Crazy, Cool Sue Cabot: SORORITY GIRL (1957), MACHINE-GUN KELLY (1958)

Raise the roof! Because under it Shout Factory TV via Prime have dislodged some of the long buried Corman gems from the late-50s beatnik Corman AIP days, including three of his very best: THE UNDEAD (1957), SORORITY GIRL (1957) and MACHINE GUN KELLY (1958). Long unseen by anyone not expressly looking for them (they've never been on DVD) the sudden availability of these three gems, ready to stream and looking great, should be great news to weird movie fans like myself. The dialogue and plots are go-for-broke inspired (Undead being a crazy riff on Bergman's Seventh Seal crossed with a Bridey Murphy hypnotist angle that prefigures The Terminator) and Corman's cadre of genius hipster actors are all here: Barboura Morris, Dick Miller, Richard Devon, and --of course--the divine Susan Cabot. She's not in The Undead but she leads the pack in Girl and Gun, wherein though she's the bad guy in both we root for her straight down the line. Cabot plays Corman's characters with such modulated catlike finesse, we don't blame him for letting her take oer the picture, even if it means stealing the show from Charles Bronson. 

I kept trying to get really good screenshots for this post but it's hard to nail down Cabot's expressive features in a single shot, as she has a way of running through an array of moods and sly glances while doing a kind of restless movement thing with her head bending low and snaking sidewise towards her prey. Both playful and a little macabre, consider, for example, when someone threatens to rat her out to the dean in Sorority Girl: Cabot's face first displays a brief animal rage as she knocks the rat out, to determination while rummaging through the rat's things while she's unconscious, to triumph when she finds some incriminating evidence that will hold the rat's tongue in a blackmail quid pro quo, to playful cool once she has the rat under her control. What matters isn't the evidence she finds, or the absurd idea someone could get kicked out of school for spanking a pledge--it's the irresistible way Cabot has with controlling a scene, with goading the other characters into pushing back, then taking their slaps or incriminations with a cat who swallowed the canary smile. It's theatrical, but it's a special kind of movie-style theatricality that scriptwriters and directors and actors can't often predict, but love when it happens as suddenly their lines take wing. Sue Cabot soars with Corman's dialogue; she susses out all the fissures and peaks and moments the writer maybe didn't even know were there because they couldn't get high enough. 

She got a contract with Universal earlier in the decade but they didn't know what they had, so they loaded her into the background of a bunch of forgettable westerns. She went back to NYC to act on the stage and then Corman came. He recognized a tough confidence in her, she was tough enough to be sensitive and open, that kind of courageous raw nerve that lets her saunter up to a cop and make small talk while her man's robbing the bank next door, if you know what I mean. He put her in the lead, Sorority Girl, then she stayed with him to make six films within a three year period of 1957-59: Sorority Girl, Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, Carnival Rock, War of the Satellites, Machine Gun Kelly and The Wasp Woman.  She could be the girlfriend of a tough guy like Charles Bronson and not even gripe or sob if he socked her for taunting him and teasing him in front of the other guys, and she could be manipulative sadistic sorority girl determined to abuse her hazing privileges. And she could win our admiration almost in spite of ourselves, every time.

SORORITY GIRL

(1957) Dr. Roger Corman

***/  Amazon/Shout Image - A

From the title, we kind of expect a bunch of malt hops and mixers, with Tab Hunter giving our heroine a pledge pin and maybe getting her pregnant the night Chubby Checker or Bill Haley come to town to play at the big beachside fraternity party. Thankfully, it's not that. And we can tell just from the mysterious animated collage credits: a surrealist figure stands, alienated from the bunch, reacting with a cat o'nine tails to those who'd ignore her, becoming a kind of surrogate harpy. It's haunting and totally unique, seriously, there is no comparison to other films. No Tab Hunter tonight. What Freud fan Corman is bringing us under that innocuous title is a strangely sexy psychodrama about a disturbed young woman named Sabra (Cabot), from an affluent but loveless home, who struggles against a deep Sadean impulse to hurt and destroy. Clearly she should see a shrink, but we must remember that back then shrinks were considered a shameful secret. If it got out you'd been to one it could ruin your reputation (a stigma that persisted through into the 70s), and chances are the analyst would be some smug male who'd decree you had 'lady part issues' and needed to get married or, on the other side, have electroshock treatment and be committed. I mention this to temper the scenes of her begging for help from her distant loveless mom, to the point we shout at the screen: see a shrink and get some anti-depressants! But antidepressants are still decades away.

Pity them, the fucked-up children in a time before Prozac.

She tries, in all the wrong ways to connect. I can certainly relate, and maybe you can to, to not realizing that your mistreatment of the one person who does want to hang out with you, just because they're a stupid loser, is the reason you are shunned by everyone else. With her schemes and bizarre psychosexual sadism Sabra prefigures Tippi Hedren in Marnie and Sara Michelle Gellar in Cruel Intentions. And during a surprise visit home to beg for help and/or affection from mom, we don't need our Penguin Freud to see where Sabra gets her inability to tolerate or express affection. It might be obvious, but it's still relentless and true, to the bone.

Thanks to the insights of her voiceover and that heartbreaking visit home, we have endless sympathy for Sabra, which makes her odious behavior all the harder to accept or understand. What sets all this above the average 'co-ed' movie (even above Corman's later nurse pics for New World) is the sober intellect and overall supportiveness of the student body amongst each other. The fear of public gossip---this being the age of strict codes of conduct, where getting pregnant can mean disgrace, when abortions are illegal-- is just a few rings more moderate than Peyton Place, making blackmail and other nefarious evils all too easy.

One of Corman's ingenious tricks is to plant his films with a very strong and entertaining centerpiece scene (i.e. the fight over the fur in St. Valentine's Day Massacre). Usually this scene has only has a moderate amount to do with the rest of the film but it packs in sex and tough, awesome talk, as if Russ Meyer took over for a middle reel. Here, it's an extended scene that goes from Sabra trying to steal her roommate Rita's (Barboura Morris') man (Dick Miller, modulating his /beat swagger to seem like a gadfly about town) downstairs in the drawing room of the sorority house while the other sisters are at a pledge party, to trying to help dowdy pledge Tina (Barbara Cowan) lose a few pounds by forcing her to do some crunches / sit-ups, to eventually becoming so incensed by Tina's defeatist childish attitude, Sabra reaches for the sorority pledge paddle. Suddenly the flow stops cold. You can almost hear the blood rushing in their ears.

 What follows is a very erotically charged sorority paddling, ingeniously edited to focus on Cabot's face, lost in a haze of suppressed lesbian (?) and Sadean desire, worthy of Petra von Kant, especially considering Tina's complicity. She meekly submits, lying face down on the ottoman as if enraptured and trying not to blow the mood. There's clearly some darkly erotic Freudian/repressed sapphic undertones as she submits. A kind of sub/dom unspoken sublimated lesbian moment that, again, is unique to the drive-in, but after all, why we're here.

Corman films this paddling from two angles-- behind Cabot and looking down to the side at the submissive pledge and then an reverse, looking up at Cabot's face, which seems to be hiding an unholy mix of sadistic lesbian relish, all done very subtly (there's no moaning or screaming in pleasure or pain). The quiet sobbing of the pledge afterwards sounds more ashamed of some secret masochistic enjoyment than of trauma. In this repressed world, paddling is about the only means of sexual contact these two maybe gay women are allowed, and even then, it's warped by social repression (cruelty is less abject that lesbianism); neither one has a boyfriend or seems interested in such things (unless, for Sabra, any man is only valuable as a tool of power over other girls). They are their only human companions, two outsiders bound in a coded sapphic master-slave relationship neither one quite understands (this being America and not Germany).

Later, on the beach, they are still sitting together. Tina is doing sit-ups and even dryly noting she's gotten tougher. She's used the incident in a productive manner. It's toughened her up.

Perhaps Cabot drew from experience, having grown up in a series of 13 foster homes in Boston before getting married at 17 in order to escape the havoc. We can feel in her eyes: the round-and-round mix of need/desire for acceptance and companionship ever at odds with a total contempt for weakness and loathing for any kind of physical affection.  When Sabra goes home, hoping in vain to get some sympathy from her socialite mother (Fay Baker), only to find mom would never let her daughter's nervous breakdown and craving for love and connection interfere with her plans for cocktails with the neighbors. It's a devastating, stand-alone scene that tells us everything we need to know and instills the utmost sympathy for this "evil" sorority sister. Cabot brings such raw hurt and psychological complexity to the scene it's simply astonishing for a 1957 drive-in picture. 

In addition to Barbara Mouris, we get Dick Miller as a bar-owning man about campus who rejects Sabra's advances so she blackmails a pregnant waitress (June Kenney) into blackmailing him, even though they both know he's not the one who got her pregnant. The music is by Ronald Stein; Monroe Askins' photography brings an airy depth to the sorority house's close quarters, and a misty mountain marvelousness to the climactic beach scene. The print on Shout TV/via Prime, is ungodly great. And so welcome. Barely clocking in at over an hour, there's not an ounce of fat on this strange cinematic event, which had a male military school version with even more kinky sadism and blackmail, the same year, The Strange One, starring the comparable Ben Gazzara. If you saw them both as a double feature you'd never send your child to school again! 

 MACHINE-GUN KELLY

(1958) Dir. Roger Corman

*** 1/2 / Amazon Stream image - A

Though Charles Bronson gets the title billing, Corman lets Susan Cabot be the real show, the real leader of Kelly's gang, and Cabot has a field day! Her character, Florence "Flo" Becker, is based loosely (one presumes) on the real-life Kelly's wife Kathryn: the brains of the organization and apparently the one who styled her husband's public image, even convincing him to adopt a machine gun as a talisman. Why isn't she the title character? Because she was too smart even for that. Instead, well, Cabot's Flo gets as many--if not more lines--as Bronson's Kelly, who suffers from a major yellow streak. She's way more courageous, witty, and pro-active than everyone else in the film. She keeps reminding Bronson he's her "little baby," and her "gun arm," and she chose him because he was so weak and pliable! She tells him that in front of the other members of the gang, including the Morey Amsterdam as a dime-dropping fink mad at Kelly for ripping his arm off via cougar!

Bronson plays Kelly with a kind of functional sadism atop the fear and, surprise, and a streak of niceness as well as cowardice. It's a full 3D performance with Bronson even playing paddy cake with their kidnap victim and thrashing Richard Devon when tries to rape the kid's nanny (Barbara Mouris).

Some elements of the true story have been shifted around (here Kelly and co. kidnap a rich guy's child -- in real life they kidnapped the rich guy himself) and it's a bit rough on our modern sensibility to see cougars and other beasts in tiny cages but Corman films it all with a punchy urgency so there's no time for feeling glum. This is no plodding origin story. This is just a few crazy heists, and then the cops get 'em, the end. Bang! Credits! Corman has no time for tedious art or Big Statements, and in the process of stripping things down he's way more insightful and illuminating than most of the overblown prestige gangster pics.

To get back to Cabot's Flo, what lets the audience know she's the real leader of the gang is the way only she seems totally at ease with danger. And she's always dressed to the nines, sauntering in and out of the hideout, trailing her fur stoles, while the men all have to lay super low, bickering and playing cards behind closed curtains. As luxuriant and catlike as one could ask for in a super moll, she's the one casing out banks, drawing out maps, and flirting with the guards. Kelly is prone to freezing and running away when confronted with any memento mori (a coffin, skull paperweight, or obituary column), so he needs constant propping up his ego, flirting with his outlaw cronies (none of them have molls) to make him jealous. After he blows a big heist (a coffin passes by in front of him on the way to the bank) the couple hide out at a small brotherl run by her Mom (Connie Gilchrist), almost as cool as Flo herself. Unfazed by Kelly's tough guy veneer, realizing he's no good and telling him so. We see where Flo gets her her scathing wit and her lack of fear when it comes to antagonizing tough-talking, hard-hitting men.

Cabot relishes her character, investing so much playful nuance and force it's amazing. Part of it, I imagine, is her theatrical background: the ability to play extended single takes covering a lot of different emotional moments, and she does it daringly well. Unlike most 'moll' characters in crime movies, her Flo enjoys the life of crime. She's a long way from being just Warner Bros-style trophy wife, sulking around on the couch, eating bon-bons, whining about how much she misses nightclubs, irritating a pacing James Cagney .Corman and Cabot's Flo is the one going out and doing all the work. And when push come to shove she's the one ready to go down swinging.

Gerald Fried whips up some really peppy rich jazz for the score, a million miles from the phoned in Dixieland ragtime generic nonsense usually played in the 70s during their 20s-30s nostalgia kick. I mean, man, this stuff rips, I found myself unable to stop snapping my fingers and at one point was lifted out of my recliner as if on the wings of Gene Krupa. And Corman makes sure it's all edited tight as bank heists and the elaborate getaways come off like clockwork tied to the precision jump-back crackerjack flap the pack rack rhythm of the band. Fried had just done the score for Kubrick's The Killing a couple years earlier and the buzz was still generating. It's 61 years later and he's still working! Every day is Fried day!

Alas, aside from this small period of working with Corman (six films in three years: 1957-59), Cabot never really made the lasting mark she should and could have. She went back to NYC and Boston after The Wasp Woman to do mostly theater, and then there's her tragic death at the hands of her deranged son (1).

As for that, well, I don't like to dwell in my favorite stars' murky home lives, lest some detail or other ruin their viability as a screen for some archetypal projection of my own. Cabot is just such a screen, that mix of anima, trickster, cougar and devouring mom I have deep in the collective cinema unconscious. She could embody all these archetypes and more, in a single scene, perfectly modulated, all with a catty class and oomph that reminds us strong cool women come in all decades, shapes, and sizes. That a short brunette with shark eyes, clunky shoes, and a weird smile can wow us to core--even in a B-list gangster movie, or a sorority sister psychodrama meant to fill in a B-slot at a drive-in--proves greatness always eventually finds its way to the light... no matter what happens offscreen. Thanks Shout Factory! We got our Cabot back.

NOTES:
1. See Tom Weaver's piece "The Life and Tragic Death of Susan Cabot" for the full sad tale
2. And to prove the powerful effect of this kind of strange, deeply Freudian scene, Corman recreated it 13 years later in Bloody Mama this time in a holding cell between Bruce Dern and Robert Walden with a wet towel instead of a paddle, and the desire/fear-paralyzed Walden gently singing a religious spiritual as the 'whacks' come down.  In getting at the deep Freudian root, in these two scenes Corman creates moments we find confusing in their eroticism. We're hypnotized and dimly--on a subconscious, precambrian level--even turned on, albeit in the way we may have been as a child imagining such punishments inflicted on others. So often in film these kinds of incidents are filmed all wrong. An auteur like Bunuel or Von Sternberg focuses more on the psychological sort of masochism, and some, like Alain Robbe-Grillet, get too hung up on the bondage gear and class. In these two examples, Corman somehow manages to stage the abuse in a way that captures all the Freudian intensity without ever tumbling into the void of either Shades of Grey softcore tackiness or Girl with a Dragon Tattoo misogynistic trauma. See: Taming the Tittering Tourists: 50 Shades of Grey for the one type (tacky), Butterfly Moanin' - Duke of Burgundy and Fairie Bower Cinema (inert) for the other.

Waiting for Katelbach, Dorleac, CUL-DE-SAC

Roman Polanski's awe-inspiring CUL-DE-SAC (1966) is free from the moths and Americans can now fully appreciate the wobbly genius of Catherine Deneuve's sister, Francois Dorleac, and the way this amazing film links the male posturing of KNIFE IN THE WATER with the cold-eyed sexual hysterics of REPULSION, and even connects highbrow small-group isolation studies like WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, with lowbrow like SPIDER BABY; PERFORMANCE with THE ADDAMS FAMILY; Samuel Beckett's WAITING FOR GODOT x Strindberg's DANCE OF DEATH all under a slinky jazz black and white sky

The plot line is more like a series of events that spiral in and out of tight isolationist control, making 'plot' per se merely something to confuse and bait the viewer: Donald Pleasance is a neurotic retired business owner named George, who's had an apparent mid-life crisis, sold everything to buy an isolated castle fortress (where Sir Walter Scott lived: "Look there's his original quill!") and stock it with his restless, much younger French bride, Teresa (Francois Dorleac). They share an obsessive, weird private headspace, part Mick and Anita in PERFORMANCE, part the Merrye Family in SPIDER BABY (with a sullen blonde pretty boy neighbor who boats over for trysts with Teresa) until a desperate, wounded American criminal, Richard (Lional Stander) breaks in to steal eggs and demand their help in rescuing his gut-shot partner, Albie (the Joyce-ish Jack McGowran).

Though the stage seems set for tense DESPERATE HOURS, KEY LARGO, HE RAN ALL THE WAY, or PETRIFIED FOREST-style tension, Polanski deliberately skews it, pretending like he's about to fall into gangster-noir cliche, then righting himself back up, and winking at us like we were chumps to think he'd ever fall into genre expectations. After dealing with endless unwelcome drop-in guests--including a very rotten child (the closest thing the film has to a true villain) and an aloof Jacquelin Bissett--George finds the relative humanity and grounded 'realness' of Brooklyn-accented yank thug Richard almost a relief. By the end of the night, Richard has bonded, kinda, with both Teresa and George over over homemade vodka and it all begins to seem like a weird metaphor for western-allied relations in WW2 and one of those unhinged lower class invigorating the ennui-ridden jet set kind of thing, ala PERFORMANCE, THE CABLE GUY, RULES OF THE GAME, SWEPT AWAY or even BARTON FINK. The keen observations and brute good-nature of Richard make him less threatening, which only makes his outbursts of violence that much more traumatic and scary.

As with so many of his 60's films, Polanski seems to draw on his experiences as a Jewish child struggling for survival in the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation; Pleasance his tortured tenure in a Japanese POW camp. Polanski makes use of his first-hand witnessing of true inhumanity to man, and where other directors would speed up and simplify -- good guys vs. bad, winning vs. losing, with Polanski it's all about shifting power and the way reality is fluidly structured by whomever's in charge (the war again, with history written as the Allies see fit). The narrative coheres, Polanski slows down and muddies the water. At which point do hostages become complicit- is it the moment they miss the chance to slit his throat shaving him? Can contact with gangsters help a 'civilized' man finally shed his veneer and start throwing out unwanted guests like a rabid maniac? Mmmmaybe.

With its groovy Ronald Stein-ish score (attributed to Komeda), the CUL DE SAC vibe recalls the uneasy luncheon centerpiece in Russ Meyer's masterpiece, FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL! KILL! or the arrival of unwanted guests in Jack Hill's 1968 cult classic SPIDER BABY. KNIFE IN THE WATER devotees will recognize themes, as will REPULSION fans, of which of course all cineastes are both. The ease with which Polanski dispenses with a singular point of view or any 'reliable' perspective of reality, removing any indication that any one character is 'right' in the perception of events over any other, no matter how warped, it's pure cinema at its most bluntly witty.

Then there's the tale of two sisters: As opposed to Catherine Deneuve, who allows us to gaze lengthily at her spider-watching-the-fly features in Polanski's REPULSION, her sister Dorleac is always in motion, long lovely Francois Hardy hair in face, dark rings around her eyes hinting at little sleep, less sanity, probably drugs, to the point where it's hard to get a full beam on her features. This is not meant as a critique, merely an observation that puts her in the same warper class as Anita Pallenberg in PERFORMANCE, who also plays a crazy cross-dressing hermit's companion and nutball butterfly of shifting allegiances and facial features. (Check here for my 'many faces of Pallenberg' post)

Though both Dorleac and Pleasance are fine and even have subtle but real rapport, the true stand-out in the film is gangster character actor Lionel Stander. His big pug-ugly mug and gravely voice belie a great charm and its heartwarming to see him get to 'steal' a whole movie. Stander was one of those unlucky victims of the blacklist, which probably explains his presence in so many European films in the 1950's through 70's (such as this one). Luckily he came back to the U.S. once the hysteria died down, and became memorable for his role in the long-lived Hart to Hart TV series.  Huge and menacing but comic and jovial in a salt-of-the-earth fashion, with that awesome gravel truck voice, Stander is heavy as a chunk of lead but light on his feet as a feather, able to go from menacing to sweet and good-natured on 1/19 of a dime. The weariness of a long day and night on the lam, worrying over his partner, and his deep-rooted fear of getting caught, all oscillate back and forth on his mug's face, even as he projects an in-the-moment kineticism that the more intellectual Pleasance lacks (but like Turner in PERFORMANCE, recognizes and longs to absorb).

As the film progresses, Richard develops a fine, borderline respectful rapport/borderline misogynist rapport with the equally mercurial Teresa: she brings him a vodka after his partner dies, but then later a hotfoot while he's napping in the sun ("that's called a bicycle!") and he responds by whipping her with his belt (!) then punching her in the side of the head ("that's called a 'klomp'!) Clearly, such kinky discipline is not something George would ever muster, so, like the love triangle of KNIFE and the real and imagined rapist/suitors that come to call and get dispatched in REPULSION, it becomes very difficult (intentionally one presumes) to chalk out a line between what goes 'too far' in trying to appease the contrary aspects of feminine sexual desire. Women want to be dominated, possessed utterly, ravished, but only when, where and with whom their whim dictates.

Men struggle with this all the time: when does Fabio-style ravishing become sexual assault? Do women really 'need' to get slapped or choked once in awhile or is it just the fantasy, some genetic memory going back thousands of years into the past, grappling the same slippery slope by which Stockholm syndrome helped ensure the survival of her DNA, via her ancient relative becoming wife to the man who's tribe overrode her village and killed her previous husband? Does this all stem (for Polanski) from the Nazis, the way, say, 95% of pedophiles were themselves abused as children? Or is it all just Polanski's deep-seated (as some claim, re: his rape charges) misogyny? Here I defer to Paglia-versed female film critics, like Kim Morgan:

...stuck in the house like a more spirited, extra primal Virgin Suicide sister, (Teresa) engages in childlike activities to amuse herself. She tears around the house barefoot, applies exaggerated eyeliner (or helps her husband with his), messes with rifles and, the best, most hilarious, lights a sleeping Stander's feet on fire with burning pieces of newspaper between his toes ("It's called a bicycle" she taunts). Oh...you just don't do that to Lionel Stander. Or perhaps, you do. Between these two mismatched misfits, it's disarmingly sexy. These characters don't establish things like "safe" words nor do they understand the concept of such a thing, so the perversity, stark beauty, the isolation, the bleakness, the menacing sexuality and the insanity make the whole experience a strangely good time.

In addition to raising chickens for their eggs, Teresa makes her own vodka, and proceeds to get both men drunk later that night and into the morning. This very strong alcohol serves to utterly confound all sense of allegiance and purpose and soon George and Richard are bonding, then fighting again, then rambling off in their own directions. The feeling that this is all happening in real time over the course of a night and into the dawn into afternoon is awesome (the way the red lines are forming on Doloreac's legs seems like she's really being whipped.

Extending and collapsing moment-by-moment experience, Polanski captures some special magic with CUL-DE-SAC. Then again I love films where characters drink and party past sunrise, when the photography is black and white and the music slinky jazz with lots of bass and funky sax. Oh and there's smoking! How retro! Who in 1966 could have imagined that in just 40 years booze, modernist ambiguity, psychosexual sadism, and cigarettes would be considered 'old-timey'?

Drowned Phoenician Sailor and his Mermaid Muse: HE RAN ALL THE WAY (1951)

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell

Harke now I heare them, ding-dong, bell.

Sometimes a movie would slip right by you if not for the recommendation of some critic willing to stand up for it and urge you to look deeper, to look--as Godard once did--for Shakespeare in Monogram westerns. You may get disillusioned if you look for Shakespeare in all Monogram westerns, so you need a Cahiers du Cinema writer to give you a name, like Edgar G. Ulmer.  Hearing someone express unabashed love for certain actors, movies, or directors is very gratifying in an age when clueless managing editors stifle the path forward for many critics, like a herd of cattle being driven into the same narrow gate.  Good journalists and critics don't need fences - they know the terrain. Such a glorious confessor and herald and thrower downer is Sunset Gun's own Kim Morgan. Naturally I was thrilled to see her featured on TCM's Critic's Choice this month, curating two films, SOMETHING WILD (1961, starring Carroll Baker) and 1951's HE RAN ALL THE WAY, starring John Garflield. She writes on the latter:

Mr. Garfield. In my mind, one of the first method actors (he trained in the famed Group Theater and worked with Clifford Odets), he was also victim to one of cinema's darkest, most shameful moments when the left-wing, progressive actor (and patriotic actor, he helped created The Hollywood Canteen for heaven's sake) testified at the scabrous House Un-American Activities Committee, who suspected him and certain colleagues, Communist. Unlike many other actors, writers and directors (including one of his former directors, Elia Kazan), Garfield refused to name names. As both a once young street tough and a man of principle, Garfield would not rat. Not surprisingly, work was then harder to come by and at the young age of 39, Garfield died of coronary thrombosis. Many speculate an already present heart condition was worsened by the stress caused by the House's inquisition. I think this assumption is correct. His mislabeling and death is so tragic that it angers me to this day.

I needed Kim's guidance, because Garfield has always annoyed me or barely registered as a short streetwise blowhard, a kind of grown-up Bowery Boy, reminding me of guys I didn't like in High School, which I freely admit is not his fault, and frankly, as a child especially, method acting just seemed dull and self-important. Again, that's where good critics come in, steering through their yes towards a richer appreciation. Would I have ever noticed Montgomery Clift or James Dean if film history hadn't lionized them to the extreme? Would any of Clift's traits resonate in today's cinematic market, where sensitivity and subtlety and deeply-felt emotion are jettisoned in place of insincere tough guy detachment, whiny self-indulgence, ordinary hunk blandness, homophobic buddy comedy confessions of manly love, and larger-than-life hamminess?

Thanks to tons of books and documentaries, we know what to look for in a Dean or Clift performance. We know to look deeper into a Clift's sensitive eyes than we might for a normal actor, because we know it's going to be worth it,  like slowing down to appreciate a bottle of really good vintage wine rather than just gulping it down like you do with your usual Saturday night box of zinfandel. If you didn't slow down, it wouldn't taste much different.

Garfield's last film-- and one written by Dalton Trumbo (a fellow blacklist victim), HE RAN ALL THE WAY operates from a standard 'hoodlum on the lam takes family hostage' plot that's a solid front for a sorrowful blacklist subtext. Within the first few minutes we've already learned that Garfield's character has a bossy, self-centered mother and one very bad-influence friend who drags him along as muscle on petty theft jobs. A payroll robbery at a garage goes sour, Garfield ends up shooting a cop, and his 'run' is on. Hiding out at the community pool, he runs all the way into the perfect cover, a dowdy blue collar broad (Shelly Winters) trying to learn how to swim, and eager to fall into the arms of a well muscled 'teacher.'

All gangster romances generally seem to involve a polarized split feminine, the glamorous femme fatale and the  virtuous, allegedly homely girl who wants to reform the antihero and is so pretty that even their plain makeup and ugly hair can't disguise her. But it's not often that we see the reverse of the typical noir equation, the homme fatale putting the moves on a genuinely homely girl, one who in this case is not even rich, merely needy and convenient. It's a precious rarity to see these situations in any film --you can count them off in one hand: A PLACE IN THE SUN, LOLITA, SUSPICION, WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION, THE HEIRESS, and maybe recently IN THE COMPANY OF MEN. Any guy who's ever dated someone they liked well enough but never wanted to be seen in public with, never wanted their guy friends to know about, has an investment in a film like this. After all, these situations happen a lot, especially around four AM in bars, or on the slicker internet dating sites like Nerve.com. Lord knows we need more movies like this. For the playas.

Of the less attractive stars in old Hollywood, Winters had it hardest but worked longest. She could never just blind you with DARK VICTORY wit and class like the similarly snaggle-toothed Bette Davis, or scare you into submission like the similarly coarse Joan Crawford, and Olivia de Havilland could only ever meet plainness about halfway, despite her lavender drubbings by the Oliviers and Clifts. So, almost by default, Winters landed all the 'easy' lay/dumb braying broad roles. Her characters knew they weren't beauty queens--or very bright, or graceful, or stylish--and though they had a bad case of the ugly tunnel vision that can result from being ignored by all the boys at every dance, Winters infused them with a warm vulnerability that made you as a man kind of imagine-- well,  maybe not sleeping with her or flirting with her, but having already slept with her and now desperately trying to get back to the keg before you sober up any further, and yet wanting, despite your best judgments, to keep the bridge only half-burned.

Note the open eyes right on water level as Garfield clocks the cops. That's fucking acting!

A simple analysis of HE RAN could see it as the gangster version of getting to know your in-laws, an Italian or Jewish neighborhood kid moving in on a working class Irish-American family of limited but comparatively affluent means. The central family in HE RAN acts happy, but a Nicholas Ray-level streak of poison runs through them. This is a family that has to announce how happy they are, but they're also perfectly willing to leave their daughter alone in the apartment with a stranger while they go off to the movies, indicating this is the first man she's ever brought home so they don't know protocol. But more than 'happy' they're just Irish martyrs --eventually miserable, and unaccommodating to their doomed house guest, more out of fear and Catholic guilt rather than it being the 'right' thing to do. Their dour refusal to eat the chicken Garfield provides makes it seem less a matter of deep family pride and more that an angry censor is standing on the other side of the room, his clipboard and pen more threatening than Garfield's gun, demanding the family display their disgust at their guests' recent criminal past at least three times for every moment Shelly buckles under his heavy charisma. And even as all through the film Garfield tries his best to ingratiate himself, to be accepted, they still refuse him even basic courtesy. Haven't they ever heard of Stockholm syndrome? He's not a tenth as needy as Shelly. I'd be helping disguise him as a Hasidic rabbi within a few minutes of that tasty chicken dinner! Hmmm mmm!

So even though after the incredibly suspenseful first 1/4,  HE RAN ALL THE WAY wanders away from its noir connections and into the sparsely furnished blue-collar method-acting Chayefsky-Kazan-Schulberg-Fink chamber drama, Garfield's eye view reigns over. He's complex! We're allowed to see him through Shelly's eyes: one minute we want to fix this wild bird's broken wing, then he snaps at us and we know he's still far from house-trained.  He's sensitive yet cold-blooded; a terrified kid trying to joke and make friends on his first day of school, and getting the airs and high hat for his trouble, so then Columbining them all the next day.

Maybe that's all just my reading too deep into it, due to the fact that I never much cottoned to Wallace Ford (he plays the dad) especially in corned beef cliche's like his snarky reporters and his John Fordian Irish-American working stiffs. It's like he's the poor man's Jimmy Cagney, and he mistook Cagney's punchy energy for rote 'snappiness' and know-it-all smarm. Nothing personal against Ford, but I wanted Garfield to shoot him.At the same time, Wallace does very well here, acting-wise. Every heroic decision he makes is second-guessed by the women in the family, and he's so roped in by 'the right thing to do' and 'family above all' that he practically chokes to death, like the gangster from THE COOK, THIEF WIFE AND THE LOVER was force feeding him all 24 pages of the production code.

Would this family's cold shoulder be warmed-up if Garfield was Irish and his mother went to their same church? I doubt it. Any sensible middle class New York family would just charge Garfield a 1/3 of his stolen money, in exchange for food and shelter, ala THIEVES LIKE US. I say screw them and their banal 'common folk' decency (1). I'd like to get that Ford enrolled in a Cultural Studies course with Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn and let him get wise to how all that 'good honest folks' prattle was invented by rich fat cats to keep him and his blue collar Irish brethren docile and productive! And you know that commie intellectual Trumbo had just such an education in mind!

So though all the ingredients are in place for a confirmation of 'American family values,' count on Trumbo to take the censor-approved ingredients of a nutritious but tasteless leftover stew and deliver instead a chicken dinner with a cookie full of arsenic for desert. Even though  the 'old-time' extended Norman Rockwell style family (dad wearing suspenders and reading the paper, mom in the kitchen, junior with freckles)--once mocked by wits like Ben Hecht, Charles Brackett, and Charles Lederer--is in the end made to win, Trumbo makes sure we're allowed to at least come away still rooting for our disillusioned wild pterodactyl of an anti-hero, John Garfield.

Garfield's performance here is so good that it accumulates in power as the movie progresses: Garfield doesn't just push Shelly and her dad around in the haphazard way Warner Brothers used to have with gangster violence (2), he grapples with them like a man trying to claw his way out of a prison of soft Irish working class flesh. Imagine James Dean's anguish mixed with Jimmy Cagney's boxer grace and Brando's stray bullet ricochet savagery (ala his table clearing or radio tossing scenes in STREETCAR), and then use all that to reverse the stairway trajectory of Jimmy Stewart pushing around Kim Novak for the final VERTIGO freakout... right? That's fucking awesome? Genius!! You don't even worry for Shelly's safety, for she is not frail.

I think its not unnatural to compare Wallace Ford's righteous Irish father with Joseph McCarthy, and read the whole thing as a stealth razzing of an uncaring, terrified 1950s conformist landscape. So damn you, Joe McCarthy. It's you who should have been shot down like a rabid foaming dog in the gutter, not this angel of poetic realism and punchy gravitas named John Garfield.

I recently moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn, and my new address happens to be 203 Garfield Place! No one can tell me it's not named after you, Johnny! Johnny, they shot you down in the street because you wouldn't rat on your friends. But thanks to Kim Morgan, and TCM, you do yet live! Now we can savor scenes like the one above, where Garfield thinks his stolen money's been re-stolen from his locker and he spasms out in a panic attack so wrenching its like he wraps all the panic of THE BICYCLE THIEF up in five seconds.

The way Garfield hides in that pool, and tries to wrestle with his lack of worldly smarts as the clock ticks out made me think of those lines from Shakespeare's Tempest, that Eliot used in The Wasteland which I reprinted up top of this post.

Translated - Kim Morgan is the sea nymph, and the sea-change suffered is not into coral and pearls, but the pearly stuff of celluloid. The something rich and strange is the new perspective over time that film history can provide us with. Uniquely modern, world-class and ahead of his time, Garfield's art is so pure it can seem to rest full fathom five, can be hard to see without sea nymphs and fairies to point out where it lies. But like that coral, Garfield's films aren't going anywhere, and if anyone's soul can be said to endure eternally anew in the briny nitrate depths of Hollywood film, it's his.

NOTES: 
(1) The production code had strict views about glorifying gangsters, or inferring anyone could ever shelter them and be anything but a louse, unless of course they sulked like little bitches, and gangsters were all but required to die in the gutter or in a fireball explosion by the end.
(2) Bogart, for example, God love him, never really threw a convincing blow (i.e. that kick he gives Geiger's shadow in THE BIG SLEEP), or even tried, to, not that it mattered, because he was such a good actor you still shuddered in fear every time he moved, his energy and malevolence before and after a punch were so intense the punch itself barely needed to happen, i.e. as the  abusive screenwriter IN A LONELY PLACE.,