Last night's movie was "Hell Bound"(1957), a high-concept crime flick with a plot as cynical as it's title. To be clear, "high concept" usually means "a potpourri of circumstances that would never happen in real life", a screenwriters concoction, and more on that in a moment. The movie opens with a voiceover, as A Man of Authority describes a shipboard heist in progress. The location is Wilmington, California, an oil and harbor town, not the most picturesque place but great as a Noir location. The narrator describes how the heist is worked out, between several accomplices, starting with a man in a raft who's signaling an SOS. He's picked up by the target ship, a freighter, then accomplice #2 boards when the ship docks and is quarantined. He is the health inspector of the Port of Los Angeles. He also happens to be a Type 1 diabetic, a fact pointed out by the narrator. I'll leave it to you, if you end up watching the movie, to learn the rest of the setup for yourself, because describing it would take too much time. Suffice it to say, when we learn how the heist has unfolded, we assume it's a past occurrence and that the gang has been caught and put in jail.
But that's where the screenwriter comes in, as mentioned a moment ago.
He throws us a curveball in the form of what we'll call a quasi fourth-wall breakthrough, a sort-of "movie within a movie", when we all of a sudden cut to the high-rise office of a securities executive (a major honcho), who is listening to a director's pitch, the same movie director who filmed the 10 minute short we've just been watching, in which we saw the ship heist in progress and listened to it described in voiceover. It turns out the whole thing was a pitch, a "cover letter" if you will, to this CEO, to ask for his monetary backing in a real heroin heist on a freighter ship coming into Wilmington harbor. And this isn't any old heroin but pharmaceutical grade. You can bet Keith Richards would've approved and cheered it on.
The CEO agrees to back it, on one condition, if his much-younger girlfriend "Paula" (June Blair) can be the "nurse" accomplice in the heist, because it involves a diabetic and an ambulance for distraction. The CEO wants Paula on the job to be sure he gets his cut of the money, when the heroin is sold.
But first, she has to actually pretend to be a nurse in a real emergency ambulance, and her heart is tested when her first patient is a little boy who dies. The screenwriter takes us in one direction, then the other. It's somewhat incoherent at first.
The leader of the heist is "Jordan" (John Russell, a hard-cheekboned Western star who looks like Dick Tracy if he was a sociopath). A big part of the problem I had with this movie is that the Jordan character is so thoroughly unlikable, beating up, running over, or stabbing everyone he can get his hands on, and overacting on top of that, that I felt I was in a Quentin Tarantino nightmare. Actually, a film like this is his dream. He wishes he could make a movie this professional, and it is that, featuring good camerawork, solid direction by William J. Hole, whoever the hell he is (and it's a good thing his middle initial isn't A). But the story, while effective, is ludicrous.
First of all, why would Jordan hire a heroin addict to be the point man for the heist, the guy in the raft who gets it going? In a side note, the addict also happens to be an abortionist; the movie's "butcher boy" scene is a repulsive classic of Crummy Cinema, you couldn't overact more, or have worse dialogue. But yeah - why would he hire a jittery, unreliable heroin addict to be the raft guy, and then also use a diabetic, who could have an unexpected medical problem, like insulin shock from the stress of the crime?
In the middle of all this nonsense is a budding romance between the CEO's slutty girlfriend Paula, who's now playing nurse, and her ambulance driver Stuart Whitman, with his classic butt chin. He knows nothing of the heist, and she, after seeing the little boy die, wants out of it. Now she wants to marry nice guy Whitman.
It's as if the screenwriter said, "Hmm, I've got some leftovers in the fridge: a psychopathic movie director, a crooked CEO who happens to be his friend, a heroin addict abortionist, a diabetic health inspector, a slut, wait, make that two sluts! Okay, I've got it! I'll make a casserole in which all these people are going to hell. I'll call it Hell Bound. It'll be delicious." And it does work, because of the professional direction, photography and excellent location. They even have a finale that takes place, in part, amidst the triple-stacked wreckage of old Red Line trolley cars. That part is really cool. The whole thing looks great, and the acting is passable too (if you exclude the "butcher boy" scene), but you could not find a more reprehensible and unlikable group of characters if you searched far and wide. John Russell's Jordan is particularly abhorrent. We're gonna give it Two Bigs anyway. It got a 6.3 on IMDB, a high number - you might really like it. It was different, I'll give it that much, but the characters made me sick. One guy, a heroin dealer named "Daddy", who hangs out in a nightclub wearing shades, is doing a Harvey Keitel impersonation before there was a Harvey Keitel. The picture is razor sharp. ////
The previous night, in "Desirable Lady"(1944), "Eve" (Jan Wiley) is an exotic dancer performing in a New York nightclub, when her manager calls the police as a publicity stunt, to generate the Wow Factor. As Eve points out (not knowing who reported her), she actually did nothing wrong. Her dance had no nudity, and while mildly erotic, it was graceful in the Egyptian tradition after which it was patterned.
No matter. "The law's the law" say the cops, and in New York, the law forbids exotic dancing, a nebulous definition at the time. While waiting for Mac (her manager) so she can strangle him, a bail bondsman enters the station to bail out a "regular customer", a notorious drunken lady named "Tillie" (Cheerio Merideth). While there, Eve asks for his help. He posts her bail, too, and boy, is she gonna kill "Mac" (Phil Warren). While at the bondsman's office, she tells him her story: how she was orphaned at 2, when her actor parents were killed in a theater collapse in Colorado. "I guess acting is in my blood, though I never knew them." Something about her story rings a bell with the bondsman, who keeps a scrapbook filled with want ads seeking persons with unclaimed money.
After Eve leaves, it strikes him. He remembers a certain ad, looks it up, and sees that, in 1923, such a theater collapse happened. And recently, in the want ad he'd cut out and taped in his scrapbook, the poster was seeking the daughter of the actor couple who died in the collapse, to inform her she may be the heir to a hair tonic fortune. The bondsman, a crook, figures Eve is as good a possibility of being the heiress as anyone, and decides to promote her as such, even on thin credentials. He explains the scheme to Mac her manager, who isn't sold until the bondsman explains the amount of money, a fortune. "Well, okay. but I'm not sure Eve would want this." They actually think the chances are slim-to-none that Eve is really the heiress.
When they take her to meet the Sardham family, whose money derives from the fortune, "Uncle Horace" (Edward Keane) is receptive, but his wife "Lavinia" (Betty Blythe) is not. Lavinia hates pretty Eve on sight, and even more when she learns Eve's a dancer. Remember that, in old movies, "dancer" is equivalent to prostitute. But Eve is a class act, whose dancing draws the line between sex and art. Madonna should have such class and talent (as if).
Eve discovers one Sardham relative, "Aunt Sarah" (Janet Scott), hidden away in a bedroom by the family because she, too, is a rebel, seen as non-presentable in society. Together, Eve and Aunt Sarah team up to flaunt the family values. The Sardham's daughter "Millicent" (Marilyn McConnell) comes up with the idea of staging a talent show to foil Eve, believing she'll make a fool of herself. Millicent arranges for Eve to fail, assigning her a scene from Cleopatra to act out in front of a high-society audience. Eve's real talent is dancing, not acting, and her "Cleopatra" reading is an utter flop as Millicent intended. Undaunted, Eve returns onstage to perform her Egyptian dance again and the society audience is thrilled, but - surprisingly - not scandalized. During the show, Mac is confronted in the dressing room by the bail bondsman, who wants his "cut" of Eve's large inheritance, because Uncle Horace now believes she really is the Sardham's long-lost granddaughter. When Mac tells the bondsman to stuff it. a fight starts, a gun goes off, and the bondsman dies, with only six minutes left in the movie! Is that too late to start a crime plot? The script is unconventionally arranged, and apparently, "Desirable Lady" is "the most re-titled film in Hollywood history" according to IMDB, due to the exotic dance scenes, which had to be cut or trimmed in many countries, hence the re-titling ("A Fig Leaf for Eve" was one alternative). We actually saw a more risque dance by Sally Rand in "Sunset Murder Case", which came out in 1938. At any rate, Jan Wiley is a talented dancer, also. Not sure why her act caused the hubub it did on screen. Her "romance" with Mac is played as a second banana farce. The main theme is the question of Eve's "worthiness" in high society, but when she does her thing onstage (thereby showing up the stuffy Millicent and Lavinia), the audience loves her. Two Big Thumbs Up, and as a bonus, there's an independent performance in the nightclub by a blues organist named Selika Pettiford. She's fantastic, and reason enough to see the film. She could've been a Deep Purple keyboardist! The picture is good, not great. ////
And that's all I have for the moment. Speaking of Deep Purple, they were my blogging music: "In Rock" and "Shades of Deep Purple". My late night is Handel's Florindo Opera. I hope your air conditioners are working well, as it's heating up out there, and I send you Tons of Love as always.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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