What else happened this year? 1948... let's see... Cold War Stuff, that's for sure. Oh! I know, Burma gets independence. It's still, as of 2020 at least, a charmless shithole because it's run by angry midgets. I think Malaysia did the same, but at least you can rely on authorities there.
What is the plot - in one sentence? In a needlessly complicated plot, a gangster's lawyer tries to help his numbers-running older brother and save him from bankruptcy.
I don't have time, just spoil it for me? It's an incredibly (and completely needlessly) convoluted plot. The older brother refuses to play along with the gangster, and is thus brought further into the underworld. The Gangsters have him kidnapped and killed, and so the younger brother kills his old partner and another gangster. When he finds his brothers body at the Golden Gate / Manhattan Bridge (I couldn't tell which is was from underneath), he vows to go straight to the very young woman he's started seeing in the last few days.
What is the meaning of the title? The Main guy is a criminal turned lawyer,* and he's referred to a couple of times by his brother as 'evil', so that might be it... but a lot of the criminals involved are convinced that their phones are tapped, and at one stage they seem to imply that the phones are a force of evil... There's some phone tapping going on in the movie too.
Anything that's not aged well? Does a woman get slapped around? For a noir movie with a lot of moral ambiguity and which is notable for its seedy atmosphere, it's amazingly free of violence to women. The older brother seems kind to his wife, and is avuncular to a young woman called Doris. His brother, for some reason, finds this Doris attractive, and woos her in what is now seen as a very creepy manner, but it's violence free. Just for the record, he refers to her as childish and threatens to take it out of her, we all know what THAT means.
Any thoughts? This is quite an interesting morality tale of a movie. The two brothers are shown as opposites. The younger one, a rogue, is doing a legitimate job in an illegitimate manner, while the other brother, a family man, is doing an illegal job in an honest way. He's employed various people in need of aid (for example, a claustrophobic) and shows a sense of loyalty and honour to his career, even if it costs him his job and his life.
He (the older brother) is the more interesting character of the two to me, and his genuine emotion and betrayal before he's taken to be killed is probably the emotional high point of the movie. It was impressive.
There's a lot of moral ambiguity throughout the movie - for example, the younger brother tries to stop his older brother going bankrupt and thus brought into a mobsters orbit, by having him arrested. However, he's too honorable to cheat at an illegal game. I get that there was moral ambiguity and some vague biblical imagery throughout, but it really WHIZZED by, and a lot of the plot is only alluded to. Certainly there was time to take a breather and explain what the hell was going on. I felt that way today, Christ knows what people would have felt like at the time.
Anyway, an example. The lawyer / younger brother character finds out his brother has been killed and goes after the two main gangsters for revenge. One of them is his boss (whom he has a hinted-at past with), and the other is... some guy we've only heard about. It removes a bit of the stakes to only meet him then.
Would you recommend this? Maybe. I might have to watch it again. It races through the story at a million miles an hour, in a labyrinthine plot which leaves so much unsaid and which we have to infer from various actions. It's a thinker, that's for sure.
Despite all that, I can only give it a mild recommendation (for this first viewing at least) because of his 'I'll be good from now' declaration at the end which seems studio enforced.
Anything else? Oh, wikipedia says that Beau Bridges had a role as a kid in the movie, but I have no recollection of it. It's the gangster's son, but I didn't note him at all.
I also liked how everyone looks a little off, none of the characters are handsome or attractive, which gave the whole thing a realistic, grubby feel. I'll also make note of the gangster bosses wife, who is all over the younger brother despite her being several feet taller than him. She's an interesting looking woman, and could easily have been the star of the movie on her own. What an intriguing character.
Here you go, 54 down, here are the other 53, and when more rock up, you can still find them there too. How convenient.
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