Before graduating to studio films for the remainder of his filmmaking career, Stanley Kubrick cut his teeth on several lean independent films with producer James B. Harris, chief among them was The Killing (1956), a masterful take on Lionel White’s novel Clean Break. Adapted by Kubrick with dialogue written by none other than legendary crime novelist Jim Thompson, The Killing tells a fairly standard tale of a heist gone wrong. However, it is how Kubrick tells it, which makes the film one of the all-time classic noirs. He rearranges the sequence of events in a way that puts a fascinating spin on how everything goes down, decades before Quentin Tarantino made it cool again with Reservoir Dogs (1992).
During the fifth race at a horse track several incidents occur, which are seemingly unrelated to the casual observer but, of course, are all part of a masterful plan as conveyed by the knowing looks between a number of men. Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) is the de facto mastermind of the job and a savvy crook who understands the odds: “Anytime you take a chance you better be sure the rewards are worth the risk because they can put you away just as fast for a $10 heist as a million dollar job.” He plans to take his cut and fly off with his girlfriend and childhood sweetheart Fay (Coleen Gray).
Kubrick skips around chronologically to introduce all the significant players in the drama: bartender Mike O’Reilly (Joe Sawyer); track cashier George Peatty (Elisha Cook) and his shrewish wife Sherry (Marie Windsor); as well as her lover Val (Vince Edwards); gambler Marvin Unger (Jay C. Flippen); with two hired hoods – sniper Nikki Arcane (Timothy Carey) and brawler Maurice Oboukhoff (Kola Kwariani). Like most heist films, everyone has their own agenda and nobody can be trusted. Kubrick establishes these characters, shows their roles in the job and their respective fates in its aftermath.
The Killing features an impressive cast with the likes of Sterling Hayden, a veteran of these kinds of films (see The Asphalt Jungle) and ideally-suited as the no-nonsense leader. Idiosyncratic character actor Timothy Carey has a small but memorable role as a grimacing sharpshooter, but it is Elisha Cook and Marie Windsor who steal the show as a deeply dysfunctional couple. She is a two-timing schemer who has her husband wrapped around her finger (or so she thinks) while he’s the proverbial doormat, ignorant of his wife’s duplicitous ways. Some of the film’s best scenes feature their rocky relationship – one that can only end badly.
Like most film noirs, The Killing chronicles the inevitable countdown to the doomed finale for all involved. We know it’s coming, we just don’t know how and one of the perverse thrills is watching as everything goes horribly wrong. An early film in his career, Kubrick already demonstrated a masterful touch as he orchestrates a meticulously plotted heist film with the confident hand of a seasoned maestro. He also shows his knack for observing human behavior – in this case that of the criminal mind as he illustrates how a carefully planned job is ruined by greed and jealousy.
Special Features:
On the first disc is an interview with producer James B. Harris who talks about working with Stanley Kubrick and, of course, The Killing. Harris recounts how he met the director and the genesis of this film. He gives a nicely detailed account of several aspects of the production and his contributions.
Also included are excerpts from a 1984 interview with actor Sterling Hayden for French television. He talks about working in Hollywood and with Kubrick. Quite the colorful character, Hayden is refreshingly candid about his experiences making films.
“Polito on Thompson” features Robert Polito, author of Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, talking about the legendary writer’s relationship with Kubrick and the problems he encountered while working in Hollywood. Kubrick was a great admirer of Thompson’s books, especially his knack for writing dialogue, and wanted to utilize this strength in The Killing. Polito recounts how the two men met and their collaboration on this film.
There is a theatrical trailer.
The second disc starts off with a fantastic extra for Kubrick fans – a newly re-mastered transfer of Killer’s Kiss (1955), a low budget film noir the director made prior to The Killing. Shot on the streets of New York City, it concerns a small-time boxer by the name of Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith) who is past his prime. He becomes romantically involved with his neighbor and dancer Gloria Price (Irene Kane) while also getting mixed up with her violent boss Vincent Rapallo (Frank Silvera). Kubrick’s background in documentaries is evident in the way he shoots every day life in New York. The city is almost a character unto itself and the film serves as a fascinating snapshot of a metropolis that no longer exists.
Film critic Geoffrey O’Brien talks about Killer’s Kiss. He compares it to a student film in the sense that it was done for very little money, was an opportunity for the young Kubrick to experiment, and demonstrates his promise as an aspiring filmmaker. He points out that there is a loose, almost improvisational quality that would be less evident in later films as Kubrick became a more skillful director.
After the classy film noirs of the 1940’s, Robert Aldrich’s adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s hardboiled crime novel Kiss Me Deadly (1955) was as tough and uncompromising as its protagonist Mike Hammer. The film reflects the Cold War paranoia that was rampant during the 1950’s and fuses it with an apocalyptic science fiction climax that still packs a powerful punch after all these years. Aldrich worked for RKO in 1941 as an assistant director and got his solo start on the anti-American film Apache (1954) and the cynical western Vera Cruz (1954). The edgy Kiss Me Deadly ran afoul of the MPAA during the script stages for its depiction of drugs and violence. Aldrich removed the drugs but the violence remained and upon its release he defended it in the press.
The film begins with a barefooted woman (Cloris Leachman) running breathlessly along a stretch of highway road at night. Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) nearly runs her over. He picks her up and it’s a decision he will regret later. Even though Hammer gives her a hard time he lies for her at a police roadblock when he finds out she’s escaped from a mental hospital. However, they are run off the road by three unidentified men and over the soundtrack we hear the woman’s terrified screams which carry over to the next scene where she’s being tortured but all we see are her dangling feet, leaving the rest to our imagination.
The men attempt to get rid of Hammer and the woman by staging a car accident that he somehow survives. Once he gets out of the hospital, government officials unsuccessfully grill him. Why? And who was the mysterious woman and why was she killed? Intrigued and understandably pissed off at almost being killed, Hammer decides to get some answers – ones that lead to something bigger than he could have possible imagined.
Kiss Me Deadly is saturated with a paranoia vibe, like when Hammer comes home from the hospital and carefully checks out his apartment for intruders. Later on, his secretary, Velda (Maxine Cooper), warns him to stay away from the windows because “somebody might blow you a kiss,” which implies that someone is trying to kill him. Aldrich employs shots of Hammer talking to people as if he’s being spied on by someone and this keeps the viewer on edge. Later on, things get serious when Hammer finds dynamite and a bomb rigged to blow up his car. Aldrich also doesn’t skimp on the violence, which must’ve been shocking for its time. Hammer viciously beats a man who tries to kill him with a switchblade by punching him down a flight of steps. In another scene, Hammer disables a henchman so quickly and efficiently that he scares off his cohort.
Ralph Meeker anchors the film with his uncompromising performance. Hammer is a crude, sexist man with a deep distrust of authority, anticipating Dirty Harry by several years as a righteous avenger with his own brand of justice. Meeker is a good-looking tough guy that does a fantastic job of portraying Spillane’s protagonist.
Kiss Me Deadly features a smart, cynical screenplay by A.I. Bezzerides who tweaked the book’s setting and removed the first person voiceover, but retained the hardboiled attitude. Aldrich’s film takes us on a journey through the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles culminating in an explosive finale that would influence the likes of Repo Man (1984) and Pulp Fiction (1994). It came out around the time that other grim, bleak noirs, like Pickup on the South Street (1953), were starting to appear, and anticipated films like Touch of Evil (1958) Don Siegel’s The Killers (1964).
Special Features:
There is an audio commentary by film noir experts Alain Silver and James Ursini. They talk about how Kiss Me Deadly is a commentary on the 1950’s. They point out innovative things for the time, like how it begins in the middle of the action before any opening credits, which play over the film backwards like a road sign. They point out that Aldrich wanted to turn the source novel on its head and use the female characters to comment on and critique Hammer. In addition to the excellent analysis, Silver and Ursini provide biographical and production information on this solid track.
“Director Alex Cox on Kiss Me Deadly” features the English director praising the film and talking about how radically it differs from Spillane’s book. He describes Aldrich as a “bold and radical” filmmaker.
“Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane” is a condensed cut of a 1998 documentary about the author’s life and career in which he also agreed to participate. Fellow writers and admirers speak highly of the man and the innovations he pioneered in crime fiction. Fascinatingly, Spillane wrote for comic books in their early days along with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. This is a fantastic primer on Spillane and his work.
“The Long Haul of A.I. Bezzerides” features excerpts from this 2007 documentary where writers Barry Gifford, George Belecanos, Spillane and Bezzerides talk about the film version of Kiss Me Deadly. Spillane criticizes the script as “lousy,” while Gifford calls the film a classic. Bezzerides says that he changed what he didn’t like about the novel and wrote his own version, “fixing” it.
“Bunker Hill, Los Angeles” features writer and L.A. film buff Jim Dawson talking about some of the film’s locations. We learn about the rise and decline of the Bunker Hill neighborhood. Dawson points out where in the city key scenes were shot in this fascinating tour.
“Altered Ending” shows the truncated ending which offers a much different fate for Hammer. A minute of footage was cut out from the film and finally restored in 1997, which is the version of the film that is on this DVD.
While Sweet Smell of Success (1957) was a hit with film critics at the time, it was not a box office smash as fans of the film’s two leads – Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis – were put off seeing their matinee idols portraying unlikable characters. Based on Ernest Lehman’s novelette and adapted by Clifford Odets, Alexander Mackendrick’s film is a cynical love letter to New York City – seen as a dog-eat-dog town with a richly textured film noir look courtesy of legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe. Sweet Smell’s reputation has only grown over time and is now generally regarded as one of the best-written films with quotable dialogue and also one of the finest takes on tabloid journalism.
Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) is an unscrupulous press agent, a bottom feeder who does anything he can to get his clients mentioned in mainstream publications like The New York Globe. For some time, he’s been trying to get in the good graces of J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), the most influential newspaper columnist in the city. He’s even willing to break up the romance between Hunsecker’s kid sister Susan (Susan Harrison) and Steve Dallas (Martin Milner), an up and coming jazz musician, by planting a story that her boyfriend dabbles in drugs. Falco sees Hunsecker as “the golden ladder to the places I want to get,” which is a position where he’s the one calling the shots instead of spending all of his time hustling.
Odets’ much celebrated hard-boiled dialogue crackles with energy and intensity as evident in the scene that introduces Hunsecker. “You’re dead son. Get yourself buried,” is how he casually dismisses Falco. “Match me, Sidney,” is another witty remark courtesy of Hunsecker. Falco gets his own clever remarks as he tells Hunsecker at one point, “Cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.” In a film like Sweet Smell of Success, words are weapons which men like Falco and Hunsecker use to destroy people with no remorse.
The film was quite a risky venture for both Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster at the time. They were popular box office draws and their roles in Sweet Smell of Success were very different from what their fans were used to seeing. Curtis, in particular, wanted to shed his pretty boy reputation by taking on more substantial material while Lancaster was a maverick within the industry and formed his own production company in order to generate personal pet projects like Sweet Smell.
Right from the opening shot, Mackendrick presents New York as a busy, claustrophobic and noisy place drenched in noirish shadows. It’s a place where heartless individuals like Falco and Hunsecker prey upon the weak. While the latter was based on infamous gossip columnist Walter Winchell, he is also a predecessor to muckraking gossip hounds of today, including websites like TMZ and feared industry insiders like Nikki Finke. Sweet Smell of Success, with its snappy acerbic dialogue, anticipates the stylized tough guy banter of David Mamet and the fast-talking characters in Aaron Sorkin’s television shows. It was one of the rare, uncompromising films from the 1950s that dared to be critical of the establishment and still get made and released within the system. The folks at the Criterion Collection have given this cinematic classic the deluxe treatment it so richly deserves.
Special Features:
Time to throw away the bare bones MGM DVD that was released years ago as this new edition features a pristine transfer that restores the Sweet Smell of Success’ exquisite black and white cinematography, and includes several wonderful extras.
The first disc features an audio commentary by film scholar James Naremore who wrote the BFI Film Classics book on Sweet Smell of Success. He offers excellent analysis of various aspects of the film and also provides biographical detail on the principal cast and crew. In addition, Naremore provides important details on Walter Winchell, the inspiration for the character of J.J. Hunsecker. He also takes us through the genesis of the film in this engaging and very informative track.
Also included is a theatrical trailer.
The second disc starts off with “Mackendrick: The Man Who Walked Away,” a 1986 documentary about director Alexander Mackendrick that runs 44 minutes in length. Contemporaries, like Burt Lancaster, and fellow filmmakers, like John Milius, speak highly of the man. Mackendrick himself talks about his beginnings in advertising thanks to his aptitude as an illustrator – a skill he applied to his filmmaking. This doc sheds light on this often-forgotten film director.
“James Wong Howe: Cinematographer” is a 1973 documentary that features the Academy Award-winning director of photography giving a tutorial on film lighting. In addition, he also tells some entertaining filming anecdotes from his illustrious career and shares his approach to cinematography.
“Gabler on Winchell” takes a look at the columnist that inspired Hunsecker in the film. We learn of Walter Winchell’s importance to American journalism, including the notion of celebrity and the concept of personal style in reporting. He grew to great prominence in the 1930s and wielded a lot of power with the ability to make or break people’s careers.
Finally, there is a 25-minute interview with director James Mangold (Cop Land, Walk the Line) who was one of Mackendrick’s students. Mangold recalls his initial impressions of Mackendrick and what drew him to the man. He says that in his teachings, Mackendrick stressed the ability to tell a story, an understanding of acting, and how a scene worked. Mangold speaks with obvious affection for his mentor in this engaging extra.
With an Academy Award nomination for his scene-stealing role in Revolutionary Road (2008), Michael Shannon’s career was given a considerable boost. For years, he’s plugged away in small roles in big films like Pearl Harbor (2001) and more substantial parts in independent films like Grand Theft Parsons (2003). He’s one of those character actors that can bring an extra special something to the table with his unconventional looks and quirky acting style, much like Steve Buscemi did in the 1990s. So, when Shannon gets the chance to headline a film, as he does with The Missing Person (2009), it is definitely worth a look.
“I coulda lied there forever, but the phone rang.” And with that bit of hard-boiled narration we are introduced to the world of private investigator John Rosow (Michael Shannon), a rumpled burn out cut from the same cloth as Elliott Gould’s gumshoe in The Long Goodbye (1973). Rosow is hired by an attorney over the phone to tail a man (Frank Wood) from Chicago to Los Angeles by train. Rosow may come across as a burn out but when it’s called for, he displays the necessary private eye skills: paying off a taxi cab driver to tail his target, pulling a fast one on the hotel clerk where the man is staying at, and listening in on the man’s room.
Rosow eventually finds out that there is much more to this mystery man than meets the eye and that there is much more to the job than he was initially led to believe. Halfway through the film, the story veers off in an unexpected direction that gives the film noir genre an interesting spin as we gain significant insight into both Rosow and the man he is following. Without giving too much away, we begin to realize that the film’s title applies not only to Rosow’s target but to the private eye himself.
Writer/director Noah Buschel makes good use of Michael Shannon’s world-weary face. Rosow seems to sport a permanent grimace as if every action were a painful chore. It doesn’t help that he appears to be a barely functioning alcoholic. Over the course of the film, it becomes apparent that he is haunted by memories of his past that come to him in his dreams. Through several flashbacks, Buschel hints at a happier time for Rosow when he was involved with a beautiful woman that was probably his wife. Shannon doesn’t overplay his character’s affectations but does make one aware of them by the way he carries himself and through body language.
Buschel has a good ear for snappy film noir dialogue, like when Rosow trades barbs with two FBI agents that are tailing him. It evokes a bygone era which juxtaposes rather nicely with the contemporary setting. For example, Rosow is approached by a dishy, femme fatale (Margaret Colin) type and asks her, “You’re not one of those gals that uses sex as a weapon, are ya?” to which she replies, “No. I don’t like violence.”
While Chicago is photographed by cinematographer Ryan Samul to look drab and drained of color, L.A. is sunny and vibrant so that Rosow, with his plain brown suit, looks out of place. Like Gould’s P.I. in The Long Goodbye, Rosow is a man out of time. He listens to music from the 1950s and dresses like a gumshoe from the 1940s which is rather fitting seeing as how Shannon looks like an actor who could’ve had a pretty good career appearing in film noirs from that era. Shannon is fascinating to watch and is an actor that makes interesting choices when it comes to a given scene. The world weary private eye genre has been done to death but Shannon, along with Buschel’s excellent writing, keeps us engaged for the entire running time of The Missing Person.
In the early 1980s it must’ve seemed like a crazy idea to mix several contemporary actors with clips from classic films into something resembling a coherent story. Even now it seems like a pretty wild idea and one with few antecedents (Kung Pow! Enter the Fist is the only one that comes immediately to mind). But director Carl Reiner and comedian Steve Martin had the chutzpah to give it a try with Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), a comedy that simultaneously pays tribute to and affectionately parodies film noirs from the 1940s and 1950s. Only a few years earlier, Reiner and Martin hit comedic pay dirt with The Jerk (1979) and so anticipation was high for this new collaboration. The result was a rare cinematic experiment that was viewed by some as lazy filmmaking and a clever homage by others.
Reiner sets the proper tone right from the get-go by featuring the Universal Pictures logo from the ‘40s. The opening credits play over a rainy city skyline at night (does it get any more noir than that?). The buildings are obviously an illustrated backdrop signifying that we are dealing with a fantasy world drenched in noir, anticipating Sin City’s (2005) own artificial world by many years. Private investigator Rigby Reardon (Steve Martin) is hired by the beautiful Juliet Forrest (Rachel Ward) to investigate the mysterious death of her father John Hay Forrest (George Gaynes), a highly regarded scientist and cheesemaker. The authorities have ruled it an accident but she suspects murder, her father the victim of a giant conspiracy.
Reardon’s hard-boiled voiceover narration plays around with the pulpy dialogue common in the film noir genre for comedic effect. For example, after his first meeting with Juliet, he thinks to himself, “I hadn’t seen a body put together like that since I solved the case of the murdered girl with the big tits.” His voiceovers also complement visual gags like when Reardon arrives at Dr. Forrest’s cheese lab and he observes, “I had no trouble finding Dr. Forrest’s cheese lab. It smelled like the number on the door.” Cut to a shot of a door with a “2” on it. In another scene, Juliet can actually hear Reardon’s voiceover narration, much to his surprise. There are a few gags that would be repeated in the short-lived Police Squad television show, which was also a parody of the crime thriller genre, but Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid’s focus is predominantly film noir.
Reardon is not your typical gumshoe. For example, he goes into a hysterical murderous rampage whenever he hears the words, “cleaning woman.” Steve Martin wisely knows when to play it straight, like when it comes to saying the hard-boiled dialogue that often authentically evokes film noirs while also poking fun at them as well. He also picks his moments to cut loose and act zany, most notably whenever the “cleaning woman” phrase is invoked. Martin has a lot of fun interacting with various screen legends, like the phone conversation he has with a hysterical Barbara Stanwyck from Sorry, Wrong Number (1948). His poker-faced delivery of most of his dialogue is what makes it so funny, as is some of the physical bits of business he does, like when Reardon makes a cup of his famous java for Burt Lancaster from The Killers (1946), which evidently involves an entire bag of coffee grounds and two eggs (including the shells).
Juliet is not a typical femme fatale. For starters, whenever Reardon is shot she removes the bullet with her teeth, a procedure she learned at camp. Rachel Ward looks absolutely gorgeous all dolled up and looking like she walked right out of a film from the ‘40s, which is obviously the look they were going for. Ward has the perfect sultry voice of a noir fatale and watching this film again serves as a vivid reminder of what a sexy presence she was in the 1980s with films like Against All Odds (1984), which really put her on the map and into the mainstream consciousness. Ward seemed to gravitate towards crime films, also appearing in the underrated neo-noir After Dark, My Sweet (1990). Martin and Ward play well off each other and have several funny exchanges of dialogue, like when she tells him at one point, “You’re a very smart man,” to which he replies, “So was Abraham Lincoln. Look what happened to him.”
In the summer of 1980, Martin was having lunch with Reiner and screenwriter George Gipe. They were discussing a screenplay Martin had written when the comedian suggested that they use a clip from an old film somewhere in his project. From this suggestion came the idea of using all sorts of clips from classic films throughout the entire feature. The three men left the lunch thinking about how they could incorporate all of these old clips into a story. Reiner figured that they could work Martin into the old footage via tricks like over-the-shoulder shots so that it looked like he was talking to these famous actors.
Reiner and Gipe spent countless hours viewing classic films looking for specific shots and “listening for a line that was ambiguous enough but had enough meat in it to contribute a line opposite,” Reiner said at the time. He and Gipe took lines of dialogue from the clips they wanted to use and juxtaposed them while also trying to write a story based on them. They finally worked out a story and then met with Martin who contributed some funny material of his own. In preparation for the film, he purposely chose not to watch any classic film noirs because he “didn’t want to act like Humphrey Bogart ... I didn’t want to be influenced.”
In order to accurately recreate the look of film noir, Reiner recruited some of the people that helped define several classic films from the genre. Costume designer Edith Head, responsible for memorable outfits in films like Double Indemnity (1944), Notorious (1946) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), created over 20 suits for Martin in similar fashion to those worn by Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart back in the day. Production designer John De Cuir, a veteran with 40 years of experience on films like Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948) designed 85 sets over the ten-week shooting schedule. Rounding out these cinematic legends was composer Miklos Rozsa, who created the atmospheric soundtracks for Double Indemnity, Spellbound (1945) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and he helped give the film an authentic noir sound. Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid looks and sounds as good as it does because of the work of these talented people. Sadly, it would be the last film for both Head and Rozsa.
Reiner and director of photography Michael Chapman do a pretty good job blending the vintage footage with their own. Nowadays you would just use CGI but back then they didn’t have that luxury and had to pay careful attention to the cinematography so that their shots would match up, making the seamless blend that much more impressive. Chapman studied the angles and lighting popular among ‘40s film noir, conducting six months of research with Technicolor to try and match the old film clips with his new footage. Principal photography began on July 7, 1981 with the bulk of it done on the soundstages of Laird International Studios in Culver City and three exterior locations shot in and around Los Angeles.
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid actually received a pretty decent response from critics. In his review for Newsweek magazine, David Ansen wrote, "A one joke movie? Perhaps, but it's such an engaging joke that anyone who loves old movies will find it irresistible. And anyone who loves Steve Martin will be fascinated by his sly performance, which is pitched exactly between the low comedy of The Jerk and the highbrow Brechtianisms of Pennies from Heaven." The New York Times’ Vincent Canby praised Martin's performance: "the film has an actor who's one of America's best sketch artists, a man blessed with a great sense of timing, who is also self-effacing enough to meet the most cockeyed demands of the material." However, Time magazine's Richard Corliss wrote, "The gag works for a while, as Martin weaves his own plot-web into the 18 old movies, but pretty soon he's traveling on old good will and flop sweat".
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is quite possibly my favorite Steve Martin comedy, even over beloved classics like The Jerk and L.A. Story (1991), because of its film noir trappings and its very funny script chock full of all kinds of gags, both verbal and physical. It is a film noir lover’s dream as we get to see Martin “interact” with the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Burt Lancaster, Veronica Lake, Ingrid Bergman and countless others. There is also a lot of fun to be had identifying which films are used in the various clips seen throughout but this is also one of its criticisms – that the film is nothing more than a stylish parlor game of spot the reference. Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is some kind of crazed, ambitious experiment that has rarely been duplicated – clearance rights for all of these clips would be a legal nightmare in today’s ultra-litigious climate. In retrospect, the film had limited commercial appeal which may explain why it didn’t exactly set the box office on fire, disappointing mainstream audiences expecting Reiner and Martin to rehash The Jerk. Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is not talked about much anymore making it prime for rediscovery as a cult film oddity.
Some of the stills used in this article came from the Precious Bodily Fluids blog and this excellent post on the film (featuring more stills). Here is a pretty snazzy fan site.
