Category: Articles

Knock on Any Door (1949 – US)

Nick Ray directs Bogart as a lawyer with a social conscience, but the closing sermon to jurors is hammered and too late. A young John Derek impresses as a hood on a murder rap.

Bogart is disengaged in this minor Ray, which could have been great. Unusually for a noir, this picture attempts to portray the social origins of criminality, and how social disadvantage and a traumatic event in a young man’s life sew bitterness and rebellion. The movie fails by focusing on the lawyer who engages only at the end when he has to defend the hood after a cop is killed, with the young criminal remaining an enigma, despite some high melodrama that results in a girl’s tragic suicide. Visually pedestrian, the one ‘cinematic’ highlight is the placement of the camera in the court in the closing scenes.

A very imaginative poster for Party Girl (1958)

Party Girl (1958 – US)

30s Chicago mob lawyer Robert Taylor falls for a gorgeous Cyd Charisse in Nick Ray’s Metrocolored Cinemascope, but Taylor is wooden. Thankfully Lee J. Cobb chews up the scenery as an off-the-wall Mafioso.

A lot of money and wide-screen Metrocolor fail to infuse this rather dour film with any vitality. Ray’s direction is almost off-hand and the terrible acting of Taylor flattens any impact. Cyd Charisse is a great dancer and looks appealing, but her portrayal as the love interest lacks flair. Taylor who has built his career and wealth as a lawyer and fixer for the Mob, tries to go straight after falling for Charisse, who challenges his crooked life, with predictable consequences. Over-rated.

The House Across the Lake (aka Heat Wave) (1954 – UK)

Toff rip-off of J.M. Cain. A hack novelist falls for ice-cold blonde wife of English country gent played by Sid James.

This movie from English writer/director Ken Hughes, who specialised in Anglo-noirs with a Hollywood feel, is better than it sounds, as there are nuances that add some resonance. A Double Indemnity like scenario is given a cross-over treatment. Expat b-player Alex Nicol as an American writer of pulp novels attracts the perilous attention of the platinum-blonde wife of a wealthy English squire. She is a classic femme-fatale and is played to steely perfection by English actress Hillary Brooke, though the act comes unstuck in a too-melodramatic denouement. What is interesting is that the femme-fatale actually does ‘shove’ when push-comes-to-shove in her spider’s stratagem of seducing the hack into a murderous complicity, and that the hack’s capitulation comes not so much from greed or sexual obsession but from an existential ennui.

Manèges (aka The Wanton 1950 – France)

A cynical, dark and savage history of a femme-fatale and the sucker she destroys. But fate has the final say.

This very dark noir from the director of the superb Une si jolie petite plage (1949 – France), Yves Allégret, has the same essential plot-line as a later film from Julien Duvivier, Voici le temps des assassins… (aka Deadlier Than the Male – France 1956). A mother and daughter team of grifters are out to fleece a poor mug with dough. This time the chump is a naïve middle-aged petit-bourgeois, who runs a horse-riding academy for the local gentry. A young Simone Signoret plays the femme-fatale to the infatuated Bernard Blier. But this picture made straight after Une si jolie petite plage does not match the earlier film. The pace is laborious and the use of iris transitions and a weird sieve wipe to telegraph flashbacks is hackneyed. What is most disturbing is the strident misogyny of the story. All the women in the film are venomous, haughty, or stupid, while even a gigolo on the make has some redeeming virtue. Indeed Allégret hates everything and everyone. Nothing escapes his caustic condemnation: aristocrat, bourgeois, or worker. Even children are targeted: when an instructor is severely injured by a kick from a horse two young girl students observe “workers are always complaining”. The ending is as downbeat and vengeful as you will ever see.

In Jean Delannoy’s sexy, funny, and uber dark adventure-melodrama, Macao, L’enfer Du Jeu (aka Gambling Hell 1939), starring a charming Erich von Stroheim as an arms dealer, the luminous Mireille Balin as a cabaret dancer, and the suave but sinister Sessue Hayakawa as a racketeer, the spin of the roulette wheel offers no escape nor redemption.  Justice is swift and unromantic – only the innocent survive.

Don’t believe the dictates of  les enfants terribles of the French New Wave or the pompous snobbery of  contemporary ‘cineastes’,  mainstream movies do have craft, enduring meaning, and true value. Viva la difference!

A fantastic hellish climax which sees the anti-heroes destroyed.

Part of the fun of having an interest in old movies is discovering an obscure title. Full Confession is so obscure that I could find only one frame and a lobby card on the Web, and no posters. It is not on DVD and while TCM has the movie in its catalog, it is not currently scheduled. I caught it on late night television over here.

While Full Confession is no lost gem, it deserves attention. Ostensibly a b-melodrama from the RKO factory, it is interesting for a number of reasons.

A compelling if contrived plot has a Catholic priest from an Irish parish connected in the fate of two men: a family man unjustly facing the chair for murder and the actual killer, who has been paroled from a stretch for robbery. The killer who had after a prison ‘accident’ confessed to the murder to the priest in a death-bed confession, survives after receiving a blood transfusion of the priest’s blood. The killer is not an evil man but tragically impulsive and this, together with his loving relationship with a modest and decent woman who is not aware of his guilt, evoke sympathy for his desire to ignore his conscience and make a new life. The dramatic tension of the priest being bound by the secrecy of the confessional and the imperative to save an innocent man drives the narrative once the killer is released.

A strong film crew and cast give the movie a certain patina. The director is John Farrow with cinematography by Roy Hunt, and original music by Roy Webb. An ensemble of veteran character actors complete the picture: Victor McLaglen plays the killer, Sally Eilers is the girl he loves, Joseph Calleia plays the priest, and Barry Fitzgerald the condemned man.

Farrow and Hunt while hobbled by some clunky expository sequences, which are largely the fault of the script, for the most part fashion impressive dramatically expressionistic scenes from, by necessity, darkly-lit studio sets, evoking the protagonist’s state of mind as he battles with his conscience and lashes out with desperate physical responses to his predicament. There are also well-constructed collages and voice-overs to portray his inner turmoil evocatively underscored by Roy Webb’s eerie orchestral accompaniment. Farrow uses the camera with panache and many scenes see the mise-en-scene explored with fluid elegant takes. Some scenes are overtly self-conscience, but are within the limitations imposed by the constraints of b film-making, and to be expected.

This expressionism and evident noir motifs I think fully qualify Full Confession as an early noir. We have the themes of fate dealing losing cards, physical entrapment and mental anguish, and redemption as a double-edged sword.

Essential if you are interested in the origins of the classic film noir cycle.

“I don’t do much business with preachers”

Ray Milland is Lucifer, alias Nick Beal ‘Agent’, who, with the help of b-girl Audrey Totter goes shopping for the soul of honest DA and aspiring governer Thomas Mitchell.  Add to the mix smart direction from John Farrow, a killer script from Jonathon Latimer, superb noir lensing by Lionel Lindon, and a haunting score from Franz Waxman. Garnish with a bespectacled George Macready cast against type as a reverend running a boy’s club, and you have a thoroughly entertaining melodrama. Milland dominates as Beelzebub in a sharp suit and rakish fedora. He slaps, ices, insinuates, and connives a swathe through the earnest life of Joseph Foster DA, after with his help Foster naively cuts a legal corner in nailing a hood.  The mis-en-scene is canny, and particularly inspired is the use of a seedy wharf-side bar as Nick’s ‘office.’ The only weakness is the bible-saves ending, though Nick is left free to disappear into a harbor fog to corrupt other souls.

The story offers an intriguing twist to the noir punishment and redemption motifs.  Nick has a written contract for the DA’s soul – vetted  as enforceable by his global legal team – which will only be triggered if when-push-comes-to-shove Foster does the right thing by a public mea-culpa and renouncing of his ill-gotten gains.  A wily trap indeed.   The jaws snap shut at the instant of redemption. But a noir ending would have had the hapless DA disappearing into the fog en-route to the Island of Almas Perdidas.

The noir city in all its desperate foreboding: a dancing sign flashes in an angel’s face.  An angel innocent and afraid yet ventures into the seething labyrinth with a stranger, her husband, running from capture into the city of entrapment.

You trust no-one, fear the worst, and blunder from one dead-end into another.  Dark faces and sharp dressers in sinister doorways.  Share a cab with a bawling waif, a dying woman on borrowed time, and a suspicious driver.  Stop! Get out!  Onto dark streets, smoke-filled dives, cafés on the edge of purgatory, and hellish rooms for rent.  A young girl in pig-tails as likely to betray you as the mother with arms folded in menace then her cold hand out for payment in advance.  Nowhere left to run.  The rented room a cell you can’t leave.

“I didn’t do it.” You believe him, why did he run?

They find you anyway, and take him away.

Where to now? The loyal ex, the nice guy you rejected with his pipe and his dog. He’ll know. Back to the hotel.  A letter sent too early, an echo of another to be sent, waiting for you.  What does it mean? Turn around fast. The street is a long way down. Run.  The beau doesn’t, it’s all cool. Packs his bag, stuffs an envelope, and mails it at the lift-well while the inquisitive cop isn’t looking.  He can’t sweat it though, he panics, it all falls down, and the new letter bursts open with the truth.