Blog Feed

They Won’t Believe Me (1947): Guilt by Intention

They Won't Believe Me (1947)

A man on trial for murder takes the witness stand in his own defense (1947 RKO. Directed by Irving Pichel  Screenplay by Johnathon Latimer 95 mins original b&w version)

Nobody Believes Me does not have a high profile, but it is an intriguing melodrama with a strong noir sensibility, that deserves wider respect.

Don’t look for noir photography, erotic tension, or sustained violence. There is the use of flashback in the narrative and the plot involves several ironic twists, but it is the  role of fate that is the fulcrum.  Half-way though the film, in a single day, the two protagonists for probably the first time in their lives each makes a profoundly redemptive decision so that in the words of the poet George Seferis: “we found our life was a mistake, and we changed our life”, but fate intervenes, and the window to a new life together is irrevocably slammed shut.

The resolution is heavily Jesuitical: culpability and punishment accrue to a malevolent intention as well as the act itself.

Highly recommended.

Touch Of Evil Restoration

Touch of Evil (1958)

Glenn Erickson has posted on Film.com a review on the 50th Anniversary DVD Edition of Orson Welles’ Touch Of Evil (1958).

Erickson provides some fascinating background on the film’s production and its restoration 40 year later.

Wall Street: “What do you mean ‘gangsters’? It’s business.” *

* Force of Evil (1947)

Force Of Evil (1947)

The Sexual Politics of Mildred Pierce

Mildred Pierce (1948)

The anonymous blog, Precious Bodily Fluids, has posted an interesting feminist critique of Mildred Pierce (1945).

I disagree with much of the article, but it is well-written and offers a novel perspective.  My views have been added as a comment to the post.

The Leopard Man (1943): Dated and Over-rated

The Leopard Man (1943)

An escaped leopard is linked with the grisly murders of three young women in a small New Mexico town. (1943 RKO. Directed by Jacques Tourneur 96 mins)

Produced by Val Lewton
Based on the novel ‘Black Alibi’ by Cornell Woolrich
Film Editing by Mark Robson
Original Music by Roy Webb

A low-budget thriller from Val Lewton’s horror production unit at RKO based on a Cornell Woolrich novel, The Leopard Man, despite a strong film-making team and spooky noir lighting, looks dated and apart from the famous expressionist sequence, where a young latino girl is sent out into a dark night with a leopard on the loose, to buy corn-meal for her mother, is visually flat. But even the scenes with the terrified young girl are inferior to a similar sequence in Tourneur’s earlier and far superior Cat People (1942) from the same production unit.

The Leopard Man (1943)

The Leopard Man lacks tension and the drama is muddied by a soppy romantic angle, and any viewer who is half-awake will pick the culprit very early on.

Overall, The Leopard Man is disappointing and over-rated.

This is some background and an alternate take from Mayer and McDonnell, ‘Encylcopedia of Film Noir’:

RKO bought the rights to Woolrich’s next novel, Black Alibi (1942), for $5,175 and gave it to producer Val Lewton, who had just completed two memorable low-budget horror films, Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Lewton, working with screenwriter Ardel Wray, proceeded to change the setting of Woolrich’s novel from Latin America to New Mexico. They also altered the story line and the title of Woolrich’s book was changed to The Leopard Man (1943). Woolrich’s five sequences involving different women who are stalked by a killer jaguar and, subsequently, a man, were changed to two deaths, with only the first one caused by a black leopard, instead of a jaguar. However, the first killing, a young girl sent by her mother into the night to buy bread for the family, remains one of the most frightening moments in the cinema as Tourneur blends silence, natural sounds, and stylized lighting with images that capture the terror of the young girl as she moves through the darkness toward her house, only to discover that her mother has locked the door. Her death is presented mainly by the use of sound and lighting.

The Leopard Man (1943)

Lloyd Fonvielle: Film Noir Revisited

Criss-Cross

Lloyd Fonvielle on his mardecortesbaja.com blog has posted a concise and penetrating survey of film noir and how it informed the cinema of the 1960’s Film Noir Revisited:

Film noir had a beginning in the global dislocations and moral derangement of WWII, and an end in the open social and political critiques of the Sixties.  There had never been anything quite like film noir before WWII, and there has never been anything quite like it since the Sixties.  It was, and remains, a distinct tradition.

Richard Corliss on the World of Cornell Woolrich

The Bride Wore Black (1968)
La Mariée était en noir (1968 The Bride Wore Black)

Woolrich not only dislodged the detective from his traditional pedestal — as the solver of the puzzle, the good guy who nabs the bad guy, the knight on the mean streets, the arbiter of ethics, the reader’s surrogate whose very presence is a guarantee of narrative clarity and the restoration of order in the chaotic world of crime — but challenged the very notions of hero and quest. Now the hero could be the villain, or the dupe; the quest itself could prove to be deranged, as the moral moorings of standard detective fiction fall away. That dark view was reflected in the humid nightscapes of film noir cinematography, just as Woolrich’s tilt of perspective was mirrored in the movies’ oblique camera angles and paranoid worldview.

Back in December 2003 Richard Corliss published a two-part article on the life and works of Cornell Woolrich on TimeCNN, which is a fascinating introduction to the life and fiction of this seminal noir writer:

Desert Fury (1947): Technicolor Noir

Desert Fury (1947)

The young daughter of a lady casino operator falls for a racketeer
(1947 Paramount. Directed by Lewis Allen 96 mins)

Despite the use of lavish technicolor and high production values, Desert Fury only has any spark in the last 20 minutes culminating in a three-car car chase across the Nevada desert at dusk, which is made even more exciting by great musical scoring from Miklós Rózsa.

The big name stars are wasted and the screenplay from the otherwise dependable A. I. Bezzeridis and Rober Rossen lacks punch, and the dialog is sadly pretty sappy.  But the story did hold my interest to the end.

The debut performance of Wendell Corey as the possessive homme-noir to Lizabeth Scott and her racketeer boy-friend is impressive: his relationship with the racketeer played by John Hodiak has an undertone of sublimated homoerotic obsession, and it this that sustains the drama and is the trigger for the final denouement.

The Legion of Decency: Under the Radar?

I have added to yesterday’s post Big Week for Noirs on Oz TV a rather risque poster for The Ghost Ship (1943), and a ‘covered-up’ version, which Dark City Dame (“DCD”) in a comment to the post, suggests, I think rightly, was a censored version of the original.  DCD also tells us of another poster for I Love Trouble (1948), which leaves only a little more to the imagination.  We both wonder if these two posters ever did get released?

The Ghost Ship (1943)I Love Trouble (1948)
Click on each image to zoom…

Noir Lighting and Analepsis: The Motley View

Double Indemnity (1944)

The Motley View blog has two very erudite and concise articles on chiaroscuro lighting and analepsis in film noir referencing Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944):