Pit Stop

One of the great horror directors of the 1930s, James Whale shot Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, and The Bride of Frankenstein in just four short years, an impressive feat that also somewhat overshadows a few of his lesser known, non-spook related features – specifically, 1931's Waterloo Bridge. . . which, interestingly enough, earned Whale so much favour with the head of Universal Pictures’ production department, that Carl Laemmle, Jr. (due to a combination of his quality work and coming in under budget), gave the director the choice of anything the studio had in early planning stages – the filmmaker chose Frankenstein, a smart decision. His Waterloo Bridge is based upon Robert E. Sherwood’s 1930 Broadway play of the same name (the playwright based it upon many of his own experiences), where we are transported to London, England, circa World War I. Stuck in the metropolis is Myra (Mae Clarke), a chorus girl who has fallen on hard times.

Picture this – a stunning modernist gallery catches the eye of a passerby late one night, not because of its striking white floors and walls that are the backdrop for noteworthy pieces of art, but rather, because it is the scene of a brutal attack. . . a woman being knifed by a man dressed in a dark raincoat, fedora and gloves, her panicked look and seeping blood in stark contrast to the pale decor. Attempting to rescue her, he gets stuck between two hard-wired glass door panels – this is the hook for the benchmark 1970 giallo The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, written and directed by Dario Argento. The man is Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante), a struggling author from the United States. Coming off of a bender, it is this disturbing sight that enlivens his senses, a chivalric jolt of adrenaline. Though he cannot rescue the girl directly, he is able to sound the alarm, flagging a late-night walker who calls the police.

Tackling Raymond Chandler’s1953 novel “The Long Goodbye” (which features detective Philip Marlowe) in a unique way, director Robert Altman decided to, “call him Rip Van Marlowe, and we took the position that he had been asleep for twenty years, woke up, and Elliott [Gould] just wandered through that film. . . and that was our idea – that he was wandering through this landscape, the film trying to invoke the morals of a previous time into this early seventies.” Set exactly twenty years after the novel’s release date, detective Philip Marlowe (Gould) awakes in the middle of the night from a deep sleep – voice raspy, five o’clock shadow quickly moving onto six. . . a man in an endless stupor. His retro suits, skinny ties and constant smoking are out of place, much like his 1948 Cabriolet Lincoln Continental Convertible – a gent who is undoubtably from another time (even his salary closely resembles what a detective would make in the late 40s or early 50s).

Landing somewhere in between French New Wave, older classic French features and the grand Hollywood musical, Jacques Demy’s 1964 colourful kaleidoscopic romantic drama, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, is most definitely not your typical movie musical. Firstly, there is no dancing (a standard in musicals), rather, Demy orchestrates many lengthy choreographed takes with his camera – it adding the graceful movement that would usually be asked of the actors. But, more importantly, and at greater risk, every single line of dialogue in Cherbourg is sung. Perhaps a bit daunting to movie audiences, it does, in some ways, make sense. I have never bought into the idea that people would just randomly break into song and dance at any given time. . . only a few films giving some sort of reason for this (see Singin’ in the Rain and La La Land), so it is more plausible, in this vividly toned movie landscape, that people naturally sing all the time – this means no distracting breaks between song and talk.

Uniting a superlative film noir cast, 1946's The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, directed by Lewis Milestone (a two time Academy Award winner, one of which he earned for All Quiet on the Western Front), begins with a triumvirate of childhood friends witnessing a crime which forges a unique bond between them, it informing their respective directions into adulthood. Building off of her performance in Double Indemnity two years earlier, Barbara Stanwyck, playing the title character, once again proves why she is one of the all-time great femme fatales. . . a calm, controlled, ruthless Machiavellian puppet master, she not only pulls the strings of her weak and feeble alcoholic husband Walter O’Neil (Kirk Douglas in his first film role – and against type from what we would later know) – who truly loves her, but she also has a manipulative control over the entire city in which she lives – owner of the plant that gives its people their jobs, the police that protect it (thanks to her husband, who is the district attorney), and everything else in between.