Word: alton
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...Alton-Mann films - T-Men, He Walked by Night, Reign of Terror, Border Incident and Devil's Doorway - are unlike any other noirs in their visual density and tonal texture. Like many movies in the genre, these are indebted to the look that Orson Welles and Gregg Toland created for Citizen Kane: chiaroscuro lighting, characters in extreme closeup or long shot, and plenty of low-angle shots. Alton pushed these tenets further than most. He shot even the sitting figures from below, with the tops of rooms pressing down on them; he loved ceiling shots more than Japanese tourists...
...Cinematographers are also known as lighting cameramen. Well, Alton was a darkening cameraman. "Where there is no light, one cannot see," he wrote in his book. "And when one cannot see, his imagination runs wild. He begins to suspect that something is about to happen.In the dark there is mystery." Alton put this theory into practice, spectacularly; he become the master of visual mystery...
...McCarthy notes, Alton liked to throw whatever light he needed on a back wall, leaving the actors as foreground shadows. Sometimes the only thing visible in a closeup is the white of a man's eyes, or the moisture in a woman's. The enveloping shadows reduce the visual information, isolate elements to which the audience's attention can be directed. In Raw Deal, Alton's closeups of Claire Trevor and Marsha Hunt manage to catch a cross of light in the left eye of each actress, and another glistening cross in their earrings. Later, to show that time...
...Alton's masterpiece with Mann was not, strictly speaking, a noir. It was a historical epic called The Black Book also known as The Reign of Terror, and it concerned the head-chopping horrors of the French Revolution, with Basehart as a rabid Robespierre and Robert Cummings as yet another Mann hero serving in the noble role of secret agent. (Instead of counterfeit plates, Cummings is looking for a Robespierre diary with an enemies list inside.) Yet, from force of habit, or in anticipatory tribute to the French critics who would later give a name to the genre, Alton concocted...
...speeches out of the darkness, their faces caged by the tight frame. Or they'll be grouped, at sardine density, to form a cacophonous crowd. The only actors granted a little light, and thus a bit of traditional movie glamour, are Cummings and the heroine, Arlene Dahl, whose gown Alton lends a silky luster. The angles are, of course, lower than low, giving the viewers the impression they are the masses staring up at these puffed-up figures of power, these gargantuan gargoyles...