Noite Candente

Late fifties Metro addition to the film noir genre, Ozarks-style, featuring Leslie Nielsen. A comedy, you say,--perish the thought! Nielsen was in his 'next-Glenn Ford' phase, and plays it straight down the line, no chaser, no jokes, and he's very good. This is an exceedingly well-crafted, offbeat little thriller about a big city reporter in over his head as he tracks down a legendary outlaw in an extremely backward, backwoods community. The sense of isolation is very well built up, as is the cluelessness of the man and his wife, who simply don't know what to do, or even how to talk to these people. Among the denizens of the backwoods are such choice Hollywood masters of the cretinous as Claude Akins and James Best. The po-faced Paul Richards plays an unhinged character; a nice piece of offbeat casting, this. Robert Wilkie manages to be both warm and frightening as the honcho bad guy. What makes the film work is its marvelous and all-pervading sense of not only the unknown but the unknowable, as we learn just how naive city folks can be when out of their element. It is literally a night movie, thus there is no question about it being film noir. Strangeness lurks everywhere on these back roads, where one might expect Robert Mitchum to turn up, or maybe Bonnie and Clyde, or maybe Jeff Dahmer. One never can tell. You think rural communities are idyllic? Think again. The biggest surprise and most charming performance in the film by far is by Edward Andrews, who normally plays smarmy, scheming or mean-spirited white collar types, often with a comic touch, totally absent here. In Hot Summer Night he is the local sheriff, and he is salvation itself. The movie just goes to show, for the umpteenth time, how far creative people can go with seemingly routine material; how it can be exciting and shocking and even, in its presentation, new. It also shows how fun it can be to see stereotypes played with, altered, turned upside down and inside out, both as to casting, locale and viewer expectation.

A very late entry in the film noir cycle--and a small-town noir at that!--HOT SUMMER NIGHT is well-done in just about every way. Except for a few awkward dialogue passages between Leslie Nielsen and Colleen Miller in the man-wife scenes (a small part of the film), the film combines the best qualities of BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (outsider comes into hostile, secretive small town and is rejected) and PETRIFIED FOREST ("regular" characters held hostage by philosophizing criminals delivering stage-like soliloquies). The film also has multiple levels of social commentary, is full of unexpected and even shocking brief spurts of violence that send the plot in unexpected directions, and is acted perfectly by virtually every supporting actor in the cast. Each character (except for the wife) is three-dimensional and complex and somewhat contradictory...just like real people! Younger viewers might be surprised to see Leslie Nielsen strutting around in a t-shirt and acting like a tough guy, but he does it convincingly and his character--a newspaperman specializing in crime stories--would need to be able to turn the tough-guy persona on when he dealt with criminals in his work. Among the supporting players, Paul Richards is fantastic as the psycho Elly, a role that may have gone to Montgomery Clift or James Dean in a bigger-budgeted film. Richards, who has a huge body of television work, passed away in 1974, but I'm anxious to seek out his work as he is a major talent. James Best also gives one of his finest-ever dramatic performances here as Kermit, the abrasive punk who is far more complex than he seems to be when we first meet him as he assaults Leslie Nielsen in a bar. The soundtrack by Andre Previn is so good, I wish I could buy a copy. There's lots of fine sax-driven rock'n'roll in the bar sequences, and the piano trio material (presumably played by Previn himself) is worthy of being released as a jazz album. The film goes in a completely unexpected direction at the mid-point, and even the climax, though not entirely unexpected, had me on the edge of my seat. As a study of the nature of crime and the nature of small-town society, or as an entertaining 1950s crime film, HOT SUMMER NIGHT is one of those studio b-movies that is so much better than it needed to be--everyone involved with it clearly wanted to make something special and memorable even though working in an assembly-line studio format, and they succeeded admirably. Don't miss it the next time it plays on TCM.

A newlywed ex-reporter sees a big story in a desperado gang holed up near his honeymoon site. Trouble is the townsfolk like the bank-robbers a lot more than they do the city outsider. But the persistent newsman smells the kind of story that might get him re-employed.

I guess I'm in a minority, but I found the results here pretty ordinary. Glossy MGM simply did not have a feel for B-movies, not even with RKO's former noir impresario Dore Scary at the helm. The movie's real potential is in a first-rate supporting cast that should have been allowed to ooze menace. Trouble is director Friedkin films events flatly and from an impersonal distance. Thus we're denied Paul Richards' (Elly) special brand of unnerving facial tics; at the same time, Wilke (Ellis) is robbed of his usual brand of thuggish menace. I realize Ellis has got to have enough nice-nice to merit the town's respect, still that undercuts the distinctive presence the movie needs. On the other hand, Flippen's fine as the levelheaded Oren, the sort of avuncular role he did so well in the previous year's The Killing. Nielsen's okay in the starring role, but the lightweight Miller has way too much malt shop for a crime drama, and is a poor match for the sturdy Nielsen.

Get set, however, for the film's one distinguishing feature, a startling development halfway through. Too bad the direction didn't reach this level of imagination.

On a more historical note, it's probably worth pointing out that many areas of the US idolized 1930's bank-robbing desperadoes like Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde. Needless to say, foreclosure banks were not exactly popular among depression-era folks. In fact, Floyd was reputed to have destroyed mortgage paperwork among the banks he robbed. So that part of the movie is interesting and based on what's now little known fact.

All in all, the crime drama's not a bad movie just a cheaply produced programmer that should have been more effective than it is.

Unusual. Despite pacing problems and pockets of clumsy dialogue, it has some good insights into the criminal mind as well as the minds of those who feel the need to mythologize outlaws that literally get away with murder. It's bolstered by a wise, unsentimental performance from Jay C. Flippen as a hard-nosed con rolling the dice one last time, and Paul Richards' strange turn as a neurotic, scarily unpredictable gunman. (He is involved in a bizarre, never-saw-it-coming act of violence about half way in that really gets your attention - to put it mildly.) Leslie Nielsen is fine as the out of work newspaperman desperate for a good story, but Colleen Miller is barely adequate as his new bride. You never buy that she would marry someone without a job, nor can you accept his decision to stir things up with the locals on their honeymoon so soon, especially in her presence. She comes across as mystifyingly accepting of the situation, and at times seems to be in some kind of a trance-like state.

But its strengths outweigh its flaws. The script is gutty and resourceful and the director, David Friedkin, creates a sense of real isolation, a feeling that this small, dingy town isn't so much a whole different planet as much as it is a kind of black hole. If you ever get caught in it, you can be sure you'll have a devil of a time getting out. Good suspense and an exciting finish. Always fun to uncover curious little efforts like this. Definite cult possibilities.

Tom Ellis and his murderous bank robbery crew have their hideout in rural Ozarks. Newspaper reporter Bill Partain (Leslie Nielsen) and his wife are on their honeymoon in a nearby cabin. He's in between jobs after a newspaper merger. When he gets a tip on the robbers, he decides to investigate but finds the locals less than welcoming.

It's interesting to see Leslie Nielsen as the young leading man. He has a stoic sincerity to his performance but he has trouble showing fear. That's the missing element which keeps the tension at a lower level. He doesn't feel like he's in danger despite the fact that his character is definitely in danger. All in all, this is an interesting little noir.