The Bribe (1949)

The Bribe is a 1949 film noir based on a Frederick Nebel story.

Whether The Bribe is true film noir or a noirish melodrama can be debated. It does have major affinities with another genre that flourished in the 40s and early 50s - thrillers in exotic settings with an atmosphere of tropical sin and moral corruption. Movies like Macau, The Shanghai Gesture and Saigon.

This is one of those noirs that doesn’t rely on shadows and darkness in the mean streets of a big city. Instead we get the blazing tropical sun, lots of sweat and an exotic atmosphere in which sin and corruption flourish. Passions get overheated.

Rigby (Robert Taylor) is a G-Man investigating a racket in stolen military aircraft engines. The trail leads to South America. To a place called Carlotta. This is definitely the tropics and presumably it’s the Caribbean. It seemed to be a general belief at that time that when Americans went bad, or finally realised themselves to be irredeemable failures, they always ended up in the tropics.

Soon after arrival Rigby encounters Elizabeth Hintten (Ava Gardner). She’s a sultry night-club singer and she gives off major bad girl vibes. But when he gets to meet her Rigby finds that she’s actually really sweet. She’s a really nice girl. That’s it for Rigby. He’s falling for this girl big time.

Her drunken loser husband Tug (John Hodiak) might be a problem, especially given that he’s a prime suspect in the aero engine racket.

There a couple of other shady characters floating about. THere’s a sleazy old guy named Bealer (Charles Laughton) who just oozes moral corruption. He seems too hopeless to be involved in a major racket but the evidence certainly points that way. And then there’s Carwood (Vincent Price), a businessman Rigby met on the plane to South America. Carwood was headed for Peru. His turning up at Carlotta is quite the coincidence.

Rigby is investigating the case but he’s spending most of his time mooning over Elizabeth. And she’s giving off damsel in distress vibes. The unhappy wife, tied to a loser drunk with whom she is obviously no longer in love. Rigby has definite knight in shining armour tendencies, especially when the damsel in distress is both really sweet and smokin’ hot.

Rigby has always been an honest cop and he’s not the sort of guy who would ever turn crooked through mere greed. But there are other inducements besides money. And Elizabeth is very cute.

This was a significant step in Robert Taylor’s reinvention of himself as a battered world-weary cynical anti-hero filled with self-loathing. No more of the lightweight pretty boy stuff. This reinvention turned out to be a brilliant idea. Few actors could portray cynics more successfully. He’s in top form here.

Charles Laughton is of course great fun. Vincent Price is delightfully oily.

This is a very good role for Ava Gardner. Elizabeth is not a straightforward femme fatale. She may not be a femme fatale. She may be the nice girl she appears to be. Rigby is sure she’s not involved in anything dishonest, but he’s not exactly unbiased. Gardner plays it subtle. Rigby wants to trust her and he’s convinced himself that he can trust her but there’s that tiny seed of doubt. The audience is in the same boat.

The odd thing about Ava Gardner’s career is that she gave some of her very best performances in movies that have been underrated and under-appreciated. Movies like Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) and Whistle Stop (1946). She herself was inclined to be dismissive of her acting career, rather unfairly.

There’s a decent crime plot here but this is a character study of a man not just tempted but torn. He doesn’t know which way to jump. He wants to do the right thing but he’s no longer sure what that means.

Robert Z. Leonard is the kind of director usually scornfully dismissed by auteurist critics, and he was certainly no auteur. He was one of those competent craftsmen and there’s nothing wrong with that. Some years earlier he had directed the very underrated pre-code Greta Garbo melodrama Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) and there are some affinities between that film and The Bribe - both deal with moral degradation in exotic settings.

The climactic action sequence really is superbly done.

The Bribe doesn’t tick all the noir boxes but it ticks quite a few of them and whether it’s really noir or not it’s still an excellent movie. Very highly recommended.

The Warner Archive DVD offers a very nice transfer.

The Good Die Young (1954)

The Good Die Young is a 1954 British crime thriller directed by Lewis Gilbert. The first thing you’re going to notice about this movie is the cast - Laurence Harvey, Margaret Leighton, Stanley Baker, Gloria Grahame, Richard Basehart and Joan Collins. That’s a staggering amount of star power, both British and American. And the supporting cast includes Robert Morley (always fun) and Lee Patterson (whose performances I always enjoy).

The movie starts with four men about to pull off an armed robbery. This is a heist movie. Then we get extended flashbacks that tell us how the four came to be attempting something so obviously destined for failure.

They are all trapped in a spiral of despair and desperation. And they’re all primed to make seriously bad decisions.

Joe (Richard Basehart) is an American who has come to London to take his English wife Mary (Joan Collins) back to the States with him. He hadn’t reckoned on the determination of Mary’s manipulative mother to keep Mary with her and to wreck her marriage. Now Joe has run out of money so even if he can persuade Mary to make the break there’s no money to get back to New York.

Eddie (John Ireland) is an American serviceman. He’s married to movie star Denise (Gloria Grahame). She’s more of an aspiring movie star, convinced that major stardom is just around the corner. And she’s having an affair with handsome young actor Tod Maslin (Lee Patterson). The ensuing dramas cause Eddie to desert. Now he’s in serious trouble.

Mike (Stanley Baker) is a boxer. After twelve years of getting the daylights beaten out of him in the ring he has saved enough to get out of the fight game. Then he’s hit by disaster. A serious hand injury leaves him unable to fight and unable to get a regular job. And then comes a second disaster when his worthless brother-in-law costs him all the money he’s saved. Now he just can’t see a way out.

These three men can all be seen as basically decent guys who don’t really understand how their lives got so messed up.

Rave (Laurence Harvey) is a different kettle of fish. He’s the idle useless son of Sir Francis Ravenscourt (Robert Morley) who is no longer willing to pay his son’s debts. Rave is charming, manipulative, lazy, scheming and a thoroughly worthless human being. The one thing Rave fears is the prospect of work. Now he’s come up with a surefire plan to get rich, but he’ll need help.

It’s a robbery but it’s fool-proof. Eddie, Mike and Joe are not happy about the guns but Rave assures them that there won’t be any need to use them.

In the case of all four men there’s a woman involved but only one of the women (Denise) could be described as a femme fatale. The women do however, in differing ways, provide the crucial motivations that lead the four men to be sitting in a car, holding guns, about to commit armed robbery.

Eddie, Mike and Joe are typical noir protagonists - basically decent guys who have succumbed to temptation born of desperation. Rave is a much more sinister figure. His problem is that he thinks he’s a whole lot smarter than he really is. He thinks he’s a criminal mastermind but he’s an arrogant bungling amateur.

All of the performances are very very good. Laurence Harvey is perhaps the standout - he really does ooze reptilian charm. Among the women Joan Collins is adorable and looks gorgeous. Gloria Grahame has a part that was tailor-made for her and she makes the most of it. She is such a bad girl.

If there’s a weakness to this movie it’s that the build-up takes a bit too long. I can understand why it was done that way - we need to get to know these people and know what makes them tick and we need to care about their fates. But a bit of tightening up would not have hurt.

When we get to the heist it’s handled extremely well indeed and it’s beautifully shot with some very noir cinematography by Jack Asher and some fine use of very noirish locations. The movie was shot widescreen in black-and-white.

The premise has plenty of film noir potential and that potential is realised. This is full-blown film noir and it packs a punch.

The BFI Blu-Ray provides an exquisite transfer.

The Good Die Young is a top-notch British film noir and it’s highly recommended.

Ossessione (1943)

Ossessione is Luchino Visconti’s 1943 unauthorised adaptation of James M. Cain’s 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice.

The novel has immense historical importance. Along with Don Tracy’s Criss Cross, published the same year, it has strong claims to be the foundation text of noir fiction and thus indirectly one of the foundation stones of film noir. Oddly enough there has never been a satisfactory film adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

The novel is very much a Depression novel and very much an American novel. Moving the setting to Italy works up to a point. Although the movie was made during the war Visconti wisely makes no mention of the war. We assume the setting is the 1930s. And like Cain’s novel it has a background of poverty, frustration and desperation.

Drifter Gino Costa (Massimo Girotti) arrives at the roadside trattoria owned by middle-aged Giuseppe Bragana (Juan de Landa). For me Gino and Bragana’s wife Giovanna Bragana (Clara Calamai) it’s lust at first sight. After a dispute about non-payment for his meal the penniless Gino is persuaded to accept an informal position as an odd jobs man.

It takes no time at all for Gino and Giovanna to end up in bed.

Giovanna despises her husband. She married him because she was desperate. She had been reduced to whoring herself out to men in return for food. She has no intention of going back to that. But she hates being married to Giuseppe. She wishes he would just die. Then she and Gino could be happy together, with Giuseppe’s money.

You know where this is going to lead.

The problem with the 1946 MGM Hollywood adaptation is that it’s too clean, too glossy, too respectable and has none of the necessary lust and sleaze. John Garfield is miscast as the male lead. He’s not rough enough and he’s not sufficiently disreputable. I’m a big fan of Lana Turner but she looks like a movie star when she’s supposed to look like a cheap waitress. The attraction between the two is too wholesome and lacks any erotic heat.

The 1981 Hollywood version was perfectly cast. Jack Nicholson was ideal as the male lead. Jessica Lange came across as cheap and brazen and slutty, just as her character was supposed to be. Nicholson and Lange generate vast amounts of sweaty erotic heat, just as they should. Unfortunately this version totally self-destructs midway through.

Ossessione has the right leads. Massimo Girotti has the right sort of animal virility. Giovanna takes one look at him and you know that she wants to tear his trousers off. And Girotti gives off the right vibes - a man who truly is drifting with no self-awareness at all. Clara Calamai projects the right kind of earthy sexuality. She might have daydreams of romance but right now she wants hot dirty sex with Gino.

The problem with Visconti’s version is that it loses direction midway through and the action slows to a crawl with irrelevant subplots.

Massimo Girotti’s performance is all over the place. It just doesn’t ring true. One minute he’s a rough, tough hyper-masculine guy and the next he’s some kind of passive sensitive soul. It’s as if the original idea was to base Gino fairly closely on the character in the novel and then it was decided to make him a totally different character.

Some of the movie’s problems are inherent in the story. The early parts of the story dealing with the beginnings of the two characters’ obsession are great stuff. Lots of dramatic tension, the inexorably rising sexual temperature, the tense three-way relationship between Gino, Giovanna and Giuseppe with all its attendant betrayals and deceptions. Then the murder occurs. In the 1981 version the movie then self-destructs. In Visconti’s version it just starts to drift aimlessly.

There’s a lengthy sub-plot involving another drifter, a guy known as Lo Spagnolo. It’s fairly clearly implied that a romantic attachment develops between Gino and Lo Spagnolo. This sub-plot goes nowhere and feels clumsily tacked-on but this is a Visconti movie so I guess he wanted to include it.

There were half-a-dozen writers involved which perhaps explains why the script lacks tightness and coherence. The movie is about 40 minutes too long. It just meanders.

This was Visconti in full-on neo-realist mode and so I suspect that it was deliberately intended to be visually uninteresting. Which it is. I have to lay my cards on the table here. l I despise neo-realism.

The fact that this movie has such a high reputation says less about its inherent quality and more about the deficiencies of the Hollywood adaptations. There’s also the fact that Visconti was one of the darlings of the arthouse movie crowd so there’s an assumption that this must be a great movie, which it clearly isn’t. It’s very much like the 1981 version in some ways - some great early moments between the two leads but then it loses its way.

Worth a look if you want to be able to say you’ve seen all three adaptations of the novel but don’t set your expectations too high. It’s a bit of a misfire.

Body Heat (1981)

Body Heat, released in 1981, is one of the great neo-noirs.

This was Lawrence Kasdan’s first film as director and it’s a stunning debut. He also wrote the script. He was a huge fan of classic film noir. Body Heat is an homage to the great films noirs of the 40s but it’s also one of the defining neo-noirs. It’s more than just a recycling of 1940s film noir tropes.

Ned Racine is a two-bit lawyer in a two-bit town in Florida. He’s a lousy lawyer but he has considerable success with women. If he put half as much effort into his job as a lawyer as he puts into chasing skirt he’d be a great lawyer. He’s a loser but he doesn’t yet know how much of a loser he is.

Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) attracts his attention immediately. She is beautiful and she has class. He wants her. His pursuit of her is clumsy. As a ladies’ man Ned has no style but he does have determination. He just doesn’t get the message when she gives him the brush-off. He has to have her.

They have sweaty steamy sex. Soon she’s as obsessed by him as he is with her.

Matty is married. She tells Ned how important it is for them to be discreet. Her husband Edmund (Richard Crenna) is rich, powerful and mean. But they’re not discreet.

They both know that there is only one obstacle to their happiness - Edmund. If Edmund had some sort of accident, of the fatal kind, they could be together. And they’d be rich. Very rich.

It’s a classic film noir setup but there are some subtle differences. This is not just a rehash of Double Indemnity. Matty is a femme fatale but Ned is the active driver of events. He seduces her. He’s the one who suggests murder.

Ned has a plan. It’s ingenious but there’s a fair amount of adolescent wish-fulfilment fantasy in all of Ned’s scheming.

Very early on we get one of the greatest lines in film noir industry. Matty says to Ned, “You’re not too smart are you? I like that in a man.” It’s not just a great line, it’s important. Ned really isn’t too smart. That’s why he’s a cheap lawyer in a cheap town. Had he been smart he’d have been a big-time lawyer in Miami.

And there are genuinely unexpected twists to come. There are no perfect crimes. The cleverer the murder the more things there are that can go wrong.

William Hurt was not yet a star. Kasdan didn’t want established stars for the lead roles. This is the movie that really put Hurt on the map as an actor.

This was Kathleen Turner’s film debut and what a debut. She sizzles.

Everything about the Ned-Matty relationship is steamy, sweaty, sleazy and desperate. And cheap and tawdry.

The biggest single difference between the classic film noir of the 1940s and 1950s and neo-noir is the visual style. One of the most important defining characteristics of classic film noir is the visual style and that visual style only worked and could only work in black-and-white. There are things you could only do in black-and-white and film noir is one of them. It’s all about the shadows.

Neo-noir starts with John Boorman’s Point Blank in 1967. It hit its stride in the mid-70s. By 1967 black-and-white was no longer a commercial option. A way had to be found to create a new noir aesthetic that would work in colour.

With Chinatown Polanski and his director of photography John A. Alonzo found one solution. Rather than having dark, moody, shadowy black-and-white cinematography that complemented the dark, moody doom-laden subject matter they would go for lots of colour and bathe everything in bright California sunshine as an ironic counterpoint to the dark, moody doom-laden subject matter. It worked brilliantly. It became one of the standard neo-noir techniques. You can see it in Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct almost two decades later.

In Body Heat writer-director Lawrence Kasdan and his D.P. Richard H. Kline found a different solution. Kasdan came up with a masterstroke - setting his movie in Florida. Not the glamorous tourist Florida but a grimy little town in the middle of a heat wave. The kind of fairly unprosperous town in which air conditioning was not yet ubiquitous. Nobody in Kasdan’s small Florida town has an air conditioner. The heat is stifling and oppressive. Everybody is bathed in sweat. The whole town reeks of sweat.

There’s heat but we don’t see much glorious sunshine. Everything seems like it’s seen through a misty heat haze. There’s nothing healthy about it. It has the atmosphere of a foetid swamp.

There’s plenty of eroticism in classic film noir but it all had to be achieved by suggestion. In neo-noir it’s right out there in plain view. The sex in Body Heat isn’t the slightest bit explicit but it’s very sleazy.

Body Heat is superb stuff. Very highly recommended.

Body Heat looks great on Blu-Ray and the disc includes something rare these days - genuinely worthwhile extras.

Black Tuesday (1954)

Black Tuesday is a 1954 independent production released by United Artists. It’s included in one of Kino Lorber’s film noir boxed sets. It’s certainly a very grim brutal hard-hitting movie but I don’t think that’s necessarily enough to make it a film noir.

Racketeer Vince Canelli (Edward G. Robinson) and bank robber Peter Manning (Peter Graves) are to die in the electric chair. Manning stole $200,000 but refuses to reveal where the money is.

Vince has no intention of keeping his date with death. His girlfriend Hatti (Jean Parker) has an ingenious plan. It’s so crazy it might work.

If Vince escapes he’s taking Manning with him. That two hundred grand will get them out of the country.

They leave a few corpses behind them and they take some hostages.

The first half of the movie is the prison break. The second half is the manhunt which ends in a bloody siege. The body count will be high.

This movie delivers plenty of violent action, and by 1950s standards it really is violent.

Edward G. Robinson is in fine form. He plays Vince as a madman, ready to explode into violence at any moment.

Peter Graves is the standout performer and Manning is the most interesting and complex character by far.

All the supporting performances are good, the one exception being Milburn Stone’s dull turn as the priest.

What makes this movie a cut above most prison break movies is its moral complexity. Vince is a vicious crazy killer but his love for Hatti is real. He cares about her more than he cares about anything else.

Manning is a nice guy gone wrong. He’s bitter but he takes no pleasure in killing.

Hatti’s devotion to Vince is absolute. She would die for him.

The bad guys are dangerous killers but in some ways the ostensible good guys are worse.The bad guys might be killers but they are at least brave men (and in the case of Hatti brave women). The prison guards and the reporters get real pleasure out of watching prisoners get executed. They get even more pleasure from psychologically torturing condemned prisoners beforehand. What they enjoy most is that they get to participate in legal killings without taking any risks.

Apart from Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole this may be the most negative portrayal of journalists in any 1950s movie.

Manning killed a cop. But the police in this movie are quite happy to sacrifice the lives of innocent civilians (including a young woman) for the sake of exacting vengeance on Manning. Apparently cop lives matter but civilian lives don’t.

It’s clear that capital punishment is seen purely as revenge. As a response to violent crime it simply fuels further violence. When men know that the state is going to execute them they have nothing to lose - they might as well keep on killing if that’s the only way to stay alive. Vince Cannelli is a killer but he’s a man and he wants to survive. It was the state’s death sentence on him that fuelled his final murderous rampage. If you brutalise already violent men you’ll just make them more violent. The cycle of violence keeps going.

Peter Manning is not a vicious psychopathic killer to begin with but with that death sentence hanging over his head he will kill to stay alive. Black Tuesday does not indulge in any obvious overt messaging but there’s some real substance to this movie if you dig a bit deeper.

The priest is self-satisfied and ineffectual. He has nothing but platitudes to offer. He’s the prison chaplain. His job is to persuade men to die meekly when they’re told to so. He never really figures out why those men quite rightly despise him.

Argentinian director Hugo Fregonese does a fine job here. Mention must be made of Stanley Cortez’s superb noirish cinematography.

Sydney Boehm wrote the screenplay. His credits include the classic The Big Heat (1953) and a stack of great movies such as Violent Saturday (1955), Secret of the Incas (1954), Union Station (1950), Side Street (1949) and High Wall (1947). Toughness was a major characteristic of his writing.

Black Tuesday isn’t pure film noir but it has some genuine noir flavour. An excellent underrated hard-edged crime thriller. Highly recommended.

Kino Lorber have provided a lovely transfer and Gary Gerani’s audio commentary is very worthwhile.

From this same Edward G. Robinson boxed set I’ve also reviewed Nightmare and Vice Squad.

Black Angel (1946)

I would not describe Black Angel, released by Universal in 1946, as an obscure film noir but over the years it definitely has not received quite as much attention as it deserves.

It is based on a Cornell Woolrich novel and it was almost impossible to make a bad movie based on a Woolrich story. His stories just really lent themselves to cinematic adaptation. Woolrich was not a great prose stylist but he had a talent for viciously twisted plots and for creating an atmosphere of paranoia, despair and madness. When translated to the screen his stories just worked.

And there’s some impressive talent involved in this movie. Dan Duryea and Peter Lorre in a film noir. That’s a very promising start. Plus Broderick Crawford who did some fine noir work.

And then you notice that the movie was directed by Roy William Neill and you remember his Sherlock Holmes B-movies for Universal. A very competent director with the ability to get great results from limited budgets.

We get plenty of noir atmosphere right from the get-go. There’s a glamorous blonde and she’s a canary and we know she’s having man trouble. Then Dan Duryea makes his appearance. He seems edgy. That’s all Dan Duryea had to do to give a movie a serious noir vibe.

Immediately afterwards we get our first glimpse of Peter Lorre, looking prosperous and chomping a cigar. We just know he’s involved in something twisted and sinister.

The songbird is Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling). On this night she has several visitors. One of them is Marty Blair (Dan Duryea) but she refuses to see him even when he explains to the hotel doorman that he’s her husband. Another is Kirk Bennett (John Phillips). Maybe there was another visitor, and maybe there wasn’t.

Mavis ends up dead and Kirk (who is one of life’s great saps) does every dumb thing that movie protagonists always do. He picks up the gun, getting his fingerprints all over it. Then he scrams, and gets seen by the maid while doing so. He has now ensured that he will be the prime suspect. Homicide Captain Flood (Broderick Crawford) isn’t a bad guy as cops go but the evidence against Kirk is overwhelming. Just to top things off he has a motive - Mavis was blackmailing him. He’s a married man and she was a married woman but they weren’t married to each other so it’s not hard to figure out the blackmail angle. It’s no surprise that Kirk gets arrested and convicted.

But all this is just the beginning of the story. Kirk’s wife Catherine (June Vincent) won’t accept that her husband is a murderer. She is determined to find the real murderer.

She has in her possession a clue. It’s easy to see why the police overlooked it. It appears to have no significance. She thinks it has no significance, until quite by accident she finds out that it’s actually crucial.

When you’re well into this movie you might find yourself thinking that it’s not very Woolrichian. Don’t worry. When the Woolrichian elements kick in they do so in big way. I can’t tell you any more than that without revealing spoilers.

If there’s a minor weakness in this movie it’s June Vincent. She’s not the greatest of noir leading ladies. She’s no Lizabeth Scott. But Catherine is after all a very ordinary woman faced with an extraordinary situation so June Vincent’s hesitant performance actually works fairly well.

Dan Duryea is of course terrific. The great thing about Duryea is that no-one could be more slimy and menacing and no-one did self-pity better but he could also project genuine charm and likeability. That works here. Marty Blair is a self-pitying drunk with a temper but we can’t be sure if he’s going to turn out to be a vicious killer or a really nice guy.

Peter Lorre oozes sinister menace as rich nightclub owner Marko who plays a vital role in the story. He gets what he wants. Including women. He wants Catherine. But this is Peter Lorre so there’s an extra something to his performance, a slight touch of ambiguity which suggests that maybe we shouldn’t take Marko at face value. It’s a fine performance.

And Black Angel has some suitably noirish visuals.

Black Angel belongs to the Woolrichian noir sub-genre and it’s a fine example of the breed. Highly recommended.

The Long Wait (1954)

The Long Wait is a 1954 Mickey Spillane adaptation but it’s not a Mike Hammer film. Between 1947 and 1952 Spillane wrote half a dozen Mike Hammer books which sold in immense quantities. Spillane went on to be one of the biggest selling novelists in history.

And in 1951 he wrote the noir novel The Long Wait. I haven’t read the novel but apparently several structural changes were needed to make it work as a movie.

The movie opens with a guy getting smashed up when a car plummets down a hillside and bursts into flames. We will later find out that the guy, played by Anthony Quinn, is Johnny McBride. McBride ends up with severe burns to his hands and total amnesia.

He tries to make a new life for himself but he can’t settle down. He’s quick-tempered and brooding. Then he comes across a clue that suggests that he hails from a town named Lyncastle. He heads for Lyncastle in hopes of rediscovering his identity and his past.

This turns out to be a big mistake. Johnny didn’t know he was wanted for murder. He also didn’t know that a big-time racketeer named Servo wanted him dead.

He knows he has to find Vera. He doesn’t remember her but he does know that she was his girl in his old life.

He soon finds himself with way too many blondes in his life (of course some would say you can’t have too many dangerous blondes in your life). Any one of these blondes could be Vera. He doesn’t remember what Vera looked like.

All the blondes seem to like Johnny a lot. Blondes just seem to find him very attractive. Dames in general seem to find him very attractive. Of course Johnny is played by Anthony Quinn, an actor with plenty of charisma and animal magnetism, so we don’t find this too difficult to believe.

Johnny finds out a few things about that murder. He doesn’t know for sure whether he committed the murder or not but he’s starting to have a sneaking suspicion he may have been framed. Lyncastle isn’t quite the idyllic place it seems to be on the surface. Racketeer Servo owns almost the whole town. There’s endemic corruption.

People start shooting at Johnny, which naturally leads him to believe he’s on to something.

The plot is very contrived indeed. I don’t mind that too much. To me film noir is a bit like melodrama. It doesn’t deal with reality, but with a kind of heightened or exaggerated reality. In the world of film noir once fate decides to destroy a man there’s no escape and if some coincidences are needed to bring that about they can be accepted. The plot is contrived but it does come together at the end.

There’s enough in this movie to qualify it as a true film noir. An ambiguous protagonist caught in a web. A whole raft of femmes fatales. An atmosphere of existentialist angst. Corruption. And lots of sexual tension.

And visual style. There are some absolutely superb visual moments in this film, especially in the latter stages. There are some wonderful combinations of inventive staging and noirish lighting (by cinematographer Franz Planer). There are also nicely staged action sequences. The late scene in the abandoned power station is one of the best visual set-pieces in all of film noir. It really is magnificent.

Anthony Quinn has the necessary star quality and the right tough guy vibe. Peggie Castle is truly excellent as Venus, the most glamorous of the blondes. There’s an excellent supporting cast.

Victor Saville does a very very fine job as director. This is a supremely well-crafted movie.

For my money The Long Wait is the best film adaptation of a Mickey Spillane novel. Gripping, tightly plotted with some decent suspense, terrific atmosphere and lots of noirness. Very highly recommended.

The Classic Flix Blu-Ray release looks lovely. You get the movie on 4K as well - I have no interest in 4K so I’ll be using the 4K disc as a drinks coaster. But the Blu-Ray does look great. There’s an excellent audio commentary by Max Allan Collins.

Vice Squad (1953)

Vice Squad (AKA The Girl in Room 17) is a 1953 crime film. It’s included in one of Kino Lorber’s film noir boxed sets so you know there’s very little chance it will be a film noir. It isn’t. It’s a straightforward police procedural.

You might assume that this is a B-movie but the 88-minutes running time is a clear indication that that is not technically the case although it’s clearly a rather low-budget production. It’s a United Artists release.

Captain ‘Barnie' Barnaby (Edward G. Robinson) is chief of detectives. His day begins with a cop getting shot when a car is stolen, but circumstances suggest there might be more to it. There’s a witness but he’s smart enough not to talk to cops without having his lawyer present.

Barnie receives some information about a planned bank robbery. He stakes out the bank.

Meanwhile he works on that reluctant witness. Barnie uses the standard police methods, denying the witness his legal rights, detaining him illegally, harassing him and framing him for crimes he did not commit. It’s all in a day’s work for this cop.

Barnie also thinks he might get some information from Mona Ross (Paulette Goddard). Mona runs an escort service. It seems to be semi-legal, with the girls being no officially call girls. She still gets regular harassment from the cops. The arrangement seems to be that she’s allowed to stay in business as long as she acts as a snitch for the cops.

Barnie’s stakeout goes badly wrong, putting members of the public in danger. Two of the gang members make their getaway with a girl as hostage.

My problem with this movie is that we’re supposed to accept Barnie as a noble cop hero but he tramples all over citizens’ legal rights, intimidates a witness into giving phoney evidence and abuses his powers in every way imaginable. Almost everything he does is unethical, illegal, immoral and unconstitutional. We’re supposed to think this is OK, that it’s perfectly acceptable for cops to be above the law.

Of course viewers today may be tempted to see this as a deliberate attempt at moral ambiguity, with the cops breaking the law just as much as the crooks. You do have to be careful not to read things into old movies, things that may never have been intended. On the other hand you also have to be careful not to assume that movie-makers of the past were incapable of making movies that worked on more than one level, or that dealt with moral murkiness.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that screenwriter Lawrence Roman (and the author of the original novel Leslie T. White) did have some awareness that the cop hero here is in danger of becoming morally compromised.

This gives the movie perhaps a very slight noir flavouring.

Edward G. Robinson didn’t want this part but he needed the money. At times he’s good, at other times he seems to be just phoning it in.

Paulette Godard is the standout performer here, showing some enthusiasm and flair.

The supporting players are all quite competent. Lee van Cleef makes an appearance in a minor supporting role.

There’s a reason you’ve never heard of director Arnold Laven. He spent most of his career in television. He does a fairly sound job here. Cinematographer Joseph F. Biroc manages some noirish atmosphere.

So Vice Squad is a flawed but interesting police procedural. Recommended.

Kino Lorber have provided a very nice Blu-Ray transfer. Gary Gerani’s audio commentary is a worthwhile extra.

Nightmare (1956)

Nightmare is a 1956 film noir written and directed by Maxwell Shane. It is based on a Cornell Woolrich novella and it’s very difficult to make a bad movie when you have a Woolrich story as your source material.

What’s interesting is that Shane’s first feature film, Fear in the Night (1946), was based on the same Cornell Woolrich novella. A decade after that film Shane decided that he could do a much better job with the material and Nightmare is certainly more ambitious and more accomplished. Nightmare would be Shane’s final feature film so his directing career began and ended with the same story.

For his 1956 remake Shane switched the scene of the action to New Orleans which was a rather good move. For some reason New Orleans had been under-used as a noir location but it’s the perfect setting for a movie with a slightly spooky mysterious vibe.

It also offered the opportunity to give the movie a more jazz-fuelled feel.

Stan Grayson (Kevin McCarthy) is a jazz musician and he’s just had a terrible nightmare about killing a man in a strange mirrored room. In the struggle (in the nightmare) Stan rips off one of the buttons of his victim’s coat. What worries Stan is that when he wakes up he is clutching that button. He also has a key which he has never seen before. Could Stan be a murderer? But why would he have killed a man he has never seen before?

Stan decides to ask his brother-in-law Rene Bressard (Edward G. Robinson) for advice. Rene is a Homicide cop. Rene assures Stan that he’s just suffering from overwork. Then Rene, his wife Sue, Stan and Stan’s singer girlfriend Gina (Connie Russell) go on a picnic. Trying to avoid a downpour they are led by Stan to an empty house. Stan has never been to this house but he knows how to get there and he knows where the spare key is hidden. There’s a mirrored room in the house - the room from Stan’s dream. And that mysterious key fits the locks in that room.

Rene now figures that Stan really is a murderer and Stan figures the same thing. But there are major plot twists to come.

Stan of course has considered the possibility that he has gone crazy. There are other possibilities. The nightmare was obviously very significant.

Changes were made to the plot for the 1956 remake and both film versions differ in some ways from Woolrich’s story.

One thing that should be noted is that the poster for the movie (reproduced on the Blu-Ray cover) gives away the entire plot of the movie. I’m not going to do that but if you’re concerned about spoilers just don’t look at that disc cover!

Kevin McCarthy is excellent as the confused and worried Stan, a nice guy whose whole world is suddenly falling apart. Edward G. Robinson gives one of his kindly wise older man performances, mixed with one of his aggressive tough guy performances.

The actresses are fine but the focus here is very much on Rene and Stan and McCarthy and Robinson are both so good that the female stars inevitably get overshadowed.

This is a visually rather impressive movie. The New Orleans locations are used well. The camerawork combines with the music to give that crazy disturbing jazzy feel that the story requires. There’s a nice use of mirrors. Not just the mirrored room, but there’s another very cool mirror shot early which doesn’t advance the plot but just adds subtly to our sense of unease.

There’s a lot of Freudian stuff. It’s half-baked Freudianism, but Freud’s Freudianism was half-baked as well so it doesn’t matter. Freudian nonsense always adds some fun.

You might think I’m being persnickety about that poster but I do think it weakens the movie. The movie works better if you don’t know the answer to a couple of the key questions which cause Rene and Stan so much anguish and bewilderment, and the poster makes those answers much too obvious. Perhaps Shane really did want us to know the answers, but the way he structures the movie suggests to me that that was not the case.

Is this film noir? I would say no, but it’s definitely noirish. Always bear in mind that the movie was made in 1956 when no-one had heard of film noir, so it was never intended as a film noir and there’s no sense complaining that some of what are now seen as essential noir ingredients are missing. This is an entertaining psychological crime thriller and it’s recommended.

Kino Lorber have provided a very nice Blu-Ray transfer.

Whistle Stop (1946)

Whistle Stop is a 1946 film noir starring George Raft and Ava Gardner.

Mary (Ava Gardner) arrives back in her home town. Ashbury is a small town with the railway station being its only valid reason for existence. Throughout the movie we hear train whistles in the background. Trains play a vital part in the story. This is not a train thriller in the sense of taking place on a train but the railroad is always a presence.

Mary had gone to Chicago in search of glamour, excitement and money. She found those things and she found disillusionment.

She has returned to see Kenny (George Raft). Kenny is a rudderless loser but she has always loved him. Kenny has never been motivated to find a job although he can always summon up the motivation to find a card game or a beer joint. Maybe he wouldn’t have turned out to be such a loser if Mary had stayed. Or maybe he would have. Maybe Mary just couldn’t see a future with him.

There’s a complication, in the person of Lew Lentz (Tom Conway). Lew is a rich businessman. He’s not a mobster but we get the impression that his business methods are ruthless and may be at times just a tad ethically slippery. Lew has always wanted Mary. Given that Kenny and Lew both love Mary it’s hardly surprising that the two men are at daggers drawn.

Another complication is Gitlo (Victor McLaglen). He’s Kenny’s buddy but he works for Lew. Lew knows something about Gitlo which gives him a hold over the man. Gitlo hates and resents Lew, but he grovels to him.

Kenny is convinced that Mary would choose him over Lew if only he had lots of money. Lew has lots of money. He carries large amounts of money on the train to Detroit. It would not be difficult to rob him. Kenny is a loser but he’s not a criminal. But he is tempted. He wants Mary so badly.

So we have a classic film noir setup, with Kenny as the potentially easily manipulated schmuck, the typical noir protagonist. And with Mary as the classic femme fatale.

And that’s why so many people misunderstand this movie and are unable to appreciate it. They want to view it through a noir lens. They forget that nobody in Hollywood in 1946 had the remotest idea what film noir was so they were not conscious of the need to follow the conventions of a genre that did not exist. The makers of this movie were making a movie that combines crime thriller and melodrama elements. The fact that it happens to contain so many of what are now seen as essential noir ingredients does not imply that is is is film noir. It can be seen as conforming to some of the modern expectations of noir, but not all of them. It also conforms to some of the conventions of melodrama.

Director Léonide Moguy and screenwriter Philip Yordan knew what they were doing, but what they were trying to do was not necessarily what modern critics would have liked them to do.

Every online review I’ve read complains that Mary’s motivations for leaving Chicago remain unexplained. I can only assume that these reviewers are used to modern Hollywood spoon-feeding them. They need everything explained in detail, with diagrams. Her reasons are obvious, and are made obvious. She had been a kept woman, and she grew tired of feeling like a whore.

The same reviewers complain that Lew’s motivations for hating Kenny are unclear. They are perfectly clear. He wants Mary. He knows that Mary feels an incredibly strong sexual attraction to Kenny. Lew might be able to buy Mary but she will never want him with that aching desperate sexual need she feels for Kenny. That’s a blindingly obvious motivation.

I’m a huge George Raft fan and he is excellent here. It’s a typical effective low-key George Raft performance. There’s some self-pity in Kenny, some bitterness and plenty of jealousy. But he has settled into a loser pattern of life.

Tom Conway as Lew is fine. He makes Lew sinister but without making him a straightforward villain. Victor McLaglen is quite effective in getting across Gitlo’s simmering resentment, the resentment of a coward.

Ava Gardner gives the standout performance. Mary is a complex woman. She seems to be a femme fatale but we can’t be sure.

Raft and Gardner have no trouble convincing us that for all their doubts and hesitations and conflicts Kenny and Mary just can’t stop wanting each other.

You can see early on where the story is going, but that isn’t where it’s really going. You can see early on what the character arcs are going to be for all the players in this dramas, but the script has some surprises for us.

I liked Whistle Stop a lot. Just try to approach it without getting too locked-in to genre expectations. Highly recommended.