Manny Farber Picks Top 1951 Films

Termite art wins in the list of the best films produced in 1951, as Manny Farber assembles such list. Ignoring prestigious studio A-films and focusing on the underdog (Feist, Walsh, early Wise) and the poular genres such as western, Sci-Fi and  horror, it is a triumph of the personal taste over the officially endorsed and brought-to-mainstream cinema of the producers and big companies.


Let Stevens or Kazan win their Oscars; The Nation's Emanuel -- a life-size drip-celluloid statue of Kirk Douglas, ranting and disintegrating in the vengeful throes of death–goes to the man or men responsible for each of the following unheralded productions of 1951.

Little Big Horn. A low budget western, produced by Lippert, starring John Ireland and Lloyd Bridges. This tough-minded, unconventional, persuasive look-in on a Seventh Cavalry patrol riding inexorably through hostile territory to warn Custer about the trap Sitting Bull had set for him, was almost as good in its unpolished handling of the regular-army soldier as James Jones's big novel. For once, the men appear as individuals, rather than types -grousing, ornery, uprooted, complicated individuals, riding off to glory against their will and better judgment; working together as a team (for all their individualism) in a genuinely loose, efficient, unfriendly American style. The only naturalistic photography of the year; perhaps the best acting of the year in Ireland's graceful, somber portrait of a warmhearted but completely disillusioned lieutenant, who mayor may not have philandered with his captain's wife.

Fixed Bayonets. Sam Fuller's jagged, suspenseful, off-beat variant of the Mauldin cartoon, expanded into a full-length Korean battle movie without benefit of the usual newsreel clips. Funny, morbid -- the best war film since "Bataan". I wouldn't mind seeing it seven times.

His Kind of Woman. Good coarse romantic-adventure nonsense, exploiting the expressive dead-pans of Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, a young man and a young woman who would probably enjoy doing in real life what they have to do here for RKO. Vincent Price superb in his one right role – that of a ham actor thrown suddenly into a situation calling for high melodramatic courage. Russell's petulant, toneless rendition of "Five Little Miles From San Berdoo" is high art of a sort.

The Thing. Howard Hawks's science-fiction quickie; fast, crisp, and cheap, without any progressive-minded gospel-reading about neighborliness in the atom age; good airplane take-offs and landings; wonderful shock effects (the plants that cry for human blood as human babies cry for milk); Kenneth Tobey's fine unpolished performance as a nice, clean, lecherous American air-force officer; well-cast story, as raw and ferocious as Hawks's "Scarface", about a battle of wits near the North Pole between a screaming banshee of a vegetable and an air-force crew that jabbers away as sharply and sporadically as Jimmy Cagney moves.

The Prowler. A tabloid melodrama of sex and avarice in suburbia, strictly out of James M. Cain, featuring almost perfect acting by Evelyn Keyes as a hot, dumb, average American babe who, finding the attentions of her disc-jockey husband beginning to pall, takes up with an amoral rookie cop (nicely hammed up by Van Heflin). Sociologically sharp on stray and hitherto untouched items like motels, athletic nostalgia, the impact of nouveau riche furnishings on an ambitious ne'er-do-well, the potentially explosive boredom of the childless, uneducated, well-to-do housewife with too much time on her hands.

The People Against O'Hara. An adroit, scholarly example of sound story-telling that every Message Boy should be made to study as an example of how good you can get when you neither slant nor over-simplify. Also highly enjoyable for its concern about a "static" subject -- the legal profession as such -- and the complete authority with which it handles soft-pedalled insights into things like the structure and routine of law offices; the politics of conviviality between cops, D.A. ‘s, judges, attorneys; the influence of bar associations; the solemn manner of memorializing the wrench caused by the death of a colleague; the painful ''homework'' of committing to memory the endless ramifications of your case, as well as the words you are going to feed the jury in the morning.

The Day the Earth Stood Still. Science-fiction again, this time, with ideals; a buoyant, imaginative filtering around in Washington, D.C., upon the arrival of a high-minded interplanetary federalist from Mars, or somewhere; matter-of-fact statements about white-collar shabby gentility in boarding-houses, offices and the like; imaginative interpretation of a rocket ship and its robot crew; good fun, for a minute, when the visitor turns off all the electricity in the world; Pat Neal good, as usual, as a young mother who believes in progressive education.

The Man Who Cheated Himself. A lightweight, O'Henry type story about a cop who hoists himself on his own petard; heavyweight acting by Jane Wyatt and Lee J. Cobb; as a consequence the only film this year to take a moderate, morally fair stand on moderately suave and immoral Americans, aged about forty. An effortlessly paced story, impressionistically coated with San Francisco's oatmeal-gray atmosphere; at the end, it wanders into an abandoned fort or prison and shows Hitchcock and Carol Reed how to sidestep hokum in a corny architectural monstrosity. Cobb packs more psychological truths about joyless American promiscuity into one ironic stare, one drag on a Cigarette, or one uninterested kiss than all the Mankiewicz heroes put together.

Background to Danger. Touch, perceptive commercial job glorifying the P-men (Post-Office sleuths), set in an authentically desolate wasteland around Gary, Indiana, crawling with pessimistic mail-robbers who act as though they'd seen too many movies like "Asphalt Jungle". Tight plotting, good casting, and sinuously droopy acting by Jan Sterling, as an easily-had broad who only really gets excited about -- and understands –waxed bop. Interesting for such sidelights as the semi-demihemi quaver of romantic attachment between the head P-man and a beautiful nun.

And, for want of further space, six-inch Emanuels to the following also-rans: "The Tall Target", "Against the Gun", "No Highway in the Sky", ''Happiest Days of Your Life", ''Rawhide'', Skelton's "Excuse My Dust", "The Enforcer", "Force of Arms", "The Wooden Horse", "Night Into Morning", ''Payment of Demand", "Cry Danger", and an anima ted cartoon - the name escapes me - about a crass, earnest herky-jerky dog that knocks its brains out trying to win a job in a Pisa pizza joint.

--Manny Farber (January 5, 1952, The Nation)

Undying Monster (1942)

مدتهاست كه مي خواهم راجع به جان برام، اين كارگردان بزرگ و فراموش شدۀ اكسپرسيونيست چيزي بنويسم و حدالامكان نوشته اي فراتر از يك يادداشت و با تمركز به روي زندگي و كارنامۀ بسيار قابل تعمل اين استاد در سايه مانده.

اين بار عزم خود را جزم كرده كه بعد از اتمام اين «ماه وحشت» كه قرار است در قالب پروندۀ ژانر وحشت در ماهنامۀ فيلم منتشر شود (و بعد از فيلم هاي تاريخي/حماسي، گنگستري و وسترن، چهارمين پروندۀ ژانر من در طول 5 سال گذشته است) به سراغ جان برام بروم؛ اما قبل از آن و بدون در نظر گرفتن اين كه برام كيست، مايلم به يكي از فيلم هاي او كه در ژانر وحشت قرار دارد اشاره اي گذرا كنم.

عنوان فيلم هست: هيولاي ناميرا (1942)، اما برخلاف عنوان و برخلاف انتظاري كه پيشاپيش از ديدن پوستر فيلم به بيننده دست مي دهد – كه زني را مدهوش در بغل يك هيولاي ترسناك بلند گرگ نما نشان مي داد و بايد بگويم "نسوان مدهوش در آغوش هيولاهاي كريه"، چه در پوستر و چه در فيلم، يكي از نقطه ضعف هاي بزرگ من است – اين فيلم به معناي دقيق كلمه يا به معناي يونيورسالي اش [منظورم استوديوي يونيورسال است] يك فيلم ترسناك نيست و چيزهايي كه جايگزين عناصر هميشگي ژانر شده مي تواند علاوه بر توضيح جذابيت فيلم، توضيح روش هاي سينمايي جان برام باشند.

فيلم داستان مجموعه اي از مرگ هاي فجيع و توضيح ناپذير در بين چند نسل از اعضاي خانواده اي اشرافي در حومۀ لندن است كه در آغاز قرن بيستم و با كمك يك كارآگاه جوان اسكاتلند يارد و دستيار مؤنثش حل مي شود. عامل اين قتل ها به گفتۀ مردم دهكده و شايعات و خرافات موجود يك هيولاست. از آن طرف به عقيدۀ اسكاتلنديارد اين مرگ هاي مرموز چيزي نيست جز قتل از پيش طراحي شده. فيلم در انتها جايي بين اين دوحالت تمام مي شود؛ بين عقل گرايي مفرط ژانر معمايي و تريلر و ايمان به ماوراء فيلم هاي ترسناك و هيولايي. برام روان شناسي و شيمي را به كار گرفته و آن را با يكي از كهن ترين انگاره هاي اكسپرسيونيستي، "همزاد" (Doppelgänger)، تلفيق مي كند. در نظر او و به شهادت آثارش روان شناسي يكي از قابل اتكاترين متدهاي علمي براي آشكارساختن رازهاي درون است اما آن سرّ نهايي را نه روان شناسي و نه علوم محض توضيح مي دهند، چنين است كه در انتها بيشتر فيلم هاي برام، تلخ و غافل گيركننده و با غلبۀ ديو درون بر قهرمان يا قهرمانان به پايان مي رسند.

تماشاي اين فيلم اين نكته را ثابت مي كند كه او چه كارگردان بي نظيري در خلق فضا بوده است. هيولاي ناميرا يك فيلم B تمام عيار است، اما ببينيد كه چگونه برام محدوديت هاي فني اين گونه فيلم هاي را پشت سرگذشته و غناي فضايي اثرش چيزي كم از ويليام وايلر يا بيلي وايلدر در همان دوره ندارد.

احسان خوش بخت

Learning from Las Vegas: Coppola & "One From the Heart"

آموختن از لاس وگاس به روایت کاپولا

دین تاوولاریس، یکی از بزرگ ترین طراحان تاریخ سینما، 13 فیلم فرانسیس فورد کاپولا از 1972 (پدرخوانده) تا 1996 (جک) را طراحی کرده و در آنها آمریکای قرن بیستم را، دهه به دهه، در قالب مجموعه ای از خیره کننده ترین فضاهای مجازی تاریخ سینما بازآفرینی کرده است.

کاپولا و تاوولاریس در فیلم های مشترکشان صورت آرمانی آمریکا (تاکر)، صورت حقیقی اش (مکالمه)، پ و صورت تلخ و سیاهش ( پدرخوانده، قسمت دوم ) را زنده کرده اند. در بین این سیزده فیلم از صمیم قلب (one from the heart) را می توان صورت رؤیایی آمریکا و چگونگی شکست این رویا خواند. فضاهای فیلم به همین خاطر فضاهایی سیالند که هم بازتاب فانتزی های قهرمانان و هم نشان دهندۀ شکنندگی این فضاها و «غیر قابل زیست بودن» آنهایند، چنان که قهرمانان فیلم در انتها به دروغی که در تمام عمرشان دربارۀ امکان رهایی و آزادی در این فضاهای چشم گیر داشته اند پی می برند. حتی چشم اندازهای طبیعی آریزونا – که محل ساخت هزاران فیلم وسترن بوده – نیز مانند «بک پروجکشنی» دو بعدی به نظر می رسد که به جز زیبایی نمایشی و خیره کننده اش شانسی برای گریز و آزادی در اختیار کسی نمی گذارد.

دکورهای به جای بازیگران تغییرات ناگهانی لحن فیلم و احساسات آن ها را منعکس می کنند. نورها و رنگ به شکلی کاملاً نمایشی در هر ثانیه به هر صورتی که بتواند متناسی با «مود» کلی آن صحنه باشد تغییر کرده و فیلم را به تابلویی متغیر بدل می کنند.

از آن جا که فیلم در لاس وگاس می گذرد قیاس میان این فیلم و متن مشهور "آموختن از لاس وگاس" (1972، 1977) رابرت ونتوری بسیار مؤثر خواهد بود. این که کاپولا چگونه در 1982 نشان می دهد که بر خلاف گفتۀ ونتوری الزاماً «کمتر ملال آور نیست» (less is a bore) بلکه «بیشتر» (یا آن طور که در تصاویر می بینیم لبریز شدنی همه سویه) مایۀ ملال است؛ بنابراین همان طور که ونتوری با واژگون کردن نظریۀ میس ون در رو سعی کرد نشان دهد که اغتشاش لاس وگاس در واقع به گفتۀ برگسون نشان دهندۀ نظمی پنهان است، کاپولا گفتۀ ونتوری را با بیانی سینمایی به نقیض خود بدل می کند. من بین ونتوری و کاپولا، دومی را برمی گزینم.

دنیایی که در آن همه چیز زیبا، اما بی جان به نظر می رسد

آدم ها به راحتی در محیط ادغام می شوند

فضا به گفتگو با انسان ها دست می زند، اما در انتها آن ها را تنها رها می کند

صحرای آریزونا مکانی برای خلق رؤیاها به زبان معماری

بین دنیای واقعی و تصاویر نقاشی شده روی دیواره ها تفاوتی وجود ندارد

مرزهای رایج و مقیاس ها دیگر وجود خارجی ندارند


نور ماهیت فضا را دگرگون می کند، نور حتی واقعیت را به کنترل خود در می آورد (دو نمای بالا)

مفهوم خانه در این فیلم درست همان نگاهی را نشان می دهد که در جادوگر شهر زمرد وجود داشته است

خیابان های رؤیا و شکست: لاس وگاس در استودیوهای زئوتروپ کاپولا

مرز بین تجارت و عواطف انسانی چیزی کمتر از یک شیشه است

شغل قهرمان فیلم (تری کار) تغییر دکوراسیون مغازه و ساخت شهرها و مناطق مختلف در این ویترین است. خود وگاس نیز به یک ویترین شبیه می شود (دو نمای بالا)

صحرای آریزونا دیگر جایی برای گریز نیست

تنها حقیقتی که وجود دارد، نور ، رنگ و حرکت است

نور متناسب با حال و هوای فیلم تغییر می کند همان طور که شهر تابع احساسات مخاطب است

الهام کاپولا از موزیکال های رنگی متروگلدوین مایر

عنوان بندی فیلم؛ چیزی شبیه به تابلوهای تبلیغاتی وگاس

From White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art

Most of the feckless, listless quality of today's art can be blamed on its drive to break out of a tradition while, irrationally, hewing to the square, boxed-in shape and gem-like inertia of an old-densely-wrought European masterpiece.

Advanced painting has long been suffering from this burnt out notion of a masterpiece -- breaking away from its imprisoning conditions towards a suicidal improvisation, threatening to move nowhere and everywhere, niggling, omniverous, ambitionless; yet, within the same picture, paying strict obeisance to the canvas edge and, without favoritism, the precious nature of every inch of allowable space. A classic example of this inertia is the Cezanne painting: in his in-doorish works of the woods around Aux de Province, a few spots of tingling, jarring excitement occur where he nibbles away at what he calls his "small sensation", the shifting of a tree trunk, the infinitesimal contests of complementary colors in a light accent on farmhouse wall. The rest of each canvas is a clogging weight-density-structure-polish amalgam associated with self-aggrandizing masterwork. As he moves away from the unique, personal vision that interests him, his painting turns ungiving and puzzling: a matter of balancing curves for his bunched-in composition, laminating the color, working the painting out to the edge. Cezanne ironically left an expose of his dreary finishing work in terrifyingly honest watercolors, an occasional unfinished oil (the pinkish portrait of his wife in sunny, leafed-in patio), where he foregoes everything but his spotting fascination with minute interactions.

The idea of art as an expensive hunk of well-regulated area, both logical and magical, sits heavily over the talent of every modern painter, from Motherwell to Andy Warhol. The private voice of Motherwell (the exciting drama in the meeting places between ambivalent shapes, the aromatic sensuality that comes from laying down thin sheets of cold, artfully cliche-ish, hedonistic color) is inevitably ruined by having to spread these small pleasures into great, contained works. Thrown back constantly on unrewarding endeavors (filling vast, egg-like shapes, organizing a ten-foot rectangle with its empty corners suggesting Siberian steppes in the coldest time of the year), Motherwell ends up with appalling amounts of plasterish grandeur, a composition so huge and questionably painted that the delicate, electric contours seem to be crushing the shale-like matter inside. The special delight of each painting tycoon (de Kooning's sabre-like lancing of forms; Warhol's minute embrace with the path of illustrator's pen line and block print tone; James Dine's slog-footed brio, filling a stylized shape from stem to stern with one ungiving color) is usually squandered in pursuit of the continuity, harmony, involved in constructing a masterpiece. The painting, sculpture, assemblage becomes a yawning production of over-ripe technique shrieking with preciosity fame, ambition; far inside are tiny pillows holding up the artist's signature, now turned into a mannerism by the padding, lechery, faking required to combine today's esthetics with the components of traditional Great Art.


Movies have always been suspiciously addicted to termite art tendencies. Good work usually arises where the creators (Laurel and Hardy, the team of Howard Hawks and William Faulkner on the first half of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep) seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture, but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn't anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.

The most inclusive description of the art is, that, termite-like, it feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.
Laurel and Hardy, in fact, in some of their most dyspeptic, and funniest movies, like Hog Wild, contributed some fine parody of men who had read every ''How to Succeed" book available; but, when it came to applying their knowledge, reverted instinctively to termite behavior.

--Manny Farber (1962, Film Culture)

Manny Farber on Henry Fonda

There is a dreadful notion in criticism that movies, to be digested by aesthetes, must be turned from small difficult into large assets and liabilities. James Agee, who always paid out tribute like a public address system, is never precise, but his fastidious pricing of a Lauren Bacall gave the reader the secure feeling that Bacall could be banked at the nearest Chaste National.
Henry Fonda, during a recent run-through of his films in New York, doesn't add up as "one hell of an actor" (as Bill Wellman declared in a Cinema magazine interview), but he is interesting for unimportant tics: the fact that he never acts one-on-one with a co-actor.

When Glenn Ford is a boneless, liquid-y blur as a cowboy dancer in The Rounders, Fonda fields Ford's act by doing a Stan Laurel, suggesting an oafish bag of bones in a hick foxtrot. Again in The Lady Eve, Sturges kids this Fonda-ism of opposing his playmates in a scene: Fonda's Hoppsy is a frozen popsicle, a menace of clumsiness while Eric Blore, Eugene Pallette are clever acting dervishes playing scintillating types.

Fonda's defensiveness (he seems to be vouchsafing his emotion and talent to the audience in tiny blips) comes from having a supremely convex body and being too modest to exploit it. Fonda's entry into a scene is that of a man walking backwards, slanting himself away from the public eye. Once in a scene, the heavy jaw freezes, becomes like a concrete abutment, and he affects a clothes hanger stance, no motion in either arm.

A good director must chop Fonda out from his competition: John Ford isolates Fonda for a great night scene in Young Mister Lincoln; communing with himself on a Jew's harp; there is another one in Oxbow Incident where Fonda explodes into a geometrical violence that ends in a beautiful vertical stomping. Left on his own, Fonda gets taller and taller, as he freezes into a stoical Pilgrim, sullenly and prudishly withdrawing while he watches another actor (Lee Tracy in The Best Man) have a ball.

Fonda's man-against-himself act was noticable in his first films during the 30s when his 20-year-old Tom Joad-Slim-Lincoln were aged into wizened, almost gnome-like old folks byan actor who keeps his own grace and talent light as possible in the role. During the 40s, in Daybreak and Ox-Bow, Fonda starts bearing down on the saintly stereotype with which writers strangled him. In a typical perversity, he edges into the bass-playing hero of Wrong Man with unlikable traits: nervousness that is like a fever, self-pity, a crushing guilt that makes him more untrustworthy than the movie's criminal population. Almost any trait can be read into his later work. From Mr. Roberts onwards, the heroic body is made to seem repellently beefy, thickened, and the saintliness of his role as an intelligent naval officer-candidate-president shakes apart at the edges with hauteur, lechery, selfishness.

The peculiar feature of this later Fonda performance, however, is that he defeats himself again by diminishing the hostility and meanness -- so that they fail to make us forget the country boy style in which they are framed.

In his best scenes, Fonda brings together positive and negative, a flickering precision and calculated athleticism mixed in with the mulish withdrawing. Telephoning the Russian premier, desperate over the possibility of an atom war (Fail Safe), Fonda does a kind of needle-threading with nothing. He makes himself felt against an indirectly conveyed wall of pressure, seeping into the scene in stiff delayed archness and jointed phrasing -- a great concrete construction slowly cracking, becoming dislodged. It is one of the weirdest tension builders in film, and most of it is done with a constricted, inside-throat articulation and a robot movement so precise and dignified it is like watching a l7-foot polevaulter get over the bar without wasting a motion or even using a pole.

Before it reaches its two strippers at midway point, The Rounders shows Fonda in urbane-bouyant stride, but even a second-team bit player, Edgar Buchanan, out-fences him during a funny exchange in which Fonda explains the name Howdy. Eugene Pallette (Lady Eve), a buoyant jelly bowl moving skywards as he goes downstairs, is a magical actor and nothing in Fonda's divested vocabulary is equipped to produce that kind of spring water bubbling and freshness.

--Manny Farber (October 14, 1965 / Cavalier)

Hitchcock Speaks

The Alfred Hitchcock episode of the classic Dick Cavett Show is an exceptional Hitch’s exhibit. For the first time he is giving the precise information about how (or in some cases why) he has directed his famous films and scenes. Although the usual ingenious humor is on, there is no trace of his sarcasm or sense of playing with the interviewer/camera which is evident in other Hitch’s TV interviews; especially as long as I remember two incredible French interviews; one paired with the greatest interview of film history with John Ford (it was broadcasted as a documentary from "arte" channel, a couple of years age), and the other one in French – yes, Hitch speaks in French! – as a part of Cinepanaroma (a French TV program dedicated to the art of filmmaking).

Don’t forget that at the time of this interview he was 73 years old – fresh from directing Frenzy, and maybe too tired to play his old games. And Cavett armored with a copy of Truffaut interview, picks his questions from the book (so must of the Q&As are nothing new to us), and it’s also a little strange for an American TV show, trying to investigate the technical aspects of Hitchcock films and Hitch, with a generosity unheard since the Truffaut sessions, giving all details and unveils his magician tricks. A must see for all Hitchcock fans.

The Fly (1958)

وقتي با يك شاهكار روبرو مي شويد به جاي اين كه قوۀ تحليل و احساسات معمولتان به كار بيافتند يا اين كه بخواهيد با تفسير اين نيروي ناشناختۀ جاذبه را آشكار كنيد، كشش شما به اثر در نيروي ناشناخته اي غريزي آشكار مي شود. يكي از اولين مشخصه هاي آن اين است كه مي خواهيد به هر قيمتي به دنياي فيلم وارد شويد، حتي اگر دنياي تباه و هراسناك آدمي باشد كه با مگس يكي مي شود و يا آن طور كه وينسنت پرايس در فيلم مگس (1958) مي گويد: «مردي با سر مگس و مگسي با سر آدم.»

اين فيلم تأثيري باورنكردني بر من گذاشت، شايد به خاطر اين كه همه چيز آن بي نقص است: چند بازي فراموش نشدني (وينسنت هم چون هميشه و هربرت مارشال در نقش بازرس فرانسوي، شارس)، دكورها (تئوبلد هولساپل و لايل ويلر) و كاربرد رنگ و فيلمبرداري كارل اشتراس در حد بهترين هاي ژانر در تمامي تاريخ سينماست. فيلمنامۀ جيمز كلاول (بر اساس داستان جورج لانگلان) نيز از اين بهتر ممكن نبوده است.

يكي از موحش ترين صحنه هايي كه در عمرم ديده ام وقتي است كه وينسنت پرايس در بين انبوه مگس هايي كه روي زباله ها بزم گرفته اند به دنبال برادرش مي گردد! به زودي در شمارۀ ويژۀ فيلم هاي ترسناك در ماهنامۀ سينمايي فيلم دربارۀ اين شاهكار كورت نيومان به تفصيل خواهم نوشت.

Manny Farber On The Leopard Man

"The Leopard Man", a reissued "B" (1942) showing with the rickety "King Kong", is a nerve-twitching whodunit giving the creepy impression that human beings and "things" are interchangeable and almost synonymous and that both are pawns of a bizarre and terrible destiny. A lot of surrealists like Cocteau have tried for the same supernatural effects, but while their scenes still seem like portraits in motion, Val Lewton's film shows a way to tell a story about people, that isn't dominated by the activity, weight, size, and pace of the human figure. In one segment of the film a small frightened senorita walks beyond the edge of the border town and then back again, while her feelings and imagination keep shifting with the camera into the sagebrush, the darkness of an arroyo, crackling pebbles underfoot, and so on until you see her thick dark blood oozing under the front door of her house. All the psychological effects -- fear and so on –were transferred to within the non-human components of the picture as the girl waited for some non-corporeal manifestation of nature, culture, or history to gobble her up. But more important in terms of movie invention, Lewton's use of multiple focus (characters are dropped or picked up as if by chance, while the movie goes off on odd tracks trying to locate a sound or suspicion) and his lighter-than-air sense of pace created a terrifically plastic camera style. It put the camera eye on a curiously delicate wave length that responds to scenery as quickly as the mind, and gets inside of people instead of reacting only to surface qualities. This film still seems to be one of Hollywood's original gems -- nothing impure in terms of cinema, nothing imitative about its style, and little that misses fire through a lack of craft.

--Manny Farber (September 27, 1952, The Nation)

Manny Farber on Ugly Melodramas

Hollywood has spawned, since 1946, a series of ugly melodramas featuring a cruel aesthetic, desperate craftsmanship, and a pessimistic outlook. These films ("The Set-Up", "Act of Violence", "Asphalt Jungle", and “No Way Out") are revolutionary attempts at turning life inside out to find the specks of horrible oddity that make puzzling, faintly marred kaleidoscopes of a street, face, or gesture. Whatever the cause of these depressing films -- the television menace, the loss of twenty-four million customers since the mid-forties -- it has produced striking changes in film technique. Writers overpack dialogue with hackneyed bitterness, actors perfect a quietly neurotic style, while directors -- by flattening the screen, discarding framed and centered action, and looming the importance of actors -- have made the movie come out and hit the audience with an almost personal savagery. The few recent films unmarked by the new technique ("Born to be Bad") seem naive and obsolete.

The new scripts are tortured by the "big" statement. "All About Eve" (story of the bright lights, dim wits, and dark schemes of Broadway) hardly gets inside theater because the movie is coming out of somebody's mouth. The actors are burdened with impossible dialogue abounding in clichés: ''Wherever there’s magic and make-believe and an audience -- there's theater"; timely words: ''We are the original displaced personalities"; and forced cleverness that turns each stock character into the echo of an eclectic writer. The new trick is to build character and plot with loaded dialogue, using hep talk that has discolored cheap fiction for years. In "The Breaking Point" the environment is a "jungle", the hero a morose skipper ''with only guts to peddle" who decides after a near-fatal gun battle that ; "a man alone hasn't got a chance". His spouse comes, through with "You’re more ma n than anyone I ever knew".

Stories, parading success-seekers through a jackpot of frustration, are unique in that they pick on outcasts with relentless cruelty that decimates the actor as much as the character. As a colored interne moves through the "No Way Out" blizzard of anti-Negro curses, everything about him is aggressively spiked so that a malignant force seems to be hacking at him. When the cruel aestheticians really click on these sadistic epics, foreboding death lurks over every scene. Cameramen dismember the human body, accenting oddities like Darnell's toothpick legs, or Pat Neal's sprawling mouth to make them inanimate; faces are made up to suggest death masks, expanded to an unearthly size, spotlighted in dark, unknown vacuums; metaphorical direction twists a chimp's burial ("Sunset Boulevard") into an uncanny experience by finding a resemblance between monkey and owner. Under the guise of sympathy these brutally efficient artists are sneaky torturers of the defeated or deranged character.


Directors like Wilder and Mankiewicz mechanically recreate the unharnessed energy and surprise of great Silent films with an elegantly controlled use of the inexplicable. In the jitterbugging scene of "Asphalt Jungle" Huston delicately undresses the minds of four characters and gauchely creates a sensuous, writhing screen, though his notion of jive is so odiously surrealistic it recalls Russian propaganda against the United States. The first glimpse of the faded star in "Sunset", using Bonnard's suede touch on Charles Addams's portraiture (a witch surveying her real estate through shutters and dark spectacles) is lightning characterization with a poetic tang. Brando, in "The Men", commands a G.I. troop into battle like a slow, doped traffic coping cars through an intersection, but his affected pantomime electrifies the screen with the hallucinatory terror of an early painting by De Chirico. Movies have seldom if ever been as subtle as these scenes, or as depressing in the use of outrageous element to expedite ambiguous craftsmanship. To understand the motives behind the highly charged, dissonant acting employed today, one has to go back to the time wasting, passive performance of an early "talkie".

No matter how ingenious the actor -- Harlow, Garbo, Lee Tracy – effectiveness and depth were dissipated by the uninterrupted perusal of a character geared to a definite "type" and acted with mannerisms that were always so rhythmically and harmoniously related that the effect was of watching a highly attenuated ballet. Directors today have docked the old notion of unremittingly consistent, river-like performances, and present what amounts to a confusion of "bits", the actor seen only intermittently in garish touches that are highly charged with meaning and character, but not actually melted into one clear recognizable person. Darnell's honestly ugly characterization of a depressed slattern is fed piecemeal into ''No Way Out", which moves her toward and away from malevolence, confuses her "color", and even confounds her body. Her job -- like the recent ones of Nancy Olson, John McIntyre, Hayden -- shouldn't be called a “performance” because it is more like a collage of personality, which varies drastically in every way to create the greatest explosion and "illumination" in each moment.

-- Manny Farber