Some Notes on Brainstorm

[I posted a couple of times about the late noir Brainstorm at The Blackboard; it just became available as an on-demand DVD through the wonderful Warner Archive. I've re-ordered the material in those comments here to make them more coherently readable as one post. These are, as I title them, "just notes," for a readership like The Blackboard's that is already familiar with the film (so I don't lay out the plot). I'll be doing more of that here, with respect to films, books, and everything else; I don't consider myself to be in the review game, so I'm not going to spend much verbiage on giving people their bearings. I don't mean that to be inconsiderate, it's just that PMD is not so public a blog, not "first level informative," but more of a middle-of-an-ongoing-conversation.]

I received my Warner Archive DVD of Brainstorm and couldn't resist playing it immediately. It looks great; I think the Archive is going to be a smashing success.

I had seen this film twice before, but only in cut, pan-and-scan television prints. Seeing a fine print uncut in the proper aspect ratio confirmed and extended the impression I had earlier received, that this is not only one of the very last classic era noir films, but one of the very greatest. Nicholas Christopher pays proper tribute to it in his fine book Somewhere in the Night. He speaks of it as an appropriately terminal film for the cycle, bleak in the extreme, and I think that is right on; anything much after Brainstorm would have to be neo-noir almost by definition, simply because this film exists. (The Money Trap was probably the last classic black-and-white noir to open in US theaters, in February 1966; Brainstorm had opened in May 1965.)

Shot by shot, the film is as beautiful and visually meaningful as Kiss Me Deadly or The Big Combo; and I don't say that lightly. Sam Leavitt (who shot Denis Sanders's thematically similar Shock Treatment the year before Brainstorm) was an ace cinematographer.

The wide image is used very skillfully by Leavitt and director William Conrad. An example of that, which of course had escaped me in the television prints, comes during the amazing scene when Jeffrey Hunter's Jim Grayam assassinates Cort Benson (and "assassinate" is the right word -- this film definitely has that sort of mid-Sixties vibe). Benson is giving a speech at an industrial conference at a hotel. Grayam enters the conference area and sees that the room being used for the speech is interior to the large exhibition hall. So the image set-up is Grayam, back to us, screen right; Benson very deep in the frame, indistinguishable although we can hear his voice; and between them, on both sides of a central corridor, an innumerable series of lateral exhibition panels.

I don't think it's at all a stretch to suggest that those panels can be taken to represent the layers of Grayam's mind. Anyone's mind has many levels, of course; but by this point in the film we are having a mighty hard time distinguishing the layers in Grayam's -- brilliant, troubled, pretending to be troubled, provoked to be troubled. Where are we? This image, only possible in wide-screen and making full use of it, is a brilliant visual metaphor for our and Grayam's confusion.

I have always felt that Jeffrey Hunter was an under-rated actor, but I will also freely admit that his good looks have a mesmerizing effect on me as a gay man. Nonetheless, whether you are a Hunter fan or otherwise, I think it is pretty clear that Jim Grayam in Brainstorm is his finest performance. (I like the contrary spelling of a last name that would usually be spelled "Graham"; "Gray Am" is an apropos suggestion for this particular character!)

The casting of Dana Andrews as the evil industrialist is perhaps one of the first flickers of a "neo-noir" impulse, in that it refers quite consciously to an earlier stage of the cycle, and that suggests an awareness of the noir cycle as a cycle that I'm not sure had been seen before (although I would welcome counter-examples). Andrews (55 when Brainstorm was filmed) was in his second generation of noir by this point, and would have played the Hunter role two decades earlier (Hunter was 37 during filming).

Nicholas Christopher refers to Brainstorm as the most "nihilistic" film noir, and interestingly, I think its closest competition in this regard may be the last noir film Andrews made before Brainstorm (unless one counts The Fearmakers in 1958): Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956).