In Which Thieves Highway Never Ends

Up the Pacific Coast

by ELEANOR MORROW

The perfect movie is Ozu's Tokyo Story, but second and an unassailable classic is Jules Dassin's Thieves' Highway. It takes one of the more boring premises — running apples up the coast to San Francisco in a rickety truck — and makes it into the highest art imaginable.

Nicky is home to visit his parents back from the war where he expanded American democracy, the loyal son of Greek immigrants. He finds out that a big stiff named Mike cheated his father out of a litter of tomatoes and left him paralyzed by the end of it. Nick's ma doesn't know what to believe, but Nicky knows better. He is determined to take revenge for what happened to his family.

As you might have guessed, with respect of the America of Thieves' Highway we might as well be de Tocqueville. It is us looking in on the confluence of these generations of immigrants. Nicky's parents are of the first generation; he's fully Americanized and yet the dilemmas he faces are as old as the Polish ghetto. He's ostensibly in love with a prim, blonde white girl, until he finds he isn't in love with her at all.

A revenge story is always the best cinematic medicine. Instead of doing a film of characters talking to each other, Dassin does a film in which they're all over each other. Once he hits San Francisco while almost getting crushed underneath his truck in the process, Nicky runs into the wrong end of the short con, meeting a foreign woman, about whom he only knows that she is cheating him somehow. She is the opposite of his plain Jane whitebread California valley girl, maybe the first real Valley Girl.

In one scene Nicky's fiancee Polly happens on what's become of him in one trip up to San Francisco. She appraises her bruised boyfriend, who has by virtue of his naivete been tossed around the city. She says, "I don't suppose you even have enough money to send me home, do you?" California girls are all the same. They have high standards, and they always expect disaster.

Nicky barely seems bothered by his development. Revenge owes no obligation to the vicious subtleties of romance. Nicky is given the illusion of choice...he is offered up to an enterprising young white woman, only to end in the arms of someone a little more his speed. She can barely pronounce his name, but to bang a con artist is a singular thrill. He allows her to take him into her arms, and while he does, her boss starts stealing Nicky's apples. You can't do that. He rises up at the man who is trying to defile him. In this loving gesture we feel the excess fury of his demand for what is right.

These broad strokes are perhaps touched on better in genre films than in so-called artistic films. Dassin fused them together, later making art out of a heist movie in Rififi. Dassin was a master filmmaker who got on the Hollywood blacklist. He had to relocate to France, a bizarre fate for a Jewish-American born in Middletown. (Our history with the Jews is more complex than even Abraham Foxman would have you believe.)

The emotional center of Thieves' Highway is actually an action scene. The major subplot of the film concerns Nicky's partner in the apple-toting enterprise, a crackfaced white guy trying to get along in a world of crooks. "You've got to be canny in this business," he tells Nicky, who obviously wasn't listening. The guy is driving down a road when his driveshaft conks out and his shaky truck explodes into a fiery ball.

The field he lies on is coated with burnt apples, some of them salvageable. He dies with no one to remember who was and how he had tried.

People crowd the road to get a better view of the dramatic accident. It is one of the most beautiful action sequences ever in film, and it happens to be one of the first. Before Duel this chase meant more. The act of witnessing is a profoundly American trait, of looking on, of taking notice of the small injustices and putting them right.

Thieves Highway is just as memorable because remarkably little of our cinema discusses what it took for America to become America. Books and even radio remember the past, the cinema forgets it. It's easier to simply construct a more modern set, with characters and people of the time who might seem more relatable. The past is a strange brew, and even Dassin might suggest, in the blood wake that ensues here, that we are better rid of it.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here.

"Circus Song" — The Great Book of John (mp3)

"Echoing Laughter" — The Great Book of John (mp3) highly recommended

"Death of a Middle School Guidance Counselor" — The Great Book of John (mp3)

In Which We Ask Whether It's Still Funny

  Funny The Way It Is

by ELEANOR MORROW

When we last left the Judd Apatow-influenced world of adolescent Jewry, Judd was showing the world why a woman had to marry whatever fat slob accidentally ejaculated inside of her. Now he's off to tell us exactly how sorry he is to be Jewish and unhappy in the nine-hour long epic tribute to inventing reasons to hate yourself, Funny People.

The point of the titular joke is that comedians are somehow more tortured than the rest of us. You have to be really sad to write a dick joke, apparently. George Simmons (Adam Sandler) is more upset than usual by the millions he's made off said dick jokes. In the film's first act, the star of Merman and Re-Do finds out he has cancer and loses interest in people, money, and fame.

This plotline would be slightly more successful if going off the rails and acting like you don't care what people think wasn't the central premise of most of Sandler's movies. He always yells at people and acts like a dick. Why do I feel like Judd Apatow never sat through Happy Gilmore?

they would have made a lot more money if they went with this premiseSandler is absolutely terrible here, substituting aging, sickly makeup for actual acting. He's bombed in every dramatic role he's taken: whether it was his stiff, almost comatose run through Punch-Drunk Love, or his weird performance opposite Don Cheadle in the brutally bad Reign Over Me. If you're going to go to the trouble of casting such a limited star, you should promote the movie as a gigglefest instead of a super-emotional learning experience for rich people. In any case, they found out at the box office last weekend that they had made a costly mistake. Which isn't to say Funny People is totally unrewarding. It's actually a very mature and promising film at times.

As the film's major subplot proves, all we really want from Judd is a gigglefest. Ira Wright (Seth Rogen) works at the deli with a member of a Wu-Tang Clan. Most people no longer look down on such work, but Rogen wants to spend hours performing for free at the local comedy club. (In hopes of becoming someone's assistant, presumably.) 

Seth looks a lot less schlumpy than usual, which is fine, but Rogen's comparably limited talents are blown off the screen by Jason Schwartzman and Jonah Hill, who play his more successful roommates. A movie about comedians shouldn't have an extra need for comic foils, but Jonah and Jason's scenes pop like a Michael Bay action sequence in comparison to the main storyline.

The film struggles through this awkward first act, of George trying to put his affairs in order, and Rogen feeling bad for him, and neither knowing who the straight man is supposed to be. Apatow's a genuinely funny writer, but his command of higher drama is lacking. Watching George bang teenagers and make fun of Andy Dick and Paul Reiser feels like a bunch of deleted DVD scenes strung together. But whatever — I'd watch these DVD extras anyway and it's not like we're waiting for any semblance of plot to unfold.

girls, don't become your momBut then it does unfold, and while I give Funny People credit in that it does come up with a protagonist and antagonist eventually, the conflict that results is so strange that I think most of the theater was simply sticking around for the next Jonah Hill one-liner. Simmons gets cured of his cancer, and newly invigorated, he decides to look up his old flame Audrey (Leslie Mann). They start talking on the phone while her husband is away on business. Pretty soon George and Ira are on the road to San Francisco so they can break up a happy little family.

This is where Funny People stops being harmless and starts getting insulting. Why Judd would write a part like this for his wife is truly beyond me. Leslie Mann's character Laura is a sobbing mess who lives for head and cheats on her husband with her kids mere feet away, justifying it by saying that he got some hjs in a Chinese hj parlor.

Let me clarify this once and for all. A handjob at a massage parlor does not count as cheating, hell you can even get a rusty trombone and it's really not that bad. I can even accept a full happy ending, unless you exchange Christmas cards afterwards. More importantly, is it really likely that the love of George's life is a weepy housewife who craves his attention and resents her husband? A husband who unlike Sandler actually has some semblance of acting ability?

"and then megan fox told me that she doesn't date jews"Without spoiling much, Apatow at least answers that question in an unusual way. There's a scene in the interminable third act that hasn't begun to leave my mind yet, perhaps because it's a moment cinema rarely attempts to capture. Laura, George and Ira are watching Apatow's daughter's performance during the final scene of a middle school production of Cats. The girl sings the song tolerably well. Leslie and Ira are crying, but George only laughs and complains about his agent.

ah yes, the second choice for Norah in 'Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist'Later George's reaction is thrown back in his face, but we actually are witnessing him being honest. Only dimly romantic fools cry at such things, Apatow is saying, and the rest of us just have to be ourselves. When you're actually good at love, you never have to pretend you're in love. If we all cried at the same things, like the beginning of Star Trek or the end of Old Yeller, what a horrible world this would be.

Aside from his penchant for writing mind-bogglingly terrible female characters, Apatow is on very comfortable ground here. He loves boys' clubs, the wriggling nuttiness of male friendship, of male love. These are all ideas that may have not been explored fully in American film. Men do love each other, quite deeply, and the strongest couple in film is Rogen and Simmons: the love of a celebrity for his assistant, and vice versa.

Would I be overjoyed to see the machinations of the tragically rich and luckily poor every week of my life? (Rogen and Sandler's characters, despite millions of dollars of differences in net worth, have the same computer.) No, I would not. I don't care about people who aren't bright enough to look their own good fortune in the eye, and my interest in Jewish adolescence ended with Woody Allen's Anything Else.

But by the end, you do have to see if there's a lesson there, because for all its flaws, Funny People pays attention to how people are, how intolerable they are, how sad and hopeless that sort of life is. "We'll slide down the surface of things," wrote Bret Easton Ellis. Funny People flopped because, thankfully, no one is the middle of our country cares about the complaints of the upper class, but it's easy for a New Yorker like me to identify with existential hopelessness, and outright despair.

We all need someone to envy. It is what drives and motivates most. After two and a half hours with these denizens of Los Angeles, both wealth and fame lose their hold over us. You can't hate these funny people. You just feel sorry for them.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Belle & Sebastian.

"Simple Life" — The Weepies (mp3)

"Jolene" — The Weepies (mp3)

"Somebody Loved" — The Weepies (mp3)

In Which There's No Such Thing As A Perfect Murder

Sex, Murder, And Insurance Policies

by ELEANOR MORROW

The insurance industry has always been a racket. It's worse than gambling, and you can tell them I said so. In Billy Wilder's masterpiece Double Indemnity, Walter Neff doesn't just sell insurance, he's the best man in the firm. When his erstwhile boss and claims adjuster Keynes asks him if he wouldn't mind getting out of hard-selling people in their homes, he refuses. His business is here, out in the world.

Double Indemnity isn't just an argument against other people, it's the immortal statement of Billy Wilder's genius, bound up in this adaptation of an adaptation based on a true story of a Newark woman who had her husband killed. The overlying metaphor is tough to miss: the insurance business attracts a seedy element. The going-on in a bureaucracy is also dirty gangsterism. The insurance man is inherently dishonest, but he's just doing what we'd all do.

Walter Neff kills Phyllis Dietrichson's husband, a Stanford-educated oil man, to get him to pay off on the insurance policy he signed. He does it for the love of Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck). The film doesn't end well for Neff (played by Fred MacMurray in a particularly blah performance), and the censors demanded an alternate ending that would show Walter Neff in the gas chamber.

What did he do to deserve such a maudlin fate? He kills Dietrichson on the way to the train station, gets on the train as Dietrichson, jumps off the observation car in the back, and plants the body. It looks like an accident, or at the very least a suicide. Then they collect on the insurance policy they got Mr. Dietrichson, the miserable bastard, to sign before he perished, but not in any train accident.

Of course we see this entire experience through Walter's eyes, and seen that way, his decisions doesn't seem that wrong. His gravelly, matter-of-fact, half delusional voiceover is actually an unreliable narration, a trick that Wilder stole from Orson Welles, or Orson Welles stole from Wilder. It gives the tricksy story infinitely more depth. We cannot know if what Walter is describing really occured, and you can endlessly debate what is real and what isn't to levels of meaning previously discernible only to students of the Talmud.

This innovative point-of-view trick takes Double Indemnity out of the realm of simple noir and into the arena of moral adjudication. What have we learned in this part of life? Yes, it's wrong to kill, but even killers have boundaries. One killer is more of a killer than another killer, wrote Gertrude Stein, probably.

Because of our indifference to Phyllis' attractiveness, we see what Neff doesn't. (Like she is some mad witch, Neff is focused on her anklet when he first meets her: the Horror!) We grow to hate Phyllis, and to sympathize with Walter. After Phyllis' husband's death, Walter even buddies up with her cute stepdaughter, taking her out on a series of several dates after she comes to him with concerns about the murder. It is a haunting scene, but Wilder shows it to us as the deeply disturbed Neff must view it: he doesn't notice that the girl is sitting crying as he's smoking his brains out at the Hollywood Bowl.

Stanwyck really gets the bad end. The evidence points the fact that she doesn't actually have the will to kill anyone. She's just good at staying alive while other people die. We don't see her side of the story, and she disappears from the film for much of its second act. She's rather fatalistic and even gets the best of Neff at the end, before he gets the best of her.

raymond chandler cameo

Perhaps audiences weren't really ready for a Chandler-like twist in which evil resided solely in the heroine. She's the perfect femme fatale, even more sinister in flowing chiffon. She never does anything but complain about her husband and insinuate that Walter doesn't really love her. We find out from her stepdaughter that she's not exactly unfamiliar with homicide, having murdered her mother as well.

But aren't those the things you'd expect from such a harlot?

Yet he does love her. At one point when he has every reason to turn away from her and the fate she represents, he says, "No baby, I do love you," and he kisses her harder than he needs to. She is the lure of money, she is the taint of corruption, but she also represents the seductive nature of pure freedom, of not living a boxed in life in a singular apartment where a black dude shines your car and every day seems better than the next. Walter's insane heroism is a vow of independence. The violation of freedom's most sacred tenet is the purest expression of the same.

Wrongdoing eats at Walter, yet his best friend and adjuster Keynes knows that he's not a bad person. Bad people don't confess: didn't you know? Double Indemnity is framed by Neff's voice-over, his accounting to Keynes of exactly what he's done. And Keynes, effortlessly portrayed by the masterful Edward G. Robinson, having heard just a bit of it, can discern the whole of the crime.

In some strange sense, Keynes is the protagonist of Double Indemnity. He stands in judgment of Walter, and we must as well. Keynes barely says anything to Walter when he finds out. "You didn't know the culprit was right across from you," Neff moans with a bullet in his shoulder, bleeding out all over the carpet. "No, I didn't," Keynes says. It is good for us, from time to time, to admit we don't know everything.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here.