Saturday, July 14, 2018

On Dangerous Ground: Film Noir Poetry- Fallen Angel and Force of Evil.

















Fallen Angel (Otto Premminger, 1946)

That was then, when Otto could still
see in the dark, anti-fascism was a 
thing, and straight to the heart the 
method. Even  at the expense of a 
premature cliché. Like sharp-talking, 
eye-candy Stella waiting tables at 
Pop’s, Hopperesquebeach-front 
diner, future real estate fodder, where 
the regulars gawk, slobber, and thrust, 
sublimated nickels into an insatiable 
juke-box. Cue the guileless June, 
another initiate in this cult of the fallen. 
86'd by Zanuck for turning down his 
musical, paid for with a sixteen year 
absence. Meanwhile, designated racaille
Eric plays both sides, as he drifts towards 
the invariable, stranger to every emotion 
save paranoia. Not that a vedette need be 
an actor. Take Mary Holland's nom-de-
plumed novel, revolving camera and 
lighting illiminating Eric’s predatory 
eavesdropping. Less ocular intercourse 
than Otto eroticism. To be filed next to 
another object of consumption: Otto 
mobiles, savoured, rebuilt engines, 
inflated chassis, primed for big budgets, 
low mileage, laundered stock, back-
handed pay-offs, blacklisted schlemiels, 
tuck-and-rolled garage, where no one enters, 
Ottomatically, from the sightless dark.   
      





















Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1948)


Fix the numbers, break the banks, 
loan them money, take them over. 
Truly an American story, with an
ever-thinning line between crime 
and business, its pursuit, warping 
happiness, and whatever. Been 
businessman all my life," says 
hard-working Leo, "and I still don’t 
know what business is.” Equally, 
what is corruption and when wasn't 
it endemic? But brother, Joe, has a 
counter credo: Taking what you 
want is natural, but getting your 
pleasure from not taking it…don’t 
you see what a black thing that is.” 
Naturally, refusing to take advantage, 
is, for the takers, malignantly un-
American. And though one might 
speculate on Joe's reference to "a 
black thing," it's social Darwinism 
that keeps it all going, and why Joe's 
awakening is barely political, but as 
much as Hollywood could take, then 
as now. Blank verse, last chance to 
miss the mark before the demigods 
arrived and dismantling became the 
only game in town. Unlike those who 
danced in fear, sleepless from what 
should never have been said, with 
numbers only takers could understand.    

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