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Hats Off to Eddie Muller!

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Turner Classic Movies (TCM) Host Eddie Muller

Most every Saturday around 9 PM Pacific Time, I turn on the television to watch the “Noir Alley” show on TCM hosted by the amiable Eddie Muller. He is one of the reigning experts on film noir, which he defined in an interview hosted by the World Literature Today website as:

A noir story is about people who know what they’re doing is wrong, and they do it anyway. And, typically, there’s hell to pay. We love watching them break the law; we love watching them reap the consequences.

Although in the interview, he is talking about literature, one can easily see how that translate into film. Just think of such Hollywood films as John Huston¹s The Maltese Falcon (1941); Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944); Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946); Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947); and Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955). The genre reached its apogee during the 1940s and 1950s.

Yesterday, Eddie outdid himself. He introduced two great noir films produced in Argentina. However tired I was, I stayed up late to watch two masterpieces by Carlos Hugo Christensen (1914-1999): Never Open That Door (No abras nunca esa puerta) and If I Should Die Before I Wake (Si muero antes de despertar). Both films were produced in 1952.

I particularly liked If I Should Die Before I Wake, a film about a child killer which even today might run into censorship problems. A son of a Buenos Aires detective finds himself identifying and running to ground a child molester who had kidnapped a female classmate whom he had befriended. It’s even more exciting than Fritz Lang’s classic M (1931) with Peter Lorre on the same subject.

By the way, if you want to read a really good book about film noir, I highly recommend Eddie Muller’s Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir (New York: Running Press, 2021).

What I’m about to say may be counted as heresy, but I think these films out-Hitchcock Hitchcock. Apparently, there is more than one master of suspense, and I am grateful to Eddie Muller for screening these two subtitled films.

You Freud, Me Jane?

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Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964)

Sometimes it takes years, even decades, for a great film to be recognized. Such is the case with Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, which confused and rattled the critics of the period. According to the New York Times, “an inexplicably amateurish script.” The L.A. Times was no more accepting: “As a story it seems naggingly improbable and, as drama, a nightmare from which the spectator constantly pulls away, struggling to wake up in a less disordered universe. No question, though, that it is at least fitfully effective“

Fitfully effective? How about ahead of its time. Both the Sean Connery character (Mark Rutland) and the Tippi Hedren character (Marnie Edgar) are obsessed in different ways. Marnie is a thief who cannot bear to be touched by men. Mark, on the other hand, is obsessed with using the tools of popular psychology to “cure” Marnie. In a way, both characters are equally out of it.

What escaped the 1960s critics was that Marnie was a strikingly beautiful film, perhaps the most beautiful color film ever produced. From the moment we see Marnie from the rear wearing a black wig walking down a train station platform with a yellow bag full of money under her arms, we are hooked. At least, I was.

Even the obvious fakery that Hitchcock seems to throw at us seems to actually add to the story in this instance. When Mark drives Marnie to her mother’s Baltimore row house, we see an obviously painted backdrop of an ocean freighter at the end of the block. In the foreground, several little girls are skipping rope while singing:

Mother, Mother, I am ill
Call for the doctor over the hill.
In came the doctor,
In came the nurse,
In came the lady with the alligator purse.

In the end, Mark and Marnie drive off and take a left just before the painted backdrop, where moments ago it seemed there was no exit.