Screenshot for the Week of 15 March 2021: "OUT OF THE PAST" (1947)

 

Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Out of the Past (1947)

Raise your hand if you've never seen this film.  I'm always surprised—and in fact a little disappointed with myself—whenever I see an old movie I've never seen before, never even heard of it, and it turns out to be great.  That was Out of the Past (1947) for me about fifteen years ago.  This is classic film noir.  It was selected for the National Film Registry in 1991, and Roger Ebert included it on his list of "Greatest Movies."  He called it "one of the greatest of all films noir." 

🌎  🌎  🌎

Robert Mitchum plays Jeff Bailey, the owner of an automotive service station in Bridgeport, a small town, a real town, on U.S. 395 in eastern California.  The film opens at Bailey's service station.  A man from out of his past shows up, and the movie instantly and irreversibly drives into the land of noir.

As it turns out, my wife and I drive through Bridgeport twice on every trip we take to Death Valley.  We most recently passed through the town in 2016.  For all I know, the covid-19 pandemic has decimated it.  In 2016 it was a quiet, semi-bustling food and fuel stop, mostly for those traveling between Lake Tahoe and Los Angeles.  When I first saw Out of the Past, I was familiar enough with Bridgeport that I easily recognized it in the movie, even in black and white, and I could see that it hadn't changed much in sixty years.

A fair amount of film footage was shot on location in and around Bridgeport and at some grand Lake Tahoe mansion that reminds me of Vikingsholm, a beautiful 38-room Nordic mansion in what is now Emerald Bay State Park.  My wife and I visited Vikingsholm about thirty years ago.  I would almost swear Out of the Past was shot there.  Whether or not Vikingsholm stood in for Whit Sterling's (Kirk Douglas's) lakeside home, there's good news: tours of the "castle" are available during the summer.  It has a rich history, and it's well worth the time and effort.

The Bridgeport Fire Department is located on the site of the service station that stood in for "Jeff Bailey's Mono Motor Service."  (Bridgeport is in Mono [MOE-noe] County.)  Ken's Sporting Goods is on the site of the diner that stood in for "Marney's Cafe."

🌎  🌎  🌎

Robert Mitchum worked on an assembly line at Lockheed Aircraft during WWII.  Next to him on the assembly line was a man named Jim Dougherty.  And every day, Dougherty's wife made him the same kind of egg sandwich to take to work.  One day Mitchum told Dougherty that his wife should learn how to make a proper lunch for her man.  Dougherty replied that his wife had other assets that made the sandwiches tolerable, and he offered to show Mitchum the photo of his wife that he always carried with him.  Mitchum, deadpan, said "I hope she looks better than that egg sandwich."  She did.  Two years later she left her husband to pursue a modeling and Hollywood film career and changed her name from Norma Dougherty to Marilyn Monroe.

🌎   🌎  🌎

Jane Greer plays Kathie Moffat, one of the most riveting femmes fatale in the film noir pantheon.  She was born Bettyjane Greer in 1924 in Washington D.C.  At age 18, rising in her career as a model, she made the cover of LIFE magazine.  Independent film producer Howard Hughes saw her photo (literally, just saw her) and told an underling, "Go find that girl and sign her."

When she arrived in Hollywood with her 7-year contract in hand, it didn't take long for Hughes to try to seduce her.  She rebuffed his advances.  He pressured her again and again.  He became obsessed with her.  In retaliation for her lack of cooperation, he refused to assign her any film roles. Fortunately for her, she managed to meet and then marry a Hollywood A-lister, Rudy Vallee, in December 1943.  Vallee pulled some strings and got her out of her contract with Hughes. Still obsessed with Greer, however, Hughes continued to hound her during her marriage.  That marriage lasted but three months.  She and Vallee separated in March 1944 and divorced in July.  Greer returned to Hughes's production company, and he finally succeeded in his conquest.

Greer made Out of the Past for RKO in 1946.  The movie was released in December 1947.  Hughes bought RKO shortly afterward.

🌎  🌎  🌎   

David Sarnoff, the founder and chairman of the boards of RCA and NBC, also founded RKO, along with Kennedy family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy.  RKO made monumental films like Cimarron (1931), the first of only three westerns to win the Oscar for Best Picture, the others being Dances with Wolves (1990) and Unforgiven (1992); Morning Glory (1933), for which Katharine Hepburn won the first of her four Oscars for Best Actress; King Kong (1933); all of the Astaire-Rogers dance musicals, from Flying Down to Rio (1933) through The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939); Annie Oakley (1935); Stage Door (1937); Bringing Up Baby (1938); Gunga Din (1939); The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939); Citizen Kane (1941); The Little Foxes (1941); Suspicion (1941); Ball of Fire (1941); The Magnificent Ambersons (1942); The Pride of the Yankees (1942); Cat People (1942); Journey Into Fear (1943); Tall in the Saddle (1944); The Bells of St. Mary's (1945); Notorious (1946); The Best Years of Our Lives (1946); It's a Wonderful Life (1946); The Farmer's Daughter (1947); Out of the Past (1947); and The Bishop's Wife (1947).

RKO began a slow spiraling decline in 1948 after Hughes took over the studio.  It filed for bankruptcy in 1959 and ceased film operations.

Screenshot for the Week of 15 June 2020: "SABOTEUR" (1942)

Pat Martin and Barry Kane (Priscilla Lane and Robert Cummings) walk toward the office buildings at a mine in Saboteur (1942).

[SPOILER ALERT!] The two characters in this screenshot eventually look through a telescope aimed out a window in one of those buildings and they see Hoover Dam, which puts their location in Nevada or Arizona.  But in fact, this scene was filmed in the Owens Valley in eastern California, and, alas, Hoover Dam isn't visible from there. [END OF SPOILER ALERT!]

The actors are in Keeler, California, walking toward an actual borax mining operation that is still there and in operation more than 80 years later.  In the background we see the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada.  In between is a dry lake bed, the former Owens Lake.  To the right but out of the frame are the Owens Valley towns of Lone Pine, Independence, Big Pine, and Bishop.  Behind the camera, about 90 miles away, is the town of Furnace Creek in what was then Death Valley National Monument and is now Death Valley National Park.

Owens Lake(dry) and the eastern Sierra Nevada seen from Keeler, California, 10 miles east of the town of Lone Pine.  Photo by Bookman, November 2011.

Toward the end of 1904, three strangers showed up in the Owens Valley.  They found themselves in a modern day Garden of Eden, naturally irrigated by the Owens River watershed, with the river itself emptying into Owens Lake.  It was a burgeoning produce-growing region with the hope of an explosion of demand, once the Santa Fe built the expected railroad spur to San Bernardino, connecting Bishop to the restaurants and grocery stores of Los Angeles.  Owens Valley farmers had every reason to believe that the people of L. A. would make them rich.

Fred Eaton, William Mulholland, and Joseph Lippincott, with malice aforethought, introduced themselves as neophyte ranchers looking to buy property in the area.  In truth, Eaton was the head of the L. A. Department of Water and Power (DWP), Mulholland was its chief engineer, and Lippincott was its land agent.  L. A. was growing, and it didn't have its own natural water supply.  It was a veritable desert.  It was thirsty and getting thirstier.

The three strangers had come to buy property, all right—hundreds of square miles of it, one seller at a time and, usually, one parcel at a time, not telling anyone about the other land purchases as they moved from one transaction to the next.  The DWP representatives wanted "riparian" land, i.e., land that bordered the Owens River.  Ultimately, they were there to snatch the farmers' entire water supply and to do it before anyone caught wind of their scheme. They were going to leave the Owens Valley to dry up and wither economically.  They were going to leave it for dead.

Lippincott orchestrated the DWP chicanery, using smooth-talking Eaton as his front man. Within weeks, DWP had bought most of the land in the Owens Valley.  Six days after Lippincott had finished his work, a syndicate of investors that included Eaton and Mulholland and the publishers of every L. A. newspaper but one paid $50,000 on an option to buy the greater part of another valley, the San Fernando Valley.

It all began when Mulholland devised an ambitious, ingenious plan.  It hinged on a surreptitious DWP land grab, airtight secrecy via a news lockdown, and L. A.'s incorporation of the San Fernando Valley into the City.

Fred Eaton was looking for a new and steady supply of water for L. A. even before the company he owned—the Los Angeles Water Company—became DWP, a public utility.  He and William Mulholland zeroed in on the Owens River and Owens Lake.  Mulholland's survey work had revealed that gravity could take water from the Owens River all the way to the Tehachapi Mountains, at which point pumps could take the water over the Tehachapis to its ultimate destination.

Reservoirs would be needed for water storage, and the San Fernando Valley, though not within the City limits, was the ideal location for the largest one.  The City could annex the Valley, build the reservoirs, purchase all the water rights in the Owens Valley, build a 224-mile-long aqueduct and have it all paid for by voter-approved bonds (the conspirators had a nasty plan for gaining approval).  It would eventually bring manna in the form of water to the lucky future landowners in the Valley.

Even luckier would be those buyers who bought land in the San Fernando Valley while the Valley was still an arid desert, while land prices were low, before the news broke that water was on the way, news that would cause property values to skyrocket.

It was only after this coordinated plan was agreed to by all the conspirators that Eaton dispatched himself and Lippincott to the Owens Valley with the task of buying as much land there as they could.  They were so successful that all the riparian land along the Owens River plus Owens Lake plus the land underneath all the towns and cities in the Owens Valley have been owned by the City of Los Angeles for more than a century.

Construction on the aqueduct began in 1908 and was completed in 1914.  For the next decade, Owens Valley farmers rebelled by periodically blowing up sections of the aqueduct with dynamite.  The City of Los Angeles sent a private militia to guard the length of the aqueduct with shoot-to-kill orders.  The hostile events of this era are known collectively as the California Water Wars.

Some of the elements of this saga contributed to the plot of Chinatown (1974), with Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and John Huston.

Owens Lake was already dry by the time Hitchcock filmed part of Saboteur there.  In fact, L.A.'s spectacular population growth required it to extend the aqueduct twice, eventually to the feeder streams of Mono Lake, 125 miles north of Owens Lake.  The draining of Mono Lake has been but another chapter in the history of the California Water Wars.

C: Joseph Valentine.  D: Alfred Hitchcock.

Screenshot for the Week of 25 May 2020:"BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK" (1955)

Russell Collins, Dean Jagger, and Robert Ryan in the 1955 classic, Bad Day at Black Rock. C: William Mellor. D: John Sturges.

It's September 1945, the end of WWII, and the passenger train stops in Black Rock.  Trains never stop in Black Rock, but this one does.  A stranger gets off the train.  The townspeople emerge from their complacency, grim-faced, displeased. Who is this stranger?  What does he want?  What's he digging around here for?  Before he's spoken a word, everyone in town gets nervous.

🌎🌎🌎

Is Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) simply a crime drama?  Is it film noir?  Is it a modern-day western?

This film was mostly shot about 15 miles north of the Owens Valley town of Lone Pine, California.  Production crews built the fictional town of Black Rock there for director John Sturges.  Hundreds of movies have been filmed in and around Lone Pine, mostly westerns.  Geographically it qualifies as a western.

Thematically?  One man against a handful of thugs in front of a town of cowering or indifferent citizens?  Sounds like High Plains Drifter (1973).  Sounds like High Noon (1952).  Sounds a little like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).  Sure, there are no horses or cowboy outfits in Bad Day at Bad Rock.  And Pulp Fiction has no fedoras or Tommy guns; yet it's still a gangster film, while Some Like It Hot (1959), despite fedoras and Tommy guns, isn't.  Bad Day at Bad Rock is a modern-day western.

It is certainly a dark film—even pessimistic.  If Niagara (1953) qualifies as film noir, which it does routinely, then Bad Day at Black Rock is likewise film noir.  It's a film noir western.

Lone Pine and the remnants of "Black Rock" are situated against the backdrop of the eastern Sierra Nevada and Mount Whitney.  In the previous decade, a dark chapter in American history occurred at Manzanar, just south of the Black Rock set.  A history of Manzanar can be found here.

Bad Day at Black Rock features what was then a bold take on American history, some spectacular cinematography, and spot-on performances by everyone.  Along with the actors in the screenshot, Spencer Tracy, Walter Brennan, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Anne Francis, and John Ericson are well-cast.