The Ace Black Movie Blog

Showing posts with label Elisha Cook Jr.. Show all posts

Saturday, 18 September 2021

Movie Review: The Killing (1956)

A high-tension heist movie, The Killing counts down the hours towards an audacious robbery from the perspective of the gang members. Attention to detail collides with a strained domestic relationship, yielding exquisite drama.

Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) was only recently released from prison. He promises his devoted girlfriend Fay (Coleen Gray) that his next heist will be a big one, allowing them to start a new life together: he plans to rob $2 million from the racetrack on the day of a high-stakes race.

Johnny's assembled gang includes veteran con man Marvin (Jay C. Flippen) and two racetrack insiders: cashier George (Elisha Cook Jr.) is desperate to buy nice things for his demanding wife Sherry (Marie Windsor), and bartender Mike (Joe Sawyer) needs money to help care for his sick wife. Police officer Randy (Ted DeCorsia) is also involved, and he plans to use his cut to pay-off debts to ruthless mobsters.

Johnny also hires brawler Maurice (wrestler Kola Kwariani) and sharp-shooter Nikki (Tim Carey) to cause distractions on the day of the robbery. The plans appears solid, but Sherry is ambitious, deeply unsatisfied in her marriage, and having an affair. She extracts information from George and provides it to her boyfriend Val (Vince Edwards), jeopardising all of Johnny's plotting.

An adaptation of the book Clean Break by Lionel White, The Killing is written and directed by Stanley Kubrick as a tight and crisp exposition of heist planning. Using documentary-style narration and subtle jumps in time to sharply define the characters and cover their actions leading up to the all-important seventh race at the track, Kubrick weaves a gripping tale of crooks coming together to execute the perfect robbery, except that the criminals themselves are far from perfect.

Cramped sets, stark light sources, dark shadows, sweaty, crumpled close-ups and remarkably fluid camera movements define a visual style coiled with tension and a sense of doom. For all the meticulous planning leading up to the robbery, this group of men is simply too flawed to pull off a heist of this magnitude, and their character weaknesses create an undercurrent of pending calamity. Johnny is going for a much larger haul than any of his previous jobs, now with the understanding that prison is prison so he might as well aim big. Marvin is small time, cashier George is meek and insecure, police officer Randy is dense enough to get into debt with the mob, and bartender Mike is no criminal.

Notwithstanding exceptions like Fay, men like this tend to attract the wrong kind of woman, and sure enough Sherry instigates the rot. George is too stupid to notice that contempt is the only emotion his wife feels for him, and she senses an irresistible opportunity to get rid of him and get rich doing it. As the pathetic George, Elisha Cook Jr. is a doleful presence, emerging from behind his cashier window to create a black hole of creeping ruin.

The 85 minutes of running time are perfectly paced. On several occasions Kubrick stops the clock just as the seventh race is about to start, and rewinds to fill in more preparation details and further increase expectations. By the time the gang swings into action and every man plays his role, all the groundwork appears to pay off, with the added bonus of one racist meeting quick justice.

But the final act is the anarchy of the universe descending upon Johnny, mundane rules and an agitated small dog having never factored into his planning. The beauty of a plan coming together is only surpassed by the potency of unanticipated randomness.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Thursday, 4 June 2020

Movie Review: Plunder Road (1957)

A B-movie heist thriller, Plunder Road is a slick and compact story of desperate men attempting to get away with a masterful robbery.

In the middle of a dark and rainy night in rural Utah, five men use two trucks to pull off a daring train heist of $10 million in US mint gold bars. Eddie (Gene Raymond) is the mastermind, and his crew consists of veteran Skeets (Elisha Cook Jr.), failed racing car driver Frankie (Steven Ritch), movie stuntman Commando (Wayne Morris) and chewing gum addict Roly (Stafford Repp).

The five men hide the gold in three trucks intending to drive 900 miles to Los Angeles, where Eddie's girl Fran (Jeanne Cooper) is waiting to help with the final stage of the plan. But with a police cordon throwing roadblocks at every turn, the journey will be treacherous.

A Poverty Row production from Regal Films, Plunder Road clocks in at 72 minutes and does not waste a second. Writer Steven Ritch (who also plays the nervous Frankie) and director Hubert Cornfield open with the immediacy of the train heist, and the first 15 minutes are almost silent, the gang executing flawlessly.

Most of the rest of the film is a tense road trip, the men split into three groups each driving a truck, making their way to a rendevouz point in Los Angeles where Eddie has readied another ingenious twist to complete the crime. But with $10 million at stake the police across multiple states deploy all their resources to find and stop the trucks, resulting in several taut stand-offs.

The road scenes allow writer Ritch to introduce some character background, and veteran Elisha Cook Jr. as the scrappy career criminal Skeets gets ample screen time to imagine an idyllic post-crime world where he can live with his son in an exotic location. Frankie emerges as the most coiled of the five men, ironically the former professional racer now exceptionally edgy about the drive ahead.

But this is a micro budget production, and the corner cutting emerges in the ruthless abruptness of some scenes. Once the men run into trouble and tangle with the authorities the film is prone to abandoning them to their fate with checkmark efficiency.

Cinematographer Ernest Haller makes excellent use of the few available dollars with stellar black and white work, particularly during the night heist scene in the pouring rain. Haller also recognizes the trucks as the true stars of the show, featuring the machines in most shots and leveraging the rumbling momentum of the large beasts into a source of energy.

Plunder Road may lack the depth and nuance of more sophisticated productions, but forcefully floors the accelerator and steers straight ahead.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Sunday, 29 October 2017

Movie Review: Carny (1980)

A drama set in the world of a small-time touring carnivals, Carny lacks plot but is rich in characters and mood.

Frankie (Gary Busey) and Patch (Robbie Robertson) are members of The Great American Carnival. Frankie plays The Mighty Bozo, a dunk-tank antagonist, while Patch collects the money and helps run the business. The carnival includes the typical assortment of rides, rigged pay-per-play games, a strip show and several sideshows exploiting various physical conditions, with scams aplenty to maximize profit. One evening bored teenager Donna (Jodie Foster) attends with her boyfriend Mickey (Craig Wasson). She quickly establishes a connection with Frankie, runs away from home and joins the carnival.

As the ramshackle tour moves from town to town, Donna comes between Frankie and Patch. She tries to make herself useful by joining the strip show, a trial that goes awry. At every small town Patch has to bribe the right officials to ignore the carnival's more sordid corners. When he tangles with an exceptionally oily businessman demanding more than the usual payout, the consequences are severe.

Directed by Robert Kaylor, better known as a documentarian, Carny is co-written and co-produced by Robertson, much better known as The Band's lead guitarist and main songwriter. And this non-traditional partnership is largely responsible for a unique look and feel. Carny defies any easy categorizations, and is a movie to be experienced rather than analyzed.

Despite the 1980 release date Carny owes more to the 1970s in being character driven, soaking up atmosphere and proceeding with blissful disregard for conventional narrative structures. Kaylor allows his cameras to roam, always finding the more interesting perspectives and capturing the pathetic nighttime energy of a touring event scrapping for survival. There is nothing glamorous about this neon-drenched life on the road, except that it is a life on the road, where what happened yesterday can be disregarded because something else will happen somewhere else today.

At the core of the non-events is a ten year mostly unspoken friendship between Frankie and Patch, the barely-in-control-brawn and the calm-and-collected brains, Frankie in the cage generating fury and Patch outside exploiting the anger. The one theme of the film is the struggle to maintain a functional connection between two men when a woman arrives on the scene, with the added tension of Donna being - maybe - just on the right side of 18, and a runaway.

Gary Busey has rarely been better - or more fearsome. The opening sequence of Frankie applying face makeup to transform into The Mighty Bozo is hypnotizing, and Busey's manic energy in the cage jumps off the screen. Robbie Robertson is an ideal counterbalance, tall, lanky, almost too laid back as he thinks through every situation. Jodie Foster's Donna is a perfect disruptive presence as she tries to find her place into the carnival's routine, the young woman's burgeoning sexuality so much fuel on an already unstable fire.

In addition to Wasson, the supporting cast includes Elisha Cook Jr. as the resident grizzled veteran, Meg Foster as the game maiden who unleashes Donna's inner tiger, Kenneth McMillan, and Fred Ward.

Carny glides towards a climax where the carnival also bares its teeth as a house of horrors. It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt, and then a different set of rules apply.