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"One big battle royale all the way through," the noir dreamscape out of David Goodis and toward Ficciones. Escape from San Quentin, off a moving truck and down a hill inside a barrel, from within a circular view like a silent-film iris. (The effect is repeated in the back of a car riding toward the light at the end of a tunnel, cf. Hou's Dust in the Wind.) The fugitive hides with the mysterious socialite (Lauren Bacall), the needed disguise comes courtesy of the chatty cabbie (Tom D'Andrea) with a fish tale and a plastic-surgery recommendation. The face-rearranger (Houseley Stevenson) is an aesthete in his own seedy mind ("The artist in me wishes I could see what a nice job I have done"), kaleidoscopic hallucinations during the operation point up the baroque nature of this fable of vision and rebirth. The bandages finally come off, and there's the scarred Humphrey Bogart mug to go with the scarred Humphrey Bogart voice. City of fear, "it's in your bloodstream now..." Delmer Daves on location in San Francisco, a judicious subjective camera to advance on Montgomery's Lady in the Lake and gaze onward to Vertigo. (The trolley glides down Market Street, and Sunrise is suddenly, irresistibly visible.) Clifton Young contributes richly to the genre's gallery of grinning weasels: "I was a small-time crook up to this very moment. Now I'm a big-time crook, and I like it." Chief amid the offbeat inspirations however remains the flash of opera in Agnes Moorehead's femme fatale turn, going from teasing to haughty to stormy before drawing the curtains for a swan dive. The darkness dissipates down South America way, Teshigahara revives it in The Face of Another. With Bruce Bennett, Douglas Kennedy, and Rory Mallinson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |