The Killing Field (2014)

A serial killer is loose in a small town in Australia, and the local police force is overwhelmed by the task of solving the murders. But viewers learn that later, after a rather surreal opening sequence that introduces many of the main characters but without connecting them until later in the narrative. Viewers see and know about as much as the police detectives do when the case arrives on their desks.

When The Killing Field opens, a boy named Bruno rides a bicycle through the town’s streets at night. The camera follows him from behind at first while he rides to a party, where teens are drinking and no adults are sight. He meets a girl named Becky, who says hello to him but then turns to her friend Sophie and tells her that she is leaving the party because she is meeting someone. After she leaves the party, Becky walks through town and sees someone named Jackson Ciesolka punch another man because of something the man said to his fiancé Stacey, although this second man denies saying anything. Becky moves on and meets another man in a car. They talk, and he drives away alone. The last shot of Becky is from the back, as she walks away and disappears, first into the shadows, then into the dark of night.

The film cuts to daytime. People are calling Becky’s name and searching a field outside a factory. Fencing around the factory comes with a warning sign about trespassing and the danger of asbestos. Among the searchers are Becky’s father, Kevin Ryan, and the man she met the night that she disappeared, Damian Jeffries. Police officers are also members of the search party. An officer’s search dog finds the first of five bodies buried on the factory site. Becky is not among the victims, which only deepens the mystery about the killer, the victims, and Becky herself. Investigators from Sydney are called in to help because the local force is too small for such a large case.

What makes The Killing Field noir for me is the overwhelming feeling that anything and everything could go wrong. And everyone could be a suspect; everyone acts like a suspect. The tension inherent in a murder investigation is amplified by other underlying tensions: the townspeople versus the outsiders, in the form of the police investigation team; the romantic tension between the two lead investigators, Eve Winter and Lachlan McKenzie; the fact that viewers are just waiting for the confrontation between the killer and Winter based simply on the facts that she is the star and she has blond hair, just like all the killer’s victims.

And then there’s the tension between what Winter wants and what McKenzie wants, both romantically and professionally. She would rather not work on a murder investigation ever again. He needs her expertise to solve a murder in the town of Mingara (the film was shot in the town of Gulgong, New South Wales, Australia), where five young women are discovered in unmarked graves. And it doesn’t hurt that he finds her attractive and knows that he can influence her if he can find the right buttons to push.

In fact, after the film’s opening showing the events leading up to the disappearance of Becky Ryan and the discovery of five bodies in a field bordering an industrial plant, McKenzie travels to Sydney to convince Winter to join his investigation team:

• Lachlan McKenzie: “So you don’t miss being in the field?”

• Eve Winter: “If this is about Mingara, the answer’s no.”

• McKenzie: “This case needs you.”

• Winter: “Oh! Well, I don’t need it. You know, there’s no PTSD in policy making.”

• McKenzie: “We always said that the bureaucracy was worse than the bodies.”

• Winter: “That was a lot of bodies ago.”

• McKenzie: “We’d be running the investigation together, Eve. Equal footing.”

• Winter: “And when has that ever worked?”

• McKenzie: “We can make it work.”

• Winter: “There are other detectives.”

• McKenzie: “But they’re not you.”

• Winter: “Good luck with it.”

• McKenzie: “Five bodies, Eve. Serial killer.”

• Winter: “I’ve done my time with murderers and dead bodies.”

• McKenzie: “Their Achilles tendons have been cut.”

• Winter: “To stop them running away. You’ll find a good team.”

• McKenzie: “Rebecca Ryan’s still missing. I think she could still be alive.”

This last line from Lachlan McKenzie seems to do the trick. He seems to know beforehand that Winter will be more likely to join the investigation if she knows that she is looking for a missing person and not a murderer and/or a dead body. After a close-up on Winter, the film cuts to a small plane landing in a field, with the investigation team, including Eve Winter, alighting and walking toward the adjoining road to meet Officer Matt Davis.

Eve Winter mentions post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in her first appearance on the screen, in the first conversation that I have transcribed above. Viewers don’t yet know her backstory, but she seems to be already familiar with trauma and PTSD, and she doesn’t want to have to experience either one again. In spite of her instincts to avoid anguish, angst, and trauma, she is drawn into McKenzie’s investigation because she is one of the best at her job, she still feels some compassion for murder victims, and she wants to help if she can. Fate seems to be pulling her in again.

The Killing Field is a story dripping with angst. Many of the characters, the residents of Mingara, have secrets, some more benign than others. But the fact that people try to hide so much from the detectives investigating the murders increases the level of suspicion and the tension. The soundtrack is also perfect for setting the mood. The music accentuates the feeling that anyone in town could be a murderer, that no one is above suspicion.

The scenes between Eve Winter and Lachlan McKenzie when they are in Sydney are very polished and glitzy. They seem a bit out of place in this film, but these scenes in Sydney at the start of the film show how Winter is drawn into the murder investigation and introduce her backstory, which is developed further as the story is told. The final scenes in Sydney show how much backbone she really has, and I found that a very satisfying way to end such a tense film.

May 4, 2014, television broadcast date  •  Directed by Samantha Lang  •  Screenplay by Michaeley O’Brien, Sarah Smith  •  Music by Basil Hogios, Caitlin Yeo  •  Edited by Dany Cooper  •  Cinematography by Toby Oliver

Rebecca Gibney as Detective Sergeant Eve Winter  •  Chloe Boreham as Constable Bridget Anderson  •  Liam McIntyre as Detective Dan Wild  •  Peter O’Brien as Inspector Lachlan McKenzie  •  Taylor Ferguson as Rebecca (aka Becky) Ryan  •  Sam O’dell as Kevin Ryan  •  Blazey Best as Jacinta Ryan  •  Laura Bunting as Chloe Ryan  •  Elia Saville as Sophie Britton  •  Warwick Young as Matt Davis  •  Kane Johnson as Mikey Davis  •  James Fraser as Bruno Fernando  •  Patrick Thompson as Larry Fernando  •  Eamon Farren as Damian Jeffries  •  Josh McConville as Jackson Ciesolka  •  Dave Eastgate as Ray Stafford  •  Emma Jackson as Kathy Stafford  •  Odile le Clezio as Angie  •  Darren Gilshenan as Brian Fleet  •  Anna Lise Phillips as Jennifer Fleet  •  Kallan Richards as Lincoln De Luca  •  Edmund Lembke-Hogan as Darren McKechine  •  Damien Garvey as Brett Holloway

Produced by Seven Productions, Cornerstone Pictures  •  Broadcast by Seven Network

Impact (1949)

Impact is one of those films that many may have trouble calling a film noir. As I have written before, I’m not a stickler for categories. By any name, however, the film is a good story, so I am not going to let categories get in the way. I did wonder about the lack of chemistry between two of the characters, Irene Williams and Jim Torrence, but the film is fun, and Brian Donlevy and Ella Raines are great in their roles.

Impact is in the public domain. Click here to see it online at the Internet Archive.

Walter (Walt) Williams, played by Brian Donlevy, is the strong lead character in Impact, and this is evident from the start of the narrative. He marches into a board meeting of an automobile production company and asks to know the decision of all those present. No one is interested in buying more factories, but he threatens to resign if the factories he wants aren’t purchased. Nobody wants his resignation, so the board members vote unanimously for the purchases. Williams then mentions that he can guarantee the prices because he bought the factories earlier that day.

(This article about Impact contains spoilers.)

Viewers learn that Williams is a darn good mechanic and worked his way up in the company. He is good with his hands, and he has a good head for business. But Williams doesn’t know his wife Irene very well. Williams is obviously in love with his wife. His nickname for her is Duchess, and after his success in the company boardroom, he arrives home with a gift, an expensive brooch, for her. They live in a gorgeous apartment, and she seems to be living the life of leisure.

But Irene Williams and her lover Jim Torrence are plotting to kill Walt. She invents a phony story about Torrence: He is her cousin and the favorite nephew of her Aunt Margaret Hubbard in Evanston, Illinois. Torrance is supposed to go to Evanston to see Aunt Margaret, and Irene wants her husband to drive him as far as Denver.

Impact was shot in California and features many on-location scenes, including the Rexall drugstore in Sausalito where Walt Williams and Jim Torrence meet. Click here to visit “REEL SF: San Francisco movie locations from classic films” for comparisons (then and now) of various location shots for Impact. The REEL SF website offers “then and now” shots of locations from several films noir. Walter and Irene Williams in Impact live at Bayview Apartments, 1000 Mason Street, and according to REEL SF, this is the same address as that used in Vertigo: “The building kitty-corner across Mason Street is the Pacific Union Club, also featured in Vertigo as Madeleine’s husband’s club.”

When Walt Williams meets Jim Torrence in front of a Rexall drugstore, as arranged by Irene, he is meeting Torrence for the first time. Before they leave, Jim Torrence punctures the right rear tire of Walt’s car so that they will have to stop on the way to Denver. At a prearranged spot on the road, Torrence, who is now driving, stops the car, helps Walt with the flat, then hits Walt with a tire iron.

With that description, it might be hard to believe that the film has any humorous elements, but it does. After hitting Walt with the tire iron, Jim Torrence has to contend with one mishap after another. He’s about to hit Walt again when a train goes by, close enough that Torrence is caught in its flashing lights. After the train is gone, another motorist stops and offers to help, but the tire is already changed and—even more important—Torrence doesn’t want the motorist to see that Walt is lying between the side of the road and his own car. After the motorist leaves, Torrence rolls Walt’s body down the steep embankment at the side of the road. The job should be done, but Torrence has to go down the embankment to retrieve the keys to Walt’s car. When he gets back up the embankment to the car, a Bekins company truck stops, and the mover in the passenger seat asks if he needs help. Instead of replying, Torrence jumps into Walt’s car and drives off. The film switches back to a serious tone: Torrence is so nervous that he drives Walt’s car over the center line and dies in a spectacular, fiery head-on collision with a gasoline truck.

I have already mentioned the Rexall and Bekins trade names, but I really didn’t notice brand names or products the first time that I first saw Impact. I did a little bit of online research and learned some interesting facts about product placement in Impact from Wikipedia:

In the 1940s, it was still uncommon for brand-name products to be seen in movies, but this was a notable exception. A Bekins moving van is prominent in several scenes. The movie trade paper Harrison’s Reports typically called attention to cases in which such products appeared on-screen, and always took a stand against that practice. Although its review did not mention Bekins, the Harrison’s Reports review noted “advertising plugs worked in for such products as Pabst Blue Ribbon beer; Raleigh cigarettes; Coca-Cola; Mission Orange soda pop; Mobil gasoline, oil, and tires; Gruen watches; and the trade name Rexall.”

In addition, Laykin et Cie (of I. Magnin & Co) is featured in the opening credits. Laykin et Cie was a leading West Coast jeweler during the period with an important salon in San Francisco during the time the movie was shot in 1948. In the opening scenes, Donlevy’s character Walter Williams presents his wife with a custom Laykin et Cie intertwined diamond double heart brooch with the initials IW (for Irene Williams), which was produced for the film. Throughout the film, Irene Williams continues to wear various Laykin et Cie jewels of the period.

◊ For more at Wikipedia about the film, including the information about product placement above, click here.

◊ For more about product placement in films generally, click here.

Walt Williams didn’t die when Jim Torrence attacked him. He was only knocked unconscious, but he is not particularly anxious to return home. Williams recovers enough to climb the embankment and hop a ride in the back of the Bekins moving truck, which he rides as far as Nevada. He calls Irene’s Aunt Margaret in Evanston and asks to speak to Jim Torrence, but Aunt Margaret says that she doesn’t have a nephew by that name. Walt is beginning to realize that Torrence’s attack was part of a plot hatched by Torrence and his wife Irene. He refuses to return to San Francisco and continues traveling until he lands in Larkspur, Idaho. In Larkspur, Walt Williams meets Marsha Peters, who is running a gas station in town. She hires Walt as a mechanic. Walt learns that Marsha’s husband was killed in Okinawa during World War II and that she took over the service station business and runs it herself. She also complicates Walt’s life romantically, and the second half of the film belongs to her part in Walt’s story.

After the initial police investigation into the automobile accident, it is believed that Walter Williams died in the fiery crash that actually killed Jim Torrence. Lieutenant Tom Quincy is the one to deliver the news to his wife Irene. She is confused because the original plan was that Jim Torrence would be a hitchhiker that Walt picked up, but she does believe that her husband is the one who died in the head-on collision with the gasoline truck. That is enough for her.

It’s easy to dislike Walt’s wife Irene, which makes it hard to figure out what Walt saw in her in the first place. It’s also unclear why a woman living in wealth and leisure would pick a man like Jim Torrence, who is living like a pauper in a boardinghouse, over Walt Williams. Nothing in the story mentions anything about the attraction between Torrence and Irene Williams or explains how they met. The two characters don’t even appear on-screen together, so it is impossible to sense any chemistry between them. It’s also hard to figure out why Irene Williams would consider murdering her husband if viewers don’t know anything about her relationship with Jim Torrence.

Another minor complaint is that the film is bookended (pun alert!) by a rather weak opening and closing. The film starts with a shot of a hardcover dictionary and voice-over narration defining the word impact according to the screenwriters. The narrator refers again to the definition at the end of the film. Both of these sequences seemed unnecessary to me. The film could have been shorter and the story more concise just by lopping off the opening and closing voice-over sequences. A spectacular and fiery head-on collision in the middle of the film was enough to tie the film’s title to the story.

But these are minor complaints. The film is fun, whether it’s called film noir or a crime drama. Brian Donlevy is another in my long list of noir favorites, and he’s great in Impact. So is Ella Raines as Marsha Peters and Helen Walker as Irene Williams. I’m adding Raines and Walker to my growing list of noir favorites.

March 19, 1949 (New York City), April 1, 1949 (United States)  •  Directed by Arthur Lubin  •  Screenplay by Jay Dratler, Dorothy Davenport  •  Based on a story by Jay Dratler  •  Music by Michel Michelet  •  Edited by Arthur H. Nadel  •  Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo

Brian Donlevy as Walter (Walt) Williams  •  Ella Raines as Marsha Peters  •  Charles Coburn as Lieutenant Tom Quincy  •  Helen Walker as Irene Williams  •  Anna May Wong as Su Lin Chung  •  Robert Warwick as Captain Callahan  •  Clarence Kolb as Darcy  •  Art Baker as Defense Attorney Eldredge  •  William Wright as the prosecutor  •  Mae Marsh as Mrs. King, Marsha Peters’s mother (she is listed as Mrs. Peters in the film’s closing credits)  •  Sheilah Graham as herself, a gossip columnist  •  Tony Barrett as Jim Torrence  •  Philip Ahn as Ah Sing  •  Glen Vernon as Ed, the new father  •  Linda Johnson (aka Leighton) as Ms. Revere, the telephone operator  •  Jason Robards Sr. as the judge  •  Erskine Sanford as Dr. Henry Bender  •  Ruth Robinson as the apartment manager at Jim Torrence’s residence  •  Lucius Cooke as Burke  •  Tom Greenway as the moving van driver  •  Ben Welden as the moving company employee  •  Joel Friedkin as Marsha’s Uncle Ben  •  Joe Kirk as the Airport Hotel clerk  •  William Ruhl as the fingerprint expert  •  Mary Landa as Della, Walter Williams’s secretary  •  Harry Cheshire as Irene Williams’s attorney  •  Hans Herbert as the station master

Distributed by United Artists  •  Produced by Harry Popkin Productions, Cardinal Pictures