Anti-Climacus

Adventures in Cultural Consumption, an ongoing series:

The Naked City
The Killers


When I first had Netflix, the purpose was to allow me to gain knowledge of the seminal moments of film history. Since I had no developed tastes, I watched a bit of everything. Occasionally, this process of beginning with the classics and working my way down made it evident that certain genres were of little interest to me. For example, The Searchers is a great film and High Noon a good one, but it took perhaps three or four other Westerns to realize the genre as a whole was an indistinguishable blur of tropes that I found unexciting in the best of cases. The same applies to directors: it took three Kirosawa films to realize I didn't like him (The Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Dursu Uzala), probably ten films of Ingmar Bergman to realize that it just so happened that three of the first four of his films that I saw were among my favorites (The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Winter Light). Smart money says the same thing will happen with Jean-Pierre Melville.

Then there's noir, that most indestructible of genres, home (or near home) to many of my favorite movies. Perhaps it's many years of Law and Order that allow me as a viewer to ignore the typical framing devices and focus on the idiosyncratic touches of each film, and on matters like the manner in which the mystery of the plot is revealed and the quality of the acting performances therein. Consequently I liked the under-studied vérité features of The Naked City even though it was perfectly obvious how it would all end.

If it weren't already obvious to me that Burt Lancaster was a great actor*--the man's credits are impressive--then The Killers would make it clear: his dialogue is occasionally ridiculous and his characterization sketchy, but his physical presence and ability to do serious work with silence more than overcame those problems.


*Is there a "what your favorite classic hollywood actor says about you" quiz out there? if not, there should be