“In a Lonely Place” (1950)
While the New Cinema movement of the 1970s, from which Paul Thomas Anderson undoubtedly drew a great deal of inspiration for “Inherent Vice,” delighted in a kind of deconstructionist approach to genre, there are examples of surprising, often self-conscious riffs on genre tropes all the way back to when the studio system was thriving. In fact, 1950 may have been a banner year for the meta Hollywood/celebrity culture satire masked as mystery or melodrama, with the release of “Sunset Boulevard” and “All About Eve.” And what those touchpoint classics did for their genres, Nicolas Ray’s terrific, deceptively strange “In a Lonely Place” may have done for the film noir. Casting Humphrey Bogart as its compromised protagonist is its first stroke of inspiration. Bogart, whether romantic lead, hard-bitten gangster, or hard boiled ‘tec (he’d already played both Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe), always played a man with a code, and man who would do what he must even when circumstances turned against him. His ‘Lonely Place’ character, by contrast, is a man of letters rather than action, a successful screenwriter who becomes mixed up in a murder plot by sheer happenstance, and who cannot resist succumbing to his worse nature as those around him, especially his bit-part actress lover, played with tremendous brittleness by Gloria Grahame, start to doubt his innocence. Decidedly among the most complex, conflicted, and nuanced roles Bogey ever played, his Dixon Steele also takes on some of the attributes of the femme fatale—it is he who is the lure to Grahame’s Laurel, not the other way round, it is she who is cast into danger by him, and also she on whom gradually dawns the realization that he may not be “good.” Innocence and guilt, storytelling, mythmaking and flat-out lying, and the desire, however much denied, for celebrity and peer respect, all these things come together in a fascinating stew of muddy morals and ambiguous motivations. Mostly, though it’s a great yarn told with Ray’s customary style, about how, no matter the layers of sophistication we may paint over them, the cracks of our true characters will always show through. And in that, it feels frighteningly modern.
“Breathless” (1983)
It takes a certain amount of bravado to attempt a remake of the one of the most influential and innovative films in cinema history, and it’s probably fair to say that “Breathless” isn’t a match for Godard‘s “A Bout De Souffle,” the French New Wave classic that inspired it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not without worth, not least as a great Los Angeles crime picture, if not necessarily a great film. The premise is about the only thing they share: the relationship between a supercool petty criminal who’s just killed a policeman (Richard Gere this time around) and his young student girlfriend (newcomer Valerie Kaprisky), albeit with the nationalities reversed from the original, where Jean Seberg played American. There isn’t much stylistically in common, but writer-director Jim McBride‘s clearly been taken by the original’s attitude, as he captures the swagger and confidence of Godard’s film without necessarily shamelessly imitating it. Indeed, the film’s specificity—Gere’s character is obsessed with The Silver Surfer and rockabilly music in place of Jean-Paul Belmondo‘s love of Bogart—doesn’t just help the film stand apart, it also prefigures the pop-culture-happy pictures of the 1990s, and not surprisingly Quentin Tarantino is among those who helped to restore the movie’s critical standing after it was mostly dismissed on release. It’s a little empty, but Gere in his prime is a surprisingly acceptable replacement for the iconic lead of the original, and McBride shoots everything with a sense of playfulness, vibrant colors, and a woozy, dreamy haze that certainly makes it an apt warm-up for “Inherent Vice,” even if the two films are ultimately pretty different.
“The Nickel Ride” (1974)
There’s no doubt that the precise milieu and trajectory of “To Kill a Mockingbird” director Robert Mulligan’s “The Nickel Ride” were more successfully and memorably staged elsewhere, specifically in “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” with which it shares quite some DNA, but it still deserves to be better remembered than it is. Starring Jason Miller (Father Karras in “The Exorcist” the year before) as mid-level crime boss Cooper, the film is unusual in its portrayal of low-level mobsterism as about as glamorous and exciting as corporate wage slavery. Cooper is a mild-mannered, intelligent man with a lovely girlfriend (Linda Haynes) who is so popular on “the block” that is his small dominion that the locals throw him an unwanted surprise birthday party. But at the same time, he’s being squeezed from below, unwilling to strong-arm old confederates who’ve lost their taste for fight fixing, and from above as his superiors, themselves feeling the pinch of new economic realities, pressure him to deliver a slicker, more ruthless operation. Caught in this untenable situation, Cooper starts to get paranoid—or does he?—imagining his bosses are plotting his demise via affable cowboy-hatted underling Turner (Bo Hopkins). From there, the film’s reality, expertly shot, starts to fray a little bit into the absurd (the repeated Beckettian motif of turning up for a dinner reservation that doesn’t exist) and the surreally foreboding (a portentous dream sequence foretells the film’s finale, but as a jumbled-up version of what really happens). Often films set in the corporate world draw more or less unequivocal parallels with the world of organized crime, and it’s unusual to see a crime flick in which that dynamic is essentially reversed. But “The Nickel Ride” makes its point eloquently: where often the ’70s antihero turns to crime as a way to undermine the system, what do you do when the system’s hierarchies and crushing impersonality become an inescapable part of the criminal world too?