Category: Lobby

It was not for want of viewing, that I have  not reviewed a movie here for 10 days.  At least two movies which while not recognised as noirs, promised significant noir elements, but in the watching were both problematic and revealing.

I am always a sucker for John Garfield.  One of his early features from 1939 was a boxing melodrama for Warner Bros, They Made Me a Criminal, directed by, yes, Busby Berkeley.  A young boxing champ played by Garfield who likes booze and broads, is framed by his manager for the death of a reporter.

The first 20 minutes are deliciously taut and noirish. The movie opens with the last rounds of a fight in front of a wild crowd. The action shifts to the dressing room after Garfield’s knockout win, where his volatile character is revealed. Cut to his apartment where he is boozing and cavorting with a young and very nubile Ann Sheridan. One thing leads to another, a man is dead, and Garfield is on the run from a murder rap. His manager has beat it in Garfield’s car with Sheridan, and the boxer’s wallet and watch. But they don’t get far – after being chased by the cops they crash into a tree with the girl’s screams extinguished by a fireball as the car explodes. Then Garfield, after being gypped by his shyster lawyer, is on the skids and riding freight trains. We are now in hokum territory with Garfield ultimately redeeming himself and home free.

Next up, an aging George Raft and a sexy Colleen Gray in a 1950 British Romulus production, Lucky Nick Cain (aka I’ll Get You for This), a boys-own thriller shot on location in Southern Italy, co-starring Enzo Staiola  (who played the young son in Bicycle Thieves) as a street-kid.  Raft plays an American gambler who is framed for the murder of a T-Man by hoods running a counterfeiting operation using a hotel-casino as a front. Gray looks great but isn’t asked to do much.  Stock-stuff you might say, and you would be right. But this movie has some distinguished noir elements.

The director Joseph M. Newman (711 Ocean Drive and Dangerous Crossing) and expatriate Czech cinematographer Otto Heller (They Made Me a Fugitive) turn a small Italian town into a noir locale of exquisite mystery, peril, and sinister shadows.

As if this was not enough, there are two out-of-left field scenes that are richly erotic and camp.  In the first scene, Raft confronts a sultry blonde femme-fatale boisterously over-played by bit-player Greta Gynt, and engages in some lurid gun-play.  Later in the picture, Colleen Gray has been arrested and is interrogated by a towering blonde female butch prison guard in a gothic women’s prison, while the guard is ragged by some b-girls in another cell. When Raft rescues the girl, the guard is placed in the same cell as the b-girls…

All-in-all, not quite the stuff of noir dreams, but not a bad double-feature.

An 82-min programmer from Eagle-Lion, Port of New York, was one of the first verite-style drama-cum-newsreel movies about crime fighting, which followed the classic noirs of the 40s, almost as a reactionary backlash against ambivalence, and which could be labelled as anti-noirs.  Documentary footage blended with an authoritative voice-over and a screenplay where govt officers pursue felons: brutal violence, thinly drawn characters, criminality brought to justice, and no shading or complexity.

Port of New York is interesting because of its on the street locales and notable performances.  Perversely, the cops are played as cut-outs and forgettable, while the hoods inhabit their roles with a depth that belies the earnestness of the script.   A young Yul Brunner in his first screen role is accomplished as a cunning but elegant crime boss dealing in narcotics. He does his own dirty work and kills with psychotic empathy to a recurring classical score. Arthur Blake, an actor who ever only played bit parts in a handful of b-pictures, is great as a small-time hood who is using as well as dealing, and goes cold turkey while being held by the cops.

Competent direction from Laslo Benedek and above-average camera-work from noir veteran George Diskant.

A solid-b. Great poster!

“It was made under the supervision of six different men in charge… and instead of fingers in that pie, half a dozen clowns immersed various parts of their anatomy into it. ”
– Director Josef Von Sternberg in his autobiography Fun in a Chinese Laundry

What a pastiche! A boring stupid movie that has the fingerprints of RKO studio boss Howard Hughes all over it. Hughes didn’t like Von Sternberg’s first cut and had Nicholas Ray direct retakes and additional scenes.  Obviously neither man had any real interest in the project.  How anyone can include it in the noir canon has me beat.

The whole debacle is an excuse to get Mitchum and Russell on screen together, for some rather lame he loves me she loves me not antics in a preposterous mistaken identity cum gambling racket story set in of all places, Macao.  The two plodding chase scenes are about as thrilling as it gets.  Who’s to blame? Von Sternberg or Ray?  Let’s say both.

Though I think a tawdry tantrum scene with Russell exposing a full leg is most certainly a Von Sternberg touch.

Gloria Grahame does add a touch of class in a small role as a gangster’s mole, but even she begged her then divorcing husband Ray, to cut her out of the picture completely.

Try it only after too much cheap rye…