When Eddie Muller asked Miss Noir City Audra Wolfmann if she had a definition for "bad girl", Audra arched her eyebrow and retorted, "Men! You can't live with them and you can't skin them and make expensive handbags."
Muller was thrilled to introduce Hugo Haas' The Other Woman (1954) because of its pristine 35mm print, courtesy of Schawn Belston and 20th Century Fox. Belston wasn't even sure if the print had ever been through a projector. As fortunate as that was for Noir City, it reflected sadly, if indirectly, on the troubles Hugo Haas had with distribution. "Bad Girls" night at Noir City has, in recent years, become Hugo Haas night. Haas, in effect, made a career out of bad girl movies. He was a poor man's Orson Welles; a Czechoslovakian émigré who came to the United States, primarily as an actor who had a great theatrical background in Czechoslovakia, but who soon discovered when he came to Hollywood that the way to make it was to control his own product, so he would produce, write, direct and star in his own movies. "He made the same movie over and over and over," Muller joked. "They were all derivations of The Blue Angel in some way, in which a middle-aged Czechoslovakian émigré was tortured and browbeaten by some buxom, blonde bombshell. Not a bad way to make a living, I suppose. As long as he didn't spend too much money, they let him keep making the same movie."
Of related interest is the off-the-presses publication of the fifth edition of the Noir City Annual, wherein Milan Hain has contributed a sympathetic profile of Hugo Haas. There is enthusiasm in (the former) Czechoslovakia regarding Hugo Haas being rediscovered in the U.S. and his films resurrected, primarily through Noir City festivals. This has led to a renewed appreciation of his work in his homeland. In his essay, Hain argues eloquently: "Haas was always working in the interstices between Czechoslovakia and the USA; between the center (as actor in the 1940s) and the edges of the Hollywood film industry (as producer/director in the 1950s); between dependence (on distributors and audiences) and independence; between entertainment and serious art; between fiction and autobiography; between ambition and reality. Those hybrid qualities made his work obscure and easy to dismiss. A reexamination of his work reveals, however, that these very qualities are what make Haas' films rich, interesting, and worthy of our attention as objects of both entertainment and serious study. While he is clearly not Fritz Lang or Billy Wilder, Hugo Haas was much more than a B-movie hack. In his haunted, often shambling way, he is proof that at least a portion of the auteur theory is a valid lens for examining film production." (Noir City Annual, 2013:104)
Cleo Moore has, perhaps, never looked so delectably curvaceous in outfits that emphasize her hourglass figure, captured affectionately by cinematographer Eddie Fitzgerald. Readers of The Evening Class might recall my earlier appreciation of "The Queen of the B-Movie Bad Girls" from Noir City 8, accompanied by a magazine rack gallery, and her swimsuit collection. Recently, watching Ivy Lynn (Megan Hilty) bid for the role of Marilyn Monroe in the T.V. series Smash, it occurred to me she would be perfectly cast in a biopic on Cleo Moore. I can dream, can't I?
