Deadline at Dawn

Deadline At Dawn (Harold Clurman, William Cameron Menzies , 1946) One of those movies that, I'm sure, grows on you over time, once all the shocks have worn off.

 

But, if you're peeping at it in for the first time...well, all I can say, pally, is it's a lot to take in. Oh, it's got a lot of familiar tropes of the noir-type: everything takes place at night, shadows seem to be the popular decor, there's good people and bad people, good people get accused of doing bad things, there are a couple of desperate chases between desperate people, and it's entirely black-and-white, the only color being the complications along the way which are, more times than not, red herrings. And if you can't follow it too well, that's understandable because it starts getting confusing with in the first ten minutes. Watching it drunk or sober won't help you with the film's terrain—you're going to be bumping into walls either way. Oh, and don't get attached to characters because most of them will disappear before the sun comes up. It's not that they die or anything, it's just that they have their fifteen seconds in what passes for a spotlight in a film-noir and then they just go away, never to be seen again. That's life in the big city.

Enough with the opening narration (there isn't any, that would be too helpful). A sailor-boy (Bill Williams) is gonna be shipped off to his next hell-hole and he spends the eve of it getting black-out drunk. He wakes up at a newsie's where he's been sleeping it off with no idea where he's been or what he's been doing. All he knows is that he's got $1400 bucks he didn't know he had. "Found money" is always a nice surprise, but not when there's four hours to kill and you're a possiible target. What better thing to do than hide in the arms of a frail (you could always use her for cover!), so he goes to a dance club and ends up with a handful of a hostess named June Goffe (Susan Hayward) who's dead-on-her-feet and doesn't get interested until sailor-boy shows her his $1400 wad. Naturally, she invites him over to her place for a sobering sandwich and the story of how he got it...if he can remember.

Pretty soon, things start going "Hayward". The sailor isn't as much of a shoe-cruncher as she thought he was but insists on thinking of him as "a baby." But, he had managed to crawl to a drinks-provided poker game (not sure if that's a euphemism or not) at the apartment of Edna Bartelli (Lola Lane), who, with her brother (Joseph Calleia) regularly ran a scam of luring rubes off the street and then robbing them of their wits and their bankroll. Somehow, he'd gotten the better end of the deal with more money than he could spend in four hours. But, he's "a baby" and he wants to return the money because it's the right thing to do (even to people who'd rolled you) and he doesn't want to spend his last four hours of furlough looking over his duffel bag to see if the cops are looking to pick him up for theft. He is in uniform, after all.

Yeah, well, no good deed goes unpunished and sometimes you get exactly what you're trying to avoid, especially in noir movies. June and Alex ('the baby") go over to the address and instead of finding the woman dead-drunk (like he left her), they find her just plain old dead. Like he left her? Well, that's the question. Either June's running around with a killer or there's a killer somewhere else running around after them. That's the question. And they only have a shrinking four hours before Alex gets deployed.

"I hear a whistle blowing" says June, metaphorically

...or is that "Odetically"?

It has the simple par-boiled "jeopardy" plot one comes to associate with its original author Cornell Woolrich (he wrote the original stories for Rear Window, The Bride Wore Black, The Window, Mississippi Mermaid and Phantom Lady) where "trust" (or lack of it) is the one thing drum-soloing through the characters' minds as they try to unravel the plot. But, Deadline at Dawn doesn't so much provoke a sense of associative paranoia as "what in the black-and-blue-blazes are you talking about?" It's scripted by Clifford Odets, who wrote it as a favor to his old Group Theater pal, director Harold Clurman, and it is Odets at his Fink-iest, feeding lines to the cast that are all starch and pepper. Odets took theater out of the drawing-room and into the tenements—and a lot of Deadline at Dawn takes place on the streets and back-alleys of early-hours New York.

Oh, it begins interestingly enough, as we watch a blind ex-husband (Marvin Miller) of future murder-victim Edna Bartelli hammer on her door to collect the $1400 she promised she had for him (the very money the sailor-boy had made off with)—and our introduction to her is properly sordid for the "Code" days where she's so stinking drunk that a fly is pirouetting around on her face. The ex is blind-mad: "You'll never change, Edna. You're bad. I loved you very much. But you're bad." 

But, once we leave the place for the murder to happen, "Golly, the misery that walks around in this pretty, quiet night." Everybody's kvetching, philosophizing, giving you their dime's worth when all you wanted was a nickel. And complaining about the heat even though nobody's sweating much. Everybody's an overripe wise-guy even the cabbie (Paul Lukas) who hears June's "misery" comment replies with "the logic you are looking for... the logic is that there is no logic. The horror and terror you feel, my dear, comes from being alive. Die, and there is no trouble. Live, and you struggle." I don't know that she was searching for any "logic" there, just making idle conversation. But, everybody's over-explaining in Odets-burg, like when another cabbie bleats "Listen, I don't wanna get in no trouble. I work. I'm just a parasite on parasites." TMI, buddy! Especially with a paying customer in your hack.

Deadline at Dawn is filled with such distractions and so many blind-alleys that you can get lost very easily, but despite the density of the population on display, the solution returns you to the same bubble-world that feels a little too neat for all the obfuscation of the community-building going on. Maybe that was to enrich the plot, but it does nothing to ramp up the tension or unease one usually finds from Woolrich. One shouldn't substitute "overwritten" for "overwrought."

Niagara (1953)

Niagara (Henry Hathaway,* 1953) An odd little film-noir (in daylight and in three-strip Technicolor yet!) filmed on location by one of Hollywood's adepts at maximizing the footage all done in a documentary style, Henry Hathaway. Hathaway was an early pioneer of both noir and cinema verité) Niagara is also the film that made Marilyn Monroe a star (followed quickly by Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire to complete her break-out troika of 1953).

And the curious thing is...it's Monroe's most atypical role. We're familiar with the Monroe persona as sexual force of nature in various stages of self-awareness, from naif all the way through to temptress. But, to my mind we'd never seen her as a "femme fatale", not even when she'd previously crossed over into shadowy noir territory (as in The Asphalt Jungle). But, then, there are a lot of peculiar things about Niagra.

But, first, a little context: before we get to the dark side of things, we follow a happily-married couple, Ray and Polly Cutler (Max Showalter—for some reason going under the name "Casey Adams"—and Jean Peters), who have come to Niagara Falls for a delayed by three years honeymoon. They're meeting Ray's boss (which in itself is peculiar), but he and the little woman have been delayed, leaving the Cutlers on their own, thankfully. But, there's a complication: their room isn't ready. 

Now, there's a whole other movie about how when one expects a room with a view, you should get a room with a view—and, I mean, how often do you get to Niagara Falls?—but, the couple who haven't vacated the Cutlers' room aren't ready to leave and according to "the wife" (Monroe), they don't expect to leave any time soon. It's only by the Cutlers' charity that she and her husband aren't evicted by the motel manager. Why they're not leaving the Cutlers have no idea...but they're not alone in that. The husband (Joseph Cotten) doesn't really know, either.

So, the room the Cutlers get doesn't have a view, but they'll have plenty of sights to see, thanks to the Loomises. For instance, you don't see much of him, but she gets out quite a lot. Shopping, she says. But, Polly sees her out by the falls making out with a man not her husband—"she sure got herself an armful of groceries" she tells Ray (the screenplay was co-written by Billy Wilder's sharp-tongued collaborator, Charles Brackett). Then, there's the night Rose Loomis got all slinked up and started crooning to a sultry love song, only to have her husband George make an appearance and smash the record in front of the crowd and everybody. The record leaves him a nasty cut and Polly, good-hearted soul that she is, gets out the mercurochrome to patch him up.

It's not just the shadows and venetian blinds that make this a noir!

Loomis is bitter. He started out as a rancher, met the much-younger Rose working as a barmaid, and married her just in time for the ranch to go bust. He's just gotten out of an Army hospital stay following his service in Korea. He knows he has his hands full with Rose, and that's why they're at the Falls, as an opportunity to patch things up, but it's not going well. He tells Polly: "Let me tell you something. You're young, you're in love. Well, I'll give you a warning. Don't let it get out of hand, like those falls out there. Up above... d'you ever see the river up above the falls? It's calm, and easy, and you throw in a log, it just floats around. Let it move a little further down and it gets going faster, hits some rocks, and... in a minute it's in the lower rapids, and... nothing in the world - including God himself, I suppose - can keep it from going over the edge. It just - goes!"

He doesn't realize how prescient he is. 

 

Because Rose has other plans and a trip to the Falls provides her another opportunity entirely. For one thing, they're right on the Canadian border for easy escape and those Falls have a convenient way of hiding motivations. Pretty soon, Rose is spending a lot of time looking around corners and becoming wary.

As well she should. This character is out-and-out bad with murder on her mind, manipulative, selectively heartless, and not afraid to give her target-husband a pity-boink to soften him up for the kill. Monroe's career is full of characters not afraid to use sex and sexuality as a motivator, but, here, they're used as a weapon. It's not unusual to find toxicity in the female characters in film-noir (which, despite the daylight and national park surroundings, this certainly is), but it's certainly unusual to base a movie around them. Here, Monroe isn't just naughty, she's just plain bad.

And yet. The way the screenplay is written and the way Monroe plays it, there's a perverse element of sympathy generated there. Partially, it's the dark noir form and that Rose Loomis isn't some criminal mastermind—and credit to Joseph Cotten playing his role without an ounce of mercy (you end of thinking worse of him...and he's the intended victim here!). Maybe it's the eternal American quandary: choosing the better of two sociopaths and anybody but Anita Loos would have a moral dilemma about that...unless, of course, you're of a similar mental state.

Some John Dunne might be appropriate here.

But, that's the sort of thing film-noir does, by challenging positivity and lightness with a shaft of dark. It was the 1950's and people were still recovering from World War II with a shaky sigh of relief, and in the midst of that re-building came film noir to act as a literary Civil Defense measure to unassure us that though the war was over and the enemy (Fascists, specifically Nazis, for any younger readers who might be only slightly familiar with the terms) was defeated...people could still be bad. Very bad. And this one is so dark that it threatens the conjugal bed and the unfissionable nuclear family.

Director Hathaway could make an innocent parking garage look like an inexorable path to doom.

It's amazing that they let this one escape. But, the 1950's was the perfect Petri dish to grow such a concoction. It is only the Cutlers, doing the typical American honeymooning thing of going to one of the continent's most dangerous natural wonders, who give us something to cling to, some sense of normalcy amidst such perfidy and despair.

Jean Peters, hanging on for dear life.

Ultimately, it boils down to a cautionary tale of a happily married honeymooning couple observing the consequences of another couple whose versions of their futures are quite different from one another's. And surviving it. Maybe even growing stronger because of it.

And at the black-hearted center of it all is Monroe, doing some of the most complex work of her career, right at the start, before she became America's Sex Symbol, and so could toy with the darker aspects of that role without it tarnishing her image. Monroe was always good. But, as the famous Mae West line goes, when she was bad, she was better.

Rose looks at her husband with contempt, wariness, and just a hint of vulnerability.

Be dismissive of Monroe's talent if you want, but this character is complex!

"I'm not bad. I'm just photographed that way."

* Did you know Hathaway was born the Marquis Henri Léopold de Fiennes? 

The Big Combo

The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis, 1955) A girl (Jean Wallace) runs away in the dark. Down murky corridors and naked open spaces where she can't hide, she runs through a stadium promenade and nobody notices her because their eyes are on a boxing match, where every light of the facility seems to be focused. But, she's not the only one running, as she's followed closely by two goons, Fante (Lee Van Cleef) and Mingo (Earl Holliman), who have split up and are trying to catch her in a pincer move. That's their job tonight, to look after the girl, Susan Lowell, who's the girl of Mr. Brown (Richard Conte), who's attending the fight—it's a business matter for him—and Mr. Brown wants her to see it. But, she's run out in Round 3 and he's mad about it. When Mr. Brown gets mad, that's when Fante and Mingo enter the picture and they finally catch up to her and try to man-handle her back to the fight. But, she decides she's hungry and although Mingo wants to drag her back to the fight-crowd, Fante tells Mingo to hail down a cab. "Mr Brown says to keep her happy." Fat chance.

Down at the 93rd precinct, they're not happy, either. There's an ongoing investigation into Mr. Brown that's been going on for too much of a time and two people are frustrated by it: the first is Capt. Peterson (Robert Middleton) who's mad at all the tax-payers' money he's been laying out for no results; and then there's Detective Lt. Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) who's been spending all that money and who's come up with bupkis except for frustration and the captain breathing down his neck. Diamond wants to turn the heat up on Brown, but the boss has his job on the line, too, and he wants to drop the whole shooting match. Plus, he thinks there might be something more to this for Diamond—he reminds him that he's been tailing Susan Lowell wherever she goes and when Diamond gripes that he paid those expenses himself, the Captain brings the hammer down: "But, I'm not in love with her! You are!" The Captain is starting to think it's all personal and a wild-skirt chase.

But, it's more than that. It's a grudge match. Find a crime in town and it eventually snakes up to Brown. Take down Brown and the 93rd gets a lot quieter. Then, when Susan shows up in the hospital for swallowing pills, Diamond thinks he has something: Susan keeps talking about an "Alicia" from Brown's past and when Diamond hauls in every Brown flunky for questioning and puts Brown under a lie detector, "Alicia" makes the needle jump the Richter scale but there's no answers from the big man. Just more patter from the mutual contempt society. "A righteous man" Brown scoffs to the old boss (Brian Donlevy) he took over the gang from. "Makes $96.50 a week—the bellboys at my hotels make more than that!" But, Diamond does get some respect, if you call taking the trouble to put him on a hit-list respectable.

The Big Combo may not be the best noir-mystery of the genre, there are no stars with bright futures of note (unless you count Van Cleef), the sets are cheap—heck, the director didn't know he was working on it until a week before shooting—but, it skirts the edges of acceptability for its time with an unsympathetic authority figure, a flashy villain (Conte is brilliant in it, rattling off dialog with a no-cares contemptuous smile), some nice hard-nosed dialog, and an artist's touch with the lighting. And, it suggests a lot more than it shows—like Susan's codependent sexual kink for Brown, the "longtime companionship" of Fante and Mingo, and some brutal violence that usually happens off-screen, but comes front-and-center in a scene that features torture-by-hearing-aid (they should have had Wilde's Diamond character shouting his dialog for the rest of the movie). The movie takes chances, at a point when many film-noir tropes were already played out.

But, the star of the show is cinematographer John Alton, who worked shadowy wonders for cash-strapped studios like Republic Pictures and eye-popping color scenes for the extravagant M-G-M, and brought rich dark spaces pierced by shimmering light to whatever set-up he touched. Born in Hungary, Alton began his camera work in the silent era and worked all the way up to 1960's Elmer Gantry. He was quick, economical, and created stunning images that arrest the eye and catch the breath. The Big Combo, for all its outlandishness, becomes more centered because of Alton's photography. You take it more seriously and things matter a bit more. Things "hit" harder because of the look of the thing.

Since 2007, The Big Combo has been in the public domain and, for that reason, we're featuring it in this post below.

Internatio-noir: Mother and The Square

Written at the time of the films' American releases. Since then, Bong Joon-ho directed the film Parasite, which won the 2020 Best Picture Oscar, as well as awards for best script and best direction.

"The Knots of the Heart"

 

"A boy's best friend is his mother."

Mother Yoon (Hye-ja Kim) ekes out a living dispensing naturopathic herbs and running an underground acupuncture practice, all for her backward son Do-joon (Bin Won), 28 and a perfect example of not knowing what he doesn't know. With severe ADD, he has problems with memory retention; the least little thing, shiny or not, will distract him. The phrase "Hold that thought" is lost on him, an impossibility with his sieve-like mind. His type never learns.

You'd think his mother would. Mother Yoon watches her son like a hawk, and though she doesn't approve of him running with "a bad crowd," she can do nothing, or else the boy will storm off and get into some other trouble, or go drinking until all hours, or get beat up. Something...and usually bad. The cops know all about him. He's crossed their paths more than once.

So, when a young girl ends up dead on the night Do-joon goes on a bender, the police arrest him and hold him for trial. And he has no answers for what he was doing that night. This sends Mother into a maternal tizzy, and she works the neighborhood, trying to make nice with the victim's family, obtaining the services of a shady lawyer, but when those avenues prove unrewarding, she begins to investigate the case on her own, pursuing every blind alley and path paved with her Good Intentions.

And you know where that leads.

One could say that this is a Hitchcockian nightmare with its themes of dangerous Moms and wrong-man incarcerations, but Mother (aka "Madeo"), directed by Bong Joon-ho (who directed the monster hit The Host) hails from Polanski-town,with its themes of obsessiveness, self-delusion and destruction. As played by the internalized Kim, the title character is so wrapped up in her maternal self-sacrifice that that she doesn't see how much she's giving up to save her son. As she digs deeper into the victim's past, she must come to grips with her own, and for all the searching her final destination is her own Soul.

Sounds grim, and even a little cruel. Cruel, it is. But, Bong—as he showed with his previous monster movie—has created an intricate little trap of a film, with moments of horror and humor combined, sometimes with their arms so tightly wound each other, they could strangle, whether from love or malice. One senses an ironic glee from the director, who keeps inserting little touches of humor into the proceedings to keep things from getting too heavy, and makes one think that maybe God puts us through such trials, because it's such good sport to see us flail.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

"Thank Christ for infidelity, I say"

 

If Bong is having a good time torching the ants in Mother, Australian director Nash Edgerton is chortling and cracking open a Foster's, making life miserable for the denizens of The Square. It, also, is a tightly wound thriller—more in the classic film-noir mode—with its Aussie blue-collar workers effortlessly slipping into "tough-guy" mode. It begins, as many noir's do—with an illicit affair, and the attempt to make it legit—but it soon crumbles around its own foundation, turning into quicksand. Like construction, it's not a good idea to go in and throw away the blue-print.

Foreman Raymond Yale (David Roberts in a fine "everyman" performance) is building a resort of "honeymoon suites" for Hubbard Construction in Sydney, Australia. He's getting a bit of side-work in, as well, (or "a bit of mischief" as is the phrase) in an affair with Carla Smith (Claire van der Boom). Both are trapped in loveless marriages: he's just "middle-age-crazy" and her husband (Anthony Hayes) is a low-life criminal. One day she discovers hubby has stashed a bag of cash in the attic—a sizable sum. She decides to tell Ray in an attempt for them to skip out and start anew with a nest-egg. Ray's hesitant. Carla takes that as a sign that an affair is all it's going to be and dumps him.

And if everything was going to be fine..that's where the movie would end. Ray can't give up Carla, so they plan their escape and to hide the theft of the loot, they arrange to burn down the Smith's house—the evidence of the switched bag will burn up, and no one will be the wiser.

Well, the last part's true, anyway. The Square is a noir deep in the tradition-ditch of such illicit classics as Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Body Heat. The perfect plot starts to unravel before it can be set in motion, and soon both Carla and Ray are hip-deep in complications that get worse and worse, and messier and messier—the perfect trial for a relationship. For all the efforts to "make things better," things simply couldn't get worse...until they do.

Director Edgerton, who, before he started turning out short films* worked as a stunt-man, always finds the good angles to shoot from, and is more than happy to lead the audience into several very uncomfortable situations that have a gritty realism to them, all to make the audience squirm as much as the characters do, then tops it off with a neat little irony that twists the knife. Like his protagonists, this director might be too clever for his own good. It will be interesting to see what he does in the future and whether he'll deepen his material. For now, though, as an exercise in noir, this one is pretty special.

* The Square is preceded by Edgerton's 2007 short Spider, which is a good preparation for how sadistic a film-maker he can be to his audience. The less said the better, but don't be surprised if the film leaves you wary of the director, and tempted to walk out before the feature starts.

Dead Reckoning

Dead Reckoning (John Cromwell, 1948) Notice the title in the poster—John Cromwell's Dead Reckoning, (as it is in the film's credits) indicating a special prominence. Producers don't allow the possessive credit (relinquishing some of their ownership, which they only do kicking and kvetching) unless the director is so powerful they can't refuse.

So, who's this John Cromwell?

We'll get to that; how's the movie? Well, it's Bogart—not looking too healthy and struggling with the material, although it's tailor-made for him...if measured a bit too tightly. But it's warmed-over Bogart, stale and picked from elements of Bogart movies past, with all the presentation of a Chef's Mess. And you know how it is when you get the last leavings of anything Bogarted: not only is there a feeling of disappointment, but also a feeling of resentment.

Things start off well enough: Bogie's a coming-home paratrooper with his buddy to receive medals for valor, but before they can exit the train, the buddy disappears, prompting Bogart's character to start a search to see what's at the bottom of it. The film is introduced by Bogart's character eluding the police, and ducking into a church where, in complete shadow, he makes a confession of sorts to a priest serving as a first-person narration. So far, so good. However, the narration, like the dialog, is as purple as can be, with tortured metaphors and a desperation to remind of Bogart's detective roles (the best of which were done—of course—without narration).* We're introduced to the buddy's wife, Carol "Dusty" Chandler (Lizabeth Scott, meant to evoke Lauren Bacall, no doubt, but more of a bleached, washed out version of her), a low-throated chanteuse at a club run by the mob—and although it's surely unintentional, you get the impression that she must be sleeping with the owner, as Scott can't sing well, even by Bacall's (or the young Andy Williams')** standards.

The movie lurches along with some fine shadow-play, photographically, but that's about it, and it ends with one big howler of a leaden line, meant to have deep meaning and import, but is merely typical of the dumb lines Bogie has to chew through. There are a lot of immortal lines associated with Humphrey Bogart: "Geronimo, baby" is not one of them. ***

So, who's John Cromwell and why was he given possession of this stinker of a movie?

John Cromwell was a well-respected actor, who was also put of the directing fast-track at Paramount Studios when he signed with them in 1928. He continued in his capacity as an actor throughout his career, winning a Tony Award in 1952 for "Point of No Return" and appearing in Robert Altman's 3 Women, and A Wedding late in life.

But forget Dead Reckoning for a moment. Look at some of the other films he directed: the 1930 version of Tom Sawyer, the Bette Davis-Leslie Howard version of Of Human Bondage, the Freddie Bartholomew version of Little Lord Fauntleroy, the Ronald Colman version of The Prisoner of Zenda, Algiers with Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr, Abe Lincoln in Illinois with Raymond Massey, Son of Fury with Tyrone Power, the "they also serve" war movie Since You Went Away, Anna and the King of Siam with Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne, the lurid Caged with Eleanor Parker. These are really good, and sometimes spectacular films made with a fine craftsman's hand.

So, why is John Cromwell not mentioned in the same breath as Hawks and Ford and the other film-makers of their generation?

The answer is simple. Cromwell was black-listed during the McCarthy era and his career seemingly thrown into a black-hole. Born in 1887, he was in his 60's when he filmed Paddy Chayefsky's The Goddess in 1958. He was still pushing the envelope of what could be brought to the screen at the tail-end of his career.

You might also know him as the father of actor James Cromwell.

Dead Reckoning aside, a re-evaluation and appreciation of his career as a pioneering film-maker is very much overdue.

 

* You'll also recognize lines and sentiments from The Maltese Falcon, To Have and Have Not, and The Big Sleep. More than once, the film evokes a "Deja Vu" feeling: "Now, where have I heard a better version of that?"

** The story goes that Andy Williams, when he was a kid, dubbed in Bacall's singing voice for one of her movies, but I've yet to see any concrete evidence (and a lot denying it) that that was the case, and not some malicious gossip (Bacall got a lot of that).

 
*** I think you have to chalk this one up to that period of time between the acknowledgement of Bogart as a big box-office star, and studios trying to figure out what to do with him. The roles and writing became better once Bogart took charge of his career and formed his own production company.

Knox Goes Away

Schrödinger's Murderer

or

"Did You Bury This Guy?" "No. Why?" "'Cause If You Had, I'd've Dug Him Up and Killed Him Again."

Knox Goes Away is a lot better than people say it is.

Michael Keaton's second directed film—his first was the little seen The Merry Gentleman—is another pulpy film noir about a hit-man. The first (which Keaton basically took over when the original director was incapacitated) was more of a character study, contrasting its hired killer becoming something of a guardian angel to a woman in need of protection. But, as opposed to the first, this time director Keaton's fully committed and this one is more of a puzzle film, with Keaton's contract killer, John Knox, having to solve two problems simultaneously, both as them as personal as could be. 

It's not territory Knox is familiar with, as he's as cold as they come, not even wanting to know about the individuals he's hired to kill. He doesn't need a reason, as much as his partner Tom Muncie (Ray McKinnon), tries to justify the murders they've been hired to commit ("because in ten minutes, Tommy, he's not gonna be anybody"). He just does the job, cleans up the scene to avoid suspicion, then goes away. He's a bit of a ghost. The record has him ex-Army ("Deep Reconnaissance Officer") and he did a stretch for tax evasion (of all things) but, given his trade, it could have been a lot worse.

But, Knox is smart. He's extremely well-read—someone says he has 10,000 books in his house—majored in English Lit and History and he has the nickname of "Aristotle" that he got in the Army for always having a book in his hand. And he survives by his wits. His assets are all neatly tucked away, and he has few strings attached—he had a wife and kid, but they've been out of the picture since prison—except for co-workers, like Muncie, and "acquaintances" in the business. There's a hooker (Joanna Kulig), who shows up like clockwork every week (Knox lends her books).

He survives by his wits. But, his first problem is they're starting to fail him. A visit to a neurologist and an E-ticket through an MRI gives him good news and bad news—he doesn't have Alzheimer's (as he feared), he has CJD—Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease—which is worse. Statistically, 70% of people die within a year of diagnosis, but Knox has weeks, not months. The forgetfulness will increase, there'll be hallucinations, coordination issues, vision problems...then dementia, palsy, coma, then his brain will just stop making him breathe...The Big Erasure. "I'm sorry," the neurologist says lamely. "S'okay, Doc" says Knox. "Even if I hated you for telling me, I'd forget soon enough."

Knox keeps it quiet. He tells Muncie their upcoming job will be his last one—that he's "going away" (truer words...)— and then he'll start "putting his affairs in order" as the doctor recommended. But, that last job of his goes bad, he screws it up when he has "an episode", proving that he's not too good at this "death" business when it happens to take the lead. He makes due with the clean-up, for all the good it'll do, but it's botched and there's nothing he can do about it. The cops are gonna see through the inconsistencies and start looking around. He's losing it and he knows it. Now, he has to work fast.

Then, the other problem happens and it's one he can't ignore, as taxing as it is on his dwindling resources. In a way, it's a similar but more complicated scenario than the issues he had to just make-do with on the botch-job. But he has to get this one right. He cannot fail at this because it'll screw up everything else that he's planned in "putting his affairs in order." But, his disease will make the likelihood of screwing up that much more likely...and he has to be precise. He has to get it right.

So, he goes to an old contact in "the business," Xavier Crane (Al Pacino, doing some of the most subtle work he's done in ages). Crane is retired (although he keeps reminding Knox "you know I'm a thief"), but Knox asks him a big solid: look at his plans, check them, make sure they're right...and, if they are, check in with Knox...daily...to make sure things are going on schedule and monitor Knox's condition. Crane becomes caretaker to Knox and his plan...and it's one the old pro doesn't take lightly.

I'm not saying anything about what Knox has to deal with—for one thing, it's really spoilery, and for another, it's a bit problematic—it's a little too convenient that it happens just at that time (one keeps expecting a twist that says the whole thing's a set-up but it doesn't), but one could, if being generous, explain it away using the "life's what happens when you're busy making other plans" trope. But, everything is so inextricably linked that it's actually far more resonant than if all Knox had to do was liquefy his assets and make sure that everything is "clean."

What Knox does in the ensuing couple of weeks will only reinforce one's confusion about his condition—what is he doing? Why is he doing that? Is he losing it? Truth be told, he is, but he's working on a scheme he came up with years ago...with an awful lot of last-minute improvisation. But, he's gotta do it without screwing up. Meanwhile, on a parallel track, the cops—in the form of Detective Emily Ikari (Suzy Nakamura, who's so good) and her partner, Rale (John Hoogenakker)—are looking at how Knox "cleaned up" that last hit and it just isn't adding up as what Knox wanted it to look like. And they're starting to circle around Knox as the forensics start to come in, confirming their theories. It's just a matter of time, something Knox doesn't have.

Like I said, this one is better than people say it is. I don't know what the issue is—maybe it's too complicated for today's entertainment "journalists" or maybe a lot of the stuff just goes over people's heads, but it's a lovely exercise in how one deals with a "post-'Dateline'" world of micro-forensics, DNA research, cell-phones, and a security camera on every street corner. It's intricate without broad strokes and there are a lot of sly subtleties in the script, direction and acting.

Keaton's great in this, certainly as an actor, but—as he showed in setting up shots on The Merry Gentleman—he has a good eye for story-telling camera placements of a certain moody edge...without the burden of the "attention-getting" tricks that early directors fall prey to. I did have some issues with how he portrayed Knox's condition—it didn't seem like Alzheimer's to me—but then reading up on CJD with its dementia AND hallucinations, I could see what Keaton was going for. Marcia Gay Harden's in this and she's terrific as Knox's ex, James Marsden might be a tad too mercurial in his part (but he's supposed to be a hot-head) and Pacino plays his wizened mentor role with the former quiet intensity of his past. It's good to have that back.

I like it for its intricacies, its resonances, and the fatalism that should run through any good film-noir. And it is a film-noir, despite the sunshine and the surprising humor that runs through it (Nakamura's delivery, for example, is as dry as a bone). I'm thinking of one particular shot of Detective Ikari near the end that in contrast to the rest of the story shows what an uncaring Universe we inhabit, no matter our intentions and competence. That shot didn't need to be there, but Keaton kept it in, and it's heart-breaking given the rest of the film. That's noir, and this little film, slipping under the radar, manages to revive the form, staying true to its inherent world of cynicism, but seeming so triumphant.