks tomorrow for yet more Gene Tierney with THE GHOST & MRS. MUIR!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
