Undertow (1949)

Undertow (1949) is included in Kino Lorber’s Film Noir: Dark Side of Cinema XVII and it’s a real surprise - it’s just about the only movie in any of these sets that is actually slightly film noirish. Don’t get me wrong. These sets include lots of fine movies that are very much worth seeing but most have no connections whatsoever to actual film noir.

Undertow is an early directorial effort by William Castle, later to become legendary for his imaginative promotional gimmicks for his low-budget horror films.

Tony Reagan (Scott Brady) has just been demobilised from the army. He seems like a pretty nice guy. At a casino in Reno he meets a rather sweet young lady schoolteacher, Ann McKnight (Peggy Dow). Ann seems like the sort of girl who’s waiting for Mr Right to come along, and she seems to think that Tony might qualify. Tony however is not interested - he’s heading to Chicago to marry his sweetheart Sally Lee (Dorothy Hart).

There’s nothing more than harmless flirtation between Tony and Ann.

We now learn that seven years earlier Tony had left Chicago under a cloud. He had been involved in organised crime and had run foul of Big Jim Lee. This could be a problem now - Big Jim is Sally Lee’s uncle.

Tony finds himself framed for murder and he has a minor gunshot wound. He needs to hide out for a while but the cops have all his old friends under surveillance. Then he remembers the cute lady schoolteacher. She lives in Chicago. She is keen to help. She just knows that Tony could never have murdered anybody. He’s not her man but she’ll stand by him anyway.

The biggest problem with this movie is that we don’t really feel that the odds are stacked against Tony. He’s in a jam but he has people on his side and we figure he’ll be OK. The movie also reveals a bit too much information too early.

Tony does qualify to some extent as a noir protagonist. There’s some moral ambiguity to him. He’s been a bad boy in the past but he’s tried to keep out of trouble since. He’s a basically decent guy in danger of being drawn into the noir nightmare world.

There is also a femme fatale of a sort, but not enough is done with the character.

For me film noir should take place in a rather hostile world - an unforgiving world in which a guy makes one mistake or gets one bad break and he’s doomed. The world of Undertow is a bit too ordered and fair. It doesn’t feel particularly like the world of film noir.

The bad guys are all that sinister. The femme fatale does some femme fatale stuff but she’s not all that seductive and she doesn’t have the full-blown evil spider woman vibe.

There’s also not much in the way of genuine noir visual style (although there is some).

Watching it today this movie seems like it has the ingredients for a film noir but they’re not sufficiently exploited. But of course nobody in 1949 was consciously trying to make film noir. Castle was just trying to make a crime thriller.

Judged in that light he does a very competent job.

The acting is solid but none of the main players has real star presence or charisma.

A few more nasty plot twists would have been nice but there’s nothing particularly wrong with Undertow. It’s only marginally film noir and it’s no masterpiece but it’s an enjoyable enough B-movie and it’s worth a look.

Kino Lorber have provided a very pleasing transfer.

Chicago Deadline (1949)

Chicago Deadline is a 1949 Paramount release that is difficult to classify. It’s definitely not film noir. There’s a mystery, but not of the usual type. There are crimes, but they’re peripheral to the main plot. Perhaps it’s best to think of it as just a hardboiled newspaper movie.

Ed Adams (Alan Ladd) is a reporter for the Chicago Journal. He comes across a young woman, dead in her apartment. Her name was Rosita. There’s no mystery to her death. She died of tuberculosis. And this is not one of those movies in which what appears to be death by natural causes turns out to be murder. She really did die of tuberculosis.

Ed finds her address book. Being a reporter he naturally steals it before the police arrive. It’s unethical but no big deal. This is not a suspicious death.

This is at best a very minor human interest story. A pretty young woman dies alone in a seedy apartment. Ed, being a reporter, decides to track down some of the people in her address book. He discovers something that interests him as a newspaperman. All of these people suddenly get really nervous when Rosita’s name is mentioned. Maybe there might be a bit of a story here after all.

He slowly uncovers Rosita’s story through the people in her address book. We see Rosita (played by Donna Reed) in a series of flashbacks.

Rosita seemed to have lousy luck with men. Some of these men are now having lousy luck. Getting murdered certainly qualifies as lousy luck.

Some of these people have colourful backgrounds of a less than strictly legal nature. Some are important people. It seems more and more likely that there’s a real story here. Ed wants that story, but he gradually becomes obsessed with Rosita herself. How did her life fall apart? It’s a mystery that Ed wants to solve.

Alan Ladd is in good form. Ed Adams is the hero but he’s a slightly tarnished hero. He’s a reporter, which means he has never had any morals. A story is a story. He’s hardboiled and cynical and that has never bothered him but as he uncovers Rosita’s story he starts to like himself a lot less. He starts to become slightly uncomfortable with the idea of treating people’s lives as nothing more than material for stories. Rosita was a real woman. Ed wants her story told fairly.

The touch of cynicism about newspapers adds some interest.

Rosita is supposed to be an enigmatic figure. That’s the whole point of the story. Was she a bad girl, a femme fatale, a victim or an innocent? Or just a very ordinary young woman whose life got out of control? Donna Reed’s performance reflects this. It’s not a showy performance because it’s not supposed to be.

The plot is perhaps a little over-complicated, with perhaps too many characters. That of course is to some extent the point - Rosita met her destiny as a result of all kinds of involvements with all kinds of people, good and bad. Some used her. Some loved her. You do have to pay close attention though.

There’s no need to worry too much about spoilers here - the movie tells us how Rosita’s life will end right at the beginning. Of course there could be no question of a happy ending - we already know that she has died alone and unloved. The pay-off at the end is satisfactory but it is just a tiny bit bleak. No-one was saved. This is is probably the movie’s only valid claim to being borderline noir. The one moderately bright spot at the end is that Ed has perhaps become a bit more of an emotionally mature human being.

Chicago Deadline is pretty decent entertainment. Recommended.

This one is included in Kino Lorber’s Film Noir: Dark Side of Cinema XVI Blu-Ray set (I’ve 
also reviewed Mystery of Marie Roget from that set). Chicago Deadline gets a lovely transfer.

The Single Standard (1929)

When people talk about Greta Garbo’s great movies they usually don’t mention her very late (1929) silent movie The Single Standard. Even when people focus on her silent films this one doesn’t get much attention. It was directed by John S. Robertson, from a novel by Adela Rogers St. Johns.

Arden (Greta Garbo) obviously belongs to the wealthy fashionable set. This was 1929 so this is a pre-Great Depression movie. This is still the Jazz Age, the Age of the Flapper.

Arden is rather fond of her handsome hunky chauffeur. One night she decides on a midnight drive, just her and the chauffeur. Arden is in the driver’s seat, and this is clearly a signal that Arden always likes to be in the driver’s seat in life. They find a romantic spot down by the lake. Just the two of them. They kiss. The movie doesn’t show us what happens next but I think it’s reasonable to assume that it’s what you would expect to happen between a healthy red-blooded young man and a healthy red-blooded young woman in a romantic setting in the moonlight.

Unpleasant consequences could probably have been foreseen, but this moonlight tryst has totally disastrous consequences.

There is of course a major class issue here. Women of Arden’s social class are not expected to offer their favours to servants.

Arden then meets Packy Cannon (Nils Asther). He’s a prize-fighter turned artist. He gives a demonstration of his pugilistic skills. Arden is impressed. Packy is artistic and very manly. He’s her sort of man. Romance is clearly going to blossom.

We’ve already figured out that Arden is a Modern Woman. She wants to lead a life of honesty and freedom. Which for her includes sexual freedom. We also know that she likes men, with a preference for masculine men. Arden believes that she has the right to make her own decisions where men are concerned.

Romance does indeed blossom. Arden and Packy sail off into the sunset together on Packy’s yacht. Things don’t quite work out and another situation arises which could potentially end as disastrously as Arden’s midnight cavortings with the chauffeur.

The title might tempt one to think that this movie was intended as an attack on the supposed “double standard” - the idea that women were held to a different moral standard compared to men. I am however not convinced that that makes sense in relation to this movie. In the context of this movie there really is only a single standard - scandal must be avoided. Morality doesn’t matter. Social approval is what matters.

Of course that is still true today. The things that bring social approval and social disapproval have changed, but social conformity still matters more than morality. Whatever the prevailing societal mores might be, however much they may change, conformity to those mores will still be ruthlessly enforced.

Arden’s mistake, which had nothing very much to do with her being a woman, was to assume that society will tolerate those who believe they have the right to make their own decisions. That has never been the case and never will be the case. This movie is really not dated at all.

We don’t think of silent movies as pre-code movies but of course a movie made in 1929 is indeed a pre-code movie, and The Single Standard feels very very pre-code. It is strongly implied that Arden and the chauffeur are lovers. It is made pretty explicit that Arden and Packy are lovers. It’s also made very clear that the audience is not meant to condemn any of these people for immorality. In fact the message of the movie appears to be that if love is on offer you should grab it. The complications that ensue for these people are not actually caused by sexual wickedness. In fact things would have worked out much more satisfactorily for everyone had Arden and Packy continued with their illicit love affair.

The Single Standard is more interesting than its reputation would suggest and I recommend it highly. And of course Garbo is terrific.

Sadly there’s a great deal of print damage evident in the Warner Archive DVD transfer but with silent movies we always have to be grateful that they have survived at all.

Union City (1980)

Union City, released in 1980, is a bit of a puzzle. It attracted mild interest at the time since it marked the real beginnings of Debbie Harry’s career as an actress (she had played a few minor roles prior to this). This film then sank without trace. It got a DVD release nearly twenty years ago and then disappeared once again into obscurity. There is still no sign of a Blu-Ray release. It’s rather bizarre. You would think that being a neo-noir starring Debbie Harry would make it well and truly viable as a Blu-Ray release. And it is a very good and extremely interesting movie.

I suspect the problem is that it’s also a slightly weird very quirky movie, the kind of movie that critics are always inclined to treat harshly. It’s also the kind of movie that would have presented a few challenges to the marketing guys. The usual response of studios to such movies is to simply not bother promoting them. And the usual response of critics (including today’s online reviewers) is to assume that such a movie is not worth bothering with.

It probably also didn’t help that this was the only feature film made by writer-director Marcus Reichert. The fact that it was made by a Hollywood outsider was another reason to dismiss it.

Union City was based on a 1937 Cornell Woolrich short story, The Corpse Next Door, and this is a very Woolrichian movie.

It is 1953. Lillian (Debbie Harry) and Harlan (Dennis Lipscomb) live in a seedy apartment in a generic fictional city, Union City. Their marriage is not a great success. Harlan is neurotic and dissatisfied with life and inclined to obsess over trivial things. Lillian has tried to be a good wife but she feels unloved.

Harlan’s latest obsession is the milk thief. Somebody is stealing his milk. He lays an elaborate trap for the thief, with disastrous consequences. As a result his fragile grip on reality becomes ever more tenuous.

Lillian seems to be drifting into an affair with the building’s super, Larry (Everett McGill). Lillian is not really that kind of girl but she’s starved of affection and Larry is much nicer to her than her husband.

Also living in the building is The Contessa (Irina Maleeva). She’s not really a contessa. She’s crazy, but likeable and harmless. She does however add to the movie’s atmosphere of weirdness.

Harlan is in a total panic because of the corpse. He has no coherent plan to dispose of it. His solution is for them to move to another apartment, which would simply make the corpse’s discovery a certainty. He is descending into a world of madness and paranoia.

As I said, this is all very Woolrichian.

I admire Debbie Harry for taking this role because, considering that she was seen at the time as perhaps the sexiest most glamorous woman in the world, it’s a very unglamorous part.

It also requires a very low-key performance. Harlan is the one who is cracking up in spectacular style and Dennis Lipscomb is the one who is called on to deliver a totally over-the-top performance (which he does very effectively).

Debbie Harry has to counter-balance that. Lillian is just a very ordinary woman. She just wanted a happy marriage. She doesn’t daydream about being a movie star or a fashion model or living in a penthouse. She just wants a bit of romance and affection, and it would be nice to have a husband who actually wanted to make love to her occasionally. She doesn’t want very much out of life, but she knows that she needs more than she’s getting.

Debbie Harry’s performance is believable and touching.

Look out for Pat Benatar in a small role. Yes, you get two pop queens in this movie.

Union City certainly has very strong neo-noir credentials but it has a feel that is quite different from other neo-noirs. It has its own totally distinctive style, possibly another reason for its neglect. It doesn’t look or feel anything like other neo-noirs with period setting (such as Chinatown, The Postman Always Rings Twice or Farewell, My Lovely) or other neo-noirs such as Body Heat or Basic Instinct.

Union City has an incredibly claustrophobic feel. It also has a very non-realist look. The use of colour to create mood is extremely interesting. There is no reason in plot terms for this movie not to have been set in 1980 - I suspect the period setting was chosen to achieve a further distancing from reality, from the everyday world. This is a movie that takes place entirely within a nightmare world. This is very obviously true in Harlan’s case but both Lillian and the Contessa can also be seen as inhabiting a world of unreality. Theirs is not a world of paranoia, but but it’s still a world of unreality. For these two women it’s a world of frustrated hopes and thwarted love.

The Tartan Video DVD is long out of print but affordable copies can still be found. I found my copy without any great difficulty. The anamorphic transfer is OK. The only extras are Debbie Harry’s screen tests and it’s easy to see why Reichert wanted her - she nailed the part perfectly right from the start.

Union City is a very unconventional neo-noir but it is still very much a neo-noir. It’s a slightly arty very moody film that makes no concessions to the conventions of cinematic realism. It’s a strange brilliant little movie and it’s very highly recommended.

Mystery of Marie Roget (1942)

Mystery of Marie Roget is a 1942 adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe story. Now there have been countless movies ostensibly based on stories by Poe many of which have only a tenuous connection with the source material. This movie was based on one of Poe’s three detective stories, stories which have a very strong claim to being the first-ever genuine detective stories. Once again, the Poe connection turns out to be somewhat nebulous.

It does at least feature a character named Dupin. But instead of the brilliant amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin this one, Dr Pierre Dupin (Patric Knowles), is a Paris police detective who appears to be a pioneering forensics scientist.

The setting is Paris in 1889. The very popular musical comedy star Marie Roget has disappeared without a trace. After ten days there seems little hope that she will be found alive. And indeed her dead body is finally found.

Since Marie Roget is played by the star of the movie, Maria Montez, we’re not the least bit surprised when she turns up very much alive. This is not a spoiler. This happens right at the beginning of the movie. The supposed disappearance of Marie Roget is merely the start of the story.

There is certainly a mystery involving Marie Roget. The mystery also involves her sister Camille (Nell O’Day), their eccentric grandmother (played by Maria Ouspenskaya), the grandmother’s pet leopard, a young man named Marcel (Edward Norris) who has been romancing both sisters and a middle-aged government official named Beauvais (John Litel) who is making a fool of himself over Marie.

There is also an immense inheritance at stake.

The grandmother is convinced that an attempt will be made to murder Camille. She wants Dupin to act as bodyguard. Dupin agrees reluctantly, mostly because there is something about Marie’s disappearance that puzzles and fascinates him.

Dupin will play the master detective role, with Lloyd Corrigan as the Prefect of Police Gobelin being the comic relief sidekick.

The plot has some reasonable twists and a few very unconvincing elements. It works well enough overall.

At this stage Universal had not yet figured out what to do with Maria Montez, although they did know they wanted to make her a star. She’s probably a bit miscast here. She also doesn’t get a huge amount to do.

Patric Knowles is not wildly exciting but he’s a serviceable hero. Maria Ouspenskaya has fun as the crazy grandmother. The other cast members are adequate without being dazzling.

Rigid genre boundaries did not exist in Poe’s days and in the first of his Dupin detective stories, The Murder in the Rue Morgue, he incorporated elements we might be more inclined to associate with horror. Universal had had some success with an adaptation of that story and obviously hoped to repeat that success. As a result Mystery of Marie Roget does have a few macabre touches (faceless corpses and body parts stolen from the morgue).

The period setting is done quite well although it certainly does not have a noir look. There’s a pretty decent horse-and-carriage chase and a couple of moderately effective action scenes.

Mystery of Marie Roget is enjoyable enough if you don’t set your expectations too high.

It’s included in Kino Lorber’s Film Noir: The Dark Side Of Cinema XVI Blu-Ray boxed set. Needless to say Mystery of Marie Roget has not the remotest connection with film noir. The transfer is nice and there are two audio commentaries.

Eyes of the Mummy (1918)

Ernst Lubitsch had been making short films in Germany for several years but Eyes of the Mummy (Die Augen der Mumie Ma) was the feature film that established him as a director to take note of. It was released in October 1918 so it was actually made during the First World War. It’s also significant in being his first movie starring Pola Negri. It gave him a taste of commercial success. Two months later he had his first major international hit, Carmen, again starring Pola Negri. Lubitsch had arrived.

It’s not that easy to classify Eyes of the Mummy. The title leads one to suspect a horror movie but the horror movie genre did not exist in 1918. At the time it would presumably have been regarded as an exotic melodrama. That’s how I’d describe it.

The next few years would see Lubitsch in wildly and intoxicatingly experimental mode. He accepted the existence of no rules. The only limits were imposed by the film-maker’s imagination and Lubitsch’s imagination at that time was boundless.

There is no actual mummy in Eyes of the Mummy but there is an ancient Egyptian tomb and there is a curse, and strange and inexplicable events have been linked to the tomb.

Two Europeans are in Egypt, separately, exploring the ruins and soaking up the exotic atmosphere. One is Prince Hohenfels (Max Laurence). The other is a painter, Albert Wendland (Harry Liedtke).

Wendland makes an amazing discovery in the tomb. There is a girl imprisoned there, and she’s very much alive. Her name is Ma (Pola Negri). That’s also the name of the Egyptian queen buried in the tomb. The girl had been kidnapped and enslaved by a scoundrel named Radu (Emil Jannings). Wendland rescues the girl and takes her back to Germany with him.

Meanwhile Prince Hohenfels has found the disconsolate Radu wandering in the desert. The Prince takes Radu back to Europe with him. This is likely to lead to trouble. Radu intends to reclaim his slave girl.

Wendland has installed Ma in his household, presumably as his mistress. They’re crazy about each other. Ma is a wild child, knowing nothing whatever of civilisation or the social rules, but she’s charming and adorable and very sexy.

Ma becomes quite a social success and gains acclaim as a dancer. A painting of her by Wendland makes her even more of a celebrity.

Unfortunately her growing celebrity also alerts Radu to the fact there she is here, in the same city. He has not given up his obsession with her. In his own perverse way he probably does truly love her.

Emil Jannings had a huge reputation as an actor in this period, something I’ve never quite understood. In this role he does certainly convey the idea of a man with a dangerous obsession.

This is however Pola Negri’s film. She was one of the great screen sex goddesses but interesting she generally did not play vamps or bad girls. Her specialty was playing wild crazy fiery passionate women. Sometimes they were a bit naughty, but in an endearing way. They were women who could drive a man crazy, but he’d enjoy it. Negri just had her own unique screen persona and it made her one of the most fascinating stars of the silent era.

The big danger here is to treat this as a horror movie, and then be disappointed that it doesn’t work as a horror movie. Lubitsch was not trying to make a horror movie. He was trying to make a romantic melodrama, and when you judge it in that light it does work. There are no overt supernatural elements but there are very subtle suggestions that influences slightly outside the range of normal experience could be at work. Ma has the same name as the long-dead Egyptian queen. Could Queen Ma be partly responsible for the hypnotic effect that the modern Ma exercises over men? Is there some vague occult connection between Ma and Radu? Perhaps.

Lubitsch was developing astonishingly quickly as a director. Within a year he would be making much more accomplished and much more ambitious movies. Eyes of the Mummy still has considerable interest as marking the beginnings of Lubitsch’s incredibly rich early German period. And Pola Negri is always worth watching. Recommended.

I’ve reviewed quite a few of these early Lubitsch films - The Oyster Princess (1919), The Doll (Die Puppe, 1919), Sumurun (1920) and the magnificent The Wildcat (1921).

Lady on a Train (1945)

Lady on a Train is a 1945 Universal release included in Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray boxed set Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema IX. Now I really don’t mind that hardly any of the Blu-Ray film noir releases these days are genuine noir. I understand that it’s a marketing thing. Slapping a film noir label on a movie makes it a viable physical media release and as a result lots of unfairly neglected movies are now seeing the light of day. That’s a good thing.

But the sheer brazenness of trying to pass off Lady on a Train as a film noir is awe-inspiring. This movie is not noir. It’s not noirish or noiresque or noir-adjacent. It does not contain even trace elements of noirness.

Lady on a Train is a lighthearted comic murder mystery with a decided screwball comedy flavour. It’s also a rather delightful movie in its own way.

It was based on a Leslie Charteris story and if you’re a fan of Charteris’s Saint stories you know that he was all about clever plotting, style, wit and fun. And this movie contains all those ingredients.

Deanna Durbin plays Nikki Collins and she is most certainly a screwball. She’s on a train and she’s reading a murder mystery by her favourite writer of detective stories, Wayne Morgan. She spends a great deal of time reading detective stories. She looks up from her book, out the window of the train, and she witnesses an actual murder. It’s not her overheated imagination.

The problem is that the police assume she’s a ditzy blonde who reads too much detective fiction and they don’t believe her.

She decides she’s going to need some help from a real expert, and surely no-one knows more about murder than Wayne Morgan. The writer is naturally flattered by the admiration of a cute blonde but his girlfriend, fashion model Joyce Willams (Patricia Morison), is less happy about pretty blondes taking an interest in her man. In fact she’s very disgruntled indeed.

Nikki does have a lead. She is sure that the murder victim was a wealthy industrialist named Josiah Waring. He is indeed deceased, although his demise has been attributed to a freak accident with a Christmas tree.

Waring left an odd will. His two nephews, Arnold Waring (Dan Duryea) and Jonathan Waring (Ralph Bellamy), were left nothing. The entire vast fortune went to Waring’s mistress, nightclub chanteuse Margo Martin (Maria Palmer).

There are plenty of other dissatisfied would-be heirs so there’s no shortage of potential suspects for murder.

There's a solid mystery plot but the emphasis is on lighthearted fun, and on watching Nikki’s attempts to play the part of an ace girl amateur detective. Her attempts turn up some clues but cause a good deal of amusing mayhem. She has a knack for blundering into situations with all the overconfidence of an enthusiastic schoolgirl.

The part is tailor-made for Deanna Durbin. She gets to be feisty, smart, accident-prone, cute and adorable. All things that she did supremely well. Her likeability factor is high enough to keep us interested in her adventures.

Naturally she has to sing and since for much of the movie she’s pretending to be a nightclub singer the songs slot neatly into the film and they’re pretty good. When she sings Night and Day she’s as close as Deanna Durbin ever got to being sultry. And she does a very sexy version of Silent Night. Yes I know that sounds bizarre but she manages it.

You might think that Dan Duryea’s presence in the cast would add some noirness but Duryea displays little of his trademark sinister presence. He’s very good, but he’s not playing a heavy.

You just have to accept that this is not going to be a film noir, and enjoy it for what it is. It’s a decently plotted murder mystery combined with a screwball comedy. Nikki is totally a screwball comedy female protagonist and Wayne Morgan is a classic screwball comedy male protagonist. Initially she drives him insane and threatens to reduce his well-ordered life to a shambles. You know that eventually they’ll realise that since they’re both screwballs they might as fall in love.

The Circus Club (where Margo is the headliner) makes a fine visually interesting setting for much of the later action. Durbin gets to wear some very fetching costumes.

The murder mystery and screwball comedy elements are nicely balanced. The mystery plot works satisfactorily, the screwball comedy elements are genuinely amusing. And Deanna Durbin’s sparkling performance is the main attraction. A charming and delightful movie, highly recommended.

The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray offers a very nice transfer. There is no audio commentary, and given the very dubious quality of most of the audio commentaries that Kino Lorber offer that’s probably a blessing.