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Valéry and Eliot have compared poets to criminals, in the New York gutter lurks the three-time loser with "the hands of an artist." The opening is cinema itself, pure and tingling: A crowded subway car, a moist passenger (Jean Peters) absent-mindedly biting her lip as a sly pickpocket (Richard Widmark) tickles the innards of her purse, a couple of FBI agents who cannot quite believe their eyes. She's a Commie agent's patsy, her filched wallet holds top military secrets, "you look for oil and sometimes you hit a gusher." With no use for "patriotic eyewash," the scoundrel in the waterfront shack is ready to sell the MacGuffin to the highest bidder until the moll and a professional snitch (Thelma Ritter) awaken his grubby sense of honor. Cold War anxiety heightens the already-combustible fabric of quotidian America in Samuel Fuller's furioso masterpiece, characters are always scavenging and knocking around for the top of the heap. (People inform on each other with no hesitation or rancor, "he's gotta live," "she's gotta eat," it's just business until it's not.) Fuller loves these scroungers as the closet defenders of the lopsided system that's marginalized them, contrasting their gritty tenacity with the cravenness of plutocratic Reds filmed in parodic Soviet close-ups. The phenomenally virile camerawork takes off from Kurosawa's Stray Dog, pushing sequences (Widmark punches Peters, revives her with splashed beer, and seduces her by rubbing her bruised jaw) beyond noir tropes and into a batty lyricism. Widmark's jackal impudence and Peters' sneer-pout are lovely comic-strip features somewhere between Runyon and Bukowski, then there's the Bowery Shakespeare of Ritter's doomed stoolie—wily, dilapidated, hardboiled and weary, pining for a fancy funeral while confronting the Reaper's record-scratch. "Even in our crummy line of business, ya gotta draw the line somewhere." Bresson's adagio telling of the conversion is just down the road. Cinematography by Joseph MacDonald. With Richard Kiley, Murvyn Vye, Willis Bouchey, and Milburn Stone. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |