Kubrick was 27 when he shot this, with Jim Thompson writing the talk, and the talk is where the rot gets in. George the teller can’t keep his mouth shut around his wife, and Marie Windsor plays that wife like she’s grading his existence at the kitchen table. Every scene they share is the real robbery. The famous structure, the same afternoon replayed from different corners of the scheme, usually gets filed under “gimmick.” I think it’s a moral argument. Johnny believes a plan can hold human weakness at arm’s length, and the movie keeps rewinding to show the weakness already in the room. Even the narrator’s official-sounding timestamps don’t add up. I’ve checked. They don’t. It doesn’t matter.

Some history the legend leaves out: the whole picture cost around $330,000, and United Artists had so little faith in it that it went out as the bottom half of double bills. Thompson, who wrote most of what people quote, got fobbed off with an “additional dialogue” credit and stayed sore about it for years. And when the veteran Lucien Ballard swapped in a different lens to fake a tracking shot the young director wanted, Kubrick, twenty-seven and directing his first real budget, told him to put the 25mm back on or leave the set. Ballard stayed.

No shadows to hide in here, either. Ballard lights the offices and locker rooms flat and bright, like evidence photos taken before the crime.

Then a cheap suitcase, a small dog, money in the wind. Sterling Hayden’s last line is barely a shrug. Best shrug in American movies.

See you same time next week…

This Week on TCM

_{All times listed are Pacific PST.}

Friday 7/10 @ 8PM: They Live by Night (1949). After an unjust prison sentence, a young innocent gets mixed-up with hardened criminals and a violent escape. Cast: Cathy O’Donnell, Farley Granger, Howard Da Silva. 2 hours.

Friday 7/10 @ 10PM: Gun Crazy (1950). Bart Tare and Annie Laurie Starr share a passion for firearms and money, and together the two go on a murderous crime spree. Cast: Peggy Cummins, John Dall, Berry Kroeger. 1 hour 45 mins.

Saturday 7/11 @ 12AM: Night and the City (1950). A London hustler has ambitious plans that never work out. Cast: Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, Googie Withers. 1 hour 45 mins.

Saturday 7/11 @ 10:15PM: The Killing (1956). Career criminal Johnny Clay plans the perfect crime before he goes straight and marries his fiancee, but greed and jealousy makes everything go wrong. Cast: Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards. 1 hour 30 mins.

Sunday 7/12 @ 12AM & 10AM: Blues in the Night (1941). The members of a traveling jazz band try to keep their leader from drinking himself to death. Cast: Priscilla Lane, Richard Whorf, Betty Field. 1 hour 30 mins.

Wednesday 7/15 @ 6:15AM: Shadow of a Woman (1946). A bride begins to believe that her new husband is intentionally starving his son from a previous marriage in order to get the insurance claim. Cast: Helmut Dantine, Andrea King, Don McGuire. 1 hour 30 mins.

Wednesday 7/15 @ 7:45AM: Chase a Crooked Shadow (1958). A man shows up at a woman’s villa claiming to be her presumably deceased brother. Cast: Richard Todd, Anne Baxter, Herbert Lom. 1 hour 30 mins.

Wednesday 7/15 @ 11AM: Shadow on the Wall (1950). A little girl witnesses her stepmother’s murder but represses the memory. Can she recover it in time to save her innocent dad from execution? Cast: Ann Sothern, Zachary Scott, Gigi Perreau. 1 hour 30 mins.

Wednesday 7/15 @ 12:30PM: Cast a Dark Shadow (1957). A wife-killer marries an innocent barmaid and plots her death. Cast: Margaret Lockwood, Dirk Bogarde, Kay Walsh. 1 hour 30 mins.

Friday 7/17 @ 8PM @ The Asphalt Jungle (1950). When a jewel heist plunges an underworld team into double-cross and disaster, the streets of their urban jungle are washed with tension and danger. Cast: Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, Jean Hagen. 2 hours.

Friday 7/17 @ 10:00PM PDT: In a Lonely Place (1950). A self-destructive screenwriter is accused of murder, and his troubles multiply when he falls in love with the sultry neighbor who is his alibi. Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy. 1 hour 45 mins.

Now Streaming

He Ran All the Way (1951), Amazon Prime Video. John Garfield’s last picture, made while the blacklist was closing around everyone involved. He holds a family hostage in their own apartment for 77 minutes and somehow you still feel worse for him than for them. Nobody did cornered like Garfield.

Director: John Berry.

Cast: John Garfield, Shelley Winters, Wallace Ford.

Bottoms Up

The Last Word

Equal parts gin, green Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur, and lime juice. Shake hard, strain, up, no garnish. Poured tonight for John Garfield's final picture, streaming above. The name felt appropriate.

• 3/4 oz Gin

• 3/4 oz Green Chartreuse

• 3/4 oz Maraschino Liqueur (preferably Luxardo)

• 3/4 oz Fresh lime juice

• Garnish: Luxardo cherry

Instructions:

1. Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker and fill with ice.

2. Shake vigorously for 10–15 seconds until thoroughly chilled.

3. Strain the mixture into a chilled coupe or cocktail glass.

4. Drop in a Luxardo cherry for garnish.

From the Files

Original press advertisements for THEY WON’T BELIEVE ME (1947)

The Feature: They Won’t Believe Me (1947)

Currently streaming on HBO MAX with a subscription.

Seventy-nine years ago this week, on July 16, 1947, RKO premiered a film in New York built on one perverse casting decision, with the rest of the country getting it shortly after. Robert Young, radio’s most dependable nice guy and the future star of Father Knows Best, plays Larry Ballentine, a man on trial for murdering his girlfriend. His own lawyer describes him as guilty of “many derelictions but not murder,” which is about as warm as anyone gets on the subject of Larry Ballentine.

The reverse casting was the point. Audiences trusted Young’s face, and the film spends 95 minutes using that trust against them. Ballentine takes the stand and narrates his own story: a marriage to Gretta (Rita Johnson) made for money, an affair with Janice (Jane Greer) that Gretta buys her way out of by purchasing him a Los Angeles brokerage firm, then a second affair with a young secretary named Verna (Susan Hayward). Three women, one cad, and a script that keeps him talking long enough to hang himself. When Verna dies in a car wreck on the road to Reno, Ballentine lets the police believe the body is his wife’s. Things do not improve from there.

The film belongs as much to its producer as its director. Joan Harrison came up as Alfred Hitchcock’s screenwriter and right hand before becoming one of the only women producing in 1940s Hollywood, and her pictures ran sardonic and cruel in ways her directors’ other work often didn’t. Irving Pichel never made another film like this one. Harrison made several. Add Harry J. Wild’s photography, fresh off Murder, My Sweet (1944), and you get a courtroom melodrama shot like a confession.

A contemporary reviewer blamed the film’s nastiness on the influence of Double Indemnity (1944) and James M. Cain’s brand of adultery and middle-class rot, which was meant as a complaint and reads today as a blurb. And the ending, which stays unspoiled here, is one of the strangest verdicts in the whole noir cycle. Seventy-nine years later, people still argue about it.

RKO later cut the picture to 80 minutes for reissue, and that shortened version was the only one in circulation for decades. The full 95-minute cut was restored in 2021, so the film can finally be seen at the length New York audiences got on this week in 1947. It remains one of the more underrated entries in the RKO cycle, mostly because nobody expects the man from Father Knows Best to be the worst person in the picture.

This Friday’s Femme Fatale

That’s it, until next time…

See you in the shadows,

Film Noir Confidential 💋

Sidney Falco is a small businessman. That’s the detail the movie’s reputation buries. Tony Curtis plays him as a press agent whose office doubles as his bedroom, with a secretary he can barely pay and one supplier who controls the whole market: J.J. Hunsecker, the columnist who decides which of Sidney’s clients exist this week. Burt Lancaster plays J.J. from behind his glasses like a man reviewing invoices. “Match me, Sidney” is remembered as menace, and it is, but it’s also a supplier reminding a vendor what the relationship costs.

Everyone remembers the venom. The venom is real. But listen to what the venom is about: placement, exclusives, delivery, terms. Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman wrote the poison, and Lehman knew the trade from the inside; he’d worked for a Manhattan press agent and escaped to tell it. Everyone in the trade also knew exactly who J.J. was: Walter Winchell, the most feared columnist in America, with the serial numbers barely filed off. The writing itself was a crisis. Lehman’s health gave out and his doctor ordered him off the picture, so Clifford Odets came in for a three-week polish and stayed for months, pages sometimes going straight from his typewriter to the set the same day the scene was shot. James Wong Howe shot the city at night, on location, and the neon is ravishing, but the cruelest scenes happen at tables in the 21 Club, over drinks nobody is enjoying.

The film flopped because 1957 audiences didn’t want their two most likable stars playing men this ugly. Fair. What I’d tell those audiences now: the ugliness isn’t the subject. The subject is that it’s a job, that the job has a market structure, and that Sidney is very good at it. The dark alley never touches him. The favor economy does.

Start with the title. The most famous film noir ever made is named after a policy clause.

Walter Neff isn’t a criminal who wandered into an insurance office. He’s a salesman, a good one, eleven years with the firm, and he plans a murder the way he’d structure a sale: know the product, know the fine print, control the paperwork. Fred MacMurray plays him, and if you remember MacMurray best from My Three Sons, that’s not a problem. It’s the joke Wilder built: the most trustworthy man on the block, calmly dictating how he did it. Phyllis doesn’t seduce him into it, not really. The anklet gets the credit, but what hooks Walter is professional vanity, the itch of a man who has spent a decade watching people try to beat the house and wants to prove the house can be beaten by someone who knows the odds.

Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler wrote it snarling at each other, and the friction shows in the best way. But the relationship that holds the movie together isn’t Walter and Phyllis. It’s Walter and Keyes, the claims investigator with the little man in his chest, cigars lit across a desk, an office friendship so warm it shames every romance in the genre. The murder isn’t undone by cops or conscience. It’s undone by an actuary who can’t make the numbers sit still.

Here’s the piece of history most write-ups skip: Wilder shot a different ending. Neff dying in the gas chamber, Keyes watching through the glass. Five days of shooting, $150,000, and Wilder called it some of the best work he ever directed. He cut it anyway. The censors found it “unduly gruesome,” but Wilder’s real reason was better: the story was between the two men in the office, and the dictaphone scene was already the execution. The footage has never been found. And James M. Cain, who wrote the source novel and had every reason to be territorial, said it was the only picture made from his books with things in it he wished he’d thought of himself.

They plot the killing in a supermarket, among the canned goods. Sunlight through the aisles. Wilder knew exactly what he was saying: this is a crime of the payroll class, planned between errands. The whole mythology of noir came out of this movie, and so did the truth underneath it. Walter confesses into a dictaphone, in an office, to a colleague. It ends as an interoffice memo.

Harry Fabian has one genuinely good idea in a life full of bad ones: break the monopoly on London wrestling. The market exists, the demand is real, and he’s even secured the one asset money can’t buy, Gregorius the Great, the legendary old wrestler who happens to be the father of Kristo, the man who owns the racket. As a business plan it’s almost sound. What Harry doesn’t have is capital, and Night and the City is two hours of watching a man try to raise a few hundred pounds from people who all know better.

Everyone in this movie runs a business. Kristo runs wrestling like a utility. Phil Nosseross runs his nightclub and his marriage on the same sour books. Helen buys her way out of both with a liquor license that turns out to be forged, the film’s most casually brutal joke about what escape costs. Richard Widmark plays Harry with such transparent hunger that you can’t look away, a hustler who lies to everyone and convinces only himself.

Jules Dassin shot it in London while the blacklist closed in on him, and the history here is better than most scripts. Darryl Zanuck shipped Dassin overseas ahead of the subpoenas and, by Dassin’s own account, told him to shoot the expensive scenes first, so the studio couldn’t afford to fire him once the names were named. It worked long enough to finish the picture. There are also two versions of the film, cut differently for Britain and America, each with its own composer and score; the American one is the knife. All of it has the quality of a man making something because he doesn’t know when he’ll be allowed to make anything again. The final chase is the genre distilled: a man running through a city that has already decided he won’t make it, toward a river that is simply waiting. And even the manhunt is commerce. Kristo doesn’t scream for revenge. He posts a price.

In a Lonely Place looks like the opposite film, a Hollywood murder story, and is secretly the same one. Bogart’s Dixon Steele is a screenwriter in a career slump, and the movie is exact about the workplace of it: the agent who covers for him, the producers he despises, the talent that can’t be separated from the temper. Gloria Grahame falls for him and then does the quiet arithmetic every Ray woman ends up doing, measuring what she loves against what it will cost her. Ray and Grahame were married while they shot it, and the marriage was already over. It’s in every frame. It’s also in the script’s bones: the ending as written had Dix strangle Laurel, then sit down to type the last line of his screenplay while the police arrived. Ray actually shot that version, hated it, then cleared the set of everyone but his actors and a skeleton crew and improvised something quieter and worse: two people who know the exact moment a thing died. He said later he couldn’t accept that violence was the only way out of the story.

The French New Wave called Ray a poet. Fine, but we should be specific: he was the poet of what breaks in ordinary rooms, and of whether anything can be salvaged afterward. Usually his answer was no. He kept asking anyway.

Read more