Cry Danger (Dick Powell), Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Reality, Longing for Home

Rocky Mulloy (Dick Powell) is out of prison after serving five years of what should have been a longer sentence, thanks to a disabled marine who has appeared with an alibi. Rocky claims not only innocence, but insists that he was framed (though the police don’t think so), and he is determined to get to the bottom of everything – even at the risk of endangering his own identity or security. That’s his goal, but nothing out there awaiting him is what it seems to be on the surface. I was prepared to run out of patience with Richard Erdman as the soldier who provides the alibi and has his own motives for glomming onto Powell, but it turned out, due to sharp direction and one liners, that I ended up liking his character before the first act was even over. 

Regis Toomey as the unconvinced, relentless cop, makes a flesh-and-blood character out of a part that could easily have amounted to a mere trope. And Rhonda Fleming (‘The Queen of Technicolor,’ but this is in B&W, so no auburn hair on display) is rightly worried about Rocky’s obsessive quest, which very shortly turns him into a walking target. William Conrad (The Naked Jungle) plays Castro, the burly villain of the piece, and in his long career it’s the best I’ve ever seen him. And the sleaziest. I guess he’s meant to be a Raymond Burr noir-clone here, but it’s a stand-alone performance as a slimy noir villain. 

The lesser roles are also well cast and acquitted. Jean Porter, appearing in a few scenes, comes on hard and defensive when Powell interrogates her, then softens up when she senses there might be something amorous for her from Erdman. In the book “Film Noir – An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style,’ published in 1979, Alain Silver says: “Robert Parrish’s pacing in CRY DANGER is fast compared to the languorous tempos of his other films [THE WONDERFUL COUNTRY, DUFFY] and much more distinctive for that very reason, thoroughly consistent with the overall realization of the film.” However, time has revealed that Dick Powell was the primary director of the film, but he allowed Parrish to take the credit. Powell cannily navigated the Hollywood waters, a long way from the boyish tenor he played in the Busby Berkeley flicks, to the no-nonsense noir protagonist he's portraying in Cry Danger, and then went to the 50s TV as entrepreneur and feature director he next became. 

I don’t know much about Powell personally, given there is not a great deal of information available, but he certainly had a clear-headed business sense. As the centerpiece in CRY DANGER, Powell carries the film effortlessly all through. It's mentioned on the Cry Danger DVD that it was a restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, funded by Eddie Mueller’s Film Noir Foundation. Bravo on them. It looks really great, and it’s a wonderful surprise. Maybe the story is a bit familiar at times, but everything else is splendid: the rapid-fire and witty hard-boiled dialogue, the revved up pacing, the intense performances, the quick narrative twists, and Joe Biroc’s masterful cinematography. Dick Powell has essential moments and scenes that are stunningly acted and thanks to Biroc's unique angles, perfectly lit and framed. Source: https://filmsinreviewarchives.com

Fredric Jameson’s essay Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Reality is actually a monograph consisting of three chapters whose main thesis is that Chandler’s novels are all essentially the same story, and Marlowe travels from space to space, the spaces each defining different socio-economic realities. The ‘crimes’ are all incidental; the search/journey is the point. In the end, the search validates Heidegger’s distinction between the ‘world’ and the ‘earth’—our historical/cultural ethos and the material world in which it is set. Marlowe discovers that separation and thus offers an interesting example of modernism which reinforces the theories of such continental thinkers as Barthes, Benjamin, Jakobson, Althusser and Heidegger. When Chandler studied at Dulwich he came under the influence of A. H. Gilkes, who had a profound respect for the ‘common man’—a view that affected P. G. Wodehouse, C. S. Forester and other prominent writers. This, along with Chandler’s own painfully-won knowledge of British snobbery helped to shape his views of culture and society. Jameson argues that the real villains in Chandler’s crime novels are “societal” villains, e.g. police corruption; the Chandler villains are all “institutional”—big government, big unions, organized crime, big business, and so on and it is his ongoing argument that these structures are often in cahoots with one another and always at the expense of the lone, decent individual. Chandler makes this point at length in the peroration of “The Simple Art of Murder”. 

The isolated individual struggling to be heroic in the face of long odds and long guns is Chandler’s hero and he fits very nicely within the ethos of both film noir and existentialism. It is one of the truly interesting aspects of twentieth-century literature that there is not a long distance between Eliot’s Waste Land and Chandler’s Los Angeles. Jameson respects the “desperate sense of piety” of Marlowe, whilst labels the expectation of a light at the end of the tunnel an “ontological fallacy.” His final chapter is called ‘The Barrier at the End of the World’ – “world” here being the Heideggerian sense of human subjects (Dasein) projecting a metaphysical “world” outwards. Jameson expands this idea to suggest that both death and the urbane city are akin to “spatial concepts” in Chandler. In Farewell, My Lovely, this “barrier at the end of the world” is represented by a white fence, which Jameson finds “the most fascinating and enigmatic object in all of Chandler”. Finally, Jameson believes this “shill game” of distraction via the detective’s diverting procedures brings us up against “the reality of death itself”, the non-space which cannot be mapped, which escapes any imagined totality. To a correspondent who suggested that Marlowe was immature, Chandler replied sharply that if being in revolt against a corrupt society was immature, then Marlowe was extremely immature. Source: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu

To find solace without the yearning for meaning is to find stillness and to experience what it is to be fully human. The French philosopher Simone Weil develops the idea of acceptance in a particular direction. ‘At the centre of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world,’ she writes in her ‘Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations’ (1943). Rather than straining ourselves in a supreme effort to find answers, to achieve goals, to reach destinations, we should instead learn to wait. Waiting means making oneself receptive, and being ready to recognise a truth when it shows up. We must stop searching for meaning continually, and instead accept that all we can do is wait, with an open and ready heart, for such truths as there are to turn up. In her posthumously published Waiting for God (1950), Weil finds resolution in a new concept of attention, attention as ‘waiting’ not as ‘searching.’ In her book The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth (1993), the US author Madeleine L’Engle longs for a garden of Eden that she is certain once existed. She writes: "We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes." In literature the longing for home is found in many stories of paradise, of the forgotten place where we once belonged. Source: aeon.co