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UNION CITY (1979)
FOX LORBER DVD (region 0)
d. Marcus Reichert; pr. Graham Belin; scr. Marcus Reichert; ph. Edward Lachman; m. Chris Klein; ed. Lana Jokel, Jerry Michaels; novel. Cornell Woolrich; cast. Deborah Harry, Everett McGill, Dennis Lipscomb (87 mins)
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Bringing an Avant-Garde Artist's Sensibility to Classic Film Noir
The 1970s saw a revival in one of the more critically revered of classic American movie genres, film noir.
INTERVIEW
DEBBIE HARRY & CHRIS STEIN
This time, however, many of the films, beginning in essence with the self-conscious homage of Farewell, My Lovely and the deliberate iconoclasm of the revisionist The Long Goodbye, were in part experiments in a kind of film noir in color, with an important consideration thus whether or not to evoke the genre’s 1940 period origins. Union City is perhaps the most obscure of these latter noirs to employ a period setting and is today noted mainly as the debut starring role for Blondie lead singer Deborah Harry. However, its literary pedigree makes it a most unusual hybrid of black comedy and guilt-ridden psychodrama. Based on a story by seminal author Cornell Woolrich, by way of Edgar Allan Poe as many reviewers of the time commented, Union City is a self-conscious tale that while impressing avant-garde followers had little appeal for general audiences. However, seen today, the film compares to the tonal experiments of such directors as David Lynch and even the Coen Brothers, visualizing the strange and stylized banality of the everyday. Although oddly acted and slowly paced, the film is an offbeat chronicle of collapsing marriage, sexual discontent and the descent into paranoia. As a portrait of American stagnation in the 1950s it finds a morbid humor, making its relative critical neglect most unfortunate.
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Synopsis (contains spoilers)
Set across the river from New York City circa 1953, Union City tells a story of desperate, unfulfilled lives trapped in a stifling and even repressively desolate suburban milieu.
Dennis Lipscomb and Deborah Harry play a married couple who now barely seem to relate to one another on any interpersonal level, including sexual. However, the prospect of their sad resignation to such a fate is slowly breeding intolerance and discontent between them as they fixate on other matters. Harry has developed sexual designs on their apartment building’s new superintendent (Everett McGill) whilst Lipscomb is oddly obsessed with an unusual crime – somebody has been drinking from the sole bottle the milkman leaves outside his apartment door every night. One night, he ties a string from around the bottle to his finger as he lies in bed. He manages to capture the culprit, a vagrant, and in a fit of rage kills him. Overcome with guilt, he hides the corpse in a nearby vacant apartment but is increasingly nervous. In the meantime, Harry tries to find satisfaction with the willingly adulterous McGill, not that the paranoid and self-absorbed Lipscomb even suspects them. Lipscomb’s guilty fear mounts when he discovers that McGill plans to show the vacant apartment to a set of prospective new tenants. He thus endeavors thus to prevent this but has to deal with his own burdensome sense of increasing responsibility.
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Human Desperation, Paranoia & the Deconstruction of Guilt
Mostly confined to the one apartment building, Union City is a bizarre, parodic film noir, a mordant comedy about human desperation and paranoia, almost a deconstruction of the genre’s fatalistic guilt.
It emphasizes the stagnant banality of these people’s lives and their mounting sense of emotional disaffection. Both Lipscomb and Harry are driven by the lack of any fulfillment – he to paranoid hallucination and she to masturbation. All connection and communication between them has been lost as they desperately but perhaps unknowingly struggle to locate some kind of remaining purpose in their sorry lives. In its depiction of Lipscomb’s descent into paranoia, the film manages to explore the idea of rapidly mounting consequence based on initially trivial obsessions, a theme treated most differently but equally amusingly in Of Unknown Origin for instance and worthy of the theatre of the absurd, to which this film in part aspires. Yearning and the eventual, forced realization of the entrapping nature of their lives only reinforces the discontent of these characters, and hence rage for Lipscomb becomes the last vestige of his long ago surrendered potency. As constricting circumstances mount, these people find bare refuge. Although their efforts (Lipscomb’s especially as the essential noir victim) are doomed to failure, ironically Harry may find the escape she wants in a most unexpected and tragic way.
The film’s second half deals with the accumulation of desperation and paranoia, Lipscomb slowly realizing that he cannot cover-up or erase his mistake and Harry realizing that her desire to be wanted merely reinforces her discontent.
The two predicaments are also traps, and the characters’ desperate, self-deluded reactions to them are compared and contrasted throughout a view of a disintegrating marriage that takes a turn into absurd hopelessness. The study of mounting guilt has a resonance worthy of Poe and makes for a nicely ironic ending in the contrast of how men and women finally react to the sense of absence in their lives, one to morbid psychosis and the other to sexual fantasy. The utter despair of American suburbia has rarely been as forcefully deployed, the film unrelentingly exposing the sheer banality of life in the 1950s as it segues into horror. The resultant tonal complexities make for an unusual viewing experience about the consequences of discontent, pettiness and the dangerous ennui of suburban disaffection. There is always something to think about in this film: however, its low key nature, unusual acting style and rather sluggish pacing (although an apt approximation of everyday rhythms disintegrating), proved too disconcerting to many. Still, it is as a rare look at the psychological absurdity behind film noir’s inherent fatalism that the film is remarkably successful.
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Photographic Expressionism in a Noir Eye
Viewers in the mood for something different and unusual may be pleasantly surprised by Union City, another film rescued from obscurity by the home theatre renaissance.
Debbie Harry: Union City Blue
Sadly, the visual transfer on this DVD is disappointing, available in 4:3 fullscreen only. As a film noir in color, the film is boldly experimental, especially in its use of colored lights and deep blacks. Sadly, it is a worn print and the color sense fluctuates between the vivid and the grainy – the brighter lights having the better clarity levels. With many static camera set-ups and mannered acting, the film may be off-putting; although it nicely manages to visualize a constricting life, with Lipscomb increasingly pushed into corners. There are sly, subtle touches throughout in unusual décor and offbeat ironic moments (as when the blood of the vagrant mixes with spilled milk – now there is something to cry over, the film slyly suggesting). Backgrounds, however, often look murky and indistinct although the necessary sense of mounting paranoia is captured in the increasingly stylized and expressionistic use of color: this is a painterly film favoring blocks of colored lights, increasing shadows and tight spaces. There is very little natural light in this film and what there is of it strains through curtained windows and screens. Sets seem sparsely populated and there is an odd sense of urban abandonment, except in the ironic crowd scene at the ending.
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Tales of Blondie, Blues & Jazz
The listed Dolby Digital stereo sound transfer is efficient although reflects the very sparse nature of the original mix, limited by a very low budget.
Indeed it may seem like mono only. However, the score (by Blondie veteran Chris Stein) is a fine bluesy jazz mix that sets the tone well, featuring nicely after the murder as if signaling both the passion and paranoia of Lipscomb as well as Harry’s need to feel sexually desirable. Well cued to their needs, the score is ever more disconcerting the more desperate they become. The film also makes telling use of quieter moments, exploring how minor, naturally occurring sounds and quiet can make for an overwhelming stagnation. Otherwise, it favors the domesticity of apartment living and the sheer peculiarity of the voices, the dialogue stressing banal triviality alongside the revealing escape each character seeks in fantasies of one kind or another. Voices may strain to communicate but seem desperately lost. Among the many silences is a noticeable hiss and some system adjustment may be needed to smooth this over. Comprised mainly of constricting interiors and a low key sense of sound, the transfer is perhaps suited to television screening rather than complete home theatre. Overall thus, the aural atmosphere seems flat and could have been much sharper than the dull, nullified treatment here, although this does reinforce the needed sense of stagnation.
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Additional Treats for the DVD Collector
There are some special features: production credits, a photo gallery (including glimpses of scenes apparently cut from the film) and filmographies for Harry, Lipscomb and McGill. Considering there are evidently scenes taken from the released movie, the lack of a deleted-scenes special feature is a most noticeable deficiency. Sadly, there is no information about the many creative talents behind the camera.
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US DVD PURCHASE INFORMATION: Union City
UK DVD PURCHASE INFORMATION: Union City [DVD]
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