Leaden Whimsey and Rural Noirs

"You get a universe, and you get a universe. You all get universes!"

The queer is liberating in the new adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's juvenile classic A Wrinkle in Time directed by Ava DuVernay. The Mrs. Ws, spirits of light and hope, shake up the unhappy world of Meg (Storm Reid) and her brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), to enlist their help in fighting The IT, a malevolent force that is beginning to gain a foothold on Earth. Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey) describes the IT as a manifestation of all sorts of horrible things, including low self esteem. As examples, she shows Meg that the bully who's been tormenting her at school is starving herself to meet the standards of beauty set in women's magazines and her friend Calvin's father berates him for only getting Bs in school. Only light and, as we will learn, love, can destroy The IT and put an end to the torments this kind of essentialism inflicts on the world. Normally, my little liberal heart would stand up and cheer over such a message. In this 2018 film, however, it's delivered with such a plodding, heavy hand that the battle between good and evil isn't a liberating triumph of queerness over essentialism; it just seems like a contest between two different kinds of stupid.

L'Engle's novel has been through a lot: a Canadian television film that she hated, three stage adaptations, a graphic novel and an opera. Now, it's been Disneyfied, and I'm not sure that it can survive. This new version is so big and heavy-handed it seems to have been directed not by a major talent like DuVernay, but rather by The IT itself (or is that ITself?).

It seems almost unfair to blame DuVernay for the film. There's nothing obtrusively wrong with the direction. Most of the scenes are shot efficiently, and she does a terrific job with the three young actors, particularly McCabe, who's almost frighteningly dead-on in his line readings. But it's been adapted with too heavy a hand. Every time it starts to get an effect going and you think you're about to soar the heights of imagination, something happens to drag it all back into the dust.

The children aren't just saving the universe; they're trying to find their father (Chris Pine), a scientist who vanished while exploring the use of tesseracts in interstellar travel. The Mrs. Ws take them to the first planet he visited and tell them to question the flowers that float around there, because flowers are natural gossips. And the flowers speak by rearranging their petals because, as Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon) explains, they speak in colors. That's a great concept. But they only have two colors. It's bad enough that there's no real visual punch to the sequence. You can't help wondering if talking in colors just means using binary code, which any computer science student will tell you is the ultimate in drudgery. Later, when the children set out to explore the planet, Witherspoon transforms herself into a giant flying leaf. Again, it's an idea with lots of potential, but the leaf's face is stuck in one expression. After watching Witherspoon dart from one thought to another in the flesh, her CGI form is another letdown.

In L'Engle's novel, the three Mrs. Ws are elderly eccentrics whose doddering behavior masks their power as eternal expressions of universal light. For this film version, they're younger, and in two instances it works. Witherspoon draws on her comic skills to make Mrs. Whatsit an exercise in mercurial whims. She knows how to shift moods and thoughts at lightning pace without shortchanging anything her character's going through, and the performance is reminiscent of her witty work in Pleasantville (1998), Election (1999) and her HBO miniseries Big Little Lies. Mrs. Who, who speaks almost entirely in quotes, could be a one-joke character played by an actress less resourceful than Mindy Kaling, whose love of all those quotes is almost infectious. And the design team has created a great visualization for the character's referentiality. The Mrs. Ws get new clothes every time they teleport, and Kaling's are like a romp through costume history. She doesn't let herself get swallowed by her succession of saris, mantillas, panniers and ruffles. She embraces them just as she does the quotes.

Mrs. Which is the earth mother of the three, the dispenser of timeless wisdom. This could be deadly in the hands of a really good actress (though I think a Shirley MacLaine or a Judi Dench would have had the wisdom to temper the bromides with a little acid). Winfrey, however, treats all that dispensed wisdom as if she were hosting one of her more inspirational TV episodes. She doesn't thrill; she lectures. With her billowing costumes, geometric hair and bedazzled makeup, she comes across as an overdressed pedant, the spirit of life transformed into your worst college professor.

On a more positive note, Zach Galifianakis takes on the role of the Happy Medium. Instead of L'Engle's vision of a woman in a ball gown and carrying a crystal ball (which always seemed a little too literal), he looks like a hipster yoga teacher, complete with man bun. Galifianakis got his start doing stand-up and has become a darling of the gonzo comedy genre, but it turns out he can really act. He has some touching moments connecting to Meg when she starts to get a sense of her purpose in the universe. It's a nice transition from the comic moments that open his sequence. He has an original, improvisatory rhythm that lifts the film for most of his episode. You may find yourself wishing that he and Kaling had written the film, instead of laboring to bring someone else's leaden conceptions to life.

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Not completely good and far from entirely bad — Alice Fay (with Dana Andrews) and Linda Darnell shake up the traditional film noir binary in Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel.

Outsiders invade the coastal town of Walton, California, in Otto Preminger's 1945 Fallen Angel, intended to follow up on the success of his earlier Laura (1944), one of the screen's great film noirs. When it turns up in film noir, small-town America usually functions as either an idyllic refuge from the corrupt world of the city or a facade masking the decadence invading every aspect of human life. In Fallen Angel, Walton may have its secrets, but it's more idyllic than not. For the most part, it's a place of good people living honest lives that keep getting screwed up by interlopers from the big city.

Walton has been invaded previously by a con artist who made off with much of the fortune the late mayor had left to his older daughter, Clara (Anne Revere). More recently, their police detective (Charles Bickford) arrived from New York. Though he claims to have been worn out by the big city's harshness, he's brought it with him, making him the perfect film noir cop. At one point he beats up a murder suspect not because he thinks he could be guilty, but because he had a face Bickford just wanted to hit.

The film opens with the arrival of another outsider, Eric Stanton (Dana Andrews), forced to stay in Walton when he can't come up with the extra $2.25 to get him to San Francisco. The titles play out as road signs seen through the bus' front window, so except for a few scenes without Andrews, Joseph La Shelle's cameras pretty much are Stanton. They prowl through the town with him as he looks for some way to survive, particularly after he falls for hash-house waitress Stella (Linda Darnell). When he realizes that all she wants is someone to fulfill her dreams of domesticity, he sets his sites on Revere's younger sister (Alice Faye) and her $25,000 trust as the ticket to winning Stella. Faye's character adores him, but he spends the wedding night chasing after Stella, only to have her turn up dead the next morning. Corruption has come to the small town, and if you pick up on the clues in the filmmaking, you'll know whodunit before the big reveal.

To do that, of course, you have to avoid getting sucked in by Preminger's filmmaking expertise, which is a tall order. From all reports, Preminger wasn't too thrilled about doing another murder mystery after his success with Laura. On the plus side, however, he enlisted much of that film's production team for the return bout — LaShelle, composer David Raksin, most of the art and costume departments and leading man Andrews. Together they weave a powerful spell that adds some dimension to a script that's not quite up to Laura's level (the climax, in particular, seems to come out of nowhere except the film's style). The greasy spoon where Darnell works, for example, is the perfect place for secrets to hide. It's on the ground level of an apartment building, with steps on one side leading to Stella's room. Preminger and LaShelle work the angles and shadows there to build suspense, first as Andrews stalks her and later as he and the police try to find the clues to her murder. When Andrews decides to put the moves on Faye, he drops in on her while she's rehearsing for a church organ recital. She's improvising, and the music Raksin supplies for her is dark, with surprising dissonances that suggest there's more to her character than her bland blonde surface. There's also a great contrast between two seaside dates Andrews has with his leading ladies. When he takes Darnell out the camera points inland. All you get in the background are the backs of buildings and a bit of boardwalk, which creates a tawdry, closed-in feel for the relationship. By contrast, his date with Faye is shot with the camera facing the ocean. It's so bucolic you know which woman he'll end up with in the long run.

Faye and Darnell represent the standard roles women take in film noirs, the Madonna and the whore. Preminger tries to shake this up by suggesting a dark side to Faye's good girl and a positive side to Darnell's femme fatale. There isn't much he and Faye can do, however, with the bland scenes she has to play. Although known as a musical star (this was her only starring role in which she doesn't sing, though she recorded a song that was cut), Faye had some pretty decent acting chops. She even managed to steal a film from Shirley Temple, Stowaway (1936), something nobody except Jane Withers had ever managed to do, and Withers was a kid, so it probably shouldn't count. In Stowaway, however, Faye had a character with some dimension. Here, the writers have made her such a goody two shoes there's not much she can do, and a lot of her readings fall flat. The character is so relentlessly virtuous that even when she suspects Andrews is after her money she doesn't care. Now that they're married, it's his, too, even if he leaves her penniless. Faye has two good moments, however, one when she loses her patience with Andrews and another when she defends him to Bickford. That's not enough to build an entire performance around, but it suggests she could have made the transition to non-musical roles. Faye had great hopes for Fallen Angel. When she screened the picture and realized her best scenes had been cut so the film could better showcase Darnell, she left the studio and didn't make another movie for almost 20 years.

By contrast, Darnell and Preminger work a minor miracle with Stella. After years of playing young innocents in thankless roles, she had turned heads playing a seductive vixen on loan to United Artists for Douglas Sirk's Summer Storm (1944). Twisting her virginal smile into a smirk and posing provocatively in a hay loft turned her into a top pin-up and also revealed she had a real talent for femme fatale roles. Her Stella is more than just a vamp, however. Even though her entrance, all decked out for a failed romance, almost screams "Isn't she cheap?" and she blithely pockets money from the hash house till when she thinks nobody's looking, she's not the heartless schemer she seems. When Andrews comes on to her, she says she wants more than just a few tawdry gifts in return for sex. She's looking for a man who'll make a home for her. Fleecing Faye is entirely his idea. When he suggests his plans, she does nothing to lead him on. She even tries to get rid of him. It's a great turn on the femme fatale role, and it would work even better if Faye's character were a more suitable opposite.

There's one other small triumph in the film. As Darnell's lovestruck boss, Percy Kilbride is a revelation.  Three years before he was forever typed as the country bumpkin in The Egg and I (1947) and the Ma and Pa Kettle films that followed, he shows how much he could do with a different type of role. He makes his devotion to Darnell so touching there's never a question that he could be the killer. And in the big reveal scene he pulls off some impressive dramatics when he realizes who stole his love. Performances like that are among the treasures of Hollywood's golden days, when the studios built up stock companies of character actors like Kilbride and Bickford.

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William Talman (center) queers Frank Lovejoy and Edmond O'Brien's already off-kilter fishing trip.

Traditional values were beginning to crumble by the time Ida Lupino directed her signature film noir, The Hitch-Hiker, in 1953. That rot was apparent in the film's production history. Although he made major contributions to the script, Daniel Mainwaring received no credit because RKO head Howard Hughes suspected him of Communist sympathies (Mainwaring was never blacklisted, but he served as a front for Paul Jarrico on a few films). On-screen, the tale of two buddies (Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy) whose fishing trip is hijacked by an escaped serial killer has a fascinating subversive side. The two have told their wives they're vacationing in Arizona, but they've come to the Baja, partly because O'Brien dreams of going back to the Mexicali bars and reconnecting with a woman he had met there years earlier. When they get to Mexicali, it's a nightmare drive through crowded streets where strange men come up to the car to lure them into the nearest bar. Although O'Brien panics and drives on, it's clear he's not some cookie-cutter family man from '50s TV. This guy is looking for an escape, even if he ultimately lacks the courage to go all the way. For Lupino, the scene is a tour-de-force in low-budget filmmaking. She shoots mostly inside the car, with the camera just behind O'Brien's head as the men come up to the window. She's clearly setting the viewer up for more attacks on the bubble of imagined safety within the car.

When they stop to pick up a hitchhiker having car trouble, their limited walk on the wild side takes a queer turn. Though the camera hasn't shown his face to that point, we've seen the man (William Talman) commit other murders as he's hitched his way to the Baja. Once he's in the car, he pulls a gun on them, and basically takes over their lives for the next 60 minutes of screen time. He derides their failures to get away, forces Lovejoy to take turns with him shooting at a tin can O'Brien has to hold up and rails about his life of anger and rejection. That life story makes him a queer figure. Talman points to one eye that refuses to close all the way. It's been with him since birth, leading his parents to reject him. But it's also one of his strengths. He warns the men that they'll never know if he's asleep or not, so there's no chance of escaping in the middle of the night.

Lupino shoots all this in a nightmare landscape, most of it in Big Pine and the Alabama Hills in California. There's flat desert and an abandoned airfield, but most if it is a jumble of rocks, reflecting some natural order beyond the characters' comprehension. The few times they venture into civilization, the locations are cluttered, breaking up the visual field as much as had the rocks. The only really clean compositions come when Lupino cuts to the police trying to find Talman. It's a welcome relief from the tension of the scenes in the desert, but it's not entirely hopeful. The closer they get to figuring out where Talman is, the more likely he is to kill his two hostages.

There's an absurdity to the plot that adds to the suspense as well. Talman's plan to get to a town on the Gulf of California so he can ferry to the mainland doesn't make a lot of sense. Because of his eye condition, he can't exactly blend into the crowd. And he boldly tells Lovejoy and O'Brien that he'll kill them before he gets on the boat to the mainland and probably kill the pilot and crew before they land. He's killing his way to freedom he'll never find.

This was Lupino's next-to-last feature as an independent producer, which is a pity. She had a great sense for matching images to action. The rape scene in Outrage (1950) is a visual tour de force, all dark streets and jarring angles, with the camera pulling upward as the leading lady is finally cornered by her assailant. At the end of Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951), Clare Trevor finally loses her hold on the tennis champ daughter she's been ruthlessly exploiting. She's left alone in a deserted tennis court, with the wind blowing debris around, a powerful visual expression of her sense of loss.

Lupino was also a whiz at getting performances out of people. She developed a lot of young talent in her independent films, and actors like Mala Powers, Sally Forrest, Robert Clarke and Keefe Brasselle were never as good as they were working with her. With pros like Trevor, Lovejoy, O'Brien and, especially Talman, her work sings.

Talman was so convincing as the vicious Emmett Myers, a character based on real-life killer Billy Cook, he was once punched by a fan who had taken the film a little too seriously. With his strong jaw and lined face, he seems to be part of the film's perverse landscape. It's an intense performance, and it hasn't dated a bit. To a contemporary viewer, he seems like a cautionary tale about the dangers of toxic masculinity. And when he forbids Lovejoy to converse with the locals in Spanish because he doesn't speak "Mexican," he seems to embody a school of thinking that's holding the entire country hostage at the moment.