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 Edward G. Robinson is a "cashier for a large New York City clothing retailer."
He's married, but finds himself falling in love with another woman. "His whole
attitude changes and his behavior is altered because of his passion for this
woman." Things get complicated when he discovers her with another man. (From
the Goldstar Video release) 1945, 103 minutes, VHS
Robinson plays a pathetic old man named Christopher Cross, who when not
playing "Arthur's Theme" is working at his dull job as a cashier in a clothing
store and being brow beaten and emasculated by his harridan wife. He isn't
what you'd call the typical film noir protagonist. He's old, strait-laced, and
a fairly dull guy. There's none of this drinking (Black Angel), abused as a child (This Gun For Hire ) or disaffected veterans (The Blue Dahlia) here, just a guy who's settled. Settled for a loveless marriage to woman that treats him like dirt. Settled
for a job that while steady, is mind numbing in its ordinariness. Settled to
confine his dreams of being a painter to doing pictures at home while his wife
mocks him, never showing them to anyone who might even think about appreciating
his efforts. This guy isn't so much a candidate for a mid-life crisis as he is
a poster child for strict gun control. We meet Chris Cross (catchy name!) at a
party his crappy job is having for him. They're celebrating CC being there for
a quarter century. After twenty-five years of dedicated service, he gets a
gold watch and a free cigar. Who needs stock options? Chris watches as his
boss steps out with a younger woman that isn't the boss' wife and wonders
what's it like for a young pretty thing to look at him. After meeting this
thing that's his wife, you'd think he'd settle for someone that wouldn't bust
his nuts every chance she got. Chris goes home and it is on this rainy night
that his life takes a turn that only could happen in film noir. He sees a
young woman being slapped around by a guy on a street corner, so he hauls his
old
dried up bum over there and beats the young man down with his umbrella (is this
guy my great-grandma?). The woman thanks him and they end up having coffee.
Her name is Kitty March and it turns out that the dude who was slapping her
around was her boyfriend Johnny Prince. Kitty and Johnny have one of those
unhealthy relationships where he beats her up and calls her stupid nicknames
like Lazylegs. Kitty is liberated in that she doesn't really seem to be
bothered by the frequent slapdowns and Johnny actually comments that he thinks
she has some need for that in a relationship. You would think then that she
could appreciate it when old Chris Cross tattoos his name on her with an ice
pick at the end of the movie, but I'm getting ahead of myself.  Chris Cross starts writing Kitty sappy love letters which Johnny discovers.
Dan Duryea of Black Angel fame (he was also in a movie with Burt Lancaster called Criss Cross) brings a great deal of slimy energy to his role as the player whose main
interest is how is he going to score more ill-gotten gains. He has no problem
pimping out Kitty to Chris Cross in an effort to suck money from him.
Initially, he says he needs a grand or two to buy into a garage or something,
but you can tell he just wants money to play craps and buy stuff at the local
fence. Kitty agrees because she loves Johnny. She starts to cozy up to Cross
and sees that marks don't come any easier. Why you may ask? Let's check in
Chris' home life. His wife Adele is the nastiest and most orneriest cuss this
side of Hazzard County! She relentlessly demeans Chris at every juncture. She
still keeps a picture of her dead first husband prominently displayed in the
living room saying that if he were still alive today she wouldn't have to be
married to such a loser and why can't Chris buy her a radio, her dead husband
would've. The dead guy was a NYC police detective who died trying to save a
drowning woman. Adele forces Chris to do the dishes and he even has to wear an
apron! I mean, subtly isn't really Fritz Lang's strong suit in this movie.
The only love Chris has in life is his painting. In spite of what goes on this
movie, let me tell you that my experienced eye says this guy has as much talent
as the college punks that display their scrawlings at the trendy coffee house a
mile from my trailer park. That being said, if you were married to someone and
at least pretended to care about them, you certainly wouldn't tell that person
that his paintings were no good and that he better keep them out of the way or
you would have the trash man come by to take them to the dump. Fritz gives you
every reason to despise this woman and feel pity for Chris. It's all a set up
to show us why a solid law-abiding guy would suddenly steal, cheat and
eventually kill and have it all seem plausible. I think Fritz overdoes it
though - we
see people do similar things in real life even when they aren't married to the
devil incarnate.  So Chris starts having an affair with Kitty. And by affair, I mean they go out
for coffee, she sucks money out of him and eventually he starts stealing from
his job to pay for this swanky artist's loft in the Village. I'm not sure what
Johnny's plan was (and everything Kitty does is at Johnny's direction)
regarding the apartment. In order to keep the apartment, they'll need to keep
Chris around to finance it and since Chris knows where it is and he thinks he's
having an affair with Kitty then he'll probably turn up now and again. He'll
especially turn up since he's moved all his painting gear there and is
producing some of his most inspired work (I really liked the one where the
snakes were coming out
of street light - tres mod!). Johnny needs money faster than they can suck
it of Cross, so he takes a couple paintings out to the Village to see what
he can
get for them. He's under the impression that Cross is a famous painter and
that these things will sell for thousands of dollars. He's irritated then when
the starving artist he takes it to tells him that he'll put them next to the
velvet Elvis paintings and see if he can trick any eggheads into paying $25
bucks for the them. Later some really stupid art critics show up and declare
the works to be that of a great artist and eventually track Johnny down to find
out the story on who painted them. He concocts some malarkey about how it was
Kitty that painted them and the critics concoct some malarkey about how
surprising it is that Kitty painted them since the paintings are so manly
(well, there was that one with the snakes). Immediately, one of the art
critics starts hitting on Kitty and Johnny tells her to play along so that
they'll keep hyping these paintings. Do you get the idea that Johnny is just a
taker and not a giver? Eventually these paintings get displayed in a gallery
and who do you think walks by and casts her Medusa-like face on them? Adele!
She marches right home and demands to know how Chris knows Katherine March.
See, Kitty signed her names on the paintings and Adele thinks that Chris has
been copying her work. Adele tells Chris that she always had seen something in
his work, but now knows it's just because he's been copying Ms. March's work.
Adele tells Chris he can't paint anymore since all he does is copycat stuff and
that if she ever catches him doing it again she's going to send a letter to
Katherine March and tell her that he's a dirty little thief. Chris goes over
to see Kitty to find out what's going on and she sells him some story about how
she needed money and so she tried to sell a couple of paintings and blah, blah,
blah. Chris seems delighted by all this and decides he must paint more! He
even has her sit for a portrait which actually turns out pretty dark and
creepy.  Chris periodically feels a little pang of worry about his cheating and stealing
ways so he is pretty nervous when he's at work one day and they tell him a
detective needs to talk to him. It's a big scruffy guy with a eye patch. The
patch is just a disguise and this bum lifts it up to reveal that he is actually
the dead first husband of Adele! Up until this point, I was completely on
board with this movie. In spite of the excessiveness of Adele's character, I
bought into rest of the picture, recognizing them as perhaps slight
exaggerations of real people with real motivations. But the whole dead husband
returning gag left a bad taste in my mouth - it smacked of cheap plotting and
stunt-drama (whatever that means). Okay, listen to the dead man's tale: He
wasn't such an Eliot Ness after all. He was dirty and taking money from
speakeasys and was thinking about ending it all when some broad starting
drowning. He went in after her and instead of saving her, saved her
pocketbook. There was $2700 in it. He caught a ride on a passing barge or
something and eventually hid out in Honduras for awhile. Now he's back and
trying to blackmail Chris. If Chris doesn't give him any money, he's going to
return and screw up Chris' marriage to Adele! Chris tries to suppress a
snicker, and immediately schemes to give him and Adele what they deserve. He
arranges for this dude to go into Chris' place to get some bonds when Adele is
sleeping in the bedroom and the last we hear is her screaming about the return
of her dead husband. I guess the whole point of this development is to allow
the character of Chris to believe that he is now free to pursue Kitty for real
(i.e. marriage), but the whole thing seemed a little gaudy when the rest of the
story was small and fairly ordinary. He tells Kitty that he's free to marry her
and she laughs in his face and tells him that he's old and ugly! Chris is
blinded by his crush on this girl (can he really love her, when it's all so
obviously one-sided?) In fact, he had caught Kitty and Johnny together earlier
and told Kitty that that was okay and that people can make mistakes and
basically did his impression of a doormat. Well, laughing at the old geezer
while he's holding an icepick turns out to be a bit of a mistake for Kitty and
she does her impression of a pincushion. Cross leaves as Johnny arrives.
Later, Cross is busted for stealing the money from his employer and is fired
but not prosecuted. Johnny gets tapped for Kitty's murder and Cross lets him
take the rap and Johnny Prince ends up riding the lightning for him. Cross
ends up a bum sleeping on park benches, haunted by the deaths of Kitty and
Johnny. The last thing he sees is someone buying that creepy portrait he did
of Kitty for $10000. I really liked this one in spite of its (admittedly few) flaws.
Robinson seems perfectly suited to play the old, put-upon guy who is just
going through
life without realizing what a crap sandwich it's become. The familiar themes
that mark the film noir movement run throughout this movie. You've got the
doomed protagonist, you've got women portrayed as users, shrews, sluts and
pretty much the total destruction of men and their manhood. I guess I
shouldn't be too surprised that these themes are so common in this genre. I
mean, if you think about it, the entire Adam and Eve story could be the basis
for film noir: Man loses paradise because of woman's greed. Why do we hate
women so much? I'll leave that question up to the man-haters in the his-ouse.
In this movie, the focus is on how women have rendered Chris a non-male,
impotent, unable to do anything a man is expected to do as opposed to a movie
like Black Angel where the focus is on how women can drive a man to destroy himself He is
treated like a hated dog by his wife, belittled to the point where he doesn't
even exist as human being to her, let alone a man. He has a very un-manly job
- a cashier sitting on a chair, behind a cage (he can't protect himself) and
even when he fights, it's not how a man is thought to battle, but with an
umbrella and he only wins the fight when his opponent trips and hits his head.
When a young women seems to take an interest in him, the long-slumbering male
in him is awakened. He starts to act in a more aggressive (and therefore male)
manner. He lies, cheats, steals, and paints a lot! Unfortunately, this new
found manliness is dependent solely on the validation this new woman can
provide. In fact, we can see how false that manliness is when he is so quick
to forgive and ignore the love affair between Johnny and Kitty. When it is
yanked away, he realizes that he isn't a man and that he's just been used by
another woman and he ceases to exist as a man altogether. Even when he was
with Adele, there was still a little spark within him - he still painted though
his wife objected. It was his way of standing up to her, no matter how passive
an act. Once he kills Kitty and lets Johnny walk the mile for the deed (are
there two more cowardly acts?) he disappears as far as society is concerned.
Is there anyone less of a man in society's eyes (and perhaps his own?) than a
bum? He's left, a bum shuffling between parks, confessing his crimes to anyone
that will listen, but no one believes him and so he's left in his own private
hell where he hears the voices of Johnny and Kitty over and over again, mocking
him. The rest of the cast in this film is very good as well, particularly Dan
Duryea. His Johnny is woman-hater, but unlike Marko (Peter Lorre) in Black Angel he doesn't survive , because this film tells us that is the weak male that
doesn't survive his encounter with the fairer sex. Johnny is as weak in
his own way as Chris. His violence toward Kitty isn't a demonstration of
strength so much as it is a demonstration of his lack of self-control. This
lack of self-control drives his machinations against Chris because of Johnny's
constant
need to replace the money he's lost gambling or blown on jewelry (but never for
Kitty). The fact that he is more than willing to farm out Kitty, whom he
pretends to love, to anyone that could conceivably fatten his wallet is
further evidence that he isn't the kind of man willing or able to take care of
his mate. Duryea is excellent is his ability to speak in a smarmy tone that
makes one think of older and more dangerous Eddie Haskell. It's actually a
little amazing to realize that this scummy Johnny is played by the same actor
who played the tormented and decent Martin Blair in Black Angel, and this is accomplished simply in the way he holds the expression on his face
and the cadence and tone of his voice. As good as Duryea is, this is still
Robinson's film, and he successfully propels it along, even when he's looking
like an old Bela Lugosi (and really, was there ever any other kind?). A good
representative, if slightly off the beaten path, of its genre.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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