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Young woman helps cops find her father’s killer
A poverty row b-thriller from a competent RKO production team. A scheming blonde, a suave villain, and an amateur female sleuth are packaged into 70 minutes of satisfying entertainment, with just a hint of sexual ambiguity and a novel twist with a reversal of roles between ego and alter-ego. Two smooth jazz interludes from Steve Gibson’s Redcaps in the Vogue night-club, and a great denoument scene at the end involving a pianola are highlights.
New York-based film writer, Dan Callahan, has written a penetrating article on the films and life of film noir regular, Gloria Grahame, for the May edition of Bright Lights Film Journal, Fatal Instincts: The Dangerous Pout of Gloria Grahame.
Callahan concludes his article with stunning directness:
Gloria Grahame lived on the sidelines of her films because it was there that she could cause the most trouble; she might appear in any movie, young and sullen, aged and insistent, under a pound of make-up or plain-faced, fucking the pain away, putting out a cigarette in someone’s eye, giggling for no reason. She’s inescapable, a disruptive force, and when I hear her in my head, she seems to say, “C’mon, you know you want to . . .”
Noir filmography for Gloria Grahame:
Crossfire (1947)
In a Lonely Place (1950)
The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
Macao (1952)
Sudden Fear (1952)
The Big Heat (1953)
Human Desire (1954)
Naked Alibi (1954)
Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)
Related FilmsNoir.Net posts:
The Big Heat (1953): Film Noir As Social Criticism
The Big Heat (1953) Revisited
Crossfire (1947)
In A Lonely Place (1950): The “Creative” Outsider
In A Lonely Place (1950): A Psychic Prison
Actor, Charleton Heston, died today. He starred alongside director Orson Welles in the last great noir of the classic cycle: Touch of Evil (1958). Heston’s first role was as a crooked gambler in the crime thriller cum noir Dark City (1950).
Others have posted obits and bios, and today’s New York Times obit by Douglas Martin is well worth reading. I will focus on one aspect of Richard Widmark’s craft.
My screen memories of Mr Widmark are bound up with his Westerns on B&W television during adolescence. His tough enigmatic persona in those movies resonated deeply, more than his film noir roles.
But there is a common theme: the outsider. The great westerns and noirs are essentially stories of a loner on the “outside”: whether as violent psychopath or flawed hero. Widmark inhabited such roles so well because he was an outsider himself, and this comes out clearly in the NY Times piece.
He was originally turned down for his breakthrough role in Kiss Of Death (1947) by the director, who told him that he was too “clean cut and intellectual” for the part. Throughout his life he protected his privacy and shunned the celebrity lifestyle.
I think his role in Samuel Fuller’s Pickup On South Street (1953) is his most nuanced noir performance: he profoundly portrays the psyche and persona of a petty criminal not only outside the law but outside even the criminal milieu – he lives an almost an ascetic existence in a shack on the city’s waterfront. When his “island” is threatened by a woman’s attachment he reacts with instinctual violence before she eventually draws him out.
The conversion scene in a boat moored near the shack is a no-man’s land where the b-girl and the pick-pocket traverse the narrow emotional and social confines of their existence. While we must acknowledge Fuller’s creative genius here, Widmark’s performance is pivotal.
BOSTON (Reuters) – Actor Richard Widmark, who earned an Oscar nomination playing a psychopath in 1947 noir “Kiss of Death,” has died aged 93. His films noir:
Kiss Of Death (1947)
Road House (1948)
The Street with No Name (1948)
Night and the City (1950)
No Way Out (1950)
Panic In The Streets (1950)*
Don’t Bother to Knock (1952)
Pickup On South Street (1953)
The Trap (1959)
Madigan (1968)
Against All Odds (1984)
* View free on-line – click the link.
He also provided a memorable hard-boiled voice-over for the 1992 documenatary Visions of Light: Noir Cinematography.
Lucille Fay LeSuer AKA Joan Crawford (1905-1977)
Films noir:
Mildred Pierce (1945)
Possessed (1947)
Flamingo Road (1949)
The Damned Don’t Cry (1950)
Sudden Fear (1952)
A married DA falls for a woman with a past
Thelma Jordan, the last film noir by Robert Siodmak is under-rated, and not because of Siodmak, whose lacklustre direction disappoints, but for the intelligent script and a bravura performance from Barbara Stanwyck, who plays Thelma, the woman with a past. I have deliberately not described her as a femme-fatale, as her character is multi-layered. She is trapped by her past but genuinely loves the DA who falls for her.
Noir determinism propels the story, which to a degree is melodramatic and contrived, but the pyschological elements and literate study of the dynamics of marriage and immaturity give the film more depth than most melodramas.
“Id’ like to say I didn’t intend to kill her, but when you have a gun, you always intend when you have to…”
Drunken Angel is the first Kurosawa film starring Toshiro Mifune, and has a strong noir mood.
From the New York Times review of the new Criterion release 27 November:
The liner notes for this Criterion Collection release identify Drunken Angel as a film noir, and visually the movie often suggests the dark, dangerously askew world that Hollywood directors like Anthony Mann and Robert Siodmak were developing during the same period in their urban thrillers. But thematically “Drunken Angel” hails back to an earlier genre, the tenement dramas of the 1920s and ’30s… with their principled heroes and calls for social reform. For every virtuoso sequence – like the Mifune character’s climactic knife fight with his former gang boss, which ends with the two squirming in a pool of white paint – there is a bluntly didactic scene in which the doctor rails against feudal traditions and demands better hygiene.
Shimura and Mifune went on to play symbolic father-and-son-type pairs in several Kurosawa films, including the dazzling and more truly noir-flavored Stray Dog of 1949; their pairing seems to represent the fundamental division in Kurosawa’s work between high-minded sentiment and down-and-dirty action. (Criterion Collection, $39.95, not rated.)
Steve-O of Noir of The Week blog has posted a good article on In A Lonely Place, from Barry Gifford’s book, Out of the Past: Adventures in Film Noir. Don‘t read the article if you haven’t seen the film, as it contains spoilers.
I always go to my falling-apart paperback copy of Steve Scheuer’s Movies On TV and Video 1993-94 for a razor-sharp plot summary: Gripping story of a Hollywood writer who is under suspicion of murder and his strange romance with his female alibi.
This picture is an atypical noir, where the psyche of a “creative” outsider is explored. Its stars an aging Humphrey Bogart, and Gloria Grahame: both are great in these against-type roles. I prefer it to Sunset Blvd.
This is a movie in which the title has a real deep meaning. In a lonely place: those of you who have suffered from or been close to someone who has suffered major depression, will also find this story a painfully accurate portrayal of how a depressed person battles with his demons. Many creative artists are linked with depression or bipolar disorder, where anger is at a trigger point. Director Nicholas Ray, deftly explores the effects of frustration and anxiety on the creative psyche within the grid-lines of the noir genre.
The The Asphalt Jungle
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:
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.
Maria has the best line in the picture. As a police siren wails in the background:
“Sounds like a soul in hell.”
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