Category: Films

“Come on Jack let’s dance.”
“Go away will ya. Gotta get this barrel straight.”
“Too bad that gun can’t cook!”
“Well that makes you both even.”

An obscure programmer that goes for just 64 minutes, They Made Me a Killer, is a tidy little thriller. An innocent guy is framed for a bank heist after a crooked dame sets him up, and faces a murder rap for the killing of a security guard and a cop. He makes a break at a hospital after a guy who could corroborate his innocence dies without making a statement to the cops. It is is non-stop action with a neat romantic interest, and an inventive technical ruse to get the evidence the guy needs to secure his freedom.

The hospital escape scene is distilled noir. The fugitive slugs a cop in the back of the head with the cop’s gun, and then tips the bed with body of the guy that has just died still in it over another cop! He makes his final escape from a window after knock-out punching a female nurse in the face! And he ain’t no saint: he gets the girl and his freedom only after an attempt to turn-up the loot and keep it for himself fails.

Great b-feature!

In San Francisco a middle-aged cop attempts to cover-up a murder committed by his rich girl-friend and being investigated by him and his rookie detective brother.

The only film ever produced by Jack M. Warner Productions, The Man Who Cheated Himself is a superbly crafted b-noir of 81 action-packed minutes. Under the tight control of director Felix E. Feist (The Devil Thumbs a Ride, Tomorrow Is Another Day, This Woman Is Dangerous ) even minor exposition scenes are focused on moving the compelling narrative forward. The film is shot both with economy and flair by Russell Harlan (Gun Crazy, The Thing from Another World, The Blackboard Jungle, King Creole, Rio Bravo). A solid script from Seton Miller (Dust Be My Destiny, Ministry of Fear, Convicted) deftly handles the tense sub-text.

The performances are solid all-round. The cop is played Lee J. Cobb, his girl-friend by Jane Wyatt, with  John Dall, of Gun Crazy fame,  in his last film role as Cobb’s brother. Cobb’s acting  is inspired as the hard-bitten cop who by his own admission has let a woman he can’t trust get “under his skin”. Wyatt impresses as the femme-noir, and Dall is convincing as the brother who suspects Cobb is hiding something.

Most of the film is shot on the streets of Frisco in deep focus and this gives the picture a gritty realist feel. The highlights are three brilliant scenes: one in the middle and two at the end of the movie.

In the first, in a typically noir twist, the murder weapon, which had been thrown into the river, surfaces as the gun used to gun-down a store-keeper in a robbery. While serving as the catalyst for the brother’s suspicions, the scenes where the hood is trailed and caught is a bleak unsentimental vignette of a young man’s fall into criminality. The emotional power behind this sequence is left to the audience to develop.  The final interrogation scene is stunningly shot and lit from a low angle.

In the second, Cobb and Wyatt, holed-up in an  abandoned prison at the foot of the Golden Gate bridge, are hiding from Dall who is searching the long hallways and metal stairwells.  Cobb and Wyatt are concealed atop a guard tower out of Dall’s direct sight when the wind takes Wyatt’s scarf.  This McGuffin brilliantly deepens this already tense sequence as the scarf wraps itself against a pillar, and then taken again by the wind floats down into the prison’s central courtyard as Dall enters it.

Lastly, the final scene in the picture in a court-house has to be one of the most brutally frank and downbeat endings in the noir canon. Played without words, the two pratoganists’ actions and expressions deliver an acid resolution totally devoid of pretence or sentiment, and marked only by Cobb’s weary bemusement as he ponders his fate, after seeing his distrust finally vindicated.

A fantastic movie and a great noir.

A United Artists release of 111 minutes, Impact looks like an A-movie wearing a B-suit: it doesn’t fit. The movie starts off noir in San Francisco, veers into bucolic redemption hokum in a small mid-western town, and then returns to Frisco for a turn at melodrama, ever ready to lapse into a comic interlude – and even slapstick. The plot is entirely derivative, with obvious parallels to Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936) and Busby Berkeley’s They Made Me a Criminal (1939).  A cheating wife conspires with her lover to kill her wealthy husband, but the ill-planned job is botched, the husband survives but is believed dead, and the wife is charged with his murder.

The direction by Arthur Lubin is tight and the deep-focus photography on the streets of Frisco from Ernest Laszlo (Manhandled, DOA, M (1951), The Well, Kiss Me Deadly, The Big Knife, While the City Sleeps) is top-notch, particularly in a pursuit though Chinatown late in the picture, and during the murder attempt on a mountain road at night near the beginning of the picture which is solidly noir in its immediate fiery and darkly dramatic aftermath.

The dames hold this picture together. Helen Walker is a treat as the conniving wife of the businessman played by Brian Donlevy, who sleepwalks through the picture.  Ella Raines is the wholesome country girl who falls for Donlevy, and Anna May Wong is engaging as the wife’s maid. Veteran character actor Charles Coburn is polished as a cop.

Surprisingly it all seems to hang together well enough, and on balance is quite enjoyable.

 
This is one-helluva-movie.  A gem that sparkles like the eyes of the hot dames that swagger, pout, smolder, and snap their high heels across the screen. A joyous LA romp in Marlowe territory which has it all. An enthralling thriller plot  enlivened by a hot-jive script from Roy Huggins (Too Late for Tears, Pushover). Incredibly taught and fluid direction from Columbia b-director S. Sylvan Simon.  Superb noir photography from Charles Lawton Jr.  A dynamic score from George Duning that sways effortlessly from dark melodrama to lecherous winks.

 
A great turn by Franchot Tone as LA private eye Stuart ‘George’ Bailey, who out-Bogart’s and out-Powell’s Philip Marlowe in a deliciously convoluted story of deception, greed, frame-ups, murder, and sexy high jinks. Bit player Glenda Farrell is a comic delight as Bailey’s cute, loyal, eccentric, and sharp-as-nails secretary Hazel.  Tom Powers delivers a solid performance as the aging suspicious husband who hires Bailey to tail his young wife, who is being blackmailed. Steven Geray delivers a nuanced low-key performance as mysterious crime-boss Keller, and John Ireland, Raymond Burr, and Eddie Marr are great as Keller’s heavies. Sid Tomack is in his element as a small-time chiseller who is out of his league. The dames are all delightfully buxom good-bad girls, with enough charm and innuendo for a dozen Marlowes: Janet Blair, Janis Carter, Adele Jergens, Lynn Merrick, and Claire Carleton.  A weird waitress-from-hell played by uncredited bit-player Roseanne Murray, is a scream.

 
There are laughs and smooth-as-nylons repartee, but the melodrama is hard-hitting and typically noir: guys get slapped hard, drugged, and slugged from behind. In one scene the face of a murder victim under a Malibu pier is highlighted by torch-light at night.  A particularly impressive scene is where a guy is under the threat of a gun, which is shown from the holder’s viewpoint, as it moves with the frightened target as he staggers backward and across the screen in a small room.

 
What is particularly captivating is the on-street location-shooting that gives the whole picture a verite-look.  From daylight scenes in the streets of LA to available light scenes at night in dives, suburban streets, and dark alleys in industrial areas. There is one daylight road scene where Bailey is being followed by another car, and he manoeuvres his car to dramatically confront his pursuer, and then gives chase. The positioning of the camera and the elegant panning as each car careens across the screen make the sequence one of the most exciting I have seen.

A must-see noir.  Sadly not yet available on DVD.

“It’s a bitter little world full of sad surprises, and you don’t let anyone hurt you.”

Hollow Triumph (aka The Scar) is a gem of a movie. A wildly implausible plot adds to the baroque charm of this melodramatic sleeper, which bombed on its release in 1948.  The basic plot-line – a  hood on the run after robbing a gambling house takes on the identity of a psychiatrist – does not do justice to the moral perversity and spiralling ironies of fate that propel the action.

We have all the ingredients for great noir entertainment: a compelling screenplay and a witty script from Daniel Fuchs (Criss-Cross, Panic in the Streets), a director of pulp-b’s in Austro-Hungarian émigré Steve Sekely, the artful cinematography of noir icon John Alton, and Paul Henreid and Joan Bennet both cast against type in the lead roles – as mirror-reversals of the typical noir archetypes – an homme–fatale of unbounded ambition and no scruples seduces a woman of strong character and with a real job.   Paul Henreid is so suave and daring, even when a photo-processor’s  diabolical and irreversibly dangerous error threatens to blow his subterfuge wide open, he  remains audacious and enthralling.  But the imperatives of the noir universe dictate that  his one-minute-to-midnight failed shot at redemption is as dramatic and ironic as it is pathetic.  On the journey to perdition we traverse a noir topography redolent with noir archetypes:  the unreformed con, the old gang coerced into a fateful big heist that goes wrong, the savage intimidation of underlings, life on the run, and the machinations required to find an out from a past that is getting ever close and will not go away.

All this aside, it is Alton’s dark and moody camera-work that defines the cinematic reality that lights up the screen.  There is a magnificent scene in a hotel room with Henreid and his straight but sympathetic brother, who has tracked him down to tell him that those out to kill him are closer and more adamant than he thinks. Once he learns the news, Henreid flips off  the lights in panic, fearing that his brother has led the killers to him. In the darkness, a flashing neon sign outside the windows rhythmically lights up the slats of the drawn venetian blinds sending streaked shadows across the protagonists.  Alton also constructs breathtaking hallucinatory montages that have to rank as perhaps the best I have seen in a Hollywood movie.  The stuff that noirs are made of.