Vertigo (1958)

Most audiences were puzzled and disappointed by Vertigo when it first appeared in 1958. Ticketbuyers of the time likely wanted a rollercoaster ride much like other Alfred Hitchcock classics of the 1950s (North By Northwest, To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much). What they got instead was something much darker and more complex, even though the movie’s plot seemed – in synopsis, at least -- the perfect blueprint for a straight-ahead, standard-issue popcorn flick.

Ex-cop John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) is asked by an old friend to watch over the friend’s wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), a beautiful but troubled woman who fears she is possessed by the spirit of a mad ancestor. Ferguson is fascinated by Madeleine, and can’t help falling in love with her. But he’s unable to stop her suicide because of his own weakness: His fear of heights, the “vertigo” of the title, prevents him from reaching her before she throws herself from a church tower.

Guilt-ridden and devastated, Ferguson suffers a nervous breakdown. While recovering, he meets a woman who is (pardon the expression) a dead ringer for his late beloved. Judy (Kim Novak again), a department store clerk, is wary of Ferguson’s attentions, but agrees to date him – and, eventually, to be supported by him. She objects, though not very strenuously, when he tries to remake her in Madeleine’s image, changing her clothes, her shoes, even the color of her hair.

Ferguson is overjoyed and grateful that he’s found someone who resembles Madeleine so strongly. Unfortunately, there’s a very good reason why there’s such a strong resemblance…

Don’t worry: No spoilers here, even though Hitchcock himself spills the beans well before the final scene. For those who prefer to enjoy Vertigo merely as a clever melodrama, and who haven’t seen any of its innumerable imitations, the surprise may come as a modestly satisfying jolt. But there’s much more to this must-see movie than an ingenious plot twist.

At heart, Vertigo is not so much a neo-gothic thriller as a moody meditation on sexual obsession. On one level, the film is a metaphor for the filmmaking process itself – or, more specifically, Hitchcock’s approach to that process. Ferguson represents the director who tries to shape reality to his own ends, and Judy represents the actor who’s asked to simply serve as a color in the director’s palette. (Remember: Hitchcock is the filmmaker who claimed actors should be treated like cattle.)

But Vertigo also can be viewed as a study of sadomasochistic symbiosis, with Ferguson single-mindedly struggling to re-create a “perfect” relationship, and Judy reluctantly agreeing to be stripped of all identity to please the man she loves. You could argue that Judy is the more deranged of the pair, in that every action she takes hints at a bottomless self-loathing. You could also argue, however, that Judy gradually emerges in the movie’s final reel as the more sympathetic character.

James Stewart is at the top of his form here, brilliantly playing Ferguson as a discontent, resolutely practical man who’s swept away by grand passions that are not unlike madness. (There’s a bitter irony at work: Ferguson, the man who’s afraid of falling, allows himself to be drawn into a different but equally dangerous vortex.) Stewart’s subtly nuanced and profoundly affecting performance provides the perfect counterpoint for Kim Novak’s fatalistic intensity as Madeleine and her skittish, anxious submissiveness as Judy.

Vertigo is a fever dream of a romantic tragedy, with elegantly graceful passages – particularly the long, silent sequence that shows Ferguson following, and falling for, Madeleine – and foreboding undercurrents. Bernard Herrmann’s score is at once lush and ominous, the perfect balance of musical moods. And cinematographer Robert Burks bathes San Francisco in an eerie glow that intensifies the lyrical beauty of key images, but also hints at hidden deceptions.

After multiple viewings of Vertigo over the years, I have come to wonder: What would the reaction have been back in 1958 – indeed, how would critics, academics and movie buffs view it today – if Hitchcock had opted to end this masterwork about ten or 15 minutes before he does? (Assuming that the Production Code would have allowed him to do so.) That is: What if The Master of Suspense had announced “The End” immediately after Ferguson and Madeleine share their fevered embrace in her hotel room, bathed in a greenish light that seems to signal a shared madness, as she finally abandons all trace of her true self and he passionately grasps his last hope for a second chance?

And what if the audience were left to consider that the only way these two characters could possibly enjoy happily-ever-aftering is to maintain interlocking lies – his self-delusion, her selfless deception – forever more?

Would even Alfred Hitchcock have had the audacity to spring something so thoroughly unsettling, if not downright perverse, on us?

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

If you accept the conventional wisdom regarding the late Stanley Kubrick, your worst suspicions will be confirmed by his crowning achievement, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

You think Kubrick was an egomaniacal control freak? OK, maybe he was. But it’s hard to see how a modest Mr. Nice Guy could have convinced a major Hollywood studio – Metro Goldwyn Mayer, no less! -- to bankroll something this intellectually ambitious, tauntingly ambiguous and budget-bustingly expensive back in 1968. As Norman Kagan notes in The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, the director spent a year and a half shooting 205 special effects shots, “many of them possible only because of technical processes Kubrick himself invented.” Compared to this guy, even James Cameron seems like a meek under-achiever.

You say you’ve always heard Kubrick was a dour misanthrope with a sour view of humankind? Then check out the scene that signals the dawn of civilization: Man-apes learn how to kill more efficiently by reconfiguring animal bones as lethal weapons. And while you’re at it, fast-forward a bit, and contemplate the insufferable blandness of supposedly more advanced homo sapiens. Time and again, 2001 underscores the ironic contrast between the miraculous and the mundane, between the panoramic splendors of outer space and the narrow-focused behavior of smaller-than-life humans. There’s something borderline-sadistic about the way Kubrick caricatures a white-bread, charm-free scientist who gets his first glimpse at hard evidence of intelligent life on other planets. “Well,” he remarks with the empty cheer of a Kiwanis Club luncheon speaker, “I must say – you guys have certainly come up with something.”

Do you find yourself agreeing with Calder Willingham, co-screenwriter of Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, who accused the director of “a near-psychotic indifference to and coldness toward the human beings” in his movies? Then consider this: HAL 9000, the soft-spoken super-computer, seems a lot more human than its flesh-and-blood traveling companions aboard a Jupiter-bound spacecraft. It’s so affecting, even tragic, when an astronaut (another personality-challenged human, played by Keir Dullea) disables HAL, you’re almost willing to forgive the digital paranoid for causing the deaths of every other crew member. Indeed, with the arguable exception of Tom Cruise’s obsessive seeker in Eyes Wide Shut, Hal is the closest thing to a genuinely charismatic and sympathetic character in any movie Kubrick made after Spartacus (1960).

Despite the absence of a significant human protagonist to generate a rooting interest, 2001 was a huge commercial success during its first theatrical run. (And not just because many chemically-enhanced viewers repeatedly savored it as a widescreen head trip.) More than four decades later, it is widely viewed as a masterpiece, even by some critics who expressed serious misgivings in their initial reviews. That it was, and continues to be, one of the past century’s most influential films is beyond dispute. And it is so firmly affixed in our collective pop-culture consciousness that even people who have never actually seen 2001 get the joke when someone makes a wink-wink, nudge-nudge allusion to the opening notes of Richard Strauss’ Thus Spoke Zarathustra (perhaps the most inspired musical choice ever made by a filmmaker) or the arrival of those imposing black Monoliths that encourage human beings to transcend themselves.

Trouble is, much of 2001 hasn’t aged very well. The mystifying climax of what one critic described as the film’s “shaggy God story” (concocted by Kubrick and visionary sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke) seems more than ever like a precocious sophomore’s idea of deep-dish philosophizing. (It doesn’t help that, when Dullea awakens after a dazzling sound-and-light show, he finds himself trapped inside what looks like the spectacularly garish luxury suite of a Las Vegas hotel.) Worse, Kubrick’s intricately and interminably detailed depiction of extra-terrestrial travel – meant to convey shock and awe at the miracle of space flight -- now seems, compared to more recent displays of high-tech wizardry, almost quaint.

Of course, some things – titles, for instance -- never go out of date. And just as 1984 continues to serve as shorthand for a dystopian vision of technologically-enhanced totalitarianism, 2001 retains its mythic resonance – an optimistic prediction of first contact with other, presumably wiser, life forms -- long after people stopped scribbling that cluster of numbers in checkbooks. Instead of inspiring awe, however, the film itself now is more likely to evoke a kind of wistful melancholy that Kubrick never intended. It’s sad, but true: These days, we simply don’t view interstellar exploration with the same wonder-fueled enthusiasm shared by Kubrick and millions of others back in 1968.

To be sure, there’s the occasional media frenzy about images beamed from Mars by unmanned spacecraft. And there’s always a ready audience for every new chapter of the Star Wars franchise. But with each passing year, it’s increasingly more difficult to imagine that anything short of a real-world appearance by a beckoning Monolith would re-ignite our intergalactic wanderlust. All you have to do is read news accounts of petty Congressional squabbling over NASA funding, and you’ll realize that, never mind what the calendar might tell you, we’re still a long, long way from the bold new age of discovery we were promised all those years ago.

Smokey and the Bandit (1977)

A textbook example of a hand-tooled star vehicle that forever labels the star in its driver’s seat, Smokey and the Bandit also is noteworthy for being the movie most often credited – or, perhaps more precisely, blamed – for kicking off an action-comedy subgenre best described as Cross-Country Demolition Derby.

Two lesser sequels and at least one long-running TV series (The Dukes of Hazzard) can be traced directly to this broadly played hodgepodge of high-speed driving, lowbrow humor and spectacular car crashes. But wait, there’s more: Smokey and the Bandit, the debut feature of stuntman-turned-filmmaker Hal Needham, also inspired literally dozens of other pedal-to-the-metal extravaganzas – mostly redneck melodramas and cornpone comedies, along with Needham’s own in-jokey Cannonball Run movies -- throughout the ’70s and ’80s. Decades later, its very title still serves as shorthand for a particular type of undemanding crowd-pleaser with smart-alecky heroes, dim-bulb authority figures and more high-octane action than a month of NASCAR events.

The thin plot is a serviceable excuse for stringing together scenes of cartoonish frivolity and vehicular misadventure. Bandit (Burt Reynolds), a swaggering prankster and maverick trucker, wagers that he can transport contraband beer from Texas to Georgia in record time. While a faithful friend (Jerry Reed) does much of the actual driving in the lager-stocked 18-wheeler, Bandit darts about in a souped-up Trans Am, on the lookout for any “Smokey” (i.e., highway cop) who might impede their high-speed progress.

Complications arise when Bandit arouses the ire of an especially grizzly Smokey, Sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason), by picking up a perky hitchhiker (Sally Field) who just happens to be the runaway bride of the sheriff’s cretinous son (Mike Henry).

Initially dismissed as a freakish regional hit at Deep South drive-ins, Smokey and the Bandit gradually proved equally popular in major metropolitan markets, and wound up in the record books as the second-highest grossing film (right behind Star Wars) of 1977. Some have credited its phenomenal popularity to its subversive allure as fantasy fulfillment: Bandit repeatedly outsmarts and humiliates Sheriff Justice and all other law-enforcement officials who dare to impinge on his God-given right to ignore any posted speed limit. (Some academic somewhere doubtless has earned a doctorate by explaining why so many pop tunes and popcorn flicks of the ’70s equated driving over 55 with all-American rebelliousness.) Most other observers, however, credit the movie’s appeal – for contemporary viewers as well as ’70s ticketbuyers -- to the once-in-a-lifetime matching of player and character.

Even moviegoers not yet born when Smokey and the Bandit first screeched into theaters reflexively think of the hard-driving, trash-talking trucker whenever they hear Reynolds’ name. Part of that can be explained by the virtually nonstop exposure of Needham’s movie on cable and home video. But it’s instructive to consider Reynolds’ own role in erasing the lines between actor and character, man and mythos.

In the wake of his becoming an “overnight success” after years of journeymen work in television and movies, Reynolds embraced typecasting – and tongue-in-cheeky self-promotion – with unseemly fervor. For the better part of a decade, he chronically reprised his Bandit shtick – winking insouciance, naughty-boy sarcasm, zero-cool self-assurance – in motion pictures and TV talk shows. It was funny, for a while, and then it wasn’t. Trouble is, by the time it stopped being funny, the image was firmly affixed in the public’s collective pop-culture consciousness. So much so, in fact, that even after demonstrating his versatility in a wide range of character roles -- most memorably, as the prideful porn-film director in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) – Reynolds appears destined to always be remembered best for one indelibly defining character.

On the other hand, there are far less pleasant ways for an actor to ensure his immortality. When asked about his enduring linkage to Bandit in 2003, more than a generation after playing the cocky trucker, Reynolds addressed the mixed blessing with typically self-effacing humor.

“I’m very flattered,” he said, “by how some people still respond to that character. I still have guys in Trans Ams pull up to me at stoplights and yell, ‘Dammit! You’re the reason I got this thing!’

“But I also remember a while back, when I was offering an acting seminar in Florida, that I was afraid they’d go over to the auto-racetrack looking for me, instead of the theater. And even when they did show up at the right place, I felt I should tell them: ‘Those of you who are wearing your racing gloves – take them off, we’re not going to need them, we’re going to talk about other things.’”

Of course, if the audience loves a character (and, better still, the actor playing that character) the character can get away with practically anything, even coming off as a bona fide egomaniac. Midway through Smokey and the Bandit, Reynolds recalled, “There’s a moment when Sally asks me, ‘What is it that you do best?’ And I say, ‘Show off.’ And she says, ‘Yeah, you do that well.’ At the time we made the film, I thought to myself, ‘If I can get that line out and they still like me – “they” being the audience – we’re home free.’ Because basically, that’s who (Bandit) was, what he was all about.”

The line got big laughs, indicating just how much the audience really, really liked Bandit. And, of course, the actor who played him.

Serpico (1973)

Much has been made of the fresh ideas, revolutionary approaches and film-school-grad fervor – in short, the youth – of filmmakers at the vanguard of the 1970s New Hollywood era. Indeed, when Michael Pye and Lynda Myles wrote their contemporaneous account of the New Hollywood era, they chose as their title The Movie Brats – a then-trendy term used to describe auteurs such as, among others, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian De Palma and Steven Spielberg, all representing “the first film school graduates and movie buffs to gain real power in the industry” during the 1960s and ‘70s.

But while it is undeniable that film brats prospered throughout the New Hollywood era – the first period in Hollywood history when significant numbers of movies were made by people who learned their craft through academic study of other movies – stage-trained directors, TV-trained craftsmen (including several with roots in live dramas of the 1950s) and sundry other grizzled veterans also enjoyed a heyday, and many were inspired to do some of their best work during the 1970s.

Chief among the relative graybeards who made impressive additions to their resumes even as the younger bucks grabbed most of the press coverage: Sam Peckinaph, who was 46 when his Straw Dogs (1971) was released; Robert Altman, already 50 when his Nashville (1975) premiered; Don Siegel, who unleashed Dirty Harry (1971) when he was 59; and John Huston, who delivered Fat City (1972) at age 66, and The Man Who Would Be King (1975) at 69.

Sidney Lumet was 49 when he started shooting Serpico, his street-smart, documentary-style drama based on the real-life story of New York police detective Frank Serpico, in July 1973. By that time, he already had to his credit 18 feature films – including the classic courtroom melodrama 12 Angry Men (1957), the Cold War thriller Fail Safe (1964), the taboo-shattering The Pawnbroker (1965) [1] and the high-tech caper The Anderson Tapes (1971) – and many acclaimed television dramas, including a live-broadcast version of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, starring Jason Robards and featuring a young Robert Redford.

To put this resume in context: In 1957, when Lumet directed 12 Angry Men, his debut feature, at age 33, Roman Polanski was a 24-year-old student at the Lodz Film School, Francis Ford Coppola was an 18-year-old drama major at Hofstra University – and Steven Spielberg was 11 years old.

Unlike many, if not most, of his younger colleagues who prospered during the New Hollywood era [2], Lumet refrained from embracing the concept of director as auteur. “I don't know what the big geshrei is about, the big noise,” he told American Film magazine in 1982. “[A]ll the auteur theory did was make what had been natural self-conscious." Even as recently as 1995, when he published his memoir Making Pictures, Lumet disdained what he describes as the “pretentious” notion that any movie is shaped entirely by the artistic sensibility of a single individual:

[I]n the late fifties, walking the Champs Elysees, I saw in neon a sign over a theater: Douze Hommes en Colere – un Film de Sidney Lumet. 12 Angry Men was now in its second year. Fortunately for my psyche and my career, I’ve never believed it was un Film de Sidney Lumet. Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t false modesty. I’m the guy who says “Print,” and that’s what determines what goes up on that screen… But how much in charge am I? Is the movie un Film de Sidney Lumet? I’m dependent on weather, budget, what the leading lady had for breakfast, who the leading man is in love with. I’m dependent on the talents and idiosyncrasies, the moods and egos, the politics and personalities, of more than a hundred different people. And that’s just in the making of the movie. At this point, I won’t even begin to discuss the studio, financing, distribution, marketing, and so on.

And yet, as early as 1973, Lumet already had distinguished himself as a director with a unique flair for gritty urban drama, developing a style of brutally straightforward realism (as opposed to naturalism) that would in Serpico begin to evolve into what Richard Combs would describe in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary as “an embryonic epic form – a modern mosaic in which socioeconomic observations are assembled, not into a message, but into a deterministic trap which the hero willfully enters.” Serpico -- not unlike The Anderson Tapes -- pivots on a protagonist who follows his obsessions to a point near death, in a manner not always admirable or even entirely understandable. The formal dislocations caused by Lumet’s deliberately episodic, documentary-flavored approach results in what Roud calls a “prismatic representation” of Frank Serpico (played by Al Pacino, the reluctant heir apparent of The Godfather) as a flawed hero viewed from a multitude of different perspectives within the same film. [3]
 
It should be noted, however, that Lumet’s artistic temperament, and his feel for urban drama of moral complexity, were not the only reasons why he was assigned to direct Serpico when Paramount production chief Robert Evans green-lit the Dino Di Laurentiis production in 1973. Like the other  “journeymen directors” Peter Biskind mentions respectfully – without examining exhaustively – in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Lumet already was known “not only for the quality of his projects, but also for the speed with which he films, the dexterity with which he handles both cast and crew, and his aptitude for location work,” all qualities that would suit him particularly well on a project with 106 speaking parts and scores of extras, that would start filming in early July 1973 with 100-plus shooting locations, and was due in theaters at December of the same year. [4]

While working at that breakneck pace, surmounting daunting logistical problems on a daily basis, Lumet somehow managed to make a movie that, decades later, remains among the enduringly influential [5] and highly regarded New Hollywood films released by Paramount during the Robert Evans regime. And in doing so, he captured and reflected the zeitgeist of a turbulent time as vividly as any movie released by any studio during the ‘70s.[6]

Crimes of the Time

Sidney Lumet’s Serpico tells the true-life story of Frank Serpico, the decorated New York City police detective who blew the whistle on the bribery and corruption that was rampant among his fellow cops in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. (In his book Making Movies, Lumet describes the film as “a portrait of a real rebel with a cause.”)

Working from a screenplay by Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler, who based their script on the non-fiction best-seller by Peter Mass, Lumet offers a largely admiring yet not always flattering portrait of the man described by Mass as “the first police officer not only in the history of the New York Police Department, but in the history of any police department in the whole United States, to step forward to report and subsequently testify openly about widespread, systematic cop corruption-payoffs amounting to millions of dollars.”

The movie, which begins with Serpico’s near-fatal shooting by drug dealers while two fellow officer refrain from rushing to his aid, is for the most part a long flashback, depicting events that lead to the title character’s 1971 testimony before the Knapp Commission appointed by New York mayor John V. Lindsay. [7]

The concluding scenes pointedly refrain from giving the audience the emotional balm of an uplifting sense of triumph. In fact, the final scene announces that a bitter and disillusioned Frank Serpico left the police force and moved to Switzerland on June 15, 1972.

By dramatizing Frank Serpico’s story in such a manner, as a tale of corruption so intense and conspiracies so vast as to seem almost beyond the ability of just and honorable men to comprehend, confront and combat, Lumet and his screenwriters tapped into the worst suspicions and darkest assumptions of a moviegoing public battered on an almost daily basis by revelations and reverberations stemming from the ongoing Watergate scandal.

Serpico had its premiere in New York on Dec. 5, 1973, scarcely five weeks after a besieged President Richard Nixon, desperate to reverse his plummeting poll numbers, ordered the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre,” two weeks after President Nixon felt compelled to inform an assemblage of 400 Associated Press managing editors that he was “not a crook” [8] – and one day before White House chief of staff Alexander Haig testified in federal court that maybe, just maybe, some “sinister force” was responsible for the 18 ¼-minute gap in a subpoenaed tape of Oval Office conversations.

But it wasn’t only Watergate that had poisoned minds and increased paranoia on both sides, left and right, of the political divide by the time Serpico was unspooling at theaters and drive-ins everywhere. Lumet’s movie arrived near the end of U.S. involvement in of the Vietnam War, a conflict that had divided the country like none since Civil War of more than a century earlier. In his 2000 book How We Got Here: The 70's, historian David Frum claims: “Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing their faith in institutions [author’s italics].”

Serpico arrived at a time – during the revelations of Watergate and the winding down of Vietnam, in the wake of a decade rocked by assassinations, scandals and civil unrest -- when American moviegoers seemed atypically willing to accept, even embrace, movies with endings that were at best ambiguous -- and at worst, bleakly downbeat.

[1] The Pawnbroker (1965), a harrowing drama about a Holocaust survivor (Rod Steiger) who continues to be haunted by memories of his death camp experiences even after relocating to New York, very nearly was denied a Production Code seal because of a scene in which a prostitute fleetingly bares her breasts to the title character in the hope of obtaining money for her desperate boyfriend.

[2] A period during which Lumet also enjoyed critical and commercial success with Murder on the Orient Express (1974, Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Network (1976).

[3] Lumet would take a similar approach to rendering the morally tarnished police-officer protagonists of Prince of the City (1981) and Q&A (1990).

[4] In order to complete Serpico in “an insanely short amount of time,” Lumet said in an interview taped for the 2002 DVD edition of the film, he and editor Dede Allen worked out a system of cutting the movie during actual production: “I finished a scene, and 48 hours later it was ready to turn over to the sound department.”

[5] Christopher Orr of The New Republic, Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post and Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly are just three of the critics who noted the influence of Serpico (and other ‘70s crime dramas) on Ridley Scott's American Gangster (2007).

[6] Remarkably, Lumet completed the filming, originally scheduled to last 11 weeks, in 10 weeks and one day.

[7] The movie emphasizes that when his own superiors refused to listen to Serpico’s charges of dishonesty in the force – and even counseled him to accept the way things were, or possibly wind up “in the river” – Serpico tried to alert the mayor to the problem of police corruption, but was rebuffed through an intermediary, allegedly because of the mayor’s concerns about the need to sustain high morale among NYPD officers who might be needed to sustain a thin blue line of defense during “a long hot summer” rife with potential for rioting. Only after Serpico co-operated with a New York Times expose on police corruption did the mayor appoint the Knapp Commission investigators (Lumet, 1973).

[8] “When President Nixon pronounced that sentence,” writes historian David Frum, the Chief Executive “pointed the gun at his own temple at pulled the trigger. It might have been wiser, in fact, for him to go on television and proclaim – yes, I am a crook. With Americans as cynical as they then were, they might well have refused to believe him.” Frum goes on to note that an ABC News poll conducted within days of the “I am not a crook” comment found that 59 percent of Americans did not believe “much of what the president says these days.”

Detour (1945)

Film rarely gets more noir than Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour, a wide-awake nightmare of unforgiving fate and dead-end fatalism that may be the cruddiest great movie ever made. Filmed in six days on a bare minimum of locations for Producers Releasing Corporation, the most impoverished of the Old Hollywood B-movie outfits known collectively as Poverty Row, it fairly reeks of grungy, sweaty desperation on both sides of the cameras. Indeed, it’s tempting to imagine this 1945 must-see movie actually was written and directed by its own protagonist, a paranoid loser who’s furiously anguished, but not terribly surprised, as his hard-knock life devolves into a worst-case scenario.

We meet Al Roberts (Tom Neal) in a dingy roadside diner that, like most of the movie’s other claustrophobic interiors, does not appear to be a studio set so much as a hasty rough sketch for one. Unshaven and socially maladroit, if not borderline psychotic, Al almost immediately alienates everyone around him. Which means, of course, he must resort to voice-over narration – a classic film noir device, used to underscore the inevitability of an anti-hero’s destiny – when he’s stirred to spill his tale of woe.

Trouble is, it’s not easy to feel sorry, or even remain patient, while Al regales us in a tone pitched somewhere between a pathetic whine and a self-justifying snarl. And, truth to tell, it’s more than a little difficult to believe everything he says as he blames everyone but himself for his dire condition. “Whichever way you turn,” he complains, “fate sticks out a foot to trip you.” Maybe so, but Al appears quite capable of stumbling into damnation without any outside assistance.

The extended flashback begins with Al speaking of happier days, when he was a pianist, and his girlfriend Sue (Claudia Drake) was a singer, at a New York nightclub. Even here, however, Al sounds like a chronic malcontent – and not just because the nightclub looks only slightly more lavish than the aforementioned roadside diner. When someone slips him a ten-dollar tip, he’s underwhelmed: “What was it? A piece of paper, crawling with germs.” And when Sue suggests that – somehow, some way – he’ll be a great classical pianist, he snaps: “Yeah, someday! If I don’t get arthritis first!”

Sue eventually announces her plan to leave town, to try her luck in Hollywood. (At least, that’s her story, and she sticks with it.) Al decides to follow the only way he can afford – as a hitchhiker. He fortuitously finds a soul mate when he climbs into the convertible of Charlie Haskell (Edmund MacDonald), a glad-handing high-roller who seems, if such a thing can be imagined, even more misanthropic than Al. Asked about unsightly scratches on his hand, Haskell boasts: “I was tussling with the most dangerous animal in the world — a woman!” Al sympathizes: “There ought to be a law against dames with claws.”

Unfortunately, the budding friendship between likeminded fellows is cut short during a heavy rainstorm. While Al tries to open the convertible top, a slumbering Haskell falls out of the door – and fatally bumps his head.

Naturally, since Al is a film noir patsy and not a reasonably sentient human being, the poor lug decides that, since nobody would ever believe he didn’t kill Haskell, he should dump the body, plant his own I.D. on the corpse, and drive away with the dead man’s amply-stuffed wallet.

And then, as if to fully demonstrate his limitless capacity for self-destructive behavior, Al stops to pick up a hitchhiker a little further down the road. Yes, that’s right: He’s driving a dead man’s car, on his way to see a girlfriend he simply can’t live without, and he still can’t resist slowing down for a hottie with, as he puts it, “a beauty that’s almost homely because it’s so real.” Unfortunately, Vera (Ann Savage) – perhaps the most hard-bitten femme fatale in the entire pantheon of noir shady ladies -- is the “dame with claws” who scarred Haskell. Even more unfortunately, she doesn’t buy Al’s story about Haskell’s untimely demise. (“What did you do? Kiss him with a wrench?”) And even if he is innocent, she doesn’t give a damn: She’s ready to blow the whistle on him anyway, unless he co-operates in her dubious scheme to fleece big bucks from Haskell’s long-estranged family.

Vera doesn’t appear until midway through this 68-minute movie, and she doesn’t get to stick around until the final scene. (Big surprise, right?) But never mind: Once she sashays into the story, she dominates Detour like slumming royalty, bullying and browbeating the hapless, helpless Al for the sheer fun of it. Having sunk even deeper into the lower depths than her reluctant companion – if you can believe her, she’s dying of consumption – Vera is viciously eager to make a killing so she can finance her final days. But the more time she spends with Al inside the cramped quarters of a low-rent hotel room, the more energy and attention she diverts to a sadomasochistic relationship that, at its nastiest, makes the toxic byplay between George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? seem like conjugal bliss. (A typical taunt: “I’d hate to see a fellow as young as you wind up sniffin’ that perfume Arizona hands out free to murderers!”) Vera’s telling response to Al’s whiny pleading -- “Stop making noises like a husband!” – intensifies the impression that, intentionally or otherwise, the second half of Detour plays like a perverse parody of a deeply troubled marriage.

And speaking of perversity: Detour, a squalid Poverty Row quickie that only gradually gained acceptance as a classic, turned out to be the high point in the lives of almost everyone involved.

Edgar G. Ulmer began his career at the heart of German Expressionism, working as a set and production designer for such notables as F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch. After immigrating the United States, however, he toiled mostly as a director of low-budget genre films, often disguising his threadbare production values with artful applications of light, shadow and camera movement. (Peter Bogdanovich once marveled: “Nobody ever made good pictures faster or for less money than Edgar G. Ulmer.”) He maintains a loyal cult following for a few other works – most notably, The Black Cat (1934), a seriously creepy thriller featuring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and striking Bauhaus-inspired sets -- but remains best known for this single, singularly bleak B-movie.

Likewise, Ann Savage had a fleeting career as a minor Hollywood contract player, but never found a better or showier role than the virulent Vera. Even so, she enjoyed more happily-ever-aftering than the seemingly cursed Tom Neal, a quick-tempered ex-boxer who spent most of his final years in prison for the “involuntary manslaughter” of his wife. Although prosecutors originally sought a first-degree murder conviction, Neal always claimed the fatal shooting was accidental. Just like his character in Detour insisted that Haskell died because of a fall -- and that Vera just happened to wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time when Al yanked on a telephone chord.

Knowing what happened to Neal two decades after Detour, you may be even more skeptical of Al’s account, and more inclined to interpret the improbabilities of the plot as unconvincing testimony by a guilty party.

In many ways, however, the movie is more potent, more devastating, if every word Al tells us is -- God help him -- absolutely true. Because if he isn’t lying, it’s all the more difficult to shake the chill evoked by his final line: “Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all.”

Day for Night (1973)

Every so often, a motion picture will stake out a territory and lay eternal claim to it. Such is the case with Day for Night, a warm-hearted yet clear-eyed comedy-drama that persuasively argues, with ample evidence, that a movie set is the most magical place on earth.

The late, great Francois Truffaut’s Oscar-winning masterwork was not, strictly speaking, the first movie ever made about the joy of making movies. But it remains, decades after its Paris premiere, the yardstick by which almost every film on the subject inevitably is measured. Its very title, which refers to a process through which night scenes can be shot in daylight, continues to serves as critic-speak shorthand in reviews of everything from Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion (1995) to Oliver Assayas’ Irma Vep (1996) to Roman Coppola’s CQ (2001).

Truffaut cast himself in the central role of Ferrand, the affable, overworked auteur who’s trying to complete a sudsy romantic melodrama, Meet Pamela, within seven weeks at the Victorine Studios in Nice. The production is beset by mishaps and misadventures, some amusingly minor (a recalcitrant cat refuses to perform in a sight gag), some shatteringly tragic (a star dies in an auto mishap before completing a key scene).

At one point, an egotistically impulsive male lead threatens to abandon the film because his current sweetheart has spurned him. Desperate times call for desperate measures by a selfless team player: The American-born leading lady, still vulnerable after a recent nervous breakdown, nevertheless volunteers to keep her feckless co-star interested in the production by feigning romantic interest in him.

Throughout the barely controlled chaos, Ferrand maintains his calm, though just barely, by keeping himself focused on the end that justifies any means. Making a movie, he says, is like taking a stagecoach ride in the Wild West: “At first, you hope for a nice trip. Then you just hope you reach your destination.”

A nice touch: Ferrand sporadically summons in his dreams a fond childhood memory of the time he swiped Citizen Kane publicity stills from a movie theater lobby. As Truffaut noted in a 1973 interview: “There are directors who boast of never going to the movies, but myself, I go all the time. And I am forever marked by the films I discovered before becoming a filmmaker, when I could take them in more fully. If, for example, in the course of Day for Night I pay special homage to Citizen Kane, it is because that film, released in Paris in July 1946, changed both the cinema and my own life. Through the young actor played [in Day for Night] by Jean-Pierre Leaud, I am always coming back to the question that has tormented me for thirty years now: Is cinema more important than life?”

Unlike Meet Pamela, Day for Night brings out the best in everyone involved. The stellar ensemble cast includes Jacqueline Bisset as the beautiful but emotionally fragile Hollywood star, Valentina Cortese as a fading leading lady who’s too flustered (and, quite often, too drunk) to remember her lines, Nathalie Baye as a frisky production assistant — and the aforementioned Jean-Pierre Leaud (a.k.a. Antoine Doinel, Truffaut’s on-screen alter ego in The 400 Blows and subsequent sequels) as the callow, self-absorbed actor who repeatedly poses another question that Truffaut himself often pondered: “Are women magic?”

D.O.A. (1950)

How's this for an entrance? In the opening minutes of D.O.A., Edmond O'Brien staggers into a police station, asks directions to the homicide division, then plops into a chair. "I'd like to report a murder," he rasps. The attentive investigator asks: "Who was murdered?" O'Brien replies: "I was."

No kidding. O'Brien plays Frank Bigelow, a small-town accountant who gets into big-time trouble when he takes an impulsive trip to San Francisco. He makes the journey primarily to avoid the marriage demands of his lovestruck secretary (Pamela Britton). Unfortunately, while he's having a drink with new friends in a jazz club, someone gives him a toxic cocktail. The next morning, Bigelow wakes up with a killer hangover, so he visits a local hospital. That's where he gets the bad news: He's been given a slow-acting poison, and has just a day or two left to live.

D.O.A. is a textbook example of film noir, a type of thriller -- vaguely defined but instantly recognizable -- that reached its peak of popularity in the decade following World War II, when hundreds of Hollywood features combined crime melodrama, aberrant psychology, sexual insecurity, Cold War paranoia and bizarrely lit, nightmarish camera work to varying degrees. Heavily influenced by German Expressionism, and frequently directed or photographed by German emigres, films noir are notorious for tell-tale visual hallmarks – trenchcoated tough guys, rainwashed streets, lazily spinning overhead fans, slats of light spilling through Venetian blinds into smoke-filled rooms – that continue to be evoked in everything from made-for-video B-movies to ultra-stylish TV spots for expensive toiletries. But the darkness in a true film noir isn’t so much a visual scheme as a state of mind, one best summed up by the hapless of protagonist of another noir classic, Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945): “Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on your or me for no good reason at all.”

The funny thing about film noir is, people who made undisputed classics of the genre during the 1940s and ‘50s didn’t think of their moody movies as anything other than conventional (albeit stylish) thrillers. If you'd been hanging around a studio commissary back then, you certainly wouldn't have heard one director tell another: “Yeah, I'm wrapping up that western, then I'm doing that film noir with Bogart . . .”

It wasn't until French critics much later coined the term film noir -- literally, dark or black film -- that film buffs became fully aware of the qualities that distinguish a film as truly noir. As Ephraim Katz notes in The Film Encyclopedia, film noir “characteristically abounds with night scenes, both interior and exterior, with sets that suggest dingy realism, and with lighting that emphasizes deep shadows and accents the mood of fatalism.” Heroes as well as villains in film noir are “cynical, disillusioned and often insecure loners, inextricably bound to the past and unsure and apathetic about the future.”

In D.O.A., O'Brien's Bigelow is a prototypical noir protagonist, a not-entirely-innocent bystander who's unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. At first, he suspects his death sentence was handed down by an elegant smuggler (Luther Adler) with whom he's had indirect business dealings. But the answer to the mystery really lies in a bill of sale that Bigelow notarized back home. The document is potentially incriminating evidence, and two co-conspirators want to destroy all trace of it.

Throughout a long flashback bracketed by Bigelow's fateful visit to the police station, D.O.A. shows how knowing you're about to die can be empowering, if not liberating. The movie refrains from stating the obvious, but there's little doubt that Bigelow behaves with uncharacteristic bravery while hunting for his killer only because he knows he has nothing left to lose, no one left to fear. He even keeps his cool during confrontations with the smuggler's chief henchman (Neville Brand), a grinning psychopath who does his best to make Bigelow's short life miserable.

O'Brien, always a dependable character actor, gives one of his finest performances here as a man who wants to make every minute count while he's running out of time. He's at his best in a surprisingly affecting scene that has Bigelow phoning his secretary, and trying very hard not to tell her what's wrong. From the look on his face and the pauses in his conversation, you can tell he's thinking about how different things might have been had he not been so quick to avoid a long-term commitment to this woman who loves him.

Polish-born Rudolph Mate (1899-1964) started out as a cameraman for the great Carl Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc) before moving to the United States to work with such notables as Alfred Hitchcock (Foreign Correspondent) and Ernst Lubitsch (To Be or Not to Be). As a director, his resume includes everything from sci-fi spectacle (When Worlds Collide) to Tony Curtis star vehicles (The Black Shield of Falworth). But he remains best known to film buffs for D.O.A., an engrossing 1950 drama that sustains an unsettling atmosphere of noirish dread even during scenes shot in broad daylight.