Emily the Criminal

Just Two Paychecks Away

or

"No...But, Yeah."
 

Emily Benetto (Aubrey Plaza) is applying for a job, office work. Pleasantries. Resume Glance-Over. Good, so far. Smile, smile.

 

Then, the interviewer brings out her background check. There's that DUI a few years ago. Then, there was the aggravated assault charge just a couple years back. Then, a nerve twitches in her right cheek and the eyes start to blink and come back narrowed. The smile turns into a sneer and Emily goes on the attack.

 

How did he get her background info? He must have known about it the whole time! Why the charade of even having an interview if he had that information? Why, if she can't trust him about that, how can she trust him about anything? How could he be so deceitful? Well, the interview is over and she goes stalking out. Oh, and, by the way, she takes her background information file with her, even though it's probably available to anyone who asks.

Fuming, Emily goes back to work. Gig work. She's a delivery-driver for buffet meals for events, with lots of heavy-lifting and stairs if there are no elevators. It's mechanical and she doesn't have to interact with the public, as they wait like cattle for the toughs to be filled. She has $70,000 worth of school debt (art major), which she'll never be able to pay off at this rate and that record keeps her from getting steady employment. There's no statute of limitations and she's stuck. A couple mistakes and her life is hosed and she has to content herself with work anybody can do (if they don't ask questions) and rooming with strangers just to have a roof over her head. The system is against her and there's no way of getting out of it. Welcome to America in the 21st Century.

Emily bumps into a co-worker in a jam—he's promised to go to his kid's baseball game and can't make a delivery, so Emily takes it. As thanks, he gives her a phone number for a job that pays $200 for one hour's work. She calls the number and the phone-call is rather sketchy: she's given an address and a time to be there. Just in case, she checks her bear-spray. At least, that's working.

It's a run-down warehouse space, and she's told to hand over her I.D. She does so, reassured that she'll get it back. She then goes into the backroom where another 25 people are waiting, and when things start, the guy has one question: he says that they'll be making $200 in cash, but what they're going to be doing is illegal. If you have a problem with that, get out.

The job is dummy-purchasing. They are going to be handed credit cards and the job is to go in and buy a big-ticket item, like a wide-screen TV. Pay for it with the credit card and leave, and meet at a secure location. "Are the credit cards stolen?" "No, but the information on them is." "What if they check my I.D.?" They hand her a driver's license with her picture on it." "Is that you?" She pulls off the job and is immediately handed $200 in cash. "We have another job and it pays $2,000." She tentatively agrees.

 

Emily the Criminal is a lean and mean crime drama about the black market that sits just under the skin of everyday life. You know it exists. You might even be taking advantage of it. It might even be taking advantage of you if your information has been hacked or your credit cards stolen. It uses the cracks in our system for the sake of convenience and using it against entities who will be writing off the losses anyway. The losses are societal, absorbed in rising insurance costs and anonymous fraud charges. Out of sight, out of the ledgers. The companies and the banks and the credit companies know all about it, but there is nothing they intend to do about it, as accepting the loss is cheaper than what it'll cost to get used product back.

For Emily, it's a chance to get her head above water and maybe, eventually, get out of the grind. But every gig has its own grind that sand-papers the nerves down, and pretty soon, she has to contend with bad actors, theft, threats, and even murder, but she takes it in stride. She's built up so much bitterness for "The System" that's kept her down, that, at least now, she's in a fair fight, and it's survival of the fittest.

One can't say enough about Plaza in this movie. She's always been freakishly good, like an adult version of Wednesday Addams, on a track by herself, that very few other actors could pull off. But, here, there's something dead behind the eyes that convinces you that she could do the things she does and be the person who will do what it takes to survive. It's her movie and she's in almost every frame, leading the camera along as she descends into the underworld. The film, in its spareness, has an old Warner Bros. gangster quality to it and it packs an ironic punch along the lines of I Was a Fugitive From a Chain-Gang.

It's visceral. You'll come out more direct, more brittle, and more arrogant, and amazed that this little film with the limited budget and cast can affect you, piercing the complacency and making you more raw. And just a little meaner.

 

This is writer-director John Patton Ford's first feature film. It will not be his last.

The Lookout

Written at the time of the film's release...there's a bit of an up-date at the end...

The Lookout (Scott Frank, 2007) When one samples a lot of movies, one notices trends. Sometimes, they're small things like the string of copy-cat movies that ride the financial coat-tails of a box office smash. Maybe it's a theme, like "pregnant woman" movies, or "kids who have sex meet a grisly death."

Or superhero movies, be they light, grim, or attitude-of-the-month.

Maybe I don't get out much, but it seems odd that a lot of the teen "thrillers" I've seen lately begin with a spectacular and traumatic car-crash. Is that part of the teen-zeitgeist that the acquisition of the freedom that "wheels" represent also is uppermost on their minds as the most ironic of deaths--especially at a time when they're feeling most invulnerable. They can't imagine a "Dead Man's Curve" that could turn them into "teen angels" when they've seen themselves as an immortal "Leader of the Pack." There's something emblematically horrific about the symbol of your freedom turning against you.

And so, teen thrillers have the air of a driver's education blood-bath film about them. The Final Destination films had a spectacular highway smash-up. Disturbia opened with one that traumatized the hero.

So, too, does The Lookout, screenwriter Scott Frank's directorial debut. Frank's made a reputation for tough-guy neo-noirs along the lines of Get Shorty, Minority Report, Out of Sight,—he has inexplicably written the screenplay for Marley & Me—and The Lookout is in the same vein. Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was a promising high-school athlete who, due to a stupid driving accident, has a variation of short-term memory loss and a crippling case of "Survivor's Guilt." For one, he has to make lists to keep him task-focused, and for the other he lives with his blind room-mate, Lewis (Jeff Daniels--fine, understated work). Cognitively, he's so "in the moment" that the only job he can reasonably function at is as clean-up crew at a local bank. That puts him under the watchful eye of a skanky team of heisters who blackmail Chris into being their entree into the facility.

One wishes that with a screenwriter of Frank's freshness that The Lookout would keep you guessing, but it does not—playing out as one might expect a movie with this particular character arc, would. This is no Memento that would turn the complications and moral implications of a brain condition like this on its medulla oblongata. Here, Scott treats it as a deficiency that needs to be overcome for the world to work right for the young Mr. Pratt. And there are enough complications that affect him personally that he is compelled to pull himself out of his funk, and get his head on straight. Sounds a bit rote--a bit Hollywood-convenient--when boiled down to those essentials. But there are compensations with the likes of actors like Daniels, and Bruce McGill, and Carla Gugino lending supporting roles.

One hopes for better things from the talented Frank, but considering he's in line to helm the next attempt to jump-start a "Planet of the Apes" franchise for 20th Century Fox, they might be empty hopes.

Note from 2021: Yeah, that :Planet of the Apes: thing didn't happen (well, it happened and happened well, but Frank wasn't credited on it. He turned to television platforms—when he wasn't writing for Marvel's "Wolverine" character—and had, it would seem a bit more freedom, and creative control. There, he made the TV series "Godless" and "The Queen's Gambit" which burned up Netflix for quite a time (and I'm watching it now...move by deliberate move).

The Unholy Wife

I'm going to try to cut down some of the long-drafted posts that I haven't gotten around to. So, since we haven't done too many of these Saturday posts in awhile, let me re-acquaint you that the spot is traditionally "Take Out the Trash Day."

The Unholy Wife (John Farrow, 1957) One of the last films produced by RKO's film division, this one is an exercise in pure pulp, originally a TV presentation on the CBS "Climax!" anthology series (the second season episode called "The Prowler") gussied up with some religious pretensions to assuage those who didn't show up to ogle starlet Diana Dors portraying a "bad girl" who confesses to committing "the perfect murder" just hours before her execution.

Well, to say it's "the perfect murder" may be a delusion of grandeur, nor is it in any way shape or form true, so the audience is already having to deal with an unreliable narrator as we watch her unfold the tale. But, given the convoluted machinations that Dors' Phyllis Hochen takes to get what she intends, one is tempted to just give up on the character and have them gas her early.

But, the film (filmed in Technicolor—and one is tempted to say that, despite the poor quality of the available images, it's not likely anyone will mourn it not being remastered) begins with a black and white view of morality that will be ignored throughout the film: "I know that in your book, there's no such thing as a perfect crime. Right always comes out on top. Good always triumphs over evil. The guilty always punished. And yet, I did manage it. The perfect crime." Then, in flashback, she walks out the front door of "the house I hated—the one they now call "The House of Death" and fires a deliberately aimed bullet from a revolver.

Subtle.

It's a hell of an opening, but it's a false flag. She's not shooting anybody. She's just trying to convince her doddering mother-in-law (Beulah Bondi) that there's nobody out prowling around the house. This may be a little extreme outside anything but an NRA convention, but extreme is usually the way Phyllis plays it, as will become evident throughout the movie, even if Dors' performance of it is rarely above the cool, calm, and colluded variety. At any rate, daughter-in-law randomly firing a gun outside the house seems to assuage Mom's jitters (eh?), so off she goes to bed.

That allows Phyllis to have a little rendezvous in The House of Death's kitchen—The Kitchen of Death?—where she meets up with rodeo cowboy San Sanders (Tom Tryon), the fellow who's been prowling outside the house, who she's evidently having a fling with, as her husband...well, who the Hell knows where her husband is at this point because Phyllis is telling her story in flashback and only gives us the set-up—she doesn't tell us how it all started. 

And it starts with her being a floozy.

Phyllis is a single-mother, originally from England (in case Dors' accent slips), married to an Air Force sergeant who seems to have flown leaving her with a young son while she hangs out at bars trying to latch onto a high-roller. In comes sauntering vintner Paul Hochner (Rod Steiger) from the Valley and his pal, Gino (Joe DeSantis). Paul's in a good mood and finding Phyllis (not a tough thing to do) just makes him that much happier. Paul is smitten and proposes that they spend the next day at the beach, so he can get to know her son, Michael. Paul, due to a war-wound, can't have children, but Michael would realize his dream of having an heir for the vineyard that has been in his family for generations. Phyllis sees Michael as a burden, but Paul and Michael bond, despite Michael's jealousy of Paul's new attention to his mother.

Phyllis tries to warn off Paul by telling him of her past, but he is not swayed and the two marry. But, from her perspective, the marriage is not a happy one, and Phyllis takes up with the rodeo cowboy. Phyllis tries to send Michael off to a boarding school so she can have more time unsupervised, but Paul refuses the idea and so, thwarted, she begins to plot. That shot in the dark at the beginning of the movie sets up the circumstance. When there's a dust-up between Paul and Gino at an industry fair, Phyllis runs home to shoot Paul when he comes in the door. When the person she kills turns out to be Gino, returning to apologize, Paul determines to take the blame to keep her from being deported, rather than calling the sheriff and portraying the shooting as an accident.

Phyllis plants evidence on the body implicating Paul, and the police arrest him and charge him with murder. This might seem like enough for Phyllis, but when she learns—from Paul's priest-brother—that the judge may acquit him, she doubles-down testifying on his behalf, implicating herself in such an amateurish and clumsy way that everyone believes that she's just lying for her husband and so he MUST be guilty. It's tortured logic and how everything get resolved is even more tortured and a bit convenient for things to come around to the point at the beginning of the film.

If you're wondering why the emphasis on "Unholy" in the title, it's because of the presence of Paul's brother, a priest, who spends a lot of time doing unpriestly things, but still has enough credibility—despite his obvious prejudices—of being able to convince a lot of righteous people about the errors of their ways. Everything is just a little on the hysterical side, but, then the thing has so much pulp in it, you wonder if it might even extend to the wine Paul produces. Everyone tries gamely, especially Dors (who could be better and seemed to excel at comedy), but no one can rescue this one.

Speaking of pulp, you can't find a DVD of The Unholy Wife anywhere—the only copies available are on VHS (hence the quality of the screen-grabs—inspiring one of those rare "I cleaned my glasses for this?" moments)—but until that time when some video-house decides the time is right and the demand is there for a "Diana Dors Collection" there won't be any remastering project in the future. So don't hold your breath, but considering holding your nose when watching this unholy mess.

The French Connection

The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971) Peripatetic police thriller with quite discernible street-grit in the film-emulsion, The French Connection (adapted freely from Robin Cook's "True Crime" book) tells the story of two New York police detectives Eddie "Popeye" Doyle and Buddy Russo (Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider, playing the noms de film of real-life detectives Eddie Egan and "Sonny" Grosso) tracking a high-level cocaine operation hiding in plain sight from overseas. 

The French Connection won the Oscar for best Picture of the Year, which seems like a good choice until you realize it was in contention with A Clockwork Orange and The Last Picture Show (as well as Fiddler on the Roof and Nicholas and Alexandra).*  Then, the choice feels as safe and conservative as can be. Yes, it's gritty. Yes, it's "edgy," but what does it have anything to say besides 1) that sometimes the good guys have to be rough with the bad guys in order to break even on the law-and-order scales, and 2) that outlaws have an easier time of it simply because they're outlaws who are bending the rules?

Not much of anything, really.  But The French Connection did take the police procedural in another direction.** The cops are less formal in their attire and language, and tougher in their asking of questions. Friedkin took a near-documentary approach to the subject matter (with the help of Owen Roizman's inelegant, constantly-searching, subjective cinematography), while conveying the frustration that cops, though maybe not crossing the "T's" and dotting the "i's" on the letter of the law, go through to try to achieve a legitimate, legally-binding "collar". One is left with a morally ambiguous ending in which lines are crossed to merely achieve a semi-positive result, as opposed to being for the greater good.

And (of course) everyone remembers the car chase.

But, the biggest through-line of The French Connection is Friedkin's constant contrasting of the cops and drug-dealers as diametrically opposed in almost every way. Charnier (Fernando Rey)—dubbed "Frog One"—and his traffickers travel and conspire unimpeded, while the detectives skulk and blend in with the savage streets and observe their targets working out in the open. The criminals live the high-life, dining and dressing elegantly, while the cops sit in the cold, eating stale sandwiches and swilling bad coffee on their stake-outs, dealing with bureaucracies and competing enforcement agencies, as the bad guys blithely go about their bad business and routinely handle such impediments punctually with gun-fire.

It is only at the end when a police road-block stops the conspirators in their tracks that the tables are turned, and the lines blur, and the ambiguities become real. And what is essentially a police chase has no discernible finish line.

* It was also the year of Straw Dogs, Dirty Harry, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Walkabout, Carnal Knowledge, Klute, and Harold and Maude, none of which made the Best Picture category and in some cases, didn't receive any nominations at all.

** Wikipedia has a funny story about Friedkin's behind-the-scenes decision-making.   The director was living with the daughter of legendary director Howard Hawks, who suggested that, since Friedkin's pevious pictures were (in Hawks' view) "lousy," he should put a good chase in the movie "better than anyone's ever done."

The real-life Eddie "Popeye" Egan with the fictional Sonny Russo  (Roy Scheider)

Rififi

Rififi (aka "Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes") (Jules Dassin, 1955)

It's not a word that people use/

Among the "swells" and "Who's Who"/

Rififi

It's the lingo of the streetwise/

The battle cry of real tough guys/

So don't try your brain and grumble/

All it means is "rough and tumble"

Rififi

A vital missing piece (in my viewing, anyway) in the career of director Jules Dassin (of Middleton Connecticut, Harlem and the Bronx—it's pronounced "Dass'-in,") is this second European film of his exile from America and the Hollywood Black List (he had not made a film since 1950's Night and the City, which he'd filmed in London at the behest of producer Darryl F. Zanuck). Rififi is not well regarded as literature (Francois Truffaut said at the time of its release "Out of the worst crime novels I ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best crime film I've ever seen."), and Dassin was not the first choice as director (that was Jean-Pierre Melville-I'll have to look at Le Samouraï one of these days), but he needed a job, and managed to turn the book (which he also didn't like) into a cracklingly dark caper movie about a motley crew of thieves knocking over a jewelry store. The leader, Tony le Stéphanois (Jean Servais in a nicely played, tubercular performance that recalls Humphrey Bogart) isn't interested, having just served a stretch in prison for a previous crime, but relents after finding his girl having taken up with a local gangster. Rather than the fast snatch-and-grab proposed to him, though, he up's the ante, going all in only if, rather than just grabbing some jewels, the group steals the entire contents of the store's safe, the latest in security.

The scheme is elaborate, involving casing the joint for police walk-by's, then doing a home-invasion of the apartment above it, and drilling through the floor/ceiling to gain access in order to disarm the high-tech, high-sensitivity alarm system. This sequence, which works out to nearly half an hour of screen-time is un-scored, reliant on natural sound...and as the heist occurs in the middle of the night, every screeching, tearing, hammering sound could betray the entire operation. It's a nail-biter, one of the better crimes in film history, and the model for every highly planned knock-over since.

The robbery is the big set-piece, but it's merely the middle of the film. It's buttressed by the set-up and subsequent fall-out resulting in a rival gang's extortion, a kidnapping, and the gradual dissolution of the gang, a section that, after the tension of the robbery, becomes more and more free-wheeling, taking off, playing on the relationships established in the film's first third, the audience's complicity in the robbery, and by itself, becoming a tour de force. At the same time, it makes an interesting change-up from the rest of the film as "le Stéphanois" becomes a one-man wrecking crew, balefully upholding his criminal code while also trying to "do the right thing," culminating in a desperate drive through Paris that has a thrilling manic intensity with nary a car crash nor explosion (why, they don't even crash through a fruit-stand).

Rififi is a showcase for Dassin's talents* as an adapter and director, taking the noir film back to the place where the phrase was first coined, by one of "da guys" in Hollywood who'd created and perfected the dark mysteries of the genre, and making it work no matter which city streets are drenched with a forbidding rain.  

* The production of Rififi was so hurried—Dassin wrote the script in six days—and strapped for cash that when an Italian actor he'd chosen for the safe-cracker failed to receive his contract, Dassin just took over the role himself.  There is some irony there: (SPOILER ALERT) the character of Cesar ultimately gives away the mob to a rival gang and suffers a fate for it. Dassin, had fled the the U.S. and his successful Hollywood career as director Edward Dmytryk had named him as a communist before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

T-Men (1947)

T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947) "T-Men" stands for "Treasury Men" or agents for the Department of the Treasury. Before 9/11, they were just behind the FBI in terms of domestic crime investigation, dealing with tax fraud, counterfeiting, bootlegging, illegal arms, as well as housing the Secret Service. The ATF and the Service broke off in 2003 to be a part of Homeland Security, but at the time this film was made it was still all under one bureaucratic roof...and probably looking for some publicity.

Now, an FBI movie could get an A-list budget. But, T-Men was strictly a B-picture, consigned to the bottom half of what they used to call in the movies "a double-bill" (look it up, you kids), but it had the great good fortune to be directed by a young up-and-coming director named Anthony Mann, who'd made a name for himself directing low-budget films for RKO and Republic. Mann brought to the mix a brilliant cinematographer John Alton, and together, the two would craft some of the more interesting examples of "film-noir" in cinema.

But, Lordy, it doesn't start out well. After a brief introduction to the work of the Treasury Department by a stern announcer (who will serve as narrator for the film), there is an introduction by former Treasury Law Enforcement Head Elmer Lincoln Irey, who flatly introduces the film as a case-study from the annals of the Department. The only notable thing about the sequence is that it's filmed, not across at the former director, but at desk level looking slightly up, giving him a slightly more authoritative air—especially to audiences naturally looking up at a screen from theater seats. But, from there, the film takes a decidedly dark turn.

In a dark-Los Angeles-alley behind a stadium, there is a rendezvous in progress. A Treasury Agent is going to be meeting a snitch. But before he can reach him a figure comes out of the shadows (literally) and cuts the contact down. End of the road. End of the investigation. The Department needs to take another tack.

Two agents are called to Washington: Dennis O'Brien (Dennis O'Keefe) and Tony Genaro (Alfred Ryder), who are called upon to go undercover and infiltrate the gang of counterfeiters, who have been passing bills with a superior paper very similar in composition to that used in legitimate currency. They travel to Detroit posing as former members of a crime ring that have been subsequently killed, leaving no traces of contacts that might blow their cover. They manage to do enough research of their cover identities as "Vannie Harrigan" and "Tony Galvani" that they work themselves into a counterfeit liquor stamps business, getting a lead on an overseas smuggler of the paper, known as "The Schemer" (Wallace Ford). The two split up with O'Brien going back to Los Angeles tracking down The Schemer, while Genaro stays in Detroit and continues to make in-roads with the counterfeiters.

O'Brien manages to find The Schemer eventually, as he's a frequenter of turkish baths, and after several steams—"I think I lost eight pounds," he tells his superiors—he makes contact with the older hood and gains enough trust that he proposes a joint effort. If "Schemer" can provide the paper, he can provide engraving plates for currency far superior to what's making it into the streets. The Schemer, though, wants to make sure that O'Brien is legit and has two of the gang's enforcers, Moxie (Charles McGraw) and Brownie (Jack Overman) to work over the agent to try to determine why he's so interested in the business. O'Brien's failure to "crack" wins him and Genaro a visit to Schemer's boss "Shiv" Triano (John Wengraf), who is interested in the venture, but wants to run tests—O'Brien only turns over one of the plates and says he'll only deliver the other to Triano's boss, a shadowy figure that is never mentioned by name.

A chance encounter in San Francisco makes Schemer suspicious of Genaro, just as O'Brien gets to meet the next tier of command, Diana Simpson (Jane Randolph), who is suspicious of any betrayal. She orders a hit on both The Schemer and Genaro: The Schemer being roasted alive in a steam bath and Genaro shot in front of his partner, who can only stand and watch helplessly as Genaro implicates himself, taking suspicion off O'Brien, and is executed, gangland-style. 

But Genaro has been clever enough to leave O'Brien clues to where he can find The Schemer's coded notebook, which the agent turns over to his superiors, bringing them closer to cracking the case, even as O'Brien has to overcome greater suspicion, due to his closeness to Genaro.

He has one advantage, however, he still has the other engraving plate that the counterfeiters now want...very much. But, as he's being watched closely—too closely by the assassin, Moxie, he has to find a way to complete the transaction, with the added incentive of bringing the ring to justice and avenging his partner.

T-Men is filmed in that "semi-documentary" style popular in the 1940's whenever a studio wanted to lend an aura of verisimilitude to a story "based on a true story" (as they like to say these days) by using real locations whenever possible. However, no documentary, semi or otherwise, has been as artfully shot and lighted, here by Mann and his cinematographer John Alton, who make the photography as oppressive as it is beautiful, enveloping the government agents in precipitous angles, uncomfortably close close-ups, and an ever-encroaching darkness that seems to swallow them up in the frame. The danger is so visually palpable you can practically smell the sweat, with or without the benefit of steam-baths.

It's a fascinating portrait of professionals, good and bad, just "doing business" with a restraint of attitude in the "Dragnet" manner, but explodes into ferocity when the guns come out. In fact, there's an energy to the finale that almost has a supernatural "horror" quality to it, of implacable hate that pulses through the veins of wounded men, rather than blood. The darkness veils emotion throughout the movie—especially in the scene where O'Brien's hat-brim shadows his eyes after witnessing Genaro's murder—only the spare splashes and flashes of light betraying the character's inner thoughts and rages. Despite good restrained performances, there's almost no acting needed, when Mann and Alton are presenting all the drama in their choices of light and dark. T-Men is one of the greatest of film-noirs, of the forces of light trying to penetrate the darkness.