It is Noirvember! A time of grey morals and chiaroscuro lighting, of bad women and weak men, of visible crime and invisible sex and inexorable fate. And it is important to celebrate not just the acknowledged classics and the rediscovered gems, but the majority of the work, the mid-level stuff that forms the bedrock of genre. The 1946 film Shock is serviceable and enjoyable, but it is most interesting as work for talent that would be better expressed elsewhere.
The film’s premise is solid enough — lively and hopeful Anabel Shaw checks into a hotel in order to reunite with her husband (Frank Lattimore), a POW until recently thought dead overseas, but before he returns she is sent into a catatonic state of see title after accidentally witnessing a man murder his wife. And the person who diagnoses her is the murderer himself, a doctor who bundles her off to his private asylum tries to keep her from recovering so he can run off with his head nurse, who’s in on the plan. It is hard to imagine a more loathsome pair; I am speaking of course of Shaw and Lattimore, whose decency and persistence and overall wholesomeness just makes you want to puke. And the movie knows this, giving top bill to Lynn Bari as the (hellooooo) nurse and a suave and for the time being clean-shaven fellow named Vincent Price.
Director Alfred L. Werker and screenwriters Eugene Ling and Martin Berkeley (the latter would later name more than 150 names for HUAC) are journeymen but not fools, they know that the villains are the protagonists here. They just don’t know or care enough to really make this snap. Werker has a few flourishes elsewhere in the movie — a trick photography nightmare of Shaw’s that is goofy but effective and an actually unnerving sequence of an asylum inmate escaping during a thunderstorm, the light and shadows finding Expressionist emphasis for his disturbed face — but is largely pedestrian when covering Bari and Price’s plotting and its unraveling, and anything with Lattimore is just tedious.
Bari and Price do what they can, though. Bari has the thin brows and hooded eyes and curled mouth of the loose and seductive woman (complimentary), her expression and bearing makes up for her cliched dialogue. Apparently Bari was frequently cast in this kind of role and she brings a needed urgency to the plot, which packs a fair amount into 80 minutes but feels like a bunch of incidents slapped together (a district attorney character just sort of appears whenever he’s required to in order to describe stuff that happened off-screen).
And Price uses that marvelous voice to insinuate, to tamp down, to assert authority with a velvet tongue. It rules to watch him thinking in real time as he realizes his crime was seen but he has the means to control if not dispose of the witness, to watch him come up with calm dismissals to flummox that dip Lattimore. What is less fun is how the script requires Price to second-guess he and Bari’s evil and rad scheme, not just in the same scene but in consecutive lines of dialogue. It’s a failure of commitment to the noir plot here, but also a failure to understand Price’s abilities.
Perhaps Price’s self-possession makes him a bad candidate for a noir lead tripped up by doomed love. He was working a lot in this and the larger crime genre in the 40s and early 50s, before moving into the horror films that would make him an icon. Being a villain rather than an antihero, but being active most of all. No one watches noir thinking the bad guy will win, but it is a slap in the face for Shock to end with Price dictating his final case notes on Shaw (recovered, ugh, and reunited with Lattimore, double ugh) before willingly walking away to prison with that DA as the credits roll, his mellifluence muted and acquiescent. Best to think of him has being led away from the darkness of noir to the shadows of haunted mansions and torture chambers, where he was free to indulge in menace. Shock is still worth a watch on a chilly fall day for fans of Price who can accept his being doomed to the fate of a middling movie. What is noir if not hoping for the bad guy to get away with even though you know it won’t happen?
Shock is streaming on Hoopla, Kanopy, Plex and — of course — Tubi.
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Double Features
Family heirlooms loom large in Father Mother Sister Brother and Vulcanizadora.
Double Features
Moving in time with One Battle After Another and Caught By The Tides.
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What did we watch?
Justified, Season Three, Episode Ten, “Guy Walks Into a Bar”
A really entertaining episode as we speed towards a finale; I find myself wanting to talk about individual scenes rather than the whole thing, such is the nature of a story that’s not finished yet. But I do notice how almost the entire story is made up of characters we’ve known for a while. All the best stories show that people get old and outlive their original place in the story.
Quarles is the most interesting person here; he’s driven by a desire to be the Head Motherfucker In Charge, which is another way of saying he aspires to feel a specific emotion as opposed to a practical, material outcome (or even, really, being a kind of person – he wants to feel tough as opposed to filling a specific archetype). The explanation of his backstory works because it’s an extension of that. It’s leading him to pushing his luck and commit psychopathic, unnecessary actions; he’s delighted when Raylan challenges him to a showdown.
There’s a point where Boyd compares Quarles to a conquistador, which is the closest we get to a specific archetype for Quarles, and indeed, not only do we get an origin story for Quarles, we get one for America – conquest and domination purely for its own sake.
Meanwhile, Raylan’s anger surfaces again. It puts him next to Quarles; exposed to the same America as him, driven by revenge on a cruel and stupid world. Raylan lacks Quarles’s active sadism but he shares the core of anger, and it can lead to irrationality.
“Tellin’ folks shit they already know, tryin’ to say it in a way that gives them permission to make a decision they shoulda made already.” I’ve been told I’m good at articulating thoughts people already had but didn’t have the language for, and this feels like a roast of everything about me in particular.
Biggest Laugh: incredibly, Art does not have the funniest moment this episode (which is saying something, given the lines he has). Instead, the winner is Jed’s grandma owning Raylan for no reason. Disabled criminals being rude to cops is the funniest fucking thing.
Biggest Art Laugh: “Next time you tell me you’re not good at something, I’m gonna believe you.”
Top Ownage: “I was young, I could sleep like a baby. Not so much, anymore.”
The Man on the Eiffel T0wer – Charles Laughton is Inspector Maigret! Filmed in color in the late 40s with “the city of Paris” billed as part of the cast, with Stanley Cortez running the cameras, this probably looked great on the big screen, but its life in the public domain has left us with merely passable prints for streaming. Burgess Meredith does double duty as a neer do well framed for a murder and a director (and seems to have done well in the latter), and Franchot Tone is strong as the actual killer, who spends about half the money taunting Laughton about how there’s not enough evidence to make an arrest. Thus the structure of the story is a bit strange, (Is this the norm for Maigret novels? Assuming there is a norm for so many books.) Laughton is, by his standards, toned down, leaving room for Tone to chew the scenery. The finale at the titular tower is quite well done.
The Muppet Show, Jonathan Winters – After six years, we are dropping Disney Plus, which went from cheap to exorbitant and which still has the smallest catalogue of anything besides Apple. So I figured I should get in some of the few things I did want from the experience. Not that I ever managed to watch much of the Muppets. despite being a child of Sesame Street and Jim Henson. This edition might offer a clue as to why. On the one hand, there are laughs to be had from the regulars (oddly without Miss Piggy) and from the guest. But the show is both of the 70s and deeply vaudevillian, and a lot of the gags have aged poorly. I wonder if I might be better off just finding clips of the best moments. Winters, BTW, is one of those people I at once know well and know nothing of. His footprint in the digital age is really kind of tiny.
Doctor Who, “Ghost Light” – Seven and Ace land in a Victorian mansion where spooky and rather inexplicable things are going on. A mansion where a century later Ace got in trouble. This was at once Sylvester McCoy’s favorite performance and impossible for him to explain. The story is a total mess, but we are in prime The Doctor as Schemer territory, and also prime interaction between McCoy and Sophie Aldred. This was the last serial filmed, and there are hints that it might come after the last one aired.
The Practice, “Legacy” – The sublime and sad, and the absurd and sad. The latter has Ernie Sabella as the worst lawyer in Boston, who begs a favor from the firm when he’s told he needs a second chair from somewhere better. His case? A man arrested for exposure whose defense is that he’s far more well endowed than the witness says. I have to admit, this sort of nonsense makes me laugh despite myself, and Sabella is very good as the sad sack. (I maybe need a better choice of words.) The former is Ellenor coming to grips with what happened to her, and the return of James Whitmore Sr. as Bobby’s mentor. Who starts off fighting his wife’s attempt to get power of attorney and then kills his wife in a fit of senile madness. As before, Whitmore is wonderful, and the whole story is just painful and gripping. (My grandfather did not get quite to that level of dementia, but he did try to harm a health care worker. Such tragedies are real.)
Fraiser, “Cranes Unplugged” – Frasier is still coping with his moment of self-awareness – a rare bit of continuity for the character – when Freddy visits. Only the kid is now 13 and acting like a sullen teen. Frasier wants to bond, but even a weekend in the woods might not help. This one, coming on the heels of such a strong episode, is a bit of a letdown, but Frasier/Freddy stories are always at least a little rewarding. (I think the title is meant to reference MTV Unplugged, in part because Martin is exposed in horrified fascination to the world of scantily clad women in rock videos.)
This is one of the (now fairly few) Vincent Price films I haven’t seen yet – shame it isn’t more of a hidden gem but sounds like there’s enough here to make sure I check it out eventually!
It delivers enough Price threatening to incapacitate/kill to make it worthwhile for the connoisseur!
Hell yeah. He very rarely disappoints!
Year of the Month update!
This November, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al from 2018!
Nov. 14th: Gillian Nelson: Christopher Robin/Mary Poppins Returns
Nov. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Ralph Breaks the Internet
Nov. 28th: Gillian Nelson: Legend of the Three Caballeros
And in December, we’ll be taking pitches on anything from 1948, like these movies, albums, and books.
Dec. 20th: Lauren James: The Lottery
Reminds me a little of the Motels video – I wonder if it’s intentional homage?
Never saw that video before! It seems more giallo/slasher inspired and it also has a sympathetic protagonist, it is hard to not root for the Shocked woman here to die already so Price and Bari can enjoy their illicit carnality. It’s only occurring to me now that Shaw’s weird dream sequence early on offered an untaken path — she’s largely unconscious for much of the movie, yes, but a film that wanted to foreground her could have used more weird menacing dreams to put the viewer in her head and make her more sympathetic.
I wasn’t sure if Fincher borrowed any visuals!
Oh, that’s a cool idea. Sounds like a better movie!
Thank you again for covering for me! And even with all the caveats, this sounds worth a watch for the Vincent Price of it all. I’ll assume he’s imprisoned in Arkham and escapes into a gothic where he could have freer rein.