Blind Alley (Charles Vidor, 1939)

Cast: Chester Morris, Ralph Bellamy, Ann Dvorak, Joan Perry, Melville Cooper, Rose Stradner, John Eldredge, Ann Doran, Marc Lawrence, Stanley Brown, Scotty Beckett, Milburn Stone, Marie Blake. Screenplay: Philip MacDonald, Michael Blankfort, Albert Duffy, based on a play by James Warwick. Cinematography: Lucien Ballard. Art direction: Lionel Banks. Film editing: Otto Meyer. Music: George Parrish. 

Blind Alley has a familiar setup: a killer on the run from the cops takes a family hostage in their own home. Chester Morris plays the killer, Hal Wilson, who moves in on the Shelby household, whose head is a college professor and psychiatrist played by Ralph Bellamy. Wilson, it turns out, is a psychopath, plagued by a recurrent dream, and Dr. Shelby sees the opportunity to disarm him by using the tools of psychotherapy. It works, sort of, in a rather too simplistic fashion, as the shrink decodes the symbolism of Wilson's dream as a traumatic event from his childhood that the killer has been repressing. The movie is a little stagy, as any adaptation of a play to screen is likely to be, but it's tidy enough in its storytelling that I didn't mind the obvious curtain lines and creaky attempts to "open out" the action -- for example, by visualizing the contents of Wilson's nightmare. It's nice to see Bellamy playing something other than a stooge for Cary Grant, as he did so memorably in The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937) and His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1941). Morris is given to chewing the scenery but Ann Dvorak is good as his moll, Mary, who knows how to handle him well enough that Shelby can work his cure. The movie is sometimes cited as one of the first films noir, which only shows how flexible any definition of that genre has to be. 

Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May, 1976)

John Cassavetes and Peter Falk in Mikey and Nicky

Cast: Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, Ned Beatty, Rose Arrick, Carol Grace, William Hickey, Sanford Meisner, Joyce Van Patten, M. Emmet Walsh. Screenplay: Elaine May. Cinematography: Bernie Abramson, Lucien Ballard, Jack Cooperman. Production design: Paul Sylbert. Film editing: John Carter, Sheldon Kahn. Music: John Strauss.

"I came as soon as I got your towel." That line, spoken by Mikey (Peter Falk) to Nicky (John Cassavetes) after the latter has thrown a bottle and a towel out of his hotel room window to get the former's attention, has an Elaine May ring to it. It's followed by a sardonic in-joke when Mikey chides Nicky for throwing the bottle because the broken glass could have put his eye out. (Falk lost an eye to cancer when he was 3.) The scene feels like a set-up for a comedy of rude manners, which Mikey and Nicky could well have become. But because May famously let the two great improvisatory actors have their head -- resulting in a shoot notorious for going way over budget and consuming reels upon reels of film -- the movie is a raucous, bittersweet tragicomedy about two old friends who have found themselves mobbed up beyond their control. Nicky, when we meet him, is a gibbering nervous wreck, so paranoid about being the target of a mob hit that he can't trust Mikey, even though he has called him to his aid. This time, the paranoia is justified: Mikey, it turns out, is in touch with the hit man, Kinney (Ned Beatty). But even the hit man is paranoid, fearful that he'll be the target next if he botches the hit on Nicky. And so goes this jittery one-of-a-kind movie, which is a kind of tribute to the movies Cassavetes directed himself. (Stories have it that he did direct some scenes.) I'm generally on the fence about Cassavetes's work, feeling that improvisation is a hit-or-miss way to make a serious movie: The misses seriously undermine the hits. Still, the energy generated by Falk and Cassavetes in Mikey and Nicky is potent and irresistible. The film is almost a two-hander, with the supporting cast, even Beatty, good as he is, serving as objects for the two leads to bounce off of. I can wish that May had exerted more control over her film -- she almost lost complete control of it to an uncomprehending studio -- but I also admit that I couldn't stop watching it.

Murder by Contract (Irving Lerner, 1958)

Herschel Bernardi, Phillip Pine, and Vince Edwards in Murder by Contract

Cast: Vince Edwards, Phillip Pine, Herschel Bernardi, Caprice Toriel, Michael Granger, Kathie Browne, Joseph Mell, Frances Osborne, Steven Rich, Davis Roberts, Don Garrett, Gloria Victor. Screenplay: Ben Simcoe. Cinematography: Lucien Ballard. Art direction: Jack Poplin. Film editing: Carlo Lodati. Music: Perry Botkin Sr.

Irving Lerner's lean, clever Murder by Contract is a favorite of Martin Scorsese's, and you can detect its influence in his work, especially in the character of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976). Claude, the central character of Lerner's movie, is a loner and an enigma, who like Travis works off some of his sociopathic urges by exercise. Brawny, brooding Vince Edwards, who gained some fame in the 1960s as brawny, brooding Dr. Ben Casey on television, plays the hit man Claude, who is both a sociopath and a misogynist -- he refers to women as "pigs" and freaks out when he discovers that his latest target is a woman: "The human female is descended from the monkey, and monkeys are about the most curious animal in the world. If anything goes on, it just can't stand not to know about it. Same thing with a woman." We first meet Claude in a wonderfully elliptical scene in which he's applying to a Mr. Moon (Michael Granger) for a job. We aren't told what the job is, and we never even meet the man named Brink who is the actual employer, but our suspicions, if we have them, are confirmed when Claude is put to the test in a couple of contract killings. Succeeding in them, he's sent to Los Angeles, where he connects with a pair of Brink's henchmen, George (Herschel Bernardi) and Marc (Phillip Pine), who help him set up for the murder of the key witness in an upcoming trial. But Claude keeps his cool, stalling George and Marc, insisting on touring L.A. before finally setting up for the kill. The result is some entertaining scenes in which Claude frustrates the hot-headed Marc but wins over the more intelligent George. Marc mockingly refers to Claude as "Superman," which is more apt in the Nietzschean sense than in the DC Comics sense -- some have even called Murder by Contract an "existentialist film noir." The movie falls apart a bit at the end, which feels anticlimactic, though it's hard to see how it could have topped the very good beginning and middle. Ben Simcoe is the credited writer, but Ben Maddow, who wrote the screenplay for John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and probably the best movie made from a novel by William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (Clarence Brown, 1949), is said to have worked on the script.

The Lodger (John Brahm, 1944)

Merle Oberon and Laird Cregar in The Lodger

Cast: Laird Cregar, Merle Oberon, George Sanders, Cedric Hardwicke, Sara Allgood, Aubrey Mather, Queenie Leonard, Doris Lloyd, David Clyde, Helena Pickard. Screenplay: Barré Lyndon, based on a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes. Cinematography: Lucien Ballard. Art direction: James Basevi, John Ewing. Film editing: J. Watson Webb Jr. Music: Hugo Friedhofer.

Laird Cregar's great gift as the heaviest of heavies was to elicit a kind of sympathy for the bad guys he played. Which is no easy task when you're playing the most infamous of serial killers, Jack the Ripper. Marie Belloc Lowndes's novel was only "based on" the notorious murderer of ladies of the night -- it wasn't explicit that the character was Jack (whoever that was) -- and the earlier filmings, particularly Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 silent version, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, followed her lead, perhaps because Hitchcock's lodger was played by matinee idol Ivor Novello, which led to a twist in which the character turned out not to be the killer after all. But screenwriter Barré Lyndon and director John Brahm were perfectly happy to capitalize on the Ripper's perennial notoriety. This is a good, atmospheric version of the story, with effective shadowy, expressionistic camerawork by Lucien Ballard, and a solid cast.

The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)

"It ain't like it used to be, but it'll do." The last line of The Wild Bunch, spoken by Edmond O'Brien's Sykes, sums up the film's prevailing sense that something has been lost, namely, a kind of innocence. Myths of lost innocence are as old as the Garden of Eden, and the Western as genre has always played on that note of something unspoiled being swept away with the frontier, though seldom with such eloquent violence as Peckinpah's film. Notice, for example, how many children appear in the movie, often in harm's way, as if their innocence was under attack. The film begins with a group of children at play, but what they're playing with is a scorpion being tormented by a nest of ants. Finally, after the grownups have had a major shootout, endangering other innocents, including a mostly female prohibitionist group, the children set fire to their little game, creating a neat image of hell that sets the tone for the rest of the film. Children, Peckinpah seems to be saying, have only a veneer of innocence, one that's easily removed. So we have children not only under fire but also sometimes doing the firing. They treat the torture of Angel (Jaime Sánchez) as a game, running after the automobile that is dragging him around the village. Not many films use violence for such integral purpose, and not many films have been so wrong-headedly criticized for being violent. Before it was re-released in 1995, Warner Bros. submitted the newly extended cut of the film to the ratings board, which tried to have it labeled NC-17 -- usually a kiss of death because many newspapers refused to advertise movies with that rating. Ordinarily, I'd applaud any effort by the board to treat violence with the same strictness that it treats sex and language, but this decision only emphasizes the shallow, formulaic nature of the board's rulings. An appeal resulted in overturning the rating, so the film was released with an R. Film violence has escalated so much in recent years that if it weren't for the bare breasts in some scenes, The Wild Bunch might get a PG-13 today. I also think the real reason for the emphasis on violence in commentaries on The Wild Bunch is a puritanical one: The movie is too much fun for some people to take seriously. It has superbly staged action scenes, like the hijacking of the train and the demolition of the bridge. And it has entertaining, career-highlight performances by William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, and Robert Ryan. The cinematography by Lucien Ballard and the Oscar-nominated score by Jerry Fielding are exceptional. And it's "just a Western," so no high-toned viewers need take it seriously, though surprisingly the Academy did nominate Peckinpah, Walon Green, and Roy N. Sickner for the writing Oscar. They lost to William Goldman for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a movie that feels flimsier as every year goes by.

Swamp Water (Jean Renoir, 1941)

Swamp Water has a few things working against it other than its title. For one, having a cast of familiar Hollywood stars pretending to be farmers, hunters, and trappers living on the edge of the Okefenokee swamp, and saying things like "I brung her" and "He got losted," makes for a certain lack of authenticity. And at 32, its leading man, Dana Andrews is about a decade too old to be playing the callow youth he's supposed to be in the movie. Add to that the director, Jean Renoir, is a wartime exile from France, making his first film in Hollywood, and you might expect the worst. Fortunately, it has a screenplay by a master, Dudley Nichols, and an eminently watchable cast that includes Walter Brennan, Walter Huston, Anne Baxter, John Carradine, Ward Bond, and Eugene Pallette, who while they may never quite convince us that they're Georgia swamp-folk, do their professional best. It turns out to be a thoroughly entertaining movie that, while it doesn't add any luster to Renoir's career, doesn't detract from it either. This was Andrews's second year in movies, and he gives the kind of energetic performance that mostly overcomes miscasting. Born in Mississippi and raised in Texas, he also seems to know the character he's called on to play, perhaps a little better than the city-bred Baxter, whose efforts at being the village outcast are a bit forced. Brennan as usual plays an old coot, but without overdoing the mannerisms -- it's a slyly engaging performance. Much of the footage was shot by cinematographer J. Peverell Marley and the uncredited Lucien Ballard in the actual swamp and environs near Waycross, Georgia. There is some obvious failure to match the location footage with that shot back in the 20th Century-Fox studio, but it's not terribly distracting.