Film Noir in One Film Image
Lincoln Center to present 17-film retrospective “Robert Siodmak: Dark Visionary” Dec.11-19
No less than eight of your critic’s favorite 1940s films noir will be showcased in this tribute to a Jewish emigre master of betrayal and revenge cinema. But all the knowledge this writer’s accumulated in a lifetime in the dark, viewing and learning from Robert Siodmak’s classic crime dramas like The Killers, Criss Cross, Cry of the City, The Dark Mirror, The File on Thelma Jordan, The Suspect, and The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry can be summarized in just one image from Siodmak’s 1944 Universal Pictures drama, Phantom Lady.
Here’s the setup for what’s preceded the image, adapted from one of the slickest, race-against-time 1944 novels by Cornell Woolrich, here writing as William Irish. Someone’s framed Ella Raines’s Manhattan boss for a murder he didn’t commit, and he’s on Death Row, awaiting execution. We saw him go from a bar off Times Square, where he met a woman wearing an extravagant hat, up Broadway and into a movie house with a stage show (very common in the era), with the hat lady. We know all this was happening while his wife was being strangled .The woman in the hat is the phantom lady Ella’s gotta find. A number of Manhattanites called to testify at her boss’ trial—a cab driver, a bartender, a street beggar, a dancer on stage, a drummer in the pit band—saw them together, but they all swore to a judge and jury the accused man was alone. Were they all lying?
Now look at this rare movie still. Ella’s standing on the platform of the El train at Times Square, high above street level, It’s 4:00 am and she’s walked from the watering hole off Broadway to the elevated train, to catch a downtown local to her rooming house off 23rd Street. She’s been in the bar all evening, watching the bartender who was one of the witnesses who fingered her boss. The bartender’s followed her up the El steps onto the elevated platform and is right behind her, and he’s thinking about pushing her onto the tracks just before the train pulls in. He’s not the killer but he’s webbed into whoever is.
The platform they’re on together is a studio set. The platform extension, the tracks, and the empty opposite platform with its signal light, are all excellent miniatures. The vast city landscape above these elements is a painting. This is a stunning example of what was called “bipacking” or “tripacking” (cut-and-paste), 60 years before CGI. The setting is claustrophobic, because it’s tight, close-in, completely artificial. It’s an Illusion far more tense and frightening than real-life location photography could ever achieve. As the flickering chiaroscuro lighting and raspy sound signal the approach of the El train about to pull in, the bartender takes a step toward Ella. This is the essence of film noir.
Woolrich/Irish dedicated his Phantom Lady novel ”to room 605 of the Hotel Marseilles”—located at 103rd and Broadway—“in unmitigated thankfulness at not being in it any more.” He dedicated another novel, The Bride Wore Black, to his Remington portable typewriter. Woolrich lived in a room at the Marselles with his mother for years, until her passing. He believed what he called his ‘line of suspense’ would hook readers of his pulp magazine stories and novels into forgiving far-fetched premises, unlikely coincidences and impossible plotting. One imagines him staring down on the hurly burly of Broadway by day, as well as the darkest nights of the city that never sleeps, typing typing typing away. In one of his last writing fragments, Woolrich allowed he was “only trying to cheat death a little longer.” Most readers and viewers of Phantom Lady simply surrender to the spell being cast by the author and Robert Siodmak, and this one noir moment which is beyond compare.
Regions: New York City