By Imogen Sara Smith
Translator: Issac
Proofreading: Easy two three
Source: Standard Collection (October 12, 2021)
When Roy Earl (Humphrey Bogart), a Midwestern robber who had just emerged from prison, drove into California, the jagged peaks of the Sierra Nevada, hovering like mirages over dusty desert gas stations, were his last chance.
He narrowed his eyes in amazement and looked at this wall in the sky, the distant hillside crumpled like a shroud dried by the sun.
The person who created the character of Earl, the screenwriter W. Miller, was the screenwriter. R. Burnett, who went west in 1930 to try his luck and succeeded in Hollywood, where the studio made him an expert on gangsters with his best-selling debut in 1929, Little Caesar. He was quick and prolific, writing dozens of original stories and screenplays, as well as novels, sometimes unpublished, all snapped up by studios.
Little Caesar
Near the end of the thirties, Warner Bros. commissioned him to write a screenplay about John Dillinger, working with Charlie Black, who was killed by federal agents outside a movie theater in 1934 while watching a gangster movie, Man's World.
When the studio announced plans to shoot "Dillinger," it was attacked by the media for making another film celebrating criminals, so Jack Warner hastily halted the project.
Men's World
Burnett, a native of Ohio, was captivated by the "fresh, crisp" air in the west and set out for Skyscrapers to fish. He lived in a rural mountain hut, and in an instant he understood how to use this exploration to make The Dillinger, a halted film.
This resort with its cabins and intelligent mixed-race inhabitants is the setting for his next novel. Nightfall Was Published in 1940, and Warner immediately bought the rights for about $12,000.
Directed by Raoul Walsh and released in 1941, the film contains a multitude of elements: a mixture of gangster films, Westerns, and original film noir; an elegy written for the typical image of a noble outlaw of the Great Depression era, like its protagonist, oscillating between toughness and sentimentality; and starring Humphrey Bogart, after more than a decade of purgatory in B-grade films and supporting roles, it was also his belated career breakthrough.
"Sleepy Skyscraper" "Night Sleepy Skyscraper"
Skyscrapers at Night and The Maltese Eagle, released later that year, transformed Bogart from an angry villain who was asked to cringe and tremble during his 1939 Showdown with James Cagney to a supporting role in 1940's Truck Fighter.
Under Walsh's guidance, both became the only embodiments of calm, skepticism, independence, and weathered romanticism on screen. In the eyes of the studios, Bogart was still in a humble position when it came to promoting Skyscrapers at Night— even though he was the protagonist — producer Hal Wallis believed that Bogart's connection to the B-movie might have affected the film's prospects, and Ida Lupino, whose sexy and seductive role in Truck Fighter made her famous, was a better choice for attracting audiences.
Truck Fighter Truck Fighter
Raoul Walsh, one of Warner's top directors, was a good fit for the film: He was a master of cops and Westerns (his 1915 "New Life" was a pioneer in the genre), known for his thrilling adventures and raucous comedies, but equally adept at interpreting dark fatalism in the United States, with a clear understanding of the unusual love between Americans and violent men.
Walsh's style is forceful and brutal; he seems to be a warm cinema, inviting you in, sometimes breaking the fourth wall to achieve this effect. Watching his films, you'll be drawn to his movements—the raucous whirlpools of the crowd or the gallops of the fugitives—and you don't appreciate his work, but feel them as if you were in the same space as his character.
"New Life"
The energy of Walsh's films comes not only from grand action scenes, but also from intimate dialogue and eye contact; from people's flirtations and arguments, but also from fights and brawls.
Of all the Hollywood directors associated with traditional male themes, Walsh's female characters live and breathe on the silver screen the most convincingly, and his male characters are the least afraid to show their need for women. They know the value of loyalty and affection in a world dominated by strife, competition, and betrayal. In many of Walsh's films, beneath the surface, a melancholy undercurrent drags his character like a falling tide.
Roy Earl didn't have the dry, snarky wit and sharp wit that would later become Bogart's trademark, but the role illustrates that a sober middle-aged character is a better fit for the actor than a small fresh meat character.
Famously, Humphrey Deforest Bogart, who came from an aristocratic background, cemented his tough guy image with his role as the roaring, fugitive gangster Duke Mandy in The Fossil Forest. He played the role on Broadway in 1935 and reappeared on screen the following year.
In a convincingly rough performance, he erased the last traces of his early fixation, when he was still a childish supporting character, jumping around on stage with a tennis racket (Roy Earl slyly hinted at this when he picked up a tennis racket to disguise himself while robbing a country club). But as Duke mandy, he went too far: staring angrily, his hands clutching the sides of his body like stiff eagle claws, harshly speaking a lame dialect.
Fossil Forest
By night in Skyscraper, he learned to relax, restrain, and learn a series of unique acting skills that convey a stylized natural style: fastening a belt, pulling the upper lip off his teeth, and speaking slurredly.
Most importantly, he found his basic position as an observer; he controlled the scene by observing, listening, and reacting to others, as precisely as the pointers of a seismometer. Walsh was often associated with action actors such as Cargoni and Errol Flynn, but he used Bogart's composure and powerful minimalism to set a serious pace for the film and give the story a solid foundation.
"Night Sleepy Skyscraper"
Bogart was only 40 years old when he made Nightfall; his temples were tanned, reminiscent of Dillinger's signature expression, a way that scoffed at preachers who opposed early biopics. But Roy is already an old man, and along with the rest of the gray-haired veterans, he sympathizes with the changes of the times and what Donald McBride calls "all the top guys are gone."
Now, they are trapped in "young idiots, soda drinkers, and nervous people", such as the impulsive punkred (Arthur Kennedy) and Babe (Alan Curtis), who argue over mary (Lupino), the "little girl who can only dance" met in Los Angeles.
While the gangster films of the early 1930s were full of energy, seduction, and naked aggression, singing all the way, "Night Sleepy Skyscraper" foresaw the feeling of farewell that would dominate the genre after World War II, with frustrated, elderly male characters in the film who wanted to wash their hands after the last vote.
Roy is an old-school, brave outlaw, but his time is long gone: soft on dogs and women, ruthless to cunning former cops or nervous gangsters.
The film is permeated with nostalgia, both nostalgia for the innocent agricultural world of the past and nostalgia for the glory of the lost outlaws.
The robbers who roamed the Great Plains during the Great Depression — Dillinger, Pretty Boy Freud, Clyde Barrow, and Bonnie Parker — became the media spotlight and folk heroes, in part because they preyed on banks, which people blamed for their financial woes, and also because they refused to endure the shame of disempowerment, which stripped many Americans of their pride.
In the public imagination, they became Robin Hood, like Roy Earl, plundering jewelry from an arrogant country club and paying for surgery for a young woman's deformed foot.
Like in 1950's Night's Silence (another film co-written by John Houston based on Burnett's novel), rogue Dicks Handley longs for a Kentucky racecourse, while Roy dreams of returning to his Indiana home, where he is connected to a family he meets who, after losing their farm in Ohio, drives to California in a dilapidated car. (They nearly collided when the long-eared hare rushed out of the road—Walsh was driving in the desert when a long-eared hare flew out of the windshield and injured one of his eyes, and the long-eared hare, probably a descendant of the former.) ）
Roy's foolish promotion of middle-class decency and "decency" sparks his absurd fantasy of marrying the family's daughter, Verma (Joan Leslie). Verma was happy to accept his handouts, but was rejected by Roy as a suitor.
"The Night Is Not Quiet"
Although Walsh is associated with intense, raucous adventures, the first half of Nightfall is far from exciting. The characters kill time while waiting for approval for the grand mission; Babe and Red savagely quarrel off-screen.
Algernon (Willie Best), a black employee who does nothing in a hotel, casts a shadow over these scenes in the mountain huts. In one of his longest scenes, Algernon tells Roy the story of an unlucky dog named Pad, and Best reveals a more natural, relaxed, and cunning charm.
There are also details that are refreshing to modern people, such as the term "cripple" used to describe women with mild disabilities, and the way men give orders, insults and scolding to women.
In this last case, however, one can find a veiled criticism of misogyny, as the most abusive men are also the weakest and least trustworthy. (Curiously, despite the massive objections to the script from the reviewers in the Hays Code office, they seem to ignore the relationship between Mary, Red, and Babe, or the fact that she left them for Roy's cabin.) ）
Under Walsh's direction, actresses such as Lupino, Ann Sheridan, and Virginia Mayo play women who are both strong and gentle in life, tired of fending off male attacks, but they make no secret of their desire and generosity for the right man.
In 1964, Walsh told the Film Handbook that in all his films, "the whole story revolves around love scenes." These scenes range from the joyful, free, affectionate tongue-fighting between Spencer Qusay and Joan Bennett in The Entertainer Raider (1932) to the touching simple reunion between the elderly villain John Wesley Harding and his wife (Roque Hudson and Julie Adams) in The Man Who Can't Help (1952), whose restraint exacerbates their irrepressible emotions.
The Impossible
In Nightfall, we see long before Roy that he belonged to Mary, a fugitive from an abused family who understood the desire to "collapse" and the way this dream of escaping "keeps you going."
With big smoky eyes and a soft voice like charcoal black, Lupino played a lot of unfortunate wanderers in Warner Bros. There is always a glimmer of steely power in these scarred flowers that will grow stronger and stronger in the coming years, both on and off screen.
Lupino was so fond of Walsh that walsh directed four of her films, including one of her best performances, the black melodrama The Man I Love (1946). He also asked her to follow her on set and in the editing room, learning the techniques she unexpectedly revealed when she took over from the ailing Irma Clifton in 1949 to direct Don't Want, the first of her seven films.
The Man I Love
She imitated Walsh's unsavory, clean, and direct style, and in her greatest film, The Hitchhiker (1953), she returned to mount Alabama, where Nightfall took some scenes. The same is true of Stewart Heisler's Bloodscraper (1955).
Walsh himself directed a looser remake of Tiger Thief Wild Flowers (1949), a brilliant film that adapted the story into a Western, a natural genre shift that deepened the tone of lamentations, with an abandoned ghost town as the main scene.
Tiger Thief Wild Flower
Movie star Joel McRae injects elegant action and stoic melancholy into the film, and the streamlined script adds a bitter twist to the tragic ending. Once again, the outlaws put up their last resistance in the rock fortress, from where there was only one way to go down. That same year, in "Bloody Battle of the Bandits," Walsh breaks the romantic metaphor of an outlaw who has no one in sight and suffers an inevitable ending at "the top of the world."
Pursued by the police, Roy fled into the mountains, and the entire plateau was shrouded in a simple purity. The long car chase has no musical excitement, only the monotonous whistle sound, the piercing wheels on the winding dirt road, and the shouts that echo in the mountains.
The bare slopes and pointed spires of the Sierra Nevada form a cruel beauty that shows no mercy to people. There is no refuge in this wilderness. Fugitives are treated like wild beasts, shot by sharpshooters, like shooting coyotes or cougars. But Roy was seduced by his human connections: his dog's fanatical loyalty and his own reckless impulses to the woman he loved betrayed him.
"Bloody Battle of the Bandits"
The stunned crowd witnessed the scene, and a radio announcer recounted the scene in flowery language, which turned the scene into a meta-annotation to the American myth that "the gangster is a tragic hero", which was the title of an article published by Robert Huaxiu in 1948.
In the words of Dr. Banton (Henry Hull), outlaws who seek the purest of freedom and success are actually "rushing to death." They are romanticized, demonized, commoditized, and packaged as a moral curriculum for entertainment and indoctrination. Roy was annoyed by the nickname "Mad Dog," an invention inspired by the editors of a city newspaper and later belittled by a cynical journalist (Jerome Cowan).
The downfall of the big man is a ritual that collectively reminds people that not only is there no reward for committing a crime, but that the "collapse" is just an illusion that keeps you going while you're serving your sentence. From the safe living room, radio listeners could indirectly savor the pain of fate and the cold rosin air of the mountains.