La potence est pour demain

John Agar himself has said (in an online chat hosted by Turner Classic Movies) that this was a "very strange" movie. Strange yes, but also intriguing in a low-budget sort of way.

Of course, the film is a retread of the old hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold romantic fantasy. (A much more recent example: "Leaving Las Vegas.") The Cleo Moore character, who agrees to spend the night with Agar, isn't actually identified as a prostitute, but we get the idea. We also know that the more time these two tormented souls spend together, the more they will get to know each other, and themselves, with a generous helping of psychobabble along the way.

But once you get past the obviousness of the film's rather incredible premise, not to mention a mawkish opening theme song, things get interesting in this modest, offbeat Hugo Haas opus. Moore and Agar deliver performances that are sincere, if at times a bit theatrical - he plays a condemned man who's mad at the whole world; she plays a suicidal woman who, despite her despair, is still capable of hope. Some of Moore and Agar's scenes together are nicely played out in long, continuous takes.

Unfortunately, the movie is nearly ruined by a frustrating, unresolved ending. Haas may have been trying for some kind of dramatically suspended moment, but it makes you want to yell at him: Tell us what happens next!!!

I admit it. I feel a strange fascination (to borrow one of his titles) for the films of Hugo Haas, written, produced and directed by, and starring. I know. They are B movies. He could not command Hollywood's elite. But he had his stock company - Cleo Moore, Beverly Michaels, Jan Englund, Anthony Jochim - just as John Ford had his. His cinematographers, Paul Ivano, Edward Fitzgerald, were craftsmen. His work is idiosyncratic. At its best it is unique and memorable. He was a Jew who escaped the Holocaust while his brother, left behind, disappeared into Auschwitz. He was a man of European sensibility floundering in America. His stories are studies in irony. Some bear the bitter irony of Guy de Maupassant, others the tender twists of O. Henry. He puts his character, a lonely middle-aged man on the downside of life, in the way of his passionate women. He sounds a pervasive note of sadness. The devastating ending of "The Girl on the Bridge" remains for me second only, in its crushing irony, to Vincent Sherman's "The Hard Way." I don't know why, of all the independent filmmakers of the classic era, he gets the least respect.

"Hold Back Tomorrow" is one of the best and certainly the strangest of Hugo Haas' films. Who else would fashion a film almost all of which consists of two people, a man and a woman, talking? They are alone, locked in a death row cell during his last hours on earth. It is a two-person play. The camera just happens to be there. She is weary of a futile and friendless existence. He awaits an unjust fate. They contemplate death. Twenty years earlier Jean Cocteau wrote a one-person play, "The Human Voice," a monologue of despair. One actress, a suicidal woman, talks into a telephone. Francis Poulenc made it into an opera. OK. Hugo Haas was not Cocteau. But he knew the play. In "Hold Back Tomorrow" he wrote a dialogue of despair. Joe has never been able to cry. He cries. Dora has never been able to smile. She smiles. Myself, my eyes are seldom able to drop tears. They were moist.

Neither not-quite-Marilyn-Monroe Cleo Moore nor post-Shirley-Temple John Agar rose to the heights of stardom. Sometimes artists rise to the heights of artistry if they are given the material to inspire it. This material inspired artistry in Cleo Moore and John Agar. Everything, the story, the emotions, must come from them, their actions and reactions. Singers sometimes talk of being naked in the music. That is, they have only bare accompaniment that leaves them exposed. "Hold Back Tomorrow" leaves its actors exposed. They are alone before the camera. Cleo Moore never got the appreciation she deserved. She is heartbreaking when she delivers, at his request, in sadness a wan smile. John Agar makes us feel his emotional release, his catharsis, when he finally weeps after having vowed fiercely that he would never cry. In the end, Dora and Clara pray for a miracle. Hold back tomorrow is the title and the song. It is also the prayer: the hangman's rope will break; Joe will live. It won't break. We know. But maybe God will grant Joe the mercy of an illusion. Will he, in his last instant of consciousness, feel it break,dream that it has broken, and he has returned to Dora? He has already imagined it. He tells her. He has imagined the breaking of the rope. Hugo Haas hints at another ironic storyteller, Ambrose Bierce, and a cruelly ironic tale, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." Bierce's hero feels the rope break, though it doesn't. He dreams, in a last instant, that he is free. Joe enters the death chamber. The clock chimes. The dream could be another movie. If I am guilty of overthinking and overpraising a Hollywood B picture, so be it.

Hugo Haas and Cleo Moore, who played in seven of his films, came, I am sure, to form a bond - she a struggling actress from Louisiana who never made it to the A list, he a major artist in his native country now relegated to petty parts in forgettable movies. They shared a complicity born of sympathy and frustration. In "The Other Woman," their fifth collaboration, Haas played what he was, a luckless actor turned director, Cleo a struggling actress under his direction. He wrote these lines of himself: "He was a big star in Europe. Here he played bit parts, just nothing." He wrote these lines for her: "I've got more talent than all those overpublicized dames ... What did you expect, to pay my way back to Louisiana and give me five bucks for expenses?" In "Hit and Run," her last film for him, her last film for anyone, she addresses her last line to his character: "Goodbye, Gus."

First, this is not a film noir, nothing to do with crime, but a noir drama, yes, of course, how could it be otherwise? Director Hugo Haas is a film maker whose filmography should be discovered again. After a brief European career, before he escapes from Nazis, he went to the USA and began a second part. And he never made something different from drama. All those films are rather gloomy, desperate, forget any happy ending - as far as I know. All those films involve women - more or less fatale chicks - and engrossing plots, gripping, for not too long films. His films are nearly all alike but who cares? I definitely like his films.

I would love to see a Hugo Haas festival. At a theater or on television. If anyone was an auteur, it was Haas. His movies are similar to but better than those of Ed Wood. They are below the standards of some other contemporaries. But they seem to have been shot with little money.

Here we have a brunette Cleo Moore and Death Row inmate John Agar. She is a self-described "pickup girl." She looks it, too. It's very sleazy -- as it is meant to be.

This basically two-character piece was ahead of its time. I can imagine it with Al Pacino and Edie Falco.

John Agar is about to be executed for murder. It's his last night, and he can have anything he wants. He asks for a woman to spend his last night on earth with him. He winds up with Cleo Moore, who has just been rscued from trying to drown herself in the river.

Hugo Haas has written a very interesting two-player drama. He cast his frequent star, Cleo Moore, and for some reason, John Agar. It's an hour of their talking emotionally. Unfortunately, neither is particularly convincing nor interesting.

Has spent about a dozen years writing, producing, and directing his own movies. When he was finished, he sold them to a distributor -- here it's Universal -- and move onto the next. Generally they were dark, gloomy noirs, variations on other pictures that went in some unexpected direction. Had he gotten better actors, this could have been a very good movie. Alas, as it is, it's more interesting for the idea than the execution.