Danger? Yes.

let’s talk about Chicago Deadline / Deadline - U.S.A.

“Somebody’s going to shoot you, sooner or later.”

“That’s the press, baby, the press! And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

There’s something uniquely exhilarating about watching a film noir in a theater. Because the genre no longer exists, seeing movies like Chicago Deadline and Deadline - U.S.A. on the big screen almost feels like an act of time travel. I bought my tickets and my popcorn (complete with real butter, another relic from a bygone era) and watched these films as though they’d just come out for the first time. The Deadline films both belong to the improbable sub-genre of “newspaper noir,” which eschews the traditional struggle between hard boiled detectives and hard boiled criminals by introducing a third party: hard boiled reporters. Of course, in a film noir the protagonist’s profession doesn’t really matter (Walter Neff was an insurance salesman in Double Indemnity, after all). What matters is that the guy is tough, lonely, and asks a lot of questions.

Luckily, Alan Ladd is the one asking the questions in Chicago Deadline. He’s the sort of actor who can convey toughness and loneliness in a glance (don’t believe me, watch Shane). Chicago Deadline is ostensibly about Ladd’s investigations into the death of a young woman named Rosita, but like many of the best mystery movies it is actually a study in male obsession. Like the classic noir Laura and the peerless Vertigo, this is a film in which a haunted man begins to feel more of a connection to a dead woman than to anyone living. We follow Ladd into a maddeningly complex labyrinth of character relationships, but his goals remain steadfast and simple: to uncover the truth about Rosita’s death, and to preserve her memory. Because the plot of Chicago Deadline is nigh incomprehensible, his commitment to understanding it is both heroic and a little sad. Rosita is played by Donna Reed in a handful of flashbacks that establish the steps by which she arrived at her tragic fate. Reed is just as endearing in this gritty little thriller as she was in It’s a Wonderful Life, and her performance provides the film’s heart and soul.

Deadline - U.S.A. is superficially different from Chicago Deadline, but the two films contain many of the same core qualities. Humphrey Bogart stars as a newspaper editor whose insistence upon journalistic integrity makes him a target, both for the city’s criminal element and for the paper’s shareholders, who want to turn it into a scandal sheet. Confronted the moral decay of print media, Bogart devotes himself to exposing a powerful crime boss in an effort to land one more big story before the paper goes under. The protagonist’s commitment to truth in the face of overwhelming corruption is a trait shared by the two Deadline movies, although Deadline - U.S.A. wears its message on its sleeve. What was implicit in Chicago Deadline becomes explicit in Deadline - U.S.A. As a result, Bogart is occasionally required to recite speeches that run a little too long, but that’s a small complaint. Even at its hokiest, Deadline - U.S.A. has a certain edge to it, and Bogart imbues every line he speaks with a weariness and sincerity that are totally credible.

Both movies, interestingly enough, contain a funeral. Chicago Deadline concludes with a surprisingly poignant scene in which a badly wounded Ladd attends Rosita’s wake. He appears to be near death himself, and the film suggests that he has a choice to either leave the funeral and embrace life, or linger near Rosita and perish. In this way, Chicago Deadline articulates its message in a way that is both understated and powerful. Deadline - U.S.A. takes a less subtle, but equally powerful route in its finest scene, which depicts a group of drunken reporters staging a “funeral” for their newspaper. The ceremony begins as a joke, but as it goes on the newspapermen become increasingly solemn. Chicago Deadline and Deadline - U.S.A. are great films about death, crime and journalism, and I was lucky to see them back to back at the Music Box theater in Chicago this past August.

Chicago Deadline, dir. Lewis Allen, 1949

Deadline - U.S.A., dir. Richard Brooks, 1952

thedailywhat:

Raising Children Right of the Day: Inspired by S. Rivas’ Reynolds Home Calvin & Hobbes playroom mural, Redditor poerhouse painted this incredible C&H nursery mural for his unborn daughter.

He says “the plan is to insert a ‘Wattersonized’ version of her once she’s two or three (and we know what she looks like),” but I agree with Redditor hockymickle , who counters “I kind of like it with just Hobbes. It implies that she’s in Calvin’s role without having to draw her in there.”

[reddit.]

bubblegumfink:

Here

let’s talk about Natural Born Killers

“Media is like the weather, only it’s man-made weather. Murder? It’s pure.”

Oliver Stone is a director driven to stylistic excess. In his best movies, he seamlessly integrates his go-for-broke impulses into conventional narratives in ways that are pointed and entertaining. Here, he has attempted to construct a film out of nothing but go-for-broke impulses, and as a result it all falls apart. Natural Born Killers plays less like a coherent movie and more like a music video paying homage to a movie, dragged out to feature length. It is a demented, jagged, aimless piece of work. Stone’s fatal error, however, is thematic rather than aesthetic. He appears to have conflated the provocative with the profound. When your movie is about a pair of mass-murdering sadists, you really can’t afford to make that kind of mistake. This material is intrinsically provocative. It is not intrinsically profound.

Natural Born Killers began its twisted life as a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino. This screenplay was subsequently revised by Stone and others to such a degree that Tarantino was finally only credited with the film’s “story.” The version of the script that went in front of cameras retained Tarantino’s proclivity for casual violence, but failed to preserve his signature wit. Although you can detect Tarantino’s influence in a few of Woody Harrelson’s folksy aphorisms, the majority of the film’s dialogue sounds like the work of a substandard Tarantino imitator. To paraphrase an aphorism for my own purposes, Stone knows the words, but not the music. There is a good Tarantino movie trapped somewhere within Natural Born Killers (presumably bound, gagged, and horribly mutilated), but it never quite manages to break free of its confinement.

The same cannot be said of the film’s titular psychopaths, whose climactic escape from prison is one of the most gleefully apocalyptic pieces of film-making I’ve ever seen. It is a sequence of sustained brilliance in which each successive moment provides a new spin in one long, spiraling descent into total anarchy. A televised interview suddenly becomes a bloodbath, which leads to a chase sequence, and then a Mexican standoff, and then a full-scale riot, and then a hostage crisis, and then, finally, a war zone. This is the only point in the film where the the madness of the material fully justifies the madness of Stone’s aesthetics. I was floored by the finale of Natural Born Killers, although I can only imagine the sort of impact it would have had upon me if the film’s earlier scenes had exercised some restraint. Dazzling though it may be, it is still an explosion of violence in a film that is consistently explosive and violent, which limits its potential to shock and awe.

The performances are a mixed bag. Woody Harrelson radiates a deadly stoicism that keeps his character scary and compelling even as the film around him comes apart at the seams. Juliette Lewis brings an unexpected doe-eyed naivete to her murderous role, and she sells it. Tom Sizemore and Rodney Dangerfield seem adrift in the material, playing their repellant characters without much enthusiasm. Conversely, Robert Downey, Jr. and Tommy Lee Jones both embrace the comic absurdity of their potentially grotesque characters and allow their performances to soar into giddy, over-the-top buffoonery. This is entirely appropriate. Natural Born Killers is, above all else, an exorbitantly violent cartoon. It is not, as some claim, a thoughtful meditation on the corrupting power of the media and the death of the American dream.

The final scene of Natural Born Killers contains a line of dialogue that helped me come to terms with many of the film’s flaws. Just before executing a television reporter, Harrelson solemnly intones, “Killing you, and what you represent, is a statement.” A befuddled look then crosses the psychopath’s face, and he adds, “I’m not 100% sure exactly what it’s saying, but, you know.” If I place my entire reading of the film within the context of that quote, I can make my peace with it. Natural Born Killers is not a great film, or even a particularly smart film. It is a chaotic mess with a stunning action climax that narrowly liberates the whole thing from mediocrity. It is also, of course, a film with a message. Oliver Stone just isn’t entirely sure what it’s saying.

Natural Born Killers, dir. Oliver Stone, 1994