The Clay Pigeon (1949)

Director: Richard Fleischer

Cast: Bill Williams, Barbara Hale, Richard Quine, Richard Loo

Have I Seen it Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: It’s a little difficult to write a review of this immediately after my review of Night Editor (1946)*, as they both have the same fundamental problem: a softness that flies in the face of the very core of film noir. A happy ending might make the second, b-picture in a double-bill go down smoother, but it leaves me thinking that the lengths which Jim (Williams) goes to get out of his bind—including becoming a fugitive from justice and manhandling the wife (Hale) of the army buddy he may be responsible for killing—as perfectly reasonable and something somebody ought to do when they’re in trouble.

Imagine if Touch of Evil (1958) had ended with Orson Welles, and Charlton Heston letting bygones be bygones and went out for tacos at the end of that film? Or take a neo-noir like Fargo (1996), and have it end with William H. Macy and Frances McDormand meeting Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare at the Radisson at the end, chalking the whole kidnapping plot up to a misunderstanding.

It’s even worse when one considers that the film could have been expanded and made a halfway decent 1970s paranoia thriller in the vein of Three Days of the Condor (1975) or The Parallax View (1974), and has been self-consciously imitated by Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014). Everyone wants to seem to call this noir, it was programmed in an ongoing noir series, but I think the film isn’t even all that interested in wanting to be noir. That’s okay! It can be another kind of film, we just need to finally tie down just what is and what isn’t noir. Not a problem. I’ll wait patiently here while the rest of you figure it out.

*After watching them both in a double feature at Circle Cinema.

Trapped (1949)

Director: Richard Fleischer

Cast: Lloyd Bridges, Barbara Payton, John Hoyt, James Todd

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Between the head cold that wouldn’t die, and the general feeling of exhaustion that filled the universe last fall*, I’ve been slacking on attending Circle’s regular Noir Night. Throw in the fact that before the movie they ran the 1923 animated short from Fleischer’s father, also titled Trapped, I can’t help but marvel that I go to one of the only theaters that still runs cartoons before a movie.

Did I Like It: Even beyond the amenities of the screening, it’s good to be back in the dim world of Noir. There’s something so simply intuitive about putting a hard on their luck schlub in the pursuit of an easy payday only to be completely ruined by that fantasy (it’s a fantasy at the moment) of consequences. Trapped hits all of the beats one would expect and need from the genre. There’s even a blonde (Payton) lurking around the edges of the film who can vacillate between victim and Iago-like manipulator for good measure.

But then the film takes a weird turn. All throughout the runtime, Stewart (Bridges) feels like the main character. He’s the schemer who is one step ahead of the coppers who are trying to bring the gifted forger back into justice. Most of the first act centers on his escape. Then, with twenty minutes left to go, Bridges gets arrested again. One might think he’s got a whole other escape in him before the end credits unfurl, but no. Lloyd Bridges suddenly becomes Sir Not Appearing In This Film. The final twenty minutes involves the Secret Service tightening their noose around a completely different character, Jack Sylvester (Todd).

This might have struck me as a flaw of the film, if it weren’t for the fact that we were all told before the film began that Bridges got quite sick in the middle of production, and with a B production there was no time to wait for him to get better. So it’s suddenly a story about Sylvester. Without Fleischer at the helm, this could have been a real mess, instead of a slightly off-beat one. It’s a testament to Fleischer’s skills that he could make as much lemonade out of the lemons available.

Just imagine how bad Conan the Destroyer (1984) would have been if Fleischer hadn’t been around to keep things under some degree of control.

*Now that that’s over with…

Armored Car Robbery (1950)

Director: Richard Fleischer

Cast: Charles McGraw, Adele Jergens, William Talman, Douglas Fowley

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I’d go on and on about the context of seeing the movie here, but you can read all about it in my review of The Threat (1949), which I saw on the same night.

Did I Like It: Which is made all the more unfortunate, as not only the filmgoing experience bleeds together, but the film itself bleeds together, too. The Venn diagram for the cast of the two films resembles an oval, and making the heavy Threat the hero here isn’t enough to have the two films not bleed together in my memory. By the time this film started to roll, I had run out of popcorn and M&Ms, so it is entirely possible that the film never really had a chance. Might not even be its fault.

Something with such a utilitarian title ought to have the ruthless, unrelenting quality of Hitchcock or the early Carpenter films. This could have opened with the titular robbery, and had their characters perpetually on the run for a breathless hour, after which all of the robbers would either tragically or rightly get their swift justice at the wrong end of a gun.

Unfortunately, this isn’t one of those b-movies that can operate like the cinematic equivalent, ironically enough, of a heist itself. It fulfills all of the requirements RKO likely had for one of its b-pictures (especially in an era where they were supremely disinterested in filmmaker’s hijacking the studio post-Citizen Kane (1941)). It meanders too long on the femme fatale, and dispenses with many of the robbers in dull or inexplicable fashion. I’m thinking that it wasn’t until Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) that someone edited footage of someone running afoul of an airplane correctly.

Conan The Destroyer (1984)

Director: Richard Fleischer

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Grace Jones, Wilt Chamberlain, Mako

Have I Seen It Before?: With so many series released slightly before my time, I feel as if I saw both of the Schwarzenegger-led Conan films in some kind of congealed blob on cable. I’m reasonably sure that I never say down with the specific intention of watching the movie, though.

Did I like it?: As I was watching Conan the Barbarian (1982), my wife found the notion that I was enjoying the film somewhat perplexing. I’ve never been a fan of fantasy in general. I’ve fallen asleep through most films based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and I’d rather do almost anything than spend any time with C.S. Lewis. But there was something about the original film that works. It’s the singular nature of the character, and his ability to embody the spirit of the filmmaker in question while mostly avoiding sermonizing on the topic of its ideals.

Then they had to go and fuck it all up with a sequel. The first mistake was likely to drain all of the violence out of the picture, in an effort to somehow amplify the box office. It didn’t work, and we are left with a far less remarkable film. One might give it the excuse of being released mere weeks before PG-13 gave films some sort of middle ground between PG and R, but it does not change the fact that we are stuck with a toothless film.

It doesn’t make up for the loss in visceral action by making Conan more of hero, either. He is a bland cypher, content to swing his sword around and hint at the future where he will wear a crown upon a troubled brow. This film might have even benefited from being less subtle about its ideas, if they were truly intending the film to be for children, but those notions are gone for one of the blandest action fantasy films of the 1980s, and that is saying something. The original aims for ideals and ideas, and it’s reasonable to debate whether or not it hit those targets. This film aims for nothing, and somehow misses.