JOHN IRELAND: FILM NOIR'S MAN APART

 By Gary Deane

"Likeable guy. And a very good actor. I'll miss him."   John Sturges on John Ireland's passing.

John Ireland and Robert Mitchum were destined to be best buds. Both were done with school at sixteen, both made their way to Hollywood through the back door, and together they lived it up like tomorrow was already gone. Never that drawn to Tinseltown’s la-di-da, the two hell-raising hipsters were mostly happy just hanging out with the hired help. Yet Ireland too-often found himself in the gaze of the public eye. Among his many fans were freshly-hatched starlets drawn to his rangy good looks and casual attentiveness. Natalie Wood, Sue Lyon, Barbara Payton, and wild child Tuesday Weld, who was sixteen when the 45-year-old actor began dating her, were some of his steadies. When pressed about the relationship with Weld, Ireland said, “If there wasn’t such a difference in our ages, I’d ask her to marry me. That and her mother are the only things that stop me.” Given Ireland’s watchful eyes and vulpine smile, it would be easy to think him dangerous—though he was known to be considerate of his friends, as well as those fans and admirers requesting autographs and photos.

However, Ireland’s indulgences would take their toll, personally and professionally. His first marriages were train wrecks—especially that to actress Joanne Dru, whom he met on the set of the western, Red River (’48). It didn’t take long for the lanky cowboy Romeo to rope Dru in. Meanwhile, director Howard Hawks was busy taking a hatchet to Ireland’s parts in the movie. Hawks said later, “I got tired of Ireland getting drunk every night, losing his gun, losing his hat, smoking marijuana…I just cut the hell out of his scenes and gave them to someone else.” Dru knew the score with Ireland, but married him anyway, only for the pair to later end up in separate hospital wards after what started as an argument ended as a brawl. Following their divorce, Dru—her bruises now faded—told reporters that she’d never marry another actor. Perhaps she just shouldn’t have married John Ireland.

Born in Vancouver, Canada, Ireland grew up in New York City and began his show business career as a professional swimmer. He discovered acting by chance, fell in love with it, and learned and developed his craft on stage from William Shakespeare. Which is likely why he sounds educated even when playing cheap crooks and guys up from the streets. In fact, just his voice is heard in three classic-period film noirs: Somewhere in the Night (1946), Repeat Performance (1947), and The Undercover Man (1949), movies in which he delivered uncredited voice-overs.

Ireland actually made his debut as a screen actor in Lewis Milestone’s dispassionate but moving A Walk in the Sun (1945) as a thoughtful, letter-writing G.I. With his Everyman’s looks and hard-boiled detachment, he’d play a wide range of soldiers, adventurers, and cowboys in over 200 movie and television appearances. Often brooding and inward-looking in performance, Ireland would be cast as characters good or bad—though he was just as well-equipped to play ones both good and bad. Whether a tormented villain or a hard-pressed hero, he was an actor purpose-built for film noir, in which he’d mostly end up being used as a threat, despite the flawed hero being well within his reach.

Roles in classic noir came early on, beginning with Behind Green Lights (1946), a fast-paced procedural starring William Gargan and Carole Landis. Next came Railroaded! (1947), the much-favored hard-boiled B title directed by Anthony Mann, with cinematography by John Alton. In what would become a signature role for him, Ireland stars as Duke Martin, a sadistic thug who spends time buffing his ammo with eau de cologne---that is when he’s not slapping around his girlfriend played by Jane Randolph in the grand tradition of boozy broads such as Claire Trevor’s Gaye Dawn (Key Largo,1948) or Gloria Grahame’s Debbie Marsh (The Big Heat, 1953). 

Soon after Railroaded! came The Gangster (1947), a feverish noir psychodrama starring Barry Sullivan as ‘Shubunka’, a washed-up mobster whose crime empire is crumbling around him due to his arrogance and apathy. However, his henchmen, including his gambling-addicted bookkeeper (Ireland), manage to hasten their boss’s fate—along with their own.  

By this time, Ireland’s career as a featured lead character player looked to be on track: a solid supporting role in the Roy Huggins-written I Love Trouble (1948), a hard-hitting Raymond Chandler knock-off starring Franchot Tone and Janet Blair; a lead in Open Secret (1948), a gripping, poor-man’s version of Crossfire; and a key supporting part in Raw Deal (1948), another emphatic Anthony Mann/ John Alton collaboration, starring Dennis O’Keefe, Claire Trevor, and Marsha Hunt. One of the era’s most violent noirs, Ireland features as ‘Fantail’, one of its most ruthless villains.

Later that year, Red River was released. Despite his part having been downsized, Ireland is memorable in several of the A feature’s most important sequences, including the confrontation between his character, Cherry Valance, and rival Matt Garth, played by Montgomery Clift. In a scene ripe with homoerotic innuendo, Cherry says, “That's a good-looking gun you were about to use back there. Can I see it? And you'd like to see mine. Nice, awful nice. You know, there are only two things more beautiful than a good gun. A Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere. You ever have a good Swiss watch?”

Other ‘adult’ Westerns would follow, including the noir-stained I Shot Jesse James (1949), a testament to its director Sam Fuller’s unbending conviction that the best movies are battlegrounds of love, hate, action, violence, and death. Ireland’s conflicted outlaw hero, Robert Ford is forced to choose between his feelings for Jesse James or those for a woman. Choosing wrongly, he ends up condemned to both the anguish of misplaced love and the infamy as James’ assassin. Ireland’s performance confirmed him as an actor to be reckoned with. 

Unfortunately, his next film that year, an aggravating mix of film noir and family comedy called Mr. Soft Touch (1949) starring Glenn Ford and Evelyn Keyes, relegated Ireland to a thankless part as a crusading reporter. However, a role in the great All the King’s Men (1949) soon would make up for it. Ireland shared top billing, this time as a more cynical scribe who goes from cautious admirer to fervent denouncer of a corrupt politico (Broderick Crawford) as he attempts to mount the steps of the Governor’s Mansion. But, while Ireland received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, the acknowledgment failed to lead to better things.

The 1950’s began with the adventure drama Cargo to Capetown (1950), a strained attempt to cash in on the popularity of All the King’s Men, with Ireland and Crawford trading blows over the affections of a tramp steamer’s only female passenger (Ellen Drew). This was followed by a line-up of smaller B noirs, each better for Ireland’s being in them: The Scarf (1951), The Basketball Fix (1951), Hurricane Smith (1952), Security Risk (1954), The Steel Cage (1954), his self-directed The Fast and the Furious (1955), No Place to Land (1958), No Time to Kill (1959), and Faces in the Dark (1960). Then at least came a couple of solid supporting parts in Queen Bee (1955) with Joan Crawford, and Party Girl (1958) starring Cyd Charisse. His on-set liaison with Crawford at the time became front-page news, mainly because Crawford appeared so ready to talk about it.   

An ardent Anglophile, Ireland also went back and forth to England during these years, headlining as the ordained American in a quartet of worthier British noirs: The Good Die Young (1954), The Glass Tomb (1955), Black Tide (’58), and Return of a Stranger (1961); also, The Cheaters (1960-62), a realistic TV series about insurance fraud.

During the 1970’s and early ‘80’s, Ireland, like many Hollywood actors of the era (e.g. Charles Bronson, Jack Palance, Telly Savalas, Farley Granger, Joseph Cotton), was kept busy in Italy and Mexico, starring mostly in westerns and thrillers. Back in the States, there was some television work and the occasional meatier movie role still available to him. One standout was as an intractable cop, Nulty, in the remake of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely (1975), which starred his buddy, Robert Mitchum. But by the late 1980’s, Ireland was desperate for what he called ‘real’ jobs. He took out a two-page ad in the Hollywood Reporter, saying only, “I’m an actor. Please…let me act. John Ireland.” The call-out paid off and he was able to find work for a few more years until health issues forced him to retire. He joined Mitchum and other movie colony friends in Montecito, an enclave near Santa Barbara, where for a time he owned a restaurant called ‘Ireland's'. In 1992, he died at the age of 78.

In the end, John Ireland, simply put, was who he was. Though he was serious about his craft and acting appeared to nourish his soul, he could sometimes be his own worst enemy and his career ended in frustration. But then as award-winning novelist and essayist Joan Didion once said of her own fallibilities, “Writing never made me a better person.” All that really matters though is that Ireland, by the fact of his charged inscrutability and unpredictability on screen, can be seen today as one of the most modern film actors of his generation.

 

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JOHNNY COOL (1963)

Written by Gary Deane

“He calls himself, Johnny Cool… Everybody remembers him, but nobody knows him.”

In Dark City, there’s a Johnny on every corner—Johnny Allegro (1949), Johnny Angel (1945), Johnny Apollo (1940), Johnny Eager (1942), Johnny Guitar (1954), Johnny Gunman (1957), Johnny Nobody (1961), Johnny O'Clock (1947), Johnny One-Eye (1950), Johnny Rocco (1958), Johnny Staccato (1959-1960), Johnny Stool Pigeon (1949), Johnny on the Run (1953), Johnny on the Spot (1954), Johnny, You’re Wanted (1956). Some you want to know, some maybe you don’t. Johnny Gunman is a morose, dull-eyed loser and Johnny One-Eye turns out to be somebody’s pet pooch.

Johnny Cool (1963), on the other hand, is one you’d do well to look out for—a stylish and chilling post-noir that comes at the screen like a fist. In the film’s tragic opening sequence, a young Salvatore Giordano watches his mother murdered by a gang of Italian fascists. In a rage, the boy manages to pull the pin on a grenade hanging from one of the soldier’s belts, then flee. He picks a rifle up and cries, “The gun is now the only family I have!” as a partisan sniper kills the others.

Fast forward a few years. Mob boss Johnny Colini aka ‘Johnny Cool’ summons Salvatore (played by Henry Silva), now a hardened fighter. Colini (Marc Lawrence, in a bravura performance) is an aging Italian-American mobster now living in exile in Italy. He tells Salvatore that he wants him to extract vengeance on those responsible for his deportation: “You’ll do a job for me no other man could do. I want you to go to the men who betrayed me, take back what they stole, and make them dead.” Once Colini’s accounts have been settled, Salvatore becomes the new Johnny Cool and takes over the mafia kingpin’s criminal empire in the United States.

Salvatore had only ever battled for freedom and justice up to that point. He must, however, follow tradition and he boards a plane for New York. After taking a few days to get adjusted, Salvatore—now ‘Johnny’—heads to a local bar for a quiet drink but ends using his combat skills to take down a quarrelsome drunk. This attracts the attention of a beautiful-but-bored socialite, Darien Guinness (‘Dare’ to her pals), who seems to find males beating the snot out of each other arousing. Dare (a lascivious Elizabeth Montgomery) is recently-divorced and thinks Johnny looks like he might be just what she’s looking for. She says to him, “All men look like men but so few really are.” She asks, “What do you do?” Johnny replies, “I do my best.” and they leave together.

By this point, the syndicate has figured out who Johnny is and decides to send him a message. A couple of its soldiers are sent to ‘rough up’ Dare (a euphemism for sexual assault). When Johnny finds out, he swears, “The men who did this to you are now dead.” and takes his vengeance up-close-and-personal. He now has to move quickly to eliminate the mob bosses scattered across the U.S. and takes Dare with him. The gangsters–̶ played vigorously by Telly Savalas, Jim Bachus, John McGiver, Brad Dexter, and Mort Saul—are soon out of the picture. Johnny returns to New York while Dare, having had enough of the mayhem, goes to ground in Los Angeles, abandoning Johnny to whatever fate has in store for him.

Based on a novel, The Kingdom of Johnny Cool by John McPartland, and adapted by screenwriter Joe Landon (The Explosive Generation (1961), The Hoodlum Priest, (1960), Von Ryan’s Express (1965), Johnny Cool gave Henry Silva his first leading role. The intense, onyx-eyed actor, raised in Brooklyn by his Spanish mother, first came to Hollywood’s attention in 1955, after he’d starred alongside classmates Ben Gazarra, Shelley Winters, Harry Guardino, and Anthony Franciosa in an Actor’s Studio production of A Hatful of Rain. In 1957, he’d reprise his role as a cold-blooded dope dealer in the feature film version, directed by Fred Zinnemann.

Silva later was contacted by Frank Sinatra, who, liking everything he’d seen of him, asked the actor to be in Ocean’s 11 (1960), a jokey, vanity-fueled heist flick. (Silva would reunite with Sinatra in Sergeants 3 (1962), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and again in Contract on Cherry Street (1977). As a result of his friendship with the ‘Chairman of the Board’, Silva had become a de facto member of Sinatra’s Rat Pack, which led to the offer to star in the role in Johnny Cool. Produced by Peter Lawford, the film also featured fellow Rat Packers Joey Bishop as a rambunctious used-car salesman and Sammy Davis Jr. as a hanger-on dubbed ‘Educated’ due to his skills at craps (Davis also performs a couple of songs, including the title number).

Unfortunately, neither The Manchurian Candidate nor Johnny Cool led to bigger things in Hollywood for Silva. In the mid ‘60’s the under-utilized actor moved to Europe where he soon established himself as a box-office favorite, headlining in a string of popular crime thrillers and poliziotteschi, movies which he elevated beyond their generic limitations. At the same time, he continued to take whatever roles he could get in the States, keeping the doors open for a full-time return to Hollywood a decade later. Once back, he continued to work in films and television until his final appearance in Steve Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven (2001), a passable remake of the ‘60’s classic.

Silva would come to the screen fully formed as the epitome of cool. Equal parts dead certainty and dead calm, he was always the kind of bad guy we want to survive even if we’re pretty sure he won’t. But Johnny’s no ordinary villain. Driven by moral both conviction and ancient codes of courage, he’s less an anti-hero than a tragic figure. To Johnny, Colini’s long-term economic interests and power grabs are unimportant; all that matters is the dutiful resolution of grievances no matter what the costs. Fearing for her safety, amid the violence that swirls around him, Johnny pushes Dare away. She says to him, “You can’t leave me. I’m nothing without you”. He responds, “We’re both nothing.” 

Whether asked to be, or by choice, Elizabeth Montgomery (daughter of actor Robert Montgomery) is as libidinous in Johnny Cool as she would ever be on screen. While the rest of Dare’s character and motivations remain underdeveloped, Montgomery’s both there and accounted as an unsuspected femme fatale and a sensual woman aroused. When she eventually dumps Adrian, her pompous ex-husband, she calls Johnny and tells him, “I need you! I need you now!

 

For those who know Montgomery only as Samantha from the comedy-fantasy television series, Bewitched (1964 -1972), a lot of this may come as a shock. However, Montgomery had been attracting admirers like moths to a flame since puberty and by the time Johnny Cool was released, she was at the height of her beauty and desirability. She’d also been through two divorces, the last from actor Gig Young just before the filming of Johnny Cool. It was during that time she met the movie’s director, William Asher, and not long after its completion, she and Asher were married. Montgomery had told him she was done with acting; however, he soon came up with the idea for Bewitched and the rest is sit-com history. Following, she would become the doyenne of TV movies-of-the-week, among them A Case of Rape (1974) which chronicles the ordeal of a middle-class housewife determined to bring her assailant to trial.

Asher was best known for his lighter-hearted television work, having directed hundreds of episodes of I Love Lucy, Our Miss Brooks, The Danny Thomas Show, The Donna Reed Show, and other shows. The opportunity to direct Johnny Cool also came about as a result of his close relationship with Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford, the film’s producer, with whom he’d fly to Las Vegas for nights on the town, returning at the shoot at 5 a.m. the next morning. Asher was friend to many in Hollywood, and several feature in Johnny Cool, including Richard Anderson, Wanda Hendrix, Joseph Calleia, Elisha Cook Jr., and other built-to-last supporting players whose faces, if not names, are familiar. (Also in the mix is an uncredited Rodney Dangerfield as a testy, flap-jawed Las Vegas bus dr river.)

With Johnny Cool in the can, Asher then got to work on the first of his famous moment-in-time ‘beach party’ pictures, starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. Big money-makers at the box office, these well suntan-oiled productions—Beach Party (1963), Muscle Beach Party (1964), Bikini Beach (1964), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), and four others—gave Asher the greatest pleasure of his career. “The scripts were sheer nonsense, but they were fun and positive.” The films were happy illusions, the very opposite of his dismal upbringing. Asher, in fact, had probed some that territory in several downbeat domestic crime dramas, notably The Shadow on the Window (1957), a suspenseful child-in-distress noir starring Phil Carey, Corey Allen, and John Drew Barrymore.

                    

The director also had worked on TV’s Racket Squad (1951-52), Big Town (!952), and The Line-Up (1954). In 1956, the producers of Racket Squad went back and stitched together several of the grittier episodes and released them in theaters as Mobs, Inc.—anticipating a swell of unreconstructed mob and gangster movies later to follow, such as Baby Face Nelson (1957); The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960); Murder Inc. (1960); The King of the Roaring ‘20’s: The Story of Arnold Rothstein (1961); Mad Dog Coll (1961); and Hail, Mafia (1965).

One of the most convincing of them is Johnny Cool, which dances on the edge of ugliness, its violence barely contained by the Production Code. The movie’s sharp-edged style, fueled by composer Billy May’s high-register jazz soundtrack and cinematographer Sam Leavitt’s expansive, hard-surfaced camerawork is strikingly modern. Leavitt came to Johnny Cool with an imposing resume, having worked on classic noirs The Thief (1952), The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), Crime in the Streets (1956), The Crimson Kimono (1959), and Cape Fear (1960). He’d also received an Oscar for Best Cinematography for The Defiant Ones (1958) and then nominations for Exodus (1960) and Advise and Consent (1962).

By his own admission, Leavitt was not the easiest person to work with and the trajectory of his career reflected the fact. He told Stuart Kaminsky in an interview for the writer’s 1974 book, Don Seigel, Director, “I don’t care who it is, the biggest director or producer, if I have something to say, I talk back to them. That’s why I don’t get many great pictures (anymore)”. If by “great pictures”, Leavitt was referring to Stanley Kramer’s plodding, sanctimonious Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), then that was his last grab at fame and fortune.

Meanwhile, to both his and William Asher's lasting credit is Johnny Cool[1], a cynical, final-gasp film noir overflowing with the pulp exigencies of life and death. As Colini warns the younger and wary Salvatore, “Now is sure, later is only maybe.” No Johnny-come-lately, Johnny Cool, in all its ferocity, is very much ‘now’.

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[1] Also, William Conrad’s under-rated Brainstorm (1965) which had Leavitt behind the camera.

 

 

 

MADELEINE STOWE: FILM NOIR’S LAST LEADING LADY

By Gary Deane

“She’s a ‘40’s actress dropped into the ‘90’s. I adore her. There’s something about her that just breaks my heart.” Jonathan Kaplan, director, Unlawful Entry (‘92)

Madeleine Stowe knows how to show up—never more than one morning in 2012 as a guest on ABC’s testy chat-fest, The View. It had been two decades since Stowe been named as one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful Persons in the World” and nothing much had changed. As could have been predicted, hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joyce Behar would look unimpressed. However, Stowe was in blithe spirits that day. She'd recently received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Drama Series in the noir-drenched Revenge, a program which would run from 2011 to 2015 and Stowe hit the stage with old-school sway, an unblushing throwback to a time when dressed-to-kill glamor and allure was the order of the day. Charming, unfiltered, and fiercely smart (she was a favorite guest of TCM host, the late Robert Osborne), it soon became clear that while she was all set to be engaging, she was—if push came to shove—just as ready to fully engage. 

For a period, the world had heard little from or about her. In the late ’80’s and early ‘90's, Stowe had been a fast-rising star, working with such A-list directors as Michael Mann, Robert Altman, and Terry Gilliam, and on the cusp of a gilt-edged career. Then suddenly things cooled off and she would find herself adrift aboard a succession of office flops and anodyne made-for-TV movies. With Revenge, all that would change. The show, a high-drama evening soap, starred Emily VanCamp as a young woman whose father had been jailed for crimes he’d never committed. Sent away as a child, she’d now returned, bent on taking revenge on those responsible—namely the Grayson family and its matriarch, Victoria Grayson, played fearsomely by Stowe. Victoria is a classic femme fatale who takes no prisoners. When she hears her best friend has slept with her husband, she brings her close and whispers, “Every time I hug you, the warmth you feel is my hatred burning through”. You get the idea.

Stowe’s own beginnings were less dramatic. Born in 1958 in Eagle Rock, California, a working-class community sandwiched between Glendale and Pasadena, she actually was painfully shy growing up. She took up piano at age ten and for the next eight years did little else but practice and perform under the tutelage of Sergei Tarnowsky, once the teacher of Vladimir Horowitz. When Tarnowsky died at age 92 in 1976, Stowe quit playing, having decided that “It was time to not be all by myself anymore”. She enrolled at the University of Southern California to study film and journalism and went on her first date—with Dennis Quaid who declined to take her virginity, not wanting the responsibility.

Then came some stage acting. But after seeing her at the Solaris Theater in Beverly Hills, an agent landed her a part in the TV series Baretta, starring Robert Blake as an undercover cop. After that came appearances on Barnaby Jones, Little House on the Prairie, Trapper John, and in the mini-series The Gangster Chronicles, starring Brian Benben as Michael Lasker, a character based on mobster Meyer Lansky (Stowe played Lasker’s wife, Ruth, and in 1981 Stowe and Benben themselves would marry). TV movies followed, including The Nativity (‘78), a kind of biblical ‘When Joseph Met Mary’ with John Shea; then Blood and Orchids (‘86), a landmark broadcast television mini-series featuring Jane Alexander as Doris Ashley, a Hawaiian plantation owner whose daughter, Hester (Stowe, in a shattering performance) is sexually assaulted by a friend of her daughter’s husband. To protect the family, Doris has Hester accuse four young Hawaiian men of battery and rape—unleashing events viewed through the cynical eyes of the investigating detective, played by Kris Kristofferson.

Tropical Snow (1988), her next feature, starred Stowe and Cuban-American Jsu Garci (as Nick Corri) as Marina and Tavo, pickpockets working Bogota’s international airport to support their families. The two agree to act as drug mules for small-time dealer, Oskar (David Carradine) and swallow cocaine-filled balloons just before flying to New York. Things do not go well for the pair. Written and directed by Columbian film-maker Ciro Duran, Tropical Snow is a noir with a beating heart, a lament for a country and the plight of its people. Despite the film’s low-rent production values and the soundtrack’s Miami Vice-like grip, its story and characters are compelling—especially Marina who, though terrified, does what she must to survive. Her only real currency is her looks and having worked in a seedy dance bar, she’s only too aware what comes next for pretty women.

Tropical Snow was released direct-to-video, piggybacking on Stowe’s breakout success a year later as a headstrong Latina in Stakeout (‘87), a comedy crime thriller and surprise box office hit. Starring as the ex-wife of an escaped convict (Aiden Quinn), she’s put under surveillance by a couple of wisecracking cops, played by Emilio Estevez and Richard Dreyfuss, and ends up involved with one of them. More than just a side-dish, Stowe’s free-spirited performance suggested that bigger things were just around the corner—which they were. In the ‘90’s Stowe would find her place in the Hollywood firmament with films such as The Last of the Mohicans (’92) but also establish herself as one of the star attractions in signature films of the golden age of American neo-noir.

The first of these was Revenge (‘90), directed by Tony Scott and based on Jim Harrison’s 1979 pulp noir novella in which women are held to be grand prizes in a male game. Kevin Costner stars as Cochran, a jet jockey who goes to visit Tibey, a wealthy friend in Mexico. Tibey is an up-from-the-gutter character (performed with peasant grandeur by Anthony Quinn) whose sable-haired trophy wife, Miryea (Stowe) enjoys every comfort, though he refuses to give her what she most wants ̶ a child. It’s not long before she and Cochran are stealing glances across the table at dinner and walking beaches together. The ferociously jealous Tibey learns of their dalliances and in a fury orders his men to deal with them. Miryea is drugged and disfigured and dumped at a brothel, and told, “If you want to be a whore, you can be one for the rest of your life”. Tibey’s taken his revenge but the badly-beaten Cochrane responds in kind. As noir often has it, no one wins—though Cochran and Mileya endure long enough to salvage some of their humanity. Stowe gives a gut-wrenching performance as a woman whose only consolation is that she gets to choose a final means of escape from hell. 

Now on a roll, Stowe would next feature in the Jack Nicholson-directed retro noir The Two Jakes (‘90), the long-delayed sequel to Chinatown (‘74). Nicholson again stars as private eye Jake Gittes, this time hired by Jake Berman (Harvey Keitel), to catch his wife, Kitty (Meg Tilley) in the act with his business partner, Mark Bodine. At question also are the fortunes of Bodine’s spouse, Lillian (Stowe) and the related whereabouts of Katherine Mulwray, last seen being abducted by her incestuous monster of a grandfather, Noah Cross. Though The Two Jakes is messy and frayed, Stowe—tough, foul-mouthed, and appealingly loopy in pink angora and a ‘40’s Victory Roll—is the movie’s sole undiluted pleasure.

Two years later came Jonathan Kaplan’s chilling domestic noir, Unlawful Entry (‘92), with Stowe sharing the bill with Kurt Russell as a couple, Karen and Michael Carr, who’ve moved recently into a leafy Los Angeles neighborhood. One night a robber breaks in and holds a knife to Karen’s throat. Though he eventually runs off, the two are badly shaken. Michael, knowing he’d been unable to protect his wife, is humiliated. The police are called and one of the officers, Pete Davis (Ray Liotta), goes out of his way to help out with installation of a security system. To show their appreciation, they invite him to dinner. In the days following, Pete begins to show up unannounced and intrude upon their lives, telling Karen, among other things, that she needs a better man around the house than her husband. Unlike other domestic thrillers of the day such as Fatal Attraction (‘87) Pacific Heights (‘90), The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (‘92), and Single White Female (‘92), Unlawful Entry’s storyline is as credible as it is gripping, as Kaplan (Heart Like a Wheel (’83), The Accused (’88) sets the story in an entirely plausible world. Cheap dramatics are avoided, the tension builds organically, and it takes most of the movie for Pete’s obsession to fully reveal itself. Stowe is strikingly and uncomfortably real as a woman-in-peril who fails to realize how drawn she is to Pete’s fantasy. While she doesn’t lead him on, she makes the near-fatal mistake of not nipping his dangerous imaginings in the bud and awareness comes not a moment too soon.

Then came Robert Altman’s three-hour pastiche, Short Cuts (‘93), based on the stories of Raymond Carver, America’s blue-collar Chekov. Stowe features as Sherri, the wife of Gene Sheppard (Tim Robbins), a motorcycle cop who routinely cheats on her. Not that she cares, being a scrapper who laughs at the lies and sorry excuses that her husband tries to feed her. Sherri is the film’s most appealingly sympathetic character and Stowe’s performance won her a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress (Stowe first had been assigned the role played by Juliane Moore but Stowe balked at the nudity the script asked for and Moore agreed to swap parts).

Short Cuts had prepared Stowe well for her next movie, Blink (’93) in which she plays Emma Brody, a fiddle player in a band working bars in North Side Chicago. Tough and independent, Emma has been blind since childhood. Early in the movie she undergoes a corneal transplant, though she’s unable until days later to register what she may have seen in the meantime—including a man in the hallway outside her apartment who may have killed her neighbor upstairs. Aiden Quinn enters the scene as detective John Hallstrom and the two soon find themselves in a combustible love-hate relationship. Emma is willful and unpredictable and no blind waif waiting until dark—which makes her a match for both the killer and for Hallstrom, a hard-edged cop who cares mostly about the job and finding somewhere to have a drink once his shift is done.

Stowe was now going to from strength to strength and China Moon (‘94), her next movie, a second coming for film noir tropes borne of the classic period, was a chance to play what she was meant to be—an unreconstructed femme fatale. Rachel Munro, a pampered, unhappy Florida beauty is stuck in an abusive marriage to a philandering husband, Robert (Charles Dance). One evening she heads to a local beach bar to drown her sorrows and meets Kyle Bodine (Ed Harris), another cop who’s always on red alert. Only this time Bodine lets his guard down and ends up a chump to end all chumps.

China Moon (effectively a re-make of The Man Who Cheated Himself, ‘50’) was directed by John Bailey, the cinematographer who’d worked with both Lawrence Kasdan (Body Heat, ‘81) and Paul Schrader (Hardcore, ‘79; American Gigolo, ‘80). China Moon also bears a strong family resemblance to Body Heat, with its moody Florida settings, and a gullible protagonist led down an equally dark path by a predatory female. However, Stowe’s Rachel is both less obvious and more complicated than Kathleen Tuner’s pulp fiction spider woman, Mattie Walker; neither is Kyle Bodine as frivolous and given to casual affairs and one-night stands as William Hurt’s louche Ned Racine. Unlike that of Ned, Kyle’s fall is far more tragic. Free of self-reflexive irony or reversals of classic elements, China Moon is a modern noir as though conjured and directed by classic greats Robert Siodmak or Edward Dmytryk.

After which came the decline. Though Stowe headlined in three other movies in the ‘90’s which did well enough with audiences: Bad Girls (‘94), Twelve Monkey’s (‘95), and the noirish The General’s Daughter (‘99), only Twelve Monkeys garnered much favor with reviewers. One which did neither was The Proposition (‘98), a big, windy period drama which even the likes of Stowe, William Hurt, Kenneth Branagh, Blithe Danner, and Patrick Neil Harris couldn’t rescue. The  ‘00’s later brought only films no one wanted to see: The Imposter (’01), We Were Soldiers (’02), Avenging Angelo (’02), Octane (’03). Somewhat better-received were some made-for-television titles, including The Magnificent Ambersons (‘02), Saving Milly (’05), and The Christmas Hope (’09). Despite notable and sometimes exceptional performances, Stowe’s stardom had collapsed amid forgettable roles, movie misfires, and outright production catastrophes.

It finally took the broadcast television series Revenge not only to restore critical confidence in Stowe but also indemnify her as une belle ideal of classic (and classy) film noir style and substance. Stowe had rightly looked to actresses such as Jane Greer, Joan Bennett, Rita Hayworth, and Lauren Bacall, women celebrated for both their beauty and brains and whose strength and authority often could be brazenly sexual. 

Doing so gave Stowe command as the last of the spirited leading ladies and in whom one could see genuine connective tissue to the greats of the classic period and not someone just playing the part. Which is to take nothing away from Kathleen Turner or Linda Fiorentino or Sharon Stone in their burned-in-the-brain outings as femme fatales. The difference is that, as Jonathan Kaplan suggests, that Madeleine Stowe genuinely seemed to be borne of that earlier era. Just as Greer and Bennett and the others are now feted for their contributions to cherished film noirs, so should Stowe be for her catalog of strikingly resonant performances in modern-day noir. It’s just a shame there weren’t more of them.