With film noir we arrive at a crucial junction where the old certainties just won't do. A world war had intervened, with home deeply upended for a few years, or permanently in many cases. Men and women had been plucked from normalcy and sent away to new unexpected lives.
The American experience of the war differs in an important way. The whole world is disheveled in the chaos of the ordeal, chaos which from the American perspective would have been not without excitement at being part of a collective purposes; a joyous sense of riding to the world's aid, knowing one day soon it would end. But crucially, at the end American homes are where people left them. As a bonus, the Depression has magically gone away, wiping clear the horizon.
So once you return, the world proves to be a disorienting thing, must have been felt to be. Having seen it all become uprooted and airborne, are you supposed to go back to being content with a home and a job you went to?
Tonight I can think of no better entry into the floating dream world of noir than this small film here, none, and I put it above many of the famous ones. It's part of a few Lizabeth Scott noirs she did in the brief time she managed to land roles. An interesting thought I read, she may have managed to squeeze in (along with others) while more established actors were busy with the war.
At any rate, I find myself wholly captivated by her this past week. I think she's someone truly worth knowing, and being able to see her in the context provided by films like this one and Too Late for Tears, just these two are enough. The closest parallel I can think of is Gena Rowlands; the same unaffected beauty; the same hardness around the eyes and smile that cannot conceal hurt; the same sense of a tough broad who knows how to survive and how to be on her own. Lizabeth must have been a tough cookie and although it seems she was wasted in some conventional roles, the material here was just right for her.
This is about everything just said above, the dreamlike tiptoeing out of the loving home of stability, someone nagged by the sense that out there in the city another life could be lived.
With just a few brushstrokes in the opening scenes, we get the illusion that becomes our space for meditation. The perfect American home somewhere in postwar Los Angeles, the wife has just finished cooking breakfast, the husband is getting ready for work. They're not rich but they're comfortably middle-class.
In a marvelous scene while she drives him to work, he wearily wonders if this is all life is going to be. He muses about just keep driving to South America together. It's great to be able to see in these exchanges not some feverish desire, he knows no one is going to be going off to South America or quitting his job, but a quiet and more everyday dissatisfaction, one that underpins so much of modern life.
In this ordinary insurance guy we can see one of those people who were whisked away by the war and returned to probably the same life after. It doesn't even have to be gruesome war in Okinawa or Omaha beach, in his case he was safely stationed in Denver, Colorado.
Another marvelous aside is the notion throughout the film that kids 'these days' have it easy. Trying to read to his son from an old book about western adventures, the kid obviously prefers his stash of comic-books with alien monsters. The kid may have grown up to be an old man musing about how hard they had it in the old days.
This is what's so great to see here, our placement in ordinary life that in many ways continues unabated. He does meet a beautiful woman later that day, he has gone to her place in his menial role as insurance agent. They take a liking to each other. Being with her promises another kind of life where you can just go on a boat-ride and stop for a drink at midday. But she's not some scheming dame, just a working class gal. Their affair is not riproaring passion that turns the soul upside down but a brief dalliance of quiet affection, maybe even just this one kiss we see.
Of course In the dreamlike world of noir machinations have already been set in motion, I will leave you to see what happens. But once more, nothing far-fetched, the sense is that life can just heave this way or that over the course of a few days, ordinary life full of paradox and coincidence. What does kissing another woman one harmless afternoon mean? It means someone is waiting outside your house one night.
This is potent work, rife for meditation, all about slow days that look the same and the wider horizon. The mind sees pictures all day and night long, he explains to his son who is startled by a bad dream. At night some of these pictures wash up in dreams.
The American experience of the war differs in an important way. The whole world is disheveled in the chaos of the ordeal, chaos which from the American perspective would have been not without excitement at being part of a collective purposes; a joyous sense of riding to the world's aid, knowing one day soon it would end. But crucially, at the end American homes are where people left them. As a bonus, the Depression has magically gone away, wiping clear the horizon.
So once you return, the world proves to be a disorienting thing, must have been felt to be. Having seen it all become uprooted and airborne, are you supposed to go back to being content with a home and a job you went to?
Tonight I can think of no better entry into the floating dream world of noir than this small film here, none, and I put it above many of the famous ones. It's part of a few Lizabeth Scott noirs she did in the brief time she managed to land roles. An interesting thought I read, she may have managed to squeeze in (along with others) while more established actors were busy with the war.
At any rate, I find myself wholly captivated by her this past week. I think she's someone truly worth knowing, and being able to see her in the context provided by films like this one and Too Late for Tears, just these two are enough. The closest parallel I can think of is Gena Rowlands; the same unaffected beauty; the same hardness around the eyes and smile that cannot conceal hurt; the same sense of a tough broad who knows how to survive and how to be on her own. Lizabeth must have been a tough cookie and although it seems she was wasted in some conventional roles, the material here was just right for her.
This is about everything just said above, the dreamlike tiptoeing out of the loving home of stability, someone nagged by the sense that out there in the city another life could be lived.
With just a few brushstrokes in the opening scenes, we get the illusion that becomes our space for meditation. The perfect American home somewhere in postwar Los Angeles, the wife has just finished cooking breakfast, the husband is getting ready for work. They're not rich but they're comfortably middle-class.
In a marvelous scene while she drives him to work, he wearily wonders if this is all life is going to be. He muses about just keep driving to South America together. It's great to be able to see in these exchanges not some feverish desire, he knows no one is going to be going off to South America or quitting his job, but a quiet and more everyday dissatisfaction, one that underpins so much of modern life.
In this ordinary insurance guy we can see one of those people who were whisked away by the war and returned to probably the same life after. It doesn't even have to be gruesome war in Okinawa or Omaha beach, in his case he was safely stationed in Denver, Colorado.
Another marvelous aside is the notion throughout the film that kids 'these days' have it easy. Trying to read to his son from an old book about western adventures, the kid obviously prefers his stash of comic-books with alien monsters. The kid may have grown up to be an old man musing about how hard they had it in the old days.
This is what's so great to see here, our placement in ordinary life that in many ways continues unabated. He does meet a beautiful woman later that day, he has gone to her place in his menial role as insurance agent. They take a liking to each other. Being with her promises another kind of life where you can just go on a boat-ride and stop for a drink at midday. But she's not some scheming dame, just a working class gal. Their affair is not riproaring passion that turns the soul upside down but a brief dalliance of quiet affection, maybe even just this one kiss we see.
Of course In the dreamlike world of noir machinations have already been set in motion, I will leave you to see what happens. But once more, nothing far-fetched, the sense is that life can just heave this way or that over the course of a few days, ordinary life full of paradox and coincidence. What does kissing another woman one harmless afternoon mean? It means someone is waiting outside your house one night.
This is potent work, rife for meditation, all about slow days that look the same and the wider horizon. The mind sees pictures all day and night long, he explains to his son who is startled by a bad dream. At night some of these pictures wash up in dreams.