#43 — Riff-Raff (Ted Tetzlaff, 1947)

Ted Tetzlaff only directed a handful of movies, but he shot over one hundred. He starting working as a cinematographer in the nineteen-twenties (his handiwork was found in the 1926 films Atta Boy and Sunshine of Paradise), racking up some impressive credits over the course of the next couple of decades. Included in that number is striking, evocative work on Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. Remarkably, his efforts on that film earned him no official accolades (Tetzlaff’s sole Oscar nomination came a few years earlier, for the George Stevens comedy The Talk of the Town), though it did seem to give him the chance to move a little higher on the Hollywood organizational chart. He notched no further director of photography credits, moving permanently to the director’s chair with the following year’s splendid film noir Riff-Raff.

Written by Martin Rackin, the film follows a private investigator named Dan Hammer (Pat O’Brien) who lives a scruffy existence in Panama. Trouble flies in when Charles Hasso (Marc Krah) arrives and hired Hammer to serve as his bodyguard, surreptitiously tacking a map to his cluttered bulletin board. That little piece of paper becomes the MacGuffin of the film with all manner of shady characters moving into Hammer’s orbit, and there are others who choose to pay for his services, with increasingly desperate need to get their hands on the map. It may not be the ingredient list for dreams, but it serves the vital purpose of setting a dizzying array of complications in motion, with slippery motivations and shaded truths abounding. In the context of the film, the purpose of the map matters far less than the anxiety it stirs. Tetzlaff knows that, and he expertly keeps all the whirligigs spinning.

What really distinguishes Riff-Raff is its endearingly offbeat tone. It’s hardly novel for a film noir to be infused with a sardonic sense of humor, but O’Brien’s private eye is at a whole different level. He appraises the collapsing calm around him with a bedraggled amusement roughly akin to an imperturbable elder statesman surveying the emotional wreckage of fervent upstarts who haven’t learned to temper their emotions. At time it seems he’s simply choosing to wait out the mayhem so he can casually pick up the useful remaining pieces. More often, he exudes the relaxed pleasure of a person who’s discovered that a massive reckless pageant is playing out before him, as if staged solely for his amusement. Riff-Raff anticipates the genre-blasting caper films of Joel and Ethan Coen, reveling in the many joys of spiraling crime stories well told while simultaneously jerking a thumb at the clattering cacophony and joyfully muttering, “Can you believe this nonsense?” That may not be enough to term Tetzlaff’s film as ahead of its time, but it definitely makes it one of the more surprising and entertaining examples of the film noir sub-genre from the time when the shadow-strewn style was at its peak.