C&C 14: Noir City Annual, Joseph Sargent, Prom Mom

Maybe my favorite movie ending ever, and the new Laura Lippman

Out now: the Noir City 2022 Annual, edited by yours truly. This volume collects the best work published by Noir City magazine last year.

Putting my copy on the bookshelf was a bittersweet experience. The annual’s release marks the official end of my almost-fifteen-year run on Noir City’s editorial team, the last three-plus as editor-in-chief. I continue to write for the magazine, and remain on the Film Noir Foundation’s advisory board. Still, the book’s publication closes a meaningful chapter in my life.

At least I’m going out in style. The 2022 edition includes some terrific stories, like Sam Moore in conversation with filmmaker John Dahl (Red Rock West, The Last Seduction), last year’s recipient of the FNF’s Modern Noir Master award, and Ray Banks on the career of Stanley Baker, the too-often-overlooked actor who prefigured the rise of the working-class English stars of the 1960s like Albert Finney and Michael Caine. Even I’m in there, talking to Tony Award-nominated actress and singer Melissa Errico about her album Out of the Dark: The Film Noir Project.

Every previous edition of the Noir City Annual has sold out, so pick one up at Amazon while you can.

What I’m Watching

I may have mentioned my love for the original—ooof, I hate typing that—The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) before. Its director, Joseph Sargent, is viewed as something of a journeyman, but he’s responsible for another film in my personal pantheon which I recently revisited.

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) is the oldest movie in the Criterion Channel’s artificial intelligence series, and easily the best; as far as I’m concerned, you can’t have an AI series without it. As it begins, a supercomputer known as Colossus has been placed in charge of America’s nuclear arsenal. While the champagne is still being poured to toast this new age of existence, Colossus dispatches a chilling message: “There is another system.” Turns out the Soviets have built their own electronic guardian, named Guardian. Soon the two machines are talking to each other. And then planning together.

I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this movie, adapted by James Bridges (The China Syndrome) from a novel by D. F. Jones. It has cemented my belief that if humanity is destined to be enslaved by its digital progeny, better it should have happened during the Mad Men era; at least then the apocalypse would have been stylish. I can’t get enough of the production design here: the clocks, the filigree in the swank bachelor pads, Colossus’s overhead display terminals equipped with teletype sounds. Renee Patrick would want me to point out that Edith Head provided the fashionable wardrobe worn by Susan Clark.

It's the end of the world as we know it and we look good

Familiar faces abound in the cast: James Hong, Marion Ross, Georg Stanford Brown. Everyone’s favorite TV dad William Schallert is darkly funny as the director of the CIA. Gordon Pinsent, one of Canada’s finest actors, plays the President of the United States, likely because he projects a Kennedyesque vibe while also calling to mind then-New-York-mayor John Lindsay. Eric Braeden stars as Dr. Charles Forbin, the charismatic but icy genius who belatedly comes to see his brainchild Colossus as an extension of his worst self. A relative unknown when he was cast, Braeden would go on to a long career; he’s been on the soap opera The Young and the Restless for decades. But to me he’ll forever be Dr. Forbin. That’s how I thought of him during his cameo in the heist film Den of Thieves (2018), directed by his son, Christian Gudegast.

Sargent expertly builds tension without any big action scenes as the scientists who created Colossus form an underground movement against it. Adding to the atmosphere is the supremely eerie score by Michel Colombier, snippets of which have haunted me for years. There’s a grim running gag about Colossus’s Rocky Mountains redoubt becoming a tourist attraction, thronged by people in Colossus T-shirts, blissfully unaware of the stranglehold it has placed on the world. Besides, I’m fairly sure you have to obey a supercomputer that has strong opinions on how to prepare a martini.

When it comes to martinis, even the machines have an opinion

In fairness to Dr. Forbin, he is clearly an adherent of the Luis Buñuel approach to the cocktail.

Colossus boasts one of my all-time favorite endings. I have long waited for this finale to play out in actuality. My new fear is that it has already happened. It just wasn’t anywhere near as dramatic.

Another Sargent film is in Criterion’s salute to 1970s car movies. (Seriously, who else would program that? The Criterion Channel is the only streaming service you need.) White Lightning (1973) is basically Burt Reynolds as a down-home James Bond. His “Gator” McKlusky is doing time for running moonshine when his kid brother is killed by a crooked sheriff. Gator agrees to go undercover for the Treasury Department as a means of getting revenge. As you’d expect, there are some solid car chases, and Sargent has a feel for the Arkansas locations; you’ll sweat while watching this movie. Best of all is Ned Beatty’s understated turn as the lawman, who seems affable and even reasonable right up until he starts shooting holes in your boat. It’s entertaining stuff, but it’s not Colossus or Pelham.

Unfortunately among Sargent’s other feature films is Jaws: The Revenge (1987), the “this time, it’s personal” sequel that prevented star Michael Caine from accepting his Academy Award for Hannah and Her Sisters. Sargent truly made his mark in the now-neglected field of the TV movie, winning multiple Emmy awards. Between Colossus and Pelham, he directed The Marcus-Nelson Murders (1973), which served as the pilot for Kojak. The Sargent telefilm I’d like to see again: Day One (1989), about the Manhattan Project, with David Strathairn as Oppenheimer and Brian Dennehy as General Leslie Groves.

What I’m Reading

Prom Mom, by Laura Lippman (2023). Amber Glass has lived her life largely defined by her worst moment, the tabloid-ready scandal of giving birth in a hotel room on the night of the big high school dance, the baby mysteriously dying. Twenty years later, circumstances force Amber to return home to Baltimore, where she is pulled—or forces herself—into the orbit of her prom night date Joe, his plastic surgeon wife Meredith, and their seemingly perfect marriage. Lippman invests in the provocative premise, writing the characters with tremendous empathy; when they act selfishly, which is often, you understand why. Joe in particular is a sharply-drawn portrait of white male privilege, the kind of friendly guy who believes the best of himself while remaining willfully oblivious to his own neediness, his short-sighted decisions, and the wreckage left in their wake. The revelations come almost too thick in the closing pages given the perfectly-paced tightening of the screws that precedes them. But the final effect, augmented by Lippman’s recreation of the fraught early months of the pandemic, is powerful.

When I interviewed Lippman about her terrific novel Sunburn (2017), I asked if she had a yen to write more noir. Prom Mom makes it plain that she likes the neighborhood. She explicitly acknowledges the influence of fellow Marylander James M. Cain in the afterword. Cain was fascinated by the mechanics of business—Mildred Pierce is practically a manual for running a restaurant—and Lippman ably follows his lead here, layering in compelling specifics about operating an art gallery and keeping it afloat as the world shuts down around it.

What (Else) I’m Reading

I loved Jessica M. Goldstein’s Washington Post article on how everyone now has the same smile. It’s a symptom of what she calls “hotness creep.” “Hotness here is … not about being sexy: messy, raw, and alive.” Instead, it’s “about that algorithmic tug toward sameness” that is even altering the physical world around us.