The scene develops with more undercurrents than surface, as McPherson enters the bathroom, glances at Lydecker, and seems faintly amused. Then Lydecker swings the typewriter shelf away, so that it shields his nudity from the camera but not from the detective. Waldo stands up, offscreen, and a reaction shot shows McPherson glancing down as Lydecker asks him to pass a bathrobe. Every time I see the movie, I wonder what Preminger is trying to accomplish with this scene. There is no suggestion that Lydecker is attracted to McPherson, and yet it seems odd to greet a police detective in the nude.
Lydecker is Laura’s Svengali. In flashbacks, we follow the progress of their relationship. He snubs her in the Algonquin dining room, then apologizes, becomes her friend, and takes over her life, chooses her clothes, redoes her hair, introduces her to the right people, promotes her in his column. They spend every night together out on the town, except Tuesdays and Fridays, when Waldo cooks for her at home. Then other men enter the picture and leave again as Waldo blasts them in his column. Big, dumb Shelby with his lean, strong body is the latest and most serious threat. Considering this Waldo-Shelby-Laura love triangle, it occurs to me that the only way to make it psychologically sound would be to change Laura into a boy.
The movie basically consists of well-dressed rich people standing in luxury flats and talking to a cop. The passion is unevenly distributed. Shelby and Laura never seem to have much heat between them. Waldo is possessive of Laura, but never touches her. Ann Treadwell (Anderson), a society dame, lusts for Shelby but has to tell him or he’d never know. And Detective McPherson develops a crush on the dead woman. There is an extraordinary scene where he enters her apartment at night, looks through her letters, touches her dresses, sniffs her perfume, pours himself a drink from her bottle, and sits down beneath her enormous portrait, which is placed immodestly above her own fireplace. It’s like a date with a ghost.
McPherson’s investigation and his ultimate revelations are handled in an offhand way, for a 1940s crime picture. He is forever leading people to believe they’re going to be charged, and then backing off. Lydecker asks to tag along as the cop interviews suspects; murder is his “favorite crime,” and “I like to study their reactions.” Astonishingly, McPherson lets him. This is useful from a screenplay point of view, since otherwise McPherson would be mostly alone.
All of these absurdities and improbabilities somehow do not diminish the film’s appeal. They may even add to it. Some of the lines have become unintentionally funny, James Naremore writes in More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, “Where Laura is concerned, the camp effect is at least partly intended—any movie that puts Clifton Webb, Judith Anderson, and Vincent Price in the same drawing room is inviting a mood of fey theatricality.”
The story of Preminger’s struggle to get the movie made has become Hollywood legend. As he tells it in his autobiography, Zanuck saw him as a producer, not a director, and assigned Rouben Mamoulian to the piece. When the early rushes were a disaster, Preminger stepped in, reshot many scenes, replaced the sets, and fought for the screenplay. Zanuck insisted that another ending be shot; the film was screened for Zanuck and his pal Walter Winchell, a real gossip columnist, who said he didn’t understand the ending. So Zanuck let Preminger have his ending back, and while the business involving the shotgun in the antique clock may be somewhat labored, the whole film is of a piece: contrived, artificial, mannered, and yet achieving a kind of perfection in its balance between low motives and high style. What makes the movie great, perhaps, is the casting. The materials of a B-grade crime potboiler are redeemed by Waldo Lydecker, walking through every scene as if afraid to step in something.
Le Samourai
NO MPAA RATING, 95 m., 1967
Alain Delon (Jef Costello), Francois Perier (The Superintendant), Nathalie Delon (Jane Lagrange), Caty Rosier (Valerie), Jacques Leroy (The Gunman), Jean-Pierre Posier (Olivier Rey), Catherine Jourdan (Hat-check Girl), Michel Boisrond (M. Wiener). Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville and produced by Eugene Lepicier. Screenplay by Melville, Joan McLeod, and Georges Pellegrin.
An empty room. No, not empty. In the shadows we can barely see a man on the bed. He lights a cigarette, and smoke coils up toward a wisp of light from the window. After a time the man gets up, fully dressed, and moves to a hat stand near the door. He puts on his fedora, adjusting the brim with delicate precision, and goes out into the street.
Like a painter or a musician, a filmmaker can suggest complete mastery with just a few strokes. Jean-Pierre Melville involves us in the spell of Le Samourai (1967) before a word is spoken. He does it with light: a cold light, like dawn on an ugly day. And color: grays and blues. And actions that speak in place of words.
The man hot-wires a car, and drives it down a forlorn street to a garage where the door gapes open. He wheels it inside. A mechanic is waiting, who changes the license plates. The driver waits and smokes. The mechanic opens a drawer and hands him papers. The driver extends his hand. For a handshake? No, for a gun. He pockets it. He hands the mechanic cash. Then he drives away. Not a word is spoken.
The man, named Jef Costello, is played by Alain Delon, the tough pretty boy of French movies. He was thirty-two when this movie was made, an actor so improbably handsome that his best strategy for dealing with his looks was to use a poker face. He seems utterly unaware here of his appearance; at times he seems to be playing himself in a dream. A “beautiful destructive angel of the dark street,” film critic David Thomson called him.
Costello is a killer for hire. The movie follows him with meticulous attention to detail while he establishes an alibi, kills a nightclub owner, survives a police lineup, is betrayed by those who hired him, and becomes the subject of a police manhunt that involves a cat-and-mouse chase through the Paris Metro. All the while he barely betrays an emotion.
Two women help supply his alibis. A woman named Jane loves him, we guess, although she has a rich lover and Jef knows it. (She is played by Nathalie Delon, his real-life wife.) The other woman, a black musician named Valerie (Caty Rosier) who plays the piano in the nightclub, lies at the lineup, and says she has never seen him. But she knows she has. Is she lying to help him? Or because she knows the men who hired him, and knows they do not want him caught? This question weighs on Costello’s mind after he is betrayed by his employers, and he goes to see the piano player, who is utterly fearless even though he might kill her. Costello’s women seem to reflect his own existential detachment: He does his job, he functions at the top of his ability, he has no values, he is a professional, there is no room for sentiment in how he lives.
“There is no solitude greater than a samurai’s,” says a quotation at the beginning of the film. “Unless perhaps it is that of a tiger in the jungle.” The quotation is attributed to The Book of Bushido, which I was disappointed to find out is fictional—a creation of Melville’s. The quotation and the whole pose of the Costello character are meant to suggest a man who operates according to a rigid code. But as Stanley Kauffmann points out in his review, “a samurai did not accept commissions to kill merely for money: honor and ethics were involved.”
Here the honor and ethics seem to be Jef Costello’s loyalty to himself; a samurai was prepared to die for his employer, and Costello is self-employed. Perhaps he should have taken his text from a real book, The Code of the Samurai, from sixteenth-century Japan. It begins with words Melville might well have quoted: “One who is a samurai must before all things keep constantly in mind, by day and by night . . . the fact that he has to die. That is his chief business.”