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Superb synopsis, I'd thought I driveled about this years earlier but apparently not, we miss you HDS. Dembo is McCauley in Heat and the latter does not get made without Straight Time, among my top ten ever.Dan Warburton wrote:
Ulu Grosbard, Straight Time, 1978
Following my own advice by way of homage to the late great Harry Dean, couldn't resist a return visit to this one. Really superb. But I said that last time (2012): "Roger Ebert once wrote that any film with either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in it had to be good - so this, with both of them, is double good. Actually, it's even better than that - have been on the lookout for it since reading Jesse's comments on it here a while back, and was delighted to see it's just come out as a Talents du Cinema mid-price Zone 2 DVD. Stanton, Walsh and Theresa Russell (another fine undersung actress) are all wonderful, but the film belongs to Hoffman (whom you could say Grosbard "discovered" when he cast him in A View From The Bridge at the Sheridan Theater in NY in 1965). Read on IMDb that there was some legal hassle about final cut, with Hoffman suing WB, but I'm wondering how much better it could be. The script is as raw and honest as a Raymond Carver short story - haven't read Eddie Bunker's book on which it's based (and on which Michael Mann also had a hand, I see) but I assume many of the lines came straight from there - and Grosbard's direction is precise and economical, never getting in the way of the disturbing moral dilemma we find ourselves as viewers: how far are we prepared to go in our sympathy for Max Dembo? At what point does hero turn into antihero and even villain?"
Dan Warburton wrote:
John Farrow / Richard Fleischer, His Kind of Woman, 1951
As Michael's magnificent reviews are as rare and wondrous as meteor showers, unlike mine which are just, well, normal showers, I can do no better than cut'n'paste what he said about this last year. It's a tad long - the movie, not MRS's write-up, but is ever so entertaining. Nobody hams up Shakespeare as well as Vincent Price (remember Theatre of Blood!), and the contrast between his silly swashbuckling humour and nasty Nick (even Mitchum, knocked out cold, gets upstaged) is priceless. Over to you, Michael:
MRS wrote: “The studio's biggest assets, the screen's two biggest chests, together for the first time." A good friend with consistent, superior taste considers Mitchum the alpha and omega of male leads, and this is his favorite. Milner (Mitchum) plays unknown rake mixed up in no good who accepts a lucrative offer to simply fly to a Mexican resort and receive further instruction. As soon as he lands Jane Russell's in the crosshairs, Lenore is a famous actress vacationing with her famous actor beau Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price). Renowned more for her endowment, Jane Russell’s face is beautiful and assertive, and she sings a couple songs in Spanish. Tim Holt shows up (ugh), Charles McGraw's a hood, Raymond Burr in spare time gives us a wonderfully nervous Tony Soprano (named Nick Ferraro), and Jim Backus plays an unconscionable hump. I don't want to ruin anything else.
St. Louisan Vincent Price prima facie can come off too 30s theater, yet with sneaky unimpeachable range. Dragonwyck counts among my favorite movies full stop. Here he's an aloof, effeminate, confused goof. He's a scorchingly homosexual drip wearing a mohair hunting coat with suede right shoulder pad and this twist on Hamlet as he chambers his rifle: "Now might I drink our blood and do such bitter business the earth would quake to look upon." If there’s a fault, Price’s transatlantic articulation amalgamated with what sounds like an old southern Virginia accent ("ha-oose" for "house") turns on and off like Costner's Robin Hood. After gunning down a goon at distance, Cardigan: "Deceased! Or as you say in plain terms, gone to heaven!"
Pleats, quadruple pleats, reverse pleats, baggy trousers with a long rise, polka-dot drapes and big gauge blinds, like the interiors of the Tahoe Corleone compound. Robust use of exposed stone interiors and exteriors, I wonder if that Mayan Revival home of many Los Angeles movies wasn't filmed here. Shadows are near gaudy even for hardboiled noir. There's some handy omniscient narrator connective tissue throughout the first half, over maps too! At one point Milner irons his shirt and loads his pistol with just a muscle shirt (what my grandfather used to call it, now unfortunately best glossed as a wifebeater) tucked into dress pants, I couldn't help but think of John McClane.
My favorite part of this picture is the unabashed humor, doubtless informed by RKO's ethos of the era. Howard Hughes hired, fired and tinkered with this ad infinitum, having mob boss Robert J. Wilke replaced with Burr post-production and each scene involving Nick Ferraro reshot. Burr is sweaty, swarthy, speaks passable Italian and ironically plays the least homoerotic character in the film. I’d just gone through the complete American Library Hammett Continental Op stories before watching this so, grain of salt. It's a long movie for the vintage. Instantly into my top five noirs.
Milner (Mitchum): "I never bet on a race in my life that wasn’t fixed."
Cardigan (Price): "Stay with me bucko, this is my private hunting ground, I know it like an owl knows his tree."
Lenore (Russell): "That was real nice, you shoulda been a masseur instead."
Milner: "Instead of what?"
