TALK ABOUT A STRANGER

d. David Bradley (1952)

An unexpectedly fantastic little film, barely an hour long, full of shadows and suspense and atmosphere, great noir-ish shots and good performances, including one from Nancy Davis, in the year that she married fading star and rising Republican Ronald Reagan.

When a young boy (Billy Gray, who is great) finds his beloved dog poisoned, he is sure that his new neighbour, a dark eyed, beetle browed man with a foreign accent who keeps himself to himself and doesn't like dogs, is responsible. Billy channels his rage and distress into investigating the mysterious man, turning the rest of the town against the new arrival in the process. In the end, his obsession almost causes a tragedy.

This film pushes all the right buttons: it spends almost half of its running time showing us how happy Billy and his scruffy little dog are together, and these scenes are so amusing and touching that when the dog is killed, we are almost as devastated as Billy. From here on, the film gathers momentum, driven by Billy who seethes with anger and fizzes with the injustice of it all. The adults he comes across (with the exception of his parents), eager for sensation, rather irresponsibly stoke up this fury and soon the town is gossiping about the new neighbour, dissecting everything from his grocery order to the cost of his watch to the stubbiness of his thumbs - 'oh, and did you know that he murdered Billy's dog?'. You know how these things go in small towns.

In the end, disaster is averted and a perfectly logical (if rather dark) answer is found. Billy calms down and, in the process, acquires not only a new dog but a new sister and a new girlfriend, so it's a happy ending of sorts, just not for the old dog.

THE ATOMIC CITY

d. Jerry Hopper (1952)

The Atomic City starts with footage of test explosions and Hiroshima and of the men and women who live and work at the Los Alamos Atomic Research Site, their faces blacked out ‘for security reasons’. Obviously, they don’t really want to be developing weaponry with the capacity to destroy the world and everything on it, but, while the ‘spirit of aggression is not yet dead in the world’ they simply have to do it.

When leading scientist Frank Harrington’s son Tommy is kidnapped, Harrington knows immediately what the ransom will be: secrets. He and his wife try to handle things without informing the authorities but, very quickly, the Harringtons learn that they themselves are under constant observation, and even their best friend is an undercover FBI agent who has infiltrated their family in order to keep a close eye on them. What follows is a taut, well scripted story with some surprising flashes of violence and cruelty: a communist courier is killed by a car bomb once he delivers his message; Dr Harrington extracts a confession using his fists; the boy, Tommy, is bricked up in a cave in the Jemez mountains* and left to die (this last one is hard to take, he’s a nice little feller) .

The Harringtons are only interested in getting their son back, of course, but, for more or less everybody else the stated priorities are, in order of importance: maintain security; catch the spies; save the kid. Cold or not, it’s still a war. In the end, they manage to more or less do all three, but not until after a great climax in which Tommy is left hanging from a cliff face.  Even though you know it will work out in the end, it’s genuinely breathless stuff, particularly as Tommy is just so gosh darned cute.    

* This area is a designated national park, and the mountains, caves and the ruins of Pueblo American civilisation here are used to provide a fascinating and unusual backdrop to the action.  

THE BURGLAR

d. Paul Wendkos (1957)

'We, the dead, welcome you'.
 

Nat Harbin (Dan Duryea, weary as hell) is a career criminal, a break in expert. He has never been caught, never been photographed, never been finger printed. Neither has he ever been particularly successful, living in a series of crummy rooms in slummy streets, eking out a living for himself and his adopted sister, Gladden (Jayne Mansfield!). They are in love with each other, but something always gets in the way: life, usually, and Nat’s higher sense of obligation and morality to the girl he has looked after since she was a kid. Maybe if things were different they could be happy, live a different life. Maybe. Nat is like a sleepwalker, locked into himself, indifferent to almost everything apart from the instinct to put one foot in front of the other. Even love is a burden. 

Nat decides that he needs a big score, so forms an ‘organisation’: him, Gladden, a whining weakling called Baylock and a sleazy psychopath called Dohmer. Together they steal a sapphire necklace from a shifty spiritualist called Sister Phoebe. It’s worth a cool $150,000, and they think they can get $80,000 for it. What they actually get is death, hunted down by a crooked cop who wants the necklace for himself.

As you might expect from a film noir based, like Nightfall, on a book by arch fatalist David Goodis, The Burglar is dark, inky black in places. The characters are lost causes, stuck on predetermined routes to sordid ends. They all need someone to talk to, someone to listen. They will end up unsung, unremembered, unburied, left in crumpled heaps or in hastily dug holes by the side of the road. The drama is played out in huge sudden close ups and in flashing action cuts, all to the blaring of an occasionally intrusive brass and vibes score. Everything about this grim little story is played big, as if it mattered, as if any of it mattered.

At the climax, in the bustling amusement arcades and tourist attractions of Atlantic City (‘the playground of the world’) the characters play out their last scenes in sudden isolation, as if they are the only people on the planet. In the end, Nat finally gets what he wanted all along: he is put of his misery. Gladden survives, the only one young enough and innocent enough to still have a shot at something else, at someone else. What happens to the necklace? Who cares?

NIGHTFALL

d. Jacques Tourneur (1957)

'That's your whole trouble, you know that? The top of your head never closed up when you were a kid. Neither did your mouth.'

Film Noir often hinges on coincidence or, perhaps more in keeping with the idiom, dumb luck. Nightfall contains a plot that is so convoluted it can scarcely be believed - but it works, it just works, and it makes for the most under-rated film I know.

I'm not going to summarise the story, other than to say it comes from the typewriter of arch pulp writer David Goodis and involves $350,000 of stolen money, a murder, two ruthless villains, a beautiful girl and an innocent man trying to clear his name, played by that most believable of fall guys, Aldo Ray*. Most of the action plays out in Wyoming, a stunning looking state of deep snow, tall mountains and great swathes of beautiful wilderness. It's not quite breathless, but it is relentless, a film of great verve and energy and momentum that is greatly aided by superb performances from just about everyone in the cast.   

I'm pretty sure that the Coen brothers watched this film before they wrote Fargo. It's by no means a rip off, but there are too many recurring elements for it to be a coincidence: a man running across a snow covered field; money buried, waiting for a thaw; a double act of killers who hate and mistrust each other, one voluble, almost reasonable, the other a psychopath; bloody death by machinery (a snow plough here, not a wood chipper). It's not a problem, it's just interesting. The Coen's clearly know their stuff, or, at least, they did: they've ploughed a very arid furrow indeed since The Big Lebowski.  

* Aldo Ray is great. Tall, heavy set, tough, but with a broken, raspy voice and blue eyes that seem permanently on the verge of tears. When he smiles, he looks about six years old.