Lust for Gold (1949)

The posters might suggest that Lust for Gold, released by Columbia in 1949, is going to be a western. It isn’t. Not quite. It is set in the West but it’s a thriller and the setting is contemporary. Or at least partly.

The original director was George Marshall but he walked off the set early on and producer S. Sylvan Simon took over directing duties.

The movie is based on the story of a real-life lost mine that has never been found.

The movie is about what the title says it’s about. Gold fever. Somewhere in the vast sprawling expanse of Superstition Mountain there is a lost mine (the legendary Dutchman Mine) and a huge hoard of gold. Enough gold to get twenty men murdered over the previous 70 years. If the Apache legends are correct then a lot more men than that have died for this gold.

And nobody knows for sure that there is any gold. Or if there is any chance of finding it.

Young Barry Storm (William Prince) has just seen the twentieth man die on the mountain. Barry’s grandfather Jacob Walz claimed to be the owner of the mine.

Barry becomes obsessed with finding the mine. He finds an old guy who tells him Jacob Walz’s story. This is not so much a main story bookended by a framing story as two distinct stories taking place decades apart both dealing with a search for the mine. There are multiple murders in both stories.

In 1887 Jacob Walz (Glenn Ford) found the mine. The mine had at that time been lost for many years. He becomes involved with a woman who owns a bakery in the nearby town. She is Julia (Ida Lupino). The connection between Julia and Pete Thomas (Gig Young) guarantees that things will get very messy.

What follows is a sordid tale of human depravity. It’s not just the lust for gold. There’s sexual lust, emotional betrayal, jealousy and a web of deceit.

The plot is delightfully overheated. Both stories have wild crazy endings. In fact there’s a third ending and it’s wild and crazy as well.

This is a fairly rare chance to see Glenn Ford as an out-and-out bad guy and yet in his own strange way he’s an innocent and a victim. It’s a credit to Ford’s subtlety as an actor that he can make us feel oddly sympathetic towards Jacob even after we’ve seen him do some breathtakingly vicious things. Ford really is outstanding here.

Ida Lupino is extremely good as a woman who may be thoroughly rotten, partially rotten or just easily tempted or maybe she’s just out of control and has no idea which way she will jump next.

All the characters are reprehensible and yet all are perhaps victims. Men will do terrible things for gold or sex. And women will do equally terrible things. Although without that gold maybe all of these people would have been decent enough. Or maybe not. They have all been corrupted.

This is not a movie that casts humanity in a very flattering light.

I’m always leery of describing movies as noir westerns because in most cases they don’t really fit the noir mould. Having said that there are of course westerns that contain some of the elements that are found in the crime movies that were later labelled as film noir. During the 40s there had been a slight shift towards darker subject matter and a more cynical pessimistic edge in several genres. Lust for Gold falls into that category. It’s part of a trend that began in the 40s, towards harder-edged less conventionally heroic westerns

Ida Lupino can certainly be seen as a femme fatale here, leading every man she encounters to disaster. It might seem like a stretch to see Glenn Ford as Jacob as a noir protagonist (he’s already a very bad man at the start of the movie) but the argument could be made. Perhaps he could be redeemed by love. He does genuinely love Julia. But choosing Julia as a vehicle for redemption is a bad bad choice.

The plot (or plots) gets crazy enough and events spiral so much out of control that although it seems highly likely that things will end badly it’s difficult to predict exactly how disaster will strike. And there’s at least one wild plot twist you won’t see coming.

Lust for Gold is a rather oddball western-thriller genre hybrid and it’s exceptionally interesting. Highly recommended.

The Spanish Blu-Ray looks great. It includes the original English-language version with removable Spanish subtitles.

Sadie McKee (1934)

Sadie McKee is a 1934 MGM production starring Joan Crawford. It’s a pre-code movie. It just made the cut. Had it come out a week or two later it would have been subject to the Production Code. And there are quite a few moments that would definitely not have been permitted under the Code.

Joan Crawford is Sadie, a servant in the household of the extremely rich Alderson family.

Young Michael Alderson and Sadie had had a bit of a childhood crush on each other but of course nothing came of it. She is a servant after all.

Sadie is crazy in love with Tommy Wallace (Gene Raymond). She thinks he’s just swell. But Tommy has to leave town after being caught thieving at his factory job.

In a fit of hopeless romantic passion Sadie decides to go with Tommy to New York. This leads to several very pre-code moments. They find a room to rent. They’re not married so of course Tommy will sleep on the couch. But he doesn’t. They share the bed. And it’s made quite obvious that they don’t share it chastely. But it’s OK, because tomorrow they’ll get married.

There’s trouble in store, in the apartment next door, in the form of Dolly Merrick (Esther Ralston). She’s a night-club singer. She’s glamorous but she’s a cheap blonde and an obvious man-eater. And Tommy has caught her eye. She steals Tommy from Sadie with contemptuous ease.

Now Sadie is stuck in New York and she’s broke. Until she meets Jack Brennan (Edward Arnold). He’s a portly middle-aged tycoon and he’s drunk. He’s alway drunk.

Michael happens to be on the scene and he is convinced that Sadie is a scheming gold digger. It’s obvious to him that Sadie intends to trap the poor hopeless drunken Brennan into marriage.

Maybe because she’s so annoyed at Michael’s obvious contempt for her that’s exactly what she does.

But she still can’t forget Tommy.

This is full-blown melodrama with a whole bunch of classic melodrama twists still to come.

The first thing that makes the movie interesting is that it is pre-code. Which means you cannot assume that it’s heading for a conventional “virtue rewarded and vice punished” ending. In the pre-code era writers could choose to end a story the way they wanted to, rather than the way the Production Code Authority told them they had to end it. And, as a result, at various times the plot suddenly doesn’t go quite where you expected it to.

The second interesting thing about the movie is that Sadie is a woman and she does things for a woman’s reasons. Tommy is a loser and a louse but Sadie is a woman and she loves him anyway and nothing can persuade her to change her feelings. Sadie is a complicated woman. She’s not a stereotypical bad girl. She makes foolish decisions based on pure emotion. She can be calculating and she can be self-sacrificing. She can be cruel and she can be kind. And although she does marry Brennan and his millions in her own way she loves him. But she still loves Tommy. She’s a sympathetic character who can sometimes be unsympathetic. Sometimes she’s just exasperating!

The movie’s third great asset is Joan Crawford who somehow manages to make Sadie’s contradictions believable and manages to persuade us to be on Sadie’s side even when she behaves badly or foolishly. It’s a complex and assured performance.

Edward Arnold is excellent as Brennan. The big problem is Franchot Tone whose wooden performance is particularly disappointing since Michael is a potentially interesting character with contradictory motivations of his own.

Sadie McKee is a melodrama that is both straightforward and not straightforward. And Joan Crawford is great in a tricky role. Highly recommended.

Sadie McKee looks great on Blu-Ray.

The Yakuza (1974)

The 70s was a great decade for Robert Mitchum. The Yakuza in 1974 started a run of notable roles.

It begins with Harry Kilmer (Mitchum) doing a favour for his old pal George Tanner (Brian Keith). He has no choice. Due to something that happened years earlier Kilmer owes Tanner a major favour. Tanner is involved in a business deal with a big-time yakuza named Tono. The deal went wrong and Tono is holding Tanner’s daughter for ransom. Kilmer has to go to Tokyo to rescue her. Tanner sends his bodyguard Dusty (Richard Jordan) along to help.

Kilmer is an ex-cop and and ex-private eye. He’s a fairly tough hombre.

Kilmer is owed a favour by ex-yakuza Ken Tanaka (Ken Tanaka). He agrees to help Kilmer.

The fairly complex plot is not what matters. What matters is the web of obligations that develops. Every action taken by any character seems to involve another obligation.

The yakuza have a code of honour that is as rigid as that of the samurai. Debts must be paid. Obligations cannot be ignored or evaded.

Kilmer is an old-fashioned guy who also believes in honouring debts. Kilmer understands Japan pretty well, having lived there for quite a few years. But he doesn’t understand Japan completely and he doesn’t understand yakuza culture completely.

The fact that several Americans are involved complicates things. There’s Kilmer, there’s Tanner, there’s Dusty and there’s Kilmer’s old friend Oliver (Herb Edelman). Americans don’t necessarily adhere to a code of honour, much less a rigid code like the yakuza code. Kilmer does, but other Americans might not.

Paul Schrader wrote the original screenplay with his brother Leonard. This movie had a troubled production history. Robert Aldrich was the initial choice to direct. Mercifully that didn’t happen. Then Sydney Pollack was brought on board. He was an odd choice for the material. He liked a lot of things about Paul Schrader’s script but Schrader had conceived it as very much a yakuza film and Pollack wanted to focus more on the ideas about obligations and on the culture crash. Robert Towne was brought in to work on the script. In retrospect Sam Peckinpah might perhaps have been a more obvious choice as director.

The Yakuza was a box-office disaster. I suspect that this was partly because in 1974 a yakuza movie would have been very unfamiliar territory for American audiences and critics.

Another problem was undoubtedly the fact that apart from Kilmer the other key characters - Tanaka Ken, his brother Goro and Eko - are uncompromisingly Japanese. Their motivations would have been perplexing and alienating to American viewers. They might have been inclined to judge a woman harshly for putting family duty ahead of love. And would certainly have been puzzled by the fact that Tanaka Ken hates Kilmer but will unhesitatingly risk his life to help him. There is a debt of obligation involved, and that overrides everything. To men like Tanaka Ken a debt must be repaid whatever the cost. And there are no moral shortcuts. If you do someone an injury it’s no good just saying you’re sorry. You can atone, but there’s a price to be paid.

And the movie is not tempted to Americanise these characters, or to soften them or to make them more sympathetic to an American audience. You just have to accept that they see things differently.

Audiences expecting an American-style gangster movie would have been bewildered.

There’s a lot of action and a lot of violence but again it’s not done in classical Hollywood style. The action scenes are more like those you’ll find in a samurai movie. There’s an enormous amount of sword-fighting. In the 1970s a yakuza would still settle a score with a sword rather than a gun.

Mitchum is excellent. Kilmer is an honourable man but now he will have to be satisfy Japanese notions of honour. This is typical 70s Mitchum - he’s world-weary and battered but he will not admit defeat.

The Yakuza has a flavour of its own. It has its problems but it’s fascinating and gripping and it’s highly recommended.

The Warner Archive Blu-Ray looks great and includes a director’s commentary track.

American Gigolo (1980)

American Gigolo was written and directed by Paul Schrader and it propelled Richard Gere into the top tier of Hollywood movie stars.

This movie dates from a fascinating transitional period for Hollywood at the tail end of the 1970s, along with movies such as The Eyes of Laura Mars. Hollywood was about to say farewell to the grimy gritty miserable politically obsessed 70s and embrace 80s glamour and decadence. Personally I think it was a change for the better.

The emergence of Richard Gere also paved the way for a new breed of 80s male movie star such as Tom Cruise and, later in the decade, James Spader. Gere was certainly a breath of fresh air after the excessively mannered and contrived performances of 70s stars like de Niro, Pacino, Nicholson and Hoffman.

While the title describes Julian, the protagonist played by Richard Gere, as a gigolo he is in fact a prostitute. A male equivalent of a call-girl. He only services female clients.

He doesn’t try to pretend to himself that he’s not a whore. He talks about turning tricks. He doesn’t feel guilty about it. He just accepts it. He takes pride in his work. It’s not just about being good in bed. He’s charming and amusing and cultured.

Then he meets Michelle (Lauren Hutton). She’s not a client, and yet she is. Of a sort. She’s prepared to pay him for sex. Just as female prostitutes learn a lot about what makes men tick so a male prostitute inevitably learns a lot about what makes women tick. And Julian actually likes women. He knows that Michelle wants more than a roll in the hay. And maybe he starts to want more than that too. Falling for a client is of course not recommended.

And he knows that she’s married.

And then he turns a trick in Palm Springs and it gets a bit kinky. Handcuffs and that sort of thing. That’s not Julian’s scene.

And then there’s a murder. Julian doesn’t see how he could possibly be a serious suspect and he has the crazy idea that if you’re innocent you’ll be OK. Unless someone is trying to frame you. Someone smart and ruthless.

This is definitely a neo-noir of sorts. Julian isn’t quite a classic noir protagonist. He isn’t tempted into crime by some personal flaw. He’s basically a decent guy, and apart from his mode of earning a living he’s totally law-abiding. He isn’t greedy. He likes money but he likes to earn it ethically. He’s drawn into a noir nightmare mostly by being in the wrong place at the wrong time and by the fact that without knowing what is happening he’s hopelessly out of his depth.

And the paranoia level starts to head into the extreme zone.

Michelle is not a femme fatale, except in the sense that getting involved with a woman with a very powerful husband can be hazardous and maybe she’ll drag him down without wanting to. Maybe she’s trapped in some ways as well.

Visually and stylistically this movie has serious neo-noir vibes. To a large extent it established the visual template for 80s/90s neo-noir and erotic thrillers. It’s a great-looking movie. The whole look and feel and tone of this movie marks a break with the 70s.

There’s a slight European flavour. And maybe a dash of artiness, but not in a bad way.

It has a cool detached style. It’s rather minimalist. I love the fact that we get no backstory for Julian. We don’t know a thing about his past. Schrader is confident that we will learn all we need to know about him by seeing the way he behaves now, and he’s confident that Gere is good enough to reveal Julian’s personality without needing to tell us how he feels through dialogue. And Gere is good enough.

Richard Gere is excellent. He’s not immoral but maybe he’s a little amoral. He’s rich but his occupation makes him an outsider. He doesn’t want to undermine society’s moral fabric. He’d just like society to leave him alone.

It’s a movie that avoids politics. It also avoids moralising. Julian does not consider that he is doing anything wrong. Some laws are just stupid and unnecessary.

This movie reminds me a lot of Klute. Both Bree in Klute and Julian in American Gigolo are very good prostitutes because they enjoy giving the client a genuinely satisfying experience. When Bree finds a man who offers her his love she is bewildered and hostile. When Julian finds a woman who offers him her love he has no idea how to handle the situation.

An intelligent slow-burn very stylish neo-noir. Very highly recommended. It would make a fine double bill with The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978).

The Criterion Blu-Ray looks good and includes a stack of extras.