Category: Articles

Edmond O’Brien is solid as a LA telephone repairman who goes crooked.

711 Ocean Drive was made to cash in on a then-current national newspaper expose of bookmaking operations. It is a predictable B gangster movie that sits more comfortably with its 1930’s forebears. Definitely not a film noir – the guy goes bad without remorse or regret. You have to wait till the end to get an adrenalin fix, with a slam-bam chase and shoot-out at Boulder (aka Hoover) Dam.

For Edmond O’Brien fans.

“Save your lipstick, girls, he plays for keeps.” Secretary tries to help her PI boss, who is framed for a murder.

A solid B thriller melodrama, with Clifton Webb reprising his role as the obsessive older lover from the superior Laura (1944). Lucille Ball is entertaining as the wise-cracking secretary with smarts. Mark Stevens is ok as the gumshoe, and William Bendix is great as a hoodlum heavy.

But night scenes and expressionist lighting alone do not give you a film noir. Fun to watch and the soundtrack deepens the ‘night-life’ milieu of the after-dark scenes. Ms Ball looks good smoothing her size-9 nylons over those long legs while making snappy innuendo.

From the breathtaking three minute opening tracking shot, which is featured below , you know you are in the realm of a master film-maker. Yet, there is a hiatus to follow and the portent of this amazing opening is not realised until the last 20 minutes of the film. Welles’ last masterwork is a disconnected emotionally remote study of moral dissipation. The crisp black and white photography of Russell Metty is forensic and can only be truly appreciated in a theatre or from a HD DVD.

The camera angles and lighting that Wells pioneered are abundant but this movie has no soul. Welles delivers an excellent performance as the dissolute sheriff, as does Joseph Calleia as his loyal deputy. Charlton Heston is miscast: a moustaclhe and dark make-up do not a Mexican make. His fractured Spanish is jarring. Marlene Dietrich is nicely enigmatic as the aging whore with soul, and Janet Leigh as the ingenue wife is engaging.

The film works best in the sleazy urban settings, where the contemporary music score adds depth.

This is not a film noir. Wells reprises his Citizen Kane mise-en-scene, but there is nothing in the story that even reaches the proximity of moral ambivalence or an existential dilemma, and it is certainly not populist cinema. It is ultimately a brilliant but flawed work of cinematic ‘art’.

Mild-mannered accountant, Frank Bigelow, is poisoned and with only days to live starts a frantic search for HIS killer!

DOA is a taut thriller with a bravura performance from Edmond O’Brien as Frank Bigelow. From the Cardinal Pictures factory and directed by Rudolph Maté, this movie packs so much in 83 minutes. It starts off slow, but once the action shifts from a sleepy rural burg to San Francisco and LA, the pace is frenetic. The streets of these cities are filmed in deep focus, and there is a sense of immediacy in every scene.

Expressionist lighting accents the hysteria and panic as Bigelow desperately races against time to track down his killer. With a pot-boiler plot and a terrific hard-edged portrayal from O’Brien, this is not only a gritty on-the-streets in-your-face melodrama, but a nuanced film noir where a random innocent act is a decent man’s un-doing.

The camera is used with abandon to visualise the traumatic whirlwind that Bigelow has been thrown into.

An early scene in a bar just before Bigelow is poisoned, has the hottest period live jive music that I have seen on film. The music and the editing meld the drama of the story with the out-of-this world music from the black players for a total immersion into the wild soul of jazz. You need Jack Kerouac to even come close to describing the feelings evoked. A classic must-see adrenalin-fuelled film noir!

The saxophanist in this clip from DOA  is James E. Streeter, a native of Wichita Kansas, who got his start playing tenor sax in Lloyd Hunter’s territory band. Bandleader Johnny Otis took Streeter to Los Angeles in 1944. Enamored of director-actor Erich von Stroheim, Streeter billed himself as Von Streeter or James Von Streeter. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, he recorded for several labels, including Coral, as Von Streeter & His Wig Poppers, playing wild, honking R&B, and several members of this group accompanied him when he appeared as a wild, sweaty sax maniac in a key nightclub scene of the original D.O.A. (1950). However, for the soundtrack the producer overdubbed another band altogether, led by saxophonist Maxwell Davis, who would later be influential as a Los Angeles A&R man during the early rock ‘n’ roll era. Streeter’s career was derailed by heroin addiction, which eventually killed him in 1960. Source for bio of James E. Streeter: IMDB

One of the early “visual” noirs, This Gun For Hire, based on the novel by Graham Greene, weaves a war-spy story into a taught and moody thriller, with breakthrough performances by Alan Ladd and the luminous Veronica Lake. Director Frank Tuttle, who made the first The Glass Key(1935), uses expressionist-influenced lighting to excellent effect.

This pre-noir clearly influenced French director, Jean-Pierre Melville, in his 1967 homage to film noir, Le Samourai, with Alain Delon, who shares not only Alan Ladd’s first name but an uncanny resemblance, in a similar story of a hit-man on the run. Le Samourai has a pet canary, while Ladd’s Raven has a pet cat. Even a dramatic rail bridge chase is copied by Mellville.

This Gun For Hire, is an interesting melodrama, which tries to explain the origins of Raven’s pychosis in a scene where he opens up after responding to the gentle concern of the Veronica Lake character. While to a degree dated and despite a weak supporting cast, this picture leaves you with serious questions to ponder.

Highly recommended.

The Set-Up from noir director, Robert Wise, is a sharp expose of the fight game packed into a lean 72 minutes. From RKO and filmed at night on a studio lot, this movie is brooding and intense, with Robert Ryan, as the aging boxer, “Stoker” Thompson, in perhaps his best role, with a great supporting cast. The boxing scenes are as real as they get: Ryan himself was a college boxing champ. The arena is brilliantly filmed with focused and repeated shots on selected spectators, which portray not only the excitement, but also the unadorned mob brutality, that reaches fever pitch as the fighters struggle to a climactic finish.

The film opens and ends with zoom shots of a street clock: starting at 9.05pm and ending at 10.17pm – yes – the actual length of the picture…

There are other interesting visual commentaries on the action which mock the existential angst of the protagonists:

The boxers’ dressing room, where Stoker’s essentially decent persona is established from his interactions with the other boxers, is beautifully evoked. Each person in that room is deeply and sympathetically drawn, and these scenes are enthralling. To the movie makers’ credit, remember this is 1949, there is a black boxer, who responds to Stoker’s friendliness, with a heart-felt wish of good luck, after winning his own fight.

A simple story of gut-wrenching humanity. One of the great noirs.

The Set-Up has been packaged with four other films noir in the DVD set Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 1. The other movies in the DVD set are the noir classics: The Asphalt Jungle, Gun Crazy, Murder My Sweet, and Out of the Past.