Station West (Sidney Lanfield, 1948)

Dick Powell and Jane Greer in Station West

Cast: Dick Powell, Jane Greer, Agnes Moorehead, Tom Powers, Gordon Oliver, Steve Brodie, Guinn "Big Boy" Williams, Raymond Burr, Regis Toomey, Burl Ives. Screenplay: Frank Fenton, Winston Miller, based on a novel by Luke Short. Cinematography: Harry J. Wild. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Feild M. Gray. Film editing: Frederic Knudtson. Music: Heinz Roemheld. 

Station West is an odd duck of a Western. Oh, there's the usual stagecoach and saloon stuff, some gunplay, and a big fistfight. But it also has the kind of snappy dialogue you associate with film noir, and nobody is exactly what they seem. It's also threaded through with songs performed by an uncredited Burl Ives, who plays a hotel owner who's also a kind of Greek chorus, commenting on the action with his ballads. One of the refrains of his songs, "A man can't grow old where there's women and gold," is sung often enough that we get the point. The women are played by Jane Greer and Agnes Moorehead, and they give no quarter. Greer is Charlene, known as Charlie, and she owns most of the business in the town, but not the gold mine, which belongs to Mrs. Caslon, played by Moorehead. And then a stranger named Haven (Dick Powell) comes to town. He's really an undercover agent from military intelligence investigating the deaths of two soldiers who were guarding a shipment of gold from Mrs. Caslon's mine that got hijacked. Powell's character is a boots-and-sixguns variation on his Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944), quick with a quip, catnip to the women, able to take a licking and keep on sleuthing. Somehow this mash-up of film noir and horse opera works. There's nice camera work, too, from Harry J. Wild, who knows how to use shadows effectively.    

Arrebato (Iván Zulueta, 1979)

Will More in Arrebato

Cast: Eusebio Poncela, Cecilia Roth, Will More, Marta Fernández Muro, Helena Fernán-Gómez, Carmen Giralt, Max Madera. Screenplay: Iván Zulueta. Cinematography: Ángel Luis Fernández. Film editing: José Luis Peláez. Music: Negativo. 

Pedro Almodóvar became the face of post-Franco Spanish filmmaking in the United States, where we often overlook the powerful influences on his work by other Spanish directors. He was, for example, a great admirer of Iván Zulueta's Arrebato, for which he dubbed the voice for Helena Fernán-Gómez's character, Gloria, and he later cast its lead actor, Eusebio Poncela, in his films Matador (1986) and Law of Desire (1987). Certainly it's possible to see how the uncompromising work of Zulueta in Arrebato, his second and last feature-length movie, may have liberated the imaginations of Almodóvar and his fellow Spanish filmmakers after the death of Franco in 1975. It's a movie about the intoxication of making movies, and about intoxication and its consequences. Zulueta, who was a heroin addict, gives us a film about a similarly addicted filmmaker, José Sirgado (Poncela), who just after finishing the production of a horror movie receives a package in the mail from Pedro (Will More), a man he has met only twice before. It contains an audio tape, a reel of Super 8 film, and a key to Pedro's apartment. And so begins a complex tale in which José becomes entwined in Pedro's very odd life and obsessions, at the end of which José becomes obsessed himself, absorbed into the strange experiences that Pedro has documented on film. Arrebato (which means "rapture") is an often muddled and maddening film, but muddle and madness are what it's about. It flopped commercially, but gathered a following at midnight movie screenings in Madrid, which eventually led to its video release and a wider audience.