DVD MIA #3: While the City Sleeps

US, 1956. Directed by Fritz Lang. Starring Dana Andrews, Thomas Mitchell, George Sanders, Ida Lupino, Rhonda Fleming, Vincent Price, Howard Duff.

I don't think While the City Sleeps is the best of Fritz Lang's American films (The Big Heat almost certainly holds that title), but it may be my favourite - it's certainly the most entertaining. It`s a sly, funny and suspenseful tale set at a news syndicate while a series of sex murders is going on in the big city. The man who founded the empire has died, leaving the works to his useless son (Vincent Price). The only man dad thought worthy of the job was the resident editoralist and TV news anchor (Dana Andrews), who has no interest in such a job, since he routinely fires off bestselling books and receives Pulitzers where he is. So Junior decides to pit three veteran department heads - wire service man George Sanders, newspaper editor Thomas Mitchell, art department head James Craig - against each other for a coveted managing director position, little suspecting Craig is sleeping with his wife (Rhonda Fleming at her va-va-voomiest). The contest: whichever department head can unmask the sex killer first gets the job.

Sanders and Mitchell immediately try to convert Andrews to their causes, using two women - Sanders`mistress, gossip columnist Ida Lupino, and his secretary, Andrews`potential fiancee, Sally Forrest.

Anyone who enjoys vintage Hollywood movies should get a jones for this movie just looking at that cast, and I`m happy to report that Lang and the scenario use them all to marvelous effect. Ever the perceptive social critic, Lang is fascinated by how the various players used the police and other peoples lives purely for the advancement not even of their common employer`s cause, but their own selfish ends. Craig doesn`t even actively pursue the job, preferring the let Sanders and Mitchell cancel each other out and just gets it on with Fleming in the meantime. Andrews, on the surface the most respectable of the bunch, thinks nothing of putting his fiancee out as bait for the sex killer, figuring the end justifies the means.

The dialogue is witty and acidic, the suspense sequences solid, even if the actions that initiate the murderer`s ultimate capture ring a bit false. Why this isn`t on DVD is beyond me, so if it pops up on TV or you find an old tape of it, I highly recommend you seize the opportunity.

Ryan Watches a Motion Picture #6: Witchfinder General (1968)

A gem of a film based loosely on the life of the Witchfinder General, one Matthew Hopkins, a lawyer turned witch-hunter during the tumultuous upheaval of Cromwell's revolution. Hopkins roved from village to village exploiting the superstitious for good coin by inflicting cruel witch-finding tests upon anyone suspected of being a witch. So basically anyone kind of weird. Or anyone people just didn't like.

In the role of Hopkins is the inimitable Vincent Price. Now, this film gave him his 75th role, and by this point Price had understandably been coasting through his horror roles like a sleeping Cthulu through the epochs, but two things now awakened him:

1. The shock of having a director like Michael Reeves, who had wanted Donald Pleasence in the role and was furious over the studio's insistence on Price. Reeves refused to speak directly to him the first day, and when Price fell from his horse, reportedly didn't even check to see if the man was alright.

2. The level of the crew's competency was something Price hadn't expected. Everyone on set was dead-serious about making a good film, and the majority of the cast seemed to be delivering the kind of performances he could actually work with.

These two things sobered Price, and later, he conceded that his own performance in the film was probably the best of his horror career. His Witchfinder General possesses a quiet belligerence made more menacing by an aloof, emotional disconnection. That disconnection doesn't seem lazy, though. It seems carefully set, and most of it comes off through his enigmatic stares.

The level of torture and violence that initially got this film banned in places, by today's standards, manages to be bloody without being gory, and fiercely uncomfortable instead of indulgent. The watershed Bonnie and Clyde was released just a year earlier, and the kind of screen violence that was emerging held a new potency. Witchfinder General could actually be considered England's Bonnie and Clyde, as both pushed the boundaries and ended off on a violent down-note. Reeves ended WG with an improvised and unnerving final sequence that will ring in my memory for some time.

So: A fluid and stylish revenge tale with Price back in action. Check it out.

Chris 2010 Viewings #12: Dragonwyck

US, 1946. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Starring Gene Tierney, Vincent Price, Walter Huston, Jessica Tandy.

Vincent Price again, and just as in The Baron of Arizona he can't get lowly farmers to accept his ownership of their land! Only this time he came by the land by birth, rather than massive forgery and deceit. It's New York state, in the 1840s. He and his wife welcome distant relation and pretty young thing Gene Tierney into their massive mansion and estate, ostensibly to be a companion to their lonely 8 year old daughter, who they don't give a rat's ass about. The mansion is said to be haunted by the ghost of a woman wronged by one of Price's ancestors. His peculiar wife gets a head cold that leads to something much, much worse. The farmers are beginning to rebel against him. And no one can figure out what he gets up to when he disappears into the tower for days on end...

Based on a popular book of its day, the film was to be directed by Ernst Lubitsch, but when he fell ill screenwriter Mankiewicz made his directorial debut instead. The sure hand that guided classics like A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve is not apparent at this early stage. The entire production yearns to be another Rebecca, with Tierney the young woman of "low birth" who feels out of her league at the opulent but threatening mansion of her mysterious suitor. Still, there are nice touches throughout, and the performances are uniformly fine, especially Price, who seems to be laying the groundwork for his seminal role in Corman's Fall of the House of Usher.

The major problem comes down to the source material just not being as compelling as something like Rebecca. Chunks also seem to have been pruned from the film pre-release with little regard for the narrative flow. Thus, Price's daughter disappears entirely half-way through (the climax seems to suggest she died, but in the source novel she has gone off to live with a relation) and events jarringly follow others with no sense of the time elapsed between them. Price's early comments seem to suggest a mansion teeming with servants, and the building seems massive in a distant model shot but we never get a sense of anything aside from a few rooms with a few steps' distance of each other populated strictly by the principals and three servants. I don't demand lavish production values, but a director in control of their material can suggest spaces and things offscreen without ever showing them; that doesn't happen here.

Chris 2010 Viewings #11: The Baron of Arizona

US, 1950. Directed by Samuel Fuller. Starring Vincent Price.

When you see Sam Fuller's name on a movie, you know it's going to be an odd one. One of the most subversive directors to ever work within the studio system, he usually found a way to combine social commentary with such oddball subject matter that even if you knew you were being preached at, you don't much mind because it's so deliriously peculiar. One of the great American films of the 1960s is Shock Corridor where Fuller tackles the major, controversial issues of the day - racial, political - in the guise of a lurid murder mystery set in a mental institution.

The Baron of Arizona is Fuller's second film, and nowhere near as wild as his later pictures, but has a definite eye for the odd. Based on a real historical figure, the film follows the exploits of James Reavis (Vincent Price), who contructs a massive con trick and forgery to claim ownership of the entire state of Arizona. Price is ideally cast, in his pre-horror icon mode, as his oily charm allows him to insinuate himself into the trust of some Mexican peasants, Spanish monks, gypsies, and Americans in order to set up his cunning plan. Though we - and Fuller - are never really on his side, Price's insinuating charisma has you half-hoping he can get away with it, even though we know from the opening scenes (and hell, history) that he doesn't. Fuller even gives Price's Reavis a happier ending than history did.