Physical Evidence (1989)

Physical Evidence is a 1989 mystery crime thriller, it’s a courtroom drama and it also has serious neo-noir vibes.

It was directed (but not written) by Michael Crichton. It might seem like an outlier in Crichton’s filmography but in his early career as a novelist he wrote relatively straightforward thrillers so it’s reasonable to assume that he had some affinity for the thriller genre.

It starts with a very impressive visual set-piece on a bridge. Which leads to the discovery of the body of Jake Farley, a sleazy nightclub owner with a spectacularly shady past.

Cop Joe Paris (Burt Reynolds) is arrested for Farley’s murder. Joe is already on suspension. He’s a good cop with a very short temper which has landed him in trouble many times.

Hotshot lady lawyer Jenny Hudson (Theresa Russell) works for the Public Defender’s Office and she begs for the case. It will be a very high-profile case, the kind of case that can make or break an ambitious lawyer’s career.

The audience has no idea whether or not Joe is guilty. The evidence against him is very strong but if he is being framed by someone powerful you would expect that, and Joe has plenty of powerful enemies.

Jenny Hudson also has no idea whether or not Joe is guilty. She’s a lawyer. Her job is to defend him either way.

And the uncertainty about Joe’s guilt is maintained quite skilfully, for a while at least. The evidence against him steadily accumulates but the possibility that someone might be framing him also increases. We still do not know. Nor does Jenny. It’s a good basis for a neo-noir suspense thriller and it works.

The main problem is that this is the most potentially interesting aspect of the plot and it gradually gets lost and the story thereafter becomes rather routine.

There’s also the problem that courtroom dramas are always dull because courtroom scenes are always dull. They’re stagey, rather than cinematic. They’re all about dialogue and dialogue scenes are inherently uncinematic. They’re at best a necessary evil. And it’s very difficult to get away from that staginess in courtroom scenes.

I have seen very few Burt Reynolds movies but he’s pretty good here, not making Joe too sympathetic but just sympathetic enough.

Theresa Russell’s specialty was playing offbeat roles in offbeat roles in offbeat movies for directors like Ken Russell and her husband Nicolas Roeg. This is a much more straightforward role but she handles it well. I like the way she does the full-on power-dressing girl boss thing on the job but throws off that persona as soon as she’s off-duty. She’s a pro. The girl boss routine is part of the job.

The sexual tension between Joe and Jenny works quite well because they’re so radically mismatched. Yes, that’s an established formula, but Reynolds and Russell carry it off well enough.

It bombed at the box office but there’s nothing really wrong with this movie. It’s a bit like an old-fashioned B-movie or a well-crafted TV-movie. It’s decent entertainment but it isn’t going to knock your socks off. And if, like me, you’re a bit of a Theresa Russell completist you’ll enjoy her performance.

This movie is paired with The Anderson Tapes on a double-header Blu-Ray from Mill Creek. There are no extras but it looks terrific. Physical Evidence isn’t particularly special but if you buy the set for The Anderson Tapes (and you should) it’s worth giving Physical Evidence a spin as well.

Five and Ten (1931)

Five and Ten (later retitled Daughter of Luxury) is a 1931 MGM pre-code romantic melodrama. It was a star vehicle for Marion Davies, with her co-star being Leslie Howard who was not yet a major name in the United States.

The Depression is an important factor in many pre-code movies but it’s ignored completely in this movie which may reflect the fact that it’s based on a novel (by Fannie Hurst) written prior to the Wall Street Crash.

Five and Ten is a story of love but this is also very much a movie about the class struggle. No, not that class struggle. This is is not the capitalists vs the workers, the upper class vs the working class. This is class struggle within the upper classes. This is the old money blue blood American aristocracy vs the rising power of the nouveau riche new upper class. This was a very real class struggle, not just a device invented for the movie.

John Rarick (Richard Bennett) and his family represent the upstart nouveau riche. Rarick owned a chain of five and dime stories in Kansas. Now he owns an immense nationwide chain and he’s fabulously rich. That made him decide to relocate, with his family, to New York City.

His wife Jenny (Irene Rich) and daughter Jennifer (Marion Davies) are at first very excited. They assume that they will be welcomed into high society in New York. But New York is not Kansas City. They are snubbed by New York high society. And for a woman there is no humiliation to compare with being snubbed by society women.

Jenny has consoled herself by taking a lover. He gives the impression of being a gigolo but Jenny doesn’t care.

John Rarick has no idea what is going on and he had no idea how lonely and socially isolated Jenny had started to feel. The truth is that John Rarick has ceased to understand anything other than money.

He is also unaware that daughter Jennifer has been snubbed as well.

Now Jennifer has met Berry Rhodes (Leslie Howard). He’s an architect, or claims to be although he’s really just a dilettante. He spends his time playing polo and going to parties. Berry is perpetually broke but that doesn’t matter. He is a blue blood. His family is Old Money. As far as society in New York is concerned he is very much an insider. He is engaged, in a desultory fashion, to Muriel Preston (Mary Duncan), also very much of Old Money stock.

Jennifer has decided that she’s going to marry Berry. It’s impossible of course. There is that yawning class gap between them. But Jennifer is a very determined girl.

Perhaps she is motivated partly by a desire to storm the walls of the fortress of society but she is genuinely besotted by Berry’s aristocratic sophistication and self-confidence and stylish elegance.

And Berry has fallen for Jennifer, although that doesn’t mean he will choose a nouveau riche girl in preference to blue blood Muriel. It’s going to be an epic battle between these two women.

Meanwhile Jennifer’s brother Avery has turned to the bottle.

I adore Marion Davies. She’s funny, she’s lively, she’s charming and she’s sexy. She’s gorgeous and she has those incredible eyes. It’s unfortunate that she is often dismissed due to the vicious hatchet job Orson Welles did on her in Citizen Kane.

Leslie Howard is pretty good here and you can see why he would soon start making an impact in Hollywood.

Is it pre-code? The answer is very definitely yes but to tell you why would involve spoilers.

Five and Ten is an excellent pre-code melodrama and Marion Davies is sensational. And directed by Robert Z. Leonard, maybe not an auteur or a visionary but just a guy who directed a lot of excellent movies. Very highly recommended.

The Warner Archive DVD looks very nice.

Les Diaboliques (1955)

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955) was based on Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s 1952 novel Celle qui n'était plus (translated into English as She Who Was No More).

The film was a huge hit in France and an international success and its critical reputation grew steadily.

In 1996 Jeremiah S. Chechik directed another adaptation, Diabolique. It has huge flaws and a trainwreck of an ending but a few interesting elements.

Hitchcock had been very keen to acquire the film rights to She Who Was No More but Clouzot beat him to the punch by a hair’s-breadth. A few years later Hitchcock adapted another Boileau-Narcejac novel, D'entre les morts, as Vertigo.

In his film Clouzot made major changes to the plot and further major changes were made in the 1996 film so if you’re familiar with any of the other versions do not assume that you knew exactly how the Clouzot film is going to end. I’m not going to talk about the plot at all since it does rely on a big twist and I don’t want to offer even the smallest hints.

Clouzot changed the setting to a private boys’ school. This works very well - a school has just the right hothouse atmosphere. Michel Delassalle (Paul Meurisse) is the headmaster. He’s a third-rate headmaster of a third-rate school. And the school belongs to his wife Christina (played by the director’s wife Véra Clouzot). She has all the money.

Michel is having an affair with one of the teachers, Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret).

Christina and Nicole are planning to murder Michel.

This is where the story starts to become strange and twisted. There’s a very odd relationship between the two women. They should hate each other. Instead there’s a weird bond between them. Modern critics and viewers will be tempted to assume they’re lesbians but they’re not and it’s nowhere near as simple as that. The bond is based on the fact that they are sharing a man. Both women love Michel and both women hate him.

There is a hint of sexual perversity. Michel bullies and humiliates both women but something has drawn both women to him.

This a story that deals with female sexuality and desire and emotion in ways that modern viewers might find disconcertingly grown-up, complex and subtle.

Véra Clouzot is extremely good as the neurotic Christina who is guilt-ridden before she’s even done anything. She’s probably been guilt-ridden her whole life.

The standout performer though is Simone Signoret as the ambiguous puzzling Nicole. Nicole thinks she has everything under control.

Les Diaboliques truly was a ground-breaking movie - a movie built entirely around a fiendish shock twist at the end. Since then countless crime and horror movies have employed this technique so a viewer watching this movie today is going to be on the lookout for such an ending. Even if you haven’t been told that this movie has a shock twist at the end you’ll be anticipating such a possibility because it’s become a tried and tested formula. But when Les Diaboliques came out in 1955 it knocked people’s socks off. They simply were not prepared for the possibility that the film had been playing games with them, leading them up the garden path. Sadly Les Diaboliques cannot possibly hit as hard today as it did then but that does not detract from its greatness and its originality or from its boldness.

The movie also benefits from some superbly atmospheric black and-white cinematography by Armand Thirard. This combines with the seedy setting that reeks of defeat and despair to create a superbly unsetting and uncomfortable air. There’s this all-pervasive feeling of wrongness.

The twist is the selling point but it’s the unhealthy emotional entanglements and the growing atmosphere of paranoia that really impresses.

Les Diaboliques is a crime thriller with some definite horror overtones and it’s a magnificent cinematic achievement. Very highly recommended.

The Criterion Blu-Ray looks great and the highlight of the extras is the interview with the always perceptive and entertaining Kim Newman.

I’ve also reviewed the Boileau-Narcejac novel She Who Was No More.

Witness in the City (1959)

Witness in the City (Un témoin dans la ville), directed by Édouard Molinaro in 1959, is included in the recent Kino Lorber French Noir Blu-Ray boxed set.

The screenplay was by the great French crime-writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. I believe it was based on one of their novels. They’re best known as the authors of the source novels for two of the greatest motion pictures ever made, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques and Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Witness in the City begins with a brutal murder of a woman on a train. We see the murderer, Pierre Verdier. There’s no ambiguity. We know it was murder. The case against him is however dismissed for lack of evidence.

The woman was the murderer’s mistress. Her husband Ancelin (Lino Ventura) is not going to take this lying down. Verdier had carried out a perfect murder. Now Ancelin plans a perfect murder of his own.

This all happens right at the beginning of the movie so I’m not giving away any spoilers. All this is just the setup.

The trouble with plans for perfect murders is that when put into practice some minor unforeseen circumstance always gums up the works. In this case it’s a witness. He didn’t see an actual murder, but he saw enough.

The movie is a hunt or rather it becomes a tale of two hunts.

Lino Ventura gives a nicely minimalist performance. It’s as if Ancelin is in some ways dead inside.

Henri Decaë provides some very fine very moody black-and-white cinematography.

There’s an enormous amount of night shooting. The movie really does have a noir city at night feel. There are a couple of scenes involving trains (alway a bonus) but a huge amount of the film takes place in cars, and cabs. The witness is a cab driver. Half the cab drivers in Paris end up being involved.

This is a movie in which characters are always in movement but not actually getting anywhere. They keep ending up driving down the same streets. The streets of Paris are like a gigantic spider web from which there is no escape. No matter how far and how fast you drive you can never leave that spider web. You always end up back where you started. The city will not allow you to escape. Noir cities are like that.

The driving scenes, some involving a dozen or more cars, are extremely well done. They have tension and energy but it’s a frustrated kind of energy. An energy that needs resolution but the resolution seems like it will never happen.

Overall I’m not sure that this ticks enough noir boxes to satisfy film noir purists (there is for example no femme fatale) but it’s definitely a movie that film noir fans will love. There’s as much pessimism as one could desire. There are also some existentialist touches.

Things are not full explained, and this is clearly deliberate. We know what happened on the train at the beginning but not why. Verdier gives his account of the events that led to the murder but Ancelin doesn’t believe him, and Verdier has a motive to lie. On the other hand Ancelin has a motive to lie to himself.

There are some touches that you wouldn’t get away with in a Hollywood movie of the 50s, such as Ancelin’s encounter with a prostitute.

We’re never quite sure if we should be sympathising with Ancelin or not.

Witness in the City is slightly offbeat noir. Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Édouard Molinaro’s Back to the Wall (1958) which is also superb. It’s included in the Kino Lorber set, along with Speaking of Murder (1957) which is not as impressive as the other two movies but still very much worth watching. There are no extras included with any of the three movies.

The Anderson Tapes (1971)

The Anderson Tapes is a 1971 Sidney Lumet movie and the fact that I generally dislike Lumet’s movies put me off seeing it for years.

On the other hand it’s a heist movie. And it’s a 70s paranoia movie. And it’s all about surveillance. These are all things I like a lot.

Robert Anderson (Sean Connery), known as Duke, has been in prison for ten years. That will prove be significant. He’s known as a very skilled and professional safe-cracker but the world has changed in ten years. Duke doesn’t really understand the ramifications of new technology for his kind of old school criminal.

He has a plan to rob an apartment building. There are six apartments, all inhabited by very rich people with all sorts of valuables - cash, negotiable bonds, jewels, paintings, objets d’art, coin collections.

He needs financing to set his scheme up and he gets it from the Mob. A very big Mob boss owes him a debt of honour.

There’s another ticklish complication. A little task that the Mob wants him to do for them.

Anderson puts together a team. The heist is intricately planned and it’s a good plan. There’s one problem. The authorities have Anderson and everyone else involved under surveillance. Not just one government agency, but a whole bunch of them - the narcotics bureau, the FBI, even the IRS. They’ve been under surveillance right from the start. Every movie they’ve made has been taped, photographed and filmed.

This is a movie in which everyone is being watched all the time. This was 1971, when the surveillance state was still in its infancy, but this movie is already taking a deep dive into tech paranoia.

The usual formula for a heist movie is that a master criminal comes up with a plan, we see the detailed planning and the rehearsals and then when the plan is finally put into operation something inevitably goes wrong. In this movie everything has already gone wrong right from the start.

When we come to the heist Lumet gets a tad tricky, with the narrative jumping back and forward between the present and the future. It’s a bit risky but he pulls it off rather well.

One very cool thing about this movie is that it features so much incredibly cool analog technology that was absolutely cutting edge in 1971. The Feds even have a super-computer, with punch cards and flashing lights just like a proper computer. And ham radio plays a key role, which is amazingly cool.

Connery gives a standard Connery performance but that’s OK because that standard Connery performance is always fun to watch. And he did tweak that standard performance for different films. In this one he lacks Bond’s charm and humour.

Dyan Cannon is quite good as his girlfriend. Christopher Walken, in his first significant feature film role, is good as a young crim befriended by Anderson in prison. Martin Balsam is there as well, as reliable as ever. Ralph Meeker is a riot as an uber-tough cop.

The heist itself occupies a very large chunk of the running time and it’s superbly done. There are only occasional moments of violence and that’s why they work and why they hit hard. Suddenly it’s not a game. And suddenly the guys who thought they had everything under control realise they’ve been fooling themselves.

The Anderson Tapes is a fine exercise in suspense and paranoia. This is easily the best move I’ve ever seen from Lumet. Highly recommended.

This movie is paired with Physical Evidence on a double-header Blu-Ray from Mill Creek. There are no extras but it looks terrific.

Cocktail Hour (1933)

Cocktail Hour is a 1933 Columbia pre-code romance with a touch of crime. It was directed by Victor Schertzinger.

Cynthia Warren (Bebe Daniels) is a successful illustrator who is sure that a woman does not need marriage, she just needs freedom. Men are just amusements.

Prince Philippe de Longville (Barry Norton) follows her around like a lovesick puppy dog. He wants to marry her. He’s a nice boy but he’s just a boy. Cynthia is only interested in men so even if she did not want to get married she wouldn’t marry Philippe.

Randy (Randolph Scott) is a different matter. He’s a man. She’s really attracted to him, but won’t marry him.

Randy knows about women. He pretends that he doesn’t care. That drives her crazy. Even if she doesn’t want to marry him how dare he stop pursuing her!

Cynthia heads off to Europe. On the ship she befriends tempestuous Russian pianist Olga Raimoff (Muriel Kirkland). Olga is really just Tessie Burns from Kansas.

And Cynthia has a shipboard romance with the handsome charming William Lawton (Sidney Blackmer). He sweeps Cynthia off her feet. He quotes poetry to her. No girl can resist that.

The affair sours a bit when the ship docks at Southampton and she is introduced to his wife. She heads for Paris. Philippe is there and he’s still mooning over her and he’s insanely jealous of her shipboard over. Randy is there as well, but Cynthia still won’t marry him.

What really bothers Cynthia is that William’s wife Pat (Marjorie Gateson) knows all about Cynthia and doesn’t care. She doesn’t take Cynthia the slightest bit seriously as a threat. There’s nothing more humiliating to a woman than to be not taken seriously as a romantic rival.

William wants to keep Cynthia as his bit on the side. That doesn’t please Cynthia and obviously it’s not to the liking of either Philippe or Randy. It leads to a moment of violence in a hotel room.

Usually I like Bebe Daniels but Cynthia is a character I couldn’t warm to. Too cold and then she switches to self-pity. Randolph Scott is good but doesn’t get enough to do.

I liked Sidney Blackmer’s restrained performance. He doesn’t overdo the charming seducer thing which makes it more plausible that a girl like Cynthia would fall for him.

Several things make this very much a pre-code movie. It’s obvious that the shipboard romance between Cynthia and William went beyond flirtation - had it been mere flirtation her angry reaction when she discovers he’s married would not have made sense.

Pat Lawton is indifferent to her husband’s love affairs of which he has had many, which is certainly very pre-code. Infidelity is not something that shocks any of the characters.

There’s a “battle of the sexes” element to the relationship between Cynthia and Randy and a conflict between traditional ideas on marriage (represented by Randy) and Cynthia’s ambition to be a career woman.

Cocktail Hour is reasonably enjoyable and I love movies set at least partially on board ships. Recommended.

Sony’s Blu-Ray offers no extras but the movie looks extremely good.

Fat City (1972)

John Huston’s career had been in both the commercial and critical doldrums for years when he made Fat City in 1972. It was a surprise commercial hit and critics loved it. It put Huston back on top. Three years later Huston would make the best movie of his career, The Man Who Would Be King (1975).

Fat City is 1970s bleakness at its bleakest. This is nihilism without a trace of hope. The only movie of this period that can match it for bleakness is They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? but in that film the characters are driven to despair by economic desperation. It is set at the worst point of the Depression.

But Fat City is set in 1972. The 70s economic crisis was grim but it didn’t start until the Oil Crisis of late 1973. In 1972 the economy was going fine. If you were a loser in 1972 you couldn’t blame the economy. The characters in this movie are all losers and it’s all their own work.

The setting is Stockton, California. Huston and his cinematographer Conrad Hall make it look like an annexe of Hell. Everything is decaying, squalid, depressing and ugly.

Billy Tully (Stacy Keach) is a washed-out prizefighter. He was never much good but now at 30 he’s trying to make a comeback. In a gym he spars with 18-year-old Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges). Billy thinks the kid has promise. He introduces him to his manager, Ruben Luna (Nicholas Colasanto). Ernie is on his way.

But he isn’t really. He’s on his way in the world of third-rate semi-pro boxing. In this world if you win you still lose. Billy never even had a sniff at a title fight. He would always have remained in the sleazy desperate lower echelons of the fight game. He made some money for a while until he got so badly pummelled in a fight that he lost his mojo. If he makes a comeback he’ll be fighting for pitifully small purses in fleapit stadiums until inevitably he’ll get pummelled again and will end as another punch-drunk wreck. He just isn’t smart enough to avoid such a fate.

Ernie has some talent, but not enough. Not enough to get him anywhere near a championship fight. At best he will eke out a living until eventually he gets his brain turned to mush, just like all the other failed fighters. Ernie is also not smart enough to avoid such a fate.

And while Billy looks up to Ruben it’s an illusion. Ruben is the third-rate manager of a string of third-rate boxers. Ruben doesn’t have the training skills or the business acumen to develop anything but third-rate fighters. Ruben is a loser as well.

Billy drifts into a relationship with Oma (Susan Tyrrell), a broken-down self-pitying drunk. She has had three marriages. They all failed. It has never occurred to Oma that this might have been her fault. It has never occurred to Oma that anything has ever been her fault.

When we first see Oma we assume she’s around 40. But Susan Tyrrell was 26 at the time and I suspect Huston deliberately chose a young actress. If you look closely at Oma you can see that she isn’t 40, she’s a young woman who has let herself go to an extraordinary degree. Oma is the last woman in the world that Billy should get mixed up with, and Billy is last man in the world that Oma should become involved with. We know that the relationship will just make things worse for both of them but they’re both incapable of making good decisions.

Meanwhile Ernie has met Faye (Candy Clark). Very soon she has trapped him into marriage by deliberately becoming pregnant. She thinks it’s a clever move but they’re both too young and irresponsible for marriage and Ernie is in no financial position to support a wife and child. We know that the marriage will ruin both their lives, but they’re too dumb to know any better.

For me the weakness of this movie is that I found it difficult to care about people so determined to remain losers. They’re too dumb and too self-pitying to care about. But maybe that’s just me.

The performances are all effective.

There are two major boxing scenes and Huston does some clever misdirection in each of them. In one there’s some obvious foreshadowing but it doesn’t play out quite as he’s led us to believe it will. In the other we’re led to expect a particular result because that’s the way other boxing movies would play it but Huston pulls the rug from under us.

The ending is interesting. I saw it one way, others see it another way.

I didn’t exactly enjoy this movie but if you’re prepared to join Huston in a deep dive into despair and misery you can admire the skill with which he conducts us on that dive. Recommended, assuming you enjoy watching awful things happen to hopeless people.