Video Dispatches is a regular column covering recent home video releases.
Whirlpool (1949) – Twilight Time
Otto Preminger made about a half-dozen noirs in his career, three of which star Gene Tierney — most notably Laura. In his book “Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Street”, Foster Hirsch labels Preminger unquestionably the weakest of the major emigre noir filmmakers, saying his style was better fit for large-scale films like Exodus and Advise & Consent: “Preminger is most comfortable when his camera can explore wide open spaces as opposed to poking around a cramped noir environment.”
Watching Laura and Whirlpool (a film Hirsch doesn’t name) back to back certainly doesn’t lend such an impression very easily. Though the latter, recently released by Twilight Time on Blu-ray, isn’t nearly as well known as the former, but deserves a spot next to it. Tierney, playing a kleptomaniac wife of a psychologist, is just as stunning here, this time playing with a vulnerability natural for someone under hypnosis. Preminger does well to let her face carry the film. As noted in the booklet essay, Tierney’s terrific wardrobe was done by icon Oleg Cassini, who was her husband at the time.
Opposite her is the fast-talking hypnotist, played by Jose Ferrer (father of Miguel), who’s absolutely delightful and unrelentingly evil. Hirsch does attribute Preminger’s noirs with a couple distinctly unique and fitting qualities, dryness and irony, both of which are embedded in Ferrer’s surrogate menacing via hypnosis.
For what it’s worth, which is admittedly not much, Whirlpool seems to have been quite an influence on Woody Allen. While his kleptomaniac in Sweet & Lowdown comes to mind, the centering of hypnosis as a conduit for crime in his 2001 comedic noir homage Curse of the Jade Scorpion could only have come from Preminger’s film.
Time Without Pity (1957) – Indicator
In the aforementioned book, Hirsch echoes a sentiment regarding Joseph Losey, who was blacklisted out of Hollywood and made the majority of his noteworthy films in England, similar to the one he paints Preminger with: that his film noir work served as an apprenticeship for his more mature works, like The Servant, Mr. Klein and The Go-Between even though “almost all his films are variations of noir themes of enclosure and paranoia.”
This was only my third Losey film, and while I admire both Time Without Pity and The Servant, I wasn’t able to connect with Losey’s kooky verve the way some are more easily able to. As I wrote following its Shout! Factory release, I was, however, very quickly swooned by Boom!, a lesser-talked-about work of his, unfortunately. Here, the father-son dynamic, which is at the heart of the film but doesn’t take up much of its runtime is the most detailed and appealing, while the rest of the film is simultaneously impressive, formally, and detached, emotionally.
Indicator have recently put out Time Without Pity (and a later one, Secret Ceremony, which is due to appear in this column sooner or later as I continue my search for comfort and access into more of Losey’s work), which was the first British film the filmmaker could put his name on. As Losey states in an interview excerpted in Indicator’s generous booklet, he made this film out of anger at the permissive state of capital punishment: “In Time Without Pity, I was talking about men who are tyrants in their own families or in their businesses, about human beings who walk over other people to make fortunes, about people who go along with hypocrisies which they dress up in all sorts of trappings.”
According to his appended essay, Robert Murphy disagrees with Hirsch, as did Cahiers, who regarded it as one of the ten best films ever made by the following decade. I’ll circle back to this one eventually in hopes of seeing what they did.
The Circus (1928) – Criterion
Released in 1969 when Charlie Chaplin decided to finally put it out with a new score by the director himself. In a 2003 documentary on the film by Emir Kusturica (included here), the filmmaker claims the film, which had a troubled production and was unmentioned in Chaplin’s autobiography, is his most underrated film, ripe for rediscovery.
Criterion’s new release of the film makes a strong attempt at considering this film as much more than minor Chaplin. It’s an absolutely stacked release of the The Tramp’s accidental turn as a circus hit — a setup that gives him an opportunity to do a ton of great stunts involving live animals. Some of these are well explicated in the bonus feature with scholar Craig Barron, who also talks about some of Chaplin’s lovely effects work in the film, particularly the doubling moment where The Tramp day-dreams of beating up the love of his crush, played by Merna Kennedy — the earliest instance I have seen of this now well-tread trope. Using an era-specific camera, Barron goes into great detail on how Chaplin made this effect. Kusturica’s documentary also gives us some insight into how Chaplin achieved the more high-flying bits of the film.
Another delight of The Circus is Chaplin’s score, which is quite moving, particularly the bittersweet strings. It complements the depth of Chaplin’s nuanced physical performance — not so much the gag work, but the moments with Kennedy. In her included essay, Pamela Hutchinson gets at his quieter touches and captures the complex emotional range of The Circus, a film that is altogether slapsticky, deconstructive of comedy, philosophical and melancholic.
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