Black Gate

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era termsp for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

This essay on Johnny Angel is not about the song sung by Shelly Fabares; though, I do like it. Instead, it’s a nautical noir starring George Raft, now at RKO after what can only be deemed a disappointing career at Warners. Of course, Raft can only blame himself for that, after passing on High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, and Double Indemnity. You think his career wouldn’t have gone differently with those classics on his resume? However, he actually did make some solid movies at RKO in the mid-to-late forties, and this is one of them. THERE BE SPOILERS HERE! Look – I’m talking about a 75 year old movie here. If I ruin something for you; well, you had plenty of chances to see it before now. Okay?

Here, Raft plays Johnny Angel – a merchant ship captain who followed his father into the same career. His father has simply disappeared, along with his ship. Johnny takes offense at insinuations his father did something wrong, and is determined to find out what happened. Raft makes a decent civilian skipper, with a stiff walk. As always, he’s the toughest guy in the room, glowering at, and verbally berating, weaker characters. And of course, beating up the bad guys. You know what you’re getting in a Raft movie.

The female co-lead is the completely forgettable Signe Hasso (though she’s third-billed). She had a funny role in George Segal’s The Maltese Falcon spoof, The Black Bird. But I don’t think she brings anything to this movie at all. If this had been a Warners flick, Joan Blondell, or Ann Sheridan, or maybe even Sylvia Sidney, would have made this a better film. Her character, Paulette Girard, knows something about Johnny’s father’s disappearance, and she’s on the run.

However, it’s top-billed Claire Trevor who carries the female load. Trevor was a terrific actress and played a number of fine parts in hardboiled and noir films. She didn’t have much screen time as Baby Face Martin’s syphilitic, hooker ex-girlfriend, but she brought another layer of emotional depth to Bogart’s character, in Dead End. She had just shone opposite Dick Powell’s Philip Marlowe in Murder My Sweet, when she made Johnny Angel. And of course, she won an Oscar for Key Largo.

…

Read More Read More

Back in my 2014, my first year covering the Fantasia Festival for Black Gate, I reviewed an animated movie called Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart, the debut film from director Mathias Malzieu. The songwriter and lead singer of French pop band Dionysos, Malzieu’s also a writer; Jack was also a concept album and novel as well as a film. Now Malzieu’s got a new movie, filled with singing and dancing and whimsy. A Mermaid In Paris (Une sirène à Paris) has many of the same visual influences as Jack, but moves beyond them in a new way. Although it has a happier ending, it also has a truer feel for melancholy and grief, and with that a sense of greater depth.

We follow Gaspard (Nicolas Duvauchelle), a singer at a bar owned by his father Camille (Tchéky Karyo) who is thinking about selling the magical place, located on a boat, hidden under a café. One night, Paris is flooded, and Gaspard finds a beautiful mermaid (Marilyn Lima) washed up on the cobbles. He takes her to a hospital where, unknown to him, she gains strength by draining the life of a doctor, Victor (Alexis Michalik), with her song. Unable to get the staff to give her treatment, Gaspard takes her home, not knowing that Victor’s wife Milena (Romane Bohringer) has sworn to find her husband’s killer. Will Lula, the mermaid, kill Gaspard? Will Gaspard, who believes he cannot love a woman after a failed relationship in his past, be drawn to her nevertheless? If so, will Lula survive, who must be returned to her native element?

Such the questions of the film. We get fine answers, though the plot that provides them is a bit ragged, here and there. Specifically, Milena is a little underplayed. Nominally the villain, she doesn’t do that much over the course of the movie, and creates little sense of tension or threat. In a way, that’s a testament to how much Bohringer brings to the part; it’s impossible not to feel for her, and Malzieu’s direction and visual imagination makes her love for Victor a powerful counterpart to the development of Gaspard and Lula’s love.

It’s also true that the basic tone of the movie is one of romance, not logic. Reality is heightened, the visual world of the film shaped by emotion, primarily love. This is the Paris of fairy-tales and dreams: colour is rich, music is everywhere, the people are whimsical and lightly ironic. Where Malzieu’s first film was strongly influenced by Tim Burton, this one marries the Burton feel to Jean-Pierre Jeunet, specifically the Jeunet of Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain. It is the kind of city into which a mermaid might wash up, and if the people of the film show less surprise at a mermaid than you might expect, that’s probably why.

…

Read More Read More

Consider if you will the high school story. By which I mean a story set at a high school, usually involving some members of the student body. It’s relatively unusual for these kinds of stories to be about actual academic achievement, or to put more than maybe one or two members of the faculty in the foreground. It happens, of course. But usually high school stories are about the students, and their lives and interactions, with classes and teachers and adults as external factors that can be used to shape the story but are ultimately incidental to it.

In this sense Kakegurui may be considered to approach the platonic ideal of the high school story, dealing as it does with a school for the children of the ultra-rich where there are no teachers and no classes and no adults. All the students do is gamble, with not only money but status on the line. A tyrannical student council runs the school, and those who lose the games become slaves — called ‘kitties’ or ‘doggies’ depending on gender.

The movie was directed by Tsutomu Hanabusa from a script Hanabusa wrote with Minato Takano; it’s an entry in a franchise that started with a manga written by Homura Kawamoto and illustrated by Toru Naomura. There are spin-offs series and a prequel, along with an anime adaptation. The live-action movie follows the continuity of a live-action TV version, which has run for two seasons and is available on Netflix. I haven’t watched the show, but there were relatively few manga adaptations at Fantasia this year; and I tend to enjoy those more than most do, perhaps because I have little experience with the original comics. At any rate, I watched Kakegurui (also Kakegurui: The Movie, Eiga: Kakegurui, 映画　賭ケグルイ), and was entertained.

The first minutes of the Kakegurui film introduce us to the school, Hyakkaou Private Academy, and to some of the people and factions at play. A mysterious transfer student named Yumeko Jabami (Minami Hamabe, Ajin: Demi-Human) emerges as the lead character, but there are also a group of punkish rebels, and a puritanical sect of anti-gambling students who have formed a Village of their own in an unused building on the school grounds. The plot of the film’s mainly to do with Jabami being pulled into the conflict between the Village and the student council, but there are schemes within schemes at play.

Which is to say that the film doesn’t end with anything approaching finality. It’s still mostly satisfying. The construction of the plot’s solid, and I’m impressed at how much exposition is delivered quickly yet comprehensibly in the film’s opening minutes. Much of what’s set up pays off, but this is clearly an installment in an ongoing story, and while it wraps things up for its main characters the institution of the school remains relatively untouched.

…

Read More Read More

I haven’t done one of these in a while. And I’ve been reading a ton of stuff as summer has moved into Fall (hopefully the weather will follow suit!). So, here we go…

West of Guam: The Complete Adventures of Jo Gar – Raoul Whitfield (Ramon Decolta)

I re-read this entire anthology for the third time. I absolutely love Whitfield’s stories about the little Filipino detective. Written under the name Ramon Decolta, there were 24 Gar stories, all of which appeared in Dime Detective. Imagine a hardboiled David Suchet as Poirot, not afraid to blast it out with the bad guys. This is just about my favorite hardboiled series, and I’m working on a massive essay about Gar. Steeger Books (formerly Altus Press) put out this collection, which is still available. I can’t recommend it enough.

Whitfield was a Black Mask Boy right up there with Dashiell Hammett, Frederick Nebel, and Carroll John Daly. But he has largely been forgotten – even though he had a couple of his pulp serials novelized: including Death in a Bowl, which really established the tropes for the Hollywood mystery story.

 

The Annotated Sherlock Holmes – William Baring-Gould

I’m working on a new Holmes short story, so I decided to go back to the source material as a refresher. And I chose my two-volume Baring-Gould annotated set to read from. I’ve got annotations from Baring-Gould, Klinger (two different ones) and the Oxford edition. And I was in a Baring-Gould mood this time around.

 

BBC Sherlock Holmes Radio Series – Clive Merrison and Michael Williams

I absolutely love this series, which covered the entire Canon, created and produced by Bert Coules. After Williams (Judi Dench’s husband) passed away of cancer, Andrew Sachs stepped in as Watson and the series continued on with original stories.

When I write Holmes, I hear Merrison and Williams. Their voices are simply perfect for the roles. Throughout the year, I listen to various episodes, and I’m never disappointed. This is the best Holmes radio play ever recorded.

…

Read More Read More