A Kinky Old, Dark House

In The Black Cat (1934), a perverse dark-and-stormy-night creeper, the Poverty Row legend Edgar G. Ulmer sets up his camera and lights his sets
as well as any A-string director. He builds mood through perspective and angle. Ulmer also has a supremely literary bent — you can see that his conceptual inventiveness comes from a mind that knows and loves books. He’s whack the way old ghost stories are whack. In movies like The Black Cat, The Strange Woman (1946), and Detour (1945), Ulmer isn’t a terribly good action director; neither was Josef von Sternberg. Sternberg kept his camera in motion but almost never pulled off a compelling action scene with his actors. Ulmer worked as a set designer for Max Reinhardt in the theater and apprenticed with F. W. Murnau on Sunrise (1927). His true strength was setting, not action. These directors excelled in static intensity. When Ulmer attempts to move the story in The Black Cat forward with simple action — as he does when David Manners is conked out twice, and we wait for him to come to so that he can rescue Jacqueline Wells, but he never does, or when Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi physically tussle — the effect is abrupt or incoherent, a real dud. But Ulmer is superb at creating that sense of campy dread that everyone enjoys in The Black Cat, quite like the fun of seeing the work of James Whale in The Old, Dark House (1932) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). When Lugosi reaches over to fondle the blonde hair on the sleeping heroine, it’s a peerless kinky moment.

Good kitty. Jacqueline Wells

The Black Cat is marred with flaws, too. Ulmer lets slide a number of opportunities that probably most people in the audience expect to see fulfilled, which prevents his movies from being classics. The black cat itself inexplicably disappears halfway through the picture. You expect to see it resurface when Lugosi is ready to blow up the crazy castle (it’s both Art Deco and Baroque), trotting out of the rubble completely unfazed. Instead, we get a silly, obviously tacked-on scene in a train carrying the honeymooning couple. Ulmer should have panned the camera to the train seat to focus on . . . the black cat! Even more important, what happens to Lugosi’s daughter? The plot hinges on her, but she shows up once for a brief chat and then it’s as if the movie forgot about her. But maybe it’s Ulmer’s particular gift to guilelessly reveal his flaws (in another scene, the local police travel up and down the mountainside on bicycles) that they seem essential to the dumb theatrical charm.

Gunmen

The Way of the Gun (2000) is worse than sick—it’s aggressively diseased. Take all the really foul stretches from the Quentin Tarantino bloodfests and the insipid humor in the Richard Donner Lethal Weapon movies and string everything together—that’s The Way of the Gun. In terms of craftsmanship, however, it’s marvelous: the lighting, the color, and the sound are expert, and the soundtrack shapes the emotional contours of the scenes.

Hip depravity. Juliette Lewis and Benicio del Toro

Several of the actors do excellent work. Dylan Kussman as the doctor is an amazing little performer who effortlessly rises above his colleagues (as he did in Dead Poets’ Society). Benicio del Toro and Ryan Phillippe are talented actors whose idiosyncrasies season their performances. (They have both grown as actors since The Way of the Gun, in Crash [2004], The Bang-Bang Club [2010], Snatch [2000], and Sin City [2005], particularly.) The two bodyguards, Taye Diggs and Nicky Katt, give clever, rousing performances, and Diggs really comes alive when Katt’s character is killed.

On the debit side, Juliette Lewis is a naggingly trendy, unconvincing presence with a repellent style—she’s a Method amateur doing an update on Ann Savage in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945). Lewis seems to find herself continually dragged into self-important garbage intended to épater le bourgeois, like Natural Born Killers (1994) and From Dusk till Dawn (1996). Lewis screams her way through this one until you’re ready to force feed her broken glass—a scene that would, not uncoincidentally, fit perfectly in this movie. James Caan shows up, too, and I thought, “What a drag to see that mannerism-infected old fart delivering lines as if he were revisiting scenes from The Killer Elite.” Caan often wears Eddie Bauer windbreakers in his movies, and sure enough he’s wearing one again here. The cutting during the final shootout is astounding—Christopher McQuarrie exhibits technical mastery of the medium—and the montage is brilliant directorial formalism. But the movie’s vision is awash in moral crud. The Way of the Gun is a morally repugnant work of art.