Ladies in Retirement (Charles Vidor, 1941)

 

Isobel Elsom and Ida Lupino in Ladies in Retirement (Charles Vidor, 1941)

Cast: Ida Lupino, Louis Hayward, Evelyn Keyes, Elsa Lanchester, Edith Barrett, Isobel Elsom, Emma Dunn, Queenie Leonard, Clyde Cook. Screenplay: Garrett Fort, Reginald Denham, based on a play by Denham and Edward Percy. Cinematography: George Barnes. Production design: Lionel Banks. Music: Ernst Toch.

Ladies in Retirement, a nifty little thriller included in the Criterion Channel’s “Noir by Gaslight” series, centers on a steely performance by Ida Lupino. She plays Ellen Creed, a Victorian spinster trying to make a life for herself and her two eccentric sisters, Emily (Elsa Lanchester) and Louisa (Edith Barrett). The sisters have been living in London with a family that has become fed up with them, so Ellen is forced to persuade her employer to let them come live with her in a somewhat gloomy house on the edge of a marshland. The employer, whom Ellen serves as a kind of companion/housekeeper, is the imperious Leonora Fiske, a retired “actress.” (We later learn that she was only a fourth-from-the-right chorus girl, who managed to accumulate a small fortune from stage door johnnies and wealthy patrons.) Unfortunately, the sisters manage to alienate Leonora as well. Louisa is batty and hypersensitive, and Emily is brusque and a collector of things she picks up on her walks, like shells and birds’ nests and even a dead bird, which she leaves scattered around the house that Leonora bullies the maid-of-all-work, Lucy (Evelyn Keyes), to keep immaculate. Ellen knows that she can’t make a living for herself and her sisters, and she doesn’t want them sent to an asylum, so she decides to take things, which means Leonora’s neck, in her own hands. Curtain on act one. (The stage origins of the movie are apparent throughout.) Enter Albert Feather (Louis Hayward), a somewhat distant relative of the Creed women, who calls Ellen “Auntie” and charms the sisters. He also charms Lucy. Albert has been to the house before, while Ellen was in London collecting her sisters, and managed to flatter Leonora into giving him some money. But now he’s on the lam, wanted for embezzlement from the bank where he worked. When he finds that Leonora is gone – “on a trip,” as the story goes – he begins to suspect that Ellen is hiding something. And so the plot hinges on his quest to uncover Ellen’s secrets, with the aid of the infatuated Lucy. It’s a nicely paced movie, with fine performances, especially by Barrett and Lanchester as the weird sisters. Though remembered today more as a director than as an actor, Lupino, then in her early 20s, excels in a part that had been played on Broadway by the much older Flora Robson. Although Louisa and Emily are the more flamboyantly mad of the sisters, Lupino manages to hint that Ellen is the maddest of them all.

Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971)

Dennis Weaver in Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971)

 Cast: Dennis Weaver, Jacqueline Scott, Eddie Fierstone, Lou Frizzell, Gene Dynarski, Lucille Benson, Tim Herbert, Charles Seel, Shirley O'Hara, Alexander Lockwood, Amy Douglas, Cary Loftin. Screenplay: Richard Matheson. Cinematography: Jack A. Marta. Art direction: Robert A. Smith. Film editing: Frank Morriss. Music: Billy Goldenberg.

Of course the protagonist of Steven Spielberg’s Duel is named David Mann. David vs. Goliath, man vs. machine, get it? This entertaining mashup of a road rage fable with a monster movie launched one of the greatest careers in movie history, and it began in that once-maligned medium, the TV movie. After its modest success as an ABC Movie of the Week – it was only 18th in the rankings of TV movies for 1971, but got good reviews and, more importantly, attracted industry notice – it was expanded into a theatrical feature that played internationally and had a limited release in the United States. Spielberg added the opening sequence of the car leaving the garage and hitting the road, wittily filmed from the point of view of the car, establishing it as much a character in the film as its driver (Dennis Weaver). Mann’s phone call home to his wife (Jacqueline Scott) was added, their unresolved quarrel making his nervousness and irritability more credible. Adding the sequence with the stalled school bus gave Spielberg a chance to heighten the suspense by showing the tanker truck as a malevolent, lurking monster with a single-minded focus on Mann – after he escapes, the truck gives the bus the push it needed. But even in the original version, the scenes at the gas station and in the diner are enough to establish Mann’s isolation and helplessness. Spielberg’s insistence on location shooting in rural Los Angeles County and along the Sierra Highway – the producers wanted to control the budget by faking a lot of the movie in the studio – adds immeasurably to the sense of Mann’s solitary plight. Spielberg often has trouble ending his movies – viz., the cemetery coda to Saving Private Ryan (1998) and the extended epilogue to Schindler’s List (1993), both of which have stirred critical debate – but he found the right one for Duel, with his victorious David tossing pebbles into the wreckage of the vanquished Goliath.

The Unbelievable Truth (Hal Hartley, 1989)

 

Adrienne Shelly in The Unbelievable Truth (Hal Hartley, 1989)

Cast: Adrienne Shelly, Robert John Burke, Chris Cooke, Julia McNeal, Katherine Mayfield, Gary Sauer, Mark Chandler Bailey, David Healy, Matt Malloy, Edie Falco. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Carla Gerona. Film editing: Hal Hartley. Music: Jim Coleman.

In his debut feature, Hal Hartley adroitly mixes the old “stranger comes to town” story trope into a romantic comedy. The result has the DNA of Jim Jarmusch and Preston Sturges in it, but it’s all Hartley’s own, and it’s lovely. The film begins with a hitchhiker who finally gets a ride after repairing a broken-down car whose driver had earlier passed him up. Because the hitchhiker is dressed all in black, driver asks him if he’s a priest. (Not the last time someone will ask him that.) No, he says, but when he says that he’s been in prison, we see the car come to an abrupt stop and the man and his bag get tossed out of the car. It’s a harbinger of the numerous times in the film when the man in black, whose name is Joshua Hutton (Robert John Burke), will have to confront his past. When he finally arrives at his destination, his old home town, the first person he meets is a young woman named Pearl (Julia McNeal), who faints dead away at the sight of him. We learn that Joshua was sent to prison after he killed Pearl’s sister and her father. So he’s not really a stranger come to town, but he might as well be, since most of the town can’t quite remember what he was accused of – the gossips inflate it into some kind of mass murder. Eventually, we will find out the not-so-unbelievable truth of what Joshua did, but not before he falls in love with Audry Hugo (Adrienne Shelly), who helps him get a job in her father’s auto repair shop. It’s a droll romance, complicated by the fact that Audry walks around in a gloomy funk, convinced that the world is about to end in a nuclear holocaust. Burke and Shelly play their roles with a kind of deadpan that serves as a foil to the emotional volatility that surrounds them. There’s Audry’s father, Vic (Chris Cooke), whose hilarious exasperation with her is reminiscent of William Demarest’s outbursts in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944). There’s her ex-boyfriend, Mike (Mark Chandler Bailey), who is so infuriated at being dumped by her that he gets into shoving matches with almost every man he suspects of being a rival. But the film would be nothing without Hartley’s ability to skew every turn in the plot or action of his characters in a direction just a few degrees off what we expect. It’s a sly, loopy gem of a movie.