Finally, on the last day of January 2010 I get to mention some films my wife an I have been watching!We are both seemingly obsessed with that iconic style of film so prevalent in the '30's, '40's and '50's, 'Film Noir' and so we spent several night the last week or two looking at several fine examples of this genre.
If you don't know, this style of film borrows very heavily from the German school of expressionism. It is almost always a drama that involves some kind of murder or serious crime and usually depicts mostly night scenes filmed in unconventional methods with bizarre camera angles, starkly contrasting silhouettes and will frequently have a tragic ending. In other words, someone always dies. Whee!
Most of the type of films borrowed heavily from the hard boiled style of detective writing produced by men like Mickey Spillane, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. When the studios made these, they tended to use less than 'top tier' actors and the budgets were often pretty skimpy. Since the studios already had several sets built to stand in for the 'naked city' it was pretty cheap to hire some writers to fling together a plot and get some actors from the studio stable to make it come alive. As a result, the vast majority of these works are definitely of the 'B-movie' variety.
In Film Noir movies, there is almost always a detective or investigtor of some kind (whether police, insurance, or private) trying to solve a murder or some felonious crime while dealing with the ubiquitous femme fatale. Good looking dames in these films are typically the last folks you want to trust...but the first you want to get close to!
There is usually a double cross and vengence is an extremely common motivator for the goons and/or hero. The better noir films try to blur the line, rather cynically sometimes, so it's not so clear cut who the bad guy or good guy is. And as I said, in the end someone often dies just short of realizing a dream, disallusioned and/or betrayed. In fact, many of these films can be argued to border on being nihilistic.
Anyway, over the last few weeks, we watched about nine of these. I'll try to give a brief synopsis of each with a rating. But frankly, there wasn't a dog in the bunch! It's easy to mock these movies through early 21st Century eyes, but when they are taken for what they are in light of when they were made, they are often very compelling.
Over acting? Sure. Melodramatic? Of course. Entertaining? Like nothing else at all! So, here's our list of recently enjoued noir films:
Raw Deal (1948)
Dennis O'Keefe as Joe Sullivan
Claire Trevor as Pat Cameron
Marsha Hunt as Ann Martin
John Ireland as Fantail
Raymond Burr as Rick Coyle
Joe Sullivan's in prision for helping Coyle with a big time rip off, but gets double crossed by Coyle who takes the whole stash. Pat helps Joe escape from prision (unknown to her they were aided by forces of Coyle so Joe could be shot and killed as an escapee) but Joe won't flee out of country. Pat loves Joe and will do anything for him, but Joe's lust for vengeance in killing Coyle makes him blind to getting away clean. Joe starts to fall for Ann Martin (a reporter who originally thought Joe was scum but starts to fall for him, too) and it's only at the very end does Pat let go of Joe after realizing too late he'll never love her...Joe loves Ann. A climatic gun battle at the end is the result of Joe rushing to save Ann from Coyle and his lackyies, spelling the end of Coyle but sadly for Joe too. Just as he was on the verge of escaping to a new life, Joe defeats Coyle but takes a bullet and dies in Ann's arms as a weeping Pat looks on.
This movie is a prototype noir film. It has it all, stark angles, deep black & white contrasts, vengeance, love, gun fights, fist fights, unrequited love, missed opportunities and a hero that wins in the end but pays with his life. O'Keefe and Burr are great, but this movie totally belonged to Claire Trevor, she owned it and gave every bit a good a performance as she did as Gay Dawn in 'Key Largo' the same year. I liked this one alot, near the top of this list!
Rating: 9/10
Call Northside 777 (1948)
James Stewart as P.J. McNeal
Richard Conte as Frank Wiecek
Lee J. Cobb as Brian Kelly
Betty Garde as Wanda Skutnik
Joanne De Bergh as Helen Wiecek
It is 1932 in Chicago, and a policeman is killed inside a speakeasy. Frank Wiecek and another man are sentenced to life imprisonment. Eleven years later, a newspaper ad by Wiecek's mother leads city editor Brain Kelly of the Chicago Times to assign reporter P.J. McNeal to look more closely into the case. McNeal is skeptical and believes Wiecek is guilty, but he starts to change his mind after meeting Helen Wiecek. McNeal meets increased resistance from authorities unwilling to be proved wrong but pushes ahead until he finally realizes that Wanda Skutnik's testimony (which was the key in putting Frank in prison) was falsified. But when Skutnik refuses to recant, McNeal is able to eventually prove Frank is innocent by expanding a photograph of a newpaper held by a newsboy, showing the date when Skutnik and Frank were photographed together, the day before he was booked for murder (which Wanda testified never happened, proving she lied under oath).
What can I say? Jimmy Stewart is Jimmy Stewart and really pulls off the 'haggered, hard bitten, cynical reporter' with aplomb. This movie was the first film ever shot on location in Chicago and it really delivers the sights, smells and spirit of the city with big shoulder well. Sadly, Cobb isn't seen more (he's one of my favorite all time actors), but when he is in he is authentic to the part with a substantial presence. The other players turn in acceptable performance, but Betty Garde's Wanda Skutnik is the best of the rest, with a delightfully 'hate-able' delivery.
Rating: 8/10
The Blue Dahlia (1946)
Alan Ladd as Johnny Morrison
Veronica Lake as Joyce Harwood
William Bendix as Buzz Wanchek
Hugh Beaumont as George Copeland
Doris Dowling as Helen Morrison
Howard Da Silva as Eddie Harwood
Will Wright as "Dad" Newell
Johnny is back from the war as a Navy hero, only to find his indiscreet wife Helen has been having an open affair with Harwood. He also discovers their recently deceased 7 year old son didn't die from illness as she told him in letters, she actually had a reckless car accident that killed him. Their marriage in shambles, Johnny goes to room with his two war buddies in their flop, Buzz and George. Buzz has been effected badly by the war (with a steel plate in his head) and as a result has an impossibly short temper, bad memory and is prone to violence when he's mad. Johnny hears on the radio that night his wife was murdered, and the signs point to him. He meets Joyce, Harwood's wife, and begins to grow close to her, even though he's disgusted by the fact her husband is slime and cheated on his wife while he was away in the war. In the end, everyone is now convinced it was really Buzz that lost his temper when going to talk Helen out of treating Johnny so badly, but ended up murdering her in a rage. But the police end up tricking the house detective Dad into confessing that he had in fact been watching Helen and Eddie, blackmailing them about their affair. Since Helen wouldn't pay more, he lost his temper and shot her. He then pulls a gun on the police and is cut down. Johnny and Joyce end up together.
I liked much of this film, it had a great cast and the stoic, mumbling Alan Ladd makes Johnny Morrison an very sympathic character. The confrontations between Johnny and Eddie's men are classic B-movie tough guy one-liners and haymakers, which makes the film fun. The end seems forced though, as if the writers said "Ah, we gotta end this, so how about ...?" and came up with the 'Dad' solution. Bendix's character can start to grate with his over the top tough guy reactionary stuff, but on the whole the film is engaging. Once you get in, you really want to know how it all works out, and you're glad it wasn't Buzz after all.
Rating:6.75/10
The Killers (1946)
Burt Lancaster as "Swede" Andersen
Ava Gardner as Kitty Collins
Edmond O'Brien as Jim Reardon
Albert Dekker as Big Jim Colfax
Sam Levene as Lt. Sam Lubinsky
Two hit men arrive at a small-town diner, assigned to find and kill a man, Ole Anderson, aka "the Swede". They track him to a boarding house where, resigned to his fate, he puts up no struggle. The Swede had life insurance, so Investigator Jim Reardon is assigned to look into the murder for his company. Interviewing people from his past, Reardon develops a theory that the Swede's murder stemmed from an unsolved payroll robbery of years earlier masterminded by Colfax and involving Kitty Collins, a mysterious woman the Swede loved, but who was ultimately betrayed by. Working with police detective Lt. Sam Lubinsky (who was a boyhood friend of the Swede), Reardon sets a plan in motion to trap the hired killers and the man who hired them. Colfax is eventually exposed and shot by the police. As he lays dying, Kitty again tries to save her own skin by begging Colfax to tell the police she had nothing to do with it, but he dies without doing so, leaving her to answer for her part in the robbery and murder of the Swede.
This is the best of this group of four. Lancaster is in his first starring role here, and carries it off triumphantly. When watching, I remarked to my wife that usually Humphery Bogart was the best at playing the sad sack sucker who got double crossed and, as you watch the film, you just know his tragic end is approaching and there's nothing that can be done. The saddest thing is, he knows it too. Well, Lancaster is the equal of Bogart in this film, and you feel incredible sympathy for him even though you saw him die 5 minutes into the film. Ava Garder is perfect in the role of the self obsessed, back stabbing beauty and you only wish something worse would have happened to her. This is a fantastic film.
Rating: 9.5/10
That's all I'll do for now, because this is getting pretty long. But as a preview, here are the other five that I'll chew up in Part 2:
Black Angel (1946)
Suddenly (1954)
Fear in the Night (1947)
The Killers (1964)
This Gun For Hire (1942)
This second group was dynamite, and for the most part was an even better group than those listed above.
Can't wait to chat about them in Part 2!
Until then, see ya' later, ya' rotten mugs....
xxxxx
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