Music Video Of The Day: Kiss From A Rose (1994, dir by Joel Schumacher)

Posted on June 23, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Rest in Peace, Joel Schumacher.

Despite what some sites on the internet would have you believe, this song was not written for a Batman film. It was featured in 1995’s Batman Forever but it was not actually written for the movie. Instead, the song was first written in 1987 and then it was first recorded and released in 1994. When it was first released as a single, it didn’t get much attention and it quickly fell out of the charts. Then it was featured during the end credits of Batman Forever and it was re-released and promoted with this Joel Schumacher-directed video and it became a huge hit. This is one of those songs that will never die. As long as there are weddings and funerals, this song will live. As long as there are comedy shows that want to do over-the-top falling-in-love montages, this song will live forever.

I used to know a guy who would sing this song every Saturday night for karaoke and, every single time, he would start crying about halfway through the song. When I asked him why the song always made him cry, he replied, “Showmanship.” I’m not really sure what happened to him, as it’s been more than a while since I last went to any sort of karaoke night. I hope he’s okay, wherever he is. The world of karaoke can be very competitive and ruthless. Someone should make a movie about it. It would probably have a really good soundtrack.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Bleached Waves by ZOON (2020, dir by John Smith)

Posted on June 22, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

It is a dream? Is it a fantasy? Is it a mirage? Is it a vision of the future? Perhaps it’s all four.

I just know that it’s atmospheric and, by this point, everyone should know how much I love atmosphere.

Enjoy!

An Offer You Can’t Refuse #14: Contraband (dir by Lucio Fulci)

Posted on June 17, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1980 film, Contraband, tells a story of the Neapolitan underworld.

Luca Ajello (Fabio Testi) and his older brother, Mickey, have a pretty nice operation going. They pilot boats up and down the coast of Italy, smuggling cigarettes and booze into Naples. It’s given both of them a pretty good life. They own a racehorse. Luca’s got a big house with a beautiful wife (Ivana Monti) and a precocious son. The police are too incompetent to stop them and their disco-loving boss, Perlante (Saverio Marconi), keeps them safe from any interference from the other mob bosses working in Naples.

But then, one night, two men disguised as policeman pull Luca and Mickey over while they’re driving down an isolated road. The fake cops proceed to fire what seems to be over a hundred bullets into Mickey. Luca, having ducked down in his seat, is not spotted by the assassins. Determined to find out who murdered his brother and why, Luca immediately suspects a rival mobster named Scherino but Scherino insists that Mickey’s murder was actually ordered by a mysterious French drug lord known as Il Marsigliese (Marcel Bozzuffi, who also played a French drug smuggler in The French Connection). The French are trying to take over the rackets in Naples and a sudden surge in violence, one which sees nearly every mob boss in Naples murdered on the same day, suggests that Scherino is telling the truth.

Contraband is a brutal Italian crime film, one that is notable for being one of director Lucio Fulci’s final non-horror films. (Contraband was released after Zombi 2 but before City of the Living Dead.) Though the film might not feature any zombies or any talk of “the Beyond,” it’s still unmistakably a Fulci film and some of the film’s brutal violence remains shocking even when seen today. The scene where a duplicitous drug smuggler gets her face melted with a blow torch is nightmarish and it’s followed by a scene where a rival gangster graphically gets the back of his head blown out. (Fulci lingers on the hole in the man’s head, giving us an out-of-focus shot of the people standing behind him.) A later gunfight leads to one gangster dying with a gaping hole in his throat while another has his face shot away, despite the fact that he’s already dead. It’s graphic but it’s also appropriate for the story being told. This is a movie about violent men and, as Fulci himself often pointed out whenever he was challenged about the graphic gore in his films, violence is not pretty. Contraband is not a film that’s going to leave anyone wanting to become a gangster.

The plot is not always easy to follow but, as is typical with a good Fulci film, the striking visuals make up for any narrative incoherence. Fulci’s camera rarely stops moving, creating a sense of unease and pervasive paranoia. Much like the characters in the film, we find ourselves looking in every corner and shadow for a potential threat. A meeting with an informant at a mist-shrouded sulfur pit ends with assassin literally emerging from the mist and stabbing the informant from behind. A later gun battle on a narrow street seems to feature gunmen literally appearing out of thin air. Fabio Testi is ruggedly sympathetic as Luca while Saverio Marconi does a great job as the decadent Perlante. Meanwhile, Marcel Bozzuffi is legitimately frightening in his few scenes as the evil French gangster. He’s a great villain, smug and willing to kill anyone. You don’t have to support organized crime to support the idea of running the French out of Naples.

Contraband is a minor crime classic and proof that there was more to Fulci than just zombies and serial killers. Today would have been Lucio Fulci’s 93rd birthday and it’s also a good day to track down Contraband, an offer that you can’t refuse.

Previous Offers You Can’t (or Can) Refuse:

Film Review: Cold Turkey (dir by Norman Lear)

Posted on June 16, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1971 satire, Cold Turkey, is the film that boldly explores just how much into the ground one joke can driven.

It’s a film that imagines what would happen if a big tobacco company decided to try to improve its image by giving people an incentive to quit smoking. In the real world, of course, they ended up funding Truth.org and coming up with anti-smoking commercials that were so lame that they would make viewers want to go out and buy a pack of cigarettes just to spite the self-righteous people lecturing them during the commercial breaks. In the film, however, Marwen Wren (Bob Newhart) comes up with the idea of offering to pay 25 million dollars to any community that can completely stop smoking for 30 days.

Wren figures that no large group of people will be able to just give up smoking for a month. Not in 1971! However, Wren didn’t count on the single-minded determination of the Rev. Clayton Hughes (Dick Van Dyke). Hughes is the stern and self-righteous minister of Eagle Rock Community Church in Eagle Rock, Iowa. He knows that Eagle Rock could really use that money so he sets off on a crusade to convince all 4,006 of the citizens of Eagle Rock to take the pledge to quit smoking.

As I said at the start of this review, Cold Turkey is pretty much a one-joke film. The joke is that everyone in the movie — from the tobacco company execs to the citizens of Eagle Rock to Rev. Hughes — is an asshole. They start the film as a bunch of assholes and, once they try to quit smoking, they become even bigger assholes. Soon, everyone in town is irritable and angry. The only people happy are the people who never smoked in the first place, largely because they’ve been set up as a sort of paramilitary border patrol. Even though his anti-smoking crusade lands him on the cover of Time, Rev. Hughes is also upset because he started smoking right before it was time to quit smoking. He deals with his withdraw pains through sex and frequent glowering.

Wren is concerned that the town of Eagle Rock might actually go for a full 30 days without smoking so he attempts to smuggle a bunch of cigarettes into the town and then runs around with a gigantic lighter that looks like a gun. It’s a storyline that doesn’t really go anywhere but then again, you could say that about almost all of the subplots in Cold Turkey. There’s a lot of characters and there’s a lot of frantic overacting but it doesn’t really add up too much. Storylines begin and are then quickly abandoned. Characters are introduced but then never do anything. For a while, It seems like the film is at least going to examine the Rev. Hughes’s totalitarian impulses but no. Those impulses are clearly there but they’re not really explored.

If I seem somewhat annoyed by this film, it’s because it really did have a lot of potential. This could have been a very sharp and timeless satire but instead, it gets bogged down in its own frantic storytelling and the film’s comedy becomes progressively more and more cartoonish. By the end of the movie, the President shows up in town and so does the military and it all tries to achieve some Dr. Strangelove-style lunacy but the film doesn’t seem to know what it really wants to say. It seems to be setting itself up for some sort of grandly cynical conclusion but instead, it just sort of ends. One gets the feeling that, at the last minute, the filmmakers decided that they couldn’t risk alienating their audience by taking the story to its natural conclusion.

Admittedly, while watching the film, I did find myself comparing Hughes and his bullying mob to the same people who are currently snapping at anyone who suggests that maybe the Coronavirus lockdowns were a bit excessive. It’s easy to think of some modern politicians and media figures who probably would have had a great time in Eagle Rock, ordering people around and shaming anyone who wants a cigarette. But otherwise, Cold Turkey was just too cartoonish and one-note to really work.

An Offer You Can Take or Leave #13: Hoffa (dir by Danny DeVito)

Posted on June 16, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1992 film, Hoffa, opens in 1975, with two men sitting in the backseat of a station wagon. One of the men is the controversial labor leader, Jimmy Hoffa (Jack Nicholson). The other is his longtime best friend and second-in-command, Bobby Ciaro (Danny DeVito). The two men are parked outside of a roadside diner. They’re waiting for someone who is late. Jimmy complains about being treated with such disrespect and comments that this would have never happened earlier. Jimmy asks Bobby if he has his gun. Bobby reveals that he does. Jimmy asks him if he’s sure that there’s a loaded gun in the diner, as well. Bobby goes to check.

Jimmy Hoffa, of course, was a real person. (Al Pacino just received an Oscar nomination for playing him in The Irishman.) He was a trucker who became a labor leader and who was eventually elected president of the Teamsters Union. He was a prominent opponent of the Kennedys and that infamous footage of him being interrogated by Bobby Kennedy at a Senate hearing seems to sneak its way into almost every documentary ever made about organized crime in the 50s. Hoffa was linked to the Mafia and was eventually sent to prison. He was freed by the Nixon administration, under the condition that he not have anything to do with Teamster business. When he disappeared in 1975, he was 62 years old and it was rumored that he was planning on trying to take over his old union. Everyone from the mob to the CIA has been accused of having had Hoffa killed.

Bobby Ciaro, however, was not a real person. Apparently, he was a composite character who was created by Hoffa’s screenwriter, David Mamet, as a way for the audience to get to know the enigmatic Jimmy Hoffa. Bobby is presented as being Hoffa’s best friend and, for the most part, we experience Jimmy Hoffa through his eyes. We get to know Jimmy as Bobby gets to know him but we still never really feel as if we know the film’s version of Jimmy Hoffa. He yells a lot and he tells Bobby Kennedy (a snarling Kevin Anderson) to go to Hell and he talks a lot about how everything he’s doing is for the working man but we’re never really sure whether he’s being sincere or if he’s just a demagogue who is mostly interested in increasing his own power. Bobby Ciaro is certainly loyal to him and since Bobby is played by the film’s director, it’s hard not to feel that the film expects us to share Bobby’s admiration. But, as a character, Hoffa never really seems to earn anyone’s loyalty. We’re never sure what’s going on inside of Hoffa’s head. Jack Nicholson is always entertaining to watch and it’s interesting to see him play a real person as opposed to just another version of his own persona but his performance in Hoffa is almost totally on the surface. With the exception of a few scenes early in the film, there’s doesn’t seem to be anything going on underneath all of the shouting.

The majority of Hoffa is told via flashback. Scenes of Hoffa and Bobby in the film’s present are mixed with scenes of Hoffa and Bobby first meeting and taking over the Teamsters. Sometimes, the structure of the film is a bit cumbersome but there are a few scenes — especially during the film’s first thirty minutes — that achieve a certain visual poetry. There’s a scene where Hoffa helps to change a man’s flat tire while selling him on the union and the combination of falling snow, the dark city street, and Hoffa talking about the working man makes the scene undeniably effective. The scenes where Hoffa spars with Bobby Kennedy are also effective, with Nicholson projecting an intriguing blue collar arrogance as he belittles the abrasively ivy league Bobby. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie doesn’t live up to those scenes. By the time Hoffa becomes a rich and influential man, you realize that the film isn’t really sure what it wants to say about Jimmy Hoffa. Does it want to condemn Hoffa for getting seduced by power or does it want to excuse Hoffa’s shady dealings as just being what he had to do to protect the men in his union? The film truly doesn’t seem to know.

Hoffa is definitely not an offer that you shouldn’t refuse but, at the same time, it’s occasionally effective. A few of the scenes are visually appealing and the cast is full of character actors like John C. Reilly, J.T. Walsh, Frank Whaley, and Nicholas Pryor. It’s not a disaster like The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight. Hoffa is an offer that you can take or leave.

Previous Offers You Can’t (or Can) Refuse:

An Offer You Should Refuse #12: Racket Girls (dir by Robert C. Dertano)

Posted on June 14, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The other night, I watched the 1951 film Racket Girls with a select group of friends. We get together every Saturday night and watch a movie. Usually, the movie’s pretty bad. (For instance, we watched Disco Beaver From Outer Space one night.) Still, I think Racket Girls might be the worst film we’ve seen to date.

Racket Girls tells the story about how the mob infiltrated the sport of professional wrestling. Umberto Scali (Timothy Farrell) and his little friend Joe (Don Ferrara) make their living managing female wrestlers but it turns out that the wrestling hall is really a front for all of Umberto’s illegal activities. We’re told that there’s a lot of illegal activities going on but we don’t really see many of them. Anyway, Umberto borrows too much money from Mr. Big and then he gets the police mad at him and it looks like it all might lead to a bad end for Umberto and his little friend Joe.

Or maybe not. Who knows? This movie is only a 67 minutes long but it’s next to impossible to actually follow the plot. To be honest, I found the complete lack of background music to be more interesting than the plot itself. It gave the film a strangely existential feel. There’s no music. There’s no entertainment. There’s just a lot of wrestling and bullets.

In fact, I’d say that the film is 75% wrestling, which …. well, I guess whether or not that works depends on whether or not you’re a fan of grainy professional wrestling footage. I’m not a huge fan, though I’ve seen some good wrestling movies that were smart enough to explore the real people behind the outsized personas. In Racket Girls, no one really has a personality and no one has a persona either. There’s a lot of overhead shots of a wrestling ring and we hear what sounds like a crowd cheering even though we never actually see them. It’s actually a bit of an odd effect. It makes the wrestling scenes seem positively surreal. I kept waiting for that strange radiator woman from Eraserhead to step out in the ring and start singing, In Heaven, Everything Is Fine….

Anyway, the film does make a legitimate point about mob’s influence in professional sports. Umberto, it should be noted, doesn’t appear to be a very smart gangster. That’s his downfall. Still, if you enjoy watching movie featuring tough guys in black suits threatening each other …. well, this film probably still isn’t for you. I mean, a few of the actors playing the gangsters have got the look down but no one’s particularly convincing. It’s like a community theater production of The Sopranos or something. It’s like they remade Scarface with Justin Bieber.

As I watched this film, I found myself wondering whether or not Ed Wood was involved because the film just feels like an Ed Wood production. Also, it should be noted that Racket Girls was produced by George Weiss, who produced several of Wood’s films and that star Timothy Farrell appeared in at least 3 Wood-directed films. Ed Wood’s name doesn’t appear anywhere in the credit but I swear, this film has his finger prints all over it.

I’m probably making Racket Girls sound more amusing than it actually is. This is an incredibly boring movie. My friends nearly abandoned me about ten minutes into the movie and that hardly ever happens. I had to beg them to stay and watch the rest of the film. (I told them that there was a cartoon coming up that featured the first appearance of Bobba Fett. That was the same line I used to keep them from abandoning me two years ago when we were watching The Star Wars Holiday Special.) This is an offer that you can refuse. In fact, you should refuse it.

Previous Offers You Can’t (or Can) Refuse:

An Offer You Can’t Refuse: Race Street (dir by Edwin L. Marin)

Posted on June 13, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1948 film noir, Race Street, tells the story of what happens when the mob comes to San Francisco.

Led by the ruthless Phil Dickson (Frank Faylen, who you might recognize as Ernie the Cab Driver from It’s a Wonderful Life), the mob is looking to move in on San Francisco’s bookmaking rackets. Dickson wants all of the bookies to pay him for protection. Of course, he knows that he’s going to have a hard time convincing some of them to go along with his plans so he comes up with the brilliant idea of making an example of one bookie. He sends two of his men to talk to a small-time bookie named Hal Towers (Harry Morgan). They tell Hal that he can either pay Phil or he can suffer the consequences. Hal says that he’ll suffer the consequences so they promptly through him down a flight of stairs, killing him.

When Hal’s best friend, nightclub owner Dan Gannin (George Raft), discovers what has happened, he swears that he’s going to get revenge. Even after Dickson’s men abduct Dan and give him a brutal beating, Dan remains committed to getting justice for Hal. Lt. Barney Runson (William Bendix), who has been Dan’s best friend since childhood, tries to convince Dan to let the police handle it. He even tries to get Dan’s sister, Elaine (Gale Robbins) and Dan’s mysterious girlfriend, Robbie (Marilyn Maxwell), to convince him to back off but Dan won’t hear of it. Of course, because this is a film noir, Robbie has secret of her own….

Race Street is a low-budget noir that only has a running time of 79 minutes but still somehow finds time to sneak in a few musical performances from Gale Robbins. When the film first started, I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting much. George Raft seemed bored with his role and William Bendix’s opening narration didn’t fill me with much confidence. However, it didn’t take long for the film to win me over. Harry Morgan, for instance, brought a lot of wounded dignity to his relatively small role and his monologue before his murder is surprisingly moving. Frank Faylen was cast against type as the evil mobster but it worked. Seeing the normally amiable Faylen threatening to kill people was a good reminder that not all monsters look like monsters. Some of them look like the friendly Bedford Falls cab driver. As befits a film noir, the film is full of ominous shadows and sudden bursts of violence. The scenes where Hal is murdered and Dan is beaten both stand out as being perhaps a bit more brutal than one might expect a film from 1948 to be.

Race Street is a minor noir but aficionados of the genre should enjoy it. This is a short and no-nonsense film that gets the job done. It’s an offer you should not refuse.

Previous Offers You Can’t (or Can) Refuse:

An Offer You Can Refuse #10: Gambling House (dir by Ted Tetzlaff)

Posted on June 12, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1950 film noir, Gambling House, begins with the aftermath of a murder.

A man’s been gunned down in an illegal gambling house. The murderer is gangster named Joe Farrow (William Bendix) but Farrow has no intention of going to prison. Fortunately, another gambler was wounded during the shoot out. Marc Fury (Victor Mature) will survive his injury but he might not survive being a witness. However, Farrow sends his gunmen to make Fury an offer. If Fury agrees to take the rap for the shooting, he’ll not only live but Farrow will pay him a good deal of money. Fury agrees because …. well, what else is he going to do?

Fury is arrested for the murder. He pleads self-defense and he’s acquitted at the trial. So far, so good, right? However, there’s always a complication. First off, there’s the fact that Farrow wasn’t exactly being honest when he promised to pay Fury. Farrow has no intention of giving Fury any money. In fact, now that Fury has been acquitted and the case is officially closed, it might be more convenient just to have Fury killed.

The other problem is that Fury’s trial brings him to the attention of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The INS takes a look at Fury’s record and they discover that he’s not Marc Fury at all! (I know, it’s a shock. Who would think that a name like Marc Fury would be fake?) It turns out that his original name was Marc Furiotta and he was born in Italy. His family came to the U.S. when Marc was a child. Marc always assumed that he was a citizen but it turns out that his parents were never naturalized and therefore, Marc is in the country illegally! INS wants to deport him. Marc wants to stay in the United States.

Fortunately, Marc will have a chance to try to convince a judge to let him stay in the United States, despite his lengthy criminal record. Until his hearing (or until he makes bail), he’ll be detained at Ellis Island. Marc soon finds himself stuck on Ellis Island, presumably right underneath the base of the Statue of Liberty. (I know the Statue of Liberty isn’t actually on Ellis Island but the imagery just got stuck in my head while I was writing this review and I’ll be damned if I’m going to take it out.) He’s surrounded by earnest immigrants who can’t wait to become American citizens and that awakens his own patriotic feelings. He also meets a social worker named Lynn (Terry Moore) and he falls in love with her. When he appears before the judge, he explains that he can’t put into words why he wants to stay in America. He just know that he does. Awwww, what a wonderful story …. oh wait. He’s still got Joe Farrow trying to kill him, doesn’t he?

Gambling House is an odd film. Actually, it’s something like three different films at once. On the one hand, it’s a low-budget film noir, with menacing tough guys and a morally ambiguous hero and an outwardly respectable villain who is actually a member of the mob. On the other hand, it’s an earnest legal drama about an immigrant who comes to love his adoptive country. And then, on the other hand (that’s right, this movie has three hands), it’s a romcom where cynical Marc ends up falling for idealistic Lynn.

That’s a lot for one, low-budget 90-minute film to carry on its shoulder and sadly, Gambling House struggles to balance all of its different elements. It gets off to a good start, with Victor Mature delivering all of his lines with a scornful disdainful for anyone who looks at him. And the scenes with William Bendix as the mob boss are effective. But none of those scenes seem to belong in the same movie with Marc waiting on Ellis Island and Lynn explaining why she wants to help people become citizens. In the end, this is a film about many things but none of those things are really explored in that much depth.

Though this is a adequately directed and acted film and this is one scene, in which Marc looks at the New York skyline from the holding cell in Ellis Island, that achieves a certain visual poetry, this is still an offer that you can refuse.

Previous Offers You Can’t (or Can) Refuse:

An Offer You Can’t Refuse #9: Rob the Mob (dir by Raymond De Felitta)

Posted on June 11, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 2014 film, Rob the Mob, tells the true story of a young couple in love who became minor celebrities when they robbed the mob. Of course, they also ended up with a huge target on their back, which tends to happen when you repeatedly humiliate a bunch of angry men who have weapons at their disposal.

The year is 1992 and Tommy Uva (Michael Pitt) and his wife, Rosemarie (Nina Arianda) are professional criminals who, after getting busted for trying to rob a florist on Valentine’s Day, end up working at a debt collection agency. Their boss (played by Griffin Dunne) spent time in prison for insider trading and he believes in giving convicts a second chance. The problem is that Tommy doesn’t really want a second chance. He’s actually pretty happy being a criminal.

Tommy has some issues with the Mafia, largely due to the fact that his father borrowed money from the mob to open up a shop and spent the rest of his short life being beaten and humiliated by loan sharks. Tommy believes that the pressure is what led his father to an early grave. Tommy’s mother (Cathy Moriarty), on the other hand, claims that it was the stress caused by Tommy being a criminal. Regardless, seeing his father repeatedly mistreated has definitely left Tommy with some anger issues.

Even though Tommy claims that he hates the Mafia, he still seems to be rather obsessed with them. At times, it’s hard to tell if Tommy is angry with the Mafia or if he’s just jealous about the fact that he’ll never be as rich or as powerful as the local neighborhood mobster. Tommy starts to skip work so that he can observe the trial of John Gotti. It’s while doing this that Tommy hears that guns are not allowed in Mafia social clubs.

Soon, Tommy is robbing those same clubs, taking all of the money that he can and humiliating the mobsters at the same time. (He forces one group of paunchy gangsters to march outside in their underwear.) With Rosemarie serving as his getaway driver, Tommy soon becomes something of a legend. The mobsters even nickname the pair “Bonnie and Clyde.” Because the Mafia doesn’t want to attract any unnecessary attention during the Gotti trial, Tommy and Rosemarie are able to get away with their activities for a while. But then they make the mistake of stealing a list that could bring down the entire New York Mafia….

Rob the Mob is a bit of an uneven film. The film starts with Tommy and Rosemarie getting high and then attempting to rob a florist and, in that scene, they both seemed like such idiots that I really wasn’t sure that I wanted to spend 104 minutes of my life watching a film about them. Even after Tommy got out of a prison and got a legitimate job, he still seemed like such an unsympathetic loser that I found myself wondering why I should care.

However, once Tommy and Rosemarie start actually robbing the mob, the film picks up. We meet Big Al, the temporary head of the New York mafia, and he’s played by Andy Garcia, who gives an intelligent and understated performance. Big Al may be a mobster but he’s not an unsympathetic character. The film presents him as being someone who has been unexpectedly thrust into a position of power and who is doing his best to keep everything from falling apart. Then, as the robberies continue, Ray Romano shows up as Jerry Cardozo, a reporter who makes “Bonnie and Clyde” famous but who realizes too late that he’s also put their lives in even greater danger than they were before. Over the past few years, Romano has gone from being a former sitcom star to being a surprisingly effective character actor and his performance here gives Rob the Mob its conscience.

Perhaps even more importantly, during the second half of the film, the chemistry of Michael Pitt and Nina Arianda finally won me over and I actually started to care about what would happen to Tommy and Rosemarie. Tommy and Rosemarie find a reason for living in their criminal activities. They go from being losers to being minor New York celebrities, even if they can’t reveal their actual identities. They may be idiots but their love is real and there’s something very touching about how much they actually do care about each other. It’s hard not to be happy for them, even if it’s obvious from the start that their story is not going to have a happy ending.

Rob the Mob is uneven but, in the end, it’s more than worth watching. This is an offer you should not refuse.

Previous Offers You Can’t (or Can) Refuse:

An Offer You Can’t Refuse #8: Force of Evil (dir by Abraham Polonsky)

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1948 film noir, Force of Evil, plays out like a fever dream of dark and disturbing things.

The film begins on the third of July with attorney Joe Morse (John Garfield) telling us that, by the end of the 4th of July, he will have made his first million dollars, something that he describes as being “an important moment in every man’s life.” Joe has an appreciation of money that one can only get from growing up poor. By his own admission, Joe spent most of his youth on the streets, committing petty crimes. It was his older brother, Leo (Thomas Gomez), who held things together back home and who kept Joe from getting into any truly serious trouble. Now, years later, Joe is an attorney and Leo is a small-time player in New York’s numbers racket.

(The numbers racket, as the film explains, is an illegal lottery in which people — mostly in working class neighborhoods — bet on which three numbers will be drawn at the end of the day. In this film, those three numbers are the last three digits of “the handle”, the amount race track bettors placed on race day at a major racetrack, published in the major newspapers in New York.)

Joe now works for Ben Tucker (Roy Roberts). Tucker may look like a respectable businessman and he may operate out of an office building but he’s actually a gangster. He got his start as a bootlegger and then, after prohibition ended, he moved into the number game. He and Joe have come up with a scheme to consolidate and take over the entire New York numbers racket. They’re going to fix the handle so that, on July 4th, everyone who picks “776” as their three numbers will win. (As Joe explains, a mix of patriotism and superstition leads to thousands of people picking 776 on every Independence Day.) When the small time operators don’t have the money to pay off the winners, Tucker will loan them the money to stay afloat. However, by accepting the loan, the operators will now be in debt to Tucker and Tucker will basically control their operations. Anyone who doesn’t want to work for Tucker will either be out of work or dead. It’s all strictly business.

The only problem is that Joe knows that the plan will basically bankrupt Leo. When Joe goes to Leo and tries to warn him, Leo refuses to listen to him. Leo may be a criminal but he’s an honest criminal and he has no interest in getting involved with someone like Ben Tucker. Leo watches out for the people working underneath him and treat them fairly, a concept that men like Ben Tucker will never understand. In fact, the only thing that Leo asks from Joe is that Joe make sure that Leo’s longtime secretary, Doris Lowry (Beatrice Pearson), is taken care of.

Needless to say, things get even more complicated from there….

Force of Evil presents us with a world where everyone — with exception of maybe Doris — is corrupt and where everything — from blackmail to murder — is strictly business. Greed is the motivator for every action and the more money that comes in, the easier it is to justify every ruthless act. Joe makes his fortune over the course of one of America’s most sacred holidays but it comes at the expense of his brother. His brother tries to do the right thing as far as his employee are concerned, just to discover that the Walter Tuckers of the world don’t care what happens to the people who work for them as long as the money keeps coming in. It’s a dark and cynical movie, a gangster movie were the cops are just as dangerous as the people they’re arresting and where concepts like love and loyalty mean nothing when there’s money to be made.

As directed by Abraham Polonsky, Force of Evil plays out like a filmed nightmare. Every interior seems to be full of ominous shadows and the exterior scenes always seem to find characters like Leo Morse and his timid accountant (Howland Chamberlain) dwarfed by the city around them. Gangsters like Ben Tucker and his associates emerge from the darkness, with the film’s final shoot-out taking place in complete darkness and featuring characters shooting at shadows despite not knowing who that shadow might belong to. It’s a dark and claustrophobic world that Polonsky presents, one that always seems to be closing in on the Morse brothers and the people unlucky enough to be around them. (The real world would later close in on Polonsky, an unapologetic Marxist whose ideology is obvious in the film’s portrait of crime just being another form of big business. Polonsky was among those blacklisted in the 50s. Force of Evil was the first of only three movies that he would ever direct.)

John Garfield plays Joe Morse with a barely contained anger. Even after he’s made his first million, he’s still angry at the world. Getting rich is his revenge on a society that predicted that someone like him would never amount to anything. Roy Roberts is perfectly sleazy as the outwardly respectable Walter Tucker and Marie Windsor has a few wonderful scenes as his vampish wife. Perhaps the film’s best performance comes from Howland Chamberlain, playing an accountant who soon finds himself in over his head as Tucker makes his move on Leo’s operation.

Tough, violent, and visually unforgettable, Force of Evil is an excellent gangster film and a classic noir. It’s definitely an offer that you can’t refuse.