Sunday, October 31, 2004
One of the best film noir; John Huston directs a cast of low lifes all blackmailing and one-upping one another. It got four Oscar nominations and is one of the NYTimes Best 1176 Films.
Jean Hagen is here for the second day in a row. Yesterday she was a comic bimbo in ADAMS RIB and today, the only sympathetic, if naive, character in this whirling cesspool. She is in love with that heel Sterling Hayden and it is totally unrequited. They have the ending together and it is a whopper. Very nice.
The thing about noir is that one becomes attached to the whirling cesspool characters in an odd and, I suppose, manipulative way. We hope that, somehow, they will succeed or overcome their nasty character defects or just fucking get away with it. They do not. So we are doubly whiplashed.
Marilyn Monroe appears here early in her career and does nicely. She dominates every scene she is in. One cannot doubt her 'potential'. She certainly has Louis Calhern wrapped around her little finger. Or whatever.
It is a great film.
I will give it a 4 out of Netflix5.
Oh. One note I cannot fit into the 'review' of the film. All of the characters in this are character regulars. None have good teeth. The age of the cap has not arrived. Nor that awful whitening thing that everyone seems to be doing today. How eerie. All that white, bright. Just like a Tide wash.
Anyway, it seems a whole lot more believable to have thugs who smoke and live hard to have bad teeth. How disrupting to see a modern film where similar types look dentally together.
