The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life 2011 (139 minutes) written and directed by Terence Malick.

We start out with Job, in the singular, so we know we are not in for an easy ride, especially because the opening Scriptural quote has God browbeating that stiff-necked citizen ‘out of the whirlwind.’

‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?’

Sorry, never going to measure up to that one, Dad—excuse me—‘Father.’

A Western Union telegram evidently announces the death of one of the three sons, at age nineteen, without further information.

We are told at outset ‘you have nature and you have grace’, with maternal grace, the lovely Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) who accepteth all and abideth, and sometimes speaketh in a voice-under, and occasionally flieth willy-nilly in air, contending with nature or, perhaps more properly, paternal human nature, embodied here in the most high and squeaky tight person of one Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt), which seeketh only itself to please (with apologies to William Blake). 

By and by, Sean Penn turns up as Jack, the eldest son, in blighted middle age, evidently an architect, lost in a grand and vast Texas urban architectural empyrean. Like his mother, Jack also speaketh single words and phrases in voice-unders.

There is lots of texture and architecture. Lots and lots. And then some.

There is also an undulating tangerine dream that appears at the beginning and at intervals throughout. This turns out not to be Georgia O’Keefeesque representations in light of our portal of entry into this world, but the product of a 1960’s op-art light construct.

David Denby, writing for The Talk of the Town in the June 27 [2011] issue of The New Yorker, identified these images which he purports to have confounded critics as light artist Thomas Wilfred’s ‘Opus 161’ (1965-6). This artwork is a lumia (not labia) ‘composition’ which ‘employed reflective mirrors, hand-painted glass disks, and bent pieces of metal—all housed in a screened wooden cabinet…to transform beams of light produced by a series of lamps and lenses.’

Who knew?

Back up the Tree, we pick our way through leafy branches to the jazzed-up Koyaanisqatsi part of the story: more fiery volcanic and fleshy vulvar orange; planetary orbs and massive colliding crescendos of sea.

A Drastic Park dinosaur skips by.

One gets the sense that man is the measure. These kaleidoscopic images are at the very heart of what man’s head-scratching rational self cannot conceive as more than a fiercely chaotic universe.

And then we are back in the golden glow of a 1950s childhood summer on which the back screen door slams shut for the last time after Father’s plant closes and the family has to get the heck out of Waco (or Smithville, Texas, where the film was shot). We watch the Tree of Life in the familiar yard of childhood grow smaller through the rear window of the departing family station wagon.

Mr. O is not a bad guy, really. He comes from hardscrabble; he helped win the war; and he works hard to provide the best for his boys. He is an inventor with big dreams and a type-A personality. But he is a Little Guy and knows it.

His frustration is framed by the fact that he is a church organist in small town Texas in the 1950s who really could and would prefer to play Brahms and Mahler. No matter how many times Mr. O makes those organ pipes come to Jesus, he will never be satisfied that he could not have done it better that sixty-fifth-plus-one more time. This is the main thing he tried to impress upon his boys.

Sean Penn’s middle-aged Jack then reappears in a suit, crossing the blasted heath of his blighted spiritual life in cinematography so mannered that it could be a super-slick corporate advertisement for an insurance or financial planning entity, if someone slapped a logo on it.

Where the blazes is all this going?

We learn nothing more, beyond the age of about twelve or thirteen, of the boy in the telegram. He is an apparently minor character in the story, but his death at age nineteen warps the family dynamic and each family member forever beyond redemption.

Was this death caused by a military misadventure or a highway accident? Drug overdose? Happenstance tragedy? We are none the wiser. One must take it on faith that this boy's untimely death eternally damned this family. Unfortunately, faith is the one resource in precious short supply here.

What is missing in all this colossal grandeur of colliding worlds and dying-Gaul lapsed faith is a sense of the wonder in a single drop of water.

The Birth of Jazz

New Orleans 1947 United Artists (90 minutes) directed by Arthur Lubin, written by Elliot Paul and Dick Irving Hyland.

This movie, made in the early dawn of the civil rights era when swing music was evolving into bebop, does its darnedest to tell the story of the New Orleans origins of jazz. 

The main plot is hokey but earnest. Miralee Smith (Dorothy Patrick), a young Baltimore heiress with musical aspirations, comes to New Orleans in 1917 and falls in love with older, swarthy Latin casino owner Nick Duquesne, the ‘King of Basin Street’ (Arturo de Córdova), and the ‘rag time’ music she hears for the first time.

Dorothy Patrick and Arturo de Cordova with an illustrious background of jazz stars in New Orleans.

However, Mrs. Rutledge Smith (Irene Rich) wants her daughter to pursue a music career along Italian opera lines. She is opposed to her daughter’s interest in the gambler Duquesne, no less than to the awful ‘music’ the household help enjoy: ‘There’s more devil than angel in that music!’

It is a little mind-blowing when, right after you first enter Mrs. Smith’s palace, you think you hear someone upstairs playing Billie Holiday. This turns out to be Endie—Billie Holiday in a maid’s suit—accompanying herself on a piano because she thinks no one is around. Holiday reportedly was not happy about playing a maid and was difficult to work with; this was her only feature film appearance. She seems bizarrely out of place, a jazz legend singing in a maid’s get-up in a B picture surrounded by long-forgotten studio contract players.

Mrs. Rutledge Smith is one of those affluent philistines with a mawk-British accent, sashaying through silken luxury and the board-certified trappings of Western high culture which Hollywood used in its heyday to portray Eastern establishmentarians—the same kind with whom the Marx Brothers had so much fun.

As in the Marx Brothers’ movies, the fuddy-duddies do not stand a chance.

We’ll give Miralee the casino owner. But it is hard to imagine anyone not falling in love with the music, especially when the people playing it are Louis Armstrong, Woody Herman and their bands, and Holiday, among many others.

Lady Day does the theme.

Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Woody Herman in Arthur Lubin's 1947 New Orleans

The high Cs down on Basin Street leading into West End Blues could come from none other than Armstrong, who plays cornet at Duquesne’s Orpheum Cabaret. Herman and his band play the Monte Carlo Saloon. Both are fictitious saloons on Basin Street in the New Orleans district Storyville, notorious for prostitution, following the apocryphal legend that jazz was ‘born’ there.

Those interested in the origins of jazz should consult Terry Teachout’s well-researched account of Storyville’s (and Armstrong’s) role in his excellent 2009 Armstrong biography Pops.

In very short, Storyville was a small district adjacent to the French Quarter, which the New Orleans city council set up in 1897 for legalized—and segregated—prostitution. ‘The District,’ as musicians called it, was named for city councilman Sidney Story. Clubs that opened there provided some of the first regular gigs for jazz musicians. But the U.S. Navy prevailed upon the city to close the district during the war in 1917, which shuttered the clubs, put musicians out of work, and spread illegal, cut-rate prostitution throughout the city, according to Teachout.

In the movie, Armstrong introduces his band with a rap: Charlie Beal on piano, Kid Ory on slide trombone, Zutty Singleton on drums, Barney Bigard on clarinet, Bud Scott on rhythm guitar, and George ‘Red’ Callender on bass.

However, Armstrong, born in 1901 and raised in Negro Storyville, would have been just 16 or 17 when the authorities closed Storyville. He made his start with Kid Ory in 1918, then played riverboats, and migrated to Chicago in 1922, Teachout wrote.

Anachronisms aside, what makes this movie worth watching is seeing these classic jazz musicians going about their business in natural settings. The tone might seem patronizing to some viewers now, and Armstrong does the goggle-eyed clowning later disparaged by those who followed him.

In one scene, Armstrong, alone with European impresario Henri Ferber (Richard Hageman, a composer, musician and conductor in real life), noodles with something Ferber taps out on the piano.

‘Stop it, stop it: that note isn’t even in the diatonic scale!’ Ferber said.

‘Diatonic? Did I do something wrong?’ Armstrong asks, wide-eyed.

‘No, extraordinary. You are playing notes between a flat and a natural. It’s like discovering a secret scale just made for this type of music,’ Ferber replied.

‘Horn, did you hear what this gentleman is saying?’ Armstrong said.

My sense is that Armstrong knew very well what he was about. The real beauty comes when he puts his lips to his beloved cornet. The sound rings true and clear—which goes for the other musicians as well, white and black.

Anyway, as our tale is told, Storyville closes.

The music grows and spreads north to Chicago and the east and west coasts, and triumphs—though notably not in the Jim Crow South.

There is a fun scene in which Duquesne and Woody Herman make sport with a Chicago thug who demands that Duquesne give him Woody Herman for his club. Herman asks the thug to clap, then playfully accompanies the thug’s impatient clapping with his clarinet, but the thug has no idea who he is.

Old movie buffs should watch for a very young Shelley Winters as Miss Holmbright, Duquesne’s secretary in Chicago, who also uses his ticket to see Miralee perform at Symphony Hall.

The female variable—the most volatile variable in life

Дзифт (Zift) 2008 Bulgaria (94 minutes) directed by Javor Gardev; screenplay and original novel by Vladislav Todorov.

The year is 1943 and the war is far away from Yuchbunar, a hardscrabble quarter of Sofia, Bulgaria, where tender young toughs with exuberantly obscene tattoos chew road asphalt they call ‘zift’ and wax philosophical. 

Zift, shot in black and white, looks like the result of mixing a Bulgarian writer well versed in American pulp detective fiction with a Bulgarian director who knows his classic film noir, Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie. These elements soak like olives in a kind of sweet naiveté lost long-ago in the West.

Boy meets girl. A pregnancy ensues, requiring an apartment and a job. The ‘job’ involves the boy, the girl, and an older male accomplice robbing a Russian Tsarist émigré who has an African statue with a large diamond concealed in its erect, screw-off phallus. The team botches the robbery; the male accomplice kills the victim and the boy takes the fall for the murder.

Twenty years later, released early from prison for having introduced ‘communist enlightenment into prison life,’ the boy—Lev Kaludov Zheliazkov, known as ‘Molets’ [Moth] (Zakhari Bakharov)—is met at the prison gate by minions of his former male accomplice—‘Pluzheka’ [Slug] (Vladimir Penev)—now a major in state security, convinced that Molets knows where the diamond is and determined to get it.   

Pluzheka first tortures, and then poisons Molets, leaving him less than twenty four hours to uncover the secret. Molets needs the antidote but seeks salvation.

In the background flutters lovely femme fatale Ada (Tanya Ilieva), Molets’ wife and the mother of the son he never saw, whom Molets nicknamed ‘Bogomolka’ [Praying Mantis]. Ada vamps as ‘Gilda’ at the Luna Nightclub. She may be in league with Pluzheka. She likes having sex with Molets. She waits to see who will come out on top.

‘The most volatile variable in life—the female variable,’ Molets observes, more as color commentator than direct participant.

Vladislav Todorov, who wrote the screenplay and novel on which it is based, said in an interview that he intended Zift to be an homage to James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). It seems an easier fit and more natural heir to Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

The fun part of this movie is watching a tall tale get taller as this madcap romp hurtles forward and various people share their crackpot stories and theories, vamp, belch, ignite farts, and show off their crazy tattoos along the way in the context of so-called Really-Existing Socialism.

‘For the soul, the eyes are like peas under a princess’ mattress. They don’t let her rest,’ the one-eyed philosopher Van Vurst-Okoto [Van Wurst the Eye] (Mikhail Mutafov) tells Molets, his prison cell mate.

The tattoos must be seen to be believed. Among other things, Molets has the insides of a woman’s legs tattooed from his upper inner arm to his chest, centered on the hair in his underarm, causing the image to spread her legs when he extends his left arm, such as placing his hand pensively behind his neck.

An acquaintance, Raycho Kozhata ‘The Skin’ (Yosif Shamli), has a clearly recognizable foot-high Disney Snow White centered on his upper back. Her bulbous breasts spill over her dindl, and she is surrounded by seven circle-jerking dwarves.

‘When Raycho got Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs tattooed on his back, he won the respect of all the kids in the ‘hood,’ Molets says.

Near the end, when Molets arrives at club where Ada works, he sizes up the bar as well as ever Spillane’s Mike Hammer did: ‘The bar looks dejected, idle, extramarital.’

Sitting down at the bar, Molets says to no one in particular that ‘a book called Candide...asks what is the human thing to do: to drift around the world with no direction or goal and be raped by a bunch of vulgarian Bulgarians, or to sit down on your warm butt in life’s flower bed?’

            A middle-aged woman at the bar (Boika Velkova) replies with a raspy voice: ‘You don’t get to choose. Man squats down in life’s flower bed anyway, but only after he’s been raped by a bunch of vulgarian Bulgarians.’ She punctuates this aperçu with a raucous laugh.

Loudspeakers broadcast patriotic music and an authoritative voice (Marian Marinov) regularly enunciates the time, an echo from the country’s communist past, as Molets’ time runs down. But where is the diamond? The characters’ best consolation seems to be, the deeper the shit, the less the moral damage.

The secret is in the street grit.

Facing facts

Make Way for Tomorrow 1937 Paramount (92 minutes) produced and directed by Leo McCarey, screenplay by Viña Delmar, based on the 1934 Josephine Lawrence novel The Years Are So Long, dramatized by Helen and Nolan Leary.

            Make Way for Tomorrow is a Hollywood romance unlike any other. Orson Welles reportedly said that it would make a stone cry. It did this stone.

The story at the center of four adult siblings and their spouses bickering over what to do with suddenly homeless Ma and Pa is this elderly couple’s fifty-year loving bond, conveyed poignantly and with humor by two veteran character actors.

It is the late part of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the worst seemed to be over. Flagging federal economic stimuli resulted in a deep recession, and the Social Security Act, signed into law in 1935, still was being challenged in the courts by Republicans.

Imagine that.

A bank forecloses on 70-year-old Barkley ‘Pa’ Cooper (Victor Moore), out of work for four years and as long delinquent with his mortgage payments. Pa and Lucy ‘Ma’ Cooper (Beulah Bondi) must leave the home where they have lived their entire adult lives and raised five children, now middle-aged adults with their own lives, families and homes.

No home, no work, no savings, no Social Security safety net: to whom are homeless and elderly Bark and Lucy Cooper to turn?

Their middle-aged children mouth the conventional pieties and twit each other’s guilt. A clever script and good character actors have fun playing up the siblings’ selfish sensitivities and hypocrisy, but the parents and their grown children know there is little chance that they can move back into each others’ lives in any practical way. 

The film takes on these freighted issues without punch-pulling sentimentality or miracle solutions. And, despite what they say or tell each other, everyone is clear-eyed enough to realize that the only options are compromises that please no one.

Son George Cooper (Thomas Mitchell) and his wife Anita (Fay Bainter) agree to let Ma stay with them for three months in their Manhattan apartment, sharing a bedroom with their 17-year-old daughter Rhoda (Barbara Read).

Daughter Cora (Elisabeth Risdon), who lives with her husband Bill Payne (Ralph M. Remley) in the same rural town as her folks, concedes to allow Pa to sleep on their parlor couch for three months. 

Thus Bark and Lucy, who have lived together since they were in their early 20s, must split up. Lucy hopes, like Mr. Micawber, that something will turn up; Bark lets Lucy pretend, but he knows that nothing can. Though Lucy is hardly delusional.

Rhoda, listening to her grandmother moon about Grandpa getting a job so they can live together alone again, tells Grandma to ‘face facts.’ Lucy replies:

‘When you’re seventeen and the world's beautiful, facing facts is just as slick fun as dancing or going to parties. But when you're seventy, well, you don't care about dancing, you don’t think about parties anymore, and about the only fun you have left is pretending that there ain’t any facts to face. So would you mind if I just went on pretending?’

The parents do not belong in the midst of their children’s lives and families, but their mutual incompatibilities only intensify when the younger generation grudgingly tolerates their aging parents rather than accepts them as adults.  

            The more the Coopers tiptoe around Lucy and treat her like a little old lady, the more she disrupts their busy Manhattan life just by being herself and trying to make the best of everyone’s difficult situation. In a remarkable, Chekhovian scene, Bark telephones Lucy one evening at the Cooper’s apartment while Anita is giving a bridge lesson to a room full of the socially ambitious. Lucy speaks to Bark in the same room as though no one were there, to which the guests, who cannot help but overhear, first listen with amusement, then embarrassment, then empathy for this lonely woman separated from her husband. 

Meanwhile, Bark, living like a fraternity boy on the front couch of a daughter who treats him more like a prison inmate than a family member, has the temerity to catch pneumonia from sleeping in the draughty parlor.

The children convince Pa to visit daughter Addie in California ‘for his health.’ Ma beats George to the punch when she tells him that she wants to go to the old age home where she knows they plan to send her anyway, but on the condition that they never tell Bark.

The last third of the film is the afternoon Bark and Lucy spend alone together in Manhattan before Bark has to catch his evening train west. They interact humorously with various people and each other as they reminisce about their life together, and return to the hotel where they honeymooned. They celebrate their friendship, love and spiritual independence, and end up drinking, dining and dancing—and skipping the send-off dinner their children prepare for them.

Amours impropres

스캔들 - 조선 남녀 상열지사 Seukandeul - Chosun nam nyo sang yeol jisa (Untold Scandal) 2003 South Korea (124 minutes) directed and co-written by E J-Yong (Lee Jae-yong)

This reimagining into early modern Korea of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ novel Les Liaisons dangereuses is lovely to look at and works surprisingly well, a lot like Stephen Frears’ 1988 movie Dangerous Liaisons.

The narratives of Dangerous Liaisons and Untold Scandal appear essentially to derive from the same selection of letters from Choderlos de Laclos’ epistolary novel; both are set in the late eighteenth century in their respective countries.

Letters are a key part of Untold Scandal, but the Korean narrative has a secondary source: the illustrated memoires of the love affairs of Cho Won (Bae Yong-joon). Cho Won stands in for Choderlos de Laclos’ Vicomte Sébastien de Valmont (John Malkovich in Frears’ movie). During the opening credits, a voiceover introduces this story while a hand turns the pages of a Korean illustrated manuscript.

Cho Won, like Valmont, is an aristocrat and a notorious seducer of well-born women. Unlike Valmont, he is an accomplished aquarellist who makes erotic paintings of the women he seduces. Throughout the film, and with the same relish and flair he brings to lovemaking, we see Cho Won make highly skilled paintings of subjects the camera views over his shoulder. In the opening scene, he is painting a Maya in her private quarters while a religious ceremony is taking place outside, coloring in a nipple as the ceremony reaches its climax and having sex with his subject as it concludes.

Cho Won is the cousin and unrequited lover of Lady Cho (Lee Mi-sook), the evil genius who drives the plot, who takes the part of Choderlos de Laclos’ Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil (Glenn Close in Frears’ movie).

Lady Cho’s problem is that neither she nor her husband Lord Yu’s three concubines have produced a male heir. The elders deem that Yu take another concubine ‘to continue the family line’: Lee So-oak (Lee Soh-yeon) a teenager of good but not noble family.

Lady Cho, a smiling and compliant dragon, hides her dark resentment of what Yu, in front of her with an almost naive relish, calls this ‘flower just about to blossom.’ She plots to avenge the bold-faced effrontery of this publicly sanctioned adultery by having Cho Won impregnate So-oak, then to wait for as long as it takes to tell Yu on his deathbed that his male heir is not his son. This detail differs from Choderlos de Laclos and Frears, though So-oak is based on the teenage Cécile Volanges (Uma Thurman in Frears’ movie) whom Merteuil similarly tasks Valmont to seduce to embarrass a former lover. Lee Soh-yeon is touchingly convincing as a coltish adolescent.

Like Valmont, Cho Won does not see a teenager as a challenge worthy of his subtle science. He has set his sights on Lady Jeong Hee-yeon (Jeon Do-yeon), a beautiful and virtuous young widow. Hee-yeon is a pious Catholic (Catholicism came to Korea via China in 1777), faithful to the memory of her husband. She is the stand-in for the novel’s Mme. Marie de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer in Frears’ movie), whose husband was abroad.

As in the novel and the Frears movie, there is a clueless young man, Kwon In-ho (Cho Hyeon-jae), curious about love and easily manipulated by Lady Cho and Cho Won, though whose misplaced revenge turns out lethal in the end for Cho Won.

This ‘misplaced revenge’ epitomizes a problem central to all three works. Devising schemes to manipulate people is for the most part a rational process, but the people manipulated often act in unpredictable ways.

            Irrational behavior brings a precipitous end to the story, prompting the disgraced Lady Cho’s escape. But the pinnacle irony is that her plot succeeds due to the same social conventions that inspired her resentment. The ‘untold scandal’ appears in an inset frame at the end of the credits: So-oak in Lady Cho’s place, pregnant with Cho Won’s child.

            Knowing this outline takes nothing from watching the story unfold by the art of this appealing cast, nor the wealth of detail and the visual treats this movie presents in elaborate costumes, sets, landscapes, and Cho Won’s watercolor compositions.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.moviemaze.de/media/trailer/view/flash/26513/

Korean trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiyJhumchlA

Dancing on thin air

Man on Wire 2008 BBC Discovery UK (94 minutes) Directed by James Marsh.

It is fascinating to watch: a self-taught French aerialist inspires friends to help him do progressively more difficult feats, with the ultimate idea of taking on New York’s brand new World Trade Center twin towers.

On the evening of August 6, 1974, Philippe Petit and his associates sneaked a ton of equipment—mostly steel cable—to the roofs of the North and South Towers. Working through the night, two-man teams on each building spanned the 200 feet between the towers with a cable more than a quarter of a mile above the street, which supported Petit for 45 minutes the next morning as he crossed eight times, a week before he turned 25. 

It is fascinating, because one gets the sense right away that Petit is like a hero of legend on a quest. He has an extraordinary talent, and he is filled with the inspiration that he must, and driven by the inner conviction that he shall, fulfill his quest.

He knew that death was the certain consequence of a mistake, but his quest was not about defying death and danger to seek celebrity—which he certainly did achieve. There was no ‘why,’ Petit said. He followed an inner voice, a voice that each time drew him out on the wire. Of his World Trade Center walk, he later said:

‘I had to make a decision to shift my weight from one foot anchored on the building to one foot anchored on the wire. This is probably—I don’t know—probably the end of my life to step on that wire. On the other hand, something that I could not resist, and I didn’t make any effort to resist, called me upon the cable. And death is very close.’

He said similar things before walking a wire between the twin towers of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in 1971 and the Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia in 1973.

The source of Petit’s charisma is that like the heroes of legend, he must be pure of heart to undertake the quest and to attract helpers. If this sounds naïve to the modern ear, it is borne out by what Petit and his helpers tell the interviewer.

Petit and Annie Allix, his girl friend at the time, speaking decades after the fact, each said that Petit viewed the feats as capers like a bank robbery, but fun, peaceful capers in which something beautiful was given to the world, nothing was destroyed and no one hurt. The film includes home movie-like footage of Petit and his friends frolicking as they prepare him for these capers in the French countryside southeast of Paris.

They do not come across as thrill-seekers, but inspired and technically proficient young people, sweet and a bit naïve, who believe in Petit’s ability and want to see him bring off the capers.

Jean-Louis Blondeau, a friend from Petit’s childhood, played a key role of challenging Petit to insure that he and the team had thought through as many of the difficulties as possible. Allix gave Petit emotional support and encouragement. The helpers each seem to have felt that they had a role in something larger than themselves or Petit.

There also is a sense of sadness after the fact, that the thing which brought these young people together ended when the hero fulfilled his quest. It had not been about a friendship, but facilitating Petit’s ascent into another plane, as though with a figure of myth or legend.

Decades after the event, Blondeau, who helped rig the cable on the roof of South Tower, became emotional when he said that after Petit’s skywalk, ‘[t]here was something broken, probably, in this friendship. It doesn’t matter because…we did it.’

Allix and Petit had been in love, but Petit as though walked into another life that day, and the middle-aged Allix said. ‘Our relationship was meant to end there and it was beautiful that way,’ she said.

These times seem happy, light and distant in the aftermath of a feat by another group of young people that brought the same towers down a quarter century later. It is odd to see footage of the buildings going up that so publicly came down on September 11, 2001, to see workers pouring the same foundations to which the towers were reduced.

The title Man on Wire is what appeared in capital letters on the police report charging Petit with criminal trespass and disorderly conduct—charges that were dropped. His verve and passion as a much older man gives a sense of the young hero who inspired helpers to assist his quest.

‘To me, it’s so simple that life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion. To refuse to taper yourself to rules. To refuse your own success. To refuse to repeat yourself. To see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge. And then you are going to live your life on a tightrope,’ Petit said.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIawNRm9NWM

A lead-pipe cinch

Illegal 1955 Warner Brothers (88 minutes) directed by Lewis Allen, written by W. R. Burnett and James R. Webb.

A blonde in a white bathrobe getting ready for a shower in front of a mirror turns and screams when a dark sleeved forearm holding a .45 automatic handgun comes around the doorjamb and blasts six shots. 

Police pick up the usual suspect—the victim’s hapless boyfriend—right away.

At trial, defendant Edward Clary (DeForest Kelley, better known later as Star Trek’s Dr. Leonard McCoy) claims his innocence with a gentle, stricken face, but District Attorney Victor Scott (Edward G. Robinson) is a cocksure, hard-charging prosecutor who has Clary right where he wants him—dead to rights in front of a jury. Scott hates to lose, and he rarely does.

This case is no different. Moreover, Scott’s successful prosecution of Clary is the final feather he needs to toss his cap in the ring for governor. But all Scott’s success as though falls apart when it turns out moments before Clary goes to the electric chair that he was innocent and Scott cannot save him.

Scott resigns, takes time to regain his bearings, and before long finds himself on the other side of the aisle in the criminal courts, as determined as ever to win. ‘I’d rather see a hundred guilty men go free than convict another innocent man,’ Scott says.

Despite the disparagements of his former associates, adversaries, a cynical press and the general public, especially when he takes on mob big shot Frank Garland (the veteran heavy Albert Dekker) as a client, what rings true about this story is that Scott remains the same tough, ethical, client-serving lawyer at the bar.

And true to the genre, it is Scott’s involvement with the mob that hatches the movie’s main plot and gets this classic film noir airborne.

Angel O’Hara (Jayne Mansfield in her film debut) appears to be connected with Garland in more ways than sitting around his office playing the piano and answering the telephone. Her looks distract the boys; she pays a lot of attention to her surroundings. She is not a femme fatale, but those who treat her like a bimbo may end up paying for it. 

Robinson’s larger-than-life Victor Scott is fun to watch in the courtroom. In one scene, he does what many trial lawyers must fantasize doing when he challenges the veracity of a smug witness he suspects to be stretching the truth by setting that witness up to take a clean one on the chin.

Prosecutors charged Scott’s client Joseph Carter (Jay Adler) with manslaughter for killing a man he evidently hit in the head with a lead pipe. Scott does not believe that the state’s only witness, a man named Taylor (Henry Kulky), is telling the truth,

On cross-examination, Scott suggested to Taylor that in the bar fight which preceded the fatal incident, Carter had knocked Taylor unconscious, so that he could not possibly have witnessed the alleged offense.

The beefy Taylor countered that Carter could not possibly have knocked him out. When Scott suggested that he and Carter are about the same size, Taylor scoffed:

‘An old man like you couldn’t knock me out. I got an iron jaw.’

‘Not even if you weren’t expecting the blow?’

‘Not even if I held up my chin like this and let him hit it.’

‘Well, that’s all, Mr. Taylor. Thank you very much.’

Then Scott, busily sorting papers at counsel table, connected with a swift money shot to Taylor’s purportedly ‘iron’ jaw as he passed Scott leaving the witness stand, coldcocking him before the bench. The prosecutor was too gape-mouthed to say a word and the court promptly granted Scott’s motion for dismissal in the interest of justice. 

And all for a $2 fee…

(This movie double bills on the same CD with the Mitchum-Greer noir romantic comedy The Big Steal)