It’s not for nothing that the first moment of physical violence in Armored Car Robbery- Richard Fleischer’s 1950 noir- is half-obscured by smoke. Fleischer was never a filmmaker prone to abstraction like some of his contemporary lower budget genre-auteurs (even less than, say, Siegel’s vision of the b-noir) but in shrouding the first act of brutality in the way he does, Fleischer reduces violence to limbs flailing and coming down hard on human bodies. In the aforementioned smoke, too, the titular robbers don gas masks, taking on an almost bestial quality for the minute or of screentime the robbery itself takes up. None of this is to say, though, that Fleischer’s imagery is used to implicitly metaphysical ends- on the contrary, his mixing of the utilitarian and symbolic only serves to emphasize the former- whatever implicit weight his images might carry is outdone by their immediacy. There’s no time to stop and think in a Fleischer film, which can sometimes make his films pounding and pulsating qualities hard to pinpoint the origin of.
One thing noted often in writing about Fleischer, especially in his period making b-noirs for RKO Radio Pictures, is his cutting on a shot-to-shot level. He’s an efficient filmmaker, basically, but what goes under-noticed in discussions of this quality is the sheer amount of spacial information he’s able to communicate in such short bursts. Take, for instance, the car chase immediately following the robbery— in just a few shots, Fleischer is able to take us from the action taking place in and around the armored car to throughout the city streets of Chicago, emphasizing the uniquely dangerous aspects of both. For so intense a filmmaker, too, his cuts rarely feel jarring even if they do feel at times violent. Fleischer’s images flow like his characters attack one another: swiftly and brutally, but never without purpose.
Despite all this, though, there is a strange grace present in Fleischer’s violence, albeit one that presents itself not through balletic choreography so much as through emotional weight. To Fleischer, framing and cutting are basically used to relational ends- whether between the film and audience, between character and character or between character and space. Thus, despite its 68 minute runtime and relative lack of textual interiority, Armored Car Robbery is hardly a film lacking for weight. Thus, when Fleischer shoots action, he shoots dialogue-without-words, a quality much great action filmmaking has— but in Fleischer’s case, his violence is a thousand times more expressive than it is expressionist.