Tangier (1946)

Tangier is included in Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray boxed set Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema IX. Like most of the movies included in these sets Tangier is not film noir at all. That doesn’t really matter. These days the only way that interesting lesser-known Hollywood movies of that era are going to have any chance of getting released on Blu-Ray is to have the film noir label slapped on them. And there are so many such movies that really do deserve to get released and get seen.

Tangier, made by Universal in 1946, seems superficially like a lower budget version of Casablanca. They have the same kind of exotic North African locale, Casablanca has Rick’s Cafe Americain and Tangier has the Ritz Hotel as an equivalent nightclub setting. The war plays an important role in the background of both films. The plots are not all that similar but one imagines that Universal were hoping that audiences would make the connection.

Tangier was a star vehicle for Maria Montez. She plays a dancer named Rita. As you might expect of a character played by Maria Montez Rita is incredibly glamorous. She’s also a bit of a romantic adventuress.

Rita is the headline act. Her pal and fellow dancer Dolores (Louise Allbritton) is somewhat in her shadow. Rita and Dolores have discovered that if Dolores dons a black wig and wears an exact copy of Rita’s costume she can take Rita’s place in a dance routine. That can be handy on occasions when one of Rita’s romantic adventures calls for her to be somewhere else without her absence from the club being noticed. This will play an important part in the movie’s plot.

In this case Rita wants to do a spot of burglary. She breaks into the room of another guest, a businessman. She finds something very interesting, a very valuable diamond, but the burglary goes awry when her dance partner Ramon (Kent Taylor) shows up. Now there’s a murder that is going to be quite inconvenient.

A lot of the inconvenience will be caused by the local military police chief Colonel Artiego (Preston Foster). The flamboyant and possibly slightly corrupt Artiego is very keen to romance Rita.

Also hoping to romance Rita is disgraced reporter Paul Kenyon (Robert Paige). He’s also hoping to revive his career.

Everyone would like that diamond but most of the characters have other complicated personal agendas as well, such as revenge. The plot is fairly twisty and fairy satisfying.

The acting is mostly pretty good. Robert Paige is a perfectly serviceable male romantic lead. Preston Foster is excellent as the morally ambiguous police chief.

But this is Maria Montez’s movie. As always she puts everything into her performance and there’s nothing naïve about her acting here - she understands the woman she’s playing and she nails her perfectly. And as always Montez projects exoticism and staggering amounts of glamour.

Nothing annoys me more than to see Montez’s movies and performances labelled as camp. That suggests that they were bad movies and that she was a bad actress. She may have had a limited range but within that range she was a very capable actress. And Tangier is a very competently made adventure/romance thriller.

This movie does look like film noir but it’s always important to bear in mind that nobody in 1946 was consciously making film noir or consciously adopting a noir visual style. What we today see as the noir visual style was simply a popular visual approach used at the time in various genres - mysteries, thrillers, private eye movies, spy films etc. Creating a moody effect with shadows was something that cinematographers had mastered and Woody Bredell (who shot this film) certainly knew how to do such things.

This is of course a movie with an exotic setting shot entirely on a sound stage and on the backlot. That’s part of the appeal of movies such as this. This movie does not take place in Tangier, it takes place in the Tangier created by the Hollywood dream factory. It’s a fantasy world of danger, intrigue, adventure and romance. That why we watch movies - to escape into a fantasy world that is much more exciting than reality.

Tangier is not a great movie but it’s solid entertainment and Maria Montez in full-blown glamour gal mode is always watchable.

As usual Kino Lorber have provided a lovely transfer.