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New DVD Set: Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 4

Films Noir Collection DVD

On July 31, Warner Home Video, will release Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4, which contains a bumper 10 remastered movies on five double DVDs from the classic film noir period of the 40s and 50s:

Act of Violence / Mystery Street
Crime Wave / Decoy
Illegal / The Big Steal
They Live By Night / Side Street
Where Danger Lives / Tension

Each DVD in the set can be purchased separately.

The DVD release has reviewed by Glenn Erickson of DVDTalk.Com, with a focus on They Live By Night and Side Street.

Update 7 Aug 2007: Decoy has been has been reviewed on Noir Of the Week.
Update 8 Aug 2007: All movies on the DVD are reviewed in filmjournal.net by clydefro.
Update 9 Aug 2007: All movies on the DVD are reviewed by Adnan Tezer at dvd.monstersandcritics.com.
Update 13 Aug 2007: All movies on the DVD are reviewed by dvdverdict.com.
Update 14 Aug 2007: All movies on the DVD are reviewed by The Shelf DVD Reviews.
Update 21 Aug 2007: All movies on the DVD are reviewed by Film Forno.
Update 9 Sep 2007: An interesting review of the DVD and film noir generally by Cullen Gallagher of The Brooklyn Rail.

These movies are a feast for noir fans with many of the top-level directors and stars of the period featured:

Act Of Violence / Mystery Street

Act of Violence (1948)
Cast: Van Heflin, Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh, Mary Astor, Phyllis Thaxter
Director: Fred Zinnemann
War veteran Frank Enley seems to be a happily married small-town citizen until he realises Joe Parkson is in town. It seems Parkson is out for revenge because of something that happened in a German POW camp, and when a frightened Enley suddenly leaves for a convention in L.A., Parkson is close behind.

Mystery Street (1950)
Cast: Ricardo Montalban, Sally Forrest, Bruce Bennett, Elsa Lanchester, Marshall Thompson
Director: John Sturges
Vivian, a B-girl working at “The Grass Skirt,” is being brushed off by her rich, married boyfriend. To confront him, she hijacks drunken customer Henry Shanway and his car from Boston to Cape Cod, where she strands Henry…and is never seen again. Months later, a skeleton is found (sans clothes or clues) on a lonely Cape Cod beach. Using the macabre expertise of Harvard forensic specialist Dr. McAdoo, Lt. Pete Morales must work back from bones to the victim’s identity, history, and killer. Will he succeed in time to save an innocent suspect?

Crime Wave / Decoy

Crime Wave (1954)
Cast: Sterling Hayden, Gene Nelson, Phyllis Kirk, Ted de Corsia, Charles Bronson
Director: André De Toth
Three San Quentin escapees kill a cop in a gas-station holdup. Wounded, Morgan flees through black-shadowed streets to the handiest refuge: with former cellmate Steve Lacey, who’s paroled, with a new life and lovely wife, and can’t afford to be caught associating with old cronies. But homicide detective Sims wants to use Steve to help him catch Penny and Hastings, who in turn extort his help in a bank job. Is there no way out for Steve?

Decoy (1946)
Cast: Jean Gillie, Edward Norris, Robert Armstrong, Herbert Rudley, Sheldon Leonard
Director: Jack Bernhard
Gangster Frank Olins (Robert Armstrong) is to die in the gas chamber much to the dismay of his girlfriend Margot Shelby (Jean Gillie) as he is carrying the secret of the location of $400,000 with him. Margot seduces gangster Jim Vincent (Edward Norris) to get him to engineer the removal of Olins’ body from the prison immediately after he dies in the gas chamber. She takes prison doctor Craig (Herbert Rudley) away from his nurse/girl friend (Marjorie Woodworth) and gets him to administer an antidote for cyanide gas poisoning. During the removal of Olins’ body, the hearse driver is killed by Tommy (Phil Van Zandt). The revived Olins gives Margot half of a map showing the money location and Vincent, in a fit of jealousy, kills Olins and takes the other half. Because the doctor’s plates on his car will get them through the police roadblocks, Vincent and Margot take him with them on the money hunt.

Illegal / The Big Steal

Illegal (1955)
Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Nina Foch, Hugh Marlowe, Robert Ellenstein, DeForest Kelley
Director: Lewis Allen
Ambitious D.A. Victor Scott zealously prosecutes Ed Clary for a woman’s murder. But as Clary walks “the last mile” to the electric chair, Scott receives evidence that exonerates the condemned man. Realizing that he’s made a terrible mistake he tries to stop the execution but is too late. Humbled by his grievous misjudgement, Scott resigns as a prosecutor. Entering private practice, he employs the same cunning that made his reputation and draws the attention of mob kingpin, Frank Garland. The mobster succeeds in bribing Scott into representing one of his stooges on a murder rap and Scott, in a grand display of courtroom theatrics, wins the case. But soon Scott finds himself embroiled in dirty mob politics. The situation becomes intolerable when his former protégé in the D.A.’s office is charged with a murder that seems to implicate her as an informant to the Garland mob. Can Victor defend the woman he secretly loves and also keep his life?

The Big Steal (1949)
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, William Bendix, Patrick Knowles, Ramon Novarro
Director: Don Siegel
Jane and Duke (alias Capt. Blake) accidentally meet in Vera Cruz while chasing flim-flam man Fiske. Soon the local Inspector General (El Gato) is involved. Fiske races across Mexico, pursued by Jane and Duke, trailed by the real Capt. Blake. The crafty Inspector General is waiting for them in Tihuacan but they all give him the slip, just in time for the climactic finale. Very tight script and pacing.

They Live By Night / Side Street

They Live by Night (1948
Cast: Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, Howard Da Silva, Jay C. Flippen, Helen Craig
Director: Nicholas Ray
In the ’30s, three prisoners flee from a state prison farm in Mississippi. Among them is 23-yo Bowie, who spent the last seven years in prison and now hopes to be able to prove his innocence or retire to a home in the mountains and live in peace together with his new love, Kitty. But his criminal companions persuade him to participate in several heists, and soon the police believe him to be their leader and go after “Bowie the Kid” harder than ever.

Side Street (1950)
Cast: Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, James Craig, Paul Kelly, Jean Hagen
Director: Anthony Mann
Joe Norson, a poor letter carrier with a sweet, pregnant wife, yields to momentary temptation and steals $30,000 belonging to a pair of ruthless blackmailers who won’t stop at murder. After a few days of soul-searching, Joe offers to return the money, only to find that the “friend” he left it with has absconded. Now every move Joe makes plunges him deeper into trouble, as he’s pursued and pursuing through the shadowy, sinister side of New York.

Where Danger Lives / Tension

Where Danger Lives (1950)
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Faith Domergue, Claude Rains, Maureen O’Sullivan, Charles Kemper
Director: John Farrow
One night at the hospital, young doctor Jeff Cameron meets Margo, who’s brought in after a suicide attempt. He quickly falls for her and they become romantically involved, but it turns out that Margo is married. At a confrontation, Margo’s husband accidentally gets killed and Jeff and Margo flee. Heading for Mexico, they try to outrun the law.

Tension (1950)
Cast: Richard Basehart, Audrey Totter, Cyd Charisse, Barry Sullivan, Lloyd Gough
Director: John Berry
A mousy drugstore manager turns killer after his conniving wife leaves him for another man. He devises a complex plan, which involves assuming a new identity, to make it look like someone else murdered her new boyfriend. Things take an unexpected turn when someone else commits the murder first and he becomes the prime suspect.

The Killers (1946) Revisited: Noir As Tragedy

The screenplay for The Killers by Anthony Veiller, Richard Brooks, and John Huston (uncredited), is not so much an adaptation of Hemingway’s short story (1927), but an imaginative response and more strongly a rebuttal to the last few lines at the end of Hemingway’s text spoken by Nick Adams, the guy who runs from the diner to warn Ole Anderson (‘the Swede’) of the Killers’ arrival:

“I’m going to get out of this town”, Nick said… “I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it. It’s too damned awful.”

After establishing the absolute resolve of the killers in the opening sequence, which is essentially faithful to Hemingway’s text, the film ventures on to explore the burning questions in the mind of the audience. What did the Swede do to warrant this retribution? Why doesn’t he run? In pursuing the story, the film’s ethos is that it takes courage not cowardice to confront and accept an inevitable – even violent – death.

The Killers (1946)

In Hemingway’s text the Swede’s explanation to Nick is “I got it wrong”, but this is changed in the script to “I did something wrong – once”. These stronger words are the fulcrum of the picture. Ole’s repentance is established from the outset and his tragic redemption seared into the viewer’s sympathies even before his story unfolds. How the script and the director, Robert Siodmak, construct the narrative using flashbacks and the continuum of the insurance investigation is a lesson on filmic technique.

The ‘rap sheet’ read to insurance investigator, Jim Reardon, by his secretary, tells us that despite Ole losing his parents at a young age, he managed to grow up straight in a tough neighbourhood until after his career as a boxer is ended by an injury in his last fight, when he falls in with the wrong crowd, and ends up in the numbers racket. Ole’s life from that fight to his death is a story of betrayal. In the dressing-room after the fight, he is dumped by his manager and trainer without empathy or ceremony. Later, his childhood friend, a cop, let’s him take the rap for the femme fatale, who then goes on to betray him again when she enacts the final double-cross.

A decent man destroyed by fate: the stuff tragedy is made of.

The Killers (1946)

New DVD: Scarface (1932)

Scarface 1932

Scarface (1932) directed by Howard Hawks and starring Paul Muni, the proto-ganster flick, has just been released on DVD from a pristine transfer. Buy the DVD

The New York Times review yesterday by David Kehr:

this is the greatest of the early-30s gangster films. Paul Muni, in what would remain his most uninhibited performance, is the simian title character, a thinly disguised Al Capone who machine-guns his way to the top of the Chicago rackets. (In a darkly playful touch, each of his assassinations is marked, somewhere in the frame, by an X.) Universal has made a new transfer of this essential title, making it available for the first time on DVD apart from its perverse inclusion as an extra in the deluxe edition of Brian De Palma’s dimly satirical, ultraviolent 1983 remake with Al Pacino.

Hawks’ film begins as an uncomfortably exhilarating comedy about the joys of unchecked desire, and ends as an expressionistic horror movie with howls of madness and intimations of incest. This disc includes a censor-pleasing alternate ending in which Muni’s Tony Camonte is caught, convicted and hanged, instead of going down, still a compelling force of nature, in the heat of battle.

Scarface 1932

Film Noir’s Anti-Hero: The Outsider

Film Noir’s Anti-Hero: The Outsider

The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have [these] dangerous impulses, yet they keep up a pretence, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganised, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for truth… the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois… because he stands for Truth. What can be said to characterise the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality… The Outsider is a man who has awakened to chaos… Even if there seems no room for hope, truth must be told… chaos must be faced.

Colin Wilson – The Outsider (1956, Gollanz, London)

The Killers (1946): Fata Morgana

The Killers (1946)

Insurance detective unravels the killing of a washed-up boxer.

– Steve H. Scheuer, Movies on TV and Video.

One of my favorite films noir. Burt Lancaster plays the former-boxer turned hoodlum with elegance and style, and Ava Gardner is hot as the femme fatale. A brilliant narrative technique by director Robert Siodmak, employing flash-backs and the story of an insurance investigation to hold it all together, produces a taut and entertaining movie.

Like most great noirs, this picture transcends the genre and is not only a story of greed, love, and betrayal, but is also about loss, friendship, innocence, and the brutal realities of trying to make a buck in a hostile world. There is a wider socio-historical context, which is more than ably discussed by Jim Groom in a recent post on his BavaTuesday blog.

The Killers (1946)


Film Noir: “All I can see is in the frame”

Out Of The Past (1947)

Tonight I came across a deeply interesting paper by fellow Australian, Rafaelle Caputo, titled Film noir: “You sure you don’t see what you hear?, published in the Australian Journal of Media & Culture (Vol5 No 2 1990). Caputo studied cinema at La Trobe University and has been a writer on film for over 15 years, contributing to various journals and newspapers. The title of the paper includes a line from Out of the Past (1947).

The paper is scholarly, but has something very important to say to all fans of the genre:

There certainly is something one can point to called film noir, which starts and stops at certain points in time, which has been written about and tabled in the history of cinema, and which has been the focus of much critical debate. Equally, however, there tends to exist another film noir whose style seemingly departs from that tradition, locked away in a kind of time capsule, but which forms it own delicate lines of tradition, continuing to creep around. Finally, I feel the best way to proceed in the reading of film noir is along a path suggested by another line from Out of the Past: “All I can see is the frame … I’m going inside to look at the picture”.

Caputo’s thesis is that defining a movie as a film noir derives from it a having a “noir sensibility” rather than fitting a pre-defined template of rules or guidelines. His argument is coherent and established, inter alia, by reference to a set of films made in Hollywood over a period ranging from the 40s though to the 70s. His analysis of Out of the Past is so brilliant it makes you want to tear away and watch that timeless work yet again.

The film [Out of the Past] opens with exterior shots of an expansive landscape of mountains and forest dissolving into each other while the credits fade-in with each dissolve, until finally there is a dissolve into a stretch of highway with a road sign in the foreground pointing directions and distances for various towns. Into the shot drives a black car, casually travelling into the distance of the frame; then a cut to a travelling-shot from the rear of the car, at an angle over the shoulder of the figure dressed in black behind the steering wheel. The shot knits our point of view with his as we pass another road sign indicating the approaching town of Bridgeport. This shot is maintained until the car pulls into a gas station, but as soon as the car comes to a halt there is an almost immediate cut, still from the same camera position but at a slightly lower angle. The gas station building now takes up most of the screen space, horizontally spilling onto the road from left of frame, and in view atop the building is another sign set off against the clouds which reads ‘Jeff Bailey’. This slight change in camera angle gives the impression of the building jutting out into the car’s diagonal path as though it has forced the black-clad figure of Joe Stefanos to stop abruptly rather than stop by his own volition…

Caputo convincingly argues that Klute (1971) is not a noir. It is interesting that the forthcoming NYC Noir noir festival organised by Film Forum includes a screening of Klute.

Other films noir referred to in the article:

The Killers (1946) and The Killers (1964)
Kiss of Death (1947)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977)

New York City Noir: Dark Dangerous Corrupt Sexy

The Taking Pelham 123 (1974)

The NY Times today published an article, Noir and the City: Dark, Dangerous, Corrupt and Sexy, by Terrence Rafferty, covering the N.Y.C. Noir film noir festival organised by Film Forum starting Friday. See my post of July 11 for the full program.

Rafferty reviews the major pictures and the article is supported on-line with high quality stills.

GUILT, desire, fear, ambition and the bad behavior those human frailties give rise to are the favored themes of the sort of film we now call noir. So it’s hardly surprising that a fair number of these pictures are set in New York City, where guilt, fear, desire, ambition and bad behavior are pretty much a way of life. Any city will do, of course, because all cities generate a certain amount of the anxiety that film noir feeds on. And all cities, somewhere, have dark, scary streets that can, in noir’ violent allegories of moral ambiguity, stand in for the dimmer, grubbier recesses of the soul. But New Yorkers pride themselves on having more of everything than people in other cities do. If noir is the great urban style of the movies and it is then New York City is surely the noirest place on earth.  More

The Asphalt Jungle (1950): When The City Sleeps

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

The The Asphalt Jungle adapted by Ben Maddow from the novel by R.W. Burnett is a movie with soul. A film that treats every character in the story as someone with a life worth knowing: the essence of a film noir. The command by director, John Huston of his story, his ensemble players, and the filmic context is profound and breathtaking.

From the opening shots, dramatised by the almost post-modern score of Miklos Rozsa, you know you are entering the realm of a great film-maker:

The Asphalt Jungle (1950) The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

The Asphalt Jungle (1950) The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

Throughout this opening sequence we hear the police radio chatter from inside the police car, but the visuals are never disturbed by a cut to inside the vehicle.

I will not cover territory more ably explored by others, but will focus on one scene that transcends melodrama and the noir genre. Safe-cracker Cavelli after being wounded during the robbery is seen in the background dying in his marital bed, through the open door of the bedroom from the kitchen of his apartment, where his distraught wife, Maria, beautifully played by Teresa Celli (who appeared in bit parts in only a handful of movies before moving into obscurity in 1953), at the kitchen table admonishing the hunchback getaway driver, Gus, for bringing this tragedy upon her young family.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950) The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

Maria has the best line in the picture. As a police siren wails in the background:

“Sounds like a soul in hell.”

Crossfire (1947)

Crossfire (1947)

Crossfire may have some historical interest for Gloria Grahame fans, but I don’t see it as a noir. It is a good B crime picture, but the only complexity is found in the peripheral characters of the taxi dancer and her strange boyfriend. It is predictable and too overtly preachy to sustain a deeper analysis. The main players are not deeply drawn and there is no real tension.

Crossfire (1947)

Paul Kelly, as the weird spurned lover of taxi-dancer Ginni, steals the film:

You know what I just told you – it’s lie…

Do you believe that – that’s a lie too…