VIOLENT SATURDAY

Violent Saturday is a sundazzled Southwestern film noir about a bank job in 1950s Small Town, America. Quibblers may question if true noir can occur in the booming noonday sun, but there is no need for rain-slicked streets and Venetian blinds to explore the darkness of the criminal soul, and once the heist kicks into gear the skeptics will forget such pedantry and enjoy the ride. Director Richard Fleischer does a great job orchestrating the plot and keeps the story snapping with suspense and twists and turns. The crux of a heist movie has always been quirky character actors, and here you have a cool ensemble that includes Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, J. Carrol Naish, Victor Mature, and Richard Egan. True to the code, the bad guys are bad and so are the good guys, or at least they're not the upstanding citizens they want you to believe. The bank manager is a peeping Tom, the librarian is larcenous, and there is a tightly coiled Amish elder itching for trouble. In Violent Saturday, American small town life is lifted like a rock to uncover its squirming creepiness beneath--decades before David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino made it their signature move.

"PACKED WITH TWISTS AND SURPRISES. Marvin proves most unsettling as a hard guy who’s always snorting from an inhaler (it’s psychosomatic: he once had a wife with a perpetual cold). Mature, with his stricken manliness, reminds you of why James Agee thought he would be perfect as Diomed in Troilus and Cressida."
– Michael Sragow, The New Yorker

"FLEISCHER'S PIVOTAL FILM... He turns the centrifugal storytelling into the motor for any number of tracking and sliding sequence shots, concentric circles turning within each other. Violent Saturday is a remodeling operation, a modernizing, abstracting, and reshaping of noir- and not only through its lengthened horizon. It is not drenched in shadows, but they are a significant and visually defining feature- from the band of shade under the brim of Marvin's hat that obscures his face, to the shadows that give weight and depth to space when the crooks case the town. The film's 'Bradenville'- part Bisbee, part studio set-is stylized but not stereotyped, with a depth and compositional care one could call painterly. Think of Edward Hopper. Violent Saturday is an artifical reality transfixed and transformed by light."
– Richard Combs, Film Comment

TU VUO' FA' L'AMERICANO

You might recognize this swinging Italian tune from "The Talented Mr. Ripley," a film adapted from a crime novel by Patricia Highsmith. (An even better adaptation of the same book is "Plein Soleil," a french film from 1960 starring Alain Delon as Ripley) In this scene, Jude Law and Matt Damon join a jumping Italian band to sing Tu Vuo' Fa' L'Americano. See if you can keep up.

Tu vuo' fa l'americano !
" mmericano! "mmericano!
siente a me, chi t'ho fa fa ?
tu vuoi vivere alla moda
ma si bive " Whisky and soda"
p? te sente' e disturb?
tu abballe'o" Rocco Roll"
tu giochi al "basebal"
ma'e solde pe' camel
chi te li d? ?...
la borsetta di mamm? !
tu vou' fa l'americano
" mmericano, "mmericano!"
ma si nato in Italy !
siente a me non ce st? niente a fa
okay, napolitan !
tu vuo' fa l'american !

The original, by Renato Carosone in 1958.

What's the meaning of this canzone Napolitane? Here is a rough translation:

You want to make like an American,
You want to make like an American,
And want to live in the latest style,
But when you drink whiskey & soda it makes you sick.

You dance to rock & roll and play baseball,
Sure, but when you need money for Camels,
Where do you go? To Mamma's pocketbook.

So you want to make like an American,
But you were born in Italy.
Seems to me there's nothing to be done.
OK, you're Neapolitan anyway.

Another take on Mr. Ripley, "Plein Soleil," directed by René Clément in 1960

TOM WAITS FOR NO ONE

Tom Waits does a pawn shop marimba in beautiful B movie black and white. You can't beat this clip. The old boxer is played by the legendary Jake LaMotta, the Raging Bull ( 83 wins--30 by knockout, 19 losses and 4 draws). Okay, tough guys don't dance, but scarecrow Tom does a moonlight jig beneath the window that jiggers the machinery of night. Nobody can take a punch like Jake, but Tom knocks him out. It's late! Who is this guy keeping all of Brooklyn awake? He's the coyote trickster, the beat boxer, the angelheaded hipster, the heartbroken thief--all the midnight archetypes rolled into one shabby suit--and he's thinking about a girl on a train.

Tom Waits is a national treasure. Buy the man a drink.

B movie man, John Garfield. Believing he killed a man in a drunken brawl, a prizefighter spends his life on the run. "They Made Me a Criminal," 1939

RICHARD WIDMARK, 1914-2008

Word just reached us that Richard Widmark passed away. Fans of film noir will remember the actor from roles in Panic in the Streets, Night in the City, Don't Bother to Knock, and Pickup on South Street, shown in the clip below. No role is more memorable, however, than his first as Tommy Udo, the giggling psycho in 1947's Kiss of Death who pushes an old lady in a wheelchair down the stairs to her death. He was a good bad guy.



For a list of my all-time favorite Films Noir, click here.