At less than sixty actual pages, the new edition—once again released a month late, leaving Jeremy Arnold’s “Cruel Yule” feature caught flapping with its pants down—is best characterized as “wan, very wan”…more pale, in fact, than the slightly grainy photo of editor-in-chief Imogen Smith, who scattershots her first “letter from the editor” in a brave but fruitless effort to provide some writerly razzle-dazzle in an issue that desperately needs her in the actual table of contents.
In issue #39 (a disingenuous number, by the way, since there are more than a dozen missing issues produced previously in the current format that have been permanently mothballed) we are not only missing Smith as an essayist, we’re also without Jake Hinkson or Nora Fiore, two writers who could be relied upon for some linguistic flair and a choice of topic that would leverage against the deadening effect of the “departments” that publisher Muller clings to in a manner remarkably similar to what the miscreants do in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat as they flail about in their leaky, lopsided vessel. (Eddie, clearly smitten with Smith--not only elevating her to the editor’s chair but also splashing her across this year’s NC 21 poster as a kind of ersatz “thinking man’s bombshell”--loyally trumpets this new edition as “stellar,” but even a casual perusal indicates that he’s whistling in the dark.)
It’s now up to Danilo Castro, one of the zine’s two “managing editors” (a function that was always murky back in the day and still remains swathed in mystery...) to provide the lead article and some kind of writerly pulse for the issue. Unfortunately, the self-limiting word limit imposed in the Keenan regime is still in effect, and Castro is constrained to force-fit a history of hit men in film noir into the literary equivalent of a sardine can, limiting his inquiry to a specific subset of the character type. He does the best he can given those constraints, but his writing here is more noticeably cramped than in previous efforts where he had significantly less ground to cover.
But Castro’s essay concludes on a wan fanboy note, lavishing over-extravagant praise on David Fincher’s The Killer, which, truth be told, is an exercise in empty virtuosity. Gushing praise for films that don’t deserve it then becomes something of a leitmotif for the rest of the issue.
AND that litany of loving lugubriousness then persists throughout the features and departments, even pervading the tone of the usually reliable Steve Kronenberg in his oddly mawkish survey of Jean Hagen’s mercurial, occasionally brilliant film noir career: the writing here is uncharacteristically rambling, featuring several mediocre credits in Hagen’s noir resume that have been elevated in quality.
That approach is echoed in Peter Tonguette’s reminiscence about Bob Rafelson, where the director’s personality proves much more noteworthy than most of the films being discussed. (Tonguette kicks off the essay with overstated praise for Rafelson’s turgid 1981 remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice, and is forced to backtrack into his earlier films to re-establish a credible context for this crusty “anti-director” and his love/hate relationship with his own work.)
And then there is the page-filling “out of season” excerpt from Jeremy Arnold’s TCM-sponsored book on Christmas movies. (What a difference a month makes: we’d curtail the eye-rolling if the NC team could simply have rolled their edition out in December--when we had similar issues in the deep past, it was because the issues were upwards of a hundred pages!)
Arnold is solid enough, but there is nothing especially revelatory or riveting in this excerpt—and, of course, it is hardly definitive in terms of the films that could have been covered. And one ironic fact that the readers would certainly enjoy seems to have totally escaped him, along with editor Smith and publisher Muller: most of these “Christmas noirs” were not released at Christmastime! Here are the release dates for the films discussed or name-checked by Arnold:
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE 12/20/1946
CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY 7/31/1944
THE SUSPECT 12/22/1944 (SF) 1/31/1945 general
LADY ON A TRAIN 8/17/1945
LADY IN THE LAKE 1/9/1947
REPEAT PERFORMANCE 5/22/1947
KISS OF DEATH 8/13/1947
I WOULDN’T BE IN YOUR SHOES 5/23/1948
THEY LIVE BY NIGHT 8/1948 UK, 11/3/1949 US
THE RECKLESS MOMENT 10/13/1949 local 12/29/1949 (NYC)
BACKFIRE 1/25/1950
ROADBLOCK 9/17/1951
BEWARE, MY LOVELY 8/29/1952
I, THE JURY 8/14/1953
NIGHT OF THE HUNTER 7/27/1955
COVER UP 2/24/1949
BLAST OF SILENCE 8/17/1962
The monthly scorecard: January 2, February 1, May 2, July 2, August 6, September 1, October 1, December 2.
Rachel Walther contributes the final feature: a look at TV director Nick Gomez’ aborted big-screen career (three films that received an inverted level of praise whe they were released in the 90s). Walther, so solid in her debut essay earlier in the year (a spirited defense of Welles’ unjustly maligned The Trial) doesn’t go off the reservation until she tackles the third film (Illtown), a work that no amount of expository rehash is going to convincingly redeem. (And there is genuine sadness in such a pronouncement, as I remain a long-time fan of Lili Taylor!)
THE issue’s back end slogs through the departments that Eddie clings to the way Linus in Peanuts holds fast to his security blanket: the favorite neo-noir, the “book vs. noir,” the “noir or not.”
The first is a somewhat padded examination of Bill Duke’s Deep Cover, a film that (like so many crime dramas in the 90s) starts well but goes off the rails in its third act.
The second is the return of Ben Terrall in unedited mode, tossing tangents in several simultaneous directions in a scattered depiction of how the source stories were shaped into the film version of Sweet Smell of Success (making it, along with Steve Kronenberg’s hommage to Jean Hagen and Jeremy Arnold’s belated extract on Xmas noir, as the only extended material covering classic noir in the issue)*.
The third is another shoehorn job by the editorial staff, taking a perfectly reasonable (if somewhat fawning) essay on Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and force-fitting it into the “noir or not” slot. (This isn’t the first time that such has occurred in the NC e-zine...and it won’t be the last.)
THE issue concludes with the ever-more compressed home video reviews churned out by the reliable Sean Axmaker, followed by two book reviews.
The first, a cameo appearance by Eddie, brings the overpraise full circle as the publisher brown-noses the mercurial but still-influential Geoffrey O’Brien for his Arabian Nights of 1934, a novelistic look at early 30s America, a time frame reshaped (and somewhat over-mythologized) by American cinephiles as the “pre-Code era.” Sadly, O’Brien’s new book was published by an obscure publishing house this past summer and, to date, has yet to receive a single review at Amazon—a sad outcome for a writer with such a lengthy and varied career. (Eddie notes that O’Brien’s earlier Phantom Empire was a seminal influence on his original Dark City, which allows him to elevate his own effort and simultaneously permits us to see how a supple, surrealistic approach in the hands of one writer can become ham-fisted in another’s.)
The second review delivers more praise (of course), but Matthew Sorrento takes a more detailed approach in delivering kudos to the dogged, versatile Woody Haut, whose book of film noir poems (entitled, fittingly enough, On Dangerous Ground) is part of his return to creative writing (he also has a new novel out). Despite being in a “noir publication,” this review provides us with a needed whiff of fresh air from Sorrento as he gives us a more complete sense of Haut’s work than is the case for O'Brien in Eddie’s text.
IN her editorial, Smith foregrounds her recent teaching gigs at NYU, a fact that flies in the face of Eddie’s “barroom, not classroom” admonitions. It’s also interesting to note the careerist cues as they attempt to mix in with the notion that the now-venerable e-zine is still somehow an outside agitator and a haven for a host of malcontents (colorfully but rather startlingly name-checked by Smith, as she slips out of character to drop a proto-Pynchonesque sentence into her usually more measured syntax). While Eddie pines and schemes to bring new millennial blood to the appreciation of film noir via his vision of its (purportedly) ever-appropriable fashion sense, Smith’s great hope appears to be in creating a new cadre of film critics from film studies programs to upend the corporatized morass that has bestowed upon her something vaguely akin to outrage. But she doesn’t seem to realize that this was exactly the approach that was taken many decades ago, which then spawned the seeds of the morass she decries.
If only the content on display in this issue of NC matched up with her clarion call...sadly, however, such is just not the case. In reality, what we have here is a significant backward step from the “special issue” that preceded it. Smith’s best bet is to charm O’Brien and Jim Hoberman into writing for the e-zine to bring a rear-guard East Coast ecrivance to its faltering pages. (And don’t be surprised if that is exactly what happens.)
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*There are also references to classic noir films in Castro's "hit men" essay, but it is strongly tilted toward neo- (and post-neo) noir...
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