Max "Bunny" Sparber

IT'S FUNNY that we use a French term to describe a distinctively American film genre. We don't call cowboy movies cinema de vachegarçonnes, but we do call hardboiled crime films noir, a phrase invented by film critic Nino Frank to distinguish films about crime that had a weird moral ambivalence, a quality that another French critic, Jean-Pierre Chartier, described as a vision of "pessimism and disgust for humanity"

Pessimism and disgust for humanity. These are not qualities generally associated with Minnesotans, who, according to popular opinion, are generally seen as mild-mannered folk who are slow to anger and have trouble making eye contact. In fact, it was exactly that meek regional character that the Coen Brothers played off of in Fargo, in which even prostitutes are so eager to help the police that they relentlessly nod their heads like bobblehead toys.

But Minnesota produced its share of noir antiheroes, actors who were perfectly suited to noir's grim vision of tough talking lowlifes and crooked cops. In fact, this state produced two of noir's cruelest antiheroes and one of its classic victims. Let us take a look at the state's contribution to Hollywood's cinema of pessimism and disgust:

Richard Widmark traveled quite a lot in his childhood, but he began life in Minneapolis, and, from his first film appearance as a giggling killer in 1947's Kiss of Death, he was Hollywood's go-to man to throw color into genre films. He was particularly good with crime films. He was so good, in fact, that he won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award for Kiss of Death, an otherwise rather by-the-books crime melodrama starring Victor Mature.

With his quick eyes and wiry features, Widmark had a special talent for playing smart hustlers -- men who brooked no small talk and who could always be counted on to think themselves out of a jam. In Night and The City (1950), he played an American on the grift in London, concocting a grotesque and doomed scheme to manipulate the career of a professional wrestler. The film was notable for its refusal to make its characters sympathetic, and Widmark's performance in it is monstrous -- he is a man entirely without scruples or compassion, ready to use or double cross anyone in his life to forward his own petty ends. In the same year, he portrayed a good-hearted military doctor leading the a chase through the streets of New Orleans in Panic in the Streets, where he heads up a desperate attempt to catch three killers who are infected with bubonic plague. 1950 was also the year in which Widmark turned in a savage performance as a virulent racist in No Way Out, so relentlessly abusing costar Sidney Poitier (in his film debut) that Widmark felt compelled to apologize after every take.

In 1953, Widmark starred in Pickup On South Street, a hysterically anticommunist film that has Widmark playing a pickpocket who accidentally intercepts state secrets stolen by a spy ring. The film might have been just more Red Scare propaganda if it wasn't for writer/director Sam Fuller's eye for odd details, such as the way he lenses Widmark's nonchalant stare as his nimble fingers creep into a nearby purse during a bus ride, or the way Widmark keeps his beer cold on his houseboat -- by hanging it out a window and in the river on a rope. Additionally, it's a tough script, one of the toughest Widmark appeared in, with a script that was rejected by the Production Code as containing "excessive brutality and sadistic beatings, of both men and women". Widmark plays his character with endless nerve, becoming unexpectedly sympathetic, such as when he shrugs off the hard sell by g-men who suspect him of having pickpocket microfilm. "I know you pinched me three times and got me convicted three times and made me a three time loser," he sneers at them "And I know you took an oath to put me away for life. Well you're trying awful hard with all this patriotic eye-wash, but get this: I didn't grift that film and you can't prove I did!"

Ralph Meeker: Despite his boyish good looks, there was a sadistic quality to Minneapolis native Ralph Meeker's face, which featured arch eyebrows and cruel smile, which may be why he was often cast as troublemakers. In 1955, he nabbed a role that must be the ne plus ultra of bullying brutes, that of Mike Hammer in Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly. Hammer was the creation of author Mickey Spillane, a private investigator of unflinching brutality and misanthropy. Aldrich's film never shied away from the character's unpleasantness -- one female character sums Hammer up with these words: "You. You're one of those self-indulgent males who thinks about nothing but his clothes, his car, himself. Bet you do push-ups every morning just to keep your belly hard."

Meeker's limning of Mike Hammer is as cold and inscrutable as any put onscreen. He hardly seems capable of human emotions, but for scorn, and he gets to his dirty business with a minimum of fuss, a maximum of sarcastic back talk, and a propensity for violence that is legitimately terrifying. Even now, in a time when torture is chic enough to have spawned several film series and one very popular television character, Hammer is a harder boiled than we're used to, casually smashing treasured record collections or breaking men's hands. He doesn't do these things because there is no other way to get information, but because brutality is the fastest means to an end, and Mike Hammer does not favorite sophisticated or subtle methods.

The plot of this movie has him chasing down a valise with glowing contents, an image cribbed by Quentin Tarantino for Pulp Fiction. Meeker's Mike Hammer chases this mysterious suitcase with the relentlessness of an onscreen monster, until its contents, once exposed, quite literally set the movie on fire. Aldrich and screenwriter A. I. Bezzerides despised the amoral character they had brought to the screen, and, in some versions of the film, we are left uncertain that Hammer himself hadn't exploded as well.

Coleen Gray: Coltish brunette Coleen Gray wasn't a Minnesota native -- she hailed from Nebraska. But, as an actress, she was a product of Minnesota, having graduated from Hamline. She was also a favorite of genre directors, frequently popping up as a fresh-faced naïf terrorized by psychopathic criminals in small-budget noir films. She was, in fact, stalked by Minnesota native Richard Widmark in his debut film, 1947's Kiss of Death. In the same year, she turned in a fine performance in a grim crime fable, Nightmare Alley. In it, she portrayed a fresh-faced sideshow performer who falls in love with a carnie (Tyrone Power) whose bogus psychic act briefly propels him to the national spotlight before sending him careening down into alcoholism, madness, and, finally, to working as a sideshow geek.

Gray also had high profile roles in other lurid crime melodramas, such as Kansas City Confidential (1952) and Las Vegas Shakedown, and she was part of an exceptional ensemble cast in 1956's The Killing. This tense tale of a race track robbery gone wrong was the film that established Stanley Kubrick as a master filmmaker, and it's told in a nonlinear style that directly influenced Quentin Tarantino. Gray plays the wife of mastermind Sterling Hayden, and she agonizes beautifully on the sideline as a series of histrionic character actors (including Elisha Cook, Jr. and filmic wildman Timothy Carey) threaten to unravel Hayden's careful plans.

More of the Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities!