Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)

September 27, 2018 (Fantastic Fest, Austin, Texas), October 12, 2018 (United States) release dates

Directed by Drew Goddard

Screenplay by Drew Goddard

Music by Michael Giacchino

Edited by Lisa Lassek

Cinematography by Seamus McGarvey

Jeff Bridges as Donald “Dock” O’Kelly/Father Daniel Flynn

Cynthia Erivo as Darlene Sweet

Dakota Johnson as Emily Summerspring

Hannah Zirke as young Emily

Jon Hamm as Dwight Broadbeck/Laramie Seymour Sullivan

Cailee Spaeny as Rose Summerspring, Emily’s sister

Charlotte Mosby as young Rose

Lewis Pullman as Miles Miller

Austin Abell as young Miles

Chris Hemsworth as Billy Lee

Nick Offerman as Felix O’Kelly, Dock’s brother

Xavier Dolan as Buddy Sunday, a music producer who fires Darlene

Shea Whigham as Dr. Woodbury Laurence, the prison doctor

Mark O’Brien as Larsen Rogers, Dock’s and Felix’s accomplice

Charles Halford as Sammy Wilds, Dock’s prison cellmate

Jim O’Heir as Milton Wyrick, the presenter at Darlene’s show in Reno

Manny Jacinto as Waring “Wade” Espiritu, a member of Billy Lee’s cult

Alvina August as Vesta Shears, the singer who replaces Darlene

Gerry Nairn as Paul Kraemer, a reporter

William B. Davis as Judge Gordon Hoffman, who sentences Dock

Distributed by 20th Century Fox

Produced by Goddard Textiles, TSG Entertainment

I had heard that Bad Times at the El Royale is an homage to film noir, and I looked forward to seeing it. It didn’t disappoint: The story is completely absorbing, and I often didn’t know what to expect next. It has many of the hallmarks of noir: flashbacks, angst, despair, revenge, greed, murder, robbery. This is one film that seems easy to categorize.

(This blog post about Bad Times at the El Royale contains spoilers.)

The film opens with a black screen and audio only: the sound of a car running and then stopping, and then a car door opening. Then the visual starts with a man entering a hotel room. He puts his suitcases on the bed. He takes out a gun and draws the curtains when he hears footsteps, but it’s nothing. This character is in the shot above, a shot that evokes the cover of a 1930s or 1940s pulp novel, or an Edward Hopper painting. Later in the film, viewers learn that he is Felix O’Kelly, Dock O’Kelly’s brother.

Felix O’Kelly starts dismantling the room: He takes up the floorboards, hides one of his overnight bags under the floor, then puts the room back together. Someone knocks on the door, which he opens. He invites the man at the door in and turns toward the center of the room. The guest shoots Felix O’Kelly in the back with a shotgun.

The film cuts to the title card, then cuts to show the following words: “Ten years later.” And now it’s the 1970s; Nixon is president. Singer Darlene Sweet and Father Daniel Flynn arrive at about the same time at the El Royale Hotel. Laramie Seymour Sullivan is already in the hotel lobby waiting for the front desk clerk and states that he gets the honeymoon suite.

Viewers learn details about the characters, their current circumstances, and their back stories slowly and deliberately. The film doesn’t rush anything, but the tension builds and subsides and then builds and subsides once again. And there is rarely a dull moment. The set is the El Royale itself, which is a shabby establishment that is past its glory days and has a seedy back story itself. And yet the set is lush and beautiful and evocative of the 1970s. The cinematography also evokes the period, the past in general, with its dim lighting and yellowish tinges. Viewers never doubt the time period.

Sullivan, Father Flynn, and Darlene check in and take up residence in their respective rooms. Sullivan looks for listening devices in his and finds several. He leaves his room to do some additional investigating. He returns to the lobby and finds it unattended. He takes the master key from the front desk and explores the area behind the desk. He discovers that the front desk clerk, Miles Miller, is a heroin junkie and is in the middle of knockout high. And he finds a secret passageway that goes past all the rooms. The mirrors in each room are two-way, providing views from the secret passageway. There are also one-way intercoms. He sees Father Flynn taking up the floorboards in his room; sees and hears Darlene practicing her singing; and sees Emily Summerspring, the last guest to arrive, dragging a female body, that of her sister Rose, into her room. Rose’s wrists are bound, and Emily ties her into a chair.

Sullivan is an FBI agent working undercover as an appliance salesman. He calls J. Edgar Hoover from a pay phone outside the hotel to tell him that they have a problem because he found several bugs in his room, not all of them the FBI’s. He also mentions the woman, Emily Summerspring, taking an unconscious hostage into her room. Hoover tells Sullivan not to interfere because the hostage is not part of his mission.

The fact that Sullivan is an FBI agent is the first of many surprises in Bad Times at the El Royale. Many of the main characters have secrets, some decidedly unpleasant. Even the El Royale has a dark past linked to illicit surveillance by the FBI. Sullivan is at the hotel to collect the FBI’s paraphernalia, including microphones and listening devices in his own room. From this point on, the narrative goes in several unexpected directions.

Intertitles (“Room 4,” “Room 5,” “the maintenance closet,” “Reno,” and so on) place viewers in the story. These intertitles also clue viewers that the following sequence focuses on a particular character. Sometimes the sequences include flashbacks that reveal a character’s back story. The narrative from one sequence to the next sometimes overlaps so that viewers see the same part of the story but from another character’s perspective. This structure reveals a lot about the characters and it allows viewers to get a more complete version of particular events.

Bad Times at the El Royale is completely absorbing, but the plot wasn’t quite neat and tidy throughout. Some questions did pop up for me as I was watching the film:

◊ FBI agent Sullivan is killed by Emily Summerspring in her room, and I wondered why someone didn’t arrive looking for him. I know he was working undercover, but he does call Director Hoover from a phone booth outside the hotel. If Sullivan’s case was so important as to warrant direct contact with the head of the FBI, surely someone at the FBI would be interested in his findings and his general well-being. Where were Sullivan’s fellow agents?

◊ I also wondered how Darlene Sweet and Father Flynn, who viewers now know is Dock O’Kelly, made it to Reno with the money that Flynn and his brother Felix stole ten years earlier. Was the FBI interested only in covering up its covert surveillance of the famous people who once frequented the El Royale during its heyday?

◊ Why weren’t the bank robbery and its perpetrators never linked to the El Royale by law enforcement? After all, one of the O’Kelly brothers’ crew found Felix easily enough ten years earlier and murdered him in his hotel room.

◊ Dock O’Kelly undergoes a transformation of sorts as a result of his experiences at the El Royale, but I did wonder if all the violence was necessary for his transformation to occur. Darlene Sweet and Dock O’Kelly help each other get away after everyone else is killed at the El Royale; in fact, Darlene arrives in Reno in time for her next singing gig. My own interpretation is that each character accepts the violence on her or his own terms: Each one makes the decision to be redeemed or not, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that each one escapes being killed.

In spite of my lingering questions, the film doesn’t disappoint. I was absorbed completely by the story and the twists and turns. My questions may mean that I have to see Bad Times at El Royale again, and I don’t think that’s such a bad idea.

Lured (1947)

September 5, 1947, release date

Directed by Douglas Sirk

Screenplay by Leo Rosten

Based on a story by Jacques Companéez, Simon Gantillon, Ernest Neuville

Music by Michel Michelet

Edited by John M. Foley, James E. Newcom

Cinematography by William H. Daniels

George Sanders as Robert Fleming

Lucille Ball as Sandra Carpenter

Charles Coburn as Chief Inspector Harley Temple

Boris Karloff as Charles van Druten

Ann Codee as Matilda, van Druten’s assistant

Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Julian Wilde

Joseph Calleia as Dr. Nicholas Moryani

Alan Mowbray as Lyle Maxwell alias Maxim Duval, Moryani’s accomplice

George Zucco as Officer H. R. Barrett

Robert Coote as the detective

Alan Napier as Inspector Gordon

Tanis Chandler as Lucy Barnard

Ethelreda Leopold as the nightclub singer (voice dubbed by Annette Warren)

Gerald Hamer as Harry Milton

Lynne Baggett as Fleming’s girlfriend

Distributed by United Artists

Produced by Hunt Stromberg Productions

A serial killer is terrorizing London (not the small unnamed seaside community in Beast, the subject of one of my February blog posts). Lured has some of the same dark themes that Beast has, but a bit of humor lightens the story from time to time, mostly because of the character of Sandra Carpenter, played by Lucille Ball. Lured gives her a chance to show her serious dramatic abilities, too.

Lucille Ball is also great in The Dark Corner, one of my film noir favorites and my first post in this blog. Click here to see my blog post about The Dark Corner.

The opening credits are handled creatively, in a style fitting a story about a hunt for a serial killer. The film starts with a circle of light on pavement from a flashlight that is held by a man (viewers know that it is a man from the shot of his shoes). The camera focuses on the man’s shoes as he walks to a street curb, where he shines the circle of light on a crumpled newspaper from the London Enquirer lying in the gutter. Then he moves the flashlight, the circle of light, to and then up a short flight of steps, across a front door, and to a “nameplate” announcing “Hunt Stromberg presents.” The circle of light is used to reveal all the subsequent credits before the narrative begins.

Sandra Carpenter works as a taxi dancer in a London nightclub called the Palladium. The scenes in the nightclub give Lucille Ball the best opportunities to show off her comedic skills. Her dialogue includes many one-liners and some dry observations of her own occupation. One of Carpenter’s coworkers, Lucy Barnard, answers a personal ad and tells Sandra all about her upcoming meeting with someone named John. Instead of finding romance, however, Lucy becomes the serial killer’s eighth victim. Advertising in the personal ads, it seems, is the killer’s way of luring his victims. He also taunts the police by sending them poems written in the style of Baudelaire, specifically Baudelaire’s poems from The Flowers of Evil.

◊ Wikipedia provides some interesting facts about the profession of taxi dancer; click here for more information.

◊ Click here for some background information about Charles Baudelaire.

In the photo above, Chief Inspector Harley Temple of Scotland Yard reads from Baudelaire’s book to his main suspect, but I’m getting ahead of myself. . . .

(This blog post about Lured contains some spoilers.)

Sandra Carpenter is recruited by Chief Inspector Temple to help in the investigation. She was the last one to see Lucy Barnard before she went missing (at this point in the investigation, Barnard’s ultimate fate is unclear), and she wants to do what she can to help her friend. Carpenter, of course, is an amateur: After she agrees to take on the undercover work, Chief Inspector Temple gives her a handgun for self-protection, and Carpenter walks out of his office without a single lesson on the care, maintenance, or use of her weapon. The scene comes across as both comedic and ludicrous. But an amateur detective is exactly what Chief Inspector Temple wants because his female and male detectives would probably be too well known for the kind of undercover work Sandra must do.

Chief Inspector Temple wants Carpenter to act as bait for the serial killer. With the help of the detectives at Scotland Yard, she answers personal ads in the hope of finding him. This plot device offers some humor and some diversions in the form of false leads: Most of the people looking for true love in London are relatively harmless. But some of them are kooky enough to raise alarm bells. One of the first ads that Carpenter answers reads, “Famous artist seeks beautiful model. Meet me nine o’clock 60 paces north of White Swan, under triple light lamppost.”

When Carpenter answers this ad, she sees a mysterious man outside the White Swan, which is a restaurant. Carpenter and viewers find out later that this man is Officer H. R. Barrett, Carpenter’s assigned police detail, but because he is working undercover, he gives Carpenter a bit of a fright and one of several diversions for viewers.

The personal ad that I quote above was placed by Charles van Druten (Boris Karloff), and Carpenter does find him under the lamppost. He asks for proof that she is the person who answered the ad: He wants her to recite the first and last line of her letter. She asks nothing of him, which doesn’t slip van Druten’s notice. They leave for his studio, however, where Carpenter meets Mathilda, van Druten’s assistant. Van Druten, a one-time fashion designer, asks Sandra to model one of his gowns for an imaginary audience. When van Druten gets carried away with his delusion and threatens Mathilda and Carpenter with a sword, both manage to escape because Officer H. R. Barrett intervenes. Carpenter doesn’t realize that Barrett is on the scene to protect her until they meet outside van Druten’s home. (This sequence, by the way, constitutes the only appearance by Boris Karloff.)

Romance manages to flourish between Sandra Carpenter and Robert Fleming, a flamboyant businessman and nightclub owner. A talent scout working for Fleming is at the Palladium hoping to lure employees with the offer of a new job. This talent scout gives Carpenter a business card because Fleming plans to open another new nightclub. Carpenter is apparently the only woman who catches the eye of the talent scout, out of a roomful of young women working as taxi dancers. This struck me as a rather weak coincidence. Another was Carpenter’s first conversation with Fleming over the phone: Fleming is instantly intrigued. It’s obvious until this point that Fleming plays the field, and I find it hard to believe that such a character would be so smitten after one phone conversation.

However, the romance between Sandra Carpenter and Robert Fleming serves its purpose in all of the intrigue, even if it starts with two somewhat flimsy plot devices. Fleming eventually comes under suspicion as London’s serial killer, which threatens his relationship with Carpenter. Lured is thus not that easy to categorize because it has so many important—and intertwining—plot threads.

The film is a remake of Robert Siodmak’s 1939 French film Pieges (titled Personal Column in the United States), which I have not seen. Even though Lured is a noir shot in black and white, director Douglas Sirk shows some flair for the dramatic, in the false starts of the criminal investigation, and for the ornate, in the exotic interior set design for Robert Fleming’s new nightclub, The Silent Dove. I have always associated Sirk with lush color melodramas, and I was surprised to see that he had directed a film noir.

For more about the director of the film, Douglas Sirk, click here. This essay from IndieWire doesn’t mention Lured, unfortunately.

Lucille Ball shows that she can act in almost anything with her performance in this film noir. It’s a very welcome change from the role of hers that I am most familiar with: Lucy Ricardo in the television series I Love Lucy. George Sanders may have gotten top billing for Lured, and he is very good in the role, but Lucille Ball upstages him when she’s on-screen.

I enjoyed this film a lot more than I thought I would, and I enjoyed seeing Lucille Ball in another film noir. Her legacy as a comedian overshadows her dramatic acting abilities, which I think is unfortunate because she is multitalented. And I wasn’t so sure who the serial killer was for a good part of the story: Keeping me guessing is always a plus for any story. Lured is the right mix of noir, mystery, and humor—and even romance.