Men at the End
Dear L—,
I only made it to a half dozen of the “Not Necessarily Noir” programs at the Roxie, but the films I saw all put me in the mind of the Dylan lyric, “As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes…” Certainly, this had something to do with leads like William Devane, Harvey Keitel, Ben Gazzera, and Robert Ryan — all of them revealing the raging hollowed core: the sociopath’s inscrutable smile, a hard stare that makes the world fall away. The programmer of the series, Elliot Lavine, has sensible things to say about the appeal of genre pictures in an interview with Michael Guillen. I especially like his evocation of Sam Fuller movies — “all this raw shit” that comes of being abandoned to the id — and only hope that he continues pursuing the crooked path of emotional intensity in his noir programs.
“One thing is clear,” James Naremore writes, concluding his compressed intellectual history of noir (the opening chapter of his book More Than Night), “The last film noir is no easier to name than the first.” Quite so, though several of the Roxie films made in the Vietnam mood (never mind that one dates from 1959) intimate the death drive with a frankness unimaginable in the classics. In many respects, nothing changes: the films remain, as Naremore writes, “an existential allegory of the white male condition,” with “passive, masochistic, morbidly curious” protagonists sent through narratives of entrapment. Brutality takes the place of convolution — it’s as if the 70s/80s directors don’t have breath enough for the plot contortions of the great era of flashbacks.
Ryan is one of the progenitors of the new masculine type, shed of the tragic consciousness of the social-realist noir hero (John Garfield), the one who says, “Someone is punching me but I don’t know who” (Dark Corner). The Ryan anti-hero is the shadow of a former self — in some cases this past is made explicit; other times it’s a howling void — who doesn’t have reasons, only rage and sleep. The characters following his wake have either learned to love the beating (Devane in Rolling Thunder) or to simply inhale death (Keitel in Bad Lieutenant). Indeed, there’s real question as to whether they’re living at all (see Zoe Lund’s vampire spiel in Bad Lieutenant, the Devane character’s explanation that as a POW in Vietnam, he would refer to the past by saying, “When I was alive…”). They are neither resigned to (Mitchum) nor panicked by (Widmark) a romantically doomed end — they are the end. The various “ticking clock” mechanisms of the film’s plots (the storm that keeps the rabid band of ex-Confederate marauders occupying a frontier town in Day of the Outlaw, the revenge plot that nominally animates Rolling Thunder, and, most ingeniously, a fictionalized Mets-Dodgers playoff series in Bad Lieutenant) are the nubs about which the whirlpool roars.
But much like a baseball series, the film does have to end (of course the game goes on indeterminately, whereas a film can only seem to). So how does the filmmaker finally cast out these very embodiments of “no exit?” They massacre, sacrifice, disappear, riding into sunsets drained of color. Day of the Outlaw’s final-act death march is unusually grim for its era. I was sure the film was finished when Ryan’s outlier, Blaise Starrett, leads the mob out of the frontier town on the promise of a hidden mountain pass and a last-ditch escape from the coming cavalry. We know there is no such pass, and that Starrett is condemning himself in order to save the village that is no longer his (Alonso has seen this, yes?). The whole line of pass into the white-out distance in a long shot framed on a diagonal. Given this composition and the extended duration of the shot, we might easily expect a fade to black. Instead, the film enters its protracted stasis, a dirge on the order of Dead Man. Death does not come all at once. The repetitive shots, thudding score, and the evident cruelty to the horses (Ryan whips his mercilessly through the snow) make for an excruciating processional: the end in place of “The End.” One image is stunning: the men ride by the camera one by one, the steam of breath and snow swirling in blinding sunlight, as if Von Sternberg’s camera turned up in Flaherty’s terrain. At last, the meanest of this wild bunch grabs his rifle to shoot Starrett off his horse. But his frozen fingers will not grip the trigger.
Whether Starrett is redeemed or simply cheating death, his reckoning in the snow echoes the same actor’s trajectory in On Dangerous Ground, made seven years earlier and, for various reasons, never far from mind. To wit, On Dangerous Ground also seems a kind of premonition of Ferrara’s film — Bad Lieutenant is the urban-nightmare half of Ray’s movie continued on its stark course. The Ryan character’s bleak apartment would surely seem familiar to Keitel’s nameless bad cop. As for Bad Lieutenant‘s ending…wow. We know what’s coming — the bookies always collect — though knowing what hardly matters in Ferrara’s fantasia. The lieutenant puts two nun-rapists on the bus out of town after waving his gun in their faces; the moment after he earns his “redemption” (which I can hardly understand), he’s gone. Long shot from the opposite side of a busy Manhattan street: we watch Keitel drop into his cruiser before another car pulls up alongside his, obstructing our view. Bullets and burning rubber. It’s hard to escape the feeling that this particular death was foretold in the lieutenant’s two previous encounters of automotive crime scenes—to say nothing of his own habit of sexualizing (and violating) strangers in their cars. Then there is the clear echo of Mean Streets’ violent end, thus bookending the passion of Keitel. But unlike all these earlier images, here we keep our distance from the car and its corpse. The street swarms back over the interruption, a nice Naked City-style turn. A bus goes by, and a woman looks in the car and begins flailing (we don’t hear what she says). Two other pedestrians flee — who knows what they’re running from? More people gather, and eventually a cop tapes off the last crime scene of the film — all of it unfolding underneath a giant banner advertising a casino with the slogan, “It all happens here.”
– MG
