War buddies! Widowers! Barflies! Gay gangbangers!: Film Noir Collection Vol. 5

Is it my own perverse nature that prompted me to start and now end my summer DVD binges with box sets of noir, hardly the most Frisbee of cinematic corpuses? I wouldn’t put it past me, yet noir isn’t entirely antithetical to summer—it’s so often about generating heat. Truthfully, not everything in Warner’s Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 5 can rightfully be granted noir or even gris status. There aren’t many classic examples of the movement/style/thematic here, though there’s a pleasing majority of forgotten gems, however you classify them. The only real disappointment is the absence of supplements, given that Warner’s previous collections boasted consistently lively and informative audio commentaries from the likes of Martin Scorsese, James Ellroy, Eddie Muller, Alain Silver and Peter Bogdanovich. To be fair, I guess assembling such material must be costly, and I’d rather have these movies available than not... Anyway, there are eight titles to cover, so I'll keep my comments for each of them brief.

Former song-and-dance man Dick Powell seemed an odd fit as the cinema’s first Philip Marlowe in Edward Dmytryk’s superb Raymond Chandler adaptation Murder, My Sweet (1944), yet as the freshly widowed Canadian pilot and newly released POW Laurence Gerard in Cornered (45), unshaven, cold-eyed, with that severe haircut, he’s so at one with his vengeful protagonist it’s chilling. This reunion with Dmytryk, who displays an exacting sense of atmosphere and detail, is an all-round success, if unrelentingly harrowing. As the war winds down Gerard travels from Europe to Argentina in search of the ostensibly deceased Vichy official responsible for the death of Gerard’s young French bride. Gerard’s single-minded—he’s got noting left to live for—so the trip’s strictly business, yet numerous shady types he encounters provide ample colour, especially the marvelous Walter Slezak.

Deadline at Dawn (46), inspired by a Cornell Woolrich novel, is considerably lighter. It’s a sweltering New York night when taxi dancer Susan Hayward feels compelled to look after a young sailor on shore leave who mistakenly robbed and maybe murdered a woman while drunk. The sailor had a near-death experience at the age of 12, so maybe that somehow contributed to his almost absurd air of innocence. The script comes from socialist thespian Clifford Odets and abounds in corny ethnic working-class types and cornier dialogue. Still, it’s quite diverting, at times intriguingly loopy and, best of all, swathed in the chiaroscuro imagery of cinematographer Nicholas Musaraca, best known for Out of the Past (47) and his work with Val Lewton.

Desperate (47) was director Anthony Mann’s first noir and fully exercises the sort of muscular expressionism and bracing brutality he’d become known for: Steve Brodie’s truck-driving hero is beaten in some dingy basement under a swinging lamp whose hard light slices the assailants’ faces before we’re treated to a tight close-up of a broken bottle held by Raymond Burr, who really resembles Victor Mature—if Mature ate donuts and hunkered over Wittgenstein instead of going to the gym. Newlywed Brodie is framed by Burr’s thugs but proves highly resourceful—his desire for pleasantly dull domesticity is that strong.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in this set is Dial 1119 (50), a terrifically menacing little hostage drama I’d never heard of, though fellow noir addicts with welcome the sight of William Conrad, James Bell and Sam Levene like old pals. Conrad plays Chuckles, the proprietor of the ironically titled Oasis, the bar under siege, while Bell’s a lonely older nerdy type who shamelessly propositions a drunk blonde, and Levene, as always, is the resident doctor. The sound of wrestling on TV is the only scoring in the movie, even during the beautiful, long reaction shot of all the barflies when formerly institutionalized Marshall Thompson says out loud that he’s going to kill everyone. We believe him—he’s already iced a bus driver. Very effective, taut, and worth checking out just for the loving attention it brings to the sad night lives of the Oasis clientele.

Backfire (50) is another title I’d never come across, somewhat surprising given that noir mainstay Edmond O’Brien’s one of its pair of war buddies hoping to go in on a ranch together once Gordon MacRae gets out of the veterans’ hospital. Some fox with a sexy foreign accent comes to the hospital one night to tell a doped-up MacRae that O’Brien’s been debilitated and is suicidal. The next morning everyone thinks the lady messenger was a hallucination, but O’Brien’s missing and MacRae immediately starts to play detective upon checking out. It’s a picture full of interesting relationships and ominous clues that would have appealed to Polanski.

Armored Car Robbery (50) meanwhile looks forward to Stanley Kubrick’s early feature The Killing (56), whose plot is nearly identical. Helmed by Richard Fleischer, it’s a bracingly efficient 67-minutes—the titular heist unfolds with barely a word of dialogue spoken, even when one of the robbers gets shot in the guts—yet leaves plenty of room for imaginative character development. Charles McGraw would reunite with Fleischer for the more famous Narrow Margin (52), but anticipates that film’s protagonist here with his charismatically gruff Lieutenant Jim Cordell, a cop so useless with sentiment he can barely offer condolences to his partner’s widow. He’s complimented superbly by the froggy-eyed criminal mastermind played by William Talman, a really interesting actor whose work I'm only started to track but am hungry to see more of.

“Fancy women, slot machines and booze,” go the lyrics to ‘Phenix City Blues’, the song performed near the top of The Phenix City Story (55), Phil Karlson’s appallingly violent docudrama about the seemingly impossible task of driving organized crime out of a notoriously corrupt Alabama town. It features the always likable John McIntire—the sheriff from Psycho (60)—as a crusading DA undeterred by threats as unabashed as having a murdered black girl tossed on his front lawn from a moving car in broad daylight. Something tells me they mightn’t have gotten away with that if it weren’t for the story’s foundation in fact.

Though it opens with a riveting and very stylishly wrought confrontation between rival youth gangs, Crime in the Streets (56), all too much the “social problem” picture, is both the chronological last and probably least powerful movie in Film Noir Vol. 5. Having said that, I’m fascinated that the gang leader seems to deliberately select the most obviously gay kids in his group—among them Sal Mineo—to be part of his nutso murder conspiracy. Admirers will surely be curious to see a very young John Cassavetes as Frankie Dane, though, speaking as one of those admirers, I can’t say he looks very comfortable in this psychotic, not altogether convincing role.

Killers, coffee, last dying words: Columbia Pictures Film Noir on DVD

Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics, Volume One collects five fascinating studies—four of them previously unavailable, each on its own separate disc—in how this thing we call noir developed throughout the 1950s, when the style/genre/sensibility was first named and catalogued. It was also the decade that saw the end of the classic noir cycle, partially as an inevitable effect of its newfound self-consciousness.

The Sniper (1952) opens with Eddie Miller (Arthur Franz) carefully assembling his rifle and taking aim from his bedroom window at a woman as she climbs the stairs across the lane. No rounds are fired. For now, Eddie’s still satisfied with rehearsal. But how long before Eddie snaps, before he needs to release his charge, before some poor singer had to die, her stricken body shattering the glass that encased the poster announcing her gig? Eddie’s a walking time bomb, and the chilling thing about this picture, among the first to attempt a serious portrayal of a serial killer, is that Eddie’s the protagonist.

Women really piss this guy off. Everywhere he goes they torment him with their mere presence, even little girls. It’s painful to watch Eddie attempt to chat up pretty ladies in bars or in their homes when he delivers their laundry. He’s upset when a strange woman doesn’t believe that he’s an engineer and that he built a bridge between two Hawaiian islands. He’s tormented and lonesome, yet, in one of the film’s little masterstrokes of social critique—this was an early Stanley Kramer production—the ostensibly normal men and women who might offer consolation consistently express this casual misogyny that only confirms the acceptability of Eddie’s vilest compulsions.

Edward Dmytryk directs with ingenious economy throughout, a superb example of his approach being that scene where a hot burner illuminates the ceiling and is overshadowed by Eddie’s hand as he presses his palm against the burning coil—a pretty awkward cry for help. Yet The Sniper’s most memorable imagery comes from Dmytryk’s dramatic use of San Francisco—unnamed yet unmistakable—whose vertical, maze-like topography feels eerily aligned to Eddie’s agitated psyche. The disc features a commentary from the “Czar of Noir” Eddie Muller (not Miller), a life-long Franciscano and a fountain of knowledge pertaining to both the film and its location.

Glenn Ford plays a rogue cop trying to annul a marriage between city officials and organized crime in The Big Heat (53). He has the moral high ground, his single-mindedness is transfixing, yet what of the fact that his crusade results in the torture and killing of three innocent women? It’s a revenge film, but not an unreflexive one. Women are collateral damage, but they’re also the most compelling, most richly detailed, smartest characters in the movie, especially Gloria Grahame, unnervingly sexy and sassy, and finally scarred by lanky Lee Marvin as a marvelously oafish gangster with a child’s feeling for stupid sadism. Grahame gets him back in the end, and I always wonder if he could smell the coffee boiling before she threw it in his face. Fritz Lang orchestrates scenes with restrained menace, the camera hanging back and then pouncing like a cat.

5 Against the House (55) finds college boys planning a prank heist in Reno with Kim Novak, here a lounge singer. This “field experiment in psychology” is strictly caper material, with lots of smart alecky gags, some nifty casino insider bits, Novak as luscious eye candy, and one weird-ass robot valet service that deserves its own documentary. Smartly directed by Phil Karlson, it’s consistently entertaining, if somewhat out of place in this collection. The sole noir element comes from Brian Keith’s Korean vet, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, ready to explode, his eyes bulging and body shaking, the hidden, writhing violence lurking beneath this film’s relatively placid surface.

A ship’s porter tosses some luggage into a cab, the cab zooms away, the cops follow, the cabbie’s shot, the car crashes. A cop’s killed in the chaos. No one understands what just happened. That’s the first 60 seconds of The Lineup (58), a San Francisco procedural based on a Dragnet-like TV show. It’s prime Don Siegel: clean, taut, lucid, and bracing. Siegel exemplifies the evaporation of the romantic fatalism of 1940s noir and the emergence of something more visceral and nasty. Less than a third of the way through the bad guys arrive from Florida to collect a shipment of heroin and completely take control of the picture. Eli Wallach plays a killer named Dancer, offing a guy in a bathhouse during a sequence baldly driven by latent homoeroticism. Bodies fall from great heights, limbs a-flopping, one of them onto a skating rink—the old Sutro Baths complex is brilliantly used. Robert Keith plays the dapper chief heavy, rather humorously trying to refine Wallach, and revealing himself to be a collector of people’s last dying words, which strikes me as a pretty apt metaphor for noir in all its emotionality, enigma and morbid fascination.

The Lineup also features a commentary track with Eddie Miller, but Miller spends most of his time fending off James Ellroy, who repeatedly goes rabid and indulges some of his most incoherent, far-right, pro-police brutality pet topics. Ellroy has been a welcome contributor to commentary tracks on the Zodiac (07) special edition and the recent Crime Wave (54) DVD, but here he proves far less illuminating and far too easily distracted.

Was Murder By Contract (58) already neo-noir? It certainly exudes a sly knowingness about noir convention and, being the story of a guy who becomes a hitman so he can buy himself a nice house on the Ohio River, it lends itself to being read as consumerist satire. It is in any case a low-budget wonder, brimming with brilliantly quirky characterizations and scenes in which killer Claude (Vince Edwards) kills time playing mini-golf, deep sea fishing, and going to the fucking zoo when he’s supposed to be killing a woman set to testify in a high profile trial. When he’s informed that his target is female he recoils, not because he’s squeamish about having to murder a woman but because he should have charged double—women, he claims, make undependable marks. At one point Claude embarks on a nihilist rant when a waiter brings him a coffee cup with a lipstick stain. But he’s most of the time Zen-like, obsessed with efficiency, and doesn’t like guns—he’s the evil version of a Jim Jarmusch protagonist.

Elegantly photographed with the barest of resources by Lucien Ballard, who’d later collaborate with Sam Peckinpah, smoothly directed by Irving Lerner, and enveloped in a quiet, insistent, all-guitar score by Perry Botkin Jr., Murder By Contract is deeply creepy, darkly funny, and totally engrossing, perhaps the premiere discovery from what’s looking like the best multi-title DVD release of the year.

Secret doors, captive beasts, pulsating heads: Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive

Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive collects five of the studio’s genre pieces spanning the years 1941-43. It’s an interesting transitional period if you consider that Universal’s golden years of monster movies climaxed a decade earlier—Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein all debuted between 1931 and 1935—while what would arguably be the most distinctive horror films of the new decade were emerging from a B-unit at RKO helmed by producer Val Lewton, whose approach to the genre—subtle, neurotic, contemporary, rife with ambiguity, akin to noir—was essentially a complete reversal of the Universal model. The title of this box set is as misleading as it is awkward. There are no classics here, but most are at least pretty fun, while some are genuinely interesting, inventive and pleasingly strange.

The Black Cat (1941) and Horror Island (41) are both pretty slight whodunits in which characters assemble in a single location housing an unidentified killer motivated by some looming treasure. Both are big on broad comedy, the former enlisting an aging Lou Costello type, the latter a lusty sailor with a wooden leg who resembles a rather discreet drag queen. Concerning a family eagerly awaiting the death of its ancient, very wealthy matriarch, The Black Cat claims to be “suggested by” Edgar Allen Poe, though I can only imagine he would have suggested aborting production. However, the film’s atmosphere, with its smoky moonlight outlining a dense garden of trees, benefits tremendously from the work of cinematographer Stanley Cortez, who would go on to shoot The Magnificent Ambersons (42), The Night of the Hunter (55) and The Naked Kiss (64).


Man Made Monster (41), directed by George Waggner, who would also direct The Wolf Man that same year, is more interesting. Like The Wolf Man, it features Lon Chaney Jr. as a protagonist who’s at once victim and monster. You could say the film is secretly about the curse of survival, and traces of its premise can be found in Unbreakable (2000). A bus is hurled into a high power line. Everyone dies—save Chaney’s Dan McCormick, a sideshow performer who does tricks with electricity. Rather than feel wracked with guilt, Dan walks away from the accident cheerful as ever. A sadistic genius electro-biologist lures Dan into his laboratory, intrigued by Dan’s apparent immunity to electricity. He starts pumping Dan with larger and larger doses of electricity until Dan develops a dependency—there’s a pretty chilling addiction subtext here—and finally transforms into an automaton whose flesh pulsates with white heat. Supporting characters tend toward the bland, but there are beguiling montages involving note-taking and lab work, a curious current of mistrust toward psychiatry, and above all a tragic, soulful yet totally weird performance from Chaney. We feel bad for him, but do we ever really know what’s going on inside this guy?

On the surface Night Monster (42) seems of the same lineage as The Black Cat and Horror Island, replete with an old dark house, abundant secret passages and Bela Lugosi as a servant. Yet this is a creepier, more sinister, more absorbing, set in some swampy Southern town where the nights are draped in fog and local authorities don’t sweat much over the series of strangulation killings occurring near the mansion of a reclusive, quadriplegic millionaire who surrounds himself with his mentally ill sister, Lugosi’s butler, some mystic in a turban, and a chauffer who doubles as a salivating rapist. A trio of doctors converge at the millionaire’s house with their hands out for donations but instead find they’re treated to demonstrations of how matter can be altered by telekinetically adjusting its vibrations. They’re also here to pay penance for their collective failure to save the millionaire from his present condition. I loved the expressionistic fog excess, there’s a really good-looking lady shrink, a haunting night walk sequence where a spunky young woman is sadly killed, and Lugosi is forced to act normal in certain scenes, reminding you what an interesting actor he could be when not always hamming it up.

A sort of girly cousin to Fox’s Dr. Renault’s Secret (42), the puzzlingly titled Captive Wild Woman (43) was directed by Edward Dmytryk, who’d soon be helming some essential noirs, such as Murder My Sweet (44) and Crossfire (47). It features two prominent male figures, one ostensibly heroic, the other the obvious villain, aligned by their compulsion to throw wild animals into unnatural situations and tame these animals until they do their bidding. The first man is a circus performer, the second a mad scientist obsessed with “racial improvement” who inserts human glands into a gorilla, the result being the beautiful and bizarre Acquanetta, “the Venezuelan Volcano.” (The actress was actually from Wyoming.) Sounds like a successful experiment in forcing the evolution of beasts into hot babes, but of course confusion and disaster await. The wildly improbably story is quite fascinating, the mise en scène an elegant mélange of slow-motion, creeping traveling shots and sudden close-ups, and the scenes in which the circus guy tangles with real tigers and lions are more genuinely nerve-wracking than anything else in the entire box set. See it. And be nice to animals.

You must remember this: Gregory Peck wrestles with his cagey brain (again) in Mirage, now on DVD

When the lights suddenly go out in New York City, David Stillwell (Gregory Peck) begins groping in the dark for answers. The blackout becomes something almost supernatural, a catalytic event, afflicting David with some sort of amnesia. He meets a beautiful raven-haired stranger (Diane Baker) in a stairwell who says she knows him and then flees when he doesn’t reciprocate. He descends into subterranean floors that later vanish inexplicably. His apartment is weirdly empty and is rearranged in his absence. He sees flashes of things—a man falling to his death, shadowy figures whispering below a tree—that don’t add up. A rabid wrestling fan attempts to abduct him, claiming David possesses some item of great value to an unnamed party. David goes to the cops, to a shrink, to a private dick (Walter Matthau), but almost no one seems able to help him, and everyone cracks wise. His life is in danger and he can’t remember why, and that strange woman reappears, more beautiful and glowing with doom that before, and offers cold comfort: it’s precisely his forgetting that’s keeping him alive.

Though ostensibly riddled with Cold War paranoia, Mirage (1965), directed by Edward Dmytryk, is too slight and warmly lit to be as noir as the set-up promises, but it is terrific fun, particularly while the ambiguity holds and we know as little about what the hell is going on as David does. This is a movie about a man who can’t come to terms with the very recent past and turns to others to coax him slowly into it. And you’ve got to wonder what it is about Peck’s handsomely furrowed brow that makes him such a perfect, sympathetic embodiment of repressed memory. He was rendered so helpless by amnesia in Spellbound (45) that Ingrid Bergman fell in love with him even when he proved to be a potentially murderous imposter. There was some profound darkness in Peck that cut through the outer decency he so often exuded, and beautiful women always seemed willing to shine a light into that darkness and root around.

The music, by Quincy Jones, is irritating, and the bursts of violence are silly, which is probably why Dmytryk cuts to the TV to watch wrestling for a bit while David is supposed to be disarming and knocking out a gun-wielding heavy. The movie’s too long, and the dispatching of clues too piecemeal for a resolution that’s inevitably less exciting than what leads to it. But Peter Stone’s dialogue crackles, Peck and Matthau are a highly enjoyably matched team of would-be sleuths in over their heads, Baker is sexy and mysterious enough in her array of hats, and Dmtryk’s unusual use of silent flashbacks is nicely creepy, foreshadowing stylistic efforts soon to come from the likes of Nicolas Roeg. Overall, Mirage is much like the spooky little girl that offers David temporary refuge and a cup of invisible coffee: there’s not much substance there, but the presentation is enticing.