Nightfall (1956)

James Vanning (Aldo Ray) has been on the run for some time now. The police is looking for him as their main suspect in the murder of a friend, while a duo of bank robbers (Brian Keith and Rudy Bond) who actually killed the man – and nearly murdered Jim as well – believe he has run off with their ill-gotten gains. For reasons best known to himself, our protagonist doesn’t trust the police enough to tell them the story of what actually happened, though in noir, unspoken war trauma is always a good guess.

There’s also an insurance investigator (James Gregory) on his trail. Things begin to come to a head on a night Jim meet-cutes model Marie Gardner (Anne Bancroft), and has an encounter with the robbers, as well as – unbeknownst to him – with the investigator.

For a film that’s generally seen as a noir, Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall does certain things rather differently. Sure, there’s a plot involving mistaken identities, gangsters, and a man on the run, but the femme isn’t fatale, the only on-screen authority figure is actually trustworthy, and our hero’s genuinely innocent – running away with the money like the robbers believe he did never seems to even have crossed his mind.

Instead of the shadows of the titular nightfall, the film’s tensest scenes take place in broadest daylight and comparatively wide open spaces – and it’s not even the desert but rather a lot of snow. All of which makes for a much nicer film than you usual find in the non-genre, the sort of film where love is a real and strengthening thing instead an object of dark obsession and method of manipulation, and where the protagonist is a very decent man whose only flaw is acting a bit stupid. Nihilism, this certainly ain’t.

Curiously enough, giving up on the darkness of the noir worldview doesn’t feel like a cop out for the film at all, but just as natural as the noir’s typical darkness comes to other films of the genre.

As Ray plays him, Jim is closer to Hitchcock’s traditional thriller protagonist, an everyman getting in over his head. Though most Hitchcock protagonists of this style do not project the sense of genuine vulnerability Ray displays here, wonderfully going against what his physique of bullneck and bulk would suggest. This is a 50s man not afraid to show his fears and genuine emotions to the woman he falls for, and consequently, Marie falling for him this quickly feels much less contrived than is typical for this sort of thing.

This compassionate eye for the softer side of the characters – see also the interactions between the insurance investigator and his wife – is not a thing you typically get in any movie seen as a noir, but for Nightfall, the feeling of watching basically decent, large-as-life people involved in a thriller plot seems central.

This being a Tourneur film, that thriller plot is realized with great care, economy and style, full of genuine tension. Nearly every scene is filled with the kind of detail that’s either telling about the characters or helps create the texture of the film’s world as an actual place.

In a way, all of this is very low key, but it’s also perfectly of a piece, and utterly convincing.

Cry for the Strangers (1982)

Psychiatrist Brad Russell (Patrick Duffy) and his wife Elaine (Cindy Pickett) are moving away from the city to a supposedly quiet little coastal town. As luck will have it, it’s the same place where the family of one of Brad’s child patients has moved to. Little Robbie (Shawn Carson) apparently suffered from an incurable case of ADHD (or something, it’s probably better not to think about it). Yet somehow, something about the place seems to have cured him and turned him “normal” (ugh).

Well, as normal as sneaking out each and every stormy night and watching some “Indian” (I’d use the more correct term “Native American” here, if these weren’t very much bad movie “Indians”) ghosts doing their sacrificial dance gets. Despite the local Sheriff (Brian Keith) mostly pretending everything’s great, there’s something else wrong with the place too. There is a history of strangers dying or getting killed on stormy nights, and it’s pretty clear the death toll is a bit too heavy to be explained by happenstance.

Brad and Elaine kinda-sorta start looking into things on their own, finding dark secrets on their way to a pretty bizarre truth.

As it is based on a John Saul novel, one should not go into this TV horror movie expecting a terribly sensible backstory or much of a plot, though I have to admit the final reveal as it is presented here is perfectly hysterical in all meanings of that word. That’s of course worth quite a bit in my sad little life.

Plus, while the narrative isn’t more than a series of clichés too well-worn for most mainstream horror writers even in 1982, the film was directed by the sometimes great, sometimes terrible Peter Medak. And in his good months, that man really knew how to create a proper macabre mood. He is, after all the director of one of the best ghost stories ever made for the big screen, The Changeling (a film I’ve apparently, scandalously, never written about). This one obviously isn’t on the level of that masterpiece – turns out Patrick Duffy is no George C. Scott – but it is an often striking and always entertaining effort.

Medak makes excellent use of location shots and the coastal setting, using all kinds of camera and direction tricks to turn the place properly creepy, generally working around the problems of plot logic and coherence by slathering on a thick mood of the American Gothic, enhancing the small town shenanigans and (mildly) dark secrets of the place with rather a lot of bad weather. Thanks to Medak’s experience working on lower budgets, the film usually gets around letting its TV budget seams show to often or too heavily. There is, however a certain shot of storm clouds that’s going to repeat again and again when you are watching this. The first two or three times, it’s actually a nice and moody enough shot, emphasising the importance of the weather to the shenanigans on the beach, but after the tenth or so time, it mostly begs the question why CBS had only footage of one single stormy sky in its archives.

For many, Cry for the Strangers’ other big weakness is going to be the final reveal of what’s really going on (or is it?), and the way it expresses its pretty damn silly idea in the most scenery-chewing way imaginable, ending a film that was up to that point holding its own rather well as a silly yet seriously made movie on a note of rather exalted crapness and camp, something that isn’t helped at all by the wild and absurd performance of a certain veteran actor which looks like an attempt to get hired by John Waters. It’s certainly not going to help with anyone ever taking this one seriously, but it’s also the sort of glorious “what the heck were they thinking” moment that makes a film very memorable indeed. If probably not for the reasons filmmakers want you to remember their work, but then, what the heck were they thinking?

5 Against the House (1955)

Al (Guy Madison) and Brick (Brian Keith) have been friends at least ever since Brick saved Al’s life during the Korean War, getting wounded himself in the process. Both men are studying law now, going to college on the GI Bill, hanging around with two non-vets, the painfully annoying “funny” Roy (Alvy Moore), and self-styled rich kid brainiac Ronnie (Kerwin Mathews). Brick is suffering from a hefty helping of PTSD, swivelling between good humour bordering on mania, depression and violent outbursts – all things Al has made the habit of trying to counter as best as he can.

When the four men visit a casino in Reno, Nevada, together and witness a botched robbery, Ronnie decides he can do better and develops a plan how to rob the place and actually get away with it and the money, getting Roy and Brick in on the thing. Brick becomes rather obsessed with the whole plan, but it’s not as if Ronnie and Roy don’t want to go through with it. They do realize that square-jawed Al’s not simply going to help them, so they decide it’s best to surprise him into becoming an armed robber (seriously) by pretending to go on a simple trip to Reno with him and his fiancée Kay (Kim Novak) and hoping to talk him into it once they get there. When Al realizes what’s going on half-way to the place, where he was indeed planning to marry Kay, and shows himself to be less than pleased, Brick starts threatening Kay’s life.

So a robbery it is.

5 Against the House is never going to be one of my favourite films by the typically great Phil Karlson. There are a lot of elements in here that I find interesting and worthwhile, and the performances by Keith and Madison are fine, but the script has terrible pacing problems and has to go through awkward contortions to avoid problems with the still not unimportant Production Code where crime isn’t allowed to pay, if it wants to get to the ending where characters are allowed to live it clearly wants to have. Which alas leaves us with a film about a casino robbery where manoeuvring Al into a position where he can take part in the robbery without being morally culpable feels more important to the film than the heist itself. The musical number and some horrible, supposedly funny, business about our protagonists hazing a freshman do not improve the pacing, either; the latter also not my mood.

The film certainly often has its heart in the right place, allowing Brick to survive and potentially get better (not that the state of psychiatry in ‘55 gives one much hope for that), portraying his violence as well as his pain with as much honesty as it can get away with, and his mental illness as something he’s not responsible for and has little control over – which is pretty great for a film of its time, and also provides Brian Keith the opportunity for an equally great performance. Karlson does of course often excel in portraying the fragile parts of men living under the thumb of societally approved machismo, not exactly criticising the structures causing their pain and pushing them into causing pain to others but certainly not blind to these things.


Also pretty great is the robbery itself, once it finally gets going, the gang dressed up in cleverly ironic cowboy costumes (it makes sense, really) going through what turns out not to be the perfect robbery Ronnie envisioned. How we get there is what lets 5 Against the House down.

Sharky’s Machine (1981)

After a larger drug bust goes badly wrong, macho cop Sharky (Burt Reynolds) is moved – really demoted – from his beloved narcotics division he had working like the titular machine (until it didn’t work) to vice, in this time and movie a place made exclusively for busting street walkers. Until Sharky acquires a list with the names and phone numbers of some high grade prostitutes working for a mystery man lamely known only as The Man (later turning out to be played by Vittorio Gassman, of all people). One of these girls, only known as Dominoe (Rachel Ward) seems to have political protection that suggests a certain degree of corruption, so Sharky convinces vice squad head Friscoe (Charles Durning) to let him surveil her, with a bit of help from colleagues Arch (Bernie Casey), Papa (Brian Keith) and Nosh (Richard Libertini).

Because that’s how things in the movies go (and because this is Rachel Ward in the early 80s), Sharky falls for the object of his surveillance badly, which will turn out to be quite the motivating factor when the corruption case turns into something even bigger and a crazy drugged up killer with the awesome name of Billy Score (Henry Silva) makes his appearance.

Sooner or later, most actors seem to get the directing bug. Some of them (not naming names but you know the type) get in the habit of trying to pull films out from under actual directors who know what they’re doing, generally ruining the films that get in the way of their egos. Others go about the business the honest way and make their own damn movies. Some of these turn out to be Sarah Polley, Charles Laughton, Joel Edgerton, or Clint Eastwood (or on a comparative level), while more than I’d like to think about just make pretty dreadful directors. The handful of films Burt Reynolds directed aren’t usually counted among the exalted ones but they are most certainly not products of a guy just coasting on being Burt.

Sharky’s Machine is usually seen as Reynolds’s best directorial effort, and while it certainly isn’t an unforgettable experience, it is a good cop movie a bit along the line of a Dirty Harry film if Harry had an emotional life, if one whose tone tends to swing from the more naturalistic to the nearly cartoonish at a moment’s notice.

The film’s major weakness is certainly the treatment of the parts of the plot concerning the romance (such as it is) between Sharky and Dominoe. It’s a bit Laura, it’s a bit Rear Window (or at least concerned with the same kind of obsession as thrillers with voyeuristic aspects) but the relationship of the characters once they actually meet never rings true to me. In part that’s because neither the script nor Reynolds manage to sell Sharky as a true voyeuristic obsessive. Nor does the film convince me that Dominoe (particularly given the background the film sketches for her) would in any way or form honestly fall for the guy. On the plus side, that latter failing has also something to do with the fact that Reynolds the director tries to stay on the right side of male gazing at the pretty woman by treating her as an an actually likeable instead person instead of only a desirable object, so turning her into the more manipulative character that would have a reason to sleep with Sharky would have been right out. Which is not at all the sort of thing I would have expected Burt Reynolds of all people to think about. So much for preconceptions.

Of course, this surprising thoughtfulness does fit nicely with one of Sharky’s Machine’s great strengths: Reynolds’s willingness and ability to step back and give his co-actors space to shine. Now, this is Reynolds’s film in the sense that he is in most of the scenes, is clearly the main character, and so on, but it doesn’t feel like an ego trip. Reynolds directs like a guy who truly appreciates the Richard Libertinis and Bernie Caseys of this world, so every one here gets a couple of scenes to shine, to do and say something interesting and not be Reynolds’s foil but have Reynolds be theirs for a bit. These scenes are a joy to watch and have the added virtue of making the audience care about these guys when things become dangerous.

Then there’s Vittorio Gassman’s wonderful outing as what is basically a cartoon villain, the kind of guy who probably would have an awesome secret lair if that sort of thing did fly down there in Atlanta, and so has to make up for it by having a trio of Asian enforcers right out of a Sonny Chiba flick, and Henry Silva giving the craziest and creepiest performance of a career full of this sort of role as his hitman brother. Silva’s as beautifully unhinged here as I have ever seen him, so thanks for that, too, Burt.

Visually, the film is not particularly fancy, apart from a handful of the more suspenseful scenes when Reynolds shows a good eye for squeezing tension out of the play of light and shadow, and for letting the audience hear instead of see certain acts of violence. And while it is not fancy, the film does follow the visual rules of late 70s crime filmmaking excellently, providing clarity when that is asked for and obscurity when that fits a given scene.


What more can you ask of a director, Burt Reynolds or not?