Let This be a Warning

One flaw in marrying a guy you just met is he may be a serial killer. Kim Hunter faces this terrible possibility in 1944's When Strangers Marry (also known as Betrayed). There's a nicely nightmarish quality to the film's rising tension actually enhanced by the fact that not all of it makes a lot of sense. The twist ending isn't very satisfying but it's worth the ride especially with Robert Mitchum onboard in one of his earliest roles.

Millie (Hunter) gets into town and can't figure out why her new husband, Paul (Dean Jagger), is so hard to track down. She runs into an old flame, Frank (Mitchum), and he helps her in fruitless search.

They talk to the police but there's no help there. For some reason, Frank takes Millie straight to the homicide detective. It's not such a strange choice as Paul's evasiveness starts to make him look an awful lot like the "Silk Stocking Killer" who recently made off with ten grand. When Millie finally does track Paul down, he's staying in an apartment with pictures of strangers and an assumed name on the mailbox. Also, he's wearing new expensive clothes. Hmmmmmm . . .

Kim Hunter reminds me of Theresa Wright and the cords this movie strikes were done better in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. Even so, When Strangers Marry has good performances and some intriging strangeness. It's available on The Criterion Channel.

X Sonnet #1819

Announcing rapid changes, bows were broke.
Beyond the middle day, she wrote a card.
For something's left to love with rum and coke.
A jealous hand the pretty brains would guard.
The bloody captains name a yearly bride.
The mountain people make a festive coach.
At dawn, the chosen lass ahead shall ride.
The village life renews at dusk's approach.
The space between an ear and phone's a week.
The busy maid would never catch the lint.
For this, the corners built a massive peak.
The fuzzy floor accrued a mighty dent.
As past the dizzy wedding couples walk,
The angels dread the killer's breezy talk.

Make Way for Mitchum

A frontier town is ruled by a murderous gang. Robert Mitchum comes to sort them out in 1955's Man with the Gun. It's not a bad film but I'd put it pretty far down the list of good '50s Westerns. It's always nice watching Robert Mitchum anyway.

He plays Clint Tollinger who rides into town wearing what looks distinctly like a modern sport coat.

Costumes are certainly one of the weak points of this film. Alex North's score is also pretty weak, or at least its juxtaposition with the action is.

Director Richard Wilson fragments the scenes too much with excessive close-ups but there are nonetheless decent action sequences. Mitchum shows he can mount and ride a horse quickly while giving a performance and I readily believe he's a marvellously quick draw.

Tollinger is a "town tamer", a hired gun whose job is to clean up towns like this. In this case, though, he was visiting just to see an old flame, the manager of a dance hall troupe of girls and possibly the madam of their brothel. She's played by Jan Sterling who's moderately attractive and gives a moderately good performance.

Man with the Gun is available on ScreenPix.

A Road Paved Beneath the Moon

Robert Mitchum roars across Tennessee and Kentucky in 1958's Thunder Road, totting moonshine. The action in this movie still largely works from the atmosphere conjured by a lot of shadows and Mitchum's ragged demeanour.

Mitchum plays Lucas Doolin, who delivers the whiskey his father makes in an illegal still. Doing so often means having to dodge government agents and gangsters alike, the latter having an interest in taking over the business.

Mostly Lucas is able to keep his cool but he doesn't want his younger brother, Robin (played by Mitchum's son James) following in his footsteps. Lucas seems to take equal shares of pride and shame in his lifestyle and Mitchum's performance helps convey the sense of a man who's made a grim peace with his own ambiguities.

There are two women in love with him, one them a decent jazz singer played by Keely Smith who has a couple of numbers in the film. Robert Mitchum co-wrote a song called "Whipperwill".

Thunder Road is available on Amazon Prime.

For Practical Purposes

Frontier settlers could take heart if Robert Mitchum strolled onto their homestead, singing and playing guitar. He forms one part of a love triangle in 1948's Rachel and the Stranger, the other nodes being William Holden and Loretta Young. It's not an earth-shattering masterpiece but a quite competently made, pleasant hour and nineteen minute diversion.

I tried figuring out when it's set. The round brimmed hats and lack of belt loops suggest pre-Civil War but no-one's wearing knee-breeches. So my bet is around 1840. William Holden plays David Harvey, a stoic man with a farm, a little boy (Gary Gray), and a recently deceased wife. Mitchum plays Jim, a wanderer and professional hunter and friend of the family who stays with them on occasion.

David reaches the practical conclusion that his boy needs a mother to school him while David's out tending crops and livestock. So he saddles his horse and sets out for town to get a new wife, just like that.

Lucky for him, the local Parson and his wife are just as pragmatic as David and they suggest a local bondwoman, Rachel (Young).

David effectively buys her and marries her and then the three of them go home. You can guess how things go from there.

It all plays out with decent subtlety and all the actors show why they were stars. David is forced to reluctantly acknowledge things and doesn't seem to notice when he constantly interrupts Rachel before she can make suggestions or tell him about her skills. Yet Holden never gives the impression of a tyrant, just a clueless guy. Mitchum strolls along and starts singing with Rachel and the tension begins.

Rachel and the Stranger is available on the Criterion Channel.

After the World and the War

A good bunch of guys come back from World War II and have trouble adjusting to civilian life in 1946's Till the End of Time. This drama from Edward Dmytryk is pretty straight forward, seeking to address common psychological and social issues faced by veterans. It succeeds decently enough at that but there's also an intriguing, understated spookiness about the relationship between leads Dorothy McGuire and Guy Madison.

The film starts with a lot of veterans disembarking at San Diego, getting health checks before having interviews about insurance and pension and whatnot. The film cuts to different soldiers as they discuss future plans, most of them tellingly not having any clear idea of what they'll be doing now. Most have vague ideas of taking good positions in high paying jobs.

The standout is Robert Mitchum as a vet with a silver plate in his head which, he jokes, he figures he could pawn for an easy dime one day. But the movie doesn't follow him, instead choosing the handsome but blander Guy Madison.

Before the war, he evidently had the nicest, most normal life a 1940s American guy could have. Loving parents, a good high school experience behind him, and a load of friends. When he gets home the house is surprisingly empty, presenting an intriguing little puzzle as he wanders about. It's a little way Dmytryk establishes the feeling of being slightly out of step--the parents simply happen to be out. So Cliff (Madison) heads off to the local jukebox joint to catch up with the old gang. There he finds the sweet and brooding Dorothy McGuire as Pat.

As their relationship progresses over the film, Pat's sorrow over the death of her husband, who was a fighter pilot, dovetails with Cliff's post-war inertia.

The movie follows a pretty predictable pattern as Cliff and Pat yell at each other now and then and then apologise a scene or two later. McGuire's a lot better than Madison but Madison's simplicity comes across as an honest lack of smarts. It seems unfair for him to have to rethink his whole life.

Robert Mitchum does come back, first having stricken it rich, then having lost everything, of course. There's an amusing scene where he shocks Cliff's mother with some light banter about gambling and girls. There's also a nice brawl at the end.

Till the End of the World is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1495

The where the running script reverts we ran.
To save a tree, we made another plant.
Entire beans could fill a single can.
A team of bees could cheer a single ant.
The copied picture cut the centre point.
To pivot off the person, paint was scraped.
The working gel relaxed the lousy join.
It's good to know the better show was taped.
The greener grass was grey in olden times.
Atop the horse we plant a hollow man.
We grow a crop of taters, oats, and lime.
And all you need's some corn to grease the pan.
The steady chance was but a leaky drain.
The talking dog was but a heavy rain.

A Dangerous but Inescapable Ride

Dealing with an intelligent, mentally ill person presents a unique challenge. Such a person may be more than simply a pathological liar--they may be someone committed to forcing their desired perception of reality on others through complicated manipulations and violence, like the femme fatale of 1950's Where Danger Lives. Robert Mitchum and Faith Domergue star as disastrously mismatched lovers pushed together by a nightmare scenario of madness and misfortune.

An easy-going, successful young doctor, Jeff Cameron (Robert Mitchum) is engaged to a nurse who works in the same hospital played by Maureen O'Sullivan. Their happy lives are disrupted when a young woman, who attempted suicide, is admitted to the ER. She's unconscious when Jeff meets her but quickly she establishes herself as an important part of his world.

Realising he's fallen in love with the young woman, Margo (Domergue), Jeff wants to marry her instead of Maureen O'Sullivan. But Margo says her wealthy father would never approve. Jeff gets drunk and storms over to the mansion to confront the man, who turns out to be played by Claude Rains.

Looking like the cat who caught the canary, as usual, Raines informs Jeff that things aren't exactly as Margo led him to believe, in fact circumstances are very different. But a series of plausible accidents occur, pushed a little further in certain directions by Margo, and the two find themselves on the run, driving to the Mexican border in an old truck.

Jeff, who'd taken a fall back at the mansion, diagnoses himself with a concussion and with Mitchum's trademark, bemused melancholy, informs Margo he might be making bad decisions, might pass out occasionally, and might just become partially paralysed. This raises Margo's anxiety, of course. Between his mild brain trauma and her compulsively preventing him from hearing radio reports referring to her mental illness, the two certainly make a fine pair fit for catastrophe.

Margo is certainly a femme fatale but she's much more sympathetic than average. She wants freedom and to be with a good man. It's not clear how much control she has over the way her mind works but because she's smart she can effectively lie to Jeff. As a doctor, he might want to help her, but how could he if she's so good at keeping him in the dark? Not to mention he'd have to get over his own feelings of hurt at discovering he'd been lied to. All things considered, it's a pretty credible scenario to anyone who's dealt with a mentally ill, manipulative person. Mitchum shows the hurt but, more importantly, the sadness of dealing with someone he loves who's so good at constructing about them a narrow, self-destructive reality.

Where Danger Lives is available on The Criterion Channel until April 30.

The River is Beautiful but Difficult

Maybe the idea of an Otto Preminger movie starring Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe put my expectations too high the first time I watched 1954's River of No Return. I find I like it a lot more now--those beautiful location shots in Calgary, Robert Mitchum's performance, Marilyn Monroe's beauty, and the story about necessity and relative morality. It doesn't compare well with Bicycle Thieves, the Italian Neorealist film that influenced it, but it's not bad.

As much as I love Robert Mitchum, and as much as I love him in this movie, he's a key part of what makes Bicycle Thieves the better film. Even though Lamberto Maggiorani wasn't a professional actor, the anxiety that naturally came through his stony face established the pain and desperation as he was forced to make increasingly bad moral choices while his son looked on. Mitchum's version, Matt Calder, always seems cool and satisfied with his own choices, something Mitchum's natural, gentle melancholy makes great to watch but which makes for a less interesting film.

Instead of a father and son whose bicycle is stolen, upon which their livelihood depends, Robert Mitchum and Tommy Rettig play a father and son whose horse and rifle are stolen. They're farmers in harsh, if gorgeous, territory and Matt astutely observes they'll never survive without the horse to plough the fields and without the rifle to protect them from Indians. The 1950s into the 60s had several westerns that began to cast Native Americans in a more sympathetic light; this wasn't one them. But the threat they present to the protagonists is certainly credible.

Marilyn Monroe plays Kay, a dance hall performer who'd befriended Rettig's character, Mark, while Matt was in prison. I don't think Monroe was a bad actress--she gives one of the greatest performances of all time in The Misfits--but in River of No Return she was the victim of bad advice from an elocution coach. The coach infuriated Preminger but Monroe insisted she remain with her on set. An insistence on perfectly enunciating every single word results in a stilted performance as different from her strikingly natural turn in The Misfits as could be. Her musical numbers aren't bad, though, and, of course, she's always easy on the eyes, even if her hair and makeup really aren't appropriate for the scenario.

It's her boyfriend, Weston (Rory Calhoun), who steals Matt and Mark's horse and rifle after Mark helped the couple when they were on a raft, caught in the rapids of the nearby river. He leaves her with them when she refuses to abandon Mark but the moral dialogue of the film mainly consists of Kay defending Weston as a desperate victim of circumstances who needs forgiveness more than punishment. In this, the film almost seems to be a rebuke of Bicycle Thieves, seemingly saying that it's only a foolish, soft-hearted woman who forgives a horse thief. Matters are complicated a little when we find out why Matt was in prison and, like the son in Bicycle Thieves, Mark is forced to assess his father's worth. But Matt, for the most part, never does anything really questionable--his crime was killing a man in defence of another--and Mitchum's performance is perfectly appropriate for the screenplay.

The only really challenging scene is when Matt starts roughly embracing Kay, forcing her to the ground as she struggles, though this follows from a dialogue in which she offered her body in exchange for Weston's life. Later it's implied Matt was trying to make a point, that Kay really didn't understand what she was offering, but the violence of the scene is by no means normal in a 50s Western. Maybe this was the point where Preminger and screenwriter Fenton wanted to show Matt doing something truly wrong but the motivations come across as too muddled.

But it's a beautiful film. The locations are great and I loved the raft scenes created without process shots, where you can actually see the actors or the stunt people are on a raft in the river, even if the rapids aren't quite as rapid as they need to be to imply peril.

Circular Paw Prints

In the midst of a terrible winter, alone in the snowy mountains of northern California, a family plays out a drama seemingly representative of human civilisation in 1954's Track of the Cat. Three brothers, each in his own way, trying to live up to an ideal of personal responsibility under the bitter, impotent influence of parents, sister, and fiancee establish their personalities for the audience in the hunt for a panther that's been killing the livestock. There are some really great location shots, nice production design, and a brave performance from Robert Mitchum, but mainly its a film that comes across as trying to make a point that doesn't quite connect. Most of the blame for this belongs to actor Tab Hunter.

I think we're supposed to want to see the youngest brother, Harold (Hunter), really succeed and prove himself against all odds. But he's just so bland and his performance is so lazy, it's just irritating when anything good happens to him. Robert Mitchum, as Curt, the arrogant and loud mouthed brother under whose shadow Harold struggles to define himself, is so much more charismatic it's even harder to want to spend time with Harold, let alone root for him.

The eldest brother, Arthur (William Hopper), is presented as saintly--called "a monk" by Curt--he sees the good in everyone but lacks Curt's assertiveness to lay down the law. Their mother (Beulah Bondi) is a severe, deeply religious woman while their father (Philip Tonge) constantly drinks and is generally too feeble to establish authority. Teresa Wright plays Grace, the only female offspring, a perpetually angry woman who constantly berates her parents and siblings for their individual failings.

It all seems like an allegory for the perils of a headless society in which various ideologies try to assert dominance but each lacks some vital element to stake a permanent claim. This is a fine enough idea in itself and oddly I think the movie would've felt more like it had a resolution if it didn't make any attempt at a resolution.

Apparently Mitchum was miserable with the filming conditions but his hard work paid off with some really effective scenes of him trudging through snowy wilderness, trying to find a panther. A panther we never see, by the way, another problem with the film. Why Katharine Hepburn can be walking a leopard in Bringing Up Baby but we can't even get an isolated shot of a panther on a soundstage in this movie I really don't know. When the cat's in your title you really need to show the damned cat.

The Weight at the Other Side

The paradox of modern romance is in its contradictory imperatives for responsibility to one's partner. Love should be about taking care of each other, of belonging to each other, yet people should neither expect others to care for their weakness and also shouldn't try to nurse them. The conflicts that emerge can seem like a seesaw and thus the title of 1962's Two for the Seesaw. A thoughtful, sometimes too clever, film about a romance across ideas and ideologies with two great performances from Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine.

The film opens with one of several great location shots in New York City, this one featuring Jerry (Mitchum) contemplating suicide, but most of the film feels very stagebound. It consists almost entirely of dialogue between the two leads and it's not hard to see the movie's origins as a stage play by William Gibson (not Neuromancer William Gibson, another one). But this production directed by Robert Wise does some nice things with the limited space. I liked how the set for Jerry's apartment is connected to Gittel's, the moving camera showing us it's not a split screen and that the actors can likely hear each other.

Gittel (MacLaine) is a young and hopeful member of the counterculture, part of the second or third wave of Beats*. Jerry meets her at the home of a mutual friend during a party mostly consisting of people having shallow debates about art theory. He walks past people talking about dichotomies of motivation and the dogmatism of discussing communication. There are so many people crowded in the little place trying to get their points across it seems like a market bazaar so it's oddly appropriate he comes across Gittel trying to sell an ice box.

All she does is ask Jerry to light a cigarette for her but he has the impertinence to get her number from his friend and call her to ask her out the next day. He tells her about how he's decided he shouldn't be walking around thinking of suicide all the time so he's asking for her help. As she points out to him later, he imposes on her generosity a lot without realising, which is particularly ironic since he spends a lot of time talking about how he doesn't want to be taken care of. "So then you say, 'need you'. I need you. Who says these things in black and white? You care about somebody, you don't make 'em ask. Like a bill that's gotta be paid. What kind of giving is that?" On the other hand, if Jerry hadn't asked, the two would never have been in a relationship in the first place.

But meanwhile, each one understands why the other resents it when someone else presumes to take care of them. MacLaine, as usual, plays a character in a precarious, potentially tragic situation. She doesn't want to tell Jerry too much about it because she doesn't want to "trap" him.

This was around the same time MacLaine was making movies with Billy Wilder and Two for the Seesaw is peppered with fast pace sex jokes that are of the same species as the kind in The Apartment or Some Like It Hot but are a little too corny to be effectively funny and outright lame when they border on dirty.

But they do help serve the dialogue on sexual liberation. Jerry is presented as a more traditional figure, a lawyer who owes his position and wealth to his father-in-law--Jerry's overbearing wife is the reason he's run away to New York to be miserable. He's surprisingly easy-going about Gittel's multiple sexual partners until he sees her kissing a friend with benefits. But both Gittel and Jerry recognise Gittel's sexual attraction to Jerry is as much a part of their relationship as Jerry's sexual attraction to her. When she offers to have sex with him early on because it's his birthday, he walks out because it's another manifestation of the charity he's been trying to get away from.

But where does the charity end and the love begin? When do you start letting someone do something for you more out of their pleasure in helping than in their independent desire to take the action in question? It's a problem Jerry and Gittel are forced to chew on endlessly.

*Incidentally, to-day's Jack Kerouac's birthday

Twitter Sonnet #1214

In cases suited just for travel packed.
In bottles corked for only bees, avast.
For planes were holding ev'ry bag and sack.
And so the moving rocks above amassed.
A waiting sign was mentioned late to-night.
In cheapest coat the frigid thought persists.
A bobbing fruit was stopped and fixed aright.
The apple stilled in cider now consists.
A file found behind the image grew.
A simple use for pages coat the walls.
The words repeat and yet were writ anew.
A chain of lights were spines throughout the halls.
Umbrellas float along the creek of wine.
A voice repelled its way from out the mine.

The Inescapable Domain of Babies

Life would be easier if pregnancies always went according to plan, especially when there's a rigid morality at play regarding that sort of thing. 1960's Home from the Hill is about a small southern town where everyone's biggest problem in life seems to involve a man, usually town patriarch Wade Hunnicutt, getting a woman pregnant and then not claiming the child. A unusual drama film for director Vincente Minnelli, the film improves a lot at the halfway point. The logic of its plot is noticeably weak on several points but a great cast and a general epic feeling conjured by Minnelli compensate.

The film opens with a guy trying to kill Wade (Robert Mitchum) for sleeping with his wife. Wade is mad for being shot at but for the most part takes it with Robert Mitchum's trademark equanimity, seemingly content in his public identity as a rake.

And why should he be worried? He's not the mayor but the landlord, seemingly, of the whole little Texas town. Tenants pay him rent and he owns mortgages on the factories. He lives in a big house where his wife, Hannah, hasn't been on friendly terms with him in years, fixing him with an invariable angry glare whenever he walks in the room.

Played by the versatile Eleanor Parker, she looks pretty young for Mitchum but in fact he was only five years older than her. I was even more surprised to learn she was seventeen years older than George Hamilton, who plays her son. In the south, in the 50s, that's downright plausible.

Hamilton plays Theron Hunnicutt, a late blooming mamma's boy who starts the movie off finally coming out from under his mother's wing to beg Wade to teach him the manly art of hunting. To assist him, Wade assigns his best lackey, the cool and independent Rafe (George Peppard).

If this movie succeeds in anything it's in making Rafe come off as a great guy. His improbably good character and tragic past are brought down to Earth by an unassuming performance by Peppard. There's a scene I loved where Rafe asks a girl out at the behest of Theron, who's too timid to do it himself.

Libby (Luana Patten) is scrubbing vigorously on a windshield with a wet sponge under a blooming tree when Rafe approaches from behind, sweaty from work, tipping his ragged hat. It's all perfectly innocent, folks. Of all the tragedy in the film, the idea that Libby's going to go out with dweeby Theron instead of Rafe may be the most poignant.

But her father (Everett Sloane, who's always Mr. Bernstein from Citizen Kane for me when I see him) actually won't let her date Theron because of Wade's reputation. When Hannah finally lets the oblivious Theron in on what everyone else seems to know, he's outraged and refuses to live in the big house any longer, going to work in a factory to earn his own way but it's a factory which, inevitably, Wade owns a stake in.

It's a story of old class privilege colliding with the practical struggles of life and temptations of youth with a heavy dose of melodramatic karma thrown in. Theron never seems quite conscious of the fact that he ends up doing something very similar to what Wade's notorious for, mostly because the plot goes through an improbable contortion to get there, forcing characters not to say things to each other they realistically would've said. But for all that, the sordid spectacle of the film is fun, nicely counterbalanced by Mitchum and Peppard giving such natural, understated performances. Parker goes for the quivering voiced southern matriarch a bit too broadly (see her in Woman in White or Caged, she can be great) and Hamilton, while excelling as a childish wimp, doesn't quite make the transition to manliness the movie seems to think he does. But mainly this is a good movie.

The title comes from a beautiful poem by Robert Louis Stevenson that doesn't really fit the story:

Requiem

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Caught Between a Corey and a Mitchum

According to Wikipedia, 1949's Holiday Affair was a failure on its original release but, thanks to Turner Classic Movies broadcasting it over Christmas decades later, it became a minor classic. I'm going to have to side with 1949 audiences on this one; this is not a good movie. It has its moments--good stars in Robert Mitchum and Janet Leigh. But the screenplay quickly turns charm into mean tedium.

Robert Mitchum plays Steve Mason, a World War II veteran who now works as a department store clerk. He meets a pretty young woman named Connie Ennis (Leigh) one day when she impatiently buys an electric train set from him. Turns out she's a comparison shopper, which he sniffs out immediately, but he feels sorry for her when he learns she's a war widow, a single mother supporting her little son, Timmy (Gordon Gebert).

At first, the film is kind of cute, even the little boy isn't bad. Steve and Connie have a sweet enough first date in central park where they feed the seals before Steve decides to help her out on her job, posing as her husband when she goes to department stores to buy things. But there's a complication in that Connie's long time boyfriend, Carl (Wendell Corey), wants to marry her and already feels like he's part of the family.

The latter two thirds of the movie consist mostly of Carl and Steve taking turns telling Connie how she feels and thinks and what she should do. Steve gives her some lame psychoanalysis about how she's trying to turn her little boy into her husband while Carl insists marriage is just the thing to do. I wanted them both to go away. By the time Harry Morgan turns up in a small role as a police lieutenant, I was unwilling to meet the film halfway and grew irritated as Morgan played up an incredulous reaction to the circumstances of Steve's arrest in the park.

Robert Mitchum has such natural coolness and contentedness about him, it's almost a fascinating experiment to see how long it takes before that loses ground to obnoxious dialogue. Unfortunately it wasn't that long.

Pictures from the Waning Year

I don't know much about Anthony Bourdain, the widely loved celebrity chef who committed suicide this morning. I have a lot of friends who love his work and I've seen a thing or two from him I liked. His death naturally has provoked a lot of discussion online to-day--I've seen a few comments along the line of depression being a mental illness and that suicide doesn't have any causes external to the person who kills him or herself. I don't think it's that cut and dry, I think there are people more prone to commit suicide because of mental illness, but I don't think it's a coincidence suicide rates increase after terrible events. Under certain conditions, suicide is arguably a very sane choice. It's certainly a brave decision.

One thing of Bourdain's I read that I liked was his top ten list he came up with for Criterion in 2011. I love most of the movies on his list, including his number one pick, the 1973 film noir The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which Bourdain called a "bleak masterpiece of low-level criminality."

Set in Boston in autumn, the film centres on a gangster played by Robert Mitchum at the end of his career. He has to be in New Hampshire in a few days to face charges and he's looking for a way to cut a deal with the cops so he won't have to do time. But like a lot of movie gangsters, he still has an aversion to being a rat.

There's a lot of irony in the title. Although Mitchum's character, Eddie Coyle, is at the centre of the story, the film spends a lot of time focusing on weapons dealers, small time robbers, and other gangsters. It creates a very credible network of cops and crooks who speak to each other with well worn patterns of language. A crooked barman played by Peter Boyle only has to say that he's been talking to people on the phone before the cop he's with knows to give him twenty dollars to hear about the people he's been talking to. There are all these people who understand the game and need each other for the roles they play but fundamental to everything is distrust.

There's a gang of bank robbers--who wear some of the creepiest masks in the history of crime films--who have a very good, sure routine of taking bank managers' families hostage. But at base everything is done without any real plan for what to do when the latest score runs out. Everyone acts like there's some kind of normality to this life but Eddie's anxiety growing too big to be contained by Mitchum's trademark cool reflects how precarious it all is. Yet at the same time there's a feeling of stasis in the film for its minimal soundtrack and its quiet scenes of people just talking. Meanwhile, it's all set in some of the most beautifully autumnal environments committed to film, reflecting death going on all around however stable it might seem.

Most of the movie people are wearing shades of rust and grey. Splashes of colour like the bright yellow car of the weapons dealer or the neon cutting through the great black 70s night scenes only serve to emphasise the film's general autumn. It is certainly bleak, more Brian Eno bleak than Slayer bleak. Its an inexorable, steadily worsening reality, a portrait of people who talk themselves into a slow burning hell in the hopes of finding one swiftly delivered salvation.