Nightmare Alley and The Tragedy of Macbeth: Cinematic “Art”

Cate Blanchett and Bradley Cooper in Nightmare Alley.

William Lindsay Gresham’s tough, darkly lyrical 1946 novel Nightmare Alley moves from the carny life to the world of phony spiritualists – scam artists who make a living off the sorrow of rich people trying desperately to contact loved ones on the other side of the grave. (In real life Harry Houdini was one of the more celebrated marks.) Gresham’s anti-hero is Stanton Carlisle, who joins a carnival and partners up with his lover, Zeena, to revive the mentalist act she used to perform with her husband Pete, a hopeless drunk who dies when Stan hands him a flask of wood alcohol. (It’s an accident: both the poison and a flask of potable gin have been stored in the same trunk. But as Gresham writes the incident, it’s one of those sinister acts of wish fulfillment, like Bruno’s murdering Guy’s blackmailing wife in Strangers on a Train.) Stan proves to be so good at the act that he soon outgrows it and takes it on the nightclub circuit, with a younger, prettier girlfriend as his assistant – Molly, whose carny performance used to involve an electric current and an alluring skimpy costume: sex and sci-fi “magic” intertwined. That’s when he crosses paths with a higher type of parasite, a psychoanalyst named Lilith who teams up with him to take advantage of her grieving patients. Stan and Lilith become lovers too, and their main target is a fabulously wealthy man named Ezra Grindle who is suffused with guilt over the fate of the girl he impregnated when he was a young man. Gresham never lets us forget how important a role sex plays in both low and high-class scams. (The Library of America, faithful purveyor of forgotten treasures, republished the book about a quarter of a century ago in a first-rate collection called Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s.)

Beauty of Action, Beauty of Character: The Criterion Collection Release of Only Angels Have Wings

Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings

The opening twenty minutes of the 1939 Only Angel Have Wings are a marvel – emotionally and tonally double-jointed, with a loose, jocular quality and a spontaneous energy, underscored by the overlapping of Jules Furthman’s expert hard-boiled dialogue, that masks the astonishing control of the director, Howard Hawks. A pair of flyboys, Joe (Noah Beery Jr.) and Les (Allyn Joslyn), who work for a South American airmail service, pick up Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur), a singer with an evening’s layover before she’s to re-embark on the boat to Panama. They buy her drinks and offer her a steak dinner at the bar-restaurant owned by Dutchy (Sig Rumann), whose money provides the operating budget for the mail company. But their boss, Geoff Carter (Cary Grant), interrupts the meal to send Joe out on a mail run, through the rain and fog that stalled Bonnie’s ship here in the tiny town of Barranca. Joe doesn’t make it. When the weather makes his passage impractical and Geoff radios him to come on back, he’s so eager to resume his courtship of Bonnie that he insists on short-shrifting his landing rather than hanging out in the skies long enough for Geoff and his best buddy and employee Kid Dabb (Thomas Mitchell) to wave him in safely. Joe’s plane hits a tree and crashes. Bonnie’s devastated – and appalled at what she sees as a lack of gravity among Carter and the other pilots in the face of this tragedy. What she doesn’t understand at first is that their joking is a form of gallantry and their apparent insensitivity is the only way they can keep going when death is always hovering over them; unspoken grief underlines their raucousness. Eventually she gets it: when she sits down at the piano and leads some of the others in a rendition of “Some of These Days,” she cottons onto the feeling of camaraderie at Barranca Airlines. The miraculously extended episode ends with one of those unconventional depictions of community that Hawks is justly famous for.

Robert Towne: A Portrait of the Artist as a Hollywood Screenwriter

Robert Duvall, Robert Towne, and Tom Cruise on the set of Days of Thunder (1990). (Photo: Don Simpson)

Robert Towne, who died July 1, at age 89, at his Los Angeles home, established irrefutably that a screenwriter could operate as an artist. Unlike literati such as Ben Hecht and Dorothy Parker, who separated movies from their real work, and writers who catered to directors, the way Jules Furthman did to von Sternberg and Hawks, and Frank Nugent to John Ford, Towne initiated and nurtured projects that fascinated him, and he fought to get his visions on the screen.

Towne elevated his chosen form by developing a style of his own, as intricate, expressive and plainspoken as Thornton Wilder’s or Mark Twain’s. He used sly indirection, canny repetition, unexpected counterpoint, and even a unique poetic vulgarity to stretch a scene—or an entire script—to its utmost emotional capacity. He changed how Americans hear themselves, whether with the vocabulary of everyday obscenity (in 1973’s The Last Detail) or the feel-good mantras of domesticated hedonism (“You’re great”; “George is great”; “Jill is great”; “Everything is going to be great”), given satiric edge in 1975’s Shampoo.

Marlowe and Boston Strangler: Mythologies

Jessica Lange in Marlowe.

The Irish writer John Banville’s The Black-Eyed Blonde, published in 2014 and the source of the new Neil Jordan picture Marlowe, is a Raymond Chandler reset of no special distinction except a rather puzzling one. (Banville’s other output is divided between high-flown literary works like The Sea – an exquisite piece of writing – and a series of mysteries, written under the pen name Benjamin Black, that feature a pathologist named Garret Quirke.) At the climax of this tale, set in late-1950s L.A., of the disappearance of a shady Hollywood agent named Nico Peterson, which Peterson’s lover, the wealthy Clare Cavendish, has hired Marlowe to solve, a potent figure out of the gumshoe’s past, a drinking buddy named Terry Lennox, resurfaces. Lennox is the pivotal character in one of Chandler’s later books, The Long Goodbye, which begins with Marlowe’s agreeing to drive him to Tijuana, no questions asked, after the murder of his wife, and ends with the detective’s helping him to establish a new identity in Mexico. The point of The Black-Eyed Blonde, as far as I can tell, is to punish Terry – to turn him into a thoroughgoing villain. But Robert Altman and his screenwriter, Leigh Brackett (who had collaborated with William Faulkner and Jules Furthman on the most famous Marlowe film, The Big Sleep), already did that in the brilliant 1973 movie of The Long Goodbye, where Marlowe is played by Elliott Gould and Terry by the ballplayer Jim Bouton, and where the story ends very differently.

Appreciating Victor Fleming

Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in Victor Fleming's Gone with the Wind

“It’s amazing: you ask people as a trivia question ‘Who directed Gone with the Wind?” and nobody knows; you give them a second clue – it’s the same guy who directed The Wizard of Oz – and they say Mervyn LeRoy. Victor Fleming was either a wonderful director or the luckiest son of a bitch in the world.”  – Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Among the big studio-era Hollywood filmmakers whose sturdy masculinity – an affinity for Westerns and other kinds of action pictures, a love of robust characters (both male and female), a comfortableness with the physical and the outdoors, a skill for shaping the distinctive qualities of all-American movie stars – Victor Fleming has traditionally been shortchanged. John Ford has been glorified, partly because he made the most consciously pictorial movies; he was always after art, and at his best he got it, in Young Mr. Lincoln, The Long Voyage Home, How Green Was My Valley. Howard Hawks, who worked in every genre, parlayed a love of raucousness and sass and tossed-off professionalism into a hard-boiled character ethic that infused all his work, whether he was making a gangster picture like Scarface or an aviator actioner like Only Angels Have Wings or a newspaper movie-cum-romantic comedy like His Girl Friday; his movies were companionable and often so speedy (the overlapping dialogue) that they felt wired. Fleming doesn’t get the same kind of respect. One reason may be that he did his best work in the thirties and very early forties and was dead by the end of the decade, whereas Hawks and Ford continued to make movies for another couple of decades; they were still around and working, if not at the height of their talents, when the film studies programs started operating in the sixties. Another reason, ironically, is that the two most famous projects Fleming was attached to, The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, came out the same year, 1939, and because they were vastly different and he wasn’t the only director who worked on either – King Vidor directed the Kansas footage in the first after Fleming prepared it, and Fleming replaced George Cukor in the latter – Fleming has been saddled with a reputation as a hired gun.