Chilly Scenes of Winter (Joan Micklin Silver, 1979)

Cast: John Heard, Mary Beth Hurt, Peter Riegert, Kenneth McMillan, Gloria Grahame, Nora Heflin, Jerry Hardin, Tarah Nutter, Mark Metcalf, Allen Joseph, Frances Bay, Griffin Dunne. Screenplay: Joan Micklin Silver, based on a novel by Ann Beattie. Cinematography: Bobby Byrne. Production design: Peter Jamison. Film editing: Cynthia Scheider. Music: Ken Lauber. 

Chilly Scenes of Winter is a kind of deconstructed screwball romantic comedy, meaning that it turns on the often comic efforts of a couple to overcome the dysfunction in their relationship. But the romance is soured and the comedy is darkened by circumstances they can't control, as well as their own egos. Initially released under the title Head Over Heels, it had a "happy ending" that felt unearned and it failed at the box office. Then writer-director Joan Micklin Silver revised the film a few years later, with a freeze-frame ending that left the protagonist in a kind of emotional limbo, and under the title of the Ann Beattie novel it was based on, it was better received. It's still full of cringe moments and skewed relationships, but in its own itchy way it makes dramatic sense. 

Human Desire (Fritz Lang, 1954)

Gloria Grahame and Glenn Ford in Human Desire

Cast: Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Broderick Crawford, Edgar Buchanan, Kathleen Case, Peggy Maley, Diane DeLare, Grandon Rhodes. Screenplay: Alfred Hayes, based on a novel by Émile Zola. Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Art direction: Robert Peterson. Film editing: Aaron Stell. Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof.

Glenn Ford's boyish nice-guy looks and personality always seemed to me to make him an odd choice for tough-guy roles like the ones he played in Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) and The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953). Lang apparently didn't have a problem with that disjunction: Having cast Ford opposite Gloria Grahame in Human Desire, he reteamed them in the latter film, with good effect. Still, Ford's limitations are apparent when you compare him with Jean Gabin, who played much the same role, a railroad engineer caught up in seamy doings, in Jean Renoir's earlier version of the Émile Zola novel, La Bête Humaine (1938). Gabin had a solidity that Ford lacks. Human Desire is, for the most part, a good contribution to the film noir genre, especially Burnett Guffey's cinematography, which uses the railway yard shadows to good effect. The screenplay has a few good lines -- "All women are alike. They just got different faces so the men can tell them apart." -- but it cheats with a happy ending for Ford's character that's at odds with the spirit of both Zola's novel and Renoir's version of it. Daniele Amfitheatrof's score is laid on too heavily, as if the filmmakers didn't trust the actors or the screenplay to carry the burden of what's being done and said.

Sudden Fear (David Miller, 1952)

Jack Palance and Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear

Myra Hudson: Joan Crawford
Lester Blaine: Jack Palance
Irene Neves: Gloria Grahame
Steve Kearney: Bruce Bennett
Ann Taylor: Virginia Huston
Junior Kearney: Mike Connors

Director: David Miller
Screenplay: Lenore J. Coffee, Robert Smith
Based on a story by Edna Sherry
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Art direction: Boris Leven
Film editing: Leon Barsha
Music: Elmer Bernstein

Joan Crawford could play almost anything but soft, but then she never had to -- I suspect she saw to that. What she could do instead was play vulnerable, though you often felt a twinge of sympathy for the person who was attacking her, knowing that she had ways of getting more than even. David Miller's Sudden Fear is a revenge drama, and one of the best. Crawford's Myra Hudson is a playwright who uses her skills at contriving a plot to get even with her cheating, murderous husband, Lester Blaine. Her plot goes awry, but fate gives her a hand anyway. What Crawford knew how to do better than almost anyone was to play off her two most notable facial features, her enormous eyes and her strong mouth and jaw, in alternation. So when Myra is falling in love with Lester, the eyes tell us everything we need to know; when the truth about her husband is revealed, the eyes grow moist and anguished and the mouth and jaw tremble; and when she sets out to take her revenge, the mouth grows hard and the jaw firm. Crawford learned this kind of control in silent movies, of course, and used it effectively throughout her long career. Changing tastes in acting, abetted by parodies of Crawford's performances, have made recent generations see her performing style as mannered, though critics have begun to re-evaluate and praise her real acting gifts. Crawford and her costar, Jack Palance, received Oscar nominations. Palance, with his knobby, death's-head face and carnivorous grin, initially seems like an odd choice for a leading man -- as Myra Hudson herself acknowledges when she fires him from her play -- but he's hugely effective in the role of faux swain and greedy menace.

The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953)

Gloria Grahame and Glenn Ford in The Big Heat

Dave Bannion: Glenn Ford
Debby Marsh: Gloria Grahame
Kate Bannion: Jocelyn Brando
Mike Lagana: Alexander Scourby
Vince Stone: Lee Marvin
Bertha Duncan: Jeanette Nolan
Larry Gordon: Adam Williams
Tierney: Peter Whitney
Lt. Ted Wilks: Willis Bouchey
Commissioner Higgins: Howard Wendell
George Rose: Chris Alcaide
Lucy Chapman: Dorothy Green
Atkins: Dan Seymour
Selma Parker: Edith Evanson

Director: Fritz Lang
Screenplay: Sydney Boehm
Based on a novel by William P. McGivern
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Art direction: Robert Peterson
Film editing: Charles Nelson
Music: Henry Vars

So many of the roles in Glenn Ford's career established him as a figure of middle-American blandness that it comes as a surprise to see the cold-eyed intensity of which he was capable in the role of the vengeful Dave Bannion in The Big Heat. He's still the good guy, fighting crime bosses and corrupt cops, but with the film noir twist that he's willing to resort to some pretty bad means to achieve his ends. He's also a solid foil for Gloria Grahame at her sultriest and a tough foe for Lee Marvin at his thuggiest. We get a glimpse of the more familiar Ford in the scenes with Bannion and his wife and daughter that verge a bit on stickiness, though the more to emphasize Bannion's quest for vengeance after his wife is killed and his daughter threatened by Alexander Scourby's suave mobster, Mike Lagana. (Is it just my prurient imagination, or does the scene in which Lagana is wakened for a phone call by George, his bodyguard, wearing a bathrobe, suggest that George may be doing more to Lagana's body than just guarding it?) The Big Heat is a classic, one of the highlights of Fritz Lang's American career, and it still has the power not only to startle and shock but also to amuse, thanks to a solid screenplay -- Grahame in particular is given some delicious lines to speak, including Debby's classic riposte to Bertha Duncan, "We're sisters under the mink."

In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950)

The "lonely place" is Hollywood, where Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) is a screenwriter with a barely held-in-check violent streak. This celebrated movie contains one of Bogart's best performances, though it looks and feels like the low-budget production it was. Bogart's own company, Santana, produced it for release through Columbia, instead of Bogart's employer, Warner Bros., which may explain why, apart from Bogart and Gloria Grahame, the supporting cast is so unfamiliar: The best-known face among them is Frank Lovejoy, who plays Bogart's old army buddy, now a police detective. In a Lonely Place seems to be set in a different Hollywood from the one seen in the year's other great noir melodrama, Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. There are no movie star cameos and glitzy settings in the Bogart film. What this one has going for it, however, is a haunting, off-beat quality, along with some surprising heat generated between Bogart and Grahame, who plays Laurel Gray, a would-be movie actress with an intriguing, only partly glimpsed past. She has, for example, a rather bullying masseuse (Ruth Gillette), who seems to be a figure out of this past. In fact, the whole film is made up of enigmatic figures, including Steele's closest friends, his agent, Mel Lippman (Art Smith), and an aging alcoholic actor, Charlie Waterman (Robert Warwick). Both of them stick with Steele despite his tendency to fly off the handle: He insults and at one point even slugs the agent, while at another he defends the actor with his fists against an insult. Though the central plot has to do with Steele's being suspected of murdering a hat-check girl (Martha Stewart) he brought to his apartment to tell him the plot of a novel he's supposed to adapt, the film is less a murder mystery than a study of a damaged man and his inability to overcome whatever made him that way. And despite the usual tendency of Hollywood films to end with a resolution by tying up loose ends, In a Lonely Place leaves its characters as tensely enigmatic as they were at the start -- perhaps even more so. The screenplay by Andrew Solt reworked Edmund H. North's adaptation of a novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, with much help from director Ray.