Early short films: Know Your Money | Buyer Beware | Respect the Law | Coffins on Wheels
Feature Films: 711 Ocean Drive | Love Nest | Red Skies of Montana | Dangerous Crossing | This Island Earth | The Lawbreakers | King of the Roaring 20's - The Story of Arnold Rothstein | Twenty Plus Two | A Thunder of Drums
The Twilight Zone: In Praise of Pip | Black Leather Jackets
The Big Valley: The Way to Kill a Killer
Classic Film and Television Home Page
Some common subjects in Joseph M. Newman films:
Organizations, and how they work:
Crime Does Not Pay seems ancestral to the whole genre of semi-documentary films, that would appear after 1945. John C. Higgins, the scriptwriter of the pioneering T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947) and other semi-docs, was also one of the scriptwriters on the Crime Does Not Pay series.
In T-Men, Secret Service agents go undercover as crooks, and infiltrate the gang. By contrast, in Know Your Money an agent takes on an undercover role - but not as a crook. Instead, he plays an honest working man making a delivery at one of the gang's fronts. This seems typical of pre-1945 undercover work: playing an honest character, rather than impersonating a crook. Such "honest" undercover roles were typical of comic book detectives of the 1930's and early 1940's, for example.
And the film also shows much about the operations of the Secret Service: how its labs work, how it trails suspects, how it does undercover work, how it alerts the public about counterfeit money.
Both portraits are quiet, un-melodramatic, and rich in informative detail: all Newman traditions.
Gangsters in later Newman films are often shown as posing as upper middle class businessmen, suave and socially proper. We get a variation on this in Know Your Money. One of the women who passes the counterfeit money, acts as if she were a highly respectable matron, almost but not quite a Society figure. And the tobacco shop in the film also seems to be a respectable business, although it is far more lower middle class than the smooth acting "country club type gangsters" in later Newman.
In his undercover role, the hero wears a leather jacket. Such jackets were restricted to professions in the pre World War II era: here the hero is pretending to be a delivery man. It will still be a few years until men can wear leather jackets, just as a fashion option. Later, good guy Jeffrey Hunter will be in a leather uniform motorcycle jacket in Red Skies of Montana.
While we learn how the process of such fencing works, the focus of Buyer Beware is less on the typical Newman theme of how an organization like a drug store works as a whole. Instead, Buyer Beware concentrates on how greed can lead a business, step by step, into the deepest levels of corruption. In this, Buyer Beware resembles Respect the Law to come. In both films, businesses start by making rational sounding decisions to save some money by breaking the law or dealing with criminals - and in both films, this leads to nightmarish, overwhelming disasters.
Buyer Beware contains what is now known as a "recall": the police call back tainted drugs. Apparently, in 1940, there were no systematic procedures for a recall, as there are today. An announcement is simply broadcast on the radio. Furthermore, while today government agents would seize suspected drugs or food, in 1940 each drugstore is left to test the drugs on their own. The test is shown on screen, and is an interesting bit of science. One wonders if Buyer Beware played a small role in helping legislators see the need for more systematic recall procedures.
Buyer Beware shows crooks disguising the appearance of a truck. Such scenes later became a commonplace in TV shows. I don't know whether Buyer Beware was the first film to include such scenes. It's a clever idea, and the first person to use it deserves credit.
Buyer Beware is full of spiffy police dress uniforms. Ralph Byrd, best known for playing comic strip policeman Dick Tracy in numerous movies and serials, makes a strong impression in a brief role. He plays the cop who shoots out the crooks' truck tire. Byrd looks great in his uniform. His hand-raising gesture, ordering the crooks to stop, is a strong image.
One policeman not in uniform is Hugh Beaumont, perhaps best known as the dad on Leave It To Beaver. Beaumont plays a plain clothes officer, as he will in Railroaded! (Anthony Mann, 1947).
Respect the Law (1941) is a short film, part of the Crime Does Not Pay series. Its wholesome title gives little clue that it is Newman's most nightmarish film, dealing with an epidemic of bubonic plague spreading from docks into an American city. It anticipates later semi-docs dealing with similar themes, such as Panic in the Streets (Elia Kazan, 1950).
Through all its melodrama, Respect the Law manages to explain how doctors, police, and city officials might fight an epidemic. It gives an overview of a whole disease-fighting set of institutions.
The doctors in Respect the Law are the scientifically skilled heroes that run through Newman. And like other Newman heroes, they have special "uniforms": the head to toe "plague suits" they wear to guard against infection. This is the earliest I've seen such suits in any film. One associates them with much later "virus hunter" films, such as the TV series The Burning Zone (1996-1997).
Respect the Law is one of the most pro-government regulation films ever made. It is a fierce attack on the modern Libertarian idea that everything will be just swell if government leaves Big Business alone.
The businessman here looks like every image of a distinguished WASP rich businessman ever seen in a movie or magazine advertisement. And he starts out by giving a speech against government bureaucrats and regulators that sounds like every Republican campaign speech of the last 25 years. Then everything starts slowly to go wrong...
Respect the Law reminds one of the first Superman comic book story, Revolution in San Monte (1938), written by Jerry Siegel, art by Joe Shuster. In both, big businessmen get their noses rubbed (by the heroes) in the horrible consequences of their business actions.
The screenwriter of Coffins on Wheels, Howard Dimsdale, later was one of the three writers on A Lady Without Passport (1950), directed by Joseph H. Lewis. Both films center on crooked organizations that sell things to innocent victims, that hurt the victims.
The detailed look at how the crooked car dealership functions as an institution, is in the Newman tradition.
The film has other semi-doc features, as well. Its title is in the numerical address tradition of such works as Henry Hathaway's Call Northside 777 and Phil Karlson's 99 River Street.
More importantly, the film has a finale set against a photogenic, industrial environment, a key feature of most semi-docs. Here we go to Boulder Dam, on the Nevada - Arizona border. This is a truly spectacular site, and the film provides a whole mini-documentary about this Art Deco landmark. O'Brien climbs a huge staircase in the Dam at the end, just like the villains in such earlier semi-docs as Jules Dassin's The Naked City (1948), and Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949). Many semi-docs have an urban industrial location. By contrast, this film resembles Newman's Red Skies of Montana (1952), in that its technology is located in a rural area out West.
The sections of 711 Ocean Drive that most resemble semi-docs are the opening half hour, which shows O'Brien's skill with telephones, and the eleven minute finale at Boulder Dam. By contrast, most of the film's middle is a fairly traditional gangster movie, with O'Brien and other gangsters all scheming for control of the wire service empire. In my opinion, the semi-doc opening and close are much better than the gangster film middle of this movie. The gangland sections are particularly cold, with all the characters being unsympathetic monsters. There is no one to root for here.
711 Ocean Drive is one of the first films to suggest that the modern mob was organizing itself along big business lines. The gangsters here are well dressed men who meet in a luxurious boardroom. They dress and act like big businessmen, not traditional movie crooks. They are just as murderous as traditional gangsters, maybe even more so, but they now act like businessmen, at least in their manners, offices and conversation. Suave, refined acting gangster Don Porter epitomizes this approach here. Unlike O'Brien, who has risen from a working class background, and whose suits are expensive but flashy, Porter looks as if he were born and bred in a country club. Porter's suits are in relentless good taste, as is his menacing conversation. He skillfully conveys the sense that he embodies upper class meanness - he reminds one of polished but ruthless business executives, the sort of men who shut down plants and put people out of work. Don Porter will repeat his characterization in John Cromwell's The Racket (1951). Not just Porter, but all the gang members we meet look like upper crust WASP's, the kinds of people who have been running non-gang big businesses in America for decades. They are the kind of ruthless overlords most Americans instinctively fear and loathe - almost all of us have had unpleasant experiences on the job with this sort of corporate elite. So the menace they convey as upper class executives is carefully blended with the menace they embody as gangsters, to create a very sinister combination. Newman will repeat this WASP characterization of gangland in The Lawbreakers (1960).
Another feature that anticipates Newman's The Lawbreakers: the detailed look at the financial aspects of the bookie business. Both films give an in-depth look at the financial aspects of the underworld, and its gambling enterprise. They are unusually realistic in this regard. Both films are almost sociological studies of this universe. As in Newman's other sociological films, there are many levels in the gangland society studied. We get to understand its dynamic as an organization.
O'Brien starts out the film as a phone company repairman, in a leather jacket. The dialogue emphasizes how brainy and technologically skilled he is. This combination, of a leather jacketed working class look unexpectedly concealing major brainpower, also appears in the undercover Secret Service operative in Know Your Money and the aliens masquerading as bikers in Black Leather Jackets.
Edmund O'Brien is a character actor, not a leading man, and the film has tried not to have any flashier looking men around to compete with him. Aside from Don Porter, all the other gangsters and cops in the film are older men. Newman would work with a similarly gifted character actor, Jack Warden, in The Lawbreakers.
The woman at the beginning who wants to marry O'Brien is full of pathos. O'Brien's rejection of her dreams is brutal. She is beautiful, somewhat working class, and a woman who is clearly trying her best. Later, in Dangerous Crossing, Newman will include another woman who is trying unsuccessfully to get married. The heroine of that later film will have her husband disappear on her honeymoon. Much is made in 711 Ocean Drive of O'Brien's disinterest in marriage. It is seen as a character flaw. By contrast, the good guy heroes of both Red Skies of Montana and The Lawbreakers will be married.
The finale stresses the architecture of Boulder Dam. Newman is an architecturally oriented director.
It is noticeable how crowded and rich in visual detail many of the Boulder Dam shots are. They show a rich profusion of buildings, architectural features and machinery of all kinds. Large groups of people are often surging through them as well. Many of the shots are designed as panoramas, and show very long views with large groups of machines. The director is not afraid of one building overlapping another, or just giving us a glimpse of one machine or building peeping out in the background from behind some obstruction. This is very different from the approach of Antonioni, for example, who tends to build his compositions so that each building or feature has a broad, uninterrupted expanse of the screen.
3D Effects: Height. Many of the outdoor scenes have a 3D quality. Newman often stages Boulder Dam shots from a great height. Sometimes these shots represent police at one level looking down on O'Brien far below at the Dam; other times, Newman has simply moved his camera high up. In all cases, the use of height adds a third dimension to the shot.
3D Effects: Circular Architecture. Other aspects add a three dimensional quality, through the use of rounded architecture:
Outdoor Staircases. When O'Brien leaves police headquarters, he goes down their long outdoor staircase. This is filmed in two shots, broken by a close-up of his ID badge. The second shot includes a pan, following him down the lower part of the staircase. Love Nest will include numerous shots staged on the apartment buildings outdoor staircases, often including camera movement.
Corridors. Throughout the film, O'Brien is associated with long corridors full of high tech machinery. When he is introduced, he is standing in such a corridor in the telephone company. The corridor stretches away into the distance. It is filled with line-switching equipment. At the end of the film, O'Brien is in similar long corridors, deep in the heart of Boulder Dam. The camera always establishes deep perspective looks down such corridors. They are typically empty of other humans, just O'Brien and the machinery. They often look somewhat dark and underground. The bookie office where O'Brien does much of his work is also deep in the heart of a building. Like the corridors, the bookie office is completely windowless. O'Brien does not own any of these locations. He always looks somewhat lost, a solitary worker trying to cope with a vast high tech institution.
The finale has a fairly long expository piece, in which the guide tells the tourists facts about the Dam while they are in a corridor far below the surface. Such institutional corridors were commonly shown in semi-documentary films. They often tend to be in public places or institutions: police stations, train depots, hospitals, orphanages. These great corridors are places where the public interfaces with the institutions. In some ways, these locales are less photogenic and far less unique in style or visual appearance than the rest of the Dam. But they still are featured prominently here, as they typically are in the semi-doc tradition. Such corridors tend to be very "convincing" to the viewers: the viewer can easily imagine himself or herself as actually present in some institution, when they see ordinary members of the public, like themselves, walking in such corridors. They help viewers imagine they are actually present in the locales shown in the film. They are sort of half-way houses, drawing viewers into the unique, spectacular institutions shown in the semi-docs. That is its role here: the corridor is the first shot inside the Dam itself. It is the viewer's introduction to the Dam's interior.
One can link Love Nest to some Newman traditions:
The movements tend to have a start-and-stop quality. The camera will be still, for a piece of dialogue or bit of business. Then the characters will suddenly move, and the camera will swing around with them, to get a good view of their new location. The camera will then stop for a while, again, while another bit of business is played out.
None of the camera moves are as extreme or as elaborate, as those of Max Ophuls, say. Still, some of the movements ultimately become fairly complex. Shots in the couple's basement apartment often go on for long takes, while the camera swings around, peers through doorways, moves from room to room etc. One of the longest shots is the one where the lights fail: it moves through many different actions, settings, and rooms of the basement. And both the indoor and outdoor staircases are treated with complex shots that follow the characters' motions.
There are some obvious differences between Red Skies of Montana and a true film noir. First, this film is in color, not black and white. Second, there are no crime elements in this film. There are no bad guys or crooks, and no one goes undercover to infiltrate their criminal enterprises. Consequently, it is clear that this movie is not a film noir in any sense of the word. Still, its techniques and subject matter draw heavily on the traditions of the semi-doc.
Also noir like are some of the emotions of the main characters. Richard Widmark's firefighter gets amnesia after a terrible blaze, and he is tormented by what he is afraid he might have done during this blackout. Amnesia is a perennial film noir theme, showing up in Street of Chance, Spellbound, Somewhere in the Night, and so on - there are probably others, but I can't remember! Widmark's amnesia is the central subject of this movie. His tormented anguish is typical of the emotionally disturbed characters he often played in noir movies. Noir often let men experience intense feelings that were otherwise taboo in the macho culture. After all, these are macho men. They parachute into forest fires and risk their lives. So they are allowed to let their feelings erupt all over the screen.
Jeffrey Hunter's young firefighter is also obsessed: he suspects that Widmark might have caused his father's death. Both characters' obsession is typical of what Alain Silver has defined as the main feelings of film noir, alienation and obsession.
This film is written by Harry Kleiner, who also did Widmark's earlier semi-doc, William Keighley's The Street With No Name (1948). Both films have a great number of uniformed men in them. Once again, the Hunter character is in a leather bomber jacket, just like the younger hero Mark Stevens in the previous film. This time the jacket is part of his Forest Service uniform. Hunter also rides a motorcycle in this one. He is one of the few "good" heroes in American film to be a cyclist; the next year, The Wild One (1953) would suggest that motorcyclists were an anti-social group of rebels, an image Hollywood has promoted ever since. Before that film, motorcyclists were largely sympathetic. For example, the kind young man who gives the priest a motorcycle ride in Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1950) represents all of the good possibilities of life. And motorcycles were regularly ridden by young heroes in British mystery novels of the 1920's, such as Freeman Wills Crofts' The Pit-Prop Syndicate (1921).
Most of the actual action is staged in the relative foreground. This is not the "depth staging" of much film noir, with tiny figures performing key actions at great distances from the camera. It is unclear if the color photography would allow such devices here.
Some of the indoor scenes use similar staging, especially those which take place in very large rooms. The scenes in the parachute room are gems of this style. We see all sorts of snow white parachutes hanging from the ceiling, through which the characters slowly segue. These shots are unique, and are among the visual high points of the film.
Perhaps by accident, many of the shots emphasize verticals. The outdoor scenes are full of tall trees. Both the outdoor and indoor parachute scenes have the parachutes being straight white vertical lines.
Just as no one believed hero Richard Widmark in Red Skies of Montana, so here no one believes the heroine Jeanne Crain. Both are up against an entire community of doubters.
Later, on ship, the entrance of the heroine and their new husband into their cabin is staged as a single long take. The take involves both complex camera movement and staging. It mixes long shots and close-ups, with the characters moving all over the cabin, sitting on the bed, rising, and so on. It is not clear why Newman is doing this. But it does give the whole shot a "special" quality. This scene will be the couple's only in the cabin, and in retrospect it will take on some of the qualities of a myth. So Newman's special staging of this scene adds force to this plot significance.
This Island Earth also looks back at The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951). Both deal with advanced aliens who come to Earth in flying saucer shaped spaceships. In both, we see the interior of the ships, which is a triumph of modernistic design (but otherwise, very different looking in the two films.) Both have scenes in which Earth scientists are assembled from nations and cultures all over the globe - underscoring that science is a global affair, and that humans are facing alien beings who form a common challenge to all of humanity. In both, the aliens are played by "sophisticated", upper crust actors.
Imagery from this film will recur in Russell Mulcahy's music video, Video Killed the Radio Star (1979). This is one of the most famous of all music videos.
The aliens' home planet is dysfunctional, and heading for disaster. This recalls other Newman worlds, such as the burned out forests in Red Skies of Montana, and the non-functioning Cavalry unit in A Thunder of Drums.
The main alien has to defy his superiors, like many other Newman characters trapped in failing organizations.
The Lawbreakers is structured to give equal time to the police and to the gang members. Lead policeman is Jack Warden, a crusading cop who is head of his city's Homicide Division. The gangsters are involved in the collection and processing of money from the numbers racket. As in Fuller's film, the suggestion is that huge amounts of money are flowing in from such activities, enabling the underworld to make itself look and feel like any other American business, at least on the surface.
The Lawbreakers is far less interested in melodrama, than in explaining the mechanisms by which its two main institutions, the police and organized crime, operate. Scene after scene methodically explores the nature of these organizations. Emphasis is given to the different sort of positions the two groups contain, and how the men in those positions interact. We get a complete look at the internal business of such groups. There is an unusually complete portrait of the inner workings of the police, showing how different branches of the police cooperate with each other, deal with rivalries for promotion, and deal with each other and the press on a workaday level. The conduct of cases is explored in depth. The police here have to cope with a corrupt Commissioner who is in the pay of organized crime. The whole effect is virtually a sociological study, an anthropological look inside an American social institution.
Many of the scenes in the film are talky, but it is interesting and informative talk. Newman establish a mood of what Andrew Sarris called "contemplative calm", designed to get the viewers to meditate on the sociological study unreeling before them. When melodramatic actions eventually do occur, they are enmeshed within a grid of information and characterization of the various groups in the film. Newman's other films have often systematically explored the internal workings of some institution: the firefighters of Red Skies of Montana, the ship's officers and crew of Dangerous Crossing. Like the leads of both of those films, Jack Warden here has to defy his superiors, pursuing a genuinely independent path within these institutions. These are not single acts of defiance; instead all the heroes have to follow an independent direction through the entire course of the film. These men are self starters, people who have the courage to act systematically on their own convictions, without much encouragement from society. They concentrate more on working hard on their own actions; they are less interested in grand scenes of defiance with their superiors. Instead they tend to quietly go their own way, employing reason and persuasion with their skeptical superiors to allow them room to operate.
The Racket showed the personal lives and homes of its cops. One sequence in The Lawbreakers shows Jack Warden's family life. This too is structured to give an inside look at the relationships within this institution. It has plenty of warmth and friendliness. But it is oddly similar in tone to the look at life inside the police.
There is a finale at a train depot, in the semi-doc tradition. Even here, we see more of the interior of the passenger depot, and less of the industrial areas supporting trains, on which earlier semi-docs would have concentrated.
Among semi-docs, this film is perhaps closest to John Cromwell's The Racket (1951), a film that also looks inside both police and the mob, and which also deals with both police corruption and the attempt of organized crime to present a respectable front. The Racket also contained newspapermen interacting with the police, just as in The Lawbreakers.
The film's most unusual piece of technology is the automatic door lock in the car. Its significance only gradually becomes apparent. It too is fairly simple.
Newman typically shoots from below. This shows the train station ceiling. The ceiling is full of rings of lights, which produce fascinating geometric patterns in the shots. I have never seen anything like these rings of lights in other films.
I don't know if this train scene is shot on location, or is a studio set.
Newman had made films about organized gambling before: 711 Ocean Drive, The Lawbreakers.
Newman favored portraits of gangsters who were suave, tastefully dressed and sophisticated, who impersonated members of the upper middle classes. This film's version of Arnold Rothstein fits that to a T. Rothstein is always quiet, well-spoken and beautifully dressed in very good suits. He looks and acts more like a corporate Vice-President of Finance than a stereotypical gangster. His suits do have more flair and sheer stylishness, though, that do the restrained tastefulness of the mob lawyer's apparel in The Lawbreakers.
The hospital staff at the end, are brief examples of the medical workers that run through Newman.
Newman liked underground areas full of technology. The crap game near the end, deep under Broadway, is certainly underground - even if it contains little technology. We see a steep, long set of stairs in the background, conveying how deep this basement is.
Much of King of the Roaring 20's shows how crooks like Newman interface with New York's corrupt Tammany Hall administration, and the corrupt cops they employ. This, to a degree, can be seen as "how organizations work". Both this material, and the looks inside Rothstein's own activities, are done in Newman's typical low key, methodical style.
One of the film's best sequences shows Rothstein running a stockbroker's firm. Satirically, this looks just like one of his bookie joints, a room of men on phones luring customers out of their money, on stocks that are mainly gambles. This room also has a secret passage, something fairly common in mobster films of the era, such as Joseph H. Lewis' The Big Combo (1955) and Samuel Fuller's Underworld U.S.A. (1961). The scenes with the stockbrokers are shot in two fairly long takes, the first of which shows elaborate camera movement. The stockbrokers are all well-dressed, like Rothstein himself, and are also Rothstein-like in their glib articulateness and skill at manipulating money. Rothstein's employees throughout the film, such as Lenny, are drastically different from the Tammany Hall culture around him, and more like Rothstein himself.
Rothstein is also a Newman hero who adopts an isolated path in an institution. He plays against the grain of the Tammany Hall system, going his own way and subverting their direction.
The relationship between the powerful, successful Rothstein, and the poor character (Mickey Rooney) who asks him for help with his life work, anticipates a bit the relationship between Peter Breck and Martin Landau in The Way to Kill a Killer.
The cops echo the motorcycle riding heroes of other Newman films. While they are not in black leather jackets, their dressy police uniforms do include huge black leather boots and gauntlets. They also wear intimidating looking sunglasses. These fancy clothes anticipate the outfits worn by the cyclists in Newman's Black Leather Jackets. The men enjoy functioning as a team. One slaps the other on the back at the end. They also enjoy assisting Rothstein with his schemes.
Rothstein's chauffeur is also in a uniform in this scene. It also includes Lenny (Robert Ellenstein) luring Rothstein away from his wife. Lenny works for Rothstein, and in some ways is his double, being equally well-tailored and suave. Lenny's clothes are a bit more flashy than Rothstein's. Lenny enjoys taking part in Rothstein's more insidious schemes, such as looting his own casino. Ellenstein is mainly a TV actor: this is a rare film role.
Later the casino has an outdoor staircase, a bit smaller than some in other Newman films. We see the hero go up it, in a camera movement that first takes him between two cars.
Twenty Plus Two seems like a low budget film. It consists almost entirely of scenes in which Janssen talks with other characters. These are usually interior scenes, on sets that recall the TV shows of the era. Often times, these scenes have Janssen talking with a single other character, all by themselves in an otherwise empty set. There is almost no action, few exteriors, and not much visual spectacle.
Twenty Plus Two does not look "sleazy". The sets try to convey an upscale look, of prosperous settings. Hero Janssen's character is a success at his work, and his Los Angeles house is a pleasant example of upper middle class interior design of the era. The spiffy Janssen wears well-tailored Kennedy-style suits, and most of the people he meets are chic-but-menacing.
On a lighter note, Jacques Pleschette (Jacques Aubuchon) is the sort of mysterious secondary character who appears that run through Newman films. Like some of the others, Pleschette is a smooth talker with a gift of gab.
Somewhat unexpectedly, there is a flashback to when the hero was in the Army. This recalls the hero of Love Nest, who is just out of the service. Both men wear sharp uniforms in some scenes, and are more commonly seen in civilian clothes in most of the film.
The finale of Twenty Plus Two is in a farm in North Dakota: one of many locations in rural areas of red states that run through Newman.
After an opening section setting forth many of these problems, the film sends a fresh young Lieutenant to join the troop. He is one of Newman's fish out of water, a typical Newman "man who has trouble fitting into a militarized, uniformed organization". He is played by George Hamilton, who often played rich, polished young men who were born with a silver spoon in their mouths: see Vincente Minnelli's Home From the Hill (1960).
I cannot say that I like A Thunder of Drums very much. Its grimness lacks entertainment value. Also, an expose of organizational problems in the 1870's US Cavalry lacks much current relevancy or interest. The film also seems poor in terms of storytelling and visual style.
The look of the film is closer to 1950's Westerns, than it is to such later exposes of the West as Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). Later Westerns tend to show the grinding poverty of the real old West, with everybody living in complete squalor. There does not even seem to be any color in later post 1970 Westerns, often times. A Thunder of Drums at least has the relatively glamorous fort and brightly colored costumes typcial of the 1950's Western. It concentrates more on problems in the Cavalry than on the poverty of the West.
In Praise of Pip contains three separate subplots, which are wildly disparate in tone and content. One shows Pip in Vietnam; one shows his father as a small-time bookie back in the USA; and finally, we get a fantasy finale at an amusement park. The Vietnam segments are remarkable in bringing up a major social issue - but brief. The bookie melodrama is not very interesting. And the finale is rich in visual spectacle.
The hero of 711 Ocean Drive was often seen moving down long corridors in Boulder Dam. The house of mirrors in In Praise of Pip is shot so that it looks as if the characters are in deep, mirrored corridors. They are surrounded by metal frames, just as the corridors in Boulder Dam seemed full of high tech fixtures.
The ferris wheel is an example of the circular architecture seen in Newman.
The bookie scenes also explain how a gambling mob works. They bring the hero into conflict with his boss: a frequent Newman subject.
The lead is played by Jack Klugman. At that time, he was definitely a character actor, rather than a star. Newman frequently has character performers in leads.
The Twilight Zone has routinely been labeled "science fiction", ever since it was first broadcast. But many of its episodes are actually fantasy or supernatural, not science fiction. Black Leather Jackets is distinctive in the series in being an actual science fiction show.
Black Leather Jackets resembles the early scenes of Newman's own This Island Earth (1955), in:
The costumes for Black Leather Jackets are some of the spiffiest motorcycle outfits in the history of the cinema. These guys have really been glamorized to the max.
WARNING: SPOILERS
Perhaps more surprisingly, the film also adopts an "organizational" approach to race relations. After all, the racial system is a social organization, too. The Way to Kill a Killer sets forth its many complex twists and turns in logical detail. Here the relations are between Anglo whites and Hispanic Americans. The organizational approach allows for an illuminating film, that reaches fairly deep into some of the complexities of the race relationship.
The Way to Kill a Killer bears the world view of 1960's exploration into race, reflecting the national conversation going on during the Civil Rights movement. It includes in its mix white Liberal Guilt. Frankly, I found this refreshingly realistic. For quite a while discussions in the USA of 2008 have been controlled by shrill, hard core right wing racism. It is nice to see some different and more liberal points of view emerge out of the cinematic time machine from 1965.
The Way to Kill a Killer is a low budget TV show. It does not have the spectacle of some other Newman works. It has only two medical workers, not the large crews of scientists seen in some other Newman films.
Nor are there any specialized medical costumes or uniforms. Nick Barkley (Peter Breck) wears the same leather vest he usually wears in other Big Valley episodes: this might relate to the Newman characters in modern day films who wear leather jackets.