The Angry Hills: a story of what could've been

You’d be entitled to expect a lot from the World War Two drama, The Angry Hills (1959). It has all the ingredients to have been a memorable film. (See the film here).

It was written by A.I. Bezzerides, responsible for two classic crime novels, Thieves Market (1949) and They Drive by Night (1938), as well as the screenplays for film noir masterpieces such as On Dangerous Ground ((1952) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955), the latter, an adaptation of a Micky Spillane novel, directed by Robert Aldrich, who was also behind the camera for The Angry Hills.

Indeed, when one considers films Aldrich was responsible for throughout his career – Apache (1954), Vera Cruz (1954), The Big Knife (1955), 4 for Texas (1963), The Dirty Dozen (1967), Ulzana’s Raid (1972), Hustle (1975) – then we know that The Angry Hills was in the hands of one of the most capable and interesting American film-makers.

Add to this, the fact that the hero in The Angry Hills was played by Robert Mitchum – one of the biggest post-war Hollywood stars and perhaps the greatest male protagonist in film noir – Undercurrent (1946), Crossfire (1947), Out of the Past (1947) and The Big Steal (1949), and that his nemesis in the film was one of the best British actors of the 1950s and 1960s, Stanley Baker, then it’s even more perplexing that the film turned out to be so underwhelming.

The Angry Hills is set in Greece at the time of the Nazi invasion (1941) and involves Mitchum as an American journalist in possession of sensitive information trying, with the help of the Greek resistance, to escape the clutches of the Germans.

The film is messy and too interested in moving things along to get underneath the skin of its troubled protagonists. Bezzerides’ script wants to say something important about big themes – loyalty, betrayal, courage, duty, love – and is not squeamish about the barbarity of the German occupation, but Aldrich seems in a rush to unfold the plot and in the process loses what would have made this a good film, which is the human drama.

The Angry Hills could have and should have been in the mould of Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City – which is also about the Gestapo hunting for resistance fighters and doesn’t shy from presenting German violence – but settles for less, the path of least difficulty, the lowest common denominator, i.e. the perennial problem facing the ambitious Hollywood film.

Aldrich admitted his failure, expressing his disappointment ‘not because it's not a good picture but because it could have been better. It had a potential that was never remotely realised... you feel sad about The Angry Hills... I'd know how to make The Angry Hills better in a thousand ways.’

Still, there are several interesting scenes – particularly, the village massacre – and the dialogue is good: at one point the Gestapo chief played by Baker tries to persuade a Greek resistance leader to hand over Mitchum by heaping derision on the American for not being a soldier, but a ‘journalist, a foreign correspondent. Do you know, Leonidas, what a foreign correspondent is? It is that brand of intellectual coward who observes while others die in order to publish his own version of events in a manner that will sell newspapers. This is the man you’ve been sheltering.’

Thieves’ Market

AI Bezzerides (1908-2007), the Hollywood screenwriter and noir novelist, was born in Sampsounta, Pontos, to a Greek father and Armenian mother, whose family emigrated to California when he was two-years-old.

Bezzerides wrote the screenplays for several seminal film noirs, On Dangerous Ground (directed by Nicholas Ray, 1951) and Kiss Me Deadly (directed by Robert Aldrich, 1955), while he adapted his novel Thieves’ Market for the film Thieves’ Highway, which was directed by Jules Dassin in 1949.

Thieves’ Market is the bleak story of immigrant Nick Garcos, an independent trucker hauling produce around the markets of California, in futile pursuit of the American Dream of honest hard work, self-sufficiency and prosperity, thwarted by corruption, deceit, ruthlessness and violence.

The novel is based on Bezzerides’ own experiences of riding with his trucker father in the fields and packing houses of California’s Central Valley and in the markets of Stockton, Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles. ‘Long, long ago,’ Bezzerides wrote of this formative time, ‘when I saw what the produce dealers did, I knew that the world was going to end.’

Indeed, this sense of despair permeates Bezzerides’ work. Writing in the foreword to Thieves’ Market, Garret White says that the themes that obsessed Bezzerides were: ‘Man’s self-destructive programming (“tragedy is etched into the genes”); the destruction of nature; the mystery and superiority of women; the exploitation of labor; addiction as a metaphor for American consumer culture; the “sanity of the insane and the insanity of the sane”.’

(Bezzerides’ critical approach to American ideology provides an interesting contrast to that of another Greek-American filmmaker, Elia Kazan).

Bezzerides also wrote the screenplay for The Angry Hills (1957, also directed by Robert Aldrich), which is set in Greece at the time of the Nazi invasion and involves Robert Mitchum as an American journalist in possession of sensitive information trying, with the help of the Greek resistance, to escape the clutches of the Germans. It’s a flawed and messy film, but there are several interesting scenes – particularly, the village massacre – and the dialogue is good: at one point the Gestapo chief (played by Stanley Baker) tries to persuade a resistance leader to hand over Mitchum by heaping derision on him for not being a soldier, but a ‘journalist, a foreign correspondent. Do you know, Leonidas, what a foreign correspondent is? It is that brand of intellectual coward who observes while others die in order to publish his own version of events in a manner that will sell newspapers. This is the man you’ve been sheltering.’