“The Mask of Dimitrios” - Jean Negulesco (1944)

The Mask of Dimitrios (1944) is one of the classic films noir of the 1940s, and it stars two of the more colorful figures of that period, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre.  Only on this occasion, instead of playing shady and somewhat threatening supporting roles, they are cast as the stars of the film and represent the protagonists of the story.  Greenstreet and Lorre appeared together in nine famous films during this period – The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), Background to Danger (1943), Passage to Marseille (1944), The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), The Conspirators (1944), Hollywood Canteen (1944), Three Strangers (1946), and The Verdict (1946) – but I would say that The Mask of Dimitrios features their greatest and most memorable performances.

Interestingly, despite their being cast here in The Mask of Dimitrios in the roles of the protagonists, Greenstreet and Lorre here retain their usual shady cinematic personae.  Lorre is his usual slimy self, and Greenstreet is characteristically abrupt and threatening, although he is here perpetually delivering his sanctimonious statement: "There's not enough kindness in the world".  Nevertheless, we are in film noir territory here, so it all fits together nicely.  Indeed, film scholar Keith Roysdon, who wrote an essay in praise of the Lorre-Greenstreet acting collaboration [1], commented:

“‘Mask of Dimitrios’ is . . . the peak of the Lorre and Greenstreet movies.”

The film was directed by the versatile Jean Negulesco, and it was based on the famous 1939 novel of the same name (aka in the U.S.: A Coffin for Dimitrios) by popular British author Eric Ambler.  The cinematography and editing was handled by Arthur Edeson and Frederick Richards, respectively; and while there are a number of distracting jump-cuts and camera-axis-crossing shots, the film’s overall appearance does very well conform to the dramatic visual panache of the dark urban film-noir underworld.  The film’s music was composed by the prolific Adolph Deutsch, who was also responsible for the music in The Maltese Falcon.  The result was a classic film noir in all its trappings.  And over the years, The Mask of Dimitrios has consistently drawn a number of appreciative reviews [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10].  

The narrative of The Mask of Dimitrios is somewhat complicated by the retelling in flashback of several lengthy past episodes from the life of the nefarious Dimitrios Makropoulos (played by Zachary Scott in his first starring role).  Dimitrios, we will learn, is a liar, thief, murderer, spy, gangster, betrayer, and traitor.  The person interested in learning his story is a well-known detective story writer, Cornelius Leyden (Peter Lorre), who believes Dimitrios would make a good subject for his next book.  

The story begins in 1938 with Leyden visiting Istanbul.  At a social gathering Leyden meets a high-ranking police officer, Colonel Haki (Kurt Katch), who is a fan of Leyden’s writing.  Haki tells him about Dimitrios Makropoulos, whose dead body was recently washed up on the beach.  It is revealed that Dimitrios is known to have engaged in various criminal activities over the past sixteen years in a number of places – successively in Smyrna,, Athens, Sofia, Belgrade, and Paris.
The evil nature of Dimitrios intrigues Leyden, and he is allowed to see the corpse just before it is disposed of.  Afterwards, a stout gentleman, a Mr. Peters (Sydney Greenstreet), also comes to the morgue to see the corpse, but he arrives too late.

Intent on basing his next novel on Dimitrios, Leyden travels to Athens to dig up more info about  him, but he doesn’t find much.  So he heads to Sofia, where he is able to track down Irana Preveza (Faye Emerson), a former lover of Dimitrios fifteen years ago.  Telling him in flashback, she says Dimitrios was involved in an assassination attempt and left the country using money borrowed from Irana. But despite his promises, Dimitrios never returned the money.  When  Leyden returns to his hotel room, he finds a gun-wielding Mr. Peters has searched it and demanding to know why he is interested in Dimitrios. After the mysterious Peters becomes convinced of Leyden’s relatively innocent intentions, he proposes that the two of them work together and that there may be some unexplained financial reward that results from it.

So Peters puts Leyden in touch with the genteel but sinister Wladislaw Grodek (Victor Francen).  In a 20-minute flashback Grodek relates how he had hired Dimitrios to obtain some state secrets. Dimitrios manipulated Karel Bulic (Steven Geray), a minor Yugoslav government official, into gambling and losing a huge sum so that he could be pressured into stealing charts of some strategic minefields.  Bulic ultimately confesses to the authorities and then commits suicide, but Grodek just smirks when telling about it.  However, Dimitrios double-crossed Grodek by selling the stolen charts himself to the Italian government.

Still desirous of knowing more about Dimitrios, Leyden heads to the next known stop of the man’s iniquitous itinerary, Paris.  There he meets up again with the up-to-now secretive Peters, who Leyden has by this time learned used to be a member of Dimitrios's smuggling gang.  Peters now informs Leyden that the corpse he saw in the morgue in Istanbul was not that of Dimitrios, and he proves it by showing Leyden an identifying photograph of the of the man, not Dimitrios, who was killed in Istanbul.  Dimitrios, Peters informs Leyden, is still alive and is living under an assumed name in Paris.  Since Leyden is the only person who has seen the corpse and can confirm that it was not Dimitrios, he and Peters are now in a position to blackmail Dimitrios. Peters wants one million francs from Dimitrios for his silence, and Leyden agrees to go along.  

Peters knows how to get in touch with Dimitrios, and he arranges a secret meeting between himself, Dimitrios, and a suitably disguised Leyden.  At the meeting Peters issues to Dimitrios his demand for one million francs in cash, or he will reveal Dimitrios’s to the authorities via Leyden’s anonymized testimony.  Dimitrios grimly concedes that they have the goods on him and agrees to make the payment.

And so at a secretly arranged location, Peters and Leyden pickup a case filled with one million francs in cash.  Peters is exultant.

However, we are likely to doubt that Dimitrios will give up the ghost so quickly, and, sure enough, Dimitrios does have another play to make – and a violent one, too.  But you will have to watch the movie, yourself, to see how it all plays out in the end.

One might be tempted to wonder if there is any moral slant in The Mask of Dimitrios', although this is not often an issue in a film noir.  However, in this film, Leyden, the ever-fascinated observer of malevolent people, is presented with closeup, contrasting views of two often-congenial but ultimately pernicious antagonists going up against each other:

• Dimitrios – He is a complete narcissist and only interested in his own utilitarian gain.  If he thinks he can gain from it and get away with it, he will lie to, cheat, murder, and/or betray any person he comes across.  Other people don’t count for him.
   
• Peters – Although we know that he has been a member of a smuggling gang, Peters does care about other people.  That is why his slogan is "there's not enough kindness in the world".  But he cares about people in both positive and negative ways.  He can sometimes hate them and want to take revenge on them.  Indeed, he has spent a major part of his life engaged in a revenge campaign against Dimitrios.  For Peters, this revenge is even more important than the one million francs.
  

So Dimitrios and Peters are malicious, but in different ways.  Dimitrios is almost a cold-blooded self-serving robot, out only for his personal gain, whereas Peters does concern himself with other people but sometimes in a vengeful way.

I personally believe that we have all been placed in this world with the assigned goal of bringing joy to all the beings that we encounter while we are here.  And anger, hatred, and vengeance have no place in the carrying out of this mission (as you may have guessed from my reviews of other revenge-films).  Therefore Peters is no angel here.  And so Leyden must consider that aspect of his encounters with the people he has met in this story, too.  

At any rate, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre with their colorful personages, do an excellent job of raising these issues in The Mask of Dimitrios.  As for the overall moral slant of the film, perhaps it does just come down to the need for more kindness.  After all, the final words expressed in the film are Greenstreet’s:

"There's not enough kindness in the world."

★★★★

Notes:

1. Keith Roysdon, “Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet: Film Noir's Greatest Odd Couple”, CrimeReads, (30 April 2021).   
   
2. Bosley Crowther, “THE SCREEN; The Mask of Dimitrios'”, The New York Times, (24 June 1944).  
   
3. Walter E. Wilson, “The Mask of Dimitrios”, The Harvard Crimson, (28 October  1957).   
   
4. “The Mask of Dimitrios Reviews”, TV Guide, (n.d.).     
   
5. Orson DeWelles, “The Mask of Dimitrios (1944) with Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet”, Classic Film Freak, (28 June 2011).   
   
6. “Synopsis”, The Mask of Dimitrios, Turner Classic Movies, (n.d.).   
   
7. James Steffin, “The Mask of Dimitrios”, Turner Classic Movies, (24 October  2003).   
   
8. Dennis Schwartz, “Mask of Dimitrios, The”, Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews (5 August 2019).   
   
9. Leonard Quart, “FROM THE ARCHIVES: The Mask of Dimitrios”, Cineaste Magazine, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 4, (2013).   
   
10. Glenn Erickson, “The Mask of Dimitrios”, DVD Savant, (20 June 2013).   
    

“The Big Sleep” - Howard Hawks (1946)

The Big Sleep (1946) is a famous film noir directed by Howard Hawks – in fact some people think it is the greatest of all films noir [1,2,3,4,5,6].  It is based on famous detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), which featured Chandler’s favorite fictional protagonist, private detective Philip Marlowe.  In Hawks’s film version here, Marlowe is played by Humphrey Bogart, and this was one of the factors that made this film noir so popular – it turned out to be one of Bogart’s more famous roles.  Another factor in the film’s popularity was the romantic pairing of Bogart (aged 44) with Lauren Bacall (aged 20), a combo that had already achieved significant traction with the public from Hawks’s earlier To Have and Have Not (1944).  “Bogie and Bacall” were coupled offscreen, too, and they got married during this period.

Despite the fame of this film, though, there are aspects of it that make the work problematical.  For one thing, the plot of The Big Sleep (both that of the film and the novel) is so convoluted that most viewers can’t keep track of it.  This is partly a consequence of Chandler’s practice of basing each of his novels on several of his earlier-published short stories, each of which had its own plot.  And anyway, plot was less important for Chandler than atmosphere and characterization.  It seems that he wanted more to create a sense of tension rather than to tell a story.  So the task was considerable for the esteemed screenwriters who worked on the film:

• William Faulkner, a novelist and short story writer who won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature,
• Leigh Brackett, who later scripted another famous film noir based on a Raymond Chandler novel, The Long Goodbye (1973), and
• Jules Furthman, a prolific screenwriter whose vast repertoire includes the  scripting of seven of Josef von Sternberg’s films.
  

Not only did Faulkner, Brackett, and Furthman need to tone down the explicit sexuality (including homosexuality) in Chandler’s original account, they also had to understand and try to make some sense of Chandler’s tangled plot in the novel.  One notable example of this difficulty occurred during the shooting of the film when Bogart and Hawks wanted to know who committed one of the seven key murders in the film [5].  That is, was Sternwood’s chauffeur murdered or was it a suicide?  It bothered  Bogart and Hawks so much that Hawks sent a telegram to Chandler to find out.  But it turned out that Chandler didn’t know, either!  As I said, Chandler was mainly concerned with atmosphere, not facts about who did what.

The story, such as it is, of The Big Sleep begins with Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) being summoned to the mansion of General Sternwood (Charles Waldron), a wealthy invalid with two wanton young daughters – the lewd and self-indulgent  Carmen (Martha Vickers) and the divorced Vivian Rutledge (Lauren Bacall).. Sternwood is concerned that Carmen is being threatened for the nonpayment of her gambling debts. Marlowe agrees to look into the matter.  

But things turn out to be not so simple as that.  Marlowe soon learns that Carmen was being blackmailed by her phony creditor, whom Marlowe soon finds murdered.  And Marlowe learns from Vivian that her younger sister Carmen has been blackmailed before by other mysterious gangsters and miscreants, who may or may not be involved in this current murder.  Throughout all the various violent events that come along and the corpses that pile up, Marlowe tries to figure out what is going on.  But he is always one step behind.  However, along the way, Marlowe and Vivian (who also turns out to be a victim of blackmailing) gradually develop an attachment for each other.

I won’t go over the plot details here, but I can say that in the end, things get somewhat resolved, although we do learn that Marlowe, Vivian, and Carmen each killed someone who was threatening them individually [2].  

So what is it that accounts for The Big Sleep’s popularity?  I don’t think it is the intricate plot, because the plot is too random and loose-ended.  Moreover, we don’t get much of a feeling for what motivates most of the events that transpire.  And I don’t think it is the “Bogie and Bacall” Mystique, either.  That relationship is very much in the background and never really occupies center stage.  

No, I think what accounts for The Big Sleep’s popularity is that the film is so heavily loaded with all the accoutrements of film noir stylistics.  There is a nonstop barrage of all the incidental elements that the aficionados of film noir look for and recognize when they encounter an instance of the genre – 

• a dark, cynical, and obscure protagonist
• attractive women with unclear pasts and ambiguous intentions
• unexpected encounters with shady characters
• unanticipated violence
• cynical and innuendo-loaded wisecracks and dialogue
  

Thus film critic Roger Ebert loved the film precisely for these elements, as he remarked
[5]:

Working from Chandler's original words and adding spins of their own, the writers (William Faulkner, Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett) wrote one of the most quotable of screenplays: It's unusual to find yourself laughing in a movie not because something is funny but because it's so wickedly clever. (Marlowe on the "nymphy" kid sister: "She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up.") Unlike modern crime movies which are loaded with action, "The Big Sleep" is heavy with dialogue--the characters talk and talk, just like in the Chandler novels; it's as if there's a competition to see who has the most verbal style.

But I don’t see things that way.  An outstanding film cannot be just all clever talk; it has to have a compelling narrative, and The Big Sleep doesn’t have that.  The story of this film is too loose-ended and contorted.  So although the film has some entertaining moments (I did like the brief, separate interactions Marlowe had with Carmen (Martha Vickers) and Harry Jones (Elisha Cook, Jr.)), this is certainly not a great film noir.
★★★

 
Notes:

1. Leonard Maltin (ed.), “The Big Sleep (1946)”, Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide, Plume, (2005), p. 47.  
2. Tim Dirth. “The Big Sleep (1946)”, “Filmsite”, (n.d.).   
   
3. Andrew Sarris, “Living the private-eye genre”, films in focus, The Village Voice” (8 November 1973).   
   
4. Jeffrey M. Anderson, “I'd Like More”, The Big Sleep (1946), Combustible Celluloid, (n.d.).   
   
5. Roger Ebert, “The Big Sleep”, Great Movies, RogerEbert.com, (22 June 1997).   
   
6. Brian Cady, Margarita Landazuri, and Frank Miller, “The Big Sleep”, Turner Classic Movies, (17 February 2005).     
   

“And Then There Were None” - René Clair (1945)

And Then There Were None (1939) is not only English mystery writer Agatha Christie’s most popular novel, it is the most widely read mystery novel ever written, with more than 100 million copies sold [1].  This novel (which was originally titled Ten Little Niggers but was soon changed to And Then There Were None) was refashioned by Christie in 1943 into a stage play with an altered, more upbeat, ending; and it is this play that has served as the basis for numerous film and TV adaptations around the world over the years.  However, the most famous of these adaptations was the first – the 1945 American film And Then There Were None, directed by René Clair.

What makes Christie’s story so irresistibly enticing?  It is undoubtedly the story’s foundational proposition – ten strangers stranded in a lone mansion on a small island are facing the prospect that an unknown member of their group is intent on killing all the others, one-by-one.  As the murders proceed, the surviving parties (and the viewers) must continually revise their suspicions as to who might be the fiendish perpetrator.  Since everyone is ultimately under suspicion, the atmosphere for paranoia is intense.  As such, this turns out to be one of the ultimate claustrophobic whodunits.     

René Clair, the film‘s director, was a famous French filmmaker and something of an auteur, but he spent the  war years of  World War II self-exiled in the U.S., where he had the opportunity to direct a number of Hollywood films (e.g. The Flame of New Orleans (1941), I Married a Witch (1942), It Happened Tomorrow (1944), and finally And Then There Were None (1945)).  So not surprisingly, this film’s production was very much a standard Hollywood product, with the script, cinematography, editing, and music all handled by Hollywood veterans Dudley Nichols, Lucien N. Andriot, Harvey Manger, and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, respectively.  Even so, the uniqueness of Agatha Christie’s story has made the film largely stand out as something of an art-house favourite over the years [2,3,4,5,6].

The film begins with eight people, all mutually strangers to each other, being delivered in a small boat to an isolated island off the English coast.  We will soon learn their identities:

• 
  Judge Francis Quinncannon (played by Barry Fitzgerald), a legal authority
• Dr. Edward Armstrong (Walter Huston), a medical physician
• William Blore (Roland Young), a police detective 
• General Sir John Mandrake (Aubrey Smith), a military officer
• Prince Nikki Starloff (Mischa Auer), an upper-class wastrel
• Emily Brent (Judith Anderson), an older upper-class woman
• Philip Lombard (Louis Hayward)
• Vera Claythorne (June Duprez)
  

They are all guests of a Mr. Owen whom they have never met.  When they arrive on the island, they are taken to a lone mansion tended to by two newly hired servants, Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, who have also never met Mr. Owen.  When the guests sit down for dinner, they notice a flamboyant centerpiece on the table featuring ten figurines of (American) Indians.  This odd centerpiece, which can evoke the macabre children’s nursery rhyme “Ten Little Indians”, will serve as a physical metaphor for the gruesome events to follow.  

Then Mr. Rogers, following instructions he had received from Mr. Owen, plays a phonograph record having a recording addressed to the newly arrived guests.  The recorded voice asserts that, based on inside information, it knows and spells out how each of ten people in the house – the eight invited guests and Mr. and Mrs. Rogers – is individually responsible for the deaths of one or more innocent people.  Essentially, they are all unconvicted murderers.  And so, according to the voice on the recording, they all deserve to be executed.

Naturally, this announcement is disruptive to the equanimity of the group, who are in the initial stages of getting to know each other.  There are various angry denials, as well as confessions of some degrees of guilt.  But they all feel that they are now the targets of revenge for their alleged past deeds.

Then the sequence of mysterious deaths begins.  The first one happens quickly.  After Prince Starloff sits down at the piano in the drawing room and plays and sings the children’s nursery song “Ten Little Indians”, he takes a sip from a cocktail drink and then keels over, dead.  The cocktail drink was mysteriously poisoned.  In this and in the subsequent death cases, the identity of the  perpetrator of the vengeful murder is unknown.  But each occasion is accompanied by an equally mysterious disappearance of another Indian figurine from the dining room table.  And the circumstances of each death weirdly reflect the circumstances of the corresponding Indian disappearance mentioned in the nursery rhyme.  At first the life-threatened guests believe that there nemesis is somewhere on the island outside the mansion.  But after thoroughly investigating this possibility, they conclude that their existential antagonist is a disguised member of their own group.

Most of the guests are stereotypes of their professional backgrounds, and so they stereotypically apply their accustomed skills to finding who is the murderer.  Thus Judge Quinncannon sees things from a legal perspective;  Dr. Armstrong sees things from a medical perspective;  General Mandrake sees things from a military perspective; and Detective Blore just wants to collect all the evidence.  Although some viewers may like this heterogeneous problem-solving admixture, I found it a bit too artificial for my taste.

So the sequence of surreptitious murders continues to play itself out, with the identity of the cold-blooded killer being continually restricted to one of a set of candidates among the declining number of surviving guests.  Eventually the viewer does learn who it is, and I will leave it to you to see the film and find out for yourself.

Enticing as this challenging many-suspect whodunit might seem, though, the film And Then There Were None doesn’t live up to its potential for several reasons:

• For one thing, there don’t seem to be potential motivations for the murders committed on the island, and this leads to an absence of suspicions.  I believe murder mysteries are best outfitted with threatening suspects whose suspected motivations can help drive the narrative. This problem here likely stems from the overly simplified and stereotyped characterizations of the guests in this story.
   
  
• Two of the guests, Vera Claythorne and Philip Lombard (whose real name later turns out to be Charles Morley), are much younger than the other guests and very glamorous compared to the others.  This makes it too obvious that they are innocent parties and that they are likely to be the protagonists in identifying the true culprit.
    
  
• And finally, the film makes too light of the notion of death and basically adopts a mocking attitude toward the loss of life.  This may help lighten the dark tenor of the story, but the film dialogue goes too far in this direction.  In fact the incessant flow of superficial wisecracks in this area wears pretty thin before we come to the end of the story.
  

So And Then There Were None may offer you an interesting mind diversion sometime, but it is a story that could have been fashioned into a more compelling cinematic experience.

★★½

Notes:

1. “And Then There Were None”, Wikipedia, (30 September 2021).    
   
2. Bosley Crowther, “SHE SCREEN IN REVIEW; 'And Then There Were None,' With Barry Fitzgerald, at Roxy, Appears Opportunely as Goblins Pay Annual Visit Universal Offers a Refashioned Drama of Pirandello in Film 'This Love of Ours,' New Bill Showing at Loew's Criterion At Loew's Criterion”, The New York Times, (1 November 1945).   
   
3. Variety Staff, “And Then There Were None”, Variety, (31 December 1944).   
   
4. Leonard Maltin (ed.), “And Then There Were None”, Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide, PLUME, Penguin Press, (2005). 
5. Jeremy Arnold, “And Then There Were None on Blu-ray”, Turner Classic Movies, (18 September 2013).   
   
6. Jay Carr, “And Then There Were None - And Then There Were None”, Turner Classic Movies, (9 January 2014).   
   

“Farewell, My Lovely” - Dick Richards (1975)

The 1975 film Farewell, My Lovely stands today as a classic film noir, even though it was made a number of years after the period (1940s and 1950s) in which the bulk of the films we associate with that genre were made.  For that reason, this version of Farewell, My Lovely is sometimes labelled a “neo-noir” film.  But in contrast with other, contemporaneous neo-noir films, like The Long Goodbye (1973) [1], which tended to feature updated perspectives and stylistics, the 1975 Farewell, My Lovely very much stuck with the traditional film noir style and themes.  These themes, as I have outlined elsewhere [2,3], consistently revolve around fatalism (most characters feel trapped in a dark world stacked against them), elusive truth (everyone dissembles and lies), and loyalty (because the main characters are solo operators, they always search for someone they can trust).

One aspect of Farewell, My Lovely, in particular, that helps lock it into the film noir genre is that it is based on a detective novel by Raymond Chandler, many of whose works (e.g. The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Lady in the Lake (1943),  and The Long Goodbye (1953)) served as the narrative bases for atmospheric films noir.  Chandler’s original Farewell, My Lovely (1940) was particularly famous, and it was adapted three times for major motion pictures – The Falcon Takes Over (1942), Murder, My Sweet, (1944), and the present film under discussion, Farewell, My Lovely (1975).  The protagonist in all these hard-boiled Chandler stories is the same – tough, chain-smoking private eye Philip Marlowe, and there is something of a mystique surrounding this cynical, but reflective, character.  This attracted major Hollywood stars to play this character, for example Humphrey Bogart for The Big Sleep (1946).  Here in Farewell, My Lovely it was Robert Mitchum, who, despite his age (57), gave an iconic performance of Marlowe.  

One aspect of Chandler’s Marlowe stories, though, that, despite their popularity, makes them difficult to adapt for film is their tortuous and sometimes contradictory plots; and Farewell, My Lovely was no exception.  So film screenwriters adapting these stories often make changes to them in order to move things along more smoothly for a two-hour film.  In consequence, I am told, a number of film critics and Chandler fans have objected to these changes and have dwelt on them in their reviews.  They also complain that the 57-year-old Mitchum was too old to play Marlowe.  Not having read the original Chandler stories, though, I am not one to object to such changes, and I accept critic Roger Ebert’s assurance that the script changes in Farewell, My Lovely were minor and acceptable [4].  And anyway, even as it stands, the story of the film is still convoluted,  and any simplifications that were made were probably needed.  

In any case, what helps make Farewell, My Lovely a compelling work is the expressionistic noirish atmosphere that pervades the film throughout.  Despite the fact that film director Dick Richards did not apparently have much experience with film noir stylistics, he and his team for this film combined to put together a classic that has been well received over the years [5,6,7,8,9].  In particular the cinematography by John A. Alonzo, featuring relentless moody low-angle imagery, as well as  the film editing by Joel Cox and Walter Thompson are perfectly attuned.  Even though it’s all presented in color, the visual style matches closely with the film-noir aesthetics of the 1940s.  And the 1940-style big-band music by David Shire is also evocative of the 1940s setting.

The story of Farewell, My Lovely is set in 1941 Los Angeles and told mostly as an extended flashback.  Because of the flashback format, the viewer is treated all the way along to the reflective and cynically philosophical commentary from the novel by the principle character, private detective Philip Marlowe.  But it is a vicious tale.  Over the course of this story, there will be seven major characters murdered, as well as numerous gun-wielding henchmen killed in shootouts.

At the outset, detective Marlowe (played by Robert Mitchum) is hired by ex-prizefighter and convicted bank robber Moose Malloy (Jack O'Halloran) to find his old girlfriend Velma, whom he has not seen in the past seven years that he has been in prison.  Marlowe and Malloy go to a nightclub where Velma used to work, and the thuggish Malloy kills the nightclub owner while cross-examining him, after which Malloy goes into hiding.  Meanwhile Marlowe separately connects with two old friends of Velma,  Tommy Ray (Walter McGinn) and Jessie Florian (colorfully played by Sylvia Miles).  Both of them promise to help, but both of them turn out to be liars, and both of them will be eventually murdered.

Then out of the blue, a somewhat bizarre man named Marriott (John O'Leary) hires Marlowe to help him pay a ransom in order to recover some stolen precious jade jewellery.  At the payoff point, though, Marlowe is knocked out and Marriott is found murdered.  At this point there doesn’t seem to be anything connecting this operation and the Malloy-Velma concern.

Marlowe decides to find out what lies behind Marriott’s murder, and his investigations lead him to a wealthy judge, Baxter Grayle (Jim Thompson), who is famous for his large jade jewellery  collection.  When Marlowe visits the elderly Judge Grayle, he is introduced to his much younger and glamorous wife Helen (Charlotte Rampling), who tells Marlowe that she knew Marriott and that she wants him to investigate his murder (which he is already doing).  

Afterwards and just to make things more confusing, a seemingly diversionary segment shows Marlowe being drugged and abducted to a whorehouse run by a notorious madam, Kate Murtagh (Frances Amthor).  There Marlowe discovers two things – (1) the dead body of Tommy Ray and (2) that Amthor seems to be familiar with Moose Malloy.  A confusing melee unrelated to Marlowe then develops which leads to Amthor’s death and enables Marlowe to make his escape from the premises.

Later Helen Grayle telephones Marlowe and tells him she wants to meet him at an upcoming party.  At the swanky party Marlowe sees Helen and is also introduced to gangster Laird Brunette (Anthony Zerbe), who hires Marlowe to arrange a meeting with Malloy.  So now the Malloy and Marriott threads are starting to link up.

Later Marlowe talks to Jessie Florian again, and she tells him that she has been in touch with Velma and that Velma wants to secretly meet up with Malloy.  Marlowe hooks up again with Malloy, and through clandestine telephone communications via Jessie Florian, Malloy and Velma arrange to meet at an obscure motel.  But when Marlowe and Malloy go to the secret rendezvous point, they are ambushed by two gunmen.  Marlowe manages to shoot and kill the two gunmen, and he and Malloy escape.  So evidently the meeting was a setup for murder.  But who is behind this?  Are Jessie and Velma part of this, or are they just a pawns?

After Jessie Florian is found murdered, Marlowe concludes that Jessie must haves just been used by some other malefactor to carry out some dirty deed, and he thinks gangster Brunette must be involved.  So Marlowe and Malloy arrange to sneak onto Brunette’s gambling yacht and see what they can find out.  When they confront Brunette, Helen Grayle surprisingly shows up, and Moose Malloy gets a look at her for the first time.  He recognizes the woman as his long lost Velma, whom he hasn’t seen for seven years.  This is the big, shocking revelation of the film – Helen and Velma are the same person!  It then becomes apparent that she had married Baxter Grayle without the judge knowing about her background of prostitution in Amthor’s brothel.  

Thus it seems that Velma had been arranging, via Brunette’s thugs, for the deaths of anyone who might reveal her salacious past.  But Moose Malloy is still madly in love with Velma and still ready to do anything she tells him to do.  She tells him not to listen to Marlowe’s accusations and to kill him instead.  A double-crossing gunfire exchange breaks out, and it winds up with Velma shooting and killing Moose, followed by Marlowe, in self defence, shooting and killing Velma.  Then the police, who had been trailing Marlowe and Malloy, arrive on the yacht and take control, and Brunette is presumably arrested.

So in this grim tale, are their any sympathetic characters presented besides Marlowe?  Most of those who are bumped off are colorfully eccentric, but they are deceitful and self-obsessed and so not sympathetic characters.  This reduces their interest to the viewer.  The person most likely to be considered a protagonist is the brutish Moose Malloy, who is madly in love with Velma, come what may.  But Moose is so rough he can kill people without thinking.  No, it’s not the existence of sympathetic characters that colors this canvas, but rather the entire nightmarish (and noirish) psychological landscape that Marlowe finds himself in.  This feeling of being hopelessly immersed in a bleak, dispiriting world of losers is something that Marlowe seems to share with his law-enforcement counterpart, Lt. Nulty (John Ireland), and in this respect Nulty and Marlowe seem to share a guarded respect for each other.

In this context it is worth mentioning the rather dismissive general attitude towards colored (i.e. black) people and colored neighbourhoods in the film.  This is not a major theme in the story, but most of the white people seem to dismiss colored people as just belonging to a lower sector of humanity, perhaps a much more common attitude in 1941 America than today.  So it is telling that at the very end of the film, Marlowe, depressed that despite his efforts he has been unable to stop the murderous mayhem, decides to try one last act of benevolence in this arena.  He takes the $2,000 that the gangster Brunette had earlier given him to help track down Moose Malloy and goes to the home of the deceased Tommy Ray, a white man married to a black woman, and gives the money to their mulatto young son.  Maybe that will help the boy, who will be facing a prejudicial society, find a good path in the future.

         

So returning to the issue of the film’s interesting character, it is Marlowe, himself.  The film is carried by Robert Mitchum’s reflective, world-weary demeanor.  Despite his age, Mitchum is perfect for this role.  He portrays a man who is not idealistic but is trying to contribute (for his small fee) a little order to a disordered world.  His dramatic persona is what makes Farewell, My Lovely a compelling watch.

★★★½
 

Notes:

1. The Film Sufi, “‘The Long Goodbye’ - Robert Altman (1973)”, The Film Sufi. (4 March 2021).   
   
2. The Film Sufi, “Film Noir”, The Film Sufi, (11 August 2008).   
   
3. The Film Sufi, “‘Le Doulos’ - Jean-Pierre Melville (1963)”, The Film Sufi, (27 February 2009).   
   
4. Roger Ebert, “Farewell, My Lovely”, RogerEbert.com, (1975).   
   
5. Richard Eder, “Screen: Detective Yarn: Mitchum Is Marlowe in New Version of Chandler's 'Farewell My Lovely'”, The New York Times, (14 August 1975).   
   
6. Molly Haskell, “Iconographic Wrinkles”, The Village Voice, (25 August 1975).   
   
7. Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, “Farewell, My Lovely”, Spirituality & Practice, (n.d.).   
   
8. Dennis Schwartz, “FAREWELL MY LOVELY”, Ozus’ World Movie Reviews, (n.d.).   
   
9. Raquel Stecher, “Farewell, My Lovely”, Turner Classic Movies, (2 January 2020).     
   

“White Heat” - Raoul Walsh (1949)

White Heat (1949), starring James Cagney, is certainly regarded as one of the best gangster films ever made, and indeed some people rank it among the greatest films, period.  Time magazine listed it as one of 100 best films all time [1], and many film critics have heaped the film with praise [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11].  Indeed, critic Vivaan Shah hailed White Heat as his all-time favourite film and the one film that changed his life [3].  

So what is so special about White Heat?  Overall, the production values were excellent but were characteristic of many top Warner Brothers’ films of this time.  The film was directed by veteran Raoul Walsh, with noirish cinematography by Sidney Hickox, film editing by Owen Marks, and emphatic screen music by Max Steiner.  However, as professionally performed as these elements were, they are probably not primarily responsible for the film’s lasting popularity.  More telling in this regard was probably (a) the film’s dark-laden script by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, which was based on a story by Virginia Kellogg, and (b) the memorably expressive acting of James Cagney.  This seemed to extend the film beyond the usual boundaries of a gangster movie or film noir and into the region of the horror genre.  For truly the character that Cagney plays in White Heat is something of a monster.

The story of White Heat is rather extended and moves through four somewhat twisted segments covering the nefarious activities of the criminal gang run by Arthur "Cody" Jarrett (played by James Cagney).  Over the course of this account, the viewer gets an increasingly extended picture of just how depraved is Cody Jarrett.  Along the way, there are two key themes that underlie what is going on:

• Trust and Betrayal 
  As generally with film noir, loyalty and trust are key issues here.  There are several instances of betrayal – both of Cody and on the part of Cody – that occur in this film. 
   
  
• Soulless Hi-Tech Surveillance
  Although Cody is ultimately a malevolent figure, he does stand as a lone protagonist struggling against several antagonists.  The most disturbing of these opponents is the machine-like operation of the government authorities which employ, for its day (1949), advanced technology to locate and encircle the fugitive Cody.  So we are continually presented with the metaphor of a lone individual struggling against a faceless machine.

These are more than just fascinating narrative elements; they identify profound issues that affect each and every one of us to this day.  In this regard, historian Yuval Noah Harari has argued that our entire civilized existence is based on our acceptance of common narratives that generate trust and facilitate cooperative operation crucial to the success of our society [12,13].  Moreover, Harari has argued that encroachments and disruptions arising from advanced computer technology represent existential threats to our entire way of life.

1.  The Train Robbery

At the outset, Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) and his gang ambush a train in the California mountains and rob a payroll of $360,000 [14] it was carrying.  The cruelty of Cody and his gang is immediately evident when we see them killing four innocent people during the robbery.  Afterwards the gang gather in a motel hideout, where Cody’s wife, Verna (Virginia Mayo) and his mother, “Ma” Jarrett (Margaret Wycherly), attend to them.  Ma Jarrett is criminally minded herself and is shown to be a gang co-conspirator.  Cody is also shown to be a secret sufferer of severe and temporarily disabling migraine headaches, which only Ma can soothe.  
There is a further display of Cody’s inherently cruel nature when the gang is about to depart from their temporary hideout and head off in separate directions.  Cody looks at one of the gang members who was severely injured during the train robbery and just sees him as a burden, so he orders another gang member to kill him.

2.  Motel Attack

Cody has committed a federal crime, and US federal investigator Philip Evans (John Archer) starts looking for evidence.  Using advanced technology, like fingerprints and walkie-talkie coordination, he traces Cody and his family to a Los Angeles motel.  But when he tries to arrest his suspect, Cody shoots him (but not lethally) and escapes.  Cody is now on the run and needs an airtight alibi.

                                       
3.  Cody’s Alibi Scheme and Escape

Cody decides to confess to a lesser crime committed on the same day as the train robbery in faraway Illinois by one of his associates.  He readily accepts the guilty verdict and begins serving his 1-to-3-year prison sentence.  However investigator Evans still thinks Cody is guilty of the train robbery and wants to track down the “fence” Cody has used to launder his stolen goods.   So Evans plants an undercover agent, Hank Fallon (Edmond O'Brien), operating under the name "Vic Pardo", in Cody’s Illinois prison cell in order to spy on Cody and uncover wanted information.

Meanwhile on the outside, Cody’s right-hand-man, "Big Ed" Somers (Steve Cochran), seeks to take over the gang and seduce Cody’s beautiful wife, Verna, too.  He tries to arrange to have Cody murdered in prison, but that attempt fails and only leads to Cody having more trust in Vic Pardo.

However, when Cody learns that Ma has been murdered (by Verna, we later learn), he goes berserk in the prison mess hall.  Cagney’s crazed outburst here is famous and has led critic Vivaan Shah to call it “the finest piece of acting ever filmed“ [3].  Cody is straitjacketed and taken to a special cell, but amazingly he manages to escape from the prison with Vic Pardo and some other cell-mates.

4.  The Chemical Plant Caper

On the outside now, Cody, wrongly assuming that Big Ed killed Ma, shoots and kills Big Ed.  Then he and the gang, now including the mistakenly trusted Pardo, start thinking about their next caper.  Here we finally meet the fence, Daniel Winston (Fred Clark), known as "The Trader", who advises them to steal the payroll from a chemical plant.  The plan is for the gang members to sneak into the walled-off plant by hiding inside an empty tanker truck that they have procured.  Pardo, however, manages to surreptitiously rig up some electronic signal-processing equipment inside the tanker so that the police can track the truck’s whereabouts by radar.

In the event, there is another grim display of faceless hi-tech surveillance, as the police, again using their walkie-talkies, trace and follow the gang’s truck to a big chemical plant.  Cody and his gang arrive first and manage to get into the payroll office, but the police come and storm the building.  A brutal shootout ensues, and most of Cody’s gang are killed.  But Cody, a heartless rogue to the end, climbs up on top of a huge gas storage tank and shoots his last remaining gang colleague, who was trying to surrender, in the back.  The final fiery shots show Cody engulfed in flames high atop the burning storage tank and shouting, "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!".  Truly he has found his home in Hell.

When we survey the whole of White Heat, we can identify many melodramatic scenes and situations that are colourfully depicted, but the question still remains – what is it that makes this film so popular?  Most compelling narratives, including those of the film noir and gangster genres, have a character with whom the viewer can have some empathetic concern.  The viewer identifies with this character’s problematic situation.  Is there such a figure in White Heat?

• Certainly Cody Jarrett, even taking into account his debilitating migraine headaches (a plot element added to the original story), is a repellant character throughout the story.  There is nothing sympathetic about his character. 
   
  
• His unfaithful wife, Verna, is a liar and cold-blooded murderer. 
   
  
• Her lover, Big Ed, is a similarly malicious murderer. 
   
  
• Hank Fallon, alias "Vic Pardo", is a government agent, but he, too, lies, betrays, and kills.
   
  
• Phil Evans, the main government investigator, is as cold and faceless as the hi-tech equipment he relies on. 
   
  
• Ma Jarrett, whose character was modelled after the real-life bank robber Ma Barker, is a sympathetic mom, but hers is a relatively peripheral character to the story.
  

So I don’t see any real sympathetic characters that the viewer can focus on in White Heat, and that is why I would say that this film seems to be not so much a film noir or a gangster movie and is instead more like a horror film or monster film.  

Nevertheless, there is something fascinating about the Cody Jarrett character.  He is not some demonic figure, like Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), whose complex evil scheme the viewer tries to unwind.  Jarrett is relatively transparent in that respect.  Nor is the viewer privy to some sort of, maybe empathy-inducing, inchoate struggle on the part of the antagonist to be more human, as was the case of Frankenstein’s (1931) monster.  Rather, there is something intrinsically fascinating about Jarrett’s irrepressibly energetic personality, as portrayed by James Cagney.  Sometimes the viewer, when presented with a struggle between agency and mechanism, will almost instinctively be drawn into following the fate of the agent, no matter what its moral stature.

So the magnetic Cody Jarrett, afflicted by crippling migraines and surrounded by traitors and encircling law enforcers, never gives up and ultimately goes it alone.  It is, especially given the prevailing Hays Code at the time, an inevitably doomed ride.  But Cody keeps going, and he takes the viewer along with him.

★★★

Notes:

1. Richard Corliss, “All-TIME 100 Movies”, TIME, (12 February 2005).      
   
2. Bosley Crowther, “THE SCREEN IN REVIEW; James Cagney Back as Gangster in 'White Heat,' Thriller Now at the Strand”, The New York Times, (3 September 1949).   
   
3. Vivaan Shah, “Raoul Walsh's 'White Heat': Cosmic Battleground”,  A Potpourri of Vestiges, (July 2018).   
4. Michael E. Grost, “White Heat”, The Films of Raoul Walsh, (n.d.).    
   
5. Jim Hemphill, “White Heat (1949)”, American Cinematographer, (July 2005).   
   
6. Matt Zoller Seitz, “30 Minutes On: ‘White Heat’", RogerEbert.com, (24 January  2019).    
   
7. Jeffrey M. Anderson, “White Heat (1949)”, Combustible Celluloid, (n.d.).   
   
8. Brian Koller, “White Heat (1949), Grade: 85/100", filmsgraded.com, (26 November 2007).   
   
9. Rob Nixon, “White Heat”, Turner Classic Movies, (27 February 2003).   
   
10. Rob Nixon, “The Essentials - White Heat”, Turner Classic Movies, (2 February 2010).   
    
11. Rob Nixon, “Behind the Camera - White Heat”, Turner Classic Movies, (2 February 2010).  
    
12. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London: Harvill Secker, 2014).
13. Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 2018).
14. It would be worth more than ten times that amount today.
    

“The Long Goodbye” - Robert Altman (1973)

The Long Goodbye (1973) is a provocative film noir (it’s sometimes dubbed as an example of “neo noir”) that was directed by Robert Altman and based on Raymond Chandler’s 1953 detective novel of the same name.  The lead character in the novel and the film is Philip Marlowe, who appeared in a number of Chandler’s works, including The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), and The Lady in the Lake (1943).  Marlow was always the detective-story tough guy, and in earlier filmed versions of Chandler’s work featuring him, his role was assumed by leading screen idols of the day, such as Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, and Robert Montgomery.  Here in Altman’s The Long Goodbye, the Marlowe character is played by Elliott Gould, and the emphatic stamp he puts on the role is a key, though controversial, feature of the film.

The critical issue with some of the film’s critics, notably Andrew Sarris [1,2], concerned the considerable degree to which Altman’s film (and Gould’s characterization of Marlowe), deviated from Chandler’s original story.  This was perhaps surprising, because the screenplay for The Long Goodbye was written by Leigh Brackett, who had co-scripted Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946), a film that had drawn no such criticism.  But in this instance, given the uncharacteristic (for him) complexity of Chandler’s own plot in his The Long Goodbye novel, Bracket chose to make significant changes to the story for Altman’s film.  And these plot alterations were readily endorsed by Altman.  

The result was a technically-resplendent masterpiece featuring the dynamic cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond and the moody music of John Williams.  Interestingly, the title-song  of the film, which was co-written by John Williams and Johnny Mercer, cleverly appears on numerous occasions and in various formats within the diegetic realm of the story.  

Altman was at this time at the height of his career, a period during which he made, besides The Long Goodbye (1973), his most famous films – M*A*S*H (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Thieves Like Us (1974), and Nashville (1975).  Most of them take a satyrical look at American life, but also have a melancholy flavour to them.  He was famous at this time for his unique cinematic style, which besides his restlessly roving camera, featured two of his self-styled modes of cinematic expression.  I have discussed these specific innovative stylistic modes (which are partly attributable to cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond) in my review of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and I will only briefly mention them here:

• Smoky effect using fog filters
  This had the effect of smudging the colors and giving the film an antique feeling.
   
  
• Overlapping sound dialogues
  This was another signature aspect of Altman’s work –
  

“Using 8-track sound recording, [Altman] emphatically overlapped multiple conversations going on in a scene so that it was hard for the viewer to discern what was being said by the personages of presumed narrative focalization.  Indeed this made it sometimes difficult for the viewer to determine what actually was the intended narrative focalization for a scene, at least at its outset.  And this is what Altman wanted – he felt it was more true to life.” [3]

But these technical innovations are not what, for me, make Altman a great film director.  His real virtue lay in the way he could evoke in his films some melancholy themes underlying the nature of human experience.  In this film, the two major themes of this nature are, appropriately enough for a film noir, dishonesty and disloyalty.  

The plot of The Long Goodbye is, even after the streamlining performed by Leigh Brackett, quite complicated, and I won’t go over it in much detail.  Instead I will concentrate on the colorful principal characters and how they relate to the themes that I mentioned.  

• Philip Marlowe (played by Elliott Gould) is an alienated, chain-smoking gumshoe working in Los Angeles and just trying to attend to the jobs that his clients give him.  He is the protagonist and center of focalization in this film.  In this film, Marlowe is largely a truth-teller, although he does lie to his pet cat.
   
• Terry Lennox (played by famous baseball player Jim Bouton) is a gambler and playboy who also happens to be a close friend of Marlowe’s.  Lennox’s problems (he owes money to gangsters and he is accused of killing his wife) are what drive the events of this story.  And Lennox is a liar.
   
  
• Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden) is an alcoholic novelist suffering from depression because he is experiencing writer’s block and can’t write.  Roger is also a liar.
   
  
• Eileen Wade (Nina van Pallandt) is Roger’s beautiful and elegant wife.  The Wades live in the same sumptuous private housing complex in Malibu where Terry Lennox and his wife live.  Eileen initially hires Marlowe to track down her husband, Roger, who has disappeared in connection with one of his fits of depression.  And we will discover that Eileen is a liar, too.
   
  
• Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell) is a gangster, whose outward conviviality masks his psychotic cruelty.  At one point in the story, he is in a conversation with Marlowe, and just to make a point of the seriousness of the threat he is making to Marlowe, he smashes and maims the face of his innocent mistress.  Later Marty calmly instructs his gang members (one of whom is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) to castrate Marlowe, whom they have taken prisoner.  Despite this atrocious behavior and as a gangster law-breaker, Augustine presumably lies routinely; but in this film he is shown demanding adherence to honesty and contractual obligations.
   
  
• Dr. Verringer (Henry Gibson) is a quack doctor who runs a private rehabilitation center for the mentally ill and who treats, for a high fee, Roger Wade at that center.  Like Marty Augustine, Verringer’s business is ultimately fraudulent, but in this film he is shown fervently demanding fulfillment of contractual obligations (i.e insisting that people honestly live up to promises).
   
  
• Mexican police.  In the course of this story, Marlowe makes a couple of trips to Tijuana, Mexico, where Terry Lennox had sought refuge from the L.A. police and from Marty Augustine’s gang.  There Marlowe discovers that the Mexican police can be bribed to lie about reporting the death of an individual – and even bribed later to confess that the earlier death report was a lie.
  

So the tenor of this film is one of a lone private-eye caught in a web of deceptions.  This is pure film noir territory.  The most reprehensible chracters in the story, Marty Augustine and Dr. Verringer, don’t lie in what is shown, and they demand  honesty.  In contrast, the biggest liars are the people that the normally-suspicious Marlowe trusts the most – Terry Lennox and the Wades.  These are people that the loner Marlowe has come to like, and he is fooled by them.

Despite these noirish elements, though, I don’t feel The Long Goodbye is a spot-on example of film noir.  The atmospheric film noir web of suspicion is not there at the outset, and it takes some time to develop.  That characteristic atmosphere of alienation in typical films noir is normally enhanced by high-contrast lighting, which implicitly evokes an emotive setting.  But here in The Long Goodbye, Altman’s smoky fog filters only just blur the image.  They don’t color the emotional landscape.  Those smoky images may be more realistic, but visual realism is not what is called for in film noir.

Nevertheless, I still liked The Long Goodbye, and that was mostly due to another aspect of Altman’s mise-en-scene – his emotional characterizations of the stressed principal characters, all playing their existential tunes before the gaze of the bemused and detached Marlowe.  There are murders, a suicide, and a shocking ending, but, on the whole, it all does work for me, as it did for some other critics, too [4,5,6].

★★★★

Notes:

1. Andrew Sarris, “Films in Focus”, The Village Voice, (1 November 1973). 
   
2. Andrew Sarris, “Films in Focus”, The Village Voice, (29 November 1973).   
   
3. The Film Sufi, “'McCabe & Mrs. Miller’ - Robert Altman (1971)”, The Film Sufi, (21 June 2018).   
   
4. Vincent Canby, “Altman and Gould Make a Brilliant ‘Long Goodbye’”, The New York Times, (29 October 1973).    
   
5. Roger Ebert, “A man out of time”, RogerEbert.com, (23 April 2006).   
   
6. Judith Crist, “Current Shock”, New York Magazine, (29 October 1973).   
   

“The Departed” - Martin Scorsese (2006)

Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006) was another one of his dazzling crime thrillers (such as Mean Streets (1973), Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), and The Irishman (2019)), which featured atmospheric and emotive coverage of a gangster underworld.  On this occasion, Scorsese had a $90 million production budget and a star-studded cast, featuring Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Martin Sheen, and Alec Baldwin, to help ensure that The Departed would be another blockbuster at the box office.  And sure enough, the film won great favor with the public and the critics [1,2,3,4].  It also garnered four Oscars, including the one for Best Picture.  One of the other Oscars that the film gained was the one for Best Director – the only time that Scorsese has ever won that particular award (he has been nominated for such an Oscar eight other times over the course of his illustrious career).  Nevertheless, The Departed has not won universal acclaim from all critics, and I am among those who have found some shortcomings with the film [5,6,7,8].

One of the main things that fascinates viewers of The Departed is its convoluted spy-versus-spy story structure.  It has a plot based closely on that of the popular Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs (2002) that was directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak and written by  Mak and Felix Chong.  William Monahan’s adaptation of this same story for The Departed won him an Oscar for Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay.

The story for The Departed is set in South Boston and involves a struggle between a mobster’s gang in that area and the Massachusetts State Police (MSP).  The leader of that underworld gang is Frank Costello (played by Jack Nicholson), but he has so far been too cagey to ever get arrested by the police.  We see an early example of that caginess when the film shows how Costello has groomed a young man from his neighborhood, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), to be a mole for his gang inside the police force.  Sullivan advances quickly inside the MSP and is soon accepted to join the Special Investigation Unit (SIU), which is headed by Captain George Ellerby (Alec Baldwin) and whose current main goal is to pin a rap on Costello.  So a spot in the SIU is exactly where Costello has wanted Sullivan to be.

Meanwhile a student about to graduate from the MSP academy, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), is recruited by Captain Oliver Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Staff Sergeant Sean Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) to become a spy for the police inside Costello’s gang.  Queenan and Dignam then appropriately doctor Costigan’s already sullied background to be suitable for him to join Costello’s outfit.

Much of the rest of the film follows the parallel, and mostly separate, narrative threads concerning the activities of the two moles.  Since their identities and activities must be kept secret, the secret identities of Costigan and Sullivan are unknown to each other, as well as unknown to their colleagues on each side of the fence.  When both Costello and the SIU eventually figure out that each of the contesting groups has an unknown rat informant in their ranks, it is not too surprising that both Costigan and Sullivan are then tasked with the jobs of uncovering the hidden mole (i.e. themselves) in their respective groups.

Things get even more entangled when both Sullivan and Costigan wind up talking separately to a young female police psychiatrist, Dr. Madolyn Madden (Vera Farmiga).  And, of course, what should never happen in such circumstance, does indeed come about – Dr. Madden soon has sexual relations with both Sullivan and Costigan.  This unlikely plot contrivance provides a particularly striking narrative opportunity for dwelling on one of the film’s major themes – establishing one’s true identity.  

Throughout the film, we see interactions among people with hidden identities.  And these veiled interactions set up opportunities for the endless double-crosses that take place in the story.  One mind-blowing additional identity obfuscation is revealed when, well into the story, Costigan learns that gang leader Costello is actually an FBI informant and therefore protected.  

But there are two aspects of identity – external and internal.  The external is what is presented to other people, and that can be falsified for opportunistic gain.  But one’s internal identity is how one sees him-or-herself, and this was a matter of deep concern for Sullivan and Costigan.  In particular, Sullivan was concerned about his manhood and sexual identity.  His implied impotence even leads him to unconsciously question his own sexual gender preference.  Costigan, on the other hand, had a guilty conscience and was concerned about his authenticity and the control of his volatile temper.  

Another theme in the film, and one that is common in Scorsese films, concerns masculinity.  Of course this is probably always an issue in the criminal underworld, but it is heavily emphasized in this film.  Sullivan is particularly concerned about his masculinity, and his self-doubts are starkly contrasted with the hyper-confidence of his idol, Costello, whose motto is

    “I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me!"

Anyway, the various encounters involving masculinity confrontations and identity misunderstandings only accelerate and fuel further double-crosses as the story proceeds.  And these lead in the closing scenes to a string of murders undertaken for revenge and self-protection.  There is no morality or sense of human justice in this gangland underworld.  Eventually, most of our principal characters wind up getting killed – Sullivan, Costigan, Costello, Capt. Queenan, and Costello’s right-hand man French (Ray Winstone).  But is there a narrative purpose or resolution to all these killings?  What is the story being told here?  It seems that many viewers have problems on this score.  In particular Sean Dignam’s murder of Sullivan at the very end of the film has left many people wondering why (although some plausible explanations have been put forward [9]).

So, overall, what do we walk away with at the close of The Departed?  Although, as I mentioned, the film did win many awards and success at the box office, I would still say that there are a number of weaknesses that detract from the viewing experience.  I have already mentioned the aimlessness of the narrative, but there are other major problems with this production, too.

• Film Production
  Unfortunately, the cinematography of Michael Ballhaus and film editing of Thelma Schoonmakeris is pointlessly agitated, and these only serve to distract the viewer.
      
  
• Acting
  The over-the-top acting, particularly on the part of Jack Nicholson (as Frank Costello) and Mark Wahlberg (as Sean Dignam), is also distracting for the viewer.  Wahlberg is constantly exploding into epithet-filled diatribes that almost lead us to believe his character is incapable of normal discourse.  Even worse is Nicholson’s ham acting as Costello, a key figure in this story.  It is reminiscent of his satanic characterizations from earlier films, but it is way too exaggerated here.  On this score, critics Nick Schager and Ed Gonzalez have commented on how Nicholson’s performance helps bring the whole film down [6]:
  

  “Quoting James Joyce, cursing with racist glee, enjoying cocaine-drenched interracial threesomes, and licking squashed bugs off the palm of his hand, his [Nicholson’s] is a routine of typically outsized Jack-ness that’s chillingly fearsome and daunting in spurts (i.e. when his gaze remains stern and his arching eyebrows remain lowered) but flamboyantly cartoonish in its entirety—a description that too often also accurately applies to the alternately scintillating, silly, and distended The Departed.”

• Realism
  In an expressionistic film such as this, we may expect some exaggerations beyond authentic realism, but many of the goings-on in this film are highly implausible, from both physical and psychological perspectives.  I won’t itemize them here, but many situations, such as Madolyn Madden’s involvements with both Sullivan and Costigan, seem very much contrived.
  
  
• Profanity
  Although profanity has been alluded to in the above points, its loud, incessant presence in this film almost suggests that it is also a significant theme on its own.  And it’s not just the gangsters.  I would think that criminals and law-enforcement people would be tougher than this and would not be constantly succumbing to adolescent temper tantrums throughout the day.

So although The Departed has some characteristic Scorsese virtues, it has enough deficiencies to bring it down a few notches.  And this means that the film, despite its flamboyant production values, does not quite measure up to its inspiration, Infernal Affairs.
★★½

Notes:

1. Roger Ebert, “Good and evil, in each other's masks”, RogerEbert.com, (5 July 2007). 
   
2. Manohla Dargis, “Scorsese’s Hall of Mirrors, Littered With Bloody Deceit”, The New York Times, (6 October 2006).  
   
3. “The Departed”, (A Nutshell) Review, (12 October 2006).   
   
4. Colin McCormick, “10 Greatest Quotes From The Departed”, Screen Rant, (30 January 2020).   
   
5. J. Hoberman, “Bait and Switch”, The Village Voice, (26 September 2006).    
   
6. Nick Schager and Ed Gonzalez, “DVD Review: The Departed”, Slant Magazine, (7 February 2007).   
   
7. Brian Koller, “filmsgraded.com: The Departed (2006) Grade: 55/100", filmsgraded.com (4 April 2014).   
   
8. Dennis Schwartz, “Departed, The”, Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews, (n.d.).   
   
9. Shane O'Neill, “The ending of The Departed explained”, Looper, (22 June 2020).