Red Scare Noir: Communists on the Waterfront

Janis Carter, John Agar and Thomas Gomez in ‘The Woman on Pier 13’ (1949).

‘The Woman on Pier 13’ (1949)

When the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, my first-grade teacher, Miss Berzetz, marched into the classroom and scared the bejesus out of us. To hear her tell it, this was the end of life as we knew it.

Soviet tanks would, no doubt, soon visit our small community to steamroll over our humble homes. Communists would appear and force us to leave school, perform menial labor and force us to speak Russian. At least, that’s what I got out of her overheated rant. 

I weighed the pluses and minuses of a communist dictatorship’s takeover versus life as a pupil in Miss Berzetz’s class. Which would be worse? It was a close call.

I was reminded of this tidbit of Cold War history while viewing “The Woman on Pier 13,” a film noir whose world view makes Miss Berzetz seem almost reasonable in comparison.

The story begins after World War II, when anti-communist sentiment rose to a fevered pitch in America, and Reds became the designated boogiemen du jour. The Korean War was on the horizon, Red-baiter Sen. Joe McCarthy was warming up in the bullpen, and in this charged, somewhat surreal atmosphere we find “The Woman on Pier 13,” an overheated, hyperventilating example of America’s burgeoning terror of an enemy within. 

The film previewed in 1949 with the straightforward but unintentionally silly title, “I Married a Communist.” RKO Pictures changed it after test audiences gave the thumbs down. Even with its new title, “Pier 13” is every bit the melodramatic tabloidesque B-picture that the original title suggests. But it reveals a lot about the country’s mood in that most unsettling era.

Its over-the-top depiction of American communists as a highly organized force of scheming, ruthless conspirators who infiltrated our institutions is a time capsule of American hysteria in the shadow of the H-bomb.  

While the Soviet Union conducted its first successful atomic test in 1949, the film came together a bit too early to press the nuclear annihilation panic button. Instead, it envisions a conspiracy of homegrown communists driving a wedge between labor and shipping industry management. 

“Pier 13” uses the communist threat in place of more typical forces of evil we see in noir — organized crime, corrupt politicians, police on the take and the like. Vast, ruthless and operating in a shadowy netherworld, these dark forces honor a rigid code of conduct, and disregarding it can have fatal consequences. Once you’re in, there’s no turning back. Like other noir heavies, the communist threat neatly checks off all of these boxes.

Richard Rober, Thomas Gomez and Robert Ryan.

As the film opens we meet San Francisco shipping executive Brad Collins (Robert Ryan), once, a card-carrying commie who labored as a stevedore in New York during the Depression. Later, he changed his name — he used to be Frank Johnson — and fled to the West Coast. A communist no more, he fits comfortably within capitalist society. But, his apparent serenity belies a dark stain on his past that won’t wash off.

Brad’s ex-flame, Christine Norman (Janis Carter), who’s secretly working for communist cell leader Vanning (Thomas Gomez), shows up unexpectedly and causes tense moments with Brad and his new bride, Nan (Laraine Day). Their whirlwind romance and quick, impulsive marriage hints at a darker core beneath an apparently shiny veneer.

Christine’s arrival isn’t a coincidence, she’s helping to put the squeeze on Brad. The local communists hold evidence that could send him to the gas chamber, and they want Brad’s cooperation. Brad labored under the misconception that he’d made a clean break with his past, but Vanning reminds him that this is folly. To underline the point, sadistic henchman Bailey (William Talman), who cackles madly as he kills (as homicidal maniacs do), disposes of an FBI informant in a particularly gruesome manner as Brad is forced to watch.

The scheme is to pressure Brad to reject dock workers’ contract demands, a move that will sabotage labor negotiations and send the industry into a tail-spin. Communists lurking within the union will arise, take power and trample loyal American workers with jackbooted feet. 

Meanwhile, femme fatale Christine, shunned by Brad, seduces Brad’s brother-in-law, Don Lowry (John Agar), while spoon-feeding him poisonous communist doctrine. Trouble is, Christine actually falls for Don. Commie boss Vanning, disgusted with her lack of resolve, chides her for being so “emotional.” Soon, pressures from within and outside of Don and Christine’s tortured relationship have grave repercussions. 

Nan gets wind of Bailey’s involvement in this web of treachery, and in an effort to collect intelligence against the killer, befriends him at the fairground where he operates a shooting gallery concession. When he’s not committing mayhem and murder, the leeringly randy communist hitman teaches attractive young ladies to shoot, all the while pawing them like a grabby uncle at Thanksgiving. 

Nan is later kidnapped, and Brad faces off against Vanning and Bailey, a duel that results in a familiar noir trope, a chase through a darkened warehouse. 

While westerns stage cowboy shootouts in the mountains, prairies or the sun-bleached dirt streets of a cow town, noir protagonists and villains, typically city dwellers, often have their last stand in steel mills, warehouses, atop train trestles or on rain-drenched asphalt — standard locations in the unforgiving heart of an industrial wasteland, where a man with a gun stands alone and overcomes unsurmountable odds — or doesn’t.

Howard Hughes, who owned RKO at the time, probably had little to do with “Pier 13” development, but we can safely assume that the film’s not-so-subtle suggestion that trade unions are peppered with communists and anarchist would appeal to the business tycoon who would have no doubt preferred that organized labor be relegated to Siberia. 

Despite, or perhaps because of, its fairly hysterical tone, “The Woman on Pier 13” may have helped nudge 1940s America toward a dimmer view of trade unions, signaling the start of their long, slow decline. 

In hindsight, organized crime, corrupt politicians and trade union officials, as well as industrialists’ propaganda probably played a more significant role in undermining their effectiveness than did the exaggerated threat of the relatively small, rather ineffectual Communist Party of the United States of America. 

These days, “Pier 13” may seem like low comedy or self-parody — the current situation in the Ukraine aside — but it neatly maps out the hot-button issues still before us, including home-grown and foreign conspirators, infiltration of government institutions, shadow governments seeking to undermine our way of life, while dishing out hefty portions of paranoia-inducing melodrama. 

The film ends on an optimistic note while serving as a cautionary tale of what might befall us if we aren’t more vigilant. That probably soothed frayed nerves back in 1949, however I’m reasonably certain that, for its reassuring sentiments and contention that justice ultimately prevails, Miss Berzetz would be loathe to take solace in it. 

 

Is My Toaster Talking to Me? No, it’s just ‘Kimi’

I

s Steven Soderbergh’s tech thriller “Kimi” neo noir? Call it what you like, a crime thriller, perhaps, but the film, streaming on HBO Max, has undeniable links to neo-noirs of the past that focus on technology, how criminality can get wrapped up in it, and how tech’s persistent surveillance invades our privacy. Let’s call it “Paranoid Geek Noir.”

"Kimi" takes its time setting up the details, but once it gets underway all of the pieces begin to add up. David Koepp’s screenplay cleverly uses details that at first seem to be mere background information but turn out to be significant later on.

Angela Childs (Zoë Kravitz) is a tech worker whose job it is to listen to recordings of data streams from a voice-activated Internet device called Kimi, much like the real-life Alexa. She’s suffering the after effects of a violent trauma and is self-isolating in a Seattle loft — except when she has an occasional booty call from her man friend whose office is across the street from her home. 

Her work-at-home job is supposed to help improve Kimi’s accuracy by listening to users’ failed attempts at making the voice activated machine do what they want it to, and correcting the malfunctions. It seems like a thankless job, but she approaches it with enthusiasm.

Listening to one recording, she thinks she hears the sounds of a serious crime being committed. She pulls out some techy thingamajigs to filter out background noise and listens to a chilling conversation. 

It’s easy to assume that her suspicions are nothing more than a paranoia born from extended isolation. But as we later learn, this niche of the tech world proves itself even more evil and vicious than our worst fears of it.

When Angela is finally forced to leave the safety of her home, she makes her way down seemingly endless corridors and staircases whose walls feel like they’re closing in on her. Those of us with COVID cabin fever can no doubt sympathize.

“Kimi” echoes films that center on technology that unexpectedly captures crime evidence, such as “The Conversation,” “Blow-Up” and “Blow Out.” Like the protagonists in those film, Angela is met with bureaucratic resistance when she tries to come forward with troubling evidence. 

Her stressed out CEO boss, Bradley Hasling (Derek DelGaudio), wants to sweep the matter under the rug, and the woman in charge of ethical matters in the company, Natalie Chowdhury (Rita Wilson), avoids reporting it to the authorities. Angela is puzzled at first, then quite rightfully terrified.

Kravitz’s isolated and highly capable Angela is bright, struggling to overcome her fears and impatient with others in the outside world. She’s as moody and angry as you’d expect of anyone in her emotional position. 

Despite her prickly manner we’re with her all the way as she struggles to escape the forces that will go to extreme measures to cover up damaging information. To say that she’s unprepared for the ordeal she’s about to face is a vast understatement. But against all odds, Angela uses her modest resources to rise to the seemingly impossible challenges she faces. 

The story comes to a breathless conclusion that ties up the loose ends, perhaps a little too neatly, and if you ignore some pretty big plot-dependent coincidences, it’s a worthwhile outing that wraps up in a tidy 90 minutes. 

A word of warning: As you view “Kimi” you might want to turn off some of your appliances. It might give them ideas.

'Nightmare Alley' 2021: Guillermo Del Toro's Noir Carnival of Horror

 

I should have known better than to smuggle a chicken burrito into the theater from the taqueria next door to it. Why, you ask? Let’s just say I bit into it at an unappetizing moment in the film. If you saw the original “Nightmare Alley” (1947) with Tyrone Power, or if you know what a carnival geek is, you’ll get the idea. Bummer.

But the good news is that “Nightmare Alley” (2021), the stunningly dark reincarnation of the original, is a black-hearted wonder. Although it’s usually a bad idea to remake a great old film, and the original was just that, director Guillermo del Toro gives it a new and, yes, darker life, closer to the novel on which it is based.

 

The film opens before the start of World War II — at one point a character remarks that the guy who looks like Charlie Chaplin just invaded Poland. The Depression is at full dudgeon and desperation hangs over the populace like a thick toxic cloud. 

In this dystopic world we encounter the amoral, tormented Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), whose life is a puzzle from the start. When we meet him, he’s committing a startlingly grim act, and only later do we learn the story behind it. He hightails it out of town and stumbles into a traveling carnival, where he’s offered temporary work, and so he mingles with the denizens of this underground culture in which it doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve done — lucky for Stan.

He wanders into the residence of fortune teller Zeena the Seer (Toni Collette), who, with Stan, cheats on her mate Pete (David Strathairn), but seems a kind-hearted soul compared with the vipers who populate the traveling carney. 

Detestable carney boss Clem Hoatley (Willem Dafoe) oversees a particularly grotesque carnival attraction, an assortment of glass jars that contain a virtual museum of deformities with remains floating in liquid preservatives. One, in particular, an infant with a protrusion through the forehead, whose mother died in childbirth, reappears on the screen from time to time, darkly implying painful details of Stan’s history. That this is a showpiece for the ogling masses casts a dark view indeed of the populace in the years leading up to the war.

With the worst of the Depression upon them, sideshow freaks are in great demand with a public who wants someone to look down on and feel superior to, Stan is told. We soon meet the most degraded sideshow performer, the geek, a tragically demented man who bites the heads off chickens for the audience’s savage amusement and is kept in a cage like an animal. 

When the geek escapes from captivity, Stan is ordered to help flush him out of the fun house where he’s likely holed up. The place is filled with monsters and other spooky things rendered in wood, cardboard and plaster of paris, a delightfully hellish landscape filled with playful menace. It may also serve as an ominous glimpse into Stan’s future. 

More ominous still, Zeena’s tarot cards predict Stan will face the opportunity to choose between a straight and narrow life and doom. When this comes to pass, we already know which path he’ll choose.

 

Stan meets Molly Cahill (Rooney Mara), the carney’s electrically charged sideshow performer — she is able to withstand large surges of electrical current that flash across her body like a lightning storm. She’s a sweet girl who manages to stay removed from the sideshow ruffians thanks to the watchful eye of carney strongman Bruno (Ron Perlman), who keeps her out of harm’s way. Unfortunately for her, she comes to believe in Stan, much to Bruno’s dismay, and the two become an item.

Stan has ambitions to go on the road with the mentalist act he swipes from Zeena’s Pete, a good-hearted but weary tippler. Stan wants to go after well-heeled dupes who are ripe for the picking. The other carneys urge Stan to avoid doing a “spook show” — posing as a true mind-reader and spiritualist, which is a line that none of them will cross. But, Stan’s all too ready to hoodwink suckers with fatter wallets than the beaten-down masses who crowd the sideshows, so he and Molly leave the carney behind and eventually make the leap to the upscale nightclub circuit.

 

It’s not long before he connects with a slippery psychologist, Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), a seductive shape-shifter who, to paraphrase Raymond Chandler, is a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. They begin an affair of sorts, and she offers him the means to cash in on some wealthy dupes. He lands a promising but somewhat dangerous client, troubled millionaire Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins).

But, with every silver lining comes a dark cloud, and Stan is eventually in for a precipitous fall — this is noir, after all, and that's a prime convention of the genre.

Speaking of conventions, most traditional noirs were shot cheaply, which meant that color film was verboten. Del Toro wants to release a black and white version of his film. The muted tones of the color print are quietly effective, but it would be thrilling to see it in black in white. Let’s hope that happens.

As remakes go, “Nightmare Alley” more than holds its own with its many outstanding performances, even in the smaller roles, wonderful direction and taut script. What sets it apart from  standard Hollywood do-overs is its refusal to compromise. True to its noir roots, the film is an oddity today, minus an upbeat ending calculated to resonate with the masses, and that’s a good thing. The chilling conclusion is devastating. Be warned, if you’re hoping for even a glimmer of sunshine when emerging from this darkened house of horrors you may need whiskey — but hold the chicken burrito. 

 

Sopranos Ending Confirmed: Told Ya So!

“Sopranos” creator David Chase finally set the record straight about Tony Soprano’s fate in the series finale, “Made in America.” 
Not to toot my own horn, but it seems that Life and Death in L.A. had it right all along. 
Chase let slip a telling comment that confirms my theory, published here in 2012. The final scene of the dramatic series left the audience wondering what happened to New Jersey crime boss Tony Soprano when the screen suddenly went black.
I felt that the unexpected blackout was a subtle way of showing that Tony was dead. Chase had never decisively stated whether or not Tony got whacked. But an interview quoted in the New York Post leaves little doubt. The crime boss who reigned supreme over North Jersey for six seasons that stretched out over eight years had finally met his demise.
The series ran on HBO, garnering more than 20 Emmy Awards and was widely acclaimed as one of the best television dramas of all time. James Gandolfini, who played Tony Soprano, the crime boss who struggled with family matters while running the Jersey mob, died in 2013. The series continues to stream on HBO. 

'The Silent Partner' : A Noir Bank Job, 1970s Style

Elliot Gould in 'The Silent Partner.'

Elliot Gould is Miles Cullen, a Toronto bank teller whose chief companions are tropical fish that flutter about in an aquarium in his cramped apartment. To his female co-workers, Miles is a teddy bear nerd with as much sex appeal as one of his guppies.

One day, he realizes that sinister acts are taking place in the mall where his bank is located. Something churns within him, and before long his ruminations bubble to the surface. He fusses over his chess board — the first clue that this drama will be a tactical battle of wits.

Frustrated in his dreams of winning the love of a beautiful woman, Julie (Susannah York), he takes an uncharacteristic step that could free him from his mundane life or lead to ruin  — pocketing a healthy chunk of the bank's funds after a hold-up man makes off with some of the cash drawer contents.

As ineffectual as he is with the opposite sex, Miles proves himself a surprisingly skilled criminal, although it becomes clear he has not considered all of the consequences of his actions.

Once the deed is done, a number of snags appear, including the reappearance of Reikle (Christopher Plummer), a sadistic criminal who is the diametric opposite of Miles. Further complicating the matter is Elaine (Céline Lomez), a femme fatale with murkey allegiances — as femmes fatale often have.

Along the way, Miles comes close to losing the purloined fortune he hopes will serve as an early retirement fund. In addition to keeping his hands on the cash, he must figure out how to rid himself of his nemesis, Reikle, who has made Miles his unwilling silent partner.

The screenplay, written by Curtis Hanson, who co-wrote and directed "L.A. Confidential," has a lean framework typical of neo noir. Scenes fit together nicely and project an understated authenticity. 

If one weakness must be singled out it's that "The Silent Partner" lacks noir's fatalistic outlook — the ending buttons up neatly and just misses greatness. See it anyway, because, unlike Julie's withering summation of Miles, its total is greater than the sum of its parts.

Infamous L.A. Crime Scenes ... and Where to Find Them

The Colt revolver found near Lana Clarkson’s body at the Alhambra crime scene.

Who doesn't like to reminisce now and then? Especially when it comes to heinous crimes committed in the City of Los Angeles. Like any large metropolitan region, L.A. has its share of dark moments. Crime in the City of Angels has been the stuff we've watched in hundreds if not thousands of movies and TV shows. The link between the city and the crimes that are perpetrated here stays burned into our collective memory long after the blood stains have been mopped up and the corpses removed to the city morgue.

Some may blame the year-round sunshine and dry desert air for driving the city's good people to distraction. Raymond Chandler said that the dusty, unforgiving winds can bring about madness and tragedy:

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.” 

― Raymond Chandler, Red Wind: A Collection of Short Stories 

If you'd like to review a bit of the city's past, try this handy guide, 'The Locations of L.A,'s Most Memorable Crimes by Neighborhood."

Did Bugsy’s Brainstorm Really Launch Vegas?

https://slate.com/culture/2019/01/mobster-bugsy-siegel-and-his-influence-on-hollywood-and-las-vegas.html

Who was really behind the creation of Las Vegas? The answer might surprise you.