A CAREFULLY rigged yak from Look Back in Anger—“It’s pretty dreary living in the American age, unless of course you’re an American”—might well be said of this film and a new item from France, Back to the Wall, which are hopelessly and rather sadly indebted to such American stylists as the underrated Michael Curtiz.
Edouard Molinaro’s Back to the Wall is a dully inactive throwback to the last days of Hollywood “B” crime films. In those films, tone-deaf technicians had little to offer except a cynical story and a religious low-budgetism that consisted of bad lighting, a cast of stiff-faced studio actors marking time between bigger jobs. At least half of those movies were taken up with a dead-handed college movie course treatment of free material (cars cruising through dark streets, people necking in the park, sitting at bars, or standing in post office lines).
Of all the foreign stylists who murder the tough crime technique invented by Dashiell Hammett, no one does a more ruthless, witless variety than the young French director trying for a quick art score. For instance, Molinaro’s film starts off with a crime (a cuckold gunning down his wife’s lover in a crowded apartment house, hauling the corpse through the lobby and into a car, and then entombing the body in a concrete wall that might go without a hitch in a Hitchcock moonless desert but hardly seems possible in its crowded Paris set-up). Needless to mention, the concrete wall chosen by the murderer is thick enough to secrete a rug-encased corpse, and the trying job of concrete-mixing, shoveling and hod-carrying is managed without doffing, or even unbuttoning, the traditional trenchcoat.
The movie version of John Osborne’s hit play about a social rebel husband who talks endlessly about the monotony of life is a reminder of the teeming, cluttered social studies that once flowed from Warner Brothers, dedicated to capturing the smear of lower depths life. The Anger-class movie nostalgically recalls Curtiz’s schmaltzy epics in which dialogues were constantly joined in mirrors, crowds were usually glimpsed in a hazy blur, and outdoor action either had to contend with a heavy rain or a gaggle of slum brats swarming over a parked Cadillac.
As a movie about a snarling rebel who is spiritually immobilized by wanting everything and nothing, and constantly in eruption, criticizing wife, friends, Mummy and Edwardians in general, Look Back in Anger suffers from a common affliction of angry young writing: It lambasts the forces of philistinism while gilding its hipsters with the corniest maneuvers of square art.
This film’s relentless fault-finder (Richard Burton) waxes heroic through the reels by blowing the same tiresome Dixieland trumpet that has loused up a lot of New Orleans films. The worst part about Jimmy (Burton) Porter’s terrible trumpet sound (which spots the film like measles) is that it is joined with romantically bleary nonsense: a duet in the midnight streets with an answering horn that seems to be coming from outer space, and a number of jazz society sessions in which an army of beat generation customers react in tempo to Jimmy’s “12th Street Rag,” as though they were purposely corning it up only to impress a photographer from Coronet magazine.
Freed of his trumpet, Jimmy Porter is often glimpsed in a glistening wetness that has enclosed other irritating heroes such as Kirk Douglas’ Champion, somehow casting a burning silver halo around the fellow’s artfully messed-up locks. At home, Jimmy is a jangle of sexual histrionics, a faint tremor of lust working the lower eyelid, his wooing (which at low ebb includes some hard-to-believe Pooh Corner antics, mimicking affectionate animals around the living room floor with his wife) being only a mess of grasps, lunges and lip-tracking which seems to come from a decade of hot-kiss films.
As conceived by Director Tony Richardson and tortured by Burton, Jimmy Porter’s wrath (“being alive you know, just being alive”) is bound to score well in art theaters where the worldly clientele may perceive the bi-sexual brocade that nestles in and around the Porter characterization. While Jimmy knocks his women over an ironing board and spews a steady flood of cheap Broadway jokes, he pursues a fine, flawless, high-minded friendship with his pal, Cliff (Gary Raymond), who practically lives in the very center of Jimmy’s marital horror.
Despite every golden impurity, Richardson’s film is somewhat of a spell-binder, thanks mostly to its solid pictorial “memories” of the archaic Warner Brothers clutter style. Though its sociological bric-a-brac is often either dull (the Porter dwelling) or over-pointed in the direction of irony (the shots of Salvation Army churchgoers moving through the rain, Edwardians wisping in the garden), Look Back in Anger bulges with a good deal of marred but interesting visual detail.
October 5, 1959