Richard Conte - Film Noir Foundation

32 Noir City Sentinel FALL 2010
RICHARD CONTE
A Private Source of Electricity
by Imogen Sara Smith
Special to the Sentinel
“Y
ou’re not like the rest of Papa’s hoodlums,” mobster’s daughter Anne Bancroft tells Richard Conte in New York
Confidential. He coolly responds, “I like to use the
term ‘employee.’” As the mugs and roughnecks of the
early thirties evolved into more sophisticated postwar
gangsters, Conte’s elegance sheathed the hood’s raw
aggression in silky style. Born Nicholas Conte in
1910, the son of an immigrant Jersey City barber, he
became one of Hollywood’s first Italian-American
leading men. He changed his name to soften its ethnic
flavor, only to be cast as Nick Magellan, Nick Rocco,
Nick Garcos. Though he never broke free from the
orbit of crime, he moved Hollywood’s depiction of
Italians away from the crude, Neanderthal impersonations of Paul Muni’s Tony Camonte (“’Attsa pwutty
hot!”) and Edward G. Robinson’s Rico Bandello,
toward the dignified mystique of the Corleones.
Conte’s swansong in American movies was his brief
but crucial turn as Don Barzini, the quiet nemesis who
lurks behind every attack on Don Corleone and his
sons in The Godfather (1972).
In House of Strangers (1949), Edward G.
Robinson, having fun with a Chico Marx accent,
plays Conte’s father, a Sicilian immigrant and onetime barber who has risen to success as the owner of
a bank and revels in his roles as family patriarch and
neighborhood “godfather,” from whom petitioners
beg loans to buy a horse or treat a sick child. A melodrama simmered with plenty of red wine and garlic,
the film is overcooked in parts, but has some sharp,
spicy scenes and settings: street markets, speakeasies
and steam baths. While the revenge plot heads for the
usual moralizing anticlimax, the family disintegrates
under the strains of jealousy, resentment and betrayal.
The script updates the tale of Joseph and his Brothers,
with Max (Conte) as the favorite son, a smart lawyer
who has inherited his father Gino Monetti’s overweening self-regard. The others suffer from their
father’s neglect and contempt: he treats the dour Joe
(Luther Adler) as a low-level clerk, barely notices the
weak, vain Tony (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.) and addresses
the muscle-bound Pietro (Paul Valentine) as “dumbhead.”
When Gino gets in trouble for unorthodox banking practices (“What I think is-a right, is-a right!”
sums up his attitude toward legality), the three mistreated sons smugly refuse to help him, then take over
the bank and banish him. Trying to save his father
from prison, Max attempts to bribe a juror and Joe
betrays him to the police; after seven years in jail he
emerges with a smoldering vendetta. His girlfriend
Irene (Susan Hayward) tries to break the family spell
of hatred, accusing him of being his father’s pawn,
sacrificing his future to a dead past. Irene and Max are
once seen kissing in front of a boxing ring, and their
sparring relationship produces some of the film’s best
moments. She’s an imperious, “chromium-plated”
heiress who claims Max as a lover despite his engagement to Maria (Debra Paget), a traditional, chaste Italian girl. Irene is drawn to his insolent swagger even as
she resists it, sneering, “This isn’t Mulberry Street.
You are no longer Il Duce.”
Gino Monetti proudly declares himself a man of
the New World, in a scene in which he hilariously bullies Maria’s mother (Hope Emerson, who had at least
six inches on Robinson) and lectures her about
modern American values. But Gino represents the
refusal to forget, the insistence on perpetuating
destructive feuds. Robinson’s charisma and operatic
brio are such that it’s hard not to side with his overbearing, wrong-headed character, and hard to feel satisfied by the redemptive ending in which Max lets his
murderous brothers off scot-free. Conte’s signature
role was that of the first-generation American, caught
between an ethnic old world of family ties and traditional machismo and an unstable modern world of
individualism, free enterprise and sexually liberated
women. While noir heroes are often alienated loners,
Richard Conte’s films most often placed him in the
turbulent confines of ethnic families and criminal
organizations.
C
onte said that he learned more hanging around
the Jersey City docks than he did in school. He
worked as a Wall Street messenger, a floor
walker, a truck driver and a barber before landing a job
as a waiter at a Connecticut country club in 1935. There
he was drafted into the floor show by entertainment
director Joe Pevney (who would appear with Conte in
Thieves’ Highway.) Initially convinced that acting was
for sissies, he found himself moved by the script—
about a man unjustly accused of murder—and gave
such an intense performance that he was invited to join
the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. There he
soaked up culture, studying drama, music and dance,
and married actress Ruth Strohm. He did well on Broad-
E
FALL 2010 Noir City Sentinel 33
way and in 1943 signed with 20th-Century Fox. In Hollywood he took up painting and hung out with other
East Coast liberals like Gene Kelly and John Garfield,
joining Bogart and Bacall on their famous trip to Washington to protest the HUAC hearings.
Like other actors recruited to combat the
wartime manpower shortage in the movies, he had a
quick rise to prominence through the celluloid branch
of the armed forces. Cast as the obligatory wisecracking ethnic city boy in A Walk in the Sun (1945), a pensive war movie about an infantry detachment in Italy
that loses its commanding officers, Conte lifts the
film with his élan, throwing off a dazzle like sunlight
on a knife’s edge. When a buddy asks him what he’s
going to do after the war, he replies without hesitation, “Join the mob.” It was a prescient response.
Once ethnic city boys were no longer needed to diversify army units, Conte turned to crime, though for
years he alternated sides of the law. He was a detective in The Spider (1945), a low-budget whodunit
with a bit too much comic relief to classify as noir. In
Somewhere in the Night (1946), a yarn about an
amnesiac vet, he demonstrated his versatility: quick
as a switchblade he could go from smooth-mannered
nice guy to vicious killer. As a wrongly imprisoned
man in the documentary-style Call Northside 777
(1948), he gives a performance of simple, almost
painful intensity; when he’s strapped into a lie-detector you can feel his throbbing pulse, twitching muscles and strained breathing.
Conte always seemed to be plugged into some
private source of electricity, as though you could get
a shock from touching him. He needs that feverish
brilliance in Cry of the City (1948), since he spends
most of the movie lying in bed or limping around,
dragging a gunshot-riddled leg and crumpling with
pain. He’s as dangerous as a wounded animal, lying
low, striking unpredictably, but his most powerful
weapon is not violence, it’s his ability to seduce
people into helping him. Proud, remorseless, flippant,
persuasive and sharp as a shiv, he easily seduces the
audience, as well.
The film dusts off that old chestnut about two
boys from the same neighborhood who grow up on
different sides of the law: Victor Mature’s Lieutenant
Candella is a staunch, incorruptible police detective,
while Conte’s Martin Rome is a hoodlum who has
shot a cop during a robbery. But the plot merely forms
a scaffold for scenes in which Rome and Candella
The wrongly accused Conte relies on crusading reporter
Jimmy Stewart to free him from prison in Call Northside 777
Conte is charismatic villain Martin Rome opposite Victor Mature's stolid lawman in Cry of the City
alternately vie for leverage and influence over an quickness, and Candella comes across as a monomaeclectic parade of supporting characters, all driven by niacal Javert whose hatred is aroused as much by his
fear, greed or some combination of the two.
enemy’s charisma as by his crimes. The scenes in
When we first see Marty he’s near death, with a which the policeman visits the Rome family seem
priest muttering over him and hushed family mem- intended to soften his character, but his success in
bers gathered around in a hospital that looks like a turning everyone against Marty—even his hero-worchurch. Though badly wounded in the shoot-out, he shipping kid brother and the innocent, angelic girlpulls through and is soon holding court while chained friend he worked so hard to protect—only builds
to a hospital bed. He cavalierly dismisses the cops sympathy for the endangered outcast.
when they come to question him about a jewel theft,
Crime and the law both use and hurt people: in
lunges to strangle the lawyer Niles (Barry Kroeger) a sad little scene, Marty’s father (Tito Vuolo) has to
when he threatens Marty’s girlfriend Teena, and uses resign from the Knights of Columbus because of the
his wiles on the dumpy, middle-aged nurse, Miss black mark against his family. The film is full of these
Pruett (Betty Garde), to talk her into hiding Teena. moments—like the revelation that Miss Pruett lives
Transferred to a prison cell, he’s befriended by a with her selfish, cranky, overbearing old mother—
dimwitted trusty who helps him to escape.
that broaden and deepen its portrait of the city. As in
Outside, he first pays a visit to Niles, the smirk- Odd Man Out, the wounded man’s journey illumiing, plump-as-a-slug lawyer who has the stolen nates the people who help or betray him. But where
jewels; after forcing him to open the safe, Marty stabs Mason is passive and helpless, Martin Rome never
him through his desk chair. Denied refuge by his par- stops fighting.
ents, he turns to an old girlfriend (Shelley Winters in
a leopard print coat) who whines about the risk, but
finds an unlicensed foreign doctor to patch him up in
the back of the car while she
drives around the damp city Fred Clark and Victor Mature surround the seductive Conte in Cry of the City
streets, using neon signs for
light. In the film’s best scene,
Marty almost meets his match
in the massive form of the
masseuse Rose Given (Hope
Emerson again), who looms
over him while he works his
bright-eyed, caressing charm,
offering to sell her the jewels
in exchange for two tickets out
of the country. “You’re a cute
little man,” she coos, and starts
to massage his shoulders, then
gets her hands around his neck
and squeezes. The scene is
funny, creepy and perversely
titillating all at once.
How could Candella
hope to compete? Mature’s
heavy, stolid presence contrasts with Conte’s mercurial
34 Noir City Sentinel FALL 2010
Charles Bickford, Conte, and Gene Tierney in Whirlpool
T
he opening shot of Thieves’ Highway (1949)
takes us far from the dark city: a hay cart trundles through a field above sunny Fresno, California. In his last American film before leaving the
country to escape the blacklist, Jules Dassin slices the
produce business open to reveal capitalism’s rotten
core. Even something as nourishing and wholesome
as an apple becomes a poisoned agent of strife when
it’s equated with money. A Polish farmer, enraged at
being paid less than he was promised for his apples,
flings boxes of them off a truck,
screaming, “Seventy-five cents!
Seventy-five cents!” The apples
roll wastefully across the ground,
an image foreshadowing the
film’s most famous shot, when
after the same truck has careened
off the road and exploded, apples
roll silently down the hillside
toward the flaming wreck. When
the dead trucker’s partner finds
out that money-grubbers have
gone out to collect the scattered
load to sell, he kicks over crates
of apples, fuming, “Four bits a
box! Four bits a box!”
Nick
Garcos
(Conte)
returns home after a long stint as
a navy mechanic; his ebullient
reunion with his parents is shattered when he learns that his
father has lost his legs in a trucking accident caused by a crooked
produce dealer named Mike
Figlia. Nick sees his immigrant
father as a “pushover” and sets
out for revenge, teaming up with
an experienced trucker to haul the
season’s first Golden Delicious
apples to San Francisco so he can
find Figlia. Despite his tough talk
and fondness for threats like,
“Gyp me and I’ll cut your heart
out,” Nick is naïve compared
with the sharpies and hustlers he
encounters, including his hardbitten partner. Ed (Millard
Mitchell) exemplifies the working man as tough guy, willing to cheat and chisel,
ready to drive thirty-six hours in a truck held together
with “spit”––anything to make a living.
After the grueling drive, Nick arrives alone in
Frisco’s produce market. Even at night it’s bustling with
trucks and pushcarts and shouting men; dripping produce, ashcan fires; crowded diners, haggling buyers.
The film’s gritty, vibrant settings are matched by visceral performances, at once naturalistic and flamboyant.
Conte brings a vivid sensuality to his role. The graceful
way he moves through the market, leaping over boxes
and bending to splash water on his face, conveys a freedom and pleasure in physicality that’s missing from
most noir tough guys, who wear their boxy grey suits
like armor.
Collapsing with exhaustion, Nick accepts a
prostitute’s invitation to come up to her room; she’s
been paid to pick him up by Figlia, who has already
spotted Nick and wants to steal his load. But Rica
(Valentina Cortese) falls for her sexy mark and warns
him. He confronts the crass, shameless Figlia (Lee J.
Cobb, having a ball) and squeezes fair payment out of
him, only to be mugged later on by goons hired to get
the money back.
Everyone in the movie is “just trying to make a
buck,” and cash haunts the film, from the opening scene
in which Nick gleefully shakes out his wallet, through the
“dirty money” that almost destroys the friendship of
trucker buddies Pete and Slob, to the climax when Figlia
scatters crumpled bills along a bar, trying to bribe the
vengeful Nick to spare him. Conte is genuinely scary in
this last scene: his eyes glitter as he fondles an axe-handle
and whispers to Cobb, “Put your hand on the table.”
Rica says that all she wants is “lots and lots of
money,” but she turns out to be far less mercenary than
Nick’s blonde fiancée (Barbara Lawrence). We know
she’s no good from the start, by her ungracious reaction
to the Japanese doll Nick gives her—until she notices
the ring on its hand. When she hears he’s made a killing
she rushes up to marry him, and leaves in a huff when
she learns he’s lost the money, inspiring Rica to remark
tauntingly, “Aren’t women wonderful?” Cortese is a
quicksilver blend of playfulness, hurt and defiance. She
displays open lust for Conte—rubbing her dark curls
against his face and playing tic-tac-toe on his bare chest
with her fingernails—and also a melancholy lyricism,
as when she says the seagulls that fly outside her room
make her dream of drowning.
Confined within her cramped apartment, Nick
and Rica circle each other warily, flirting and insulting each other, veering from barbed distrust to combustible passion. He presses her body against his, then
tells her she looks “like chipped glass.” During their
first kiss they seem to be seconds away from getting
in deep trouble with the Hays Office. In film noir lust
usually leads people astray, but here it leads Nick to
his authentic self. As in A. I. Bezzerides’ source
novel, Thieves’ Market, sensuality always marks the
FALL 2010 Noir City Sentinel 35
humane, life-affirming elements in the movie, and the
earthiness seems directly linked to ethnicity: Nick’s
Greek father chopping vegetables and singing along
with a phonograph, the Polish farmer’s children playing in the sun-dappled orchard, the way both Nick and
Rica wallow in the pleasure of a hot shower.
The late forties marked Conte’s brief peak; he
would rarely get roles or films worthy of him again.
He was miscast as a strangely obtuse psychoanalyst in
Whirlpool (1949) who fails to notice his wife is cracking up. The Sleeping City (1950) is a bleak, needlesharp little movie about hospital corruption, but
Conte’s role as an undercover detective is upstaged by
the grim Bellevue locations and Richard Taber’s
skuzzy turn as the rat-like Pop Ware. He’s a likable
afterthought as a reporter in Fritz Lang’s lackluster
Blue Gardenia (1953), and his best efforts can’t make
much of flimsy pot-boilers like The Raging Tide
(1951), about a slot-machine kingpin who discovers
the simple pleasures of life as a fisherman, or Highway Dragnet (1954), a dirt-cheap car-chase flick with
a slumming Joan Bennett. His broad shoulders carry
the lackluster load in a pair of obscure 1955 crime
dramas, The Curse of the Red Monkey and the interesting if inert Steve Fisher–penned The Big Tip-Off.
Like other swarthy actors in Hollywood, Conte
offered all-purpose foreignness, becoming an Arab
bandit in Desert Legion (1953), a Mexican boxer in
The Fighter (1952), and something biblical in Slaves
of Babylon (1953). Ethnicity and crime were brands
he could never wash off, though he always wore them
with panache. In the sixties, Conte turned up in
Ocean’s Eleven and Sinatra’s Tony Rome movies,
light-hearted anti-noir crime movies set in Las Vegas
and Miami. He acted on television and spent his last
five years in bloody Italian mafia thrillers (“spaghetti
noir”?) before dying of a heart attack in 1975.
I
n the waning years of noir,
Conte starred in a trio of
films exposing crime syndicates run along the lines of
big business, part of the postKefauver fascination with the
mafia. In The Big Combo
(1955), old-school mobsters
named Grazzi and Bettini have
been replaced by the sinisterly
anonymous Mr. Brown—no
known first name. Since he’s
played by Conte, one suspects
that his name may once have
been Brunelleschi, but his ethnicity is no longer important.
“Brown’s not a man, he’s an
organization,” someone says
early in The Big Combo. But
Brown is very much a man,
and as with Martin Rome, his
most potent weapon is not a
gun. He overpowers an armed subordinate through
sheer force of will, lectures a hapless boxer that the
secret of power is hate, and boasts of his power over
women, since “they can tell the difference. They’ve
got instinct.” The spell Brown casts over women isn’t
as solid as he thinks it is, and he’s brought down by
his shame-stricken mistress and horrified wife.
Again like Cry of the City, the film pits Conte
against a cop fanatically determined to bring him
down; here it’s Lieutenant Leonard Diamond (Cornel
Wilde), a man in the grip of a monomania. Diamond
has a yen for Brown’s mistress, Susan (Jean Wallace),
a once-classy debutante who has become a dazed,
self-loathing prisoner; Brown uses his two not-socloseted gay torpedoes, Fante and Mingo, like harem
eunuchs to guard her whenever she goes out. But even
this jealousy doesn’t seem enough to account for Diamond’s dogged, obsessive hatred of Brown. The selfsatisfied gangster his own theory: “The only trouble
with you is you’d like to be me,” he tells the cop,
whom he taunts with his low salary. “You think it’s
money, it’s not: it’s personality. You haven’t got it.”
Style easily dominates substance in The Big
Combo. There’s no excuse to root for Mr. Brown,
who calmly murders even his loyal employees,
enjoying lobster while they expire in agony, and who
orders his mistress to change into something white
because “a woman dresses for a man.” But Conte,
who softens his voice to a purr and glows with a sinister smile, gets all the best lines, including his
repeated motto, “First is first and second is nobody.”
The film revels in his eerie omnipotence and his
blend of sadism and sensuality, as it revels in brassy
burlesque jazz, greasy alleys and the extreme
chiaroscuro stylization of John Alton.
Diamond, by contrast, is withered, joyless: he
goes through the movie hectoring, browbeating and
self-righteously lecturing everyone in sight about the
evil of Mr. Brown, even grimly harassing Susan in
the hospital after she has attempted suicide. He shatters the peace of the spaghetti-loving Bettini, who
has successfully adopted a new identity, and threatens the stability of Brown’s fragile wife Alicia,
sequestered in an asylum where she tends flowers.
He causes the death of the ship’s captain who knows
Brown’s secret, and of the kind-hearted stripper
whom he uses as an occasional salve for loneliness.
Yet the film gives its official stamp of approval to
Diamond, who sneers, “Let’s go, hoodlum,” as he triumphantly arrests his nemesis.
The same year, Conte starred in New York Confidential, which lacks the visual flair and perverse
flavor of The Big Combo, but is the purest evocation
of blandly corporate corruption pervading the country. It suffers from heavy-handed narration,
schmaltzy music and a predictably schematic, clichéridden script, yet remains both entertaining and
potent. The Syndicate, in this portrayal, is a new form
of society as radical as communism: its central rule is
that the organization is always more important than
the individual. It thus becomes a monstrous machine
that devours its own members in an endless cycle of
self-destruction.
The film draws us in with detailed, warmly
human portraits of likable mobsters who speak in colorful gangland patter. Charlie Lupo (Broderick Crawford) is a blustery but anxious Mr. Big who lives in an
art-stuffed mansion with his mournfully loyal mother
and his daughter Kathy (Anne Bancroft), a debutante
poisoned by shame and disgust at having a “hood-
36 Noir City Sentinel FALL 2010
Conte smacks costar Audrey Totter in Under the Gun. Maybe he preferred her as a blonde?
lum” father. Lupo agrees to force his best friend, Ben
Dagajanian (J. Carroll Naish), to leave the country
rather than risk a deportation case that would draw
attention to the Syndicate. He praises loyalty (“Most
of the pigs that work for us can’t even spell it”), yet
tows the party line that the organization comes first,
ensuring his own eventual destruction.
Nick Magellan (Conte) is dispatched from
Chicago to kill a gangster who broke the rules,
making an “unauthorized hit” for personal
vengeance. Quiet, polite and ruthless, wielding
a gun with a silencer, Nick wins Lupo’s
approval with his “clean” technique, loyalty
and “class.” Eventually he becomes Lupo’s
second-in-command and surrogate son. He’s
drawn to the troubled Kathy, who compares
him to “a cobra, always relaxed, yet always
ready to strike.” He tries to crush her dreams of
respectability and decency, telling her that
everyone steals, the world is merciless, and
money is all that matters.
The biggest crooks of all are politicians
and Washington lobbyists; everything begins to
go awry after the Syndicate is double-crossed by
one of these “country club hypocrites.” Finally,
after Kathy has committed suicide, Lupo decides
to turn states’ evidence, and Magellan is sent to
kill him. He obeys reluctantly—he’s the only one
for the job, precisely because Lupo trusts him—
and afterward surveys the corpse of his mentor
with frozen bitterness, a sense of waste and desolation so total that when he himself is gunned
down minutes later (an “insurance policy”), it’s
almost a relief.
The Brothers Rico (1957) brings together
the dissection of corporate-style crime with the
portrait of an Italian family torn apart by the
strains of the modern world. It’s a small, lowkey movie, but it has a chilling heart. Conte
plays a man who undergoes a tragic disillusionment as he’s duped into betraying his own
brother. He learns the hard way to accept his
Mama’s advice: “Don’t trust nobody.”
Eddie Rico (Conte) is a former mob
accountant who has left the organization and
literally laundered his criminal past, becoming
the successful owner of a commercial laundry in
Bayshore, Florida. The long, low, white building that
houses his business is symptomatic of the film’s look:
flat, bright, horizontal. While the bland, TV style may
put off some noir fans, it suits the film’s depiction of
a brave new world that is cold, prosperous, and amnesiac. The opening scenes establish Eddie’s sexy, idyllic relationship with his wife Alice (teasing the Production Code, their twin beds are pushed close
enough together for him to sleep with his hand on her
chest), who has been unable to bear a child. The
couple is on the point of adopting a baby, but a phone
call in the middle of the night proves Eddie is still the
property of the Organization.
He’s summoned by the big boss, Sid Kubik,
who urges him to find his youngest brother, Johnny
(James Darren), who has gone missing after participating in a mob hit; his “friends” fear that his new
wife may persuade him to go to the D.A. Eddie
blindly trusts “Uncle Sid,” who owes his life to Mama
Rico (she took a bullet meant for him), and who
claims that in his heart, he’s a member of the family,
which will always come first. Larry Gates, who plays
Kubik, is a bleached, android-like actor; he sports a
white polo shirt and yachting cap and luxuriates in a
sleek Miami apartment full of oriental art, an incongruous setting for his unctuous claim that “families
should stick together.” Eddie loyally goes in search of
Johnny, upset by the mere suggestion that Uncle Sid
could betray him. After all, Eddie keeps insisting,
“He’s not an animal.”
When he reaches El Camino, California, where
Johnny and his pregnant wife are hiding out on a
farm, Eddie is confronted by the truth: he has been
used to track down his brother, who is marked for
death. In the film’s most wrenching scene, Eddie is
held in his hotel room by two casually heartless, amiably amoral mob soldiers as Johnny is forced to walk
out to his executioners, going quietly to spare his wife
and child. When the anguished Eddie pleads for his
kid brother, the impassive local boss muses, “We’re
all brothers, aren’t we? Did that ever stop anything?”
Everyone, even Alice, tells Eddie he can’t fight, he
can’t buck the system: his only hope is to run away.
Of course he doesn’t, and in the film’s rushed denouement he guns down Kubik and exposes the syndicate
to the D.A. But the happy-ever-after epilogue, back in
sunny, palm-lined Florida as Eddie and his
wife head to the orphanage to pick up their
baby, can’t erase the icy bleakness of the
middle section, which depicts a world
scrubbed of all human empathy. No murders
or beatings are shown; no emotions are
allowed.
Back on Mulberry Street—always seen
at night, with fire-escape shadows slanting
over bricks—Mama Rico lives above her
candy store, with her own mother who happily giggles over the TV Eddie bought for
them, even though she doesn’t speak a word
of English. Eddie is embarrassed that his
mother keeps calling her new refrigerator an
“ice box,” and he tells his wife, when she
worries, “You sound like a superstitious peasant from the old country.” But it’s really
Eddie who is stuck in the past: he believes in
loyalty and has faith in the reasonableness of
the organization; he’s been away from it too
long to know how it’s changed. In noir,
people usually struggle against the unyielding grip of the past; but here, for a change, the
tragedy is that the bonds of memory have no
power over the present, a world as inhuman
as the UFO movies Grandma Rico watches
on TV. When Eddie offers to send her to a
rest home in the country, his mother refuses:
“If she go away from Mulberry Street, she
die.” It’s odd for a film to celebrate the comfort of its shadows, but in a sterile world of
shiny jets, glassy airports, and men who are
serenely untroubled by killing, noir itself
walks out to meet its executioners. n
L