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Fear in the Night (1947): Wake in fright

Fear In the Night (1947)

A timid young bank teller wakes from a murderous nightmare to find it’s true. (Pine-Thomas Productions 1949, Directed by Maxwell Shane 72 mins).

Fear in the Night, is a very good b-thriller-cum-noir, based on a Cornell Woolrich story, Nightmare, adapted for the screen by the director, Maxwell Shane, and shot by cinematographer Jack Greenhalgh. The movie was remade less successfully in 1956 as Nightmare by the same director and production company.

The direction is tight and the action never lags over 72 minutes, with inventive camera work by Greenhalgh that creates exactly the dark signature mood of the Woolrich story. The nightmare scenes are powerful and the use of voice-over narration flashback adds to the mystery.  The performance of noir regular Paul Kelly as a cop with a conflict of interest is on target, and the troubled protagonist is well-played by De Forest Kelley, with good support from Ann Doran as his sister, and Kay Scott as his girl-friend.

I found the performance of bit-player Scott in her first role as Betty Winter, particularly engaging: her portrayal is so unaffected that the whole bizarre story seems real and grounded in the familiar. Her incomprehension at her boyfriend’s paranoia and strange behavior, and the dark mood established by the deft camera work and direction, establish exactly the nightmare Woolrich world of existential dread.

A strong climax with a doomed car-chase at night nicely ends the action. Definitely a B+.

Fear In the Night (1947)

Marlowe on trade-offs

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Howard Penning
 Reproduced under Creative Commons License

From Raymond Chandler’s novel, The Little Sister (1949):

They were never young and will never be old. They have no beauty, no charm, no style. They don’t have to please anybody. They are safe. They are civil without ever being polite and intelligent and knowledgable without any real interest in anything. They are what human beings turn into when they trade life for existence and ambition for security.

The Dark Knight (2008): Still a comic

The Dark Knight (2008)The Dark Knight is worth seeing for Heath Ledger’s bravura study in psychopathology, but as a movie it rarely strays from the confines of its comic-book origins.

Many are waxing lyrical on the “dark vision” and the portrayal of a flawed Batman, and this is true, but to say that the picture “is a straight-up gritty, dirty, soul-rending film noir crime drama” *, is pure hyperbole.  In the film noir universe, there are no super-heros.

As a film it has also major flaws: confused editing with dis-jointed dialog, and an obsession with the minutiae of violence.

* Review by Movie Blawger at SportingNews.com.

The Clay Pigeon (1949): Snappy B Thriller

A WW2 ex-POW suffering from amnesia is accused of treason. (RKO 1949, Directed by Richard Fleischer 63 mins).

The Clay Pigeon is a tight b-thriller from Richard Fleischer, who also directed the b-noirs Bodyguard (1948), Trapped (1949), Armored Car Robbery (1950), and The Narrow Margin (1952). Set on the streets of LA’s Chinatown with a realistic chase sequence, and a nail-biting climax on a train at night, the movie is energetic and great entertainment. A Japanese villain adds to the exotic mix, with good performances all-round from a solid b-cast.

There is an interesting interlude in the apartment of a Chinese widow of a Sino-American war vet where the protagonist hides from his pursuers, which is deftly woven into the story and adds considerable depth. The widow is nicely played by Marya Marco, who had a short career as a bit-player in the 40s and 50s.

The Clay Pigeon (1949)

 

 

The Clay Pigeon (1949)

LA Woman: “so alone…”

LA Woman

…Drivin’ down your freeways
Midnight alleys roam
Cops in cars, the topless bars
Never saw a woman…
So alone, so alone
So alone, so alone
Motel money murder madness…
Lets change the mood from glad to sadness

LA Woman – The Doors (1971)

Marlowe on the moon and justice

From Raymond Chandler’s novel The High Window (1942):

The night was all around, soft and quiet. The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don’t find.

Evelyn Keyes Dead at 91

The Prowler (1951)Evelyn Keyes, who died on July 4, starred in a number of films noir: Johnny O’Clock (1947), The Killer That Stalked New York (1950), The Prowler (1951), and 99 River Street (1953).

The Prowler (1951)

Gun Crazy (1950): Not so Bonnie and Clyde

Gun Crazy (1950)Violent femme and husband with a gun fetish decide to emulate Bonnie & Clyde (Orig title: Deadly is the Female, King Bros Productions 1950, Directed by Joseph H. Lewis, 86 mins)

I greatly admire Lewis’s film noir The Big Combo (1955), but Gun Crazy is a lesser work.  I am not sure it is even a film noir.

While there is a potent mix of sex and violence, layered with psycho-sexual motifs and fetishes, the narrative lacks tension and some scenes are very slow. Peggy Cummins is strong as the psychopathic urban gun-slinger, Laurie, but there is no depth or history to this woman who kills on reflex and with no remorse. The rest of the cast is ok only, and it is the director’s signature obsession with violence as a sexual psychosis that drives the story.  Gun Crazy is really a robbers-on-the run movie with noir pretensions, and these are only really evident in the climactic early morning shoot-out at the end in a fog-laden creek.  Bart, Cummins’ partner in crime, achieves some sort of redemption by shooting Laurie dead before she can kill two of his un-armed child-hood friends, one a deputy sheriff, who approach them  pleading that they give themselves up, after which he is killed in a hail of police bullets.  There is a tragic irony here: the man who is not a killer kills his reason for being.

The much-acclaimed long take inside the get-away car before, during, and after a bank robbery, is innovative for the period, but the action is flat until after the heist and they are pursued by the cops.  Low and high camera angles are used by Lewis to express mood and suggest sexual undercurrents, but if they operate on the audience, do so only unconsciously. While much has also been made of the ‘amour fou’ of the two protagonists, it is more an instinctual sexual attraction that is sustained on Laurie’s part by the sexual gratification that she achieves in their life crime.

Interesting historically and although it transcends its b origins, Gun Crazy is not a great movie. It’s cult status has more to do with the perversity of the theme and the performance of Cummins, than its merits as a filmic work.

Gun Crazy (1950)

The French Crime Wave: Film Noir & Thrillers 1937-2000

Over four weeks from August 8 to September 4 the NY Film Forum Movie House, 209 West Houston Street, New York NY 10014, will screen 39 (!) French films noir and thrillers.

The full program has not yet been released, but the French Embassy’s French culture site has released early details:

This festival of 39 prime examples opens with the late ex-pat Jules Dassin’s classic heist picture Rififi, which kick-started a whole new cycle of French Noir, and includes both classics and rarities by such masters of the genre as Jean-Pierre Melville (Bob le flambeur, Le Cercle rouge, Un flic), Jacques Becker (Touchez pas au grisbi), Henri-Georges Clouzot (Diabolique, Wages of Fear), Georges Franju (Eyes Without a Face), René Clément (Purple Noon), Louis Malle (Elevator to the Gallows), Claude Chabrol (La Cérémonie), and François Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid, The Bride Wore Black). Among the many stars showcased are the five great hommes durs (tough guys) of the genre — Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura, Yves Montand, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Alain Delon — and such femmes fatales as Simone Signoret, Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, and Brigitte Bardot. The festival concludes with a one-week run of Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player.

Noir Directors: Edward Dmytryk

Mirage (1965)Mirage (1965)

From an article, Film noir goes to war, in the TLS by Philip French:

Edward Dmytryk, Canadian son of Ukrainian immigrants, worked his way up in the cinema business from studio messenger boy to make Farewell My Lovely [aka Murder, My Sweet (1944)] . He followed this with two other crucial noir pictures, Cornered (1945), about war crimes and neo-Nazism, and Crossfire (1947), centring on returning veterans and post-war anti-Semitism. He was one of the Hollywood Ten, left-wing filmmakers jailed for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Unlike the others, he emerged from prison to reappear before HUAC, name former Communist associates and go back to work, making large-scale anti-Communist and conformist potboilers. But in 1965 he directed Mirage, an undervalued noir thriller, shot in black-and-white, turning on one of the genre’s favourite themes, amnesia, and indicting the military-industrial establishment which Dwight D. Eisenhower had warned against in one of his final speeches as President. It helped open the way for a new kind of political cinema that was to include such post-Watergate movies as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor.