Bowen’s Cinematic

The George Clooney project has primarily been an attempt to resurrect the angry, ambitious films of the 1970s, a seemingly magic time when the divide between “pop” and “art” movies was less tangible. Clooney has been partially successful: he only works with the most respected filmmakers (or the occasional promising newcomer), and the resulting pictures are generally well-intentioned and well-crafted, usually some of the best generally mainstream entertainments of whichever year they are released. I say partially successful because the films don’t entirely reside in “right now”, their 1970s nostalgia limits their timeliness and their personality: the movies tend to be more about “weren’t the 1970s movies awesome!” than the climate of today. This is an issue with quite a few of our noteworthy American filmmakers (a notable exception are The Coens, and they began as movie-movie jokers too.)

But the 1970s tunnel vision of our name directors is a hash for another day. I bring it up at all because Clooney’s newest vehicle, The American, exists for the same reasons, and Clooney, to his credit, has basically admitted as much in interviews. The American is a familiar fusion of high art and low genre, a formula art-genre picture. I usually use that term – “art-genre” – dismissively, because I normally sense that the creators of these sorts of pictures are deluding themselves: serving formula disguised as an instantly minted masterpiece. But I don’t get that vibe from The American, I think it knows exactly what it is.

The American is another picture about a lonely assassin rapidly approaching a point in his life that could be described as being over the hill. The assassin, of course, is seen in a botched or troubled situation in the beginning, and this, of course, prompts him to enter into a precarious scenario that is meant to be his last job. The assassin, usually, finds himself comforted by an impossibly beautiful woman, which is more believable than usual because the killer is, himself, either impossibly handsome or impossibly charismatic and debonair, with money, of course, being a non-issue. The American is unavoidably in the school of Le Samourai, and a number of other fatalistic existential noirs where everything is beautifully hopeless.

Clooney, at his most Clooney-ish (Out of Sight, Ocean’s Eleven) is a suave, glamorous bad-boy prankster who gives performances that exude more than a bit of conscious self-satire (which is a roundabout method of self-congratulation). Clooney has been compared to Cary Grant a number of times, but his strategy is more reminiscent of Warren Beatty in that the text of his “star” performances seems to be “yeah, I know I’m a lucky sonofabitch, and I know you love me anyway”. Like Beatty, Clooney likes to occasionally toy with that, to turn everything down to a simmering suggestion where the tampering down of his persona is meant to evoke something more timeless and existential. The American is one of those roles in the tradition of Clooney’s underrated performance in Solaris. Clooney doesn’t do much here that you haven’t seen before, but he’s more confidently open and matter of fact. There’s a great bit, one of Clooney’s career best, when he realizes that his Gorgeous Opportunity for Personal Salvation and Self-Actualization (Violante Placido), a prostitute he’s been seeing as a client, is asking him out for real. Clooney’s half-step, his disbelieving half-swallow, is worth seeing the picture for alone.

The movie, directed by Anton Corbijn (Control), also mercifully spares us most of the clutter inherent in the assassin-on-the-run scenario. The American is about soaking in the Italian countryside and the bodies of the young women; it is also about the minute details of putting a weapon together (which is a refreshing deviation from cliché: Clooney’s last job is one of construction, not on-the-site execution). I have read a few comparisons to Antonioni, but Corbijn isn’t that committed to his character’s state of mind at the expense of plot. Antonioni was a master of an atmosphere that told the real story at hand; Corbijn is very assured with wonderfully (and occasionally extremely) composed shots that let us feel our way around familiar territory.

This picture uses – in the tradition of these lonely hunter movies – gorgeous people, gorgeous scenery, gorgeous clothes, and movie situations as stand-ins for universal loneliness and confusion. Most of us feel the American’s detachment, his depression, his alienation, at least some of the time. This genre blows those feelings up into a vehicle that gives us the ideal embodiment of those frustrations: these troubled, seemingly unearthly, people act out a more exciting version of our tedium and uncertainty. Movie killers aren’t merely bored, they’re trapped in an existence that invites words such as “ennui”; words that sound more than a tad overblown when applied to a lonely Friday of drinking beer and watching cartoons and maybe, after a number of those beers, calling a hook-up you barely knew anyway. Corbijn and Clooney have made a strangely touching movie out of spare parts.

I saw L.A. Confidential in my home town theatre when I was maybe seventeen. I wasn’t that versed in noir at that point, I had seen a few of the obvious – Chinatown, Double Indemnity, Touch of Evil – but hadn’t gotten into the nitty-gritty yet, and I’m really still doing that now. I remember seeing it with my older younger brother, and both of us loving it, particularly the juicy/literate tough guy patter, the performances of Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Danny DeVito, Kevin Spacey, Kim Basinger, James Cromwell (everyone really, even future TV-pretty boy Simon Baker makes an impression in a brief bit), and the well-staged, occasionally startling bursts of gunplay. I’ve revisited L.A. Confidential several times throughout the years but it had been awhile, and I wanted to see if my few years of writing and more serially watching movies had changed my view of it. The answer is: a bit.

Co-writer (with Brian Helgeland)/ director Curtis Hanson has always been a clever maker of B-movies such as The Bedroom Window, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The River Wild; he’s sturdy, professional, unpretentious, and his pictures are well-paced and well-staged. The relief of a Curtis Hanson movie is the knowledge that the filmmaker knows what he’s making and, while he isn’t condescending, he isn’t laboring to pump his genre pictures with pregnant, half-assed meanings (anything Bryan Singer has made since The Usual Suspects, for example; The Dark Knight, for another). But professionalism has its price, and that price is personality. You watch L.A. Confidential, and wonder how someone could make a movie out of Ellroy this cut-and-dry. L.A. Confidential is a mystery without any mystery, and the characters, who’re supposed to be trapped and resentful and tormented, are pretty obvious types, marching dutifully to the third act finish-line, which is, in this case, the biggest insult of the picture.

I never liked the happy ending, which has investigators Ed Exley (Pearce) and Bud White (Crowe), saving the day from a corrupt administrator (Cromwell) who is using his position to take over the criminal empire that has been scattered after its Big Kingpin’s imprisonment. One sees Cromwell coming a mile away, because a. you know his “dirty side of the law” speeches to Exley have to have a pay-off, and b. because there isn’t really anyone else to be the bad guy. The reveal of Cromwell’s true loyalties is a show-stopper though (and still shocking), and the business with “Rollo Tomasi” has a wonderful dime-store pulp irony – it could have come from a particularly shrewd 1940s thriller.

But the problem is that the kind of material Hanson is playing with here isn’t meant to be so straight-forward, even in the times when the good guy did ostensibly win (the underrated Hanson picture In Her Shoes is the kind of usually soft/sentimental material that benefits from his clarity). Noir (which L.A. Confidential isn’t, exactly) traffics in the horror movie idea that we are all guilty, that we’re waiting for the thing that reveals us to be the animals that we’re barely disguising. Noirs have blurry, intangible evil at their sidelines that might leave a little residue. I have voiced a number of doubts with Nolan’s Dark Knight over the last few years, and the picture is wildly undisciplined and over-explicit, but those are the trade-offs of obsession. Nolan isn’t a clean, nice, considerate professional. He aims all over the place, and while the results can be maddening, certain things stick. Dark Knight isn’t, technically, as “good” a movie as L.A. Confidential (and, I still prefer L.A. Confidential) but it comes closer to the spirit of noir and of Ellroy: which is that, the more you find out, the more you know you don’t know. Gotham has this hidden rot that stays with you; Hanson’s 1950s L.A., which is ripe for those implications, doesn’t. You truly feel at the end of L.A. Confidential that all of the bad guys are dead. (Though there are individual moments that reach their full potential, such as Exley’s manipulation of a group of black kidnapers, or Spacey’s flirtation with a groupie at a sound stage.)

That said, if L.A. Confidential is, ultimately, a polished studio product, then it is the way to have your polished studio products. The script still snaps; the pace is a model of one-incident-propelling-another storytelling; the performances are all essentially perfect, both individually and collectively (as a coherent ensemble); the shootouts are crackerjack; and the 1950s L.A. setting (courtesy of, among others, ace cinematographer Dante Spinotti) is the surreal movie factory of our dreams. One would be tempted to wish that Hanson had Nolan’s obsessive drive; or that Nolan had Hanson’s common sense and basic filmmaking coherence, but those qualities seem to be rare in the same person – one has to take an interesting director for the good and the bad.

Director Nicholas Ray was known for imbuing his thrillers with an almost naive, sad-eyed desperation, and that suits his romantic chase noir, On Dangerous Ground, to a tee. The picture depends upon clichés that were old hat before the talkies, but it transcends them, primarily because we’re more accustomed to encountering them in a romantic melodrama that might more closely resemble Marty than a nastier thriller centering on the hunt for a young girl’s killer. The policeman on the hunt, Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) sees himself through the killer’s sister’s (Ida Lupino) blind eyes and calls himself out on a life that’s been dominated by cynicism and recklessness. We don’t roll our eyes at the second act pathos, nor the Lupino martyr, we’re instead thrown for a loop, wondering what the hell is going on.

It helps that Ray and Ryan are nearly unrivaled in this sort of business. Ray’s pictures aren’t calculated, but raw, almost uncomfortably melancholy and self-conscious. In a Lonely Place is another picture that starts down a familiar path (Hollywood screenwriter, murder, etc.) only to end on a devastating note of miscommunication and un-purged rage. There’s also, of course, Rebel without a Cause, a picture that never annoys from overexposure, if only because it’s authentically unforgettable, a nightmare exploration of the chasm between the generations (just as In a Lonely Place was exploring the un-crossable differences between the genders). On Dangerous Ground has similar conviction in itself, and Wilson ranks as another refreshingly understated, poignant Ray creation. The first three scenes tell us all: one cop hugs his wife, one cop watches TV with his family, Wilson examines pictures of suspects at the dinner table alone. Too bad the picture feels the need, in the first act, to repeatedly remind us of Wilson’s disillusion with needless dialogue, but even this doesn’t irritate, it contributes to the broad, dreamy vibe of the picture, to its big, broken, bleeding heart.

Ray could’ve gotten all of that out of a mediocre actor (and has) but Robert Ryan appears, in all of the pictures I’ve seen at least, to be incapable of giving of a false or boring performance. Ryan can be terrifying even in pictures that aren’t in his league (check his work in the otherwise just ok Crossfire or Clash by Night, both of which can be found in TCM Noirs Vol.2) but when the film manages to be even somewhat up to him the results can be extraordinary, such as The Set-Up, The Naked Spur, the iconic The Wild Bunch, or even here. Ryan, like many of my favorite leading men, has a fascinating, flexible contradiction about himself, he’s scary, badass, childish, noble, buffoonish all, possibly, at once, and can adjust the ingredients seemingly without effort depending upon the part. Wilson is, like the Bogart character in Place, of the not entirely sane school of broken idealists, needing a saint, someone who can in good faith just plain shut up for a while and deal with it, to purify his potentially lethal spiritual toxicity.

On Dangerous Ground follows a traditional three act structure, but the proportions are unusual and further contribute to the surreal discombobulation of the film, while also managing to further dry out the sentimentality. The film is approximately eighty minutes long, thirty of those are devoted to act one, a chase that has little bearing on the official plot (though it organically fleshes out the Wilson character). By minute thirty-five, Wilson has been summoned to another town (to escape problems sprung from his violent practices) to solve a murder. At this point we settle in, expecting twenty minutes or so of fish out of water plotting, the usual no bullshit cop in strange town burlesque, only to have a townsperson spring into a building in the middle of Wilson’s introduction to the prominent townspeople to announce that he’s seen the killer fleeing. Wilson teams up with the father (Ward Bond, very effective) and the remaining forty-five minutes largely constitute this second chase, with the accelerated romance with Lupino, who isn’t, despite first billing, introduced until about minute forty, as a sideline. The film toys with the formula admirably, and embodies what screenwriters preach of underlining character with action.

My only real regret of On Dangerous Ground is that it doesn’t take full advantage of the possible explosions that could be savored from a Robert Ryan-Ida Lupino collaboration. Lupino has proved herself in other roles to be very much Ryan’s equal, but here she’s saddled with an uninteresting male fantasy. Ray exhausts his imagination with the strange pacing, and his empathy with the Wilson character. It’s hard to fault On Dangerous Ground too much though, it’s an original picture with a fantastic lead performance, a clear, hard, amazing visual style, a haunting Bernard Herrman score, and a good as can be expected secondary performance. You don’t roll your eyes at the final kiss, it’s, despite the shortcuts, earned.

★★★½