Old Yorker

  • Ace in the Hole

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Billy Wilder (1951)

    Billy Wilder made Ace in the Hole immediately after Sunset Boulevard.  That film did for Hollywood; Ace in the Hole does for the press and broadcast news, and the public that partakes of them.  There are jabs along the way at self-serving politicians too.  Some of these targets were familiar from recent Preston Sturges films but the satire is packaged very differently, and often more surprisingly, in Sturges.  Ace in the Hole‘s misanthropic message is delivered, like that of Sunset Boulevard, in a lugubrious, hard-edged style, once the story is underway.  That implies a different style before then and the opening sequences of Ace in the Hole are certainly the best.  Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) marches into the becalmed offices of a New Mexico provincial paper, the ‘Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin’.  Tatum tells the owner and editor, Jacob Q Boot (Porter Hall), that he – Tatum – is exactly what the paper needs.  The calmly principled Mr Boot doesn’t necessarily agree but gives him a job anyway.   A year later, Tatum is still working there and verging on stir crazy.  The framed sampler on the office wall – its motto, ‘Tell the Truth’, embroidered by genteel Miss Deverich (Edith Evanson), the paper‘s household-hints columnist – epitomises all that Tatum despises, and is exasperated by, at the Sun-Bulletin.  But within a couple of days, he has stumbled across a scoop that he doesn’t intend to let go.

    Chuck Tatum has worked his way down the professional ladder, on a journey that’s taken him from New York to New Mexico.  He’s been fired from a succession of newspapers for a variety of reasons – libel suits, adultery with the editor’s wife, drink problem – but his desperation for any kind of job appears only to have sharpened his ambition and self-confidence.   Tatum is dismayed by his latest assignment for the Sun-Bulletin – he’s sent to cover a rattlesnake hunt, accompanied by the paper’s naïve young photographer, Herbie Cook (Robert Arthur).  En route, they stop at a store-cum-diner-cum-trading-post that advertises Indian curios.  (Its ominous appearance gives it a strange kinship with Norma Desmond’s mansion.)  Tatum and Herbie find in a room behind the bar a woman deep in prayer.  Mama Minosa (Frances Dominguez) is asking for the deliverance of her son Leo, who helps run the family business.  He is trapped underground, following a rockfall in nearby caves, where he was collecting Native American artefacts.  Tatum seizes his opportunity.  He and Herbie go to the caves to interview and photograph the stricken Leo (Richard Benedict).  Tatum then does everything he can to prolong Leo’s agony, and keep the story of his plight on front pages and in news bulletins across the country.

    Tatum has some willing accomplices.  The greenhorn Herbie soon forgets the journalistic ethics that Mr Boot taught him and is smitten instead with ideas of selling his photographs of Leo to Life.  Leo’s sullen, bored wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) despises her husband and wants out of life in the middle of nowhere but she’s willing to postpone her departure, once a press pack and tourists descend on the site of the accident and start spending money in the Minosas’ bar.  Lorraine is also happy to stay put for as long as Tatum  is around:  she fancies him though he treats her rough.  The local sheriff (Ray Teal), who’s running for re-election, likes the idea of making a name for the place.  On Tatum’s suggestion, Sheriff Kretzer puts pressure on Sam Smollett (Frank Jaquet), the contractor supervising rescue attempts, to drill into the caves from above instead of from the side – as a result, the rate of progress down to Leo is painfully slow.  Within a short space of time, the land round the caves has become a grotesque, ghoulish holiday venue, with fun for all the family.   (The film was renamed The Big Carnival by Paramount shortly before its release.  It regained its original title some years later.)

    We watch and listen to Tatum, after a whole year’s stagnation at the Albuquerque paper, fulminating about its piddling ambition and his own talents going to waste.  His colleagues don’t react much, although you feel he would long ago have become a barely tolerated office bore:  it’s not before time, from everyone’s point of view (including the audience’s), when his scoop materialises.  From this point onwards, however, the plotting of the story – Wilder wrote the screenplay with Lesser Samuels and Walter Newman – is remarkably unsurprising, and the same goes for Kirk Douglas’s performance.  He makes a fine initial entrance.  On his way into the Sun-Bulletin offices, Tatum exchanges a few words with a blue-collar worker; the man addresses him as ‘sir’; but Douglas, a moment after he’s walked past him, does a little double-take, as if to indicate Tatum’s displeasure that he hasn’t been acknowledged as much as he deserves.  The opening pitch to Mr Boot is entertaining but Douglas is soon and increasingly hard to take.  He gets his teeth into the role of Tatum in such an aggressive, condemnatory way that there are moments when you feel sorry for the anti-hero:  the character is being savaged by the actor playing him.

    It’s a pity Billy Wilder didn’t extend to casting of the lead the carry-on-Sunset–Boulevard aspect of Ace in the Hole.  William Holden might have brought some shadings to Chuck Tatum – Kirk Douglas puts on a hyperkinetic show but there’s no development of the character until Tatum tries, too late, to get Smollett to revert to the quicker procedure for reaching the doomed Leo.  The journalist’s outburst of bitter, snarling self-reproach is an instance of seeing the light Hollywood-style:  here Wilder adds – one assumes inadvertently – to the satire of the movie world he launched in Sunset Boulevard.  The ending of Ace in the Hole has a curious resonance too with that of Champion, which I’d seen two days earlier (both films are part of BFI’s season to celebrate Kirk Douglas’s imminent hundredth birthday).   In neither movie do you feel the protagonist, bad as he is, deserves to die.  In both movies, the melodramatic finale enables Kirk Douglas to go out with the bang he’s been straining to achieve all the way through.

    Jan Sterling gives Lorraine a distinctive disgruntled sultriness although the character is one-dimensional.  Porter Hall is very good, at least for as long as Mr Boot’s honourableness is conveyed in a droll register.  Boot’s later switch to more righteous dismay at what Tatum and Herbie are up to, makes him one of the few people in the story presented as acting from motives other than base ones.  The other exceptions include the humble Minosa parents (John Berkes is Papa), the priest (Lester Dorr) who delivers the last rites to Leo, and sundry Native Americans in bit parts:  Billy Wilder’s exemption of these ‘simple’ folk is condescending.  His command of the enlarging scale of the media and other circuses setting up in the New Mexican desert is impressive but only in a technical sense.  The point Wilder is making in Ace in the Hole – it is essentially just the one point – has already been repeated ad nauseam.

    6 September 2016

  • The Streetfighter

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Walter Hill (1975)

    Walter Hill’s The Streetfighter[1] is an incredibly good pulp film.  It’s almost inspiring to see a director doing the best he can with square, hackneyed material, instead of going through the motions or camping things up.  From the moment the streetfighter Chaney (Charles Bronson) jumps from a slow-moving goods train until the final scene, in which he disappears into the shadows, the film is invigorating and entertaining.  These opening and closing sequences are a simple, symmetrical expression of its man-from-nowhere theme.  The Streetfighter is set in New Orleans during the Great Depression.  The penniless Chaney arrives in the city to make some money with his fists.  He is, of course, formidably good at using them and a familiar strong, silent hero.  The picture includes other easily recognisable figures.  There’s Chaney’s opportunistic agent, Speed (James Coburn); Poe (Strother Martin), a man of good education brought low by a fatal character flaw; Lucy Simpson (Jill Ireland), a sad, lonely, wised-up girl who can’t live with Chaney because he’ll never stay the night and has no regular wage; Chick Gandil (Michael McGuire), the unscrupulous and imperturbable local Mr Big.  As stereotypes, they’re all easy to dismiss – in theory.  The achievement of The Streetfighter is that you don’t dismiss these characters and their story.  You feel they might turn out to be memorable – though, of course, it’s too soon to be sure about that.

    Hill, who co-wrote the screenplay with Bryan Gindoff and Bruce Henstell, has said of the film:

    ‘Guy rides into town, sorts things out, doesn’t give a lot of himself and rides on out in the end.  The fact that it’s New Orleans in the thirties is quite irrelevant.  It could be the Yukon in 1898 or Laramie, Wyoming. ‘  

    The 1930s setting comes across as important, nevertheless.  All the main characters are after money.  They’re not illustrations of a grubby, acquisitive society but victims of the Depression.  They have to be obsessed with money in order to survive.  In their situation, money is dignity.   When money is so essential, the potential of affluence becomes more important too.  Gambling is virtually the raison d’être of the streetfighting in the film.  Because of the personal prestige involved and in spite of the drab milieu, the gambling matters – to a greater extent than either the Western saloon or glamorous casino gambling we’re more used to seeing on a cinema screen.  Chick Gandil is determined, after his bullet-headed champion Jim Henry (Robert Tessier) has been expensively beaten by Chaney, to re-assert his authority as sponsor of the top fighter in the city.  He procures a supposed champion, pits him against Chaney, bets on the contest and agrees to pay all Speed’s debts if Chaney wins – which he does.  Although Gandil therefore loses even more heavily as a result, this venture brings him success in the longer term.   He makes the fight so potentially dangerous to his opponents that Chaney decides to go elsewhere; Speed disappears too, muttering about changing his patch.  In this Depression context, Gandil and Speed aren’t simply manipulative bookmaking figures:  success in the streetfighting management game is the measure of a man.

    Hill stages the fights – four involving Chaney and a couple of others – intelligently.  He exaggerates the pulp conventions in order both to intensify the action and to make it double-edged.  The punches crunch onto the soundtrack so loudly and crisply that they echo the zap-kapow sound effects of strip cartoons.  The fighting is given immediacy as a result but its aural proximity stops you lapping it up and though you root for Charles Bronson, you feel fear for his rivals as well as for Chaney.  The overhead shot that Hill favours for the two big fights in the story is conventional but  the action is so involving that it’s impossible to feel superior to the fight audience on the screen, even as they bay for blood.  You feel instead the crazy excitement of this kind of combat in the time and place in which the film is set.  Cine-sociologists claim that, during the recent recession, audiences have been favourably inclined towards disaster films because the people on screen are so much worse off than they are.  By contrast, the crowds in The Streetfighter are animated both by the visceral excitement of the spectacle and by the reassurance that you don’t need money in order to succeed in the fight game:  these onlookers are identifying with heroes as poor as themselves.  The streetfighting is a raw, brutally accurate metaphor for people’s attempts to avoid the Depression’s knockout punches.

    The characters’ names can be seen as semi-symbolic – Chaney, the sort-of beast the crowds come to watch; Speed, the fast talker; Poe, the intelligent opium-eater.  Speed moves, laughs and shoots a line with élan and is physically animated by the sight of greenbacks yet he’s never quite convincing as the hot-shot entrepreneur he aspires to be.  His exaggeratedly slick talk and gestures – the wisecracks, the flashing smiles, the affable, it’s-a-deal hand-slapping – make Speed look silly even when his man wins.  In a crisis, he is easily compromised and ineffectual, and relies on Chaney to get them both out of trouble.  Lying in a brothel bed, he asks the prostitute how he performed.  ‘Really terrific,’ she replies, not sounding as if she means it.  ‘That’s exactly what I thought,’ says Speed:  his shallow braggadocio carries even less conviction.  In debt and in panic, he tries the standard you-were-nothing-before-you-met-me-and-you’ll-be-nothing-without-me line on Chaney but the fighter sees the cliché for what it is and confirms he has the upper hand merely by saying nothing back.  James Coburn illustrates Speed’s weaknesses while making him charming and likeable too.  Speed is still on his feet, in spite of the Depression and his own shortcomings.

    Strother Martin’s Poe is likewise a figure of fun but a fundamentally determined one.  Poe is, in effect, the team doctor – a squat, dapper, white-suited, panama-hatted figure.  Like all the characters, he needs some moral fibre even to survive, though he’s even more lightweight than Speed and is no ladies’ man.  His passion for opium curtailed his medical school career but Poe is still something of a thinker:  we first see him at a black Pentecostal church service – he tells Speed he’s fascinated by comparative religion.  The irresponsibility of Speed and Poe give their set-up an amateurish quality that contrasts sharply with the sleek Gandil and his henchmen.  Gandil himself is well dressed and gives away less facially even than Chaney.  The shaven-headed Jim Henry looks more weapon than human being, until his defeat by Chaney, after which he’s reduced to the role of baggage man.  Jim Henry’s replacement, Street (Nick Dimitri), as he steps down onto the station platform, is a smart professional fellow, a businessman rather than a brawler.  There’s one incongruous figure in the Gandil camp – a pale little man with a moustachioed Dodge City bartender’s face, who keeps desperately switching sides to keep his head above water.  Maurice Kowaleski looks just right in the role.

    Walter Hill has used Charles Bronson honestly but knowingly.   This smallish (5’ 7”), middle-aged man is a huge Hollywood star.  He makes money for himself and directors like Michael Winner by bashing people up on screen.  Bronson thus brings an extra, grimly amusing dimension to the character of Chaney.  He’s an inexpressive actor but Hill turns that quality into inscrutability.  In physical terms, Bronson is certainly well cast as a teak-tough, lifeworn pugilist; his immobile, somewhat Oriental features seem right for Chaney’s serene, resigned attitude to life too.  Hill does more than communicate his affection for the mysterious underdog.  He also makes it infectious.  Philip Lathrop’s subdued photography catches the hopelessness of the grey streets and black alleyways.   The set decoration by Dennis W Peeples favours browns, pale greys and sad blue-greens.  Barry DeVorzon’s good, simple score is melancholy but the high notes are quietly hopeful – it’s an underdog’s signature tune.  All the harassed characters are, in the circumstances, underdogs:  their successes make them thankful for small mercies.  The Streetfighter made me, after seeing some ropy films recently, feel the same way.  Food for thought is not what you expect from a Charles Bronson picture but you get some from this one.

    [1970s]

    [1] Afternote:  The film was released in the US as Hard Times and that’s its primary title on Wikipedia and IMDB.  The latter confirms that the film was released in the UK as The Streetfighter.

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