Gangsters of love

Daisy Kenyon 1947 Twentieth Century Fox (99 minutes) produced and directed by Otto Preminger; cinematography, Leon Shamroy; set decoration by Thomas Little and Walter M. Scott; edited by Louis Loeffler; screenplay by David Hertz, based on the novel by Elizabeth Janeway.

This is a love triangle tale told as a detective story, with beautifully stylized mis-en-scène, camera work and lighting, a keen eye for detail, and a seasoning of social issues. 

These issues include extramarital sex, child abuse, and the psychological injuries of soldiers coming home from war. The movie also comments on the racist treatment of American-born and -raised Nisei Japanese, a number of whom served with distinction in Europe.

The plot is straightforward. Daniel O’Mara (Dana Andrews) is a bright, ambitious lawyer from a hardscrabble background who married into the family of prominent Manhattan attorneys and became a partner in the family firm.

His skills as a litigator and lobbyist carry the firm. He patronizes his law partner father-in-law—‘Sugarplum,’ ‘Dew Drop,’ or ‘Walking Dead’ Coverly (Nicholas Joy), the apparent lightweight heir to a legal legend father—as well as his neurotic Upper East Side society wife, Lucille (Ruth Warrick).

Played by the low-key Andrews, the star of Otto Preminger’s 1944 classic Laura and William Wyler’s Oscar-sweeping The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), O’Mara at first comes off as a confident, entitled alpha-type used to getting his way.

The O’Mara family dynamic is complex. O’Mara’s 13- and 11-year old daughters, Rosamund (Peggy Ann Garner) and Marie (Connie Marshall), call him ‘Dan’ rather than ‘Dad.’ They take their cues from him in gaming their emotionally insecure mother. Rosamund challenges her mother for Dan’s affection; Lucille takes out her frustration at being patronized by Dan and outplayed by the girls by physically abusing Marie.

Dana Andrews, Peggy Ann Garner, Conniie Marshall, Nicholas Joy and Ruth Warrick in Daisy Kenyon. 

Daisy Kenyon (Joan Crawford) is the ‘other woman.’ Kenyon, O’Mara’s long-time mistress, is a professional illustrator who lives and works in a dream Greenwich Village walkup apartment of yesteryear—the more dreamlike for being on a West 12th Street corner created on a Hollywood studio lot.

Despite their history, her feelings for O’Mara and everything he tells her, Kenyon knows that he will never divorce his wife and leave his comfortable circumstances to be with her. He has too good a set-up as things are.

Kenyon has been seeing Peter Lapham (Henry Fonda), whom she met socially. Lapham, an Army master sergeant, is a Yankee hull designer from Cape Cod who joined the Army after his wife’s death in an automobile accident at the beginning of the war. He was affected by his war experience in Europe, wounded twice, and stayed in the service in Germany after the war, depressive and still not over his wife’s death.

Kenyon feels that she must get her life on track by breaking up finally with her charming, attractive lover who is never going to leave his wife and family to be with her, and making a relationship with a partner who will, such as the Christopher Marlowe-quoting, ‘nice but a little unstable’ Lapham.

She also appears to have a close relationship with Mary Angelus (Martha Stewart), a fashion model with whom she works. Angelus is lovely in black and white and gets a lot more screen time than usual bit-part characters. This has suggested to some critics that Preminger meant to intimate Kenyon’s ambiguous sexual orientation, at a time when the movie industry’s morals code put the topic strictly off limits.

(Preminger was among the first Hollywood directors to test the limits of industry self-censorship which had been rigorously enforced since 1934.)

Kenyon and the audience can see that Lapham has unresolved psychological problems—a ‘project’ for her. His directness and intensity appeal to her, not to mention Fonda’s distinctive open, earnest face. The actor conveys his character’s subtle turn of mind through a wry smile similar to that on the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon’s Voltaire.

Lapham knows that he needs to come to terms with the loss of his wife and his war experiences and start his life over in a stable relationship with a partner.

O’Mara’s problem—and the main story line—is that his ideal life, which includes a perfect wife and family, a loving mistress, and successful, high-powered career, comes apart at the seams when each begins to tug him in a different direction and looks less than ‘perfect,’ ‘loving,’ and ‘successful.’

These characterizations hint at the outcome. The scenes develop in long takes which invite viewers in rather than telegraph pat judgments. The threat of violence lies just beneath the veneer of civility; at times, this civility has an edge. This gives the story dramatic tension and lends to the film noir atmosphere, but there are no guns or saps; nor are there clear good guys or bad guys. Preminger does not tip his hand as to how the story will end until the final moment.

By placing Crawford between these two strong, understated male leads, Preminger tones down the operatic, sometimes freakish affectations her performances take on with lesser lights and uses her iconic star quality to full effect: she is a thorough professional and a great subject to shoot. It is fun to watch these three actors work together.

Among the period and place details are O’Mara’s exchanges with overworked postwar New York cabbies in beat-up prewar cabs (no new civilian models were built during the war). The Nisei reference comes when O’Mara decides to represent pro bono a decorated Nisei soldier whose California farm was ‘legally stolen’ from him while his family was interned and he was serving in Italy.

Also, visit to a studio mock-up of Manhattan’s storied Stork Club includes cameos of radio star and gossip columnist Walter Winchell and New York Post columnist Leonard Lyons. Broadway boulevardier writer Damon Runyon and actor John Garfield are sitting at the bar in the background.

Speak to me of love

Who’s That Knocking at My Door 1968 U.S. (90 minutes) written and directed by Martin Scorsese, with Mardik Martin and Richard H. Coll; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker.

Martin Scorsese’s first feature film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, is like a teaser to the body of his work that followed.

It has Scorsese’s mobile, inquisitive camera eye, his ingenuity for telling a story with pictures, his stylistic use of popular music, and his male Italian-American New York neighborhood characters. It also is a movie about movies, filled with references to and discussions of classic movies, scenes and actors.

The story is a simple boy-meets-girl formula. J.R., a young, working class Sicilian-American like the boys Scorsese grew up with in his neighborhood on Elizabeth Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy, meets The Girl, a bright, attractive, well-educated uptown girl, on the Staten Island Ferry. They have a brief relationship which their vast cultural differences probably doom from the start.

Harvey Keitel stars in his first feature role as The Boy, J.R. The Girl is Zina Bethune, a dancer and successful soap opera actress.

The story focuses most on the boys’ background. Scorsese knows this well, particularly the boys’ Manichean view of woman. The movie opens with images of The Holy Mother, from the ceramic Madonna on the bureau to J.R.’s mother (Catherine Scorsese, the director’s mother) whom the camera watches prepare food for a family meal and feed five children. Yet the boys’ hangout—8th Ward Pleasure Club, Private—is replete with centerfold images of wanton sex goddesses. And the boys’ main topic of conversation is ‘broads’—female objects of their sexual fantasies whom they should never dream, much less dare, to marry.

The holy mother on the one hand—church doctrine makes clear that the divine conception was an entirely unerotic, automatic transaction undertaken to make God a man (as presumably were the boys’ own origins); and on the other, the pleasure-giving whore, with sisters and other off-limits relations sexless in the middle. This view clearly makes ‘dating’ and ‘petting’ fraught subjects.   

Coming out of a movie theater together just having seen Rio Bravo (1959), The Girl comments to J.R. on the character played by Angie Dickinson:

‘I really liked the girl in that picture.’

‘Well let me tell you something. The girl in that picture was a broad!’

‘What do you mean, abroad?’

‘A broad! You know, there are girls, and then there are broads.’

The scene cuts to J.R.s visually interpreted definition of ‘a broad,’ a fantasia of J.R. and four prostitutes (Anne Collette, Tsuai Yu-lan, Saskia Holleman and Marieka) having sex, cut-choreographed to Jim Morrison and the Doors’ The End.

The street scene resumes:

‘You know, a broad isn’t really a virgin, you know what I mean? You play around with them, you don’t marry a broad, you know what I mean?’

‘Come on, you don’t mean that?’

‘Oh I mean it. Sure I mean it.’

These words and attitudes, which bear a catechismal echo of fatherly advice, frame The Girl’s ‘secret,’ later told in shots and stills cut-choreographed to The Dubs’ doo wop Don't Ask Me (To Be Lonely) when revealed at the film’s dénouement.

The matter comes down to a consideration of the enchanting creature who, dressed in fantastic expectations, is just another being as mystified in her own way as any male could be. What makes Scorsese’s telling so striking is that while he is so entirely of the boys and their world, he shows us this girl, mystified in her own way, with Ingmar Bergman-like insight and sensitivity.

Bethune is one of the wonders of this remarkable picture. Scorsese said that Bergman’s films had influenced him as a student. Apart from her Nordic looks, Bethune would be an easy fit in a Bergman movie because she has a lively, intelligent, expressive face that also would have made her ideal in silent movies. It is easy to imagine falling in love with her. In this work, Scorsese gets great work out of her: he watches her very closely and his camera loves her.

The film, which began as Scorsese’s thesis, can feel like a patchwork because the finished work is a combination of at least four distinct shoots between 1964 and 1968. The soundtrack is the first clue: it ranges from early 1960s bubblegum doo wop and rhythm-and-blues to The Doors’ spooky The End, first released in 1967. The final title, which changed several times during the film’s long gestation period, derives from the song Who's That Knocking? by the New York-area rockabilly band The Genies. Another tipoff is that Keitel changes from the kid–looking character (aged 25) he appears to be in some scenes to the more knowing adult male (aged 29) in others. This serendipitous tic lends mystique to his character.

The film has an interesting backstory.

Scorsese’s first shoot was the party scene edited to Ray Barretto’s 1963 hit Latin song El Watusi. The highly stylized four-minute scene begins as a slow pan from left to right and turns into a slow motion dance, in which about a dozen young men in sharp suits horse around with pistols at a drinking party in an apartment. It looks and feels as though it were a test run for Goodfellas (1990). Scorsese is among the revelers.

The following February or March (1965), Scorsese shot his main boy-meets-girl story with J.R. and his friends Joey (Lennard Kuras) and Sally ‘Gaga’ (Michael Scala) but no girl. At this stage, The Girl, whom J.R.’s friends never meet, is an unseen presence, the reason for J.R.’s distracted attitude as the trio kill time horsing around in the ‘hood and take a side trip to rural Copake, New York, two hours north of the city in the Berkshires.

About two years later, Scorsese cast Bethune as The Girl, shot her scenes with Keitel, and edited these scenes into the existing work. This version exhibited at the Chicago film festival in November 1967 as I Call First.

Distributor Joseph Brenner subsequently bought the film on the condition that Scorsese add a ‘nudie scene’ to increase the film’s marketability. Scorsese was in Europe in the spring of 1968; he brought Keitel to Amsterdam where they shot the J.R. fantasy sequence, which out-[Jean-Luc] Godards Godard—as most of the rest of the film does anyway. It opened that fall in New York as Who’s That Knocking At My Door.

It is hard not to think this lovely-made, free flowing scene influenced the scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now! (1980) in which Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard has a drunken episode in a Saigon hotel room.

There is a lot more to discover, appreciate and enjoy in this movie. It is far from perfect, but it does many good things amazingly well and intimates the great things that followed it.

Additional music credits:

Jenny Take a Ride, covered by Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels (opening scene)

I've Had It, The Bell Notes

Shotgun, Jr. Walker and the All Stars

Ain't That Just Like Me? The Searchers

The Plea, The Chantels

Plus ça change…

Heroes for Sale 1933 Warner Brothers/First National (71 minutes) directed by William A. Wellman; screenplay by Robert Lord and Wilson Mizner; Howard Bretherton, editor; James Van Trees, cinematographer.

An injured veteran’s addiction to painkillers, smug and craven upper-income bracket swells, workers downsized to maximize corporate profits, homeless ex-servicemen, and heavy-handed government treatment of ‘undesirables’: all are part of this classic story which resonates today.

William A. Wellman directed this Warner studios epic which follows its hero from the trenches of the Western Front through the irrationally exuberant 1920s to the breadlines of the Great Depression in the first 100 days of the Roosevelt Administration.

Thomas Holmes (Richard Barthelmess), a soldier assigned to a ‘suicide mission,’ is left for dead on a rainy nighttime battlefield by his panicked platoon leader. This officer, Roger Winston (Gordon Westcott), is a wealthy acquaintance from Holmes’ home town. Taken to be the sole survivor of what turned out to be a successful mission due to Holmes’ unsung initiative, Winston becomes a decorated war hero.

But German soldiers found Holmes alive and he got medical treatment as a prisoner of war. His injuries lead to a dependency on painkillers which interfere with his readjustment to postwar civilian life, particularly his new employment back in his home town at the Winston family bank.

Holmes’ ‘disgrace’—his morphine addiction exposed—puts him in inpatient treatment, during which time his widowed mother died. ‘Cured and discharged’ after six months’ treatment but with nothing to go home to, Holmes makes a new start in Chicago.

The young man’s verve, imagination and charm get him back on track in a new home, with a girlfriend (Loretta Young) and salt-of-the-earth friends, and a job at an industrial laundry. He finds a purpose in life and the chance to make a difference. He convinces the laundry owner (Grant Mitchell) to install a labor-saving device which improves efficiency and the company’s bottom line, though on the condition that none lose their jobs. He marries and starts a family.

Richard Barthelmess, Robert Barrat, Loretta Young and Aline MacMahon in Heroes for Sale.

But everyone does not live happily ever after.

A national chain takes over the laundry. The new owners adopt the plant’s labor-saving innovations nationwide and lay off the redundant work force. Holmes’ efforts to help the workers lose him his job and his wife; he gets a five-year prison term for a crime he did not commit from a society jittery about ‘anarchists’ and political radicals. After his release from prison, the local police ‘Red Squad’ run him out of town among the army of homeless unemployed veterans.

This broad sweep of early twentieth century American history takes place in little more than an hours’ running time. The story spoke to the heart of audiences during the most severe period of the Great Depression, and has a folksy ‘Joe Hill’ ending.

Wellman slipped memorable devils in the works, such as Holmes’ drug dealer (Tammany Young) and the surly pair of snap-brimmed Red Squad officers (Robert Elliott and Charles C. Wilson). 

In the establishing scene before Holmes is forced to leave town, an eight-column RED RIOT WRECKS MACHINE SHOP headline splashes across the screen and the Red Squad grab several Italian-speaking men unrelated to Holmes’ story from their homes and off the street: mustaches were the old turbans.

The craven Winston and his sanctimonious bank president father (Berton Churchill) are less devils than weak characters in a low circle of hell.

Barthelmess’ Holmes leads the angels as a Tom Hanks-like character, with the lovely Loretta Young as his wife Ruth. Character actor Robert Barrat’s ‘Max’ Brinker is a stereotypical comically overbearing German immigrant who vents his disapproval with a clicking tongue—a ‘Red’ until his revolutionary invention makes him a white spats-wearing, cigar-smoking capitalist. 

The real treat is the wise-cracking Aline MacMahon as Mary Dennis who, with her old codger father, Pa Dennis (Charley Grapewin, Dorothy’s Uncle Henry in The Wizard of Oz and Grandpa Joad in The Grapes of Wrath), runs the Chicago diner with rooms upstairs where Holmes gets his second start—homely, lonely places that could be Edward Hopper subjects.

MacMahon has great comic timing. Her Mary takes to the appealing Holmes from the moment he first appears in her diner, but he sees in her only a reliable older friend. A short scene that flows like an eloquent pause says in a minute everything about Mary’s loneliness and disappointment beneath her salty, ironic surface.

Holmes gets a promotion and offers to take Mary and girlfriend Ruth to dinner; he won’t hear of Mary’s polite decline. Mary rushes excitedly into her adjoining room to change, and then opens the door to see the couple standing close together with their backs to her. She holds for a beat, silently closes the door, and shouts to Mary from behind the door that she won’t be ready in time. Then she turns to the camera for a long beat.

In general, the framing, editing and pace are as crisp and snappy as Robert Lord and Wilson Mizner’s script. Wellman did not have to search far for images of a country and people out of work. Many of his extras in the crowds and breadlines reportedly were the real thing, hired for the movie. And when it rains, it literally pours.

Though Wellman never shuffled through a breadline, he had been a combat flyer during the war who sustained serious injuries when he was shot down over France. (He also crashed a SPAD fighter aircraft while shooting his classic Wings in 1928, after he which never flew again.)

Heroes for Sale is among the early Hollywood talkies released before the motion picture industry began to enforce its self-imposed ‘Production Code’—censorship guidelines on sexual and moral content—in 1934, and continued to do so until directors like Otto Preminger started testing the limits in the late 1950s. There was plenty of sex of all kinds, substance abuse, left wing politics, and moral failings among the grand and good in the United States before the 1960s, just not at the movies and on television.

Turner Classic Movies reissued this movie among several sets of so-called ‘pre-code’ films on DVD as its Forbidden Hollywood Collection. Despite ‘blue movie’ cover art, the moral, social, and political subject matter make for the more controversial parts.

            This DVD includes Wellman’s classic Wild Boys on the Road (1933), a socially conscious drama about economic hard times breaking up families, with teenagers riding the rails seeking work and adventure in the Depression-era United States.

Illustrated men

The Mark of Cain 2000 U.S./Russia (73 minutes) directed and co-produced by Alix Lambert; cinematography Anastasi Mikhailov.

This documentary works within the context of the barbaric conditions of the Russian prison system to tell the stories of two dozen men and women inmates who have illustrated their lives in tattoos.

The legend is that ‘traditional’ Russian criminal society, the so-called vóry v zakóne, or ‘thieves who follow the code’ (the literal cardboard rendering ‘thieves-in-law’ suggests in English the agency of a spouse’s family), has a hierarchical structure, and that its members’ lives and careers are memorialized in elaborate nakólki, or tattoos, which identify them like a resume, passport, or military badges, rank and insignia.

Their stories are bleak and intense; the illustrations are elaborate. The scariest-looking subjects often seem calm and philosophical; some of the friendlier ones give off a vibe that makes one feel it would be better not to meet them in a crowded, day-lit street, much less alone in a dark alley. Several camera-curious, genuinely frightening-looking characters drift occasionally through the background. Russian criminal society may be male-dominated, but women appear to hold their own throughout the ranks.

Prison rules prohibit tattooing, but the visual evidence indicates that officials do not strictly enforce them. The pain the procedure can cause lends to its mystique.

We see stars on pecs and knees (‘I don’t bow or kneel to authority’), torso-covering churches for which each cupola stands for a conviction, spiders on webs (thief, or drug addict), and heavily muscled, hooded executioners or Christs on the cross (‘I follow the thieves’ code’). Sailing ships indicate a ‘roving life.’ German and Nazi symbols display disdain for conventional social norms and authority, as with 1950s American bikers, not pro-Nazi or racist views.

During the Soviet period, prisoners facing death sentences sometimes tattooed images of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin over their hearts, chests and backs, on the theory that guards would not dare mar such sacrosanct images with bullets.

However, any ‘tradition’ of tattooing and what the images mean seem open to a variety of interpretations. Several subjects said there are serious consequences for not being able to ‘answer’ for one’s markings. But among younger inmates, tattooing would work more along the line of creating a criminal Facebook page. As in other things, the more display suggests the less actual play.

According to Colonel Anatoli Teryokhin of Perm Central Penitentiary, tattoos fell from fashion among an element in prison and in the military among whom certain symbols and images once held specific meanings. Like everything else in the New Russia, tattooing is not what it used to be.

One of the most interesting details Lambert records is not a ‘what’ but the ‘how.’

Aleksandr Borisov, a career criminal doing nine and a half years for robbery, was the tattoo artist-in-residence at Perm Central Penitentiary, a high-security facility where Lambert and her crew appear to have done most of their interviews.

Borisov improvised a rotary tattoo machine from a hand-held mechanical wind-up razor. His ‘needle’ is a five-inch (13 cm) section of metal guitar string with one sharp end, mounted on the razor housing. The blunt end attaches to a lug on the razor motor and the sharp end trains through a repurposed ballpoint pen tip fixed to the other end of housing. The razor motor agitates the needle quickly up and down.

For ink, Borisov used the finely sifted soot of burnt boot sole dissolved in urine—preferably a client’s own. ‘I use only soot,’ Borisov said. ‘It turns out darker, doesn’t fade over time, and everything comes out bright.’

Lambert could not have picked a better time to make this film. She shot it in the late 1990s. Her subjects disparage the post-Soviet, moneyed New Russia of Boris Yel’tsin, Russian president from 1991-1999. This phase ran roughly from the last geriatric gasp of the Soviet Union in the failed 1991 August Coup to the dawn of the age of Vladimir Putin, who became president in 2000.

The result is a living document of an important transitional period in the country’s history, as well as in the history of the penal system that came out of the 1917 Revolution, which former political prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn chronicled extensively as the GULag Archipelago. (GULag is a Soviet-era acronym for Glávnoe Upravlyénie ispravítel’no-trudov‎ykh Lágerei, which means Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps.)

‘The GULag still exists,’ said Valerii Abramkin of the Center for Prison Reform and a former prisoner at the notorious Byélyi Lyébed’, or White Swan, Prison in Solikamsk in Perm Oblast’. ‘The GULag is not only a system of camps. It is an unscrupulous, abundant, and incredibly cruel “repression”.’

Lambert shot footage inside White Swan but did not interview any then-current inmates. The prison was set up and run on Soviet state security founder Felix Dzerzhinsky’s principle that ‘prisoners could be made to eradicate each other all by themselves,’ said former inmate Slava Yermanov. The institution’s original task was to ‘break’ clergymen. Since the Khrushchev era thaw, the Interior Ministry has used it to ‘soften’ the hardest vory and ‘to solve unsolved crimes,’ Abramkin said.

Abramkin and Yermanov described the most notorious and effective method that White Swan authorities employ, called press-kámera, or ‘cell press.’ They place an inmate they want to break in a crowded cell with other inmates—‘crocodiles in a hole.’ The result is a free-for-all in which the other inmates may do as they like with him, which usually turns the hardest case into an ‘amoeba,’ Abramkin said.

Lambert tells an incredible tale. It is hard to imagine any Russian government before Yel’tsin’s, and certainly not Putin’s afterward, allowing a foreigner, especially a curious American woman, such open access to so unvarnished an aspect of Russian life.  

What's the meta?

Zen 2011 U.K. BBC Masterpiece Theatre (three 90-minute episodes: Vendetta, Cabal, and Ratking). Directed by John Alexander (Vendetta), Christopher Menaul (Cabal), and Jon Jones (Ratking); screenplays by Simon Burke, based on Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen mystery novels.

The ‘meta’ here is doughty middle class Brits playing the Edward Gibbon-flavored noble and ignoble Romans they learned about reading classical authors, in a miniseries of modern-day police thrillers set in Rome. 

Aurelio Zen (Rufus Sewell)—his surname is Venetian, he reminds people, not a New Age confection—is a homicide detective and a ‘good cop,’ the son of a policeman killed in the line of duty when he was seven years old. He is separated from his wife and lives with his mother (the former pop singer Catherine Spaak). Not to worry, though: Zen’s love interest is a new secretary at work, Tania Moretti (Caterina Murino), whom everyone in the section would like to bed.

Zen is the center of the action because he is recognized as a straight shooter in a world in which most self-respecting people give every appearance of operating as players with something up his sleeve or down her cleavage. Picture Daniel Craig’s James Bond in the midst of I, Claudius or the BBC/HBO series Rome, in finely tailored Italian suits.

It works like a charm, and Sewell is ideal in the role.

Each episode involves a murder that quickly involves political implications in which a certain ministry (presumably the interior ministry, because it exercises control over police personnel and the agency budget) takes a special interest.

The unnamed Minister (Eduardo Guerchini, played by Anthony Higgins, according to imdb.com), through his aide, Amadeo Colonna (Ben Miles, in a Robert Vaughn-like role), summons Zen to the ministry to receive his missions impossible. Colonna closely monitors Zen’s progress as each case proceeds. Due to the extremely ‘sensitive’ nature of his assignments, not to mention the often questionable legality of obtaining the desired result, Zen, sensibly wary of his associates, generally works alone, intuitively, through his street contacts, informants and former cops.

The episodes, based on Michael Dibden’s complexly plotted novels, move quickly and efficiently. A farrago of sexy circumstantial information involving money, sex, politics, and celebrity gets chopped in a blender, as in Raymond Chandler’s classic The Big Sleep. Little is what it seems to be. The solutions come out in the wash. 

Vendetta—a business executive and two prostitutes are slain at his Abruzzi villa; his business partner who fled the scene is the prime suspect. The partner confesses, but there are too many loose ends and prying eyes to make the case go away quietly. Another man wrongly convicted of murder, released from prison with a terminal illness, seeks to even scores with those whom he holds responsible for his conviction, including Zen.

Cabal—the gay black sheep of an aristocratic Roman family takes a nosedive off a bridge. Is it suicide or murder? If murder, was the motive personal or a move to prevent exposure of an Opus Dei-like cabal of the well-connected? An ambitious female prosecutor senses old-boy blood in the water. Zen’s office romance with Moretti blooms as he works this case, but her estranged husband is opposing the divorce she seeks.

Ratking—an enormously wealthy industrialist and political contributor with a playboy son and an unstable daughter married to an ambitious parvenu, is kidnapped and held for five million Euro ransom. His lawyer is murdered and the ransom stolen en route to the kidnappers, who demand another five million Euros. Meanwhile, Zen must deal with a new chief who is a stickler for the book and resents his ‘special relationship’ with the Minister.

There are many moving parts to each story, lovely details and great camera shots, and good individual performances from a variety of British character actors within an entirely Italian milieu, from Miles’ Colonna to Stanley Townsend as Zen’s dyspeptic chief Moscati.  

The haunting series theme music helps to set the atmosphere of threat veiled behind the bright surfaces of this famously beautiful city, giving the work the feel of a throwback to crime and espionage stories of cold war era television.

Midnight Mary

Midnight Mary 1933 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (74 minutes) directed by William A. Wellman; story by Anita Loos, screenplay by Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola; cinematographer, James Van Trees; editor, William S. Gray.

This beautifully cut and polished William Wellman gem is a romance set in the late dusk of the pre-censorship, pre-noir era and wrapped in a courtroom drama.

The protagonist Mary Martin (Loretta Young) shared a chronic problem with a lot of the American film audience in 1933—not to mention 2012: she was young, single, out of work and could not find a job.

Mary tells her life story in flashbacks, reminiscing in a clerk’s office adjacent to the courtroom where she awaits a jury verdict in her ‘sensational’ murder trial. Her eye first catches the year she was born—1910—on the back of a volume of court proceedings on a shelf in the clerk’s office; she moves apace through the key events.

She is a ‘good gal’ at heart, though she has a knack for turning up in the wrong place at the wrong time. It did not take her long to fall in with the wrong crowd, even the wrong Mr. Darcy—Leo Darcy (Ricardo Cortez), a dapper thug, and his gang—not exactly Jane Austen’s paragon Fitzwilliam Darcy.

On the other hand, Mary gets great mileage out of being a strikingly beautiful wrongster, especially after she turns the head of Thomas Mannering Jr., Esq. (Franchot Tone), son of a judge and scion of a wealthy family with a Park Avenue address.

Ricardo Cortez, Loretta Young and Franchot Tone in Midnight Mary

The writing is crisp and sharp. The studio lighting, editing and montage are reason enough to see this gem. An early sequence follows Mary wearing holes in her shoes and runs in her stockings as she pounds pavement looking for work. At the end of the day, advertising signs in lights speak to her disheartenment in a manner similar to details in Bruce McCall’s covers for The New Yorker magazine:

A sign advertising ‘Coco Facial Soup’ becomes ‘No Jobs To-Day’; a sign for ‘Tires: More Miles’ becomes a rotating ‘No Help Wanted’; the sign for the Riverside Drive subway station reads ‘No Jobs; No Help Wanted’; and the ‘Capitol’ and ‘Joan Crawford’ of a picture palace marquee flash ‘No Jobs’ and ‘No Jobs To-Day.’ The superimposition of this collection of images in a single frame crowns her disappointment and frustration.

Cortez was an Austrian expatriate who changed his name and modeled his look on the classic Latin lover popular in films of that time. He played the first film Sam Spade in Warner Brothers’ 1931 Dangerous Female, a well done but not well known adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s pulp detective novel The Maltese Falcon, directed by Roy Del Ruth. (John Huston made his classic version with Humphrey Bogart for Warner Brothers in 1941.)

Incidentally, the great character actress and comic Una Merkel, who plays Mary’s lifelong friend Bunny in Midnight Mary, was Sam Spade’s secretary Effie Perine in Del Ruth’s Dangerous Female.

Several references in this movie to William Randolph Hearst publications movie relate to recondite details of newspaper history. When we first see Mary at the defendant’s table in court during her murder trial, her eyes appear above a copy of Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan magazine she is reading as the District Attorney (Frank Conroy) gives his closing argument.

At the end of the movie, a series of New York Journal headlines and subheads brings the story arc to a clean, three-point landing. The New York Journal was the newspaper Hearst brought out in 1896 to take on Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World by emulating and amplifying Pulitzer’s ‘yellow journalism.’

Midnight Mary is among the early Hollywood talkies released before the industry began to enforce its self-imposed ‘Production Code’—censorship guidelines on sexual and moral content—in 1934, and continued to do so for nearly three decades.

Turner Classic Movies reissued this movie among several sets of so-called ‘pre-code’ films on DVD as its ‘Forbidden Hollywood Collection.’ Despite the ‘blue movie’ cover art, the moral, social, and in some instances political subject matter make for the raciest parts.

Horse sense v. horses’ asses

Demony wojny w/g Goi (Demons of War [according to Goya]) 1998 Poland (93 minutes) written and directed by Władisław Pasikowski

This is a good war movie about the problems that politicians with legal training leave to professional soldiers to clean up, often with unpredictable consequences.

These narratives typically come down to the conflict between the horse sense of the boots on the ground and the nonsense of horses’ asses making Big Decisions in government ministries far from the landmines and cracking bullets.

In this story, a tough-as-nails Warsaw Pact-trained Polish airborne officer commands a battalion of Poland’s elite 6th Air Assault Brigade (Airborne) working with NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The Polish battalion and a co-assigned Norwegian army unit are part of IFOR, the ‘Implementation Force’ tasked to implement the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords.

Major [Edek/Edward] Keller (Bogusław Linda) is the kind of maverick military hero politicians and his own higher-ups find it as difficult to live with as to go without. An airborne unit under Keller’s command was the best-trained in the Warsaw Pact, and he had peacekeeping experience in the Lebanon. He also was relieved of a command for pushing post-Cold War era troops too hard.

There is an additional spotlight on this unit because the action takes place in the late 1990s when Poland was pending NATO full membership.

The film opens with Keller leading a patrol that rolls into a town square in Srebrenica in two armored vehicles, moments after a violent crowd captured three men in military fatigues whom it clearly intends to execute. 

Without harming anyone or getting involved in the who-shot-Ivan politics, Keller and his men take charge of the three captives, drive them 15 kilometers out of town and turn them loose on a bridge. Keller strikes one of the three men, a mercenary who has the temerity to suggest that ‘we are all just soldiers doing someone else’s bidding.’

The next thing Keller knows, the Polish defense ministry sends Lieutenant Czacki (Olaf Lubaszenko) a staff lawyer from the military procurator’s office, to investigate his part in the ‘incident in Srebrenica’—the intervention which resulted in the rescue and release of the three captives about to be shot. Keller apparently was accused of executing the men himself. The ministry also assigns Major [Czesiek/Czeslaw] Kusz (Tadeusz Huk) to take over Keller’s command.

The man Keller punched on the bridge (Christophe Rex-Jarnot), identified throughout the film only as ‘a mercenary,’ is in the hire of Skija (Slobodan Custić), a ‘bandit’ with a multi-national gang more interested in personal gain and ‘sport’ than ethnic politics.

Skija’s bandits give Czacki and Kusz a hot welcome. They and the driver, Corporal ‘Houdini’ Moraczewski (Zbigniew Zamachowski), are rescued by a passing patrol, led by Cichy (Mirosław Baka), one of Keller’s equally tough platoon leaders. 

The drama and characters develop during the film’s set piece, in which Keller and Cichy lead a patrol of well-trained but not battle-tested paratroopers to rescue an IFOR task force Norwegian helicopter downed by Skija’s bandits. Kusz and Czacki accompany the team ‘to observe.’

The story ‘got personal’ when Keller hit the mercenary on the bridge. The stakes go up after Keller liberates two of Skija’s hostages connected with material evidence of his war crimes: Nicole (Aleksandra Nieśpielak), a French television journalist, and Dano Ivanov (Denis Delić), a dodgy Balkans ‘government representative.’ Keller also takes an interest in a ‘Gypsy’ village in harm’s way. A twist in the tale gives the story a clean finish.

Demony wojny według Goi apparently was the first Polish film released on DVD. The reference in the film’s title to Francisco de Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra etchings, a series of which appear as background to the title credits, feels unnecessarily arty. It is Keller’s humanity and professional grasp of war’s ‘disasters’ that gives him the skills to navigate and survive this perilous terrain.

This film does a good job showing the less glamorous side of men under fire, in advance of similar treatment in the new generation of American feature films and documentaries of war released since the American-led Crusade began a decade ago. 

Though not tongue-in-cheek, this story bears comparison with Danis Tanović’s classic satire Ničija zemlja [No Man’s Land] (2001), also set in the Bosnian war. In that film, a Bosnian civilian soldier, a regular Serbian Army enlisted man, and a French NATO sergeant try to save the life of a Bosniak whose temporarily unconscious body Serbian soldiers laid as a booby trap on a ‘bouncing betty’ land mine. This delicate task takes place under the klieg light of European Union political posturing and a media circus between the front lines in the Bosnian war.

Apart from the disparagement with which many Americans greeted the Bush fils ‘alliance of the willing,’ Americans get scant notice of the country’s many political allies engaged in its foreign policy in action. Several notable foreign films show what American foreign policy looks like through the eyes of its allies.

Armadillo (2010), a documentary about a contingent of the Danish Guard Hussar Regiment in Afghanistan, came out the same year as Sebastian Junger’s and Tim Hetherington’s Restrepo. A memorable edit comes when a grenade flung on a video game cuts seamlessly to an explosion in the lethal night outside an armored personnel carrier screened inside via infrared camera.

Brødre [Brothers] (2004), Susanne Bier’s searing feature about the readjustment problems of a Norwegian special operations officer presumed dead who returns home from Afghanistan after a period of captivity, five years later became Jim Sheridan’s Brothers (2009), starring Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman.

We are meant to feel the senselessness of war in the severe and outsized impact these soldiers’ harrowing experiences has on their civilian families. This senselessness feels the more poignant when the soldier comes from a small civilized country that seems to have so little at stake so far away from his home. 

In Armadillo, an enlisted Danish medic telling a newcomer about finding a dead comrade and picking up another soldier’s body parts, said:

‘You have to keep an eye on yourself. You’re not wacko just because you laugh at some irrelevant stuff. You need normality, because this is so meaningless that you can’t grasp it.’