Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Edward G. Robinson is alive and well at Film Forum

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From New York City: I took a break from my job-and-apartment hunting yesterday to go and see a couple of movies at the Film Forum's B Noir festival, and was sure glad that I did. Both films starred the legendary stout, bulldog-like actor Edward G. Robinson (Little Ceaser, Double Indemnity). The festival focuses on both underrated, lesser-known noirs and pulpy, dime store crime flicks, most of which aren't available yet on video or DVD. Black Tuesday, the first film of the evening, was one of the latter.

Robinson and Peter Graves (Night of the Hunter) are Vincent "King" Canelli and Peter Manning, a couple of criminals in prison awaitng their deaths in the electric chair. Manning was jailed for stealing $500,000 and is offered a ten-day extention of his sentence if he tells where he hid the money. He doesn't budge, though, because, as Canelli says; "yer gonna burn anyway!"

Secretly, however, Canelli's associates are hatching a plan to break them out just minutes before their execution and use the money Manning stole to get out of the country. Canelli's moll Hatti (Jean Parker) kidnaps the daughter of a prison guard to force him into helping, and a goon disguised as a newspaper reporter attends the execution too to help hold back the guards. After a violent breakout, the motley crew and their assortment of hostages hold up in an abandoned warehouse, biding their time until they can make a break out of the country.

While much of the plot is fairly ludicrous, and none of the supporting actors would ever be confused with Alec Guiness or Laurence Olivier, but the film was massively enjoyable nonetheless, mostly due to the sheer awesomeness of Robinson's performance as Vincent Canelli. Here are a few examples of how great he is:

- As the warden and police officers try to concince Manning to reveal the locaction of the stolen loot, Canelli hurls glee-filled taunts from the cell next to them. Grinning like a Cheshire cat, he says, "Headliner can't open the show, Manning! You gotta have acrobats or somethin' go out first, get 'em warmed up a little before the big climax!"

- While riding in a stolen armored car with the other escapees from the prison, Canelli orders the vehicle to stop and kicks the other prisoners out. When one of them protests, saying, "We ain't got a chance out their, Vince", Canelli removes three bullets from his revolver, hands the gun to him and throws the bullets out onto the ground. Then he says, "There, there's three chances."

- In the warehouse, the captured prison priest tries to talk some sense and morality to Canelli, who ignores him as he fiddles around with the contents of a crate filled with toys. He then winds up a toy tank and runs over a couple of stuffed Disney character dolls, with a gleeful shout of "Lookout, Donald!"

The second film of the evening, The Glass Web, was in contrast a much more polished and sophistiated noir which really should be a lot more well-known than it is. Directed by Jack Arnold (The Creature from the Black Lagoon, It Came From Outer Space) It deals with a TV show called "Crime of the Week", which dramatizes homicides and murders on a weekly basis. Robinson is Henry Hayes, the details-obsessed head of research for the show, and John Forsythe (the actor best known as the voice of Charlie on "Charlie's Angels") is Don Newell, the scriptwriter. Kathleen Huges is Paula Reiner, a struggling actress and cold-hearted, manipulative femme fatale who is having an affair with both men to try to try and land a big role and part them from their money.

Paula seems to have Don wrapped around her little finger, especially when she threatens to blackmail him to the tune of $25,000 with a pair of Don's pyjamas with the nametag stitched in. Unfortunatley for her, her impatience with Henry's inability to land her a role winds up to be her undoing, as she flies of the handle and unleashes a string of insults upon him, causing Henry, in his shocked and wounded state, to strangle her to death.

With Paula dead and her blackmail on his conscience, Don is terrifed that he may be the biggest suspect. Matters only complicate more when Henry up and decides to use the Paula Reiner murder as the basis for their final show of the season! It's a paranoid, tense, and grim situation; everything that a great noir should be. Forsythe is terrific as the honest man in over his head, and Robinson, while not as balls-to-the-wall badass as he is in Black Tuesday, is equally great here as narrowly-veiled "true evil" of the story. Interestingly, the film was shot in 3D (Arnold's second film to be shot as such) but due to test audience responses was released in 2D. It's understandable, since most of the movie is fairly stagey and doesn't have what I'd think of as great 3D-worthy visuals, except for one scene where Don wanders down the street, paranoid and oblivious to his surroundings. He is narrowly missed by a pickup truck with ladders on the top, a man with a hose, and rocks falling down a chute, all of which come right toward the camera like they're coming out at you. Incidentally, I found several pictures from The Glass Web on a John Forsythe tribute page, so check them out.

Kudos to Film Forum for picking out these two great films from obscurity and showing them to the the cineastes of New York City. The best thing about seeing these kinds of movies in the theater is the sheer immortality that cinema provides for its great ones. Edward G. Robinson was alive last night. He was a living, breathing human being up there on the screen before us, and he, and others like him will continue to live forever as long as people still watch their films.

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