In his 1970 essay Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir, Raymond Durgnat suggests that the genre’s most common topics developed as a method of plausible deniability. As the Red Scare hotted up, left-leaning directors could address corruption in, say, prisons or boxing and have it stand as a microcosm of corruption in America as a whole, without getting close enough to the heart of the system to offend conservative audiences. As if to prove Durgnat’s suspicion, shortly after he published his essay a string of new noir-influenced crime pictures started to come out of Hollywood. As well as having more explicit sex and violence, the “neo-noirs” like Chinatown and The Parallax View also featured more explicit politics, placing the subtext of the original films firmly within the text for a post-Kennedy dynasty, post-Vietnam America.
That’s the general overview, anyway, and like most general overviews it’s not completely accurate. There were some golden-era films noir that tackled politics overtly, and chief among them was The Glass Key, now reissued on Blu-Ray by Arrow Academy. Based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett, whose previous work The Maltese Falcon was adapted into arguably the first canonical noir, it’s a tale of love triangles, murder and racketeering transposed from the genre’s usual sleazy underworld to the no less sleazy overworld of New York gubernatorial politics.
The Glass Key is a first-rank noir novel, even though Stuart Heisler’s film isn’t quite first-rank film noir. Heisler was a journeyman director, and this is far and away his most famous film. Although he’s being fed remarkable, rich, shadowy lighting from cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl, he’s unable to synthesise that into memorable compositions, preferring simple close-ups and upper-body shots. It may be that Heisler decided any more complex visual strategy would be a distraction from unpicking the knots of Hammett’s complex plot.
The movie’s best performance is Veronica Lake as the lover of both Beaumont and his boss, who had previously starred alongside Ladd in This Gun for Hire.
THE GLASS KEY
And he may have been right. Even without the distraction of flashy visuals the plot of The Glass Key still has a dizzying array of shifting alliances and double-crosses to get to grips with. It still makes sense, which is more than you can say for a lot of more fêted noirs. It still arguably marks the genre’s first step towards postmodern works like Arthur Penn’s Night Moves or Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in USA, where the difficulty of understanding the plot became part of the film’s commentary on the secrecy and subterfuge of modern politics. The Glass Key begins with a political fixer watching his corrupt boss ally with a whiter-than-white reform candidate, and before long you can’t tell which is which.
That fixer, Ed Beaumont, is played by Alan Ladd, a very different kind of noir hero to the slick, dangerous George Raft (who has played the role in a less famous 1935 adaptation). Ladd is fresh-faced and disarmingly innocent, hard to credit as someone who’s survived in the rough-and-tumble world of NYC politics but perfect for the new type of hero Hammett minted in his novel. Resilient, fatalistic and ultimately helpless, he lacked the dynamism of Hammett’s other heroes Sam Spade and the Continental Op, but he makes up for it with a deep and discomforting reservoir of self-hating psychopathology. He hangs like a ghost around the edges of scenes, tumbles through windows and – in the movie’s most notorious scene – is battered by William Bendix’s sadistic gay gangster for so long you have to question which one of them’s enjoying this more.
The movie’s best performance is Veronica Lake as the lover of both Beaumont and his boss, who had previously starred alongside Ladd in This Gun for Hire. In that film Lake was meant to be playing Robert Preston’s love interest but her chemistry with Ladd stole the show. Despite this precedent The Glass Key still doesn’t give them enough scenes together, but the ones there are sizzle, and Lake always manages to add something sly and mischievous to even the smallest moments.
If the film The Glass Key doesn’t quite use its resources to their best advantage, the same couldn’t be said for Arrow Academy’s disc. The extras are hefty and fascinating, from Alastair Phillips’s half-hour visual essay to crime cinema expert Barry Forshaw’s in-depth, discursive commentary. Best of all is a half-hour radio dramatisation starring Ladd and Gene Kelly, complete with hilariously prim retro commercials. In the days before VHS, these cut-down radio versions were the nearest thing audiences had to enjoy a film in their home. Nowadays, it has a very different utility; viewers might find it a useful Cliff Notes version of Hammett’s plot.
THE GLASS KEY IS OUT ON ARROW ACADEMY BLU-RAY
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