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Katharine Hepburn marries Robert Taylor but finds herself strangely drawn to an absent Robert Mitchem in 1946's Undercurrent. It's a fascinating gothic noir from Vincente Minnelli.

I really wonder sometimes how Robert Taylor came to be a star, I always found him kind of one dimensional. He plays Alan Garroway, famous for inventing a kind of engine crucial to winning World War II. When he meets young Ann (Hepburn) he sweeps the star-struck young woman off her feet. But her heart is almost immediately distracted by some ambiguous shadow in Alan's life. Violently jealous, he becomes enraged when Ann shows a fondness for a particular song or poem. Taylor's lack of subtlety as a performer makes it all seem even more nightmarish.



Ann is the point of view character and we follow her as she compulsively digs up clue after clue, in spite of, and largely because of, her husband's rage. When she finally meets Robert Mitchum, playing Alan's estranged brother Michael, she doesn't even know she's met her quarry. He pretends to be the caretaker of a ranch.



Mitchum's cool melancholy stands in contrast to Alan's angry grasping for Ann's loyalty. It's kind of the story of the sun versus the wind trying to get the man's coat off. Mitchum wins Hepburn's heart with the barest hints of his existence. It provides an interesting existential subtext to Alan's plight. How much is fate drawing Ann to Michael, how much is Alan's own rashness, how much is the peculiarly effective chemistry between Ann and Michael?

Undercurrent is available on The Criterion Channel until the end of the month.

London's East End in the aftermath of World War II was not an easy place to live in. In addition to physical damage to structures from the war there was also a persisting scarcity of resources. The 1948 film noir It Always Rains On Sunday captures some of this world in an almost incidental way, featuring some real location footage but even more extraordinary backlot scenes populated by diverse characters, shot by the great cinematographer Douglas Slocombe. Featuring several curious subplots, the main story surprisingly focuses on women dealing with sexual frustration. The end abruptly crashes into a set of solutions to meet moral imperatives but the film is fascinating in the lead up to these especially since a few of the subplots, uniquely for films of the time, remain unresolved.



Googie Withers stars as Rose Sandigate, a young working class wife married to a man, as the dialogue pointedly draws attention to, twelve years her senior, George (Edward Chapman). Rose is constantly frustrated and argumentative but seems glumly settled down to life caring for the basically amiable George and his three children from a previous marriage--two beautiful teenage daughters, Vi (Susan Shaw) and Doris (Patricia Plunkett), and a little boy named Alfie (David Lines).



Like most teenage girls, Vi and Doris have their dramas involving boys, but Vi's trouble is slightly unusual. She's been going out with an older, married man--a band leader and owner of a music shop named Morry Hyams (Sydney Tafler).



The film features several unambiguously Jewish characters, unusual for the time, especially striking given the film's tangential relationship to World War II. We meet Morry's wife, Sadie (Betty Ann Davies), and his brother, Lou (John Slater), who runs a local arcade and seems to be something of a mild gang boss, though he never comes off as especially sinister or foolish. Three would-be gangsters who try to associate with him are played more for laughs. In one amusing scene, they show up at a store owner's home and try to force him to pay exorbitant rates for possibly stolen goods but the store owner manages to intimidate them a bit into lowering prices and securing a deal for paying on delivery. The three young men leave with slumped shoulders, like three Charlie Browns who've failed to start a protection racket.



The film's main plot starts when George casually mentions one of the guys who escaped from prison the night before is someone named Tommy Swann (John McCallum). Rose struggles to maintain composure, doesn't quite succeed, but the blissfully oblivious George doesn't notice. Tommy is a former lover of Rose's, from before she met George. When she discovers him hiding in the yard, we discover that Tommy is a lot younger a lot better looking than George.



She stashes the dirty, wide eyed, desperate hulk of a man in her upstairs bedroom, a walking and talking metaphor for her own repressed passion and sexuality. With the affable and stable but soft and sexless George as her husband, it's easy to draw comparisons to Madame Bovary, especially as Rose finds it more and more difficult to resist her attraction to Tommy.



Vi and Doris both resent having to call Rose mother--one wonders how far apart in age the girls are from Rose--and the tension between Rose and Vi starts to boil over when Vi tries to get into the room where Rose has hid Tommy in order to get a mirror Rose borrowed. There's a lot you could unpack there if you wanted to analyse--Vi intruding on the territory of Rose's hidden sexual desire and shame, the younger girl's mirror as a sign of self-reflection and a tool of beautifying oneself in the effort to attain sexual satisfaction. As Vi struggles with the locked door, the two get into an argument that turns into a slightly bizarre, more than slightly kinky fight where Rose rips Vi's dress in half.



Of course the film can't say much directly about sex but it's visually communicated in a lot of ways. Googie Withers never seems to be wearing a bra in the film, for one thing. With the vivid realism of the neighbourhood and the relationships between family members, and the realistic overlapping of frequently unresolved subplots, the film manages to make what it's not saying come across very distinctly.

Why do works of fiction spend time on people with amnesia? One good reason can be seen in Hal Hartley's 1994 film Amateur--it's a convenient tool for discussing essential human nature. But it's just one of the ways the film talks about guilt and compassion, men and woman, and the significance of socially prescribed identity.



The protagonists all have extreme, larger than life identities--in addition to the amnesiac, who turns out to have been a high level gangster, there's a porn star, described as one of the biggest porn stars in the world, and a virgin former nun who describes herself as a nymphomaniac.



The amnesiac, Thomas (Michael Donovan), wanders into a cafe at the beginning of the film where he meets the former nun, Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert). Both characters are blank slates in different ways--Thomas, obviously because he doesn't even know his own name, and Isabelle because her peculiar history makes her free of prejudice. She now tries to earn a living writing smut for a porno magazine but the publisher is frustrated when she constantly brings him stories that end with depressing existential statements.



There's a cuteness in the size of things established in the film and the deadpan dialogue that has a fetishistic quality. The porn star, Sofia (Elina Lowensohn), is intensely beautiful and Hartley wastes no opportunity to remind us.



She blames Thomas, her husband, for leading her to a life of porn. She talks about the abuse she's suffered at his hands and she's clearly terrified of him yet at the same time she says she loves him. The film never actually shows us Thomas before he lost his memory so almost everything we know about him comes from Sophia with one significant exception.



Isabelle hears Thomas talking in his sleep to someone named Sophia, threatening to cut her face with a razor. So we can assume Thomas was capable of horrific behaviour but the fact that we never actually get to see him or his relationship with Sofia puts us in his perspective since we know about as much about him as he does. Sofia's terror of him is justified but his frustration at being constantly met with suspicion also seems justified.



Thomas says he doesn't think Isabelle is really a nymphomaniac and he might have a point. We see her go on a date to a movie with a guy she met through a phone sex line. When he starts groping her she seems mildly surprised, gets bored, and abruptly leaves. She says she wants to sleep with Thomas but keeps putting it off throughout the movie. She, too, starts to wonder if he's really the decent guy he seems to be, and if this is because he's not the man he used to be or if it's because that man was more complicated than the few horrible details we know about him. With her being a former nun--who is on this adventure because of a divine vision she claims to have had--it's hard not to think about original sin and her potentially infinite compassion being the grace of God, or her potential condemnation being God's wrath.



As a counterpoint, we meet another man in the film, Edward (Damian Young), a friend of Sofia's who's mixed up in the same Dutch criminal empire as her and Thomas, run by a sinister, unseen man named Jaque. Two of Jaque's goons wind up catching Edward and he's unwilling to give them the goods on Sofia despite the fact that they spend all night torturing him by electrocuting him. After this, though, it's hard to tell if he hasn't also lost his identity. When he winds up at a police station, a soft hearted police woman uncuffs him at which point he immediately takes a gun and murders another officer. So this is a world in which Isabelle would not be wise to blindly trust someone like Thomas.



Huppert gives a performance that is both deeply cool and weirdly innocent. Hartley's storytelling instincts are nicely low key and this is an enjoyable, thoughtful film.

You can't talk through some problems and it's hard to say if it's better or worse when the person you're with knows this. 1957's I Am Waiting (俺は待ってるぜ) is like a great, classic noir in its first half as a suicidal opera singer and a washed up boxer bond over the similar emotional issues that also keep them acutely aware of the unnavigable distance between them. The second half disappointingly drifts into a more typical revenge film and both characters are flatted out, particularly the female lead. But the whole film's beautifully shot with a great, torchy score by Masaru Sato.



Trying to find a video clip of the opening song on YouTube, I see it became a big karaoke hit. Here's a more professional performance:



The film begins when tough guy restaurant owner, Joji (Yujiro Ishihara), comes across a woman who calls herself Saeko (Mie Kitahara) at night, contemplating dark waters.



He convinces her to come back with him and he feeds her, explaining to her he knows quite well there's nothing else he can do. She gradually warms to the idea of staying in the spare room and working in the restaurant.



They each slowly learn about each other's pasts and it turns out everyone's killed someone--Joji, Saeko, and a doctor who frequents the bar. And no-one's quite sure how guilty they ought to feel. When the unrelated plot about Joji's missing brother turns into a story about Joji needing to avenge him, I thought the film was going to go the Quiet Man route with Joji slowly accepting he needs to be a fighter again despite the unresolved feelings he has about the man he accidentally killed with his fists. But things get more straight forward than that--Joji commits to his mission and Saeko drifts into the sidelines, becoming a fairly typical girlfriend character.



Still, the action's pretty good and Yujiro Ishihara is good in fight scenes, cutting an imposing physical presence and possessed of quick reflexes. Saeko has a couple nice musical numbers. The fact that Joji actually whistles his theme tune at one point makes me feel this was another movie Seijun Suzuki had in mind when he made Tokyo Drifter, probably feeling, as I did, that I Am Waiting ought to have gone further with its characters.