Tonight's movie was a low budget noir from Republic Pictures, sporting a Statement Title : "The Man Is Armed"(1956). See past blogs for an elaboration on the subject of S.Ts......
Reliable noir veteran Dane Clark plays "Johnny Morrison", a hothead who's just been paroled from San Quentin for a crime he didn't commit. Once out of the joint, he heads straight to L.A., to find the guy responsible for framing him. Thinking it was a former co-worker at the trucking company he drove for prior to getting locked up, Johnny confronts the guy at his apartment and ends up pushing him off the top of the building, to his death. No one sees him do it, but the cops - led by the great Barton MacLane (of 1930s gangster films) - are hot on his trail, suspecting him from the get go.
Free for the moment, and with an alibi, Johnny heads back to the office of the trucking company to ask for his old job back. The company owner is William Talman, which indicates right away that Johnny is in deeper trouble than he knows, because Talman is "The Hitch Hiker" from 1953, a sociopath of the highest order. Casting always plays a part in motion picture storylines, and once you've seen enough films you start to learn "who's who" in the sense of typecasting. Because of that you know what to expect going in. In an aside, I should mention that "The Hitch Hiker" was a top notch crime film directed by Ida Lupino, one of the first successful female directors who was also a movie star in her own right.
But William Talman? He always played a deadly slimeball, but a smart one and not to be trifled with......
So yeah, Johnny is in over his head by getting involved again with his old boss. As soon as they meet, Talman informs Johnny that he was the one who framed him. Then he laughs in his face. He insinuates that he's aware Johnny has killed his trucker co-worker, in a case of mistaken revenge. So now Talman has him blackmailed, adding insult to injury, and he forces Johnny to go along with him on a Brinks Truck robbery.
It sounds like a heck of a good setup, and it is. The trouble is that things become far fetched in the second half of the film. The first half is pure hard-boiled noir. But then they left the egg in the water a little too long and the yolk turned grey. Johnny, a sensitive tough guy, starts playing the movie's theme on piano. What gives? Is he writing the score as we go? He's in love with William Talman's secretary (May Wynn), a woman unsure of herself who is torn between the erratic passion of Johnny and a highly respected doctor she's been dating since he went to prison. Johnny's efforts to tear her away from the doctor, and to free himself from the wiles of William Talman will spin the film off it's track, as plot points progress into The Stretchable, then The Unbelievable.
I'm all for suspending disbelief, and in fact I go out of my way to do so, but when things get to the point where I say "this would never happen", then you know a film has gone off the rails, because I am very forgiving (except for truly bad movies like "Cosmopolis", which I turned off at the three minute mark).
In short, "The Man Is Armed" is still worth a view, though it doesn't hold up past it's promising first half.
"Neighborhood Note" : The legendary Dick Reeves makes a brief appearance as one of the Brinks Job hoodlums. As reported in the past, Mr. Reeves lived right across the street from us on Hatton in Reseda. Me and Pearl pass his house every day on our walks. /////
I just finished reading a book called "Man and Technics" by the German philosopher Oswald Spengler. It's actually more of a pamphlet, only 77 pages long, but it's worth reading in the context of what I was talking about the other day : the idea of progress in the modern era. I came to Spengler because I have on my bookshelf my Dad's copy of his most famous work : "The Decline of the West", written in 1931. I am not a student of philosophy, never studied the Greeks in school except maybe five minutes of Plato and Aristotle in 8th grade. And of course German philosophers are known to be - depending on your outlook - unbearably heavy (geez, why don't you lighten up, you German philosophers?). So yeah, I'm not much for philosophy, because I'm still working on my own haha, but having read some of Thomas Aquinas' "Summa Theologica", what I am impressed by, in an enormous way, is the ability of a major league thinker to organise his thoughts right down to the finest detail, and then to use logic to prove his point.
This process, at it's highest level, goes way beyond the tiresome political debates of today. Pick up the "Summa Theologica" and see for yourself. This is thinking things out to their ultimate conclusion, point by point. I found a copy of the book in the Free Bin at the library many years ago. I only made it through a dozen pages because it's so incredibly dense with repetitive logical verbiage, but suffice it to say that Aquinas would smoke any trial lawyer living today. Reading his statements, you literally can't argue with what he is saying. The same is basically true with Oswald Spengler, although in his case opinion gets in the way of pure logic. Still, his pamphlet is worth reading, if you've ever felt alienated, or pulled along in the unrelenting current, of this thing we call "progress". Spengler was a genius thinker himself. He conceived of what he called "the Armed Hand" as the first example of modern man's technology. Spengler starts with the hand itself, with it's unique shape and opposable thumb, and proposes that all subsequent technology (the root of which means "touch") arises from Man's realisation of the capabilities of his hand, coupled with the animal instincts of his mind. He takes this all the way to the invention of nuclear weapons.
Spengler's view is very cynical, and I do not agree with his final conclusions, but I strongly recommend this short work, "Man and Technics", because like the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, his ideas are so brilliantly argued. You can read it in two days, and if nothing else, it will make you think about the world we are living in. /////
That's all for tonight. See you in the morning. Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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