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Glauber Rocha has nothing on Edgar G. Ulmer's aesthetics of hunger. The chump (Tom Neal) slumps in a greasy diner, a tune triggers the flashback, the lights dim and a flashlight barely illuminates his eyes. A piano virtuoso once upon a time, turning Brahms into boogie-woogie for zombified nightclub patrons, "all in all, a pretty lucky guy." His girlfriend (Claudia Drake) heads off to Hollywood, on the way west he thumbs a ride from a chiseler (Edmund MacDonald) and is left with a corpse, a convertible, and a new identity. The road is a purgatory for losers, runaways, patsies and predators—the hero is a pushover, the fiercest creature is the scraggly broad (Ann Savage) he unwisely picks up, a vulturette who looks "as if she'd just been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world." Ulmer's threadbare bondage-noir masterpiece grinds Double Indemnity into powdered milk, moving from one magnificently seedy setup to the next until its circular desert becomes the essence of nightmares. He floods bare sets with fog, projects stock-footage wastelands behind stationary cars, and, denied a cabaret, creates one with shadows on a wall. Poverty just heightens the desperate splendor, even the cracks in the celluloid feel like the lines of a hand. The doomed protagonist spits at the audience watching his suffering (with "that don't-make-me-laugh expression on your smug faces") yet promptly acquiesces to Savage, who, in one of cinema's truly unforgettable performances, reigns over a sadistic lampoon of male-female domesticity. Kafka's watch chain (Das Urteil) becomes a telephone wire in a squalid motel room, the camera contemplates the distressing tableau, in and out of focus. "Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all." "Your philosophy stinks, pal!" A haunted film, a whirlpool in a shoebox, a trance. With Tim Ryan, Esther Howard, and Pat Gleason. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |