Two old ladies own a boarding house populated by other pensioners like themselves, a somewhat dotty crew of faded dreamers who look with fear and hopefulness upon the world that’s passed them by. One spinster (the great Zasu Pitts of fluttery hands and quavery voice) convinces herself that mashers follow her through the streets, and she can’t wait to tell everybody how frightened she feels by the attention. A stiffly proud old magician (Felix Bressart), attended only by his dog, will have his feelings hurt at any slight in the respect he deserves. One man (Grant Mitchell) can be persuaded to recite his wretched poetry, while another (Brandon Tynan), with a touch of dementia, lives in the past and forgets that the lady who owned the house no longer lives. It now belongs to the other two women, one a dreamer (Jessie Busley) and the other a carping Irish housekeeper (the great sharp-nosed Una O’Connor) who must deal with reality as best she can. They owe back taxes and the bank is about to foreclose.

Suddenly, the dreamer’s son Tommy (Jeffrey Lynn) and the housekeeper’s sassy daughter Sarah Jane (Ann Sheridan, a pistol but “a good girl” and not “a hussy”) come home after not having made any great success in their different paths to show biz. Tommy brings his boss, gangster Chips Morgan (Humphrey Bogart), who’s blackmailing Tommy into hiding him in the boarding house after a murder. As unlikely as it seems, the stir-crazy Chips, putting the make on Mary Ann, takes it into his head to turn the joint into an old-fashioned nightclub called the Roaring 90s (there must be no zoning issues), and they put on an elaborate floor show that looks like they could never make their money back.

Director Valie Export and writer Peter Weibel come from Germany’s post-1960s avant-garde generation of confrontational performance and video artists. PopMatters reviewed Export’s first two features here and we’re tempted to summarize this 1980 effort as “third verse, same as the first”, though it’s not that simple.

This is a highly dialectical film on the topic of the relations between sexes, or more specifically women trying to reconcile motherhood with “personhood.” The point of the title is that women/wives (frauen) must be allowed to be human beings (menschen). A central conflict for each woman involves her status as a mother or would-be mother; it’s notable that all four women in the film want to have children or keep the ones they have, and the prospect of going childless isn’t desirable for any of them.

This is an early film in the trend that French critics would call “film noir”, and a very interesting one. It’s an inverted mystery in which we see the murder committed, and then follow the killer’s point of view as events become increasingly tense, leading to the possibility that he’ll have a nervous breakdown before he’s ever caught for the crime. Being forced to identify with a “bad guy” in a hopeless situation, played alternately with sympathy and chilly steel by Humphrey Bogart, is the heart of the film’s claim to noir, and the shadowy, foggy black and white photography is the seductive garment wrapped around it.

Architect Richard Mason (Bogart) feels trapped in a miserable marriage to the brittle Katherine. She’s played by Rose Hobart, a rather angular actress who has something of a cult around her, since she was the subject of an avant-garde film called Rose Hobart. We don’t know why their marriage is this way, but there’s a strong possibility it could be his fault. Anyway, he’s clearly not having sex with his wife; we intuit this subtext not only from their demeanour but from a big symbolic injury to his legs, which renders him psychosomatically unable to walk until he leans on a cane. He secretly yearns for his wife’s younger sister (Alexis Smith), so he devises a clever plan to murder Katherine in a misty, expressionistic scene.

Thanks to Martin Scorcese’s recent Hugo, which is as much at attempt to educated the jaded audience to the wonders of the early silent era as it is a showcase of modern technology, many viewers have been introduced to the fact that French film pioneer Georges Méliès existed and that among his many movies was a certain epic called A Trip to the Moon. In the scene where one rediscovered print is projected to two wonder-struck children, the director’s wife carefully explains that they hand-colored it.

The 15-minute epic is presented as a lively group of scenes, each telling its own little sequence of detailed events within the shot. A professor tells an assembled mass of fogeys (dressed in wizard robes) about his planned trip. He shows his colleagues the workshop where it’s being assembled. There’s a ceremonial firing from a massive cannon (borrowed from Jules Verne), attended by dancing girls in vaguely naval uniforms.

George C. Scott plays a retired mob guy in Spain. It’s a beautiful, sleepy coastal town, and he’s got a fishing boat and a warily sentimental yet hardbitten prostitute (Colleen Dewhurst) for regular assignations. He’s not happy. His marriage ended with the death of their child. He’s got nothing to live for and feels he’s only pretending, just going through the motions and waiting to die, so he accepts a job that of course goes wrong—springing a young punk (Tony Musante) from prison who stops to pick up a girlfriend (Trish Van Devere). Her calculating, sympathetic, ambiguous character is a piece of work. The sizing-up that goes on between Van Devere and Scott is of course acting required by the story, but we can’t help imagining we see the electricity that would quickly make them a real-life couple with several more shared credits.

This is a film of doomed characters with the weight of imagined yet largely unexplained backstories, brought to life by good actors and spiced with excitingly staged violence that bursts into carefully paced setpieces. The young criminal is unlikable yet gradually opens up, gaining some respect for the old man while always considering him useful and expendable. It’s a road movie, and a “driver” movie (like The Driver a few years later) as opposed to a “hitman” movie (like The Mechanic, which I mention out of the million others because it has a kind of mentor/apprentice thing), and it’s kind of a Hemingway movie. Sven Nykvist shot it with an eye for placing people in limpid landscapes. Jerry Goldsmith’s moody score features a lush yet melancholy piano theme for Scott’s character.