Villains and Vixens or "film-gris"

Well, this week my computer died in a pile. It happens eventually to the best of us. What a sickening feeling to turn on the computer and have nothing (or almost nothing) happen. We called the computer doctor to come and perform "emergency surgery" on the blasted machine. Fortunately, it was resurrected after its near death experience. It has a new lease on life for the time being. After that nasty experience, I have promised myself that I will do a more thorough job of backing up my files. (I did have a back-up, but not as comprehensive a one as I really would have liked.)

What does all of that have to do with TVO's Saturday Night at the Movies? Virtually nothing except that I have been much delayed in writing up my blog. Well, if you stretch it, you could say that the title of the first film, "This Gun for Hire" plays into my experience of the week. "Nerds on Site" in their little red "nerdmobile" came to the rescue to fix my computer in a hired gun capacity. It was very nice to be able to hire a professional who came to do a dirty job that my hubby and I could not have done ourselves.

"This Gun for Hire" was paired with another film made in the same year, "The Glass Key". Both films utilized the duo of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake as a major drawing card at the box office. Looking back sixty years later, one has to employ a bit of imagination to figure out why these kinds of films would have been so popular. When one remembers that these were the days before television churned out masses of mediocre programming for popular consumption, it makes a little more sense. There are hundreds if not thousands of "made for TV" movies and serials that will not stand up half as well as these two "B" grade movies from the 1940s. Okay, well, maybe to be honest, we sometimes slip into the "C" category here, but no matter. I still watched them. That is more than I can say for most television programming.

Alan Ladd as Raven is absolutely stunning with his black hair. I mean that I was stunned by the black hair, not by Alan Ladd, the acting, the character development, the dialogue, the directing or anything else. I just couldn't get over the hair. Alan Ladd with black hair?!? How could they?!! There is nothing I associate more with Alan Ladd than his beautiful, naturally blond hair.

I suppose that it would have been impossible in those days for Ladd to have played the bad guy, Raven, with blond hair. As Rob Sawyer mentions later in the Interviews, there was a time in Hollywood when if you wanted to create a bad guy in the audience's mind, you just had to stick a black hat on him. In this case, you just had to stick black hair dye on Alan Ladd.

There are attempts to make the characterization of the main character a bit more complex. Raven shoots his mark and the unfortunate accompanying "secretary" in cold blood. At the same time, Raven picks up a ball for the crippled child who witnesses his entry into the scene of the crime and is inexplicably kind to a cat. The filmmakers go to great lengths to show us that Raven is a sociopath and a generally bad guy who at the same time has a soft side.

Veronica Lake is the major means through which we see the villain's soft underbelly. Aside from the nightclub novelty acts, (Get a load of those song and magic-act routines in the ultra-tight fitting costumes!), Lake's main function in the plot seems to be to expose the internal workings of Raven's criminal mind.

After Lake has had a chance to work her "magic" on Raven for a while, we find out that the cold-blooded killer is actually the victim of misfortune and child abuse himself. Philip Raven is exposed in a much more sympathetic light. Early in the film when Raven is receiving his payoff from the squeamish Gates, he is asked the question, "How do you feel when you're doing this (murder)?" Raven replies perfunctorily, "I feel just fine." Later on in the film, after Ellen Graham has worked him over for a while, you see tears well up in the Philip's eyes as he recalls painful childhood memories. The message seems to be that Raven doesn't feel just fine when he murders someone. He probably doesn't feel anything at all most of the time because he has closed himself off long ago to normal human interactions.

Raven pushes Ellen away when she gets too close. "Take your hands off me! You just want me to go soft!" he snarls. Ellen tries to convince Raven to stop the shooting rampage. He seems hell-bent on claiming his personal revenge on Gates and the man behind the scenes, Brewster. After he has had time to calm down and think it over, Raven makes a counterproposal. If Ellen will help him to escape the police dragnet by being a decoy, Raven will try to secure the needed confession to treasonous activities from Brewster before he exacts his personal revenge and kills the old man.

A few more twists and turns in the plot ensue, but essentially Raven partially redeems himself by exposing the horrendous plot to put poison gas into the hands of the enemy and by sparing the life of Ellen's policeman/fiancé. As is inevitable, Raven dies amid a hail of police bullets, but not before a last exchange with Ellen: "Did I do right for you?" Only Ellen understands the meaning of Raven’s words when she says, "Yes."

Silly Saturday afternoon matinee stuff it may be, but like I said, there is lots more mindless drivel to entertain the masses generated by the Hollywood entertainment industry today that is just as silly or even worse.

It is interesting to note that the dark, able-bodied villain, Raven, is portrayed as an angry young man for whom you have some sympathy in the end. This portrayal is carefully contrasted with the feeble, white-haired Brewster, an invalid in a wheel chair who seems to embody evil itself. Both men are willing to kill people for money. However, the film is constructed in such a way that the audience has no sympathy for Brewster at his demise and yet wants to stand up and salute when Raven dies an inadvertent hero's death. Anyone who can stick it to the Japanese in 1943 in America gets automatic brownie points, even if he has spent his life as a cold-blooded killer.

It has been said that this film is an early example of "film noir". Perhaps. For me, the lines are not drawn clearly enough for it to qualify as "film noir". The bad guy may be a good guy after all and the good guy, Robert Preston as Detective Michael Crane, is just a good guy. As for the girl, she is smart and attractive in an ornamental sort of way, but she is not a "femme fatale" in spite of Raven’s protests about her "clutching claws". My take on it is that Ellen is a pretty girl literally holding on to Raven trying to save him from auto-destruction. If there were such a thing as "film gris", perhaps this crime drama would be a candidate.

"The Glass Key" is also a film that seems to have these blurry lines. Alan Ladd is supposed to be a wisecracking gangster hanging around a crooked politician. I hardly even recognized him as a gangster. Both Ed Beaumont and Paul Madvig are too good to be bad. Ladd’s hair has lightened up since the last film, as has the character. Beaumont sports a medium brown this time around. He is still not a natural blond, but at least Ladd looks a little bit more like himself.

Veronica Lake, as in the last film, suffers from some outstanding millinery misfortunes in her role as the socialite, Janet Henry. What was wardrobe thinking on some of those concoctions? Oh dear! Sometimes the hat just doesn’t help with all of those sly looks that Janet gives the very beau Mr. Beaumont.

Janet Henry does seem confused and confusing. Is she a vixen or a damsel in distress? Is she interested in Beaumont because he is good looking or because he can help her find her brother’s murderer or because she can use him to obscure her tracks? It is all not very clear right up until the end. In a most unlikely dénouement, it turns out that it is the father who killed the brother, that Janet is the innocent, and that all is forgotten between Beaumont and Madvig to the point where the jilted Madvig gives his blessing to those two crazy kids, Janet and Ed, to run off and get themselves hitched. As long as Janet returns the diamond engagement ring to Madvig, no harm done. Everything is A-Okay!

Well, what can you say except that’s entertainment!

On Saturday, August 27th, catch Alec Guinness as "Our Man in Havannah"(1955) and Joseph Cotten in "The Third Man" (1949) on TVOntario 's Saturday Night at the Movies.

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