It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

“You’re wonderful,” she tells him, wrapped up by that rakish striped coat and the jaunty hat, her brown tresses flowing rudely down both sides of her face. “In a loathsome sort of way.”

As much could be said about Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday, a sparkling, acid whirlwind of a screwball comedy, starring a he (Cary Grant) and a she (Rosalind Russell) who’ve rarely been better. Though surely not as madcap — or as winning — as Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (let’s face it, Rosalind Russell ain’t Katharine Hepburn), it does squeeze in a lot of twists and turns: Grant is Walter Burns, the ruthless, raffish editor of a big city paper, Russell is his ex-wife and the paper’s ace reporter, Hildy Johnson, and Ralph Bellamy is the dull straight man, Bruce Baldwin, with whom Hildy hopes to settle down and become “a human being” (read, a “real” woman) again. All’s fair in love and yellow journalism, so as Walter undermines Bruce and Hildy’s marriage plans at every turn, hoping to win her back, she chases down a final scoop, about an innocent man condemned to death. The battle is, in the best moments, joyously raucous: “I wouldn’t cover the burning of Rome for you,” Hildy tells Walter after a particularly embarrassing ploy, “if they were just lighting it up.”

Watching the movie again, though, I was struck not by the speed of the verbal sparring or Grant and Russell’s fiery sexual tension, but by the harsh cynicism of a city seeming to spin out of control. Filled with gallows humor (literally — the periodic thunderclap of hangmen testing the gallows resounds throughout the film) and the press’ desperation to get the story, it often feels less like a comedy than a drama that’s curdled into sarcasm. The good guys of the movie — the accused killer Earl Williams and Bruce himself — are the ones who suffer, all while their callous counterparts gallivant around forgetting everybody but themselves. The dizzying layers of corruption, lies and general carelessness leave, as Earl suggests, a sickly taste in the mouth. “I’m not guilty,” he tells Hildy. “It’s just the world.”

A Bunch of Swindlers South of the Border

Early in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948), there's a barroom brawl that seems to sum up the whole film. Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and his buddy Curtin (Tim Holt), two drifters languishing in the Mexican hamlet of Tampico — how they got there is anyone's guess, including their own — confront their first swindler, a man named Pat McCormick who hired them for a job and never paid.

The fighting isn't fast or fancy; no one's a quick draw or a sharpshooter. Instead, the fisticuffs are slow and awkward and unfailingly human; it's a sloppy fight, with men crawling on the ground and clawing at each other's legs. The other men in the bar stand idly by, watching these Americans make fools of themselves in a land they fail to understand. And though Dobbs and Curtin win the battle, there's no clear winner once the film's bigger picture emerges: The money they get from McCormick leads, almost fatefully, to their ruin.

This isn't your normal Western with Gary Cooper standing up at high noon waiting for judgment to come; you're witnessing a tragedy (in the Greek sense), Dobbs' rise to riches and fall, staggering and dusty, into the ditch where he'll be left to die.

Dobbs may be Bogart’s darkest creation, a conspiracy theorist who thinks his partners will steal his money or get him killed by bandits. He's got a face like a dirt road, recording every track of foot, hoof or tire across its crevasses. Even clean-shaven, his sunken cheeks throw dark shadows across his face, creating an ambiguous charm. As the film's antihero, who leaves with Curtin and a grizzled, old prospector (Walter Huston, the director's father) in search of the mother lode, you can see distrust flash across his face, cleaving it in two. "Fred C. Dobbs," he says emblematically, "ain't a guy that likes being taken advantage of."
Every tragic hero has a tragic flaw, and Dobbs' inability to trust is what brings him low. In the climactic scene, set in a rocky, raw, firelit campsite, his distrust turns terrifying. Trying to stay awake all night so Curtin doesn't make off with his share, Bogey's smile turns delirious, his mouth stretching into a maniacal grimace. He's lost his grip on reality, turned into a ghoul of sorts, exacting vengeance for uncommitted crimes.

To some extent, all Westerns examine the tense balance between society and the individual, the line between friends and enemies. Huston is one of the masters of the genre. Even by 1948 he had such a grasp on the material that he could twist it into something much darker. This isn't a "meditation," as some might be prone to call it, despite the fact that there are no duels on Main Street or men in white hats. In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, there's action to make the directors of lesser, higher-octane Westerns swoon. The difference is that Huston finds equal tension under the cover of night: when Dobbs, seeing that the old man has left the tent, decides to go check on his share of the loot, you half expect him to start shooting right then.

The genius of the film is that we half hope he does. Dobbs, unlike his partners, is a man in full, not generous and kind like Curtin, or funny and wise like the old man, but someone whose humanity streaks across his face like land illuminated by a flash of lightning. It isn't until the after the credits have rolled that our intellectual and emotional minds separate and we realize that Dobbs is as much the villain of the film as the hero. If his weren't the first face we see, we'd be prone to root against him. Instead, we recognize our own lightning strikes of greed, those moments when the friends we have seem less than they are and the benefits of loneliness seem better than they ever have. We pretend we would act differently, that we root for him because we don't know what's coming.

But we know what's coming from the beginning: the old prospector, like a one-man chorus or even a sighted Tiresias, warns Dobbs and Curtin that "gold is a devilish sort of thing anyway ... not even the threat of miserable death would keep you from wanting $10,000 more. I know," he continues softly, his eyes full of the sorrow of a man who's lost himself in this Unholy Grail, "what gold does to men's souls."

Dobbs smirks, of course, sure of himself like an Oedipus of the desert. He knows what's coming as well as we do but goes merrily along with the charade until violence bubbles up from within. Every hero's tragic flaw, really, is that he doesn't realize that he has one.

A Homefront Picture

No warning shots are fired across the bow, no prisoners taken or Flanders fields crossed, but William Wyler’s homefront picture, The Best Years of Our Lives — about three veterans returning from World War II — is a battle film through and through. It has that same fragile toughness we’ve come to expect from our troops, that same inner salient where memory and duty fight it out to a draw. But it does not begin and end, Saving Private Ryan-style, by the battering waves of Omaha Beach, or travel into Apocalypse Now’s addled heart of darkness. It takes place in middle-American Boone City, a mythical place of soda fountains and parking lots where GIs looking for a loan are “gambling on the future of this country.”

By turns pious, moving, sentimental and tough; sprawling, claustrophobic, mincing and unflinching; too careful, too long, too overtly heroic, not even close to unhappy in the final determination, it is still better than “decent and humane” (David Thomson’s faint praise) — and far more than the “schmaltz” Manny Farber saw. Frederic March captured a vulnerability he had never before displayed. Gregg Toland’s deep focus photography gave the mundane a layer of suburban chaos, suggesting that the American order was not as neat as the vets (or their women) would have hoped. And those women: Myrna Loy and Teresa Wright, appropriately frustrated and loving, tidying up after a man’s mess, leading lives they wish resembled those of the years before the war just a little more.

What works is the tale’s soft sorrow, the tender disappointment of a hero’s welcome leading inevitably to a sense that even a war’s survivors lose something vital, something they may never fully reclaim — to the touchy, touching notion that Boone City is a salient unto itself, where the battle continues apace.

Carol Reed's Cordial Violence

Novelist Graham Greene and director Carol Reed collaborated on three films in the cloying atmosphere of the early Cold War, literate spy thrillers crackling with false propriety in political and climatic extremes. The backdrop of the films — shadow governments thrust into corners of broken worlds — is unmistakably dark, a kind of British noir, but each film feels somehow lightened by Reed's fleet direction: in The Third Man even the cobblestone streets of black market Vienna shimmer after an evening rain.

The postwar city is no longer the center of European civilization but a bruised and crumbling beacon of the cigarette trade; a dead body floats quite innocently among the ice chunks in the river. But instead of a dark, brooding score, Anton Karas' peppy zither causes the foot inevitably to tap. His dementedly happy Viennese Waltz sends up the prim Old World Austrians we almost never see, and who seem, by implication, no longer to exist.

Pulp writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives in Vienna with a job offer from a college buddy, Harry Lime. Unfortunately for Holly, Harry is dead. Unhappy with a British inspector’s accusation that Harry was the head of a deadly penicillin racket, Holly embroils himself in an investigation of his own, picking up a multinational entourage of friends and enemies — Harry's Czech girlfriend, Anna (Alida Valli), a mysterious Romanian, an Austrian porter, spectral Russians lurking over the border — along the way.

The Third Man glories in the utter disorder of the "peace," its tone one of cordial violence: a literary compliment follows a sucker punch; the police graciously conduct an unwarranted search and delicately pursue deportation proceedings. "I don't know what protocol means," says Anna as she's led away by a British officer. "Neither do I, miss," he replies. War disrupts; peace often fails to fix things. Reed's beautiful compositions — the diagonal lines of rooftops and window frames jutting across and away — leave one slightly punch-drunk, like the jagged, uneasy divisions of the four occupying powers or the zig-zag feeling of protocols ignored and unknown. Policies and politics are quickly lost to messy practicalities.

That, of course, is what Holly cannot grasp. As Fowler, the British narrator of Greene's novel The Quiet American says about the titular character, Pyle, "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused." Like Pyle, Holly is a naively idealistic American, wreaking havoc on the delicate structures and strictures of unofficial routes, of "codes" and "channels" and "ways of reading the situation" in the Russian zone or in Saigon. But The Third Man takes a gentler view of Holly than Fowler does of Pyle, mostly because the heroic heights of liberation are still fresh. Things are hunky-dory, for the time being.

When Harry finally appears (a dark and dapper Orson Welles), one feels, as Holly does, snakebit. We've been had, duped, by a devilish man: "Nobody thinks in terms of human beings," he says to justify his killings. "Governments don't. Why should we?" To Harry, the cordial violence of a war zone breeds the art of the con. Neutrality — of the Swiss persuasion — breeds only the cuckoo clock. When Harry tries to escape the closing net of international officials by fleeing through Vienna's cavernous sewers, the scene, sans explosion, doesn’t explain “protocol” any better than that British officer. We’re left only with the sense that, as the inspector notes in his opening voiceover, the four occupiers "did their best, you know."