Streaming Shuffle
The end of Noirvember brings you an unjustly forgotten--and deeply feminist--cocktail party from hell.
Without Honor—an unusual, nightmarish exercise in tension—is one of my favorite Noirvember discoveries. It’s a lean 69 minutes, and though it plays out in or close to real time, it handles its brisk story arcs with so much conviction that it packs in years’ worth of character development. This is a killer work of suburban noir that should be in a double feature with Cause for Alarm.
Laraine Day plays Jane, whose late afternoon tidying-up is interrupted by the arrival of her lover, Franchot Tone’s Dennis Williams. His arrival makes her glow—never mind that it’s a bad idea for him to drop by when her husband’s due any minute, this man, as weaselly as he quickly turns out to be, is her only source of happiness. But while she’s still playfully fretting about feeling dowdy in her housedress, he hits her with a one-two punch: a private eye’s been tailing them, and he’s gathered up enough proof to blow their lives apart. Jane’s shocked but relieved. This isn’t how she wanted her marriage to end, but she’ll be glad to have it over and done with, and then she and Dennis can be together. After all, he’s always told her his marriage was already over in all but name.
Jane, they always say that.
Day does a good job sinking into stunned denial as everything in her life unravels—she won’t have her lover, and soon, she suspects, she won’t even have the consolation of a stable, if distant and unhappy, life with her husband, either—and that’s good. She’ll stay submerged in those emotions for almost the entire film, surfacing only at odd intervals to act, almost frantically, to try to keep her sense of self and her integrity intact.
She goes from revelation to catastrophe to a kind of living hell, because it turns out that her husband didn’t hire that private eye: her brother-in-law, Bill (Dane Clark), did. And he’s so twisted up with sexual obsession and resentment and jealousy that he wants to torment her for a while, bullying and coming onto her before sticking her in an emotional pressure-cooker, with her and her husband and Dennis and his wife all crammed into the living room. It’s a parlor scene, and he’s the detective. He wants to be the one to reveal whodunnit, and where, and how often. He wants to watch her squirm.
I don’t want to give away too many details about the small incidents that make this feel so vivid. Let’s say that director Irving Pichel has an eye for the kinds of vivid, familiar but slightly surreal (or alienating in how they’re deployed here) images and occurrences: a broken heel, a garden hose spraying wildly against a dress, the black netting on a hat casting dark stars across a pale face, a woman stumbling through an orange grove, a careening ice cream truck, a lift home, a new TV. A house is a prison. This all has faint Lynchian vibes of peeling off the superficially normal skin of suburbia to find the strangeness and—worse—writhing rottenness underneath.
The film doesn’t see Jane’s affair as a transgression; it doesn’t think there’s anything unspoiled for her to transgress against. It is, explicitly, a symptom of a wider disease, of the way her whole life has been poisoned by all the active malice and self-serving lies undergirding this normalcy. Maybe some of that is treatable. Maybe it’s not. (Either way, the image the film chooses to end on has a shocking raw power to it.)
Dane Clark gives magnificent wild-eyed sleaze as Bill, who ratchets back and forth between emotional neediness and the drive to humiliate so quickly that it shows Clark’s understanding that it’s all of a piece, all a manic desire to get exactly what he wants from everyone exactly how he wants it, but some bottom recognition that he doesn’t have the guts or the power to get it without twisting someone’s arm. At first, the movie seems to be setting him to play off Jane, but the real time conceits works against that—Jane is too numb and shaken-up to fight back properly. Instead, his true opposite number is Katherine Williams (Agnes Moorehead), Dennis’s wife, who knows why she’s been invited here but has her own reasons for attending.
Moorehead is always good, and here she walks aways with the whole movie. Her Katherine is coolly controlled but not, it emerges, chilly; she has her own compassion, and she distributes it in a clear-eyed way. She’s always seen through the polite fictions Dennis tried to sell her, and she sees everyone else just as easily: her calm recognition of who everyone here is and what they’re doing is speech as character-defining action. Bill wanted all this to be a very one-sided cat-and-mouse game, with him toying with Jane to his heart’s content. Katherine interrupts that both by being another cat and by refusing to play as he expects.
Empathetic, effective, weird, humane, and always invested in its female characters’ full humanity, Without Honor deserves a revival. Once again, Tubi is doing the Lord’s work.
Without Honor is—per that last line—streaming on Tubi (as well as Philo, Plex, and The Roku Channel).
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
Dan Duryea gets a shave and a second chance.
Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid – The idea is a good one: meld a contemporary production with clips from old movies to somehow create a new story. And the technical execution is generally good, and also proof you can do things like this without a computer. But this is a parody, and somehow ends up unsure if it’s telling a story, making fun of the tropes, or paying homage to the classics. Oh, and it’s not funny. (It starts with Steve Martin groping an unconscious Rachel Ward and the level of the gags never gets much better.) Martin is game, but acting opposite basically nothing (he was not, from what I can tell, watching the clips play offscreen) gives him little to react to. The only really good scene is with him and director/guest bad guy Carl Reiner interacting. A lesson that acting in a vacuum leaves a lot to be desired.
The Practice, “Till Death Do Us Part” – Bill Cobbs and Beah Richards are just married despite Beah’s Alzheimer’s, and her daughter wants the marriage annulled. Rebecca has the case dropped on her at the last minute, and discovers there is more than meets the eye. Dear lord, this was gutwrenching and brought a rare tear to my eye as Ms. Richards tells the judge, Helen, and Rebecca the tragic truth. Beah Richards won a guest star Emmy for this shortly before her death, and earned it. Meanwhile, Ellenor comes so very close to getting a court to order a new DNA test for the client on death row, but no. To be continued. The fourth season has really been chugging along as we get close to the end.
Frasier, “Forgotten but Not Gone” – On the night Niles starts his second term as corkmaster of the snooty Wine Club, Frasier announces he is quitting the club to do a weekly wine show. A show that Frasier is hoping will be enlivened by calls from club members only Niles forbids it. And it takes Martin stepping in and treating his sons like children to patch things up. Not a great episode, but better than the ones that come immediately before, and at least it’s fair to say that Frasier and Niles are very capable of acting like children. Plus Jennifer Coolidge guest stars as Daphne’s German substitute.
Seinfeld, season 4 episodes:
“The Shoes” – another entry into the ongoing meta show-within-a-show plot. I definitely prefer the standalone episodes but there’s still plenty of room for fun stuff here and some excellent chaotic escalation.
“The Old Man” – I’m a little obsessed with the crazy Vulture article that ranks every single episode at this point. They put this in the top ten which feels like a stretch to me, it’s pretty funny but not a classic IMO. Jerry, George and Elaine all volunteer to spend time with elderly people and Jerry’s old guy in particular is hilarious.
“The Implant” – this was my favourite of the three, though. Some top-tier guest stars (Teri Hatcher and Megan Mullally!) and a wonderfully disastrous George / Kramer plot to get cheap flights.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Back for Christmas” – a little slight, but I enjoyed this one a lot more than the last couple.
The old woman going into rapturous detail about Gandhi’s lovemaking skills is great.
“the Mahatma!?”
The Old Man is not THAT great but it is very funny and Elaine’s desperation culminating in the Yankee Bean song is a level of darkly hilarious pathos unique for the show, which is often dark but usually more cynical.
Been watching The Great, which is, uh, great! The fifth episode “War and Vomit” actually earns comparisons to The Shield with it’s very “action reveals character” plotting: one character takes an impulsive action and sets off a chain reaction of events right up to the final beat. (Great implication here that General Velementov is much more competent and decisive without booze or Peter around to make fun of him.) There’s a good balance throughout of everyone having their reasons, whether Georgy or Archie, and genuinely shocking, very funny images and moments that come of course from a tyrannical court where everyone’s terrified of the tsar, drinking and partying too much, and are used to extreme violence. Catherine also finds her limitations, especially that she’s intelligent and insightful, but extremely naive, while Peter is surprised to discover the very faintest glimmers of self-reflection and even change in himself. I believe Hoult got nominated for the show and he deserved it, an actor visibly enjoying the insane and silly things he gets to say and do on screen. Even the way he says “fucker” is great. Huzzah!
The X-Files, “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man”
A devout non-smoker succumbs to the lure of nicotine and, over the course of his life, tries unsuccessfully to quit.
This is a fantastic tragicomedy of an episode, with both William B. Davis and Chris Owens knocking the titular role out of the park (as usual, in Davis’s case). The way the episode sets “the Cancer Man” up as a kind of malignant Forrest Gump and then puts a perfect, hilarious button on it with his own grumpily, pettily nihilistic take on “life is like a box of chocolate” (“a cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable because all you get back is another box of chocolates”) is iconic, but let’s not forget that his accumulated power–or Frohike’s rendering of it, depending on how far you want to go with the whiff of unreliable narrator here–leads to a scene that’s amazingly reminiscent of “Homer the Great.”
But Davis also lends the character such a (pathetic) pathos, getting sadness as well as laughs out of the Cigarette-Smoking Man freezing like a deer in headlights when invited out for Christmas or stammering his way through his first pulp story acceptance with adorable, effervescent delight. Owens is the character as he once was: a dedicated crusader steadily losing his better qualities to the crusade. Davis comes in once the fervor is over, when basically all he has is a shell of a life … and then the crusade itself ends, taking away even the work. All that’s left is scuttling around, trying to keep what’s there. (Him lingering outside Mulder’s office door near Christmas is another sad-and-funny bit.) And when he tries for more, his inexperience with powerlessness means the small blow he gets is devastating. It’s his arc as much as all the secret history material that makes this feel like a condensed James Ellroy novel.
Killer Frohike line: “He’s the most dangerous man alive. Not so much because he believes in his actions, but because he believes those actions are all which life allows him.”
For once, Deep Throat reappears but isn’t my favorite thing in the episode. That’s only because of how good the rest is, though: his scene with the Cigarette-Smoking Man is magnificent, as we watch the two of them inflict a kind of wound on themselves that they’ll never really recover from.
Clearcut
This needs a full article, so: more later.
Hell fucking yes on Clearcut, cannot wait for that one. Graham Greene the god here.
Justified, Season Three, Episode Thirteen, “Slaughterhouse”
“Like we’re talking about the weather.”
“Pain and suffering?!”
What I love about this show is that I never quite know what’s going to happen; it was obvious Quarles wasn’t gonna make it (and I really should have seen his ending coming from the moment his gun contraption showed up), but I had no idea what was going to happen to Limehouse. This was a great, deeply cinematic episode; it lightly touches on Raylan being the angriest man in the world, gesturing at it – Timothy Olyphant is always amazing when he chooses to reveal Raylan’s rage, because it’s a deliberate acting choice he plays as morally neutral. It’s driving Raylan to do good, but it’s not necessarily driving him to be smart. The best moment in the episode is when Art tells him to stand back while he and the other cops are actually doing stuff, and we see him perfectly still as cop cars drive out around him.
Only Quarles would make the mistake of killing a cop. Wynn’s exasperation with Raylan’s game of Russian roulette is so funny to me (“Jesus Christ!”). Cathy Ryan!
Biggest Laugh: “You’re not as dumb as you look. I like the use of the word ‘cahoots’, though.”
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “Oh, shit, it’s a piggy bank!”
Top Ownage: Limehouse disarming Quarles.
Raylan’s last scene with Winona is so good, too. Olyphant is great at playing Raylan with this gulf of an open wound inside him, almost dazed because he’s hurting in a way he didn’t want to acknowledge he could be hurt. He doesn’t want Arlo to mean anything to him. But here he is, all the same.
That disarming sequence is A+ unabashed genre television, as is Quarles’s glee at the “piggy bank.”
There’s a funny thing where, theoretically, Raylan is basically every other TV action hero cop, but Olyphant commits to every emotion he has without distance. When he’s being smug and distant, it’s because Raylan is. But when Raylan is in a vulnerable place, Olyphant takes him there without any irony – in fact, he always seems delighted to do some real acting.
This sounds great and I would normally cheer Tubi – but they’ve removed Babylon 5! Nooooo!
Oh no! I thought they’d have that forever, so I wasn’t in a rush about it! May it come back.
Year of the Month update!
This December, we’ll be taking pitches on anything from 1948, like these movies, albums, and books.
Dec. 18th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Rope
Dec. 20th: Lauren James: The Lottery
Here’s how we’re wrapping up this month:
Nov. 28th: Gillian Nelson: Legend of the Three Caballeros
And here’s the movies, albums, books, TV, and games from 1985 for you to write about next January.
Jan. 2nd: Gillian Nelson: Return to Oz
Jan. 5th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Rambo: First Blood Part II
Jan. 9th: Gillian Nelson: Advice on Lice
Jan. 16th: Gillian Nelson: The Wuzzles/The Gummi Bears
Jan. 19th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Breakfast Club
Jan. 23rd: Gillian Nelson: The Golden Girls