The Rest, to Infinity
Blast of Silence (1961)
directed by Allen Baron
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
The Maltese Falcon is a great movie because the personalities of its stars cut loose the script's theatrical tethers. If it were anyone other than Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, and Humphrey Bogart sitting in Sam Spade's office, we would think of the room as the stage it was. The Big Sleep, likewise, is always as good as its H. Bacalls, but better than that is the hothouse, the bookstore, and the street where Sam hides his car. The sweat beneath Bogart's armpits is less personal than the invasiveness of General Sternwood's Peeping Tom taste for alcohol, and noir, more than the scripted doom that lies in wait for its protagonist's soul, is the hoped-for opening in a door to a dream: not one single, sprawling nighttime landscape, but instead a universe of uninhabited, uncommunicative worlds.
You need only retrace Allen Baron's New York locations with the Criterion staff to realize that Blast of Silence is not New York. It couldn't have been New York even in 1961, even though the same brownstones and marshes remain intact enough today to make the extras. I read about the Village Gate in liner notes for jazz CDs, but I saw it for the first time today in a movie. Once a place exists in a movie, so long as it exists uniquely (the sofas in The Maltese Falcon don't), you can only revisit it in the dark, and nowhere else, forever. The cold winter winds, the reeking heat of Big Ralph's apartment and the wetness on his lips: the sea and stars of an unseen shore.
directed by Allen Baron
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
The Maltese Falcon is a great movie because the personalities of its stars cut loose the script's theatrical tethers. If it were anyone other than Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, and Humphrey Bogart sitting in Sam Spade's office, we would think of the room as the stage it was. The Big Sleep, likewise, is always as good as its H. Bacalls, but better than that is the hothouse, the bookstore, and the street where Sam hides his car. The sweat beneath Bogart's armpits is less personal than the invasiveness of General Sternwood's Peeping Tom taste for alcohol, and noir, more than the scripted doom that lies in wait for its protagonist's soul, is the hoped-for opening in a door to a dream: not one single, sprawling nighttime landscape, but instead a universe of uninhabited, uncommunicative worlds.
You need only retrace Allen Baron's New York locations with the Criterion staff to realize that Blast of Silence is not New York. It couldn't have been New York even in 1961, even though the same brownstones and marshes remain intact enough today to make the extras. I read about the Village Gate in liner notes for jazz CDs, but I saw it for the first time today in a movie. Once a place exists in a movie, so long as it exists uniquely (the sofas in The Maltese Falcon don't), you can only revisit it in the dark, and nowhere else, forever. The cold winter winds, the reeking heat of Big Ralph's apartment and the wetness on his lips: the sea and stars of an unseen shore.
posted by NPK at 10:56 AM
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