A SQUARE BEAM of light shot through the aperture in the booth and splashed across the screen, followed closely by the clickety-click of celluloid frames clattering through the gate; is there any sound more sweet?
There were a few seconds of blank footage, the lead-in, and then the old familiar countdown began, the letters and numerals jumping due to broken sprocket holes (not enough to damage the film):
10
NINE
8
7
SIX
5
4
3
2
A broadcast tower appeared, sending out animated concentric circles from atop the curvature of the earth, accompanied by Morse code beeps: the RKO Studio logo, in razor-sharp black and white and shimmering silver, illuminating the image as if from behind; an effect missing from features printed on modern safety stock. The picture was square, conforming to the original aspect ratio, the blank screen on both sides masked by the gold velvet curtains.
Now the title pounced onto the screen, with a plosive from the string section, the letters standing out dramatically in pseudo-third dimension, like blocks in a prison wall:
BLEAK STREET
With a sigh, Valentino settled in for seventy-nine minutes of voyeuristic bliss.
His host had been right about the elements of cliché. All the allegorical tropes were in place: the revenge-driven anti-hero, the implausibly patient Good Girl, the poisonous Femme Fatale, the Psycho Villain, and the hapless Squealer, shot to death in a telephone booth whilst informing on his colleagues. Bleak Street had, in fact, every disadvantage of a sub-genre on the verge of extinction.
However, superior performances, edge-of-the-seat tension, and a cloying miasma of dread made it anything but run-of-the-mill. Even the gutter dialogue, boiled as hard as a ten-minute egg and too glib for ordinary conversation, came off as naturally as infection settling into a neglected wound.
Van Oliver was the keystone. From the moment he made his entrance, stepping down off a train from New York and pausing, only his eyes moving as he stood on the platform with one hand hidden inside the breast of his trenchcoat, searching for friends or enemies (possibly both in one package), the movie became unique, and all his. He was a lean man in his early twenties, with dark Mediterranean features under the turned-down brim of his fedora, piratically handsome. When he opened his mouth to deliver his first line, Valentino half expected an exotic accent. Pure American came out instead, in a casual baritone that took on a dangerous edge when he met resistance. He acted balletic rings around the veteran cast. It was impossible to take one’s eyes off him. Even the scenes in which he didn’t appear crackled with tension, actors and audience alike anticipating his return. He seemed to have star tattooed on his forehead.
The action scenes—Oliver disarming a rival with one hand, punishing him with a backward swipe of the other, retreating into a pitch-black doorway from the approach of a cruising police car—again with one hand out of sight beneath his coat, ready to commit cold-blooded murder in his obsession with his grim purpose—were exciting and fresh. There was little on-screen violence, however. One of the hallmarks of this school of filmmaking was its sardonic compliance with the stern Hays/Breen censorship code, averting graphic scenes of bloodshed by casting the action in shadow on an alley wall. Like the offstage murder of King Duncan in Macbeth, the device compelled the audience to supply the gory details from its imagination, creating a tableau far more disturbing than any special-effects team could create.
This was the form, pure and simple: Spun by writers, directors, actors, and cinematographers from the whole cloth of wartime angst, released in an unbroken chain of mostly second features to feed an insatiable appetite for gritty realism. It was dismissed by critics, censors, and sometimes the creators themselves as pulp, melodrama, sordid trash; even subversive anti-American propaganda. It took a colony of French reviewers, exposed all of a sudden to this fare in one undigested lump at the end of World War II, to give it a name: cinema noir (black film). Like so many of America’s native contributions to world culture, it could be traced back to foreign lands, smuggled onto our shores by refugee directors from Fascist Europe, introducing the look of German Expressionism, French existentialism, and the nihilistic view of a world gone terribly wrong.
Pools of harsh cold light. Cameras tilted at precarious angles. Shadows cut out as if by a shiv. Rain-slick streets stuck in perpetual midnight. It was all conspiracy, wrought by auteurs, scenarists, studio electricians, and second-unit crews to create a nightmare that was still there when you awoke. Desperate characters speeding headlong toward destruction, like a sedan careering down a mountain road with a roadblock at the bottom and the audience riding in the back seat.
The ending riveted. Oliver’s death scene was defiant, not contrite, and bore all the earmarks of a life actually expiring on camera, not at all play-acting. His curtain line—“You and what army?”—belonged in any reference book on great movie quotations. It could not have occurred during the gangster cycle of the Depression—the powerful Catholic Anti-Indecency League would never have allowed it—and its lack of inner conflict was a slap in the face to the standard view of 1940s noir. Had the picture been released, this drastic departure might have revitalized the genre, extending its existence another twenty years. Valentino found himself applauding when the closing credits appeared.
The lights came up. Ignacio Bozal, lounging now in the adjoining seat with legs crossed, observed his companion’s expression with a smirk. “Quite a show, eh? Paul Newman would never have got a shot at The Left Handed Gun if Oliver had hung around: All that Actors Studio bunk would’ve stunk like cheap aftershave next to the real deal. That’s why I buy into all that hype about mob connections. You don’t pick up that stuff mawking over your little dog getting run over when you were six.”
“I don’t know if I agree about Paul Newman, but Bleak Street could have jump-started the revolution of the sixties ten years early.”
“It would also have buried the studio system that much faster. The red-baiters in Washington jumped on any excuse to denounce a picture as pro-Communist; it meant headlines and re-election. The studio moguls didn’t know it at the time, but Oliver getting killed was the best thing that could’ve happened to them. It saved their butts from unemployment and probably indictment.”
Valentino pointed to where the credits had faded from the screen. “Whatever happened to Madeleine Nash, the bad girl? She looked familiar.”
“She had bits as wisecracking secretaries in a couple of programmers before she landed this part. Her real name was Magdalena Novello; she was Puerto Rican. She could turn the accent on and off. After the picture was shelved, RKO didn’t renew her contract. Columbia offered her a long-term deal, but that meant sleeping with Harry Cohn, so she turned it down. I heard she married some joker and moved to Europe.”
“Too bad; for moviegoers, I mean. She held her own against Oliver.”
“She’d’ve been out of work in a couple of years anyway. Can you see her as June Cleaver in Leave It to Beaver, or teaching a bunch of teenage brats in Our Miss Brooks? TV wouldn’t have let her play anything else; the FCC was worse than Hays and Breen. Mustn’t warp the morals of the little rugrats in their parents’ living rooms.”
“For someone who came here late in life, you know a lot about inside Hollywood.”
The old man blew a raspberry, loud enough for Esperanza to call and ask if he was okay. He said something terse and hung up. “Everybody who was anybody wintered at my joint in Acapulco. You hear a lot of gossip when you play the obliging host. See a lot, too. Marilyn Monroe went skinny-dipping in the pool.” He leered.
“Is that how you heard about Van Oliver?”
“Some of it down there, some up here. It’s part of industry lore. If there’s anything folks in the profession like to talk about, it’s scandal, and the nastier the better. He was just what you saw on-screen, though I don’t know if there’s anything to that rumor about him bumping guys off. He ran errands for the Five Families back East, everyone seemed to agree on that. Maybe he was tagged to babysit Mickey Cohen, or maybe to muscle in on the guilds. Anyway he got his picture taken at the Brown Derby and the Coconut Grove, usually with some hot-to-trot starlet on his arm. Howard Hughes liked his looks and offered him a screen test. Well, you can see the impression he made. The studio changed his name from Benny Obrilenski and signed him for three pictures.”
“And the mob saw that as a threat?”
“Maybe they didn’t approve of moonlighting, or maybe Oliver fell for his own publicity and told them to go climb a rope. Anyway, when the picture wrapped, so did he.”
Valentino pondered. From the direction of the booth, he heard the rapid clicking of reels being rewound. He knew the sound better than the beating of his own heart. Like her grandfather, Esperanza knew more about the proper treatment of volatile silver-nitrate film stock than either would admit. The hospitality of the Bozal household was genuine enough; but as friendly as its residents behaved, inside those walls lurked unspoken thoughts, hidden agendas, and secrets to the ceiling.