I guess it was only fitting that my trip to Iran became an opportunity for me to catch up on some classic film noir on dvd. There are parts of Tehran that would make a great location setting for a black and white, down and dirty noir melodrama, if only Orson Welles were still around to film it.
The severe jet lag due to the travel time and the almost 12 hour time difference in which day is night and night is day for our body clocks left me wide awake with my portable dvd player and a cd case full of titles I had brought along to catch up on in the pre-dawn darkness.
For some reason, consciously or unconsciously, the movies that I carried included some film noir titles like the Mark Hellinger production of "Brute Force" directed by Jules Dassin and starring Burt Lancaster, which I know I had seen on television in my youth as many moments were familiar to me, but I had not really watched this almost archetypal prison film in three or four decades.
I want to say that it was my own slight case of paranoia traveling to a country we've heard characterized for years in our mainstream media as part of the Axis of Evil, but for whatever reason this tough noir with its economy of storytelling and imagery (the opening dutch angle shot of the prison walls in a biblical size downpour is a classic) and an unforgettable turn by Hume Cronyn as the sadistic Captain Munsey really resonated with me.
"Why don't they learn: there is no escape. No one ever escapes."
Another movie I had heard much about but never seen was a lighter shade of noir, the breezy Elliot Kastner production of "Harper", based on the novel "The Moving Target" by Ross McDonald, and directed by the unknown, to me, Jack Smight. Thanks to Tom Pollack for educating me to Smight's resume as a top tv director in his day, picked by Kastner to handle the chores on this star vehicle.
It has its charms, especially in guessing at the various L.A. locations they used back in the mid-sixties, and in nutty Strother Martin's turn as a cult leader/illegal immigrant smuggler on some Malibu or Mulholland Drive mountaintop temple, but in the end it is a minor guilty pleasure, not a classic.
One curiosity is why the title character's name was changed from McDonald's famous private detective Lew Archer, to the Lew Harper which is stenciled on the door of Paul Newman's office. I thought it might be a rights problem, but I read that it was Newman's own whim, apparently based on his superstition that he had had some measure of success in "Hud" and "Hombre" and wanted the title of his next film to also start with an "H".
Hmmm. "Hold Mountain", anyone?
william
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