Shadows and Fog and Walker: Two Comedies About Sticking Our Noses Where They Don't Belong

Shadows and Fog, by Woody Allen, 1991


I've seen most of Woody Allen's films at this point, although I've fallen off in recent years. I was pretty sure I had seen most, if not all, of the best ones, which left me pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed his 1991 film, Shadows and Fog.

A darkly comedic homage to German Expressionism, Shadows and Fog has some really beautiful black and white cinematography. In fact, there are tons of shadows and lots of fog in the movie, as I suppose should be expected. Set, I think, in the 1920's, a serial killer is stalking the streets and strangling his victims. Kleinman, a nebbishy 50-ish Woody Allen type, played by Woody Allen, is awakened in the middle of the night by the men of the neighborhood, who are forming a vigilante group to hunt this guy down. He is peer pressured into joining, despite his well-founded reservations.

At the same time, at a travelling circus outside of town, a couple, a sword swallower (Mia Farrow) and a clown (John Malkovich) to be exact, get in a fight over cheating and having kids, and the sword swallower, Irmy, leaves the clown. In the city, she falls in with a prostitute (Lily Tomlin), who takes her into her whorehouse for safety, and the two main stories begin to collide.

I really liked Shadows and Fog. The story is complex, funny, spooky, and interesting, Allen's directing is at its best, and the cast is top notch. It includes Allen, Farrow, Malkovitch, Tomlin, Madonna, Kathy Bates, Jodie Foster, Donald Pleasance, John Cusack, and even a brief appearance by William H. Macy. I especially enjoyed Pleasance's small part as a coroner, and Cusack as a young student infatuated with Farrow, who he believes to be a prostitute. The payoff at the end is pretty great too.

Woody Allen has made a lot of movies. I'm not sure where Shadows and Fog would rank among them, but I'd put it somewhere in the top half, and that's saying quite a lot.

Walker, by Alex Cox, 1987


I didn't know what to expect when I turned on Alex Cox's trippy anti-Biopic, Walker. Cox, director of Repo Man and Sid & Nancy (which I still haven't seen!), brought his punk-rock ethos to the Historical Biography genre, and destroyed his own Hollywood career in the process. Walker is a truly strange mess of a movie, and I kind of loved it.

Walker is the story of William Walker (Ed Harris), an American soldier of fortune in the 1850's who leads a group of mercenaries into Nicaragua to liberate the locals, only to take over and become dictator himself. Cox is not so much interested in historical facts, however, and he plays fast and loose with the truth. He's more interested in commenting on what America was actually doing in Latin America in the 1980's, and he viciously comments on it throughout.

There's lots of hilarious black comedy in Walker, such as the battalion drummer who asks to sit out on the next day's battle because he's noticed in all the war paintings that the drummer is always one of the corpses. Walker looks him in the eye like a holy man and says "as long as I am your commander, no harm shall come to you." Of course, at the battle he is gunned down violently and repeatedly, as Walker is somehow able to walk through all the carnage magically unscathed.

In addition to the comedy and the carnage, there is a surrealist element to Cox's film as well. As the movie progresses, he starts sneaking in historical anachronisms, to remind us that this isn't the 1850's he's talking about, this is today (1987). At first it's something like someone lighting a fuse with a Zippo lighter, or a guy drinking a bottle of Coke, but by the end, there are helicopters disrupting the period authenticity.

Add to all this an excellent, moody musical score by Joe Strummer of The Clash, and you have in Walker a great piece of anti-establishment cinema; shocking, funny, violent, and rebellious. I think it was slammed by critics at the time of its release, but like the best cult movies, has later experienced some rehabilitation and found an audience. Some even hold it up as Alex Cox's best film. I still need to watch Sid and Nancy, so I don't know yet. I sure dug it, though.

Frilmz Noir: The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street

Before recently, my experience with Fritz Lang's films began and ended with his Expressionist science fiction masterpiece Metropolis. Considering how amazing that movie is, it's baffling that I've gone so long without seeking out more.

1944's The Woman in the Window and the following year's Scarlet Street, are two of Lang's early film noirs, both very dark tales of passion and murder, and both featuring the same main cast. They were made nearly two decades after Metropolis, and by this point he had gone from Germany to Hollywood.

The first, The Woman in the Window stars Edward G. Robinson as Richard Wanley a timid, middle-aged professor who yearns for the adventurousness of youth. After a quiet night of drinking at a social club with friends, he finds himself admiring a painting of a beautiful woman in a storefront window. He is then surprised to meet the subject of the painting herself, Alice (Joan Bennett). They get a drink together and Wanley soon finds himself at her home. Not long after that, her lover comes in, furious and violent. Wanley ends up killing him, and he and Alice work out a plan to cover up the murder.

The rest of the movie is Wanley trying to live with his guilt and cover his tracks, even as his own friends from earlier, the District Attorney, and a doctor, investigate the case and come ever closer to finding the culprit. At the same time, a blackmailer (Dan Duryea) is tormenting Alice with his knowledge of what really went down.

The whole thing builds toward a beautifully dark, poetic and ironic conclusion. That is, until it's all taken away in the last three minutes by the strict guidelines of the Hayes Code, whose regulations restricted pretty much anything cool in American movies until the mid-60's. That's right, they didn't accept the original ending, so Lang had to tack on a crappy little scene afterwards that negates pretty much everything that went on before. It's very disappointing, but if you just turn off the movie a little bit early (you'll know when), you'll get a story that feels complete, uncompromised, and uncompromising.

Lang's very next film, Scarlet Street, feels like he wanted a do-over after his previous film had been tampered with. It explores some of the same themes, of midlife restlessness, and of the nature of guilt. This time around, Robinson plays Christopher Cross, a timid, middle aged bank cashier in a loveless marriage whose true passion is painting. At a celebration honoring his long years with the bank, he jealously watches his boss leave the party with a young mistress. Walking home that night, he witnesses what he believes to be a mugging. Chasing off the mugger, he takes the victim, Kitty (Bennett), for a drink. Smitten, he tells her about his aspirations as a painter.

Kitty, in actuality, is the girlfriend of the mugger, Johnny (Duryea). Knowing little of the arts, Kitty believes Cross is actually a successful but modest painter, not just a hobbyist. Together, they work up a scheme to bleed Christopher dry, with Kitty acting as a muse for his paintings and Johnny selling them. It all leads to, you guessed it, a murder. And then guilt. I won't spoil the outcome, though.

Of the two, I liked the second film better. The Woman in the Window almost feels like a sketch for what ultimately became Scarlet Street. The characters were all around more three dimensional in Scarlet Street, the plot more fully formed, and the sad ending was not compromised. Also, even though no blood is shown, and the victim is cleverly obscured, the murder scene in Scarlet Street is still really brutal and effective. It takes some pretty sly work for a director to sneak something past the Hayes Code, and Lang gets away with quite a bit here.

These two films were the first I'd ever seen starring Edward G. Robinson, and I have to say, he really surprised me. Like everyone, I associate him with the "Nyeah, see, NYEAH!" voice that he's often parodied with. He's not like that at all in these. In both movies, he's a shy and timid loser-y guy who gets tangled up with the wrong kind of girl and makes a series of bad decisions. He's very sympathetic along the way, and it hurts to see him eaten alive by the end.

If you're in the mood for a good Film Noir double feature, you could do worse than these two movies. They play great as companion pieces to each other, and seeing Edward G. Robinson playing against the type he's come to be synonymous with is really fun. I'd love to watch more Fritz Lang films, especially more of his early German work.

Faust

It's amazing what could be accomplished visually in film almost a hundred years ago. Sure, the medium was still developing as an art form; we're not talking Star Wars level yet, but the effects in the best fantasy films of the 1920's and 1930's and beyond still hold up today. They weren't hung up on realism back then. They wanted to transport you to another world through striking visuals and good storytelling. Nobody watches The Wizard of Oz or King Kong and goes "that looks so fake!", because they don't care.

F.W. Murnau's 1927 silent masterpiece Faust is one such fantasy film. The story is a timeless classic, and the movie visualizes it beautifully. Faust is, of course, the story of a bet between the demon Mephisto and an Archangel. If Mephisto can corrupt the soul of a good man, then the earth will be his. Mephisto chooses the old alchemist Faust, and sets his plan into motion by spreading the plague to Faust's village. Faust prays for assistance in curing the dying masses, but the only help he gets is from Mephisto, who offers him the power to heal for a 24 hour period only. This, of course leads to more deals, for money, power, lust, and ultimately love. Will Faust's soul be saved, or will the world be given over to Mephisto?

Murnau is perhaps best known for Nosferatu, the eternally creepy Dracula adaptation that is better than the actual Dracula adaptation. He is an important figure in the German expressionism movement, which influences the look of fantasy and horror movies to this day. He brings this expressionist dynamic to his beautiful and surreal visual portrayals of heaven and hell. I mean, just look at this!


The standout performance in the movie isn't Faust, it's Mephisto himself, played by Emil Jannings. He's sinister and playful all at once, always peeking over Faust's shoulder and toying with him. His performance is made all the more unsettling with the knowledge that 15 or so years after this movie, he was a Nazi, acting in several propaganda films for the party. Learning that fact made me kind of sad because I totally wanted to like the guy.

The Faust legend has been told and retold a million times. My favorite version is Bedazzled, the Dudley Moore and Peter Cook comedy from the 60's. And you can't discount 1941's The Devil and Daniel Webster, with Walter Huston's performance as Old Mr. Scratch being possibly the most endearing and memorable portrayal of the devil in cinema. Murnau's Faust is also up there with the best of them, and one of the most beautiful looking films of the silent period.