Buxom, blonde, and dangerous to know: Cleo Moore and Bad Girls of Film Noir, Vol. 2 on DVD

Cleo Moore was born on Halloween, 1928 in Baton Rouge. At 15 she was briefly married to Huey Long’s youngest son, and had very likely already assumed the sort of undulating corporeal proportions that can make a guy break down and weep. She would eventually set records for the longest filmed kiss on live television, run for governor of Louisiana, and enter the world of real estate before dying of a heart attack at the age of 44. But in the 1950s she was a star of sorts, the muse of eccentric Czech-born auteur Hugo Haas, slated at one point to star in a bio-pic of Jean Harlow, though I knew her only for her memorable cameo in Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1952). If we shave off just one of its four titles, the recently released Bad Girls of Film Noir, Vol. 2 could just as easily be titled The Cleo Moore Signature Collection. The two-disc set serves as an introduction to a minor but nonetheless interesting career, one that speaks volumes about the role of women in postwar America.

The girls in these titles tend to not be all that bad, and the films certainly not all that noir. Too transparent for manipulation, Moore didn’t play the femme fatale. At the start of Haas’ One Girl’s Confession (53), Moore’s waitress steals $25,000 from her scumbag employer, hides it, and thereafter turns herself in. She becomes a model prisoner, and upon early release goes back to where she came from and, too deeply paranoid about people spying on her to recover her stash, takes another gig slinging drinks for a swarthy, lecherous gambler, played with terrific zest by Haas himself, who becomes chastely enamored with Moore, even after she nearly kills him. This strange tale of feminine self-reliance and the perils of coveting dirty money is highlighted by pleasingly bizarre plot twists and Haas’ distinctive use of close-ups. It’s a bit disappointing when Moore winds up content to be romanced by a horny fisherman, but in her private thoughts, conveyed through dreamy voice-over, she confesses that she’s genuinely drawn to him. He has clean fingernails, she thinks. “From all that salt water, I guess.”

“Caged men are separated only by a thick wall—from caged women. The system is wrong…” So goes the over-heated opening narration of Women’s Prison (55), directed by Lewis Seiler from a script by Jack DeWitt and Crane Wilbur, and the mother of all babes-behind-bars movies. It’s an ensemble piece, and Moore has a smaller role here, co-starring with none other than Ida Lupino, who plays the stylish and sadistic supervisor of the female half of the penitentiary where all the action takes place, as well as Jan Sterling, who starred with Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole (51), and Audrey Totter, veteran of several key noirs, such as Lady in the Lake (47), The Set-Up (49) and Tension (49). Despite Lupino’s prestige, Women’s Prison is about as trashy as you’d expect, given the period and the studio gloss, with hysterical inmates, saucy wisecracks, and a tawdry secret rendezvous, though there's little to suggest the subgenre’s token lesbianism. It’s perhaps a little fantastic that virtually all the women seem to do their time together in perfect harmony, exuding solidarity, but the pay-off comes when they organize to take over the joint with only a couple of knives and some ingenuity, and can only be suppressed by rifles, gas and the promise of revenge on Lupino.

Over-Exposed (56) begins when Moore’s snared in a police raid of a bar frequented by prostitutes and is ordered to leave town. She doesn’t, and instead is taken under the wing of a kindly old tippling photographer with a cat who runs in slow-motion. She learns the trade and adopts a new identity, trading in Lily Krenshka for Lila Crane—a name which would assume very different connotations only a few years later when given to Janet Leigh’s sister in Psycho (60). She moves to New York, rises in the ranks of society and becomes a famous portraitist, at one point a guest on this bizarre television program where the host phones her celebrity guests at their homes instead of bringing them on the show. Her ambition is soured by greed and a growing distrust of everyone around her. The mafia connections responsible for her social position prove to be her undoing, but as hubristic as Moore’s heroine may be its immensely frustrating when the movie ends with her succumbing to the drab, condescending, paternal affections of journalist/conscience Richard Crenna, who would one day become Rambo’s father figure, and the film’s latent feminism nose-dives with the realization that no woman in her right mind would choose a career over becoming an obedient spouse. Over-Exposed would be Moore’s second-last credit, and even if she never quite embodied the truly independent bombshell in the movies, she seems to have made considerable strides over the remainder of her too-short life.

The sole non-Moore title in Bad Girls, Vol. 2, which also lacks a female protagonist, is Night Editor (46), part of an unrealized franchise of wee-hour tales told by a big city newsman. A married cop witnesses a banker beat a woman’s brains in with a stick while trysting in some tall grass with the glamorous, wealthy, and equally married Janis Carter, excellent as the poisonous other woman. Some great location work and weird details, such as the old ethnic cop who habitually downs four glasses of buttermilk in a row, bring some flavour to an otherwise moralistic but entertaining thriller.

Busting up the boys, singing those skeletal blues, a MacGyver of improvised bikinis: the inimitable Ida Lupino graces two of the finest Fox noirs

Man, oh man, Ida Lupino. Just one of her loaded little wordless hms is worth more than reams of dialogue from most other actresses. She was born in Brixton, schooled at RADA, but like so many of the elements that fed the best of American movies of the 1940s, and film noir in particular, her outsider's, specifically European perspective seemed only to heighten her contribution to the deep, strangely poeticized Americaness of her on-screen presence. Émigrés helped nurture what would eventually be tagged—the by French, of course—as the noir sensibility, its fatalism and chiaroscuro stylistic economy, but Lupino never seemed less than American in her toughness and resilience, her fundamental vulnerability and make-due-with-what-you-got glamour. If you didn’t know better, you’d believe that she, Gloria Grahame and Barbara Stanwyck all came from the same little town—and all three of them anxious to escape.

Moontide (1942), one of three new releases in the ongoing ‘Fox Noir’ series, and a major discovery for most of us, was a proto-noir especially informed by European tastes. Fritz Lang was its first director before the more utilitarian Archie Mayo took over, and Lang’s moody aesthetics remain very much intact. The film was the US debut of French superstar Jean Gabin, familiar to contemporary cineastes, if not the average American moviegoer, from his roles in films by Jean Renoir, who’d also crossed the Atlantic to work in Hollywood. Ever vigilant regarding his image, Gabin was exactingly involved in the script’s development, and apparently much to the project’s betterment. There was also a delirium sequence initially designed by Salvador Dalí, though it seems little of his ideas made it through the censors. But perhaps the most European thing about Moontide had nothing to do with the personnel at all: after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the West Coast location shoot was cancelled and the production moved into the studios, where the luminous artificiality of the sets, the foggy docks especially, endowed the film with its sublimely dreamlike atmosphere, which only increased the story’s already considerable air of dread and romance.

Based on actor Willard Robertson’s pulp novel, deemed unfilmable by many on account of its being too sordid, and adapted by novelist John O’Hara, Moontide begins with a night of expressionistic alcoholic oblivion, with dockworker and working class bon vivant Bobo (Gabin) emerging from his ominous blackout in front of a bait shack. A murder’s been committed, and Bobo can’t be completely sure he didn’t do it. Bobo’s pal Tiny (Thomas Mitchell), to be found that morning, get this, snapping towels against the naked ass of the flamboyantly monikered Nutsy (Claude Rains in an interesting but smallish role), suggest the pair skip town, but Bobo’s usual wanderlust is suddenly overwhelmed by his fascination with Anna (Lupino), a waif with a background too painful for her to share. He fishes from the sea one night during a suicide attempt, keeping the fuzz at bay by pretending to be her husband. Anna threatens to domesticate Bobo and bring his alliance with Tiny, apparently forged in blackmail and repressed homosexuality, to a grinding, ugly halt.

Moontide is drenched in neurosis, swarming with damaged psyches and astoundingly loopy romantic gestures—at one point Bobo gives Anna a prostitute’s dress as a symbol of his affection—yet its never less than buoyant thanks to the profound charisma of its leads: Gabin’s sensuous gaze, his easy, gypsy hedonism and rather chauvinistic optimism—he has a magnificently callous speech where he extols the virtues of breakfast as a balm for suicidal depression—matched by Lupino’s aching sense of weary regeneration, her unspoken recesses of darkness and immensely touching surrender to love, at one point caressing Gabin's fleshy face like a precious stone. The film in its way looks forward to In a Lonely Place (50), one of my all-time favourite noirs, in its tender, brooding study of a fragile connection between a younger, secretive woman and an older, violent man that no one seems entirely safe around.

If Moontide has spent most of its cinematic life unknown or under-appreciated, Road House (48) has remained something of a legend, rather difficult to see but now finally appearing on DVD, only months after the death of the great Richard Widmark, whose appearance here formed yet another triumphant follow-up to his unforgettable debut in Kiss of Death (47). Curiously, it finds Lupino again coming between a seemingly untamable virile type and a seemingly more civilized, well-heeled associate, oddly matched male buddies whose friendship is tainted by compromise. When Midwestern rural roadhouse proprietor Jefty (Widmark) comes back from his travels with “a new attraction from Chicago” named Lily (Lupino, suddenly blonde though looking only more like some strange creature from elsewhere), his intentions are clearly more than professional. But Lily, the picture of feminine independence, seems utterly disinterested in romance, her response to all of Jefty’s increasingly intense come-ons being little more than barely softened brush-offs or some variation of those wonderful little shrugging hms of hers. She remains impenetrable until she suddenly sets her sights on Jefty’s manager Pete (Cornell Wilde), and that's when all hell breaks loose.

Watching Lily and Pete’s courtship shift from mutual antipathy to desire—he’s anal about tidiness while she chain smokes and leaves her butts burning everywhere—is supremely pleasurable, even sort of surprising despite the conventions. It's nearly as pleasurable and surprising as Lily’s debut as the road house chanteuse. As Lupino unceremoniously plunks herself down at her mini-upright we hear bowling balls still knocking about in the background. But by the time she starts singing her stark blues number in that seductive, gravelly, idiosyncratic voice—has Cat Power, a.k.a. Chan Marshall, seen this movie?—there isn’t a single person in the joint who isn’t under her peculiar spell. The scene is magic, visibly stoking a flame within both the already swooning Jefty and the much cooler Pete.

The love triangle as originally conceived in the first versions of the script, something much discussed in the disc's supplements, strikes me as the source material for Blood Simple (84), though I've never heard the idea brought up elsewhere. But the story as it emerges here is at once more conventional and more emotionally pointed that was originally intended, building up to a last act that bristles with betrayal, manipulation and Jefty’s masochistic, maybe even suicidal mania. Indeed, Widmark steals the show in the final scenes, though there would arguably be no scenes to steal without Lupino’s  singularly beguiling presence charging every scene with attitude, conflicted desire and on-the-spot ingenuity—you’ll be amazed at what she can do with a few scarves during the scene where they go to the beach sans bikini. All of these qualities would come to shape Lupino’s groundbreaking work as a director: she was one of the first women in Hollywood to bust up the boys. But, as is evidenced in these films, she had already been rehearsing for that job for years.