On Dangerous Ground: This Gun For Hire (1942), Touch of Evil (1958)

This Gun For Hire (Frank Tuttle, 1942)

A lone hitman, evermore. Scarred, Raven 

is kind to animals. As our better angels 

before their wings were clipped and 

the tabloids' discredited absence. A crippled 

remnant of an old-school country song 

witnesses one of his transgressions. Rise up, 

shorty, you have nothing to lose but your fedora. 

Window-licking alien visiting a diseased 

planet. Like the last purveyor of commodity 

fetishism, lost in an abstract chiraroscuro, 

whose oblique angles stain the walls. 

To watch is to be esconsed in an old Etonian
nightmare. Is this what war and modernity
have wrought? Rave on, you catalogue of
fear and looping, offered to the highest
bidder. Naturally, the pettiest of criminals 

will hand over marked bills, then report
them stolen. What a scam! Like being

caught in a drift of historical artifacts. 

She asks him, why not do the decent thing 

and kill for peace? What a guy. What a 

fool am I. Better stick to someone else's

song, tweaked by another Tinseltown 

leftist. Life imitating art or vice versa, 

like Standard Oil greasing the gears of 

I.G. Farben. Wings clipped, Raven's heart, 

dry, a leaf droning in the wind, wired beyond 

the last proletarian chimney, where smoke 

will obscure each and every object of desire.

Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)

Tracking the time it takes to boil an egg, 
as chorography melts into crackerjack 
philosophy. Fortune-telling soon turns 

into a cottage industry wherein only fat 

cops and the shadow know. Deliciously 

spent, alienated labour, surplus capital, 

and a soupcon of false consciousness. 

The sum of which I sleep therefore 

I am. And so say more with less, then

less with less. Because stylisation will

betray the territory as well as the map.

It's the image, stupid! Everyone trying

not to be hookwinked. That he was some 

kind of man. As opposed to what? may

I ask. Ad absurdum made flesh, stored 

in some bumpkin's menagerie. All power 

to the echo chamber! Straddling borders 

superating north and south, here and there, 

law and order, motels and flea pits, Rocky

and Bullwinkle, Santa Monica and Venice. 

Charlton, not yet an NRA shill, mis-cast. 

Unlike,"Shakespearean loony" Weaver. 

Or sleazy Akim, strangled, a lamb's tongue 

stuck in his craw.  Marlene second only to 

Mercedes, ambiguous motorcycle madonna 

gypsy queen, threatening hubby's wife 

with a dubiously accented "mary jane." 

Hey, guapa, how about throwing a little 

smoke my way! Or am I already high? 

Enough to know Orson wanted Tijuana 

but settled for mongoose oil wells, trash-

filled canals and a cliché-trodden boardwalk. 

Boasting he could make shinola from shit. 

Not an uncommon tendency in that line 

of work. At least the rough cut was delivered 

on time, his future not yet used up, that is 

until the assholes demanded he re-edit and 

re-shoot. Released as a B-movie, supporting 

Hedy's Female Animal. Poor Orson. Nearly 

300 pounds of topographical genius,

the padding and corruption oozing from

every pore. A sign of the times emblazoned 

on celluloid wings: now and forever, a lean 

on his body and a mortgage on his soul.