MICHAEL M MALONEY

(1940 (uncomfirmed) - ?)

The ultimate one-shot deal, the hit-and-run man, Maloney more or less came out of nowhere , made a single shining, unique masterpiece, and disappeared, never to be heard from again.
No confirmed pictures of him exist, and descriptions of his background vary depending upon who you ask.
According to Angie Dickinson, he was

“A mousey little guy, dark haired and quiet. You could barely hear him when he spoke to you, you always had to lean in close. But he had a way. When he told you how he wanted a scene, you knew it was the right way, you trusted he knew what he was doing. He had a vision. You can see that in the film. He knew exactly how he wanted everything…”

Maloney – almost certainly not his real name – appeared in Hollywood in the late 60s, where he apparently did some script work for Robert Brandon on projects which never reached the screen. He was shopping around a spec script, however, which quickly became semi-legendary for its unusual quality and daring.
Many studios wanted it, but Maloney, a virtual unknown with no track record or reputation within the industry to speak of, refused to sell until he was granted two conditions: he wanted to direct, and he wanted final cut.

Finally, faced with the baffling vagaries of the motion picture business during a counter-cultural revolution of sorts, in a period when a low-budget film like Easy Rider could be a smash hit while a Megalith like Doctor Dolittle could flop so absolutely, a studio buckled. 20th Century Fox put up a small amount of money and decided just to see where this would lead. In the late 60s, William Goldman’s “Nobody Knows Anything” had never been more true. Maloney’s timing could not have been better and so he found his script in production, and himself directing.
That script was entitled “Blood Journal” and it followed a few weeks in the life of everyman Frank Clark. In the script, and indeed the film, Clark goes to work at a bank, returns home to his pretty wife and sweet children, walks his dog, goes bowling and drinking with his buddies, visits his parents with his family, makes love to his wife, and generally behaves like a model, upright citizen of an ideal sort of Eisenhower America where the turbulence of the 60s appears never to have occurred.
Except every so often, Clark goes out alone and murders a girl.

Maloney cast Robert Wagner as Clark and Dickinson as his wife Laura and they have great chemistry, especially during their tender, creepy love scenes. Wagner seems to burrow into himself, finding the darkness at the core of his beauty, and in his scenes with Dickinson – particularly the later ones, after we have witnessed him at “work”, his hollow, flat cheeriness is absolutely terrifying and introduces an incredible level of clammy suspense to the narrative.
Dickinson – seemingly oblivious throughout – subtly allows some ambiguity to seep into her portrayal in the last act, suggestions that she is aware of her husband’s otherness, if not quite the full extent of his extreme behaviour. Maloney’s direction of each lead, and of all the actresses playing victims, indicates that he was a fine, sensitive director of actors as well as an original and gifted stylist.

The beautiful scope photography from James Wong Howe remakes the world of American suburbia into a fantastically beautiful wonderland of colour, where vivid fire engine reds run alongside cyans and cobalts and rich navy. This together with Elmer Bernstein’s loungey score serves to create a portrait of America as almost supernaturally perfect – glowing with colour and life.
The films first half hour give no indication of what is to come. We see Clark at work, at home, sleeping with his wife, playing with his kids. It is becoming dull, almost, but for Wagner’s mesmerising work and Maloney’s fabulous eye.
And then Clark leaves work one night, drives to a bar, picks up a girl (Tuesday Weld) there, goes back to her place and, in a long and scarcely bearable scene, strangles her.
It begins as a love scene, and there is quite an erotic charge between the actors, which evaporates when Clark breaks away from a long kiss with the girl with his hands clamped around her throat. Maloney pushes a slow zoom in towards his intent, rapt features as she shakes and racks herself against him and sweat breaks out upon his brow as we watch.
His calm, clinical, efficient disposal of her corpse is portrayed with economy in a few crisp sequences and the final scene of the first act is perhaps the scariest in the film – Clark returns home and sits on his daughters bed, watching her sleep, having killed less than an hour before.

Wagner has stated that Maloney never explained the film to the cast, but that he minutely modulated Wagner’s work, urging him to flatten out or pump up line deliveries, whispering in Dickinson’s ear during their scenes together. Howe refused to discuss Maloney after the film was completed, and the crew claim that his visual perfectionism and refusal to compromise over any shot or camera movement gave his DP little creative crawlspace – Maloney did all the work and expected the great Howe to arrange it, acting as a mere technician.
The film does look incredible, an otherworldly portrayal of the familiar. This, combined with the darkness of the themes and story – Maloney is attempting a critique of American consumerist society, it seems, but there have been numerous existentialist readings of the film and its ambivalent portrayal of its protagonist – meant that the film was a commercial disaster. It sank without trace in the US, and was only really rescued by its championing in France, where it became a cult object, remade in 1984 by Bernard Goublis with Michael Pare in the lead role.

This commercial failure has made it easier for Maloney to disappear, and subsequent attempts to locate him have all ended up in dead ends.
The fact that Maloney was not his real name – and that nobody in Hollywood knew what his real name was – has made it next to impossible to find him, or even discern if he is alive or dead. He fell off the radar soon after the film’s release, and has never reappeared on it. The real tragedy of this, for the cinephile, is that a director of rare talent and vision is lost to us. The only consolation is the exceptional quality of the single film he left behind, and the fascinating riddle of his life.