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Erich von Stroheim in the noir sticks, immaculate amid shoestring seediness. "Hiya maestro, what gives?" A bit of bravura kicks things off, the camera at the back of a Mexican music hall slowly advances and ascends onto the stage during a matinee performance that's promptly cut by off-screen shots and screams. An artiste of bullets, his confession following the great fall, broken-backed. The marksman in tuxedo and monocle whose act is an extramarital tableau with a pair of living targets—the manipulative vixen (Mary Beth Hughes) and her soused husband (Dan Duryea). Seduced and betrayed by the assistant, he dives into the murderous scheme "like a man who walks through a nightmare with feet of lead," cf. Double Indemnity. Remarkably vivid apprentice work by Anthony Mann, with a dynamic sense of composition throughout: Mirrors and pans in dressing rooms to expand space, proscenium figures dwarfed by looming shadow play, a darkened room pierced by flickers from swinging pendulums. The psychosexual neuroses of Lewis' Gun Crazy and Mann's own The Furies are in place, before the ménage the protagonist has only his pistols to cultivate: "That guy wouldn't be interested in Venus unless she had a couple of guns in her girdle." His massive dome shaved in close-up, Stroheim gets a rare chance to display vulnerability. (On a cloud of amorous anticipation, he does a pirouette in his hotel suite; deep in his desperate search for the absconded siren, his Teutonic façade crumbles as magisterially as Emil Jannings'.) Shakespeare's world-as-stage philosophy is quoted and revised for the hard-boiled territory, "yeah, only some have better billing." With Steve Barclay, Lester Allen, Esther Howard, and Michael Mark. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |