Bill Hader on Film Noir

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[00:00:00]Let's go. Let's go. It's the 1945 film noir Detour.

[00:00:04]This is about a down-on-his-luck piano player named Al Roberts, who's heading across country to see his girl and to find better fortunes in Los Angeles.

[00:00:13]But Al's luck changes for the worse when he does a good deed by giving a woman a lift. That woman turns out to be perhaps the single most treacherous femme fatale in movie history. No good deed goes unpunished, at least in film noir. It looks like a beautiful movie, but yeah, it is this weird thing where then I've always used to watching Detour as like looking terrible and that's kind of the weird charm of it. It's like this weird you know, you know, satellite thing from like a hell, you know?

[00:00:47]It's from some other world. I don't want to look at it through your viewfinder. I want to see it kind of >> [snorts] >> There's like a nice Like it looked at the drive-in. Yeah, looked at the drive-in. I mean, those What I love about Detour is how director Edgar G.

[00:00:59]Ulmer gives us just enough to suggest the mean streets of middle America, of roadside diners, seedy motels, and used car lots. What Ulmer made was a film that serves as a perfect comment on the dual nature of going out there to find yourself on the road in post-war America. You were told to hit the road and find happiness in your car. You could also find utter despair. It just depended on blind luck around the bend.

[00:01:23]Director Edgar G. Ulmer was a legend in making great films with practically just a handful of pennies. This movie was brought in for just $30,000.

[00:01:32]But don't let his budgets fool you.

[00:01:33]Ulmer was a true filmmaker with plenty of training.

[00:01:36]During the silent era and into the 1930s, Ulmer worked in one capacity or another on a number of films by F. W.

[00:01:43]Murnau, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and a lot more.

[00:01:47]All these guys had a huge influence on Ulmer, which you can see all over Detour. No, there's a there's a there's a school of thought now that's come out that Lou Landers actually uh got directed the picture. What?

[00:02:00]Hi there. I'm Bill Hader. Our movie tonight is a great detective story starring Humphrey Bogart, The Maltese Falcon. Based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett, this is a story of a private eye named Sam Spade, played by Bogart.

[00:02:13]He's put on the clock by a beautiful dame for a missing person's case. But Spade quickly figures out that the dame is after something much more sinister and deadly, a statuette called The Maltese Falcon, worth so much money people will kill [music] for it.

[00:02:28]This American classic was John Huston's directorial debut and it made quite an impression on audiences and critics alike. Today, many film scholars refer to The Maltese Falcon as the first legitimate example of film noir, a genre that came to prominence in the 1940s.

[00:02:45]Adding a great deal to that film noir feel was the expert cast, headlined by Bogart, but especially Mary Astor as [music] the femme fatale Brigid O'Shaughnessy. Keep your eye on her.

[00:02:57]She's a sneaky one.

[00:02:58]There was also Peter Lorre as the sniveling Joel Cairo, screen newcomer Sydney Greenstreet as Kasper Gutman.

[00:03:06]He's my favorite guy in the movie.

[00:03:08]And the great character actor Elisha Cook Jr. playing a pitiful but deadly henchman named Wilmer. And in an unbilled cameo, director John Huston cast his own father Walter Huston. Only John Huston could turn a story involving murder, lies, and greed into a family affair.

[00:03:26]>> [music] >> From Warner Brothers in 1941, also starring our focus for Summer Under the Stars, Gladys George, it's The Maltese Falcon. Okay. So, the statuette of The Maltese Falcon itself, want to know what happened to it for real? After being sold and held by various owners over the past 70 years, the actual prop of the statuette was sold last year at an auction co-sponsored by Turner Classic Movies. It went to the final bidder for millions of dollars.

[00:03:54]Now we know how much it cost to buy the stuff that dreams are made of.

[00:03:58]Smoke?

[00:04:01]No.

[00:04:02]Face front.

[00:04:05]And keep driving. Hey there, I'm Bill Hader and welcome back to TCM's Friday Night Spotlight on Road Movies. Our last movie Detour was about the hand of fate really fouling up a guy's time out there on the road. Our next film won't do much to lighten up the mood. It's a riveting film noir from 1953 directed by Ida Lupino called The Hitch-Hiker. The story is actually based on the true crime story of a killer on the road named William Cook who murdered six people he hitchhiked from on various roads in California.

[00:04:33]That real-life horror was turned into this story about two fishing buddies played by Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy who end up on the worst road trip of their lives after giving a lift to a sadistic hitchhiker played by William Talman.

[00:04:46]This isn't a straight adaptation of the true story, but one of the facts borrowed from the case was a creepy touch about the killer having one eyelid that always stays open. It's unnerving and pretty terrifying.

[00:04:58]Hitch-Hiker is notable for being the first example of film noir directed by a woman, that woman being Ida Lupino. Her ability to achieve professional quality with very limited budgets impressed many in Hollywood. What I find even more impressive was how she depicts life on the road. You never know what's around the next curve in the highway, but you can pretty much guarantee it'll be dangerous, unpredictable, and sudden.

[00:05:20]So, fasten your seat belts. Here is the movie that asked, "When was the last time you invited death into your car?"

[00:05:27]The Hitch-Hiker. The Hitch-Hiker was released through RKO Pictures, which was owned at the time by Howard Hughes. It was the multi-millionaire who refused giving screen credit to the story's original writer, Daniel Mainwaring.

[00:05:39]Hughes thought Mainwaring's leftist politics were too much of a risk, despite his credits for writing the screenplay to Out of the Past and other films.

[00:05:47]The screenplay ended up being credited to Collier Young and Ida Lupino.

[00:05:51]Mainwaring survived the snub and later wrote The Phoenix City Story and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

[00:05:57]Hey there. I'm Bill Hader and welcome back to TCM's Friday Night Spotlight on Road Movies. The stories we've seen so far tonight have been about fate or bad luck changing the lives of the characters out there on the open road.

[00:06:09]But in our next movie, luck's got nothing to do with it. The movie's called Gun Crazy from 1950.

[00:06:15]Peggy Cummins plays a carnival sharpshooter named Annie Laurie who meets a gun nut named Bart, played by John Dall. The two of them share a fixation on firearms. It's not called Gun Crazy for nothing.

[00:06:28]Pretty soon though, they put their trigger-happy talents to good use by heading the road and robbing liquor stores, banks, and other cash hotspots along the way.

[00:06:38]This movie is basically a love story, but out there on the open road it turns into a doomed romance.

[00:06:44]Much like Detour earlier tonight, Gun Crazy was made within the confines of a B budget. The low budget forced the film's director, Joseph H. Lewis, to be creative in putting the story up on the screen. The film's lack of production values actually adds to its impact and realism. What really stands out is a bank heist sequence shot in one continuous take, from the approach to the bank to the stickup, and then the getaway.

[00:07:09]This was years before Orson Welles, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, and others used long traveling takes in their own films. So, here it is from 1950 starring John Dall and Peggy Cummins, Gun Crazy. One of the bit players in Gun Crazy was a guy named Dale Van Sickle. He played a guard at the meatpacking plant that gets robbed.

[00:07:29]Van Sickle was also behind the wheel in the well-executed car chases. He was the very first president of the Stunt Men's Association of Motion Pictures. He put the pedal to the metal in scores of movies, including the 1971 film Duel, which we'll see later this month.

[00:07:45]But coming up next, lovers on the lam continue to move on down the road in Terrence Malick's feature film debut.