Slightly Scarlet

The 1956 film noir “Slightly Scarlet,” which I discuss in the clip above, was directed by Allan Dwan (1885-1981), who is the first subject featured in Peter Bogdanovich’s essential volume of interviews with classic Hollywood directors, “Who the Devil Made It.” Bogdanovich writes, “For half the century, from 1909 to 1961, he was involved in the making of something like one thousand films, directing more than four hundred of them.” Howard Hawks, in the same book, called Dwan “an individualist” (he also brought Dwan in as a partner in the company he founded in 1919, Associated Producers), and added, “Allan Dwan I admired. He was a pro—tough and hard with a good touch. He didn’t dwell on things—he just hit ‘em and went on.” Here’s what Dwan said, in the late nineteen-sixties, about his early experience in silent films:

I found it was a good idea to let the actors have free play—I learned that at the beginning and I never got over it. I don’t believe in telling an actor every move to make…. A director’s job shouldn’t be to teach acting—that’s another kind of a profession. Your job is to keep everything going together, sort of as a coach does with a lot of fine athletes. Keep them coördinated, keep them doing their job, and not let them run away with the rest or be too slow so they can’t catch up.

Both the pace and the intensity of the performances in the clip above indeed suggest the play of athletes who respond to the shifts of the game with sure instincts. The story is based on a novel by James M. Cain, “Love’s Lovely Counterfeit”; it’s set in a political milieu, and Dwan invests it with a clever, nerve-jangling sense that the strings are being pulled from somewhere way off-screen—whether with the police, the governor, the gangland leader, or even, God help them, the voters. The inflamed manner is intensified by the lurid decor, by one of Dwan’s longtime collaborators, the art director Van Nest Polglase: “Slightly Scarlet” is as rich in color as the title suggests, and, where the cast is a little lacking in energy (John Payne, Arlene Dahl, and Rhonda Fleming aren’t Hollywood’s most charismatic performers), the sets more than make up for it.

Hawks’s remark about Dwan’s swiftness is to the point: watching the DVD, I was struck by the visceral thrill of several long set-pieces, which flew by with excitement despite running, by the clock, many minutes each. These results are consistent with Dwan’s approach to filming, which was influenced by the methods of the early silents:

In the old days, if I wanted to make a shot of you coming out of a house on location, getting into a car and driving away, I could do it with a hand camera. I’d just say, “Come on,” and you’d do it and I’d photograph you. But now I’ve got to have 140 men to go out with me in twenty-five trucks. I have to buy them lunch and put up reflectors and great big lamps in the street. They don’t light them. We don’t need that amount of light, but that’s the rule—you’ve got to go with a full crew, makeup staff and all.

Dwan gets, from his crew of a hundred and forty, the same loose-limbed efficacity as he got from the hand camera in the early silent era, and infuses “Slightly Scarlet,” a widescreen Technicolor artifact of the sleek, industrial ‘fifties, with a pioneering spirit of invention.

P.S. The DVD of “Slightly Scarlet” is a charming artifact—as the clip above shows, the video transfer was made from source material that hasn’t been thoroughly restored. I like it that way. There are a few scratches visible, and the color has a moist, tactile quality that recalls the voluptuous experience of watching a screening of a well-travelled print in a well-worn revival house.