THE HARDER THEY FALL - CRITERION CHANNEL

Setting things right, and watching the intended companion in a double-feature with John Huston’s The Misfits [review here, and a part II piece here].

And honestly, I am ashamed of myself for waiting this long to watch Humphrey Bogart’s last picture. Released in 1956, The Harder They Fall features an aging Bogie at his most tenacious, a stand-up guy trying to get through by doing a little wrong. It’s both a tad too late to be classified as a sports-themed noir a la The Set-Up, and a little too early to stand as a symbol of old Hollywood trying to get its licks in with the new generation. Imagine this same movie in the mid-1960s, featuring Bogart tussling with a heavyweight from that era, someone like Jack Nicholson or Dustin Hoffman in the Rod Steiger gangster role, and it would be the classic studio man tearing into the avant garde. This role could have been as iconic for Bogart as a punctuation of a time as Orson Welles’ turn in Touch of Evil [review].

In The Harder They Fall, Bogie plays Eddie Willis, a sports writer who finds himself out of work following the folding of the newspaper where he wrote for nearly two decades. Realizing that the job kept him fed but never gave him enough to start a savings, he throws in with crooked fight promoter Nick Benko (Steiger, Jubal [review]), hoping to earn enough green to never be in this position again. Benko has a South American giant he wants to turn into a North American star, but El Toro (Mike Lane) can neither throw nor take a punch. Only Eddie knows how to work the press to turn this loser into a champion, getting his old pals on the circuit to look the other way when things are dodgy and ignore that the fix is in.

What follows is a long tour of sell-outs, compromises, and lies, as Eddie tries to keep the whole enterprise from going belly up by Toro either finding out the truth about the cheat or getting beaten to a pulp. The audience and some of Eddie’s friends--a television reporter he had a falling out with (Harold J. Stone, Spartacus) and Eddie’s wife (Jan Sterling, Ace in the Hole [review])--see Eddie’s willful ignorance for what it is, even as he doubles-down at every obvious cue to get out. He has to believe that somehow Toro will get his payday, or Eddie will never get his.

The Harder They Fall is directed by Mark Robson (Bedlam [review], The Valley of the Dolls [review]), working from a script by Philip Yordan (God’s Little Acre [review]), who in turn is adapting a novel by Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront). It’s a slick picture, its swift pace held together by a tightly constructed script. The dialogue is terse and the viewpoint resolute in its cynicism. You’re going to really hate the bad guys, more so when they appear so spineless next to Eddie. As a narrative, The Harder They Fall is scrappy studio system efficiency, pulling off ten rounds of drama without ever hitting the canvas. 



Robson treats all the boxing matches as important, be it a quick done-in-one where the chump goes down easy or the finale where Toro has to tussle for real with the champ. In that climactic bout, the camera deftly moves in and out of the ring, giving us both the fighter’s POV and that of the audience. The latter’s pained expressions makes the beating seem all the more harsh. The most brutal match, however, is an earlier exhibition where a particularly proud pugilist (Abel Fernandez, TV’s The Untouchables) has to be given a bloody out. Try not to cringe waiting for Toro to hit the right mark.



Eddie is on par with some of Bogart’s most famous roles--the last good man amongst a whole lot of bad ones. Like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, he has a moral code that he should not deviate from lest there be consequences. Unlike them, Eddie has thrown that code out, and his arc is all about getting it back. The older actor mines a weariness that serves him well, making it as if Eddie somehow knows he is the last of his kind. When he goes down, all else will follow. Eddie’s relationship with Toro is a bit like a citified Of Mice and Men, with the simple giant never quite grasping how things work. The tragedy here is that he is very nearly self-euthanizing, taking Eddie’s advice that the only way out is by taking it on the chin--again and again and again.

The Harder They Fall is a fitting finish for Bogart. While, sure, he could have done something more grand or obvious before the final bow, it makes more sense to see him go out as he started: playing the toughest guy in the room. Even the very last scene, when he sits down to write, a flipside to In a Lonely Place [review], there is a statement of intent: Bogie will never give in, he’ll always be Bogie. It would have been interesting to see him punch into the next decade. Imagine his collaborations with Godard, or playing an elderly heavy in a Coppola movie. The old hound dog would have certainly taught the young pups a thing or two about a thing or two.

Jean-Paul Belmondo looking at a The Harder They Fall poster in Breathless.

BEDLAM/I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE - FILMSTRUCK

These reviews were written in 2005 to cover the Val Lewton boxed set and published in my now-defunct column "Can You Picture That?" It is adapted here now that several of Lewton's productions have been added to Filmstruck for Halloween.

Val Lewton started off as a pulp novelist before being hired by David O. Selznick to work as part of his production team. RKO eventually snatched him away to try to revive the studio after the Citizen Kane fiasco of 1941, and Lewton created a roster of efficient craftsmen to start cranking out B-movies for the studio. The result was some classics of the genre, famous for their sense of invention. Lewton had to work quickly and with little money, so he developed a style that used economy to its advantage. The stories were tight, usually preying on the imagination of the audience by keeping much of the macabre violence offscreen. Lewton realized it was better to make you create your own impression of the horrible things that happened, to make you a part of the experience, flying directly in the face of the Universal monster fests that had been on top of the horror heap for quite some time. 

Mark Robson, a former editor who collaborated with Lewton, directed Boris Karloff in 1946's Bedlam, the second film the pair made together, and it has a similar center to their first team-up, Isle of the Dead: a malignant force trapping people in one place to serve his own ends. In this case, however, Karloff’s apothecary, Master George Sims, doesn’t see any greater good the way Isle's General Pherides becomes misguided in trying to preserve his army. Sims is only trying to preserve himself and maintain his position as the head of the infamous 19th-century mental hospital.

Based on engravings by William Hogarth, Bedlam is gruesome and macabre. It’s not a traditional spookified frightfest, but instead uses its medical setting and the sociological conditions for a little psychological horror, playing on a rather common fear: being wrongfully committed to the madhouse. When Sims locks up Nell Bowen (Anna Lee) for opposing his cruel tactics, it can stand in for the anxiety any of us would feel in a situation we can’t escape from. It’s survival against malicious forces beyond our control. Ultimately, Bowen’s kindness does exactly what Sims fears: the lunatics take over the asylum. 

Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 film I Walked With a Zombie is easily a standout of the genre that takes us to the West Indies where voodoo is alive...and so are the dead!

Tourneur creates a gorgeous setting for the story: the tropical estate of the Holland family, long-time exploiters of the island people. Amidst the lush foliage is a statue of Saint Sebastian, the namesake for the island, pierced with arrows, his body arched in pain. When the rain falls over its torso, the statue appears to bleed. Frances Dee plays Betsy Connell, a nurse hired to come to the island and care for the catatonic wife of Paul Holland (Tom Conway). No one is exactly sure what happened to the woman. One explanation is she caught a tropical fever that wiped out her mind, and another--one popularized in a local song--says that when Paul found her canoodling with his half-brother, he persecuted her into insanity. The locals that make up the servant class on the Holland estate believe something different, that she is no longer alive at all. She is the living dead!

I Walked With a Zombie works along many parallel lines. In one sense, it is an indictment of imperialism, decrying the wounded state of the oppressed people. The citizens of Saint Sebastian were brought over on slave ships, and they are so distraught over their non-lives, they cry when a baby is born and laugh with relief when one of their number dies. Their state of living decay is beginning to affect the Hollands, and the family is falling apart. The dominance of the now indigenous culture is also a victory over the oppressors’ science. Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett), the Holland matriarch, is a doctor, and she has invaded the voodoo ceremonies to sneak a little medicine into suspicion. Yet, there is nothing she can do for her daughter-in-law, and as the voodoo priests call the zombie out into the sugar fields, she begins to believe there is something beyond what she can understand or control.

The mixture of science and magic holds very real consequences that are analogous of the ways we interact with each other. The infidelity of the Holland family has destroyed their grasp on their opulent life. Only Betsy’s goodness pulls Paul out of the abyss. The same cannot be said for his brother. Unable to let go of the feelings he has for the zombie woman, he ultimately meets a dire end, finding the relief in death that the islanders have promised. Fittingly, he and his absent lover are chased to their doom by the only other zombie in the movie--a towering island man who has come to claim the woman so she can be put amongst his people, where she now belongs.

Tourneur’s direction is lyrical, using the natural surroundings of Saint Sebastian to their full effect. This is a story about nature winning out, after all. Amusingly, the film was based on a tabloid story about a woman’s love affair with a dead man. Lewton was often given very little to start his films with, sometimes just a title. The triumph of I Walked With a Zombie is that of creative men taking small beginnings and making something bigger out of it. 

Martin Scorsese has said that film fans that don’t like horror movies can’t be real film fans. Horror films are movies at their most visceral, playing with our bodies and our minds, provoking reactions. In these splatter-filled days of ridiculous curses and unrestrained gore, horror films don’t poke at our imaginations the way these older movies did. In the end, their endurance is evident of the lasting scares they inspire. Even their lack of color gives the viewer something spookier, something culled from the terrors of the night. Pass on the latest remake making a box office grab and go to your local video store for something with a little more power, and then get ready for a scary Halloween.

VALLEY OF THE DOLLS - #835

There is a pargraph in Glenn Kenny’s essay in the booklet accompanying Criterion’s release of Valley of the Dolls where he posits that simple adjectives, either good or bad, don’t quite fit when talking about the 1967 phenomenon. An enduring cult classic, it embodies many things, and takes on its own image well before many in its continually renewing audience even get a chance to see it. It’s infamous, it’s campy, it’s scandalous--all things that are true, all things that don’t quite hit on what a strange little creature this film really is.

Adapted from a best-selling novel by Jacqueline Susann, whose name became synonymous with outrageous stories about ambitious, liberated women, Valley of the Dolls is a culmination of many story traditions and the evolution of the same. It updates the 1950s concept of the “women’s picture,” as well as the career girl movie. It’s essentially a showbiz version of The Best of Everything, but with an added frankness about the sex, booze, and drugs that previously only went on way behind the screen. And then there is that showbiz thing itself--Valley of the Dolls is also an update of the Tinsel Town and Broadway dramas, a bit A Star is Born, a bit All AboutEve. There is a touch of the musical, especially with Dory Previn’s off-kilter songs (written with her philandering husband Andre, and more than hinting at Dory’s own personal drama), as well as a smidgen of horror films (the asylum, the nightmarish empty streets in the final New York scenes). Director Mark Robson, who also helmed Peyton Place and edited the original Cat People, and screenwriters Helen Deutsch (Lili [review]) and Dorothy Kingsley (Kiss MeKate) combine their knowledge of all these genres and subjects with Susann’s narrative to create a fresh 1960s perspective. Thus we get former child star Patty Duke popping pills, and Sharon Tate seemingly commenting on her own blonde bombshell image, and pop-art redoes of the fashion shoots from Funny Face [review].

The plot of Valley of the Dolls is nothing new. Anne Welles (Barbara Parkins, a star on the PeytonPlace TV series), a privileged college girl from New England, travels to the big city in hopes of escaping the conventional married life laid out for her. She gets a job as a secretary for an entertainment lawyer, and on her first day, gets a quick lesson in backstage politics, when her own innocent comment to an aging theatre star (Susan Hayward, I Married a Witch [review]) gets the new ingénue in the show fired. Duke plays the young starlet, Neely O’Hara, and Tate plays chorus girl Jennifer North, who is on hand at the rehearsal to witness the injustice (and suffer her own, given that her body is a topic of discussion). The lives of these three women quickly become entwined, both socially and professionally, as each sees different career paths open for them.

In these criss-crossing stories, Dolls explores different notions of hard work and fate. Jennifer is lucky enough to be born blonde and bosomy, and so easily snags a husband (a nightclub singer played by Tony Scotti). She knows she has little talent, and the work she’ll eventually turn to in order to help pay the bills relies on her assets. (As is the nature of these kinds of stories, someone must have a fatal illness, and that ends up being her man.) In one of the more comical scenes--and also for the time, more progressively honest--the young Jennifer, chastised and shamed by her forever-unseen mother, starts her nightly breast exercises to keep them perky before saying forget it, let them droop.

I note that it’s the “young Jennifer” because Valley of the Dolls follows all of its characters over a course of a couple of years, so these women do age--though not necessarily physically, there is no notable old-age makeup, which only sharpens the biting commentary that comes ¾ of the way through. When her addiction to sleeping pills (nicknamed “dolls”) gets the better of her, Neely is told she’s been replaced by a new, younger actress, she’s looking too old. “I’m only 26!” she declares. It seems ageism is imprinted in Hollywood’s DNA. Neely’s on-set tantrums are modeled after Judy Garland, but they also have echoes of Marilyn Monroe, who was cut from her final, unfinished picture because she couldn’t make it to set in performance condition. Duke makes the most of her meaty role, easily the best in the movie, playing the lush life to the hilt. She also gets the movie’s most memorable and campiest scene, a final bathroom showdown with Susan Hayward’s Helen Lawson, the diva who would have ruined her. (As in George Cukor’s TheWomen, much happens in the bathroom.)

That climactic clash between Duke and Hayward is actually indicative of the light touch Robson took to most of this. Sure, heavy things happen, but the movie itself rarely feels heavy in its telling, even when the women have to make tough choices. It’s also telling how little backstabbing the core trio does to one another. Outside of a third act boyfriend grab when Neely is heading for her ultimate downfall, these ladies aren’t vying for the same slices of pie. At the same time, the kindness they attempt to show one another is often rebuffed. Friendship buckles under selfishness.

Even so, they are more emotionally mature than their male counterparts. The men in Valley of the Dolls are childish philanderers with fragile egos. Both of Neely’s husbands resent her success and her inability (unwillingness) to cater to their needs, while Jennifer’s spouse is the opposite, resenting having to be the breadwinner. Though, not even he is in control of his own destiny: besides his illness, his sister (Lee Grant, Mulholland Dr.) manages his floundering career, holding the purse strings and telling him what to do. The one guy doing for himself, Barbara’s on-again/off-again paramour (Paul Burke, TV’s Naked City), is no picnic either: he has commitment issues. Gone is the Sirkian man of the land, there is no Rock Hudson to swoop in and make things better. So absent is this figure in this newly liberated lifestyle, actually, that the end of Valley of the Dolls takes the back-to-nature element of Sirk’s All thatHeaven Allows and gives it to Barbara, who gets out of the rat race single, free, and whole.

Amongst the extras on the new Valley of the Dolls Blu-ray, for those who can’t quite get at why they like the movie, or what its strange machinations add up to, the wonderful film critic Kim Morgan provides a video essay in which she digs into the progressive subtext and the subversive genre tropes, embracing the criticism of the source material as “trash” and balancing it against the more “serious” but comparable literature of the day. Interesting to hear that Harlan Ellison removed himself from scripting duties when he felt the ending of Susann’s novel had been compromised. That Harlan, always with his shoulder against the grain.

Jacqueline Susann at a book signing.

Morgan tackles and makes a case for the more aspirational aspects of the story, and how the women take over the traditionally male roles and suffer for it, which also leads us to an interesting question to ponder: just why do we enjoy such tragic movie-star movies? Is there a self-loathing that runs through Hollywood, where they indulge in these cautionary tales about the price of stardom, or are they merely tapping into a mean streak that connects all moviegoers? We won’t ever be the next big crooner or the face of a national ad campaign, and so we like to watch our idols fail. If not us, then not them either, and none of it is what it’s cracked up to be anyway.

Comics fans also take note, the exclusive cover here is by Phil Noto. Those unfamiliar with Noto should check out his website. Or maybe his amazing run on Black Widow for Marvel Comics.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.