Ruth Roman – Movie Musings

Kirk Douglas is a boxing heel in this noirish melodrama full of excellent moments

Director: Mark Robson

Cast: Kirk Douglas (Midge Kelly), Marilyn Maxwell (Grace), Arthur Kennedy (Connie Kelly), Paul Stewart (Tommy Haley), Ruth Roman (Emma), Lola Albright (Palmer), Luis van Rooten (Harris), Harry Shannon (Lew), John Day (Dunne), Ralph Sanford (Hammond), Esther Howard (Mrs Kelly)

What does it take to get to the top? Skill, luck, ambition, determination – and sometimes just being a ruthless bastard. Midge Kelly (Kirk Douglas) as all five of those skills in spades, flying from bum to champ in just a few short years, burning every single bridge along the way. Champion tells the ruthless story of how Kelly alienated his devoted lame brother Connie (Arthur Kennedy), dropped the trainer (Paul Stewart) who discovered him in a heartbeat and used and tossed aside a host of women: dutiful wife Emma (Ruth Roman), would-be femme fatale Grace (Marilyn Maxwell), artistic, sensitive Palmer (Lola Albright) wife to his new manager. As he enters the ring to defend his title against old rival Johnny Dunne (John Day), will all these chickens come home to roost?

Champion is deliciously shot by Franz Planer with a real film noir beauty, in particular the vast pools of overhead light that fill spots of the backstage areas of the various venues Midge fights in. Its boxing is skilfully (and Oscar-winningly) edited into bouts of frenetic, enthusiastic energy – although you can tell immediately that no one in this would last more than 90 seconds in a real ring – and it manages to throw just enough twists and turns into its familiar morality tale set-up to keep you on your toes and entertained. In fact Champion is a gloriously entertaining fists-and-villainy film, full of well-structured melodrama and decently drawn moral lessons. It’s the sort of high-level B-movie Studio Hollywood excelled at making.

For a large part it works because Douglas commits himself so whole-heartedly to playing such an absolute heel, the kind of guy who knows he’s a selfish rat but just doesn’t give a damn. Douglas was given a choice of a big budget studio pic or playing the lead in this low-budget affair, chose Champion – and his choice was proof he knew where his strengths lay as an actor. Midge Kelly is the first in a parade of charismatic, ruthless exploiters that Douglas would play from Ace in the Hole to The Bad and the Beautiful. Kelly is all grinning good nature until the second things don’t go his own way: and then you immediately see the surly aggression in him.

Its why boxing is a good fit for him. He doesn’t quit a fight – pride won’t let him. It’s the quality that Tommy sees in him, after Midge is literally pulled in off the street to pad up the under-card at a challenger’s fight night. Clueless as he is about boxing technique, he refuses to stay down and picks a fight with the promoter on the way out when cheated out of his fee. Champion shows how, for resentful people like Kelly, pugilism is a great way of getting your own back when you feel life has screwed you in some way. Perhaps that’s why he goes for his opponents with such vicious, relentless energy and why he takes such a cocky delight in beating the hell out of them. In fact, Champion could really be a satire on the ruthless, put-yourself-first nature of much of Hollywood, with both Connie and Tommy commenting that the fists-and-showbiz world is a cutthroat one.

What Champion makes clear though is that Kelly isn’t corrupted by fame. For all Douglas’ charming smile, there is a cold-eyed sociopathy in him from the start. Kelly performs loyalty, but it’s always a one-way street. He’ll assaults those who call his weak-willed, more cynical, crutch-carrying brother Connie ‘a gimp’, but he has no real sense of loyalty. He doesn’t even pause for a second when seducing Emma (daughter of the diner the brothers end up working at on arriving in LA) for a quick fumble despite knowing Connie’s feelings for her. Later, criticised by Connie, he’ll just as angrily lash out at Connie, mocking his disabilities, the second his brother starts to make decisions of his own.

Kelly’s ruthlessness towards women is also clearly something innate. He’ll whine like a mule when forced (virtually at gunpoint) to marry Emma, who he’ll immediately leave behind with no interest of hearing from again (until she finally develops some feelings for Connie of course, at which case he seduces her as a point of pride). His sexual fascination for the manipulative Grace – a purring Marilyn Maxwell – quickly burns out, again not pausing for a second in chucking her aside, all but flinging dollar bills on a table as he goes. Even more heartlessly, after showing some flashes of genuine courtliness in his romantic interest in Palmer (a very sweet Lola Albright), he happily takes a cheque from her husband (right in front of her) to never see her again. None of this comes from fame: it’s the sort of guy Kelly is.

And, as Douglas’ smart, self-absorbed performance makes clear, it’s because deep down Kelly always thinks he is the victim and the world owes him a living. There is a strong streak of self-pity in Douglas’ performance, bubbling just below the surface combined with a narcissistic need to be loved by strangers even while he’s reviled by everyone who knows him. There is an escape from inadequacy for Midge in fighting: something he keeps coming back to time-and-again in complaints about the unjust treatment the world has given him in the past, used to justify any number of lousy actions.

Champion unfolds as an interesting study of a deeply flawed, increasingly unsympathetic character with a huge drive to destroy other people, either by words or fists. An excellent performance by Douglas is counter-poised by a host of other strong turns, especially from Arthur Kennedy, whose Connie effectively trapped in an abusive relationship and Paul Stewart’s unromantically realistic trainer who knows the score long before anyone else. Handsomely shot and directed with a melodramatic flair by Mark Robson, it can enter the ring with any number of other boxing films.

A man accidentally agrees to a murderous exchange in Hitchcock’s tense, seductive thriller

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Farley Granger (Guy Haines), Ruth Roman (Anne Morton), Robert Walker (Bruno Antony), Leo G. Carroll (Senator Morton), Patricia Hitchcock (Barbara Morton), Kasey Rogers (Miriam Joyce Haines), Marion Lorne (Mrs Antony), Jonathan Hale (Mr Antony), Howard St John (Captain Turley)

Two men meet on a train: Tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) and entitled playboy Bruno Antony (Robert Walker). They chat awkwardly, possibly because Guy is too polite to tell Bruno to sod off and leave him alone. They both have problems: Guy can’t marry his girlfriend, Senator’s daughter Anne Morton (Ruth Roman) because his trampy wife Miriam (Kasey Rogers) won’t give him a divorce; Bruno longs to escape from the shadow of his controlling dad. Then Bruno makes a suggestion: he’ll dispatch Miriam and Guy can kill his father. No-one will suspect a thing, as neither man has a motive. Criss Cross. Guy shakes hands and forgets all about it: until Bruno murders his wife and demands quid pro quo.

Hitchcock’s dread was to be arrested for a crime he did not commit. As a young boy, his father sent him down to the local police station with a note instructing him to locked up for a few hours to teach him a lesson. The horror stayed with Hitchcock for his whole life. Strangers on a Train was one of his best explorations of this concept (with the twist that the hero secretly wanted to but wouldn’t of course), and desperately attempts to prove his innocence and stop the psychopath he’s accidentally commissioned.

It’s a dream of a concept from Patricia Highsmith’s novel, superbly assembled into a tense thriller, where questions of whodunnit are (as so often in Hitchcock) irrelevant, with the real suspense coming from how the hero is going to get himself out of his predicament. That horrific predicament is masterfully assembled by Hitchcock into a series of striking set-pieces and shots, all of which carefully build a sense of being trapped in a terrible, oppressive nightmare as Guy realises there is no escape from the expectant glare of Bruno, determined that he fulfil his side of the bargain.

Bruno haunts Guy like a phantom. Guy sees him standing in front of an empty Lincoln memorial, Hitchcock shooting Walker like a distant black smear on the pristine white background. At a tennis match, Bruno sits fixedly starring at Guy, while every other face moves from side to side around him. Bruno inveigles his way into the home of Guy’s would-be fiancée and cheerfully sends him instructions on the best time and method for dispatching his father. The world seems to close around Guy – he’s framed through grills, trapped in rooms, never in control of his own destiny.

Bruno is relentless in his pursuit – and that feels like the right word for it – of Guy. It’s a superb performance from Robert Walker as this sexually ambiguous psychopath, chillingly amoral, fixated on his own desires and unrelenting in his sinister obsessions. Walker’s charisma and slimy, insinuating charm dominate the movie – he’s bizarrely sympathetic, so honest is he in his carefree sociopathy – and makes a great contrast with Granger. Here Hitchcock used the weakness of an actor to splendid effect. Original choice William Holden would never have been so meek and awkward talking with Bruno on a train: Granger, a less strong performer, utterly convinces as someone so inept at removing himself from an unwanted conversation he accidentally commits to murder.

The meeting between the two men on the train drips with homoerotic tension. It plays pretty much like a pick-up, Bruno smoothly working his way from sitting opposite Guy, to sitting next to him, to sharing dinner with him. Hitchcock introduces the two of them with tracking shots of their very differently shoed feet walking to a train, until they accidentally touch feet. Later a lounging Bruno stretches out his feet to touch Guy’s once more. Bruno essentially seduces Guy, Guy’s flustered awkwardness at least as much connected to a sort of sexual confusion as it is to the strange social interaction. Walker’s performance has a seductive purr and a beautiful delicate, feminine precision.

Not that it stops him committing murder. The killing of Miriam (wonderfully played with a slutty charm by Kasey Rogers) sees Bruno again as stalker, only this time with murder in mind. He prowls behind Miriam – dragging two horny lads along – as she moves through a fairground, keeping his distance but constantly catching her eye. Hitchcock tracks these flirtatious glances – this really is murder by seduction – and Bruno impresses her like a would-be lover with his prowess at the strong-man bell. It’s a dance, the two of them drifting down a tunnel in boats, one after the other.

And it culminates in an intimate killing by strangulation. Hitchcock uses a virtuoso shot: we watch the killing of Miriam reflected in the lens of her fallen oversized glasses, Bruno bearing down over her until she disappears. The perverse sexual excitement Bruno feels over the killing creeps into his fascination with Anne’s sister Barbara (played, for extra perverse points, by Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia) who wears similar glasses to Miriam. Bruno stares at her with dreadful, tingling excitement and eventually loses control of himself miming out strangulation on a guest at the Morton’s house, swept up in the thrill of it.

Of course, Guy is far too straight-laced (in every sense) to get to wrapped up in Bruno’s plot. (Rather different from Highsmith, where his equivalent character regretfully but willingly upholds his part of the bargain.) The film overplays its hand slightly as it heads into the denouement with an overextended tennis match intercut with Bruno attempting to retrieve Guy’s lighter from a drain (where he has dropped it, en route to planting it at the murder scene). It pulls it back though with a final fight on a wildly speeding-out-of-control carousel (just the right side of ridiculous).

The film is littered with little references to doubles and dark shadows and is a superbly constructed thrill ride by Hitchcock. Granger’s weaknesses as a performer are surprisingly well suited to his role, although Hitchcock failed to hide his lack of regard for Ruth Roman in a weakly written role. The film gets a superb dark momentum from Robert Walker’s marvellous performance and Hitchcock shoots it with a brilliantly unsettling stalkerish eye, with Bruno’s trailing of each of his targets tinged with a dark sexuality beneath the malicious intent. With good reason, Hitchcock called this his “first American movie” and it kickstarted a run of hits.