The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953)

The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953)

Cast: Edmond O'Brien, Frank Lovejoy, William Talman, José Torvay, Sam Hayes, Wendell Niles, Jean Del Val, Clark Howat, Natividad Vacío. Screenplay: Collier Young, Ida Lupino, Robert L. Joseph, Daniel Mainwaring. Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Walter E. Keller. Film editing: Douglas Stewart. Music: Leith Stevens.

The thing I admire most about The Hitch-Hiker is its economy. It doesn't waste time giving us, for example, the backstory of Roy Collins and Gilbert Bowen, the two guys played by Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy. Lesser films would have given us scenes in which they bid farewell to their wives and children, trying to establish them as good guys in the hands of a psychopath -- we catch on to that fast enough without sentimental ties back home. Ida Lupino doesn't need to mess around with unnecessary sympathy for them. In fact, we're aware that they're not entirely paragons of virtue: They bicker, for example, about where they're going to spend their little time away from their wives, and there's a suggestion that they're glad to get away from home and family -- it looks like they want a little more action than just fishing. Later, after they've been trapped by Emmett Myers (a wonderfully scary performance by William Talman that makes me regret he got forever stuck as Hamilton Burger, the loser D.A. on the Perry Mason TV series), they quarrel about how they might escape from his clutches -- at one point Bowen even slugs Collins, who is on the verge of hysterics. There are some flaws: It's never really clear why Myers doesn't just shoot at least one of them -- he doesn't really need both to complete his journey to Santa Rosalía. And I do think the film falls a little flat at the end when Myers is so easily captured, but not enough to mar the gritty whole of the movie. Lupino and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca use the desert landscape to great effect: It provides both isolation and exposure. The Hitch-Hiker deserves its reputation well beyond its historical distinction as a film noir with an all-male cast directed by a (gasp!) woman.

The Mad Miss Manton (Leigh Jason, 1938)

Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in The Mad Miss Manton

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Sam Levene, Frances Mercer, Stanley Ridges, Hattie McDaniel. Screenplay: Philip G. Epstein, Wilson Collison. Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark. Film editing: George Hively. Music: Roy Webb.

If The Mad Miss Manton seems to me a laborious misfire of a screwball comedy, it may be because I can't help comparing it to another film that also stars Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, Preston Sturges's sublime The Lady Eve (1941). Stanwyck plays the doyenne of a gaggle of silly socialites who get involved in trying to solve a murder. They tangle with a police lieutenant played by Sam Levene and a reporter played by Fonda in the process, but Stanwyck's character and Fonda's naturally fall in love during the proceedings. It's over-frantic and under-motivated.

The Blue Gardenia (Fritz Lang, 1953)

The Blue Gardenia (Fritz Lang, 1953)

Cast: Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Ann Sothern, Raymond Burr, Jeff Donnell, George Reeves, Richard Erdman, Ruth Storey, Ray Walker, Nat "King" Cole. Screenplay: Charles Hoffman, based on a story by Vera Caspary. Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca. Art direction: Charles D. Hall. Film editing: Edward Mann. Music: Raoul Kraushaar.

Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952)

Robert Ryan and Barbara Stanwyck in Clash by Night 

Mae Doyle: Barbara Stanwyck
Jerry D'Amato: Paul Douglas
Earl Pfeiffer: Robert Ryan
Peggy: Marilyn Monroe
Joe Doyle: Keith Andes
Uncle Vince: J. Carrol Naish
Papa D'Amato: Silvio Minciotti

Director: Fritz Lang
Screenplay: Alfred Hayes
Based on a play by Clifford Odets
Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca
Art direction: Carroll Clark, Albert S. D'Agostino
Film editing: George Amy
Music: Roy Webb

There's a wonderful directorial touch in the middle of Fritz Lang's Clash by Night that almost makes up for the talky melodrama of the rest of the film: Stealing from the romantic gesture executed by Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), Lang has Robert Ryan light two cigarettes at once and hand one of them to Barbara Stanwyck. She looks at it with distaste for a moment, then tosses it over her shoulder, takes out her own pack of cigarettes, and lights one herself. It's possible that the moment is spelled out in Alfred Hayes's screenplay, or in the play by Clifford Odets on which it's based, but I like to think of it as Lang's own employment of Stanwyck's great gift for playing women in charge. In fact, Stanwyck's character, Mae Doyle, is hardly ever fully in charge -- she can't control her life because of the men in it, which she describes as either "all little and nervous like sparrows or big and worried like sick bears." The problem with Clash by Night is not the cast, which is uniformly watchable, or the direction, which does what it can with the material, particularly by exploiting the film's setting -- Monterey, the bay, the fishing fleet, and Cannery Row -- but the screenplay. It's full of Odets characters who can't resolve their internal conflicts but also can't stop talking about them. Even the secondary characters, like Jerry D'Amato's father and uncle, can't help putting in their two cents, often in florid Odetsian metaphor. The title of the film comes from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," in which the speaker laments the loss of faith in a world that has "neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." It's a place where "ignorant armies clash by night." That bleak Victorian pessimism, however, doesn't translate very well to a story in which the clashing armies are men and women, a battle of the sexes that's a little too conventional in concept. Mae returns to her family home in Monterey, and immediately starts making a mess of things by attracting not only the good-hearted Jerry but also his cynical burnt-out friend Earl. Since Jerry is played by the somewhat schlubby Paul Douglas and Earl by the handsome Robert Ryan, we can see immediately where this is going to go, and the wait for it to get there gets a little tedious. There's also a rather pointless secondary plot involving Mae's brother, Joe, and his girlfriend, Peggy, who are played by Keith Andes and Marilyn Monroe. The backstories that stars and their personae bring to the roles they play are often valuable. Here, however, Marilyn's presence in the cast has unbalanced our subsequent reaction to the film, which can never be watched without the irrelevant knowledge of the actress's skyrocketing career, troubled relationship with her directors (including Lang, who terrified her so much that she vomited before performing a scene), and pitiable demise. Peggy is a small role, and she plays it well, but it was never meant to be the principal reason many people watch Clash by Night.