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| Orson Welles, ‘The Third Man’ (1949). |
By Paul Parcellin
Film noir loves morally sketchy locales — the kind of places where law and order is on life support and police can be manipulated like a vending machine. Like America’s Wild West, post-war Europe and Asia’s rubble strewn roadways were a magnet for drifters, bootleggers, grifters and fugitives in need of a hideout. Those undesirables were likely chased out of Brooklyn, Chicago or wherever they were working an angle and needed a new ’hood in which to roost.
Anywhere social order teeters on the brink of collapse is fertile ground for vice, smuggling and larceny. Laws do exists in battle ravaged places, technically, but enforcement is a bit slow and easy to deflect — perfect conditions for a crime wave.
The French coined the term film noir, and the Yanks (and others) returned the favor by exporting their rogues to distant lands already in the throes of great distress. Not exactly an even trade, but it makes for colorful drama:
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| Glenn Anders, Orson Welles, ‘The Lady from Shanghai.” |
‘The Lady From Shanghai’ (1947)
“The Lady From Shanghai” feels like a feverish nightmare narrated in voice-over by a speaker with a less than convincing Emerald Isle brogue. Minute by minute the stuff happening onscreen grows stranger as the film ambles toward its highly surrealistic conclusion.
When Irish sailor Michael O'Hara (Orson Welles) rescues damsel in distress Rosalie Bannister (Rita Hayworth) he doesn’t anticipate the deep bed of quicksand he’s about to land in. O’Hara is attracted to Rosalie, who is in a May-December marriage to Atty. Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane). Her husband is well aware of their flirtations, and O’Hara rightly senses trouble ahead. Despite his misgivings, he reluctantly accepts a job as an able seaman aboard Bannister’s yacht. The plan is to sail from New York to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. Along the way Bannister's law partner, George Grisby (Glenn Anders), joins the travelers and makes a stunning proposal to the O’Hara, offering him $5,000 if he’ll pretend to murder him. Meanwhile, private eye Sydney Broome (Ted de Corsia), who has been watching from the sidelines, offers O’Hara a stern warning about Grisby and the double cross the unbalanced attorney has planned. Once in foreign waters, the Americans onboard seem to compete for the title of most underhanded, and it’s a close contest. Watch for the famous hall of mirrors finale. Quite a way to end a movie.
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| William Bendix, Jane Russell, Robert Mitchum, ‘Macao.’ |
‘Macao' (1952)
American drifters, corrupt cops and nightclub parasites people Macao, then under Portuguese rule. The location has all the atmosphere needed for an exotic adventure story. Gambling, booze, westerners in white linen suits and Panama hats abound. A New York undercover police officer is killed in the opening minutes, and before long three new arrivals to the island are swept up in the unlawful activities that thrive in this land of the unprincipled. Former U.S. Signal Corps Lieut. Nick Cochran (Robert Mitchum) arrives by ferry for no certain purpose other than staying far away from New York, where the police want to ask him unpleasant questions. Also aboard the ferry is nightclub singer Julie Benton (Jane Russell) and salesman Lawrence C. Trumble (William Bendix), who is hawking an odd assortment of wares.
Every crime story needs a tough-guy gangster, and Vince Halloran (Brad Dexter), who runs a local casino, is just that. Halloran, who’s got problems of his own, suspects Cochran is out to get him, and he tries to persuade the drifter to blow town. But Cochran wants to stick around and get to know the nightclub chanteuse better. Predictably, friction results.
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| Richard Widmark, ‘Night and the City.’ |
Con artist Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) uses up every morsel of good will he might receive from friends as he scrambles to host wrestling matches in post-war London. Fast talking only takes him so far, and he’s stepped on some important toes. Given Harry’s slippery ways, it’s a cinch he’s worn out his welcome in his native land, America.
This is one of Widmark’s most stellar performances. As Harry, he’s a mixture of smug, self-assuredness and raging self doubt. London is still shaking off the dust and rebuilding after innumerable German bombing raids. Like the city, Harry is in survival mode, living by his wits. But there are only so many lies and double crosses he can get away with before it’s time to pay the piper. And Harry’s bill is long overdue.
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| Gene Tierney, Ona Munson, ‘The Shanghai Gesture.’ |
‘The Shanghai Gesture’ (1941)
In Shanghai, an occupied zone overseen by Western forces, American gamblers, hustlers, and ethically challenged refugees behave atrociously in an exotic moral vacuum. Ground zero is a decadent, tiered casino crammed with tuxedoed high rollers. It’s a vortex of moral decay that sums up the mood in Shanghai. Seen from above, the gaming area resembles a giant funnel positioned to send a motley platoon of con artists straight down into the bowels of hell. Casino owner and resident dragon-lady "Mother" Gin Sling is being forced to move her gambling joint out of its well positioned location and into Shanghai’s Chinese sector. Wealthy English entrepreneur Sir Guy Charteris is buying up property and wants her out. Meanwhile, "Poppy" Smith (Gene Tierney) arrives, fresh out of an exclusive Swiss boarding school. She romances with shady poet "Doctor" Omar (Victor Mature) and develops a strong affinity for alcohol and gambling. Complications and double crosses abound as we learn that some of the characters here have met earlier and are not having a happy reunion.
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| Humphrey Bogart, ‘Tokyo Joe.’ |
Ex-Air Force Col. Joe Barrett (Humphrey Bogart) returns to Tokyo after the war and finds that the nightclub he owned in earlier times, Tokyo Joe’s, is intact and being run by an old friend. But his wife, Trina (Florence Marly), a nightclub chanteuse whom he thought died in the war, is alive and in his absence has divorced him and remarried. Joe has a predictably awkward meeting with the new hubby. But he’s determined to get her back, and his 60-day visa doesn’t allow him much time to iron out the details. He enters into a business deal he hopes will buy him time to stay in the country longer. Trouble is, his new partner plans to operate a shady air transport company with Joe serving as the figurehead owner. In desperation, Joe is willing to exploit occupied Tokyo’s gray economy as a means to reunite with his ex-wife, who seems to have settled into her current marriage quite comfortably. Little does Joe know that there’s a dark spot on her past.
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| Joseph Cotten, Trevor Howard, ‘The Third Man.’ |
‘The Third Man’ (1949)
Battle scarred as it is, post-war Vienna’s beauty is an astonishing panorama of ornate facades, wide boulevards and grand Baroque palaces. Amid the imposing appearance of this imperial city, gangsters run a cornucopia of illicit rackets that puts an ugly face on the war-torn metropolis. Into a raucous tangle of humanity steps an innocent American, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), author of many a dime novel of the American Wild West. He’s come to Vienna at the urging of an old pal, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who says he’s got a job for him. Turns out, this Austrian city is every bit as untamed as the cattle rustlers and gunfighters that spring from Holly’s pulp-fiction imagination. Barely in town long enough to catch his breath, Holly gets some bad news. It seems that Harry has, as Holly might write in one of his paperbacks, bitten the dust, the victim of a freak traffic accident. Holly meets Harry’s lady love, Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), and begins poking around when the facts of Harry’s demise don’t appear to add up. But an earth shaking revelation brings the whole story into focus. Let’s just say that the European gangsters in this mixed up town have nothing on one American hoodlum, who’s operating a particularly sleazy criminal enterprise there. Incidentally, the American hoodlum makes one of the greatest entrances in film history.
Next time, in Part II, we’ll look at films about Americans in foreign lands fighting the forces of crime, corruption and oppression.
