#and for all his suaveness in front of the camera that little moment of vulnerability when he has to turn away from the camera and

[rickybaby]

Silverstone Test | Dts S6 E2

[gumnut-logic]

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Thank you ever so much for all your support of this fic. It has floundered in places, but I think it is much more solid now and going in a direction I can control. Of course, it has just past the 20,000 word mark, so much for the fabled ‘ficlet’ I set out to write. ::ponders writing twenty fandomversary fics of that length and falls on face::

I’m working the next six days straight as it is my shitty weekend this week. I will keep writing, but results may vary as I get worn down by work. What gets doen, will get done. Work cramps my style.

This is for @soniabigcheese​ one of the mainstays of this wonderful fandom :D

-o-o-o-

The crowd erupted.

“Virgil, sit down.” It was hissed at him as the roar overtook everything.

Everyone was shouting.

Veronica was calling for order, but no one was listening.

That one woman kept staring at him. He couldn’t help but feel responsible for her tears.

“Do you admit responsibility for the sixty-three deaths in New York?”

“That was an apology!”

“Why did you let it happen?”

It was an avalanche threatening to sweep him away.

Then someone got a hold of a megaphone. “You people are disgusting!”

It was like an extra knife, twisting in his gut. Virgil looked down at the wooden table in front of him. After images danced in his eyesight.

But the megaphone continued. “How can you treat these men this way? How many of you have had loved ones saved by International Rescue? I have! We owe these men everything, you ungrateful slimes!”

Virgil’s head shot up. What?

On the other side of the crowd, almost opposite the woman who had accused him, were a group of people all dressed in green. Beside them were other groups of colours – yellow, blue, gold and red. Above this rainbow were more placards, but their message was considerably different.

‘Virgil Tracy saved my boy’.

‘I’ve been saved and so have you.’

‘Rescued by International Rescue.’

‘Leave IR alone.’

The one that screamed out in blue ‘Scott Tracy, will you marry me?’ held a different message altogether, but the spirit was there.

The woman holding the microphone was dark-haired and unfamiliar.

The hub bub had died down just a little and Virgil found the ability to breathe again.

The woman’s eyes caught his and the determination and the…trust in them was a physical thing that up and slapped him.

She didn’t let him go.

He was International Rescue.

He saved people.

Again, the crowd reacted to him. Much more must be showing on his face than he was aware, because a tension settled over the people below. Eyes darted between the woman in green and Virgil’s stare. New questions popped up, but they were quieter and finally, Veronica was able to take control of the proceedings.

“Thank you for your consideration.” Her pursed lips added sarcasm and not a little admonishment to her words. “Scott and Virgil Tracy are here to answer a few questions, but before we start, Mr Tracy has a statement.”

She stepped back from the lectern and Scott stood up, his fingers brushing gently over Virgil’s shoulder.

Scott exuded command. His brother was putting every bit of himself into projecting confidence and power.

And he was succeeding.

“Several accusations have been made against International Rescue in recent days.” He paused, letting his words sink in. “Regarding Hurricane Lucy…myself and my brothers are grieved at the loss of life caused by the storm, and the damage to the environment incurred by the oil spill.” Another pause, eyes raking the crowd. “Despite repeated attempts to launch, we were restrained by the Global Defence Force from saving those in danger.

“We wanted to, but we were forced to sit and watch when we could have prevented so much.

“And for that reason, we share your grief.”

Blue eyes raked the silent crowd. “Regarding the incident in New York…” A whimper to their left and Virgil’s eyes were once again forced to land on the woman who had lost her son.

The tears were gone and he only found hatred in her eyes.

He drew in a breath.

Cameras flashed yet again.

“Virgil! We trust you!” It was loud. It was sudden. But it whipped his eyes away from accusation to the other side of the crowd once again where that colourful group of people projected support.

His heart twisted.

He felt Scott’s eyes on him, before his brother retook control of the crowd. “Regarding the incident in New York. We are investigating the cause of the accident, but I can assure you that it was not pilot error.”

He held the crowd with his eyes and Virgil found even more admiration for his brother. Scott knew exactly what he was doing and he was doing it well.

His brother took a step back. “Thank you for coming.”

Several reporters twitched at that, arms shooting up with a sudden fear they were about to lose their opportunity to speak with the Tracys.

Intelligent and powerful, Scott looked down on them and held them with his eyes just that moment longer before breaking the spell and returning to his seat beside Virgil.

Virgil stared at him.

Okay, wow.

His brother turned to look at him and blue sparkled as one corner of his lips curled up just a little.

Oh, confident and suave Scooter who was fully aware of his skill. It distracted Virgil from dark thoughts and he suddenly realised that he was as subject to his brother’s spell as the rest of the crowd.

Smart ass.

Veronica took the stand again. “We have time for a few relevant questions.”

Hands that had dropped under that blue-eyed bewitchment shot up again. Veronica turned to Scott, non-verbally handing him the floor.

And Virgil realised that Scott had returned to his seat for only one reason.

To support his younger brother through this.

Virgil let his shoulders drop.

Control of the crowd returned to Scott.

The commander eyed the cluster of journalists, raised a hand and pointed to one on the right. “Ned?”

Virgil blinked. It was indeed Ned Cook. Scott and the reporter had a long term, ongoing antagonism. Cook had chased International Rescue across the globe, attending as many rescues as he could. Having once encountered a frustrated Scott in person, and then been saved by Virgil during a building collapse not long after, he was very pro-IR on every front.

Scott still had words with him time to time. The man always had to push the boundaries and Virgil knew his brother found him irritating.

Virgil just worried the man was going to get himself killed.

But he was a fair reporter and would relay the facts.

Dark hair and eyes bounced between the two Tracys. “So, what you are saying is that International Rescue was not responsible for either incident?”

Scott tilted his head. “Mr Cook, what I am saying is that we are not responsible for being unable to assist during Hurricane Lucy. That blame lies entirely with GDF Command. We have recordings of their direction during the crisis and the extent we tried to help. We were vetoed on all fronts.”

“Why didn’t you fly anyway?”

“And give the GDF an excuse to ground us permanently? Risk all the future lives we could save?” Scott sighed. “We can only help those who want to be helped.”

That set the crowd rumbling. There were shouts of ‘we wanted help’ and ‘please help us’.

Virgil found his eyes drawn again to the left.

The woman was still staring at him with accusation in every line.

He shied away.

“What about the New York disaster?” Cook wasn’t letting them off the hook.

Scott remained calm. “As I said, we are still investigating.”

Virgil was aware of all the eyes on him.

Scott pointed at another reporter.

The man straightened. “Eddie Kerr, sir. I’d like to address Mr Virgil Tracy.”

Scott glanced at him sideways, but Virgil nodded.

All the attention turned to him.

“Virgil, what were your thoughts when that slab of concrete dropped on those sixty-three people?”

Virgil’s throat tightened and he had to clear his throat, but he found his voice. “Sixty-four, my youngest brother was also under that concrete when it fell.”

“But he survived. The other sixty-three did not.”

“I tried, Mr Kerr. God, I tried. It shouldn’t have happened.” A hand landed on his arm and cameras flashed at him again.

God, he was the vulnerability.

“You did your best, Virgil” The megaphone again. “We know you-” She was cut off.

His eyes found the green woman wrestling with a police officer. He appeared to be attempting to take away the megaphone.

Virgil stood up. “No, leave her alone!”

“Virgil!” Scott hissed at him again.

He turned to his brother. “She has the right to speak, Scott. Just as much as anyone else here.” Turning back to the crowd. “Leave her be!”

“You don’t control the police, Mr Tracy.” It was sneered from somewhere down at the front.

Scott rose beside him, tension in every line as a woman in a suit stepped out of the crowd. She had an intensity in her step that spoke of confidence and a right to be where she was.

On the other side of the plaza, the green woman was joined by one dressed in red and a man in blue. More police ran to the scene as the woman struggled. The crowd murmured uneasily.

“Mr Tracy!” The woman in the suit was being held back by IR Security. Gerald, in fact, Scott’s personal attendant. “I’m from the Office of the Commissioner of Justice.” Her tones were sharp and her identification was literally shoved in Gerald’s face. The officer frowned as he focussed on the document. Eyes darted up to Scott and confirmed her identity.

Cameras were flashing again, almost blinding Virgil as his brother nodded. Gerald let the woman through, hovering behind her, hand on his stunner.

She sauntered up to the podium, eyes cold and accusing. She slapped a clear flimsy down in front of Virgil as Scott shifted closer, all towering protectiveness.

The woman ignored him. Attention solely on Virgil, “You’re summoned, Mr Virgil Tracy, to answer for your actions.” Her finger tapped the electronic slip and the flimsy flashed acceptance.

Virgil stared at her, but she ignored him, and turned to Scott. “You don’t control everything, commander. You will answer for your actions.”

She spun on her heel and strode off into the crowd.

Virgil found his mouth open and shut it.

The light and noise of the crowd rose up and consumed him.

-o-o-o-

Next

[aion-rsa]

How an Overlooked British Classic Boasted Sean Connery’s Finest Performance

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“He moved like a panther.” This was the observation which convinced producers Albert R “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman to cast Sean Connery, a relatively unknown young actor from Edinburgh, in the lead role of the first James Bond picture, 1962’s Dr No. It was this decision which was to forever change the face of movie stardom and blockbuster film-making. The choice was not, initially, a popular one with 007 author Ian Fleming; where his books had imagined Bond as the archetypal upper-class English gentleman, the gruff Scottish Connery brought a transatlantic insouciance and a palpably working-class edge to the role. In the process, he had invented the modern action hero.

Within a few short years, Connery had been cemented as an international sex symbol and propelled to unprecedented heights of celebrity. He later said of the relentless pursuit by fans and the press, “the only comparison would be The Beatles, but there were four of them to kick it around.” Perhaps it was because of this relentless adoration that Connery’s focus quickly shifted from blockbusters to meatier roles in smaller productions.

Thus it was in September 1964, off the back of the smash-hit Goldfinger and approaching the peak of his 007 fame, that Connery travelled to the blistering heat of Almería to shoot The Hill with up-and-coming American drama director Sidney Lumet. A mid-budget, black-and-white British war drama, this was entirely divorced from the technicolour spectacle of the Bond adventures, and it’s unlikely the film would have been made at all without Connery’s name attached. His commitment to the project is perhaps illustrated by the fact that the filming schedule caused him to miss the red carpet premiere of Goldfinger in London. This faith turned out to be well placed, as The Hill represents some of Connery’s finest work in front of the camera  – a powerfully nuanced performance which effectively immunised him from typecasting by the Bond films.

Set in a British Army disciplinary camp during the Second World War’s North African Campaign, The Hill stars Connery as Trooper Joe Roberts, a disgraced new inmate whose rebellious spirit brings him into conflict with the brutal prison authorities. From its opening moments the film knowingly trades on Connery’s celebrity and imposing screen presence. The cavernous wrinkles and beads of perspiration on his twitching, moustachioed face are framed in extreme closeup – a stark visual technique Lumet was fond of using to add cinematic impetus to the script. 

Indeed, there’s a remarkable lack of vanity throughout Connery’s performance. Forgoing the hair piece on which he relied as Bond, his receding hairline is on prominent display, and the screenplay provides little opportunity for his characteristic swagger. The anti-heroic Trooper Roberts is stripped of Connery’s usual physicality and sex appeal, allowing him to stretch his legs as an actor into moments of moral complexity and weakness.

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James Bond Producers, Daniel Craig, Hugh Jackman, and More Pay Tribute to Sean Connery

By Mike Cecchini

A crucial such episode arrives in the final act of the film when Roberts, bloodied and exhausted after days of abuse, collapses during a verbal confrontation. Unlike the suave and controlled professionals with whom Connery was usually identified, Roberts is a broken man always teetering on the edge of losing control. Taken within the context of his superstar career status at the time, it’s a brave and remarkably vulnerable performance.

Although Connery receives top billing, his name arriving before even the film’s title in the opening credits, Ray Rigby’s screenplay for The Hill is really an ensemble piece. Connery’s brilliance is more than matched by a malevolent performance from Harry Andrews, who makes for a formidable antagonist in the form of the tyrannical RSM Wilson. There’s also an intense turn from Ossie Davis as Private Jacko King, a West Indian prisoner who endures racial abuse from camp guards and fellow prisoners alike, and eventually allies with Roberts in his campaign against the cruel authorities.

Depicting the British military establishment as ignorant, callous, and vicious, the film avoids the typically optimistic and patriotic trappings of British war films of its era, and this may explain its relative underperformance at the box office. Awarded an ominous “X” rating by British censors upon release, it paints a grim and uncompromising picture of the masculine barbarity which flourishes at times of war, and the moral courage required in facing up to it.

Rarely feted with the same veneration as Connery’s Bond blockbusters of the sixties, The Hill remains an underseen British classic which nevertheless illustrated the Scottish superstar’s immense range as an actor, and placed him in good stead for when the time came to retire 007’s licence to kill. He made four more films with Lumet, notably including the dark 1973 crime drama, The Offence, but none would match the dramatic intensity or political radicalism of The Hill.

As the first and arguably finest Bond, Sean Connery reinvented what it meant to be a leading man. In a real sense, he was James Bond, but The Hill demonstrates that he was also so much more; an actor of versatility and vulnerability with a dedication to his art that went beyond what was easy or in vogue. The ultimate icon of his era, Connery was to British screen acting what the Beatles were for British rock, and every male film star of the last six decades lives in his shadow. He might have moved like a panther, but it was his humanity which dominated the screen.

The post How an Overlooked British Classic Boasted Sean Connery’s Finest Performance appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[chiseler]

STEVE COCHRAN: The Rough and the Smooth

The Chase (1946) opens with a broke ex-serviceman finding a lost wallet, plump with cash and bearing the name and address of its owner, Eddie Roman. Being an honest guy—or, as Roman’s sidekick puts it, a “silly law-abiding jerk”—the vet goes to return it. As though wandering into an opium trance, he enters a classical-rococo-tropical mansion, a fantasy of vulgar magnificence. The front door is bedecked with cherubs’ heads (one of which swivels to reveal a peep-hole framing the unmistakable eye of Peter Lorre). The dazzling white interior is cluttered with marble statuary on pillars, crystal chandeliers, antique chairs, banana trees, all slashed by thin bars of sunlight falling through white shutters.

Eddie Roman, a Miami gangster, is at home amid this surreal decadence. We first see him sitting regally in a barber’s chair, crowned with a pearl-grey homburg, intently studying his pencil-thin mustache in a hand-mirror. He has reason to look pleased as he contemplates his handsome face, its square-jawed and thick-browed swarthiness lightened by limpid eyes and a deceptively sweet smile. Absorbed in admiring his appearance, he pays no attention to the girl kneeling at his side giving him a manicure, until her file slips and nicks his finger. “I’m sorry, Mr. Roman, you moved,” the frightened girl gasps. “Yeah, but you didn’t—fast enough,” he replies, knocking her to the ground with a casual blow.

With a different actor, this whole set-up—the flamboyant interior decoration, the classical allusions, the dandified sadism, the ever-present sidekick played by Peter Lorre—might come across as heavily lavender-tinted. But Eddie Roman is Steve Cochran, who plays it straight in more ways than one. Cochran grew up in Wyoming and had worked as a cowboy before trying his hand at acting, but Hollywood took one look at his oily black hair and arrogant poise and pigeonholed him as a mobster. He took to the role with a patented brand of velvety menace, concluding that the way to play heavies was to assume that his characters had done nothing wrong, as they themselves would no doubt believe. Not for him the noir torments of guilt or anxiety or haunted memory. His gangsters were slick and unfeeling, and when he came to play deeper roles in films like Tomorrow is Another Day, Private Hell 36, and Il Grido, he plumbed the specific melancholy of men whose inchoate vulnerability is forced through the conventional expressions of machismo.

He was born Robert Alexander Cochran in 1917 and adopted the name Steve while acting in stock. (It suits him, perhaps for the same reason Lauren Bacall assigns it to Bogart’s Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not, giving it a distinctive inflection that conveys, “You’re an overconfident jerk—if only I didn’t find you so attractive.”) Cochran left college and headed to Hollywood convinced he could be a movie star, but despite his looks and confidence he was no overnight success; it took seven years of provincial theater (including Shakespeare in Carmel) before he finally scored a contract with Goldwyn in 1945. The Chase was his first decent break, after a series of small parts in Boston Blackie programmers and Danny Kaye vehicles.

Directed by Arthur Ripley and gorgeously shot by Franz Planer, The Chase is a baroquely convoluted adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s The Black Path of Fear. The centerpiece is an extended dream sequence that eschews the usual cinematic clichés but unsettles through jarring plot discontinuities; a maze of dark, disorienting spaces; and inexplicable poetic images like the woman weeping at a table bearing the half-eaten carcass of a watermelon, like something out of a 17th century Spanish painting. The film’s seemingly normal hero (the ex-serviceman, played by Robert Cummings) turns out to have a fragile mind prone to sudden white-outs. He’s almost as passive as Eddie Roman’s imprisoned wife (Michèle Morgan), who drifts around the mansion in draped Grecian gowns and a fog of hopeless terror. What she’s terrified of is her husband, and Cochran makes you believe that Roman is capable of even worse cruelty than anything we see him do. The calmer he is the more anxiously we wait for his outbursts of violence. His light voice, sweet smile, and hypnotic stillness create a deliciously sinister effect. Here and elsewhere, there’s something about the way Cochran’s hazel eyes catch the light, with a gleam that can register as tenderness or threat. It’s hard to pin down this luster, and that’s one of the best assets a movie star can have—some small thing that can’t be explained.

Though the bulk of his work was in B movies, Cochran appeared very briefly in Goldwyn’s great triumph, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Near the end of the movie, the beleaguered former airforce captain played by Dana Andrews—an intelligent, serious man stymied by a bad marriage and a humiliating job as a soda jerk—walks into his apartment to find another man lounging around in his shirtsleeves. It takes only moments to register the kind of heel he is: a self-satisfied, flashily handsome guy in a loud pinstripe suit, smoking and chewing gum and condescending to his married girlfriend’s husband. It’s his job to embody the crass, unscrupulous side of postwar life, the veterans who aren’t haunted by what they’ve seen, the operators who see money “lying around” for the taking. Cochran nails the type in under five minutes of screen time.

Virginia Mayo plays the wife he’s fooling around with, and they were paired frequently in the late forties, both typed as low-class, sexy but vulgar. They’re forgettable in A Song is Born (1948), Howard Hawks’s lifeless musical remake of Ball of Fire, but wonderful as a pair of greedy, backstabbing lovers in Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949). Cochran is “Big” Ed, a discontented second-banana to Cody Jarrett (James Cagney), who taunts him with sneering air quotes around his moniker. Cagney’s majestically psychotic performance fills the movie like a bellows, as he crumples inward under the pressure of his migraines and then explodes in gleeful violence. Big Ed is his opposite, cool and smooth, his stolid repose off-setting Cody’s trip-wire sensitivity. Cochran looks fantastic in a dark suit with a black shirt and light tie, and his best moments are tiny touches like the way he loudly spits out his gum before kissing Mayo, or blows smoke sideways in a beautifully nasty, smirking close-up as he quietly threatens to tell Cody who killed his mother if she walks out on him. If Cagney is white heat, Cochran is black ice.

He played a variation on Big Ed the next year in The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), one of those fun, full-throttle Joan Crawford vehicles that follows a woman as she claws her way out of dreary poverty, attains a pinnacle of penthouse luxury, and plunges from there into the abyss. Starting in the Texas oil fields, she winds up as the mistress of a racket boss (the terrifying David Brian), who sends her on a mission to spy on one of his regional under-bosses, whom he suspects of plotting to take over. That would be Cochran, who is not satisfied with the desert fiefdom where he lounges around swimming pools in white terry-cloth robes and saunters around nightclubs in loud sport jackets. He’s not a bad guy here, especially compared with Brian, but he remains devoted to the one Big Ed calls, “a very good friend—me.”

Cochran’s philosophy of playing heavies as though they were blameless did not mean he tried to make them sympathetic; indeed, it’s the utter remorselessness of his bad guys that makes them so bad. Still, it can be hard not to root for him in formulaic “crime does not pay” flicks like Highway 301 (1950), which opens with not one but three state governors solemnly addressing the camera, and then smothers all the action with heavy-handed voice-over. It’s tempting to just turn the sound off, because the film looks terrific, darkly glistening with rain-wet streets, sleek curves of forties cars, the matte sheen of good suits and perfect fedoras. Cochran, as the leader of a heist mob, wears an arrogant sneer as stylishly as his overcoat. When his girlfriend whines about feeling bored and neglected, he says coldly, “Why don’t you do something about your face? That ought to keep you busy for a few hours.”

He took a break from suave gangsters to play a cowardly redneck lout in Storm Warning (1950), an “exposé” of the Ku Klux Klan that proves nothing is more pusillanimous than Hollywood when it thinks it’s being courageous. Cochran cited the role as a favorite; he recalled being terrified by Klan demonstrations as a child and spoke of wanting to show how “shabby” they really were, of his pride at striking a small blow for racial tolerance. He was clearly sincere, and he later attended the 1963 March on Washington with fellow progressives like Marlon Brando; unfortunately, Storm Warning makes no mention whatever of the Klan’s attitudes towards blacks or Jews, depicting it as merely a racket to extort money from gullible hicks.

The film is further compromised by shameless plagiarism of A Streetcar Named Desire, with Ginger Rogers visiting her pregnant sister (Doris Day), who dotes on her crass but hunky working-class husband. Cochran, wearing a white t-shirt and sucking on a bottle of beer, lays on the dumb rube act a little thick, though at least he does not come off as a Brando impersonator. After a beautifully filmed opening in which Rogers witnesses a Klan killing in the deserted streets of a Southern backwater, and a powerful scene in which she is bullied into lying under oath about what she saw, the film turns luridly exploitative. Rogers is spied on and assaulted by her drunken brother-in-law, then publicly whipped at a Klan rally. This pushes the film’s wrong-headedness to absurdity: the culmination of the Klan’s evil is an attack on a beautiful blonde white woman.

In the 1950s, Cochran got tired of playing heavies and biting the dust in every movie; unhappy at Warner Brothers, he left in 1952 to form his own production company, producing a few change-of-pace films like Come Next Spring. But one of his very best roles came at Warners in Tomorrow is Another Day (1951), an unusually subtle and character-focused B noir directed by Felix Feist. Here he sheds his usual self-assurance to play a rough, unfinished man, drastically inexperienced and socially awkward—and does it beautifully. His character, Bill Clark, was sent to prison at age 14 for the murder of his abusive father. Released at 31, he’s a child in a man’s body, touchingly naïve but also insecure and truculent, readily falling back on violence.

Like Rip Van Winkle waking to an unfamiliar world, he wanders around town in a cheap, unfashionable suit, carrying his few belongings in a cardboard box. He’s drawn first to the new cars, studying one with boyish wonder; then to girls, hesitantly trying to follow one in the street. His uncertainty and sulky defensiveness are painfully exposed, whether he’s being teased for ordering three pieces of pie in a diner, or stumbling sheepishly into the dime-a-dance Dreamland, where ten cents buys sixty seconds of feminine company. Here he is easy pickings for Kay (Ruth Roman), a gorgeous, hard-shelled bottle blonde who demands trinkets in exchange for her time. When he obediently returns with a wrist-watch, she rewards him with a peck on the cheek and a “Thanks, Jim.” Still smitten, he shyly kisses her hand, and on learning she doesn’t get off work for hours, mutters, “I’m used to waitin’.”

When Bill and Kay are mixed up in a killing, he panics, knowing that with his record he’s a “dead pigeon.” They go on the lam, but their route takes them far from the usual lovers-on-the-run formulas. Without a car of their own, they sneak into one of the vehicles being towed on a tractor-trailer, hop freight trains, and hitch a ride with a Joad-like family on their way to a lettuce-picking camp in Salinas. They start out hostile and bickering, and when Bill proposes in a motel room he does so by handing her a ring and saying churlishly, “Pawnbroker gave me a good deal.” But though he implies that marriage is a sacrifice to necessity, the truth is that he desperately wants her and has decided this is the only way he can get her. In the scene that follows, as they lounge on a bank above the railroad tracks, he tells her about the murder of his father and about his years in jail, where he earned ten cents a day as a welder. “You worked a whole day,” she says wonderingly, “Just to dance a minute at Dreamland.”

Bill asks his bride if she thinks people change, “I mean, inside.” She does: dying her hair back to brunette, switching her name to Kathy, she emerges from her cynical shell. But Bill never seems to change; in the end, when he’s betrayed by a friend and threatened with going back to jail, he reacts with blind anger and panicked violence. This incorrigibility coexists with his gentleness: when Kathy tells him she’s pregnant, his sullen face delicately opens into an angelic smile, but not long after she has to shoot him to stop him from killing the sheriff who comes to arrest him.  The ending of the movie is a cop-out, but the revelation that the whole saga has been driven by mistakes, lies, and misunderstandings has a certain fitting irony.

Cochran drew even more deeply on this strain of confusion and sorrow in Antonioni’s Il Grido (1957), another movie about life on the road. The title translates as “The Cry,” and the film is essentially one long, muted howl of loss. Dubbed in Italian, Cochran plays Aldo, a simple working man who has lived for years in a common law marriage with Irma (Alida Valli), with whom he has a daughter, Rosina (Mirna Girardi). The movie opens as Irma, without warning or explanation, tells Aldo she’s leaving him for another man.

Like Bill Clark, Aldo is a muddled mixture of gentleness and violence, an aching wound papered over with inarticulate masculine pride. His reaction to Irma’s rejection is baffled and ineffectual; his instinct is to lash out, but he pulls back from hitting her. Later, desperate to assert his authority, he beats her in front of a crowd of townsfolk, but it’s he who comes away looking weak and defeated, having now sealed their estrangement. Taking their daughter, he sets out on an aimless journey, a futile search to replace what he’s lost.

The real star of Il Grido is the wintry landscape of the Po Valley. Nothing could be further from the Italy of vacation fantasies than this grey, muddy, industrial wasteland. Thin, bare branches are traced on the fog, sprouting from pollarded trees like amputees’ stumps. Desolate fields of rocks, marshes, and flat sodden riverbanks are made even bleaker by factories and construction sites, gas stations and refineries. The relentlessly overcast, drizzly weather is like an expression of Aldo’s numb, mournful mood. Cochran’s face, beginning to look worn, blends in with the landscape; he’s still ruggedly handsome, but stripped of all glamour and self-assurance, an ordinary man suddenly adrift with no bearings.

Aldo is hardly a model father, as he subjects his little girl to a tough and lonely life on the road, but there are moments when he comforts her with heartbreaking tenderness, and you always feel that in his fumbling way he is doing his best for her. (Still, it’s a relief when he finally sends her back to her mother.) The structure of this episodic film comes from Aldo’s encounters with three different women, each a possible but ultimately inadequate substitute for Irma. A former girlfriend (played by Betsy Blair) and a sexy young widow who runs an isolated service station both offer him refuge, and he has a torrid affair with the widow, but both times he drifts away. He has the chance to go to Venezuela, but inexplicably tears up his papers. He winds up with a prostitute who suffers from malaria, huddling in a leaky hut made of reeds and filled with acrid smoke. Amid this wretchedness, he remembers visiting a museum with Irma, a poignant revelation of what she represents in his barren and messy world.

He is inconsolable, and the life and purpose just drain out of him, leaving him an empty husk. In the end, Aldo returns to the town he left, to find it roiling with mass meetings over land seizures, a chaos of bulldozers, ruins, blazing fields and armed police. But for Aldo, the last straw is seeing, through a window, Irma with her new baby, annihilating his hopes. It’s hard to think of another movie in which someone essentially, and convincingly, dies of love.

Steve Cochran had a great deal of practice at dying; having succumbed onscreen to many predictable violent ends, he topped them in 1965 with one of Hollywood’s most legendarily bizarre deaths. That he was only 48 is tragic, but that he died aboard a yacht with an all-female crew is irresistibly titillating. None of the young Mexican women (whom he had hired, allegedly with a view to making a movie about a real yacht captain who had an “all-girl” crew) knew how to pilot the boat, which drifted for ten days off the coast of Guatemala after Cochran unexpectedly fell ill and died of a respiratory ailment. This story left a somewhat lurid stain on his life, though it seems to have been nothing but a publicity stunt gone terribly awry.

Alas, Cochran’s off-screen behavior rarely enhanced his reputation for seriousness. He seems to have been amiable and well-meaning, and neither his chronic womanizing nor his penchant for reckless driving and flying were anything out of the ordinary in Hollywood. More damningly, Don Siegel claimed he had trouble catching Cochran “even slightly sober” during the filming of Private Hell 36 (1954), though you’d never guess this from his sharp, nuanced performance as a corrupt cop in love with a nightclub singer (Ida Lupino, who co-wrote the script). His character, Cal Bruner, is callous, vain, and morally shifty—a plainclothes dick who tackles and fatally shoots a robber, then readies himself for a date with perfumed aftershave while complaining that the “miserable creep” ruined his new suit. He’s a guy on the make, lightly detached from everything except his own concerns. Yet when Cal falls for Lily, a canary with an exhausted voice and bone-dry sense of humor, he becomes someone we care about. He has better taste than we would have expected (Lily—who seems older than Cal, though Lupino was a year younger than Cochran—is no brainless babe), and more substance.

“You know, somewhere in my dim past I seem to have heard this before,” Lily deadpans when Cal makes a pass. “I’ve said it before,” he replies readily, “To all shapes and sizes. Only this time I mean it. Don’t ask me why.” Cochran and Lupino have serious chemistry (the scene where he unties the halter neck of her dress and massages her naked shoulders is a classic of Code-era steaminess), but Cal and Lily also connect on some deeper level, making us believe these two what’s-in-it-for-me types surprise themselves with genuine feeling. When he sits at the bar watching her croak out a hard-hearted ditty called “Didn’t You Know,” his eyes brim with a clear, soft light. In this part, Cochran layers cool selfishness and tender warmth so closely, nothing thicker than a razor could separate them.

by Imogen Sara Smith