The Right Faces

There’s a humbling experience examining any era of filmmaking where you inevitably discover that, despite their laurels and historic significance, by-and-large most of the movies from any place in time will be middling at best, if not outright bad. The chill in the air had me giving into Criterion Channel’s “Noirvember” advertising scheme, only to realize that this “genre” (really, they crime films that were posteriorly classified as “noirs” by French critics because of certain post-war tendencies within the films—one could think of French Poetic Realism or many New Wave movements the same way) isn’t very good, even the ones touted as paramount. While I fit in the 80-minute films between getting off a bar shift and bed—which, to their credit, if they’re not very good don’t overstay their B-picture welcome—but some of the bigger dramas require more proper feature runtimes.

Best example of this would be how underwhelming the broad strokes of Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra (1941) are. The sort of heist film centering around an aging gangster was a star-maker for Humphrey Bogart (even though he has a horrific haircut in the picture, one which is ambiguous if it’s a bad fade or they were going for a touch-of-gray on the sides) falters in its constant wheel-spinning, but shines in little moments. It’s the kind of film that exists best in one's memory, where the larger portrait fades away and it’s the quiet times between characters that stand the test of time. In one’s memory, you can forget that the best part of the film, Ida Lupino’s performance, has so little screen time in the film's strangely stagnant 100-minutes.

Walsh was always best as a director of actors. Although he tried to be a stylist, he never reached the coherence of Curtiz, the cogency of Wellman, or the grandiosity of Vidor. He’s able to give his actors enough room to live in their scenes, and at the same time give a little more pizazz and depth to location than the staginess of Hawks. When he’s got the pieces all right though, Walsh’s work can soar.

The Man I Love (1947) is another Walsh-Lupino collaboration, but here her raw talent is let loose with its full range of possibility. Following a nightclub singer, Petey Brown (Lupino), decides to take some time away from New York City to see her sisters and brother back on the west coast. As Petey, Lupino effortlessly bounces between being the woman out for herself in the seedy world of crime-adjacent bars and her softer role as a sibling in her family’s complicated domestic affairs. Despite only 95 minutes, the film’s backed with the whole world of lives of two-hands worth of characters. If Walsh is a great director of actors, it’s not just the way he’s able to balance all these people while still maintaining a snappy momentum (not to mention, making plenty of room for the film’s devastating moments of silence), it’s also the way he’s able to glimpse into their workings with the tiniest expressions or quick reactions from the players.

Perhaps The Man I Love’s greatest trick is that what one would imagine would be the center of the story, the doomed romance that Petey finds herself in, is enough away from the heart of the film’s production that the Lupino’s “co-star” isn’t even billed until fourth or fifth down.

Bruce Bennett is one of those Hollywood handsome men not brought to screen for particular acting talent, but physical prowess. The Olympian got his break being cast as Tarzan, and later changed his name from Herman Brix to Bennett to shake the type he’d fallen into. Maybe it’s what makes him such a perfect match acting against Lupino, one of Hollywood’s best-ever while never aspiring to be an actress and feeling very insecure when she was finally pushed into that role. The two float past each other like objects of different orbits floating through space, immediately pulled in by the other’s gravity, but fated for their imminent escape velocity.

A nightclub singer and a gifted piano man who squandered his life with bad romance and alcohol. The spark between them accidentally bursts out of their faces while they’re trying to hold back all of the sadness within them. It’s that kind of dynamic that critics like to call “electric,” although it’s much more than that: it’s copper wires spinning faster and faster to create transferable power. Lupino and Bennett are impossible to look away from, and they feel like magnets of opposite charge getting pulled apart by the force of the story. It makes that final inevitability of their ships passing in the night all the more devastating—that physical feeling of ripping apart two that were briefly joined into one. Walsh may not be one of the all-time greats, but in the world of industrial Hollywood you never had to be to make one of the best movies ever made, you just needed all the right pieces, just enough journeyman’s skill, and the right faces looking back at each other for the last time.