Jack Elam | Kansas City Confidential | Dir. Phil Karlson | 1952 | 99 mins

Kansas City Confidential is a bank heist film and of course it goes wrong. It begins with a bitter ex-cop, Mr. Big (Preston Foster), rounding up three hardened criminals, each with a reason for fleeing the US authorities and each compelled to take the $300,000 payday. The story is ‘confidential’ because the crime was masterminded by an ex-cop and for this reason it does not exist in police files. The opening is an incredibly taught piece of filmmaking, one of the best in noir, not least in its memorable introduction of the three criminal recruits, each of whom defines menace in their own particular way. The film commences with Mr. Big plotting the heist from an apartment across from the bank, patiently marking a worksheet with precise timings of comings and goings day-after-day. He’s done the research, now he needs a team. Reaching into his notebook, he draws a name from stolen police files: Pete Harris. Cut to a dishevelled hotel room and an extremely jittery Jack Elam (gun holster over shoulder) frantically raiding his cigarette butts for something to smoke before turning to throw dice. A more rapid establishment of a character’s essential wrongness would be hard to find. The phone clatters and Harris instinctively lunges for his gun. He refuses to acknowledge Mr. Big’s call at first but succumbs to the immediate re-call. In close-up, Elam’s narrow, bony, stubbled face and heavy-set eyebrows over a misaligned and blind left eye (improbably damaged by a pencil in a scout camp fight at the age of 12), in contrast to Mr. Big’s calm and authoritative presence, presents a picture of desperate connivance as he weighs up his straitened options. Take on the job with a stranger for a big pay-day or stay on the run and wait for the authorities to nail him on a murder charge? The choice is already made. 

When Harris gets to Mr. Big’s apartment, he again jumps for his gun after Rolfe enters in a blank-faced mask (uncannily resembling the one worn by the daughter in Georges Franju’s 1960 surrealist fantasy horror, Eyes Without a Face). Mr. Big says aloud what the audience is thinking: “No change, eh, Pete? Still jumpy”. “That was a sucker move burning down your [gambling] boss”, he continues, “You had him all wrong, he never crossed you, but you’re a guy who shoots first and thinks afterward”. Harris knows Mr. Big has him under the thumb and tries to jump him, but his anger rapidly turns to limp helplessness when Mr. Big retaliates, slapping him repeatedly from side to side like a wet rag. Thrust back in a chair, sweating, gasping, eyes engorged, Harris’s frantic scheming remains intact. The scene is portrayed with profound edginess by Elam, whose anxious body movements mirror the high-strung emotive registers in that face, “kind of dark and real weird eyes”, of a hundred low-life crooks. Slowly, he regains his composure, calculating his position anew, and Elam brings a more measured side to the character: a survivor of sorts in a world gone bad with only one, inevitably doomed, way out.

With Harris on board, the next ‘interviewees’ are Tony Romano (Lee van Cleef) and Boyd Kane (Neville Brand). Romano is played with cold charm by van Cleef, a ‘ladies man’ with arrogance etched all over his cruel handsome face.  Neville Brand as Boyd Kane is granite-faced unrepentant cop-killer menace. Mr. Big, with access to police files, has them at his mercy, as he does Harris, making for one of the great hoodlum ensembles in film noir. They pull off the caper with a duplicated florist truck. Everyone wears those blank-faced masks so no-one can identify them, even each other, then they split to foreign countries and wait for things to cool off before plans to reconvene and share out the loot. The rest is about Mr. Big containing the volatile beasts under his precarious command and, unexpectedly, the gang avoiding an enraged Joe Rolfe (John Payne), the everyman truck driver who was framed (and beaten by the cops) for the robbery and now must prove his innocence to clear his name.

Rolfe, who becomes the main protagonist in the film, gets a tip to follow the trail of dice and cigarette smoke in Tijuana if he wants to find Harris. He finds him. Elam’s performance here embodies Harris’s character: dripping with cynicism, mendacity and bullishness yet wilting and desperate under pressure; at times almost gleefully arrogant and mocking, at other times skulking, waiting to strike out or escape the clutches of the latest force come to restrain his restless criminality. Eyes contorted with anguished pleading and veering deliriously between self-pity and self-preservation with whatever escape plan he’s momentarily hatched, Elam expertly conveys the transparency between Harris’s interior cunning and his overwrought facial expressions. It’s a performance of great physicality that soon comes to a bad end, shot by the police while reaching for a gun he no longer has, and croaking out one final great line while spitting blood on his way to death: “This is a laugh. All that dough”.  

With such a memorable face, Elam acted in many great gangster films and Westerns, including an iconic turn in the opening sequence of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), but his tough, stubbled visage also worked a treat for noir. In the early-50s, he considered getting his eye fixed, but Darryl Zanuck, then head of 20th Century Fox, convinced him against it. With his kind of looks, Elam would never be a leading man, but the ‘lazy eye’ became part of his mystique, a mark of distinction that helped sustain decades of work in Hollywood. A lazy eye, however, is not enough for a “veteran baddie” career like Elam’s, and his performance in Kansas City Confidential, easily matching if not superseding the lead actors he plays alongside, is just one example of his acting quality across a 40-year career of bit-part gems.  

Neil Gray.

View Movie at: https://archive.org/details/KansasCityConfidential720p   

Frances E. Williams | The Reckless Moment | Dir. Max Ophuls | 1949 | 82 mins

Max Ophuls, the celebrated European director of such opulent classics as Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) and La Ronda (1955) is perhaps not the first name to come to mind when discussing film noir, for his extravagant set designs and melodramatic leanings sit in firm opposition to noir’s minimalist hard-boiled aesthetic. However, Ophuls, a German Jew exiled in Hollywood during World War 2, made two films at the end of his American tenure which have come to be considered noir classics. Caught (1949), provides a harsh critique of wealth and power in upper-class American society, then comes a subtle and damning portrait of the middle-class family in The Reckless Moment (1949). 

The latter film centres around Lucy Harper (Joan Bennett), a middle-class housewife whose life is thrown into darkness when her daughter Bea (Geraldine Brooks) accidently kills her low-life boyfriend Ted Darby (Shepperd Strudwick) after he suggests extorting money from her mother. Enraged, Bea hits him during a tryst in the family boathouse. She runs off, but unbeknownst to her, Darby stumbles, falls into the river and drowns. Lucy finds the body in the morning and manages to dispose of it. The police begin an investigation when the body reappears but there is nothing to link the Harpers to the death, nothing that is until Martin Donelly (James Mason) appears in Lucy’s front room brandishing letters Bea had written to Darby, given to Donelly’s dangerous associate Nagel as collateral for a loan. Now Darby is dead the letters have worth as blackmail material, and Donelly is there to extort the sum of $5000 in return for them. At this moment, the film’s emphasis shifts from the fate of Lucy Harper onto Donelly, who, enamoured with Lucy’s strong spirit and dedication to her family, begins to fall in love with her. He tries to convince Nagel to leave her alone, which ultimately saves Lucy’s family but dooms himself. 

The arena of the middle-class suburban household is a downsize for Ophuls who was accustomed to staging his elaborate tracking shots within the palatial interiors of late 19th century Viennese society, but Ophuls skilfully uses the architectural constraint to ramp up the claustrophobia surrounding Lucy. She is frequently framed through the bars of banisters or interior widow frames, constantly caged in. Her husband is away on business and won’t be home for Christmas, and her son, father and daughter ensure she never has a moment to herself. As Donnelly puts it: ‘You’re quite a prisoner, aren’t you?’. Lucy dismisses the comment, but part of the film’s power is her growing realisation that she is trapped in the social-economic situation of a housewife with no money of her own to pay the blackmailers, while being beholden to an absent husband. Is he even on a business trip? Just why isn’t he home for Christmas? Donnelly’s moments of consideration towards Lucy point towards this elephant in the room without anything being directly stated, and the husband’s absence is one of the great unarticulated elements of the film. Unarticulated verbally that it. Ophuls’ great skill is to communicate the characters relationships visually through gestures, objects, composition and framing. And when one starts to look at the film in this light one character begins to emerge as central to the film’s dynamic: Sybil, the black maid. 

Sybil (Frances E. Williams) has minimal dialogue, but is a constant presence on screen, viewed through internal windows in the house, working in the next room, or silently casting glances at the family as they converse. When she does speak, she has none of the exaggerated mannerisms associated with black maid characters of the day, she’s dignified and intelligent, understanding Lucy’s situation more than anyone, including Lucy herself. Frances E. Williams was a highly respected activist and actor who had just become the first black woman to run for The California State Assembly, someone who, presumably, would not take the role of a domestic worker unless she saw something worthwhile in the part. 

Within the prevailing context of race relations, it’s perhaps hard to comprehend now just how radical a figure Sybil is for a film made in 1949, and how radical the relationship between Lucy and Sybil is. In one scene, Lucy and Sybil discuss family finances in a way that appears more like the discussion of husband and wife than employer and servant. This implied suggestion of equality between Sybil and Lucy becomes more evident during the ending, where Donelly kills Nagel and drives off with the body and letters in one last attempt to protect the family. Sybil and Lucy give chase, during which Sybil gets her only close-up in the film as she utters: “I liked Mr Donelly”. It’s a key moment, there is so much tied up in the statement. Donelly has risked everything for Lucy and her family, how does this sacrifice compare to anything else in Lucy’s life? Compared to a husband who can’t be home for Christmas, say? Only Sybil understands this, because, like Donelly, Sybil notices things, all her actions reveal someone who sees how much is put upon Lucy within the home. She can see that Lucy is in real trouble and she sees that Donelly is doing everything he can to help. Lucy finally breaks down, uncontrollably weeping over the dying Donelly’s crashed car. It’s left to Sybil to take control of the situation and drive them home. Donelly has given Lucy the letters and tells the police he killed Darby just before he dies. The film ends with Lucy, still in tears for Donelly, on the phone to her husband saying how much he is missed, framed by the banister bars.

Although Williams’s performance is understated and deceptively slight, she is Lucy Harper’s only confidant within the family, carrying much of Lucy’s emotional burden and supporting her at her lowest moments, yet she barely says a word, reflecting the reality of many domestic employees, especially those who are black. Symptomatically, Frances E. Williams acting efforts themselves went formally unacknowledged in The Reckless Moment, for her name appears nowhere on the credits. Why bother, the producers must have thought. She had only one or two lines. 

Sandy Milroy. 

Watch Movie at: https://archive.org/details/therecklessmoment1949