The Weird World of Richard Quine
why did she show up alone to that double feature wearing an open-backed white cocktail dress with no bra?
"It's been weird knowing you," Kim Novak's glistening moll says to rumpled Fred MacMurray, about a third of the way through Richard Quine's 1954 noir Pushover. I didn't catch how this was translated into French subtitles, but I can tell you that I was the only person in the packed house at the Cinematheque Francaise last Saturday afternoon who laughed at it.
I laughed because it felt so out of time -- not contemporary, exactly, at least not to 2024, but more like something you'd hear in a neo-noir of the 1990s than in a film made in 1954, at the tail end of the first noir wave. But then, a lot of things about Pushover are "weird." The sheer starpower, for starters: I watch a lot of film noirs and while many are anchored by one or two stars, more often it's Barbara Stanwyck and a C-list hunk, or Robert Mitchum and a starlet who would be unlikely to merit her own evening on TCM's Summer Under the Stars. The Double Indemnitys or In A Lonely Places, featuring superstar pairings, are rare. Pushover features three stars who could anchor their own miniseries on the Criterion Channel, although at the time it was made, only Fred MacMurray was at that level of fame.
46 years old, ten years after starring in foundational noir text Double Indemnity, MacMurray looks frozen in time. Though he's more than twice the age of 22 year-old Kim Novak, in her first credited role, the age gap between them is barely noticeable and doesn't feel at all inappropriate. This weekend I watched about half of Brat, Andrew McCarthy's documentary about what he felt to be long-lasting repurcussions from a New York Magazine story that coined the term Brat Pack to describe the stars of a wave of films about young people (I discussed this in Erotic 80s). In his documentary, McCarthy (who I've always liked, and who is now a silver fox about whom my texts between other middle aged women are on fire) claims, “In the history of Hollywood, this had never happened before." He's wrong about that -- with the advent of rock ‘n’ roll in the mid to late 50s an early 60s, Hollywood would became completely obsessed with youth culture. Think about Gidget, or Annette Funicello. Think about Elvis. But he’s also wrong to omit the context of wider cultural change.
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