Sweat and Blood

THE PHENIX CITY STORY (Phil Karlson; USA; 1955)

This brief blog post is my second contribution to the For the Love of Film (Noir) Film Preservation Blogathon hosted by Ferdy on Films and Self-Styled Siren. There's a whole slew of bloggers, all scribbling furiously to raise funds to restore Cy Endfield's film noir classic The Sound of Fury (1950), for the Film Noir Foundation. The blogathon runs from Feb 14 to 21. Browse all the other posts, being collated by Ferdy on Films and Self-Styled Siren, and flick some moolah to the Foundation!! It's terrifying simple - just smack that button below, it'll take you to where you wanna go.

 

 

Sometimes not knowing the framework behind the story of a film can add real salt and pepper to the viewing. This was definitely the case when I first saw The Phenix City Story. The film depicts a struggle between the 'good honest townsfolk' of Phenix City, Alabama, rising against the corrupt 'peddlers of vice' who have marked the city as one of sin, degradation, and turning blind eyes. It culminates in the murder of a recently elected Attorney General, Albert Patterson, at the hands of the crime syndicate who feel suddenly threatened by this man's ability to coalesce public opinion against these syndicates. The first twelve minutes of the film are devoted to a news report on the murder of Mr Patterson, and the history of crime in Phenix City. Several folks are interviewed by a reporter, and these interview segments, plus the declamatory reportage directed straight-to-camera by the dapper reporter, all felt to me, at the time of first viewing, so wonderfully realistic. Filled with halting speech, interviewees who are too shy to look at the camera, the occasional slip or stammer, this fake documentary segment bristled with an unpolished energy that fascinated me. But it was not long after seeing the film that I learnt that the whole story around Phenix City as “Sin City, USA” and the murder of Albert Patterson was entirely true. And, thus, the report at the beginning of the film, helmed by true-to-life journalist Clete Roberts, was also a true blue documentary. And returning to the film a second time, it became a little more obvious, a little clearer that this was 'real'. Clete Roberts states that there was “no careful rehearsing of speech” for his candid interviews, and heck, right after the report is over and the credits for the film roll, there's a whole spiel flashed up on the screen thanking the inhabitants of Phenix City for allowing this film to exist. I didn't see these signs as signs of the 'real' – I happily fooled myself into concocting the film as an elaborate fictionalised tale with pseudo-documentary flourishes. The opening segment, seen with new eyes, is still unusual and fascinating, a wonderfully odd choice to initiate a film. But, I like that I still have the trace of my original mis-viewed understanding of this opening section still pulsing within my vision.

The fictionalised story of Phenix City that takes up the remainder of the running time is surprisingly brutal, frank, and bloody. This is an extremely raw film, where absolutely no-one is exempt from savage attacks. Women get beaten up and bloodied, children get slapped, and in one horrifying scene the corpse of a young black girl is flung from a car. There's countless close-ups of sweaty faces, scores of scenes where people are pounded and pummelled, and yells, shrieks, and wailing are drizzled through the soundtrack. Yet, for all its coarse and brutish textures, the film derives a huge amount of vigour from being so brazenly forthright. This is not a lazy or hastily spliced film – the early sequences that introduce each character are deftly painted and woven together. The story is built from passing one character to the other – we meet a young man doting on a girl at a cheap and plain casino, and then pass to the club owner, who then visits his old lawyer pal, who then picks up his son from the airport....and from this concatenation of scenes, a certain momentum is picked up as each of these characters' lives intertwine and knot around each other. This film is predicated on crescendoing pace and rhythm, peaking and peaking and peaking, waiting for that right moment to explode.

But the film is perhaps most appealing as a docu-style traipse through small-city USA in the 1950's. We are driven through the main streets at night, allowed to soak up the seedy atmosphere, the tacky neon lights, the authenticity of night-time street bustle. Characters walk us through the streets, letting us mingle with the small but active crowds. And we drift through plain offices, functional and dull-looking clubs, ordinary homes. There's a strange pleasure to be had in seeing the mundane and quotidian parts of a city.

Back in the Cold, Black Silence

BLAST OF SILENCE (Allen Baron; USA; 1961)

This blog post is my wee inaugural contribution to the For the Love of Film (Noir) Film Preservation Blogathon hosted by Ferdy on Films and Self-Styled Siren. After the rousing success of last year's Film Preservation Blogathon, this year's efforts are for the benefit of the Film Noir Foundation, who endeavour to restore Cy Endfield's film noir classic The Sound of Fury (1950). The blogathon runs from Feb 14 to 21. Check out everyone else's blog posts, being collated by Ferdy on Films and Self-Styled Siren. And donate to the Foundation!!!! It doesn't hurt. Hit the big ol' button below.

Arriving at the tail-end of the supposed heyday of film-noir filmmaking, Allen Baron's Blast of Silence comes across as an early mutation of the film noir blueprint, a kind of twisted bastard child born from years of pent-up celluloidal anger, violence, and paranoia. This is one heck of an awkward, angular, and abrasive film, it's beauty derived from unremitting seediness and grime. The inauguration of the film seems to be taking noir to its very literal extreme, offering a black screen and the words of a narrator intoning in a tough-as-nails hard-boiled way “Remembering out of the black silence. You were born in pain.” The black screen steadily reveals an ever growing aperture, and as we hear a woman's strangled screams, a smack, a baby's cry, and the narrator referring to the lead character's birth into the world, the film is born into the world, via the locomotion of a train, and the aperture reveals a tunnel. In one moment, the birth of the main character is conflated with the birth of the film, which is conflated also with the very birth of cinema itself (trains and cinema forever intertwined through Lumiere's L'Arrivée d'un train à la Ciotat).

And right from the outset we are introduced to two key components of the film – the relentless barrage of words spouted by the unseen, unknown narrator, and the pain, anger, and hate he talks of in his first few sentences. Frankie Bono, a hired killer originally from New York and now working in Cleveland, who comes back to New York around Christmas time to perform a routine hit, has his every action commented upon by this ceaseless voice. This continual chatter indicates some kind of psychosis, a voice in Frankie's head that can also begin to drive the spectator mad as well. The narrator spews forth a torrent of thoughts, almost all of them alluding to anger and hatred, and a preference for loneliness and coldness, emotional and physical. “You were born with hate and anger built in. Took a slap in the backside to blast out the scream and then you knew you were alive.” It's clear the narrator is talking to us as much as he is talking to and about Frankie. This inability for the narrator to shut up is annoying yet unusually appealing - here is a film that actually seems to want us to feel like we're being goaded, poked, and prodded, a film that suddenly seems to be speaking to us and telling us how damn painful the act of living is supposed to be.

Even the simplest of exchanges are imbued with savagery and petulance. The ubiquitous noir scene of the hitman meeting the anonymous messenger is presented here as a game of surreptitious physical torment, with the messenger jabbing Frankie repeated and violently in the ribs with a finger, and Frankie ending their exchange by treading firmly on the messenger's foot. Except for key moments, rage is hardly ever visibly etched on any characters face, yet the films seems to boil and bubble with constrained volatile emotions. Frankie meets an old female friend and his ice-like clarity starts to dissipate. As his emotions surface, his only way of expressing them is in a forced and brutal manner, meaning that when he tries to embrace her and woo her, he ultimately ends up trying to rape her. This seems to prove the narrator right – emotions, in this world, are best left cold, dormant, unexpressed, and unattended.

The gritty, darkened city is of course a key trope in film noir, but never before has a city been portrayed so synaesthetically. New York can be felt and smelt. Greasy food, mouldy apartments, early morning air – scenes exude scents and textures. And as Frankie's mental state seems to unravel, the sounds, rhythms, and textures become more intense, culminating in a near-hallucinatory moment in a night-club, where a bongo-thwacking beatnik sings of being “dressed in black all the time” and driving the cinematic rhythm into clipped paranoid snippets of eyes, limbs, and mania.

And before you start considering this film to be bleak as all hell and not worth the time, let me say just how cinematographically elegant this film often looks, even in all it's ugly ungainliness. I'm reminded here of an incredible long take of Frankie, walking a silent street in the early dawn, starting as barely a pinprick in the distance. During the course of a minute or two all we see is Frankie walking – yes, the narrator's still there, but the voice becomes a mosquito-like buzz as the scent of dawn seems to stretch to the nostrils, and that eerie quiet of early-morning city-streets emanates from the screen. Frankie keeps getting closer and closer, until his trench-coated bulk dwarves the screen and consumes us entirely. Back again, and briefly, to black.