LOOK IN ANY WINDOW (1961)

 

By Gary Deane

 

“Nothing between their secrets and the neighborhood except a pane of glass!.”

 

“Adults who want new sensations out of life…before it’s too late! Kids who want to find out what it’s all about…too early!”

 

Poor Craig Fowler. His father, Jay (Alex Nichol), is a self-pitying drunk who’s just been fired from his job as an aircraft mechanic. His mother, Jackie (Ruth Roman), is fed up to here and has begun trading sideways glances with the neighborhood skirt-chaser, Gareth Lowell (Jack Cassidy). Meantime, Craig (played by a sixteen-year-old Paul Anka) has taken to skulking around at night in a rubber mask, peeking through bedroom windows in hopes of seeing what goes on behind closed doors. It's tawdry stuff but then by the early 1960s, classic noir had long since crossed over to the seamier side of the street.

Look in Any Window forages for its noir-stained drama among Southern California’s burgeoning suburbs and newly-affluent middle-class who lust after the good things in life---flashy cars, color televisions, backyard swimming pools, built-in barbeques, and the ’lifestyle’ to go with. Not that anyone looks to be any the happier. Husbands work late to bring home the bacon (while enjoying a little something on the side) while the wives sit by the pool all day, drinks in hand. As for the kids, they do whatever they want.

Meanwhile, there is the problem of a peeping tom on the prowl. Folks are in a panic and their complaints to the police bring out a couple of plainclothes officers---one of them with profiling experience---who are assigned to a 24-hour lookout. While they watch and wait, the two witness the chronic boozing, the flagrant affairs, and the domestic upheaval. Eventually, Craig will be caught and unmasked. But by that time, the cops have come to their own conclusions about what’s wrong with the picture.

Despite the cheesy taglines, Look in Any Window is a movie with something to say. It also does a good job of saying it, ringing truer than Rebel Without a Cause (1955), a once film célèbre that today looks and feels ridiculously overwrought.

At the heart of Look in Any Window are the neighborhood’s pair of dominant homemakers and pool-party organizers, played by Roman and Carole Mathews, both of whom give compelling performances. Their characters are smart, attractive, and libidinous females in their late ’30s, who married young and now want to move beyond their everyday existences as material girls and handmaidens to louts. Mathews is especially affecting as Betty, who works hard at keeping her family together, if only for her daughter’s sake. At the same time, she’s increasingly drawn to her next-door neighbor, a courtly Italian widower (George Dolenz) who is as appreciative of her curiosity and intelligence as he is of her figure in a one-piece. On the other hand, the philandering husband, Gareth, shows little regard for either her or their teenage daughter, Eileen (Gigi Perreau). Gareth is a jerk, and when Betty tells him she’s going to leave him and that she hopes his money will buy him happiness, he shrugs and says, “With money, who needs happiness”.

Cassidy was an actor with matinee good looks, as suave and self-confident in real life as he was on the screen. Perfect for the part, he evinces the kind of preening arrogance that comes with an ego as unchecked as Gareth’s. Cassidy came to Hollywood from the stage and his acting often tilted toward the theatrical. In Look in Any Window, he backs off the gas a little. It’s one of his more natural screen performances---and one of his best.

As for the hapless Craig, all he needs is a girl with whom he can share his troubles (and probably his virginity); also for his parents to start acting like adults. After his arrest, Craig at least gets a sympathetic ear from the police and, later, the girl next door. Paul Anka (in his first starring role) was not yet the actor he'd become only a couple of years later in The Longest Day (1962). However, his shortcomings as the young and ill-fated doofus in Look in Any Window serve the picture well.

Look in Any Window was also William Alland's first (and only) outing as a screen director.  Up until then, he had worked primarily as a producer on low-budget westerns and science fiction programmers such as The Creature of the Black Lagoon, a landmark science fiction title of the era. However, Alland’s resume also included time spent in New York as a stage and radio actor with Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater, along with contemporaries Joseph Cotton, Norman Lloyd, and Agnes Moorehead. 

Alland also was a friend of Look in Any Window's screenwriter Lawrence E, Mascott who’d done episodes for the television series, Johnny Staccato starring actor, and later director, John Cassavetes. Of Cassavetes, British writer/ critic David Thompson observed that the filmmaker had always looked for inspiration in “stories of basic, unenlightened, unhappily successful people...a rarity, and rigorously shunned in American films.” This would describe equally the characters in Look in Any Window, an ersatz piece of American Neo-Realism that plays like something which Cassavetes, a native New Yorker might have conjured, had he been born and raised in Long Beach, California.

Look in Any Window conspires to rise above its low-rent origins and does so in unexpected ways,  engaging intimately with its characters and showing respect for their stories.  Well worth a peek.

 

 

FORBIDDEN (1948)

 

By Gary Deane

 

Like carpeting in bathrooms, curry and chips, and the sport of cricket, some things British don't travel that well. You could add to the list the numbers of cheaply-made post-war Brit noirs, which would feature Hollywood actors ferried over in hope of adding some box office allure to the UK productions. George Raft, Dane Clark, Dennis O’Keefe, Alex Nichol, Dan Duryea, Arlene Dahl, Ginger Rogers, John Derek, Barbara Payton, Dana Wynter, Jayne Mansfield, and dozens of others would all have their moment on British screens.

However, the American presence did not always make for better pictures. Often, it did more harm than good, as it soon became evident that the imports were there just to be there. It also created a sense of cultural uncertainty around the films themselves. In the end, the foreign involvement underscored the conviction that many of the movies hadn’t been worth the effort to start with.

However, one B-feature notably strengthened by the involvement of an American was Forbidden (1948), a stylish noir thriller starring Douglass Montgomery, an actor born and raised in Los Angeles. Throughout the 1930s, Montgomery had featured opposite A-list actresses such as Joan Crawford and Katherine Hepburn. But after four years overseas during the war in the Canadian forces, he had become yesterday’s news.

Fortunately, things later took a turn for the better for the good-looking and affable Montgomery when he was cast in Forbidden as a once-promising Canadian research chemist, Jim Harding, who's now estranged from his vocation. Though married, he’s living emotionally and sexually apart from his wife and now is peddling patent medicine and hair restorer on a Blackpool promenade. There, he becomes attracted to one of the carny girls, Jeannie Thompson (Hazel Court), who spins candy floss at a nearby stall. Without telling her that he’s married, he begins an affair with Jeannie, something for which he might not be blamed.  

While not entirely a femme fatale, Harding’s wife, Diana (Patricia Burke), is still one of the more venomous females to be found in classic noir. A stage actress who is desperate to revive a failed career, Diana’s taken to sleeping with any punter she thinks might help her get back on the boards. At the same time, she refuses to give Jim a divorce, as he provides her with at least some degree of financial security. As she tells it, “Having a husband in the background at least gives me some choice”.

When a local spiv, Johnny (Kenneth Griffin, who specialized in playing lowlifes and weasels), tells Diana of Jim’s affair, she hunts down Jeannie, confronting and calling her “a fairground slut”, and saying, “Why don’t you stick to your own kind—or don’t they pay enough?”. When Jim hears about the run-in, he decides that is enough. Aware that Diana uses thyroid pills to control her weight, and with his background in chemistry, he calculates that he should be able to increase the dosage just enough to kill her without raising suspicion. Sticking to plan, he later returns home to find her dead, then buries her body under the slate tiles of his lab. That, of course, is just the beginning.  

Harding is not a character we should like. He's complacent, compromised at every turn, and maybe too ready to play the victim. And yet Montgomery persuades us to go along and to sympathize with Harding and his plight. Like Richard Basehart in He Walked by Night (1948), Montgomery takes a character from whom we’d rather keep our distance and manages to render him compelling.

The film’s two female leads, Hazel Court and Patricia Burke, provide a fascinating study in contrasts. Court, an actress with doll-like radiance, is affecting as a decent working-class girl who “knows her place”. As she says, “I tried looking up over the fence once. Now I’m in me own backyard and it suits me fine”. On the other hand, Burke’s hardened and hateful Diana is convinced she’s deserving of much more and that her place is elsewhere. However, she’s plainly just ‘mutton dressed up as lamb’. The only one who doesn’t know it is her.

Forbidden, atmospheric and unsettling, takes place mostly in the vicinity of the funfair, a natural gathering place for fast-buck artists, con men, grifters, and wide-boys like Johnny. Amusement parks are recurrent locations in film noir, arenas frequently portrayed as far more threatening than amusing. As told in flashback, Forbidden is all that. Crisply directed by George King (Crimes at the Dark House, 1940), The Shop at Sly Corner, 1947), with cinematography by Hone Glendinning (The Shop on Sly Corner, 1947, The Noose, 1948, and Shadow of the Past,1950), Forbidden is part of Odeon Entertainment’s ‘The Best of British Collection’.

 

Run. Run, Run, Runaway: Eddie Macon’s Run (1983) and Thompson’s Last Run (1986)

By Gary Deane

While Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat (1981) and Michael Mann's Thief (1981) kicked off the ‘80s with a bang, much of the rest of the decade proved a bust as far as potent crime thrillers go. That said, a couple of films did make an effort.  

The first was Eddie Macon’s Run, an old-school police drama starring a still-vital Kirk Douglas as Carl ‘Buster’ Marzak, a New Jersey cop. Marzak has a score to settle with runaway felon Eddie Macon (played by John Schneider), who’d been convicted and jailed on minor charges but is now on the lam. Though Macon made his escape in order to get money to pay for medical treatment for his sick child, the hard-nosed Marzak doesn’t give a damn. The law’s the law and that’s that.

Every bit an ’80s crime title, Eddie Macon’s Run is blunt and melodramatic, stripped of the brooding cool that had qualified dramas of the decade before. Production-wise, the film also looks and feels as though made-for-TV. However, the performances stand tall, especially that of Douglas, whose out-sized character is not far removed from those of his defining noir classics like Ace in the Hole (1951), Detective Story (1951), and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).

Schneider too is impressive in Eddie Macon’s Run. Unfortunately, after seven seasons of being just one thing in The Dukes of Hazzard, the actor would be asked, for the rest of his career, to sleep in the bed he’d made for himself. For her part, Lee Purcell shines as the spoiled socialite who’s only too eager to give shelter to the hunky Macon just for the thrill of it.

Eddie Macon’s Run is available on YouTube.

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If Eddie Macon’s Run looks and feels a lot like a movie of the week, Thompson’s Last Run was the real thing, which had its first broadcast showing on the CBS network in February of 1986. A lower-key affair than Eddie Macon Runs, this one has big-screen warhorses Robert Mitchum and Wilfred Brimley in harness as longtime pals who end up on opposite sides of the law.

John Thompson (Mitchum) is a seven-time loser facing a transfer from an out-of-state prison back to Texas where he’ll serve a life sentence under the state’s habitual offender law. Texas lawman Red Haines (Brimley), though he's less than a week away from retirement, asks to be the one to bring Thompson back.

During the transfer, however, Thompson’s niece, Louise (Kathleen York) manages to break him loose. Louise, who’s been turning tricks to support herself and her young daughter, figures that John must have enough money hidden away for her to leave the life and have the three of them disappear forever. That’s what she thinks, anyway.

Unlike Eddie Macon, Thompson’s Last Run reels out slowly, without a lot of heightened action. For one thing, Thompson isn’t that anxious to be on the run. Now out of jail and in hiding, he’s enjoying spending time with Pookie, an old girlfriend, and another tart-with-a-heart, played convincingly by Susan Terrell. However, it doesn’t take Haines all that long to put things together and begin closing in.

Like Eddie Macon’s Run, the film is low-rent fare. But Mitchum, being the Hollywood pro he was, is fully present and accounted for and looks to be enjoying himself. Brimley, on the other hand, was never cast to look like he was enjoying himself, whether playing ‘Sherriff’, ‘Doc’, or ‘Coach’. He’s in great form here as the curmudgeonly Haines.

Thompson’s Last Run offers up a compelling story about two old-timers, life-long friends as well as long-time adversaries, who manage to get through it all without killing one another. In this case, that’s no small thing.

Thompson’s Last Run is streaming on Hoopla.