Manny Farber's best films of 1951, #9; "Appointment With Danger," directed by Lewis Allen; followed by a summation of What We Have Learned Here

The pri­or entry is here, and, as always, you can move back­wards from there for the others. 

Three readers/friends were of great help in get­ting me access to this pic­ture; I won’t name them, but they know who they are, and I thank them. The above image would prob­ably be impossible to get a “clear” ver­sion of in any mani­fest­a­tion, but the sight of Alan Ladd wal­lop­ing Jack Webb seemed to me a no-brainer of an open­er. And the back­ground of the hand­ball court gives the whole image the feel, for me at least, of some­thing out of a Farber paint­ing. In any event, here’s Manny: 

“Tough, per­cept­ive com­mer­cial job glor­i­fy­ing the P‑men (Post-Office sleuths), set in an authen­tic­ally des­ol­ate waste­land around Gary, Indiana, crawl­ing with pess­im­ist­ic mail-robbers who act as though they’d seen too many movies like Asphalt Jungle. Tight plot­ting, good cast­ing, and sinu­ously droopy act­ing by Jan Sterling, as an eas­ily had broad who only really gets excited about—and understands—waxed bop. Interesting for Morgan-Webb bit play­ing, such side­lights as the semi-demi-hemiquaver of romantic attach­ment between the head P‑man and a beau­ti­ful nun.”

By the way, those of you fol­low­ing along from Negative Space rather than the recently-issued Farber on Film see this film erro­neously cited as Background To Danger; the more cur­rent volume sup­plies the cor­rect title.

I know what you’re think­ing: “Post-Office sleuths?” Scoff all you like; this pic­ture estab­lishes such sorts as tough­er than nails with the intro­duc­tion of oper­at­ive Al Goddard, who just knows that his fel­low officer could not have been strangled because, he, too, had the Post-Office sleuth train­ing that made him tough­er than nails. Before we get a glimpse of Ladd’s Goddard, there’s this exchange between a uni­formed man and a secretary: 

“Mr. Al Goddard. Is he as tough as ever?’

“I just got his order for lunch: a small boy with mustard.”

Ahem. I ima­gine that soun­ded quite a bit dif­fer­ent in 1951 than it might sound today. Work with me here, people.

Prior to Goddard’s intro­duc­tion, we get a good deal of the “Morgan-Webb bit play­ing,” as in Harry Morgan and Jack Webb, long before they paired as good guys for Dragnet, here por­tray­ing not merely pess­im­ist­ic rob­bers but cold-blooded killers. Here Morgan’s George tries to snow a nun (Phyllis Calvert) who will later become the case­’s star witness.

One notes that Farber’s piece was pub­lished in The Nation. One won­ders at the sort of read­er­ship The Nation had back then, that Farber could expect them to know what “Morgan-Webb bit play­ing” was. Maybe he did­n’t. Who knows. It’s amus­ing to con­sider, though. 

Anyway, once said nun becomes the star wit­ness, Webb’s Joe (not Friday, obvi­ously) devel­ops a pretty unhealthy obses­sion with her, res­ult­ing in a very bad con­sequence for his one-time buddy-pal George. Joe then lays an ear­ful about her on ringlead­er Earl (Citizen Kane’s Paul Stewart, act­ing not as if he’s got an ulcer but as if he’s con­stantly anti­cip­at­ing one, a con­sid­er­ably trick­i­er pro­pos­i­tion), who finally deliv­ers the immor­tal (as from his mouth, at least) line, “Forget about the nun, Joe.” As much as the gang­sters DO talk as if they’ve seen too many pic­tures like Asphalt Jungle, there is a genu­inely dis­tinct crackle to much of the dia­logue, wheth­er it’s Goddard dis­cuss­ing the theo­lo­gic­al per­quis­ites of “oblig­a­tion” with Calvert’s nun, or debat­ing the mer­its of “waxed bop” with the kept B‑girl por­trayed by Serling. Arching an eye­brow when she waxes enthu­si­ast­ic on the genre, Ladd describes it as a band play­ing “five dif­fer­ent tunes at the same time.” (The script is by Richard Breen, who’d go on to work with Webb on Dragnet and Pete Kelly’s Blues, and Warren Duff, who worked on Angels With Dirty Faces and a lot more.)

The “authen­tic­ally des­ol­ate waste­land” approved by Farber is matched by what seems to be a reas­on­ably accur­ate account of Post-Office police work and crim­in­al schem­ing, all the way down to the secur­ity loop­hole that the would-be rob­bers hope to exploit to the tune of a mil­lion bucks. Lewis Allen’s dir­ec­tion is as brisk and unfussy as it was in 1944’s The Uninvited and would be in 1955’s A Bullet For Joey. 

Reading the both funny and accur­ate descrip­tion of the film’s depic­tion of the Ladd-Calvert rela­tion­ship as the “semi-demi-hemiquaver of romantic attach­ment” made me a bit wistful—who uses such ter­min­o­logy in film cri­ti­cism any more, or maybe the ques­tion should be who uses such ter­min­o­logy with such unpre­ten­tious accur­acy, right? But before we go there, let’s talk about what we’ve learned from/about Farber, rather than what we know from his absence.

First of all: spend­ing these hours in the Farber film world of ’51, I found out it really is true what they say: they really don’t make ’em like that any­more. Most of them share a hard-bitten atti­tude that a lot of con­tem­por­ary pic­tures would like to emu­late, but just don’t know how to. For all of the putat­ive advances that have been made in con­tem­por­ary cinema in the depic­tion of sex and viol­ence, and in use of lan­guage, there’s also some­thing that feels coddled, by com­par­is­on, in the sup­posedly franker con­tem­por­ary mater­i­al. Look at some­thing like Losey’s The Prowler in com­par­is­on with, say, L.A. Confidential (a film I largely admire, incid­ent­ally); for all the Production-Code-mandated restraint of the former pic­ture, it oozes a par­tic­u­lar kind of sleaz­i­ness that Confidential simply can­’t touch. I used to laugh off quasi-moralists who insisted that self-imposed cen­sor­ship used to force American film artists to find more cre­at­ive solu­tions to get­ting cer­tain things across; hav­ing looked at a series of such well-curated films in a con­cen­trated space of time, my cer­ti­tude on this point has got­ten a major shakeup. 

Also: Farber liked ’em lean, and I don’t blame him. Only one of the nine sum­mar­ized films on his list hits the two hour mark: His Kind of Woman, which might be the excep­tion that proves the rule in that it kind of plays like two dif­fer­ent films in the space of its run­ning time. Everything else here is rel­at­ively brief pic­ture with no bag, no sag. While Farber clearly enjoyed a pic­ture with a good “hangout” ele­ment to it (Woman, The Thing From Another World), he also insisted on tight­ness of con­struc­tion. In later years he would semi-dismiss the sacred-to-some (myself included) Rio Bravo as “a soft, slack, not very rous­ing Western by a man who should know bet­ter.” Yow. Now of course tight­ness and tem­por­al brev­ity were not neces­sar­ily mutu­ally exclus­ive qual­it­ies to Farber…then again, look­ing at the lengths of the Straub-Huillet films he and Patricia Patterson wrote so admir­ingly of, maybe they were. Call that a sub­ject for future research. 

Even more than the at-least-partial hangout pic­ture, Farber admired movies in which work and pro­cess were depic­ted in detailed, con­vin­cing ways. From The People Against O’Hara’s “insights into things like the struc­ture and routine of law offices” to The Thing From Another World’s “good air­plane takeoffs and land­ings,” to the per­cept­ive­ness of Danger’s glor­i­fic­a­tion of the P‑men, the world of work is nev­er far from Farber’s mind when deal­ing with a pic­ture. This remains a con­stant in his cri­ti­cism, even after he began col­lab­or­at­ing with Patterson; indeed, it anim­ates one of his (their) earli­est com­plaints about Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, in the chal­len­ging essay The Power and the Gory: “The movie starts off with a lot of mater­i­al and then abruptly cuts it off…No oth­er Checker cab seems to be oper­at­ing at night in Manhattan except DeNiro’s cab, which nev­er stalls, needs gas, or runs into the delays and quick decisions which are the cab­bie exist­ence norm.”

Spending so much time with Farber (and Patterson) and now, lately, with the recently depar­ted Robin Wood, is both dis­pir­it­ing and inspir­ing. Dispiriting because, a few lonely lights aside, very few writers out there are even aspir­ing to do what they did, and because the cur­rent scene, such as it is, is filling up with happy hacks, humor­less self-promoting pseuds, non-writing quasi-moralizing “con­trari­ans,” and sev­er­al oth­er such unedi­fy­ing types who are united in their insist­ence that they are “crit­ics.”  As many of you know, I’ve cocked a snoot at some of them from time to time (some would, and have, said that I’ve done so far too often), but
the thing is, it does­n’t do any damn good. Even if one could provide a per­fectly cal­ib­rated math­em­at­ic­al proof to any such type that what he/she does is bad for cri­ti­cism, bad for art, bad for think­ing, such a thing would­n’t move any one of them to recon­sider his/her pro­fes­sion or alter his/her prac­tice. So one of my New Year’s res­ol­u­tions is gonna be to ignore them. I’ll try to engage in hon­or­able argu­ment with good-faith prac­ti­tion­ers of the dis­cip­line when it’s prop­er to, but what I want to con­cen­trate on in the next year is becom­ing a bet­ter good faith prac­ti­tion­er of the dis­cip­line myself. Truth to tell, I am always sheep­ish about call­ing myself a crit­ic, and in the months to come I intend to pur­sue some pro­fes­sion­al options of a rather dif­fer­ent sort. But as long as I con­tin­ue writ­ing about film, I think it’s a bet­ter idea to try to emu­late what Wood and Farber actu­ally did (in whatever puny way I can) rather than scold those I feel are dis­hon­or­ing their craft. Does this mean I’m drop­ping the “Armond White-ism Of The Week” from my Auteurs “Topics” column? It does; in fact, I did so last week.  That’s life; like the Production-Code-bound film­makers of 1951, I’ll have to find more ingeni­ous ways of bring­ing the sup­posed comedy.