How about some more noir for November.

The Glass Wall (1953), directed by Maxwell Shane. This man-on-the-run noir thriller stars Italian actor Vittorio Gassman as a Hungarian refugee hoping to find a new life in America. The film begins with the arrival of a boatload of refugees to Ellis Island. Happy faces abound, except for one, the stowaway Peter (Gassman). He is detained and told he must return to Europe. Frantic to stay in the new world, Peter jumps ship and the chase begins. First, he stumbles across the down and out Maggie (Gloria Grahame) who helps him. The two of them set about trying to find Tom (Jerry Paris), the clarinet player and former G.I. whose life young Peter saved during the war. Tom can sponsor Peter, if only Peter can find Tom. Obstacles abound as Peter wanders the mean streets of New York, mostly at night. At one point, Peter finds refuge with Tanya (Robin Raymond), a kindly exotic dancer whose family is from Hungary. Then we have a final set piece in the United Nations building, a sequence that looks ahead to Hitchcock’s set piece in the same building. Cinematography is by Joseph Biroc, and his location shooting in night time New York is impressive. The post-war America here is a mixture of hope and despair. 

 

Black Widow (1954), directed by Nunnally Johnson. Wide screen, colour, mostly interior shots, mostly daylight make this an unlikely film noir. And yet this is typical noir in its story of an innocent man caught in a web and nearly brought to ruin by a conniving femme fatale. What we have here is a noir crossed with a whodunnit. The detective is C. A. Bruce (Georg Raft). The innocent man is Broadway producer Peter Denver (Van Heflin). The loyal wife is Iris Denver (Gene Tierney). The fatal woman is ‘Nanny’ Ordway (Peggy Ann Garner). To round out the cast, we have the sarcastic actor Carlotta Marin (Ginger Rogers), her rather limp husband Brian (Reginald Gardiner), the nervous uncle Gordon Ling (Otto Kruger), and the brother and sister, John and Claire Amberly (Skip Homeier and Virginia Leith). The wide screen and open spaces of the interiors belie the situation in which well-meaning Peter finds himself. We have the familiar man-on-the-run laced with a cast of questionable characters. Given the backdrop of the theatre, we can expect that most of the characters are performing in order to hide their true selves. This is a cleverly constructed noir, complete with voice over and unpleasant undertones of a world gone wrong.

 

Nightmare (1956), directed by Maxwell Shane. This is a remake of the same director’s Fear in the Night (1947). It tells the story of Stan Grayson (Kevin McCarthy), a clarinet player in New Orleans who finds himself in a pickle when he wakes from a dream in which he killed someone, and then begins to think the dream was actually a reality. He seeks help from his brother-in-law, the detective Rene Bressard (Edward G. Robinson). At first, Bressard dismisses what Stan tells him as just a dream. Stan, he says, needs to take a breath and calm down. As things transpire, however, Bressard begins to think that Stan has indeed killed someone. Poor Stan appears to be guilty of murder. Golly, how is he going to get out of this rather dreadful situation? There was that guy in the next apartment who dropped by Stan’s to see if his lights were still on. There was a woman. Then there is that book by Sigmund Freud on Hysteria. Oh, and the mirrored room, reminding me of Welles’s Lady from Shanghai. All of this plays out well, and we have a nice late noir.

 

The Tattered Dress (1957), directed by Jack Arnold. In this one, high-priced New York defence lawyer, James Gordon Blane (Jeff Chandler), comes to a small town to take on the case of wealthy Michael Reston (Phillip Reed). Reed’s wife Charleen (Elaine Stewart), has been roughed up by local bartender, and Reston proceeds to shoot down this man in cold blood in front of witnesses. Open and shut. Well, lawyer Blane manages to convince the jury to acquit Reston, partly by his dramatic cross-examination of local sheriff Nick Hoak (Jack Carson). Blane humiliates Hoak, a local celebrity because of his former glory days as a football player. After the acquittal, Hoak arranges a set-up that targets Blane for bribing one of the jurors, Caro Morrow (Gail Russell). Thus we have the man caught in a trap motif of noir films. Arnold, ever reliable, directs with a sure hand and the wide-screen cinematography is impressive. The acting here is also noteworthy, Carson being especially effective as the sadistic sheriff. The courtroom scenes are good, and the recurring shot of the statue of justice outside the courthouse reminds us just how that blindfold of justice results in much misjustice. Arnold may be best known for a film such as The Incredible Shrinking Man, but he knows how to tell a story deftly and he knows how to handle his actors. His other film with Chandler, Man in the Shadow (1957), is also worth a visit.

 

Appointment with a Shadow (1957), directed by Richard Carlson. This is a noir with a difference. It tells the story of an alcoholic, Paul Baxter (George Nader), whose addiction has lost him his job as an ace newspaper reporter and has nearly lost him his relationship with Penny Spencer (Joanna Moore). Think films like The Lost Weekend (1945) or Days of Wine and Roses (1962). Here Paul finds himself witness to a police shooting in which ugly criminal Dutch Hayden (Frank DeKova) is killed. The truth, however, is that Dutch is alive and well, the man killed being a patsy set up by Dutch and his moll, Florence Knapp (Virginia Field). Paul sees Dutch and is now the only person who knows that the man killed by the police is not Dutch, and of course no one will believe Paul when he tries to tell the police that Dutch is not dead. No one includes Penny’s police brother, Lt. Spencer (Brian Keith). Soon Paul finds himself the object of Dutch’s attention and things get challenging for the inebriate now sober. The wide screen works well here with shots of Paul and just out of arm’s length a bottle or sometimes several bottles. Nader gives a convincing performance, and the film gives us that sense of dread and darkness we associate with film noir.

 

Murder by Contract (1958), directed by Irving Lerner. This noir is about a contract killer, Claude (Vince Edwards), who is about as cold as they come. He has much in common with the hitman in David Fincher’s The Killer (2023); he is unemotional, calculating, focussed, and patient. He is a misogynist who remarks: “I don’t like women. They’re not dependable. I don’t like killing people who are not dependable.” After proving himself in his assignments in New York, he takes on a job in Los Angeles. Arriving there he meets two men who will look after him until the job is over. These are George (Herschel Bernardi) and Marc (Phillip Pine), and you can bet things won’t end well for them. Things won’t end well for them because things go awry for Claude. Guess why things go awry. Well Claude’s target here is a woman. Claude, like the nameless killer in Fincher’s film, shoots the wrong person. Oh-Oh. What’s a fellow to do to set things right? Claude plans to finish the job he has botched and finds himself caught like a rat in a culvert. Ugly ending to an ugly person. Lucien Ballard does the black and white photography crisply. The film has a minimalist sensibility, and the lean guitar score is impressive. The sunny expanses of Los Angeles overturn the familiar dark wet narrow streets prevalent in this genre.

 Some more noir for Noirvenber.

The Breaking Point (1950), directed by Michael Curtiz. This is something of a remake of Hawks’s To Have and to Have Not (1944), and both are versions of a story by Ernest Hemingway. The Breaking Point was undervalued and rarely seen for years because its star, John Garfield, was implicated in the Red Scare of the late 40s and early to mid 50s, and the film was not promoted by Warner Brothers. In any case, this is an impressive film from a somewhat under rated director. Here Curtiz gives a masterclass in camera movement, blocking, and mise en scene. The early scenes in the Morgan house set the tone efficiently (Curtiz is always efficient – see Casablanca, maybe the most efficient film ever made) and slyly. We get the layout of the house, members of the family, and the dynamic of a family on the economic edge. What Curtiz brings to all his efficiency with camera movement and blocking of scenes is an interest in character, and the people here are complex; they have interior lives communicated through both camera and bodily and facial gestures. As for the story, this is a daylight noir. It involves a sailor returned from the war to find life difficult, if not downright impossible. Harry Morgan (Garfield) finds himself scrambling to make a living with his fishing boat off San Diego. He gets himself into trouble, first with human trafficking and then with gangsters who have robbed a racetrack. Along the way, he meets this film’s femme fatale, Leona Charles (Patricia Neal), loses his friend and partner, Wesley Park (Juano Hernandez), and nearly loses his wife, Lucy (Phyllis Thaxter) and two kids. Harry survives the mayhem, but barely and not without the loss of a limb. The final shot of the film is devastating, an empty pier with just a young black boy standing hopelessly and bewildered, shown in a long crane shot. This boy is Wesley’s son who has come to meet his father. No one bothers to notice him and inform him that his father is not coming home. Hawks’s version of the story is jaunty when set beside this grim examination of post-war angst.

 

The Enforcer (1951), directed by Bretaigne Windust and (uncredited) Raoul Walsh. This film is distinguished by its fractured narrative. The story is told in flashback, and flashback within flashback. The story concerns organized crime, and contracts and hitmen, and a voice over the phone. Joseph Rico (Ted de Corsia) is in jail, a witness in the trial of crime boss Albert Mendoza (Everett Sloane). Rico does not make it to trial. He falls to his death trying to escape from custody. Crusading District Attorney Martin Ferguson (Humphrey Bogart) now has a problem. Can he find another witness by combing through all the evidence the police have amassed? His investigation takes us back in time. We meet a gang of hitmen who answer to their boss, Rico. Rico, in turn, gets his orders over the phone. The is a taut procedural, having something of the feel of a documentary. Much of this is thanks to the uncredited Walsh who reshot some of the film, especially the intense ending. We also have a bit of a mystery thrown in, a mystery that turns on a dead woman’s brown eyes. This is an impressive film.

 

Without Warning! (1952), directed by Arnold Laven. Carl Martin (Adam Williams) is an unassuming gardener who also happens to be a serial killer who prefers blond young women. His weapon of choice is a pair of garden shears! This is a well-done thriller that is surprisingly prescient. It plays out as an early version of CSI, following the painstaking work of the police and forensic people as they seek to find out who is committing a series of murders. The murderer, Carl, is consistent in the women he targets and in the timing of the murders. He is also something of an amateur. Although not, strictly speaking, a noir, this film does reflect the postwar angst and paranoia. It moves along quickly and efficiently, and has enough tension to hold the viewer’s attention.

 

My Name is Julia Ross (1945), directed by Joseph H. Lewis. Lewis made two well-known noir films, Gun Crazy and, one of my favourites, The Big Combo. He also made a bunch of other low-budget winners. My Name is Julia Ross is an early film by Lewis that merges the likes of Rebecca with Gaslight to deliver a noir-gothic mix that will satisfy your taste for the unusual, but somehow familiar. Julia Ross (Nina Foch) is looking for work as a secretary. She finds a job with the pleasant elderly woman, Mrs. Hughes (Dame May Whitty). She goes to work in a London house where she is to board as well, and wakes two days later is an isolated house in Cornwall, wearing clothes that sport a monograph with the letters MH. It turns out that MH is Marion Hughes, wife of Ralph Hughes (George Macready). Julia/Marion finds herself held prisoner, and saddled with a husband who seems to have a screw loose. He especially likes knives. Lewis gives us walls, windows, bars, gates, doors and a creepy stairway to let us know Julia’s plight. I must say the plot holds well, and poor Julia appears to be heading for her death. Will she escape? Will she drink poison? Will she jump from the window onto the rocks below?  I suspect we might piece things together early in the film, but Lewis keeps things tense and firmly under control so that we suspend disbelief and enjoy the machinations of kindly Mrs. Hughes and her wacko son. This is a satisfying small film.

 

Obsession (1949 – AKA The Hidden Room), directed by Edward Dmytryk. Made in England while Dmytryk was in exile from HUAC, Obsession ia about an urbane doctor whose wife has a series of affairs. Reaching the “last straw,” the doctor plans the perfect murder of his wife’s latest lover. His plan is to dissolve the man in a bath of acid, but the little dog Monte manages to thwart the clever doctor’s scheme. The doctor, Clive Riordan (Robert Newton), is suave to the point of creepiness. His wife Storm (Sally Gray) is slinky. The American love, Bill Kronin (Phil Brown) is suitably hapless. Into this mix comes Inspector Finsbury (Naunton Wayne), a cerebral adversary for the cool Dr. Riordan. The film has tension, perhaps best exemplified in the Doctor’s intention to try out his acid bath on cute little Monte. Especially clever are the borders the Doctor provides for his prisoners, Bill and Monte, borders beyond which their chains will not allow them to pass. Prior to this film, Dmytryk had made impressive noir films in Hollywood – Murder, My Sweet (1944), Cornered (1945), and Crossfire (1947), for example – and he brings his flair for this sort of thing to Obsession.

 

Undertow (1949), directed by William Castle. This little thriller with a noirish sensibility arrives from William Castle before he became the king of schlock in the 1950s. It is an efficiently paced man-on-the-run film with impressive location shooting in Chicago. The story is familiar: GI returns to the U.S. after seven years military service, meets an old friend in a Reno casino, plans to marry his old flame, befriends a woman he happens to meet on his way to Chicago, and finds himself the suspect in the murder of his intended bride’s uncle. People are not who they appear to be, although being familiar with this sort of thing, we know who is not who they pretend to be. The cast is serviceable with Scott Brady taking the lead as Tony Regan, former soldier and former criminal now hoping to go straight and run a resort in the High Sierras. Others include Tony’s friend Danny Morgan (John Russell), his other friend Detective Charles Reckling (Bruce Bennett), his girlfriend Sally Lee (Dorothy Hart), his new friend Ann McNight (Petty Dow), and briefly an unnamed detective played by Rock Hudson (billed as Roc Hudson). Tony is in deep hot water, but he manages, with Ann and Charles’s help, to swim to shore.

 

Scandal Sheet (1952), directed by Phil Karlson. The film derives from Sam Fuller’s novel, The Dark Page (1944), and it has Fuller’s gritty, cynical take on the newspaper business, already turning into more of a scandal sheet than an outlet for legitimate news. Broderick Crawford is Mark Chapman/George Grant, editor of the New York Express, a newspaper whose readership is climbing because of the lurid stories it publishes. The opening scene has reporter Steve McCleary (John Derek) and photographer Biddle (Harry Morgan) joking about not being able to get a picture for the front page because the woman whose murder they are investigating has too much blood on her face. The plot has Chapman finding himself in trouble when his wife, a woman he has abandoned years ago, turns up at a Lonely Hearts Club gathering and recognizes her long-absent husband who has not changed his name. As things turn out, the poor woman meets her end when she and Chapman scuffle in her seedy hotel room. Chapman tries to cover up this mess, but his attempts to do so lead to him murdering a hapless old reporter who happens upon the truth of Chapman’s identity. The story gives us a sense of the newspaper business as morally suspect, interested only in sales. Surprise! The scandal here is what lies behind the news, not the news itself. As noir films go, this one is more than serviceable. Crawford gives a sweaty, paranoid, loud-talking performance. In other words, he gives the kind of performance we expect from this actor. John Derek and Donna Reed as the two young reporters offer a bit of hope in this examination of an America losing its way.

 

The Thief (1952), directed by Russell Rouse. Here is a noir with a difference – it has no dialogue. None. No one speaks from beginning to end. The effect is a film that both works and does not work. It works because the sounds, especially the ringing of a phone and the protagonist’s laughter/crying near the end, serve to heighten tension, accentuate the main character’s loneliness, and inform us of the haunted situation the main character finds himself in. It does not work because some interactions between characters, especially the one between Allen Fields (Ray Milland) and the girl down the hall (Rita Gam, in her first film), strike us as impossible without some spoken words between the two. The film also calls for patience on the part of the viewer. The plot has Dr. Fields, an award-winning nuclear physicist, passing secrets to the enemy, most likely the Russians, and becoming more and more conscience-stricken as the unanswered phone calls keep coming. Fields is a noir anti-hero who finds himself caught in a web of intrigue. We surmise from his reactions to the ringing phone and to his gathering of secret intelligence and to his paranoid (for a good reason) reaction to people, that he desperately wants to extricate himself from the situation in which he finds himself. All in all, this is an interesting experiment, but one hardly to find acceptance by a general audience.

 November (Noirvember) has arrived.

The Green Cockatoo (1937), directed by William Cameron Menzies. Here is a little gem from a story by Graham Greene. Menzies brings an expressionistic sensibility to the film, especially in the scene inside a derelict building. The story has something of a film noir turn when young country girl Eileen (Rene Ray) arrives in London late one night to find herself embroiled in gangster goings-on, and then on the run from the police who think she has murdered someone. This someone is Dave (Robert Newton), a bad egg who has double crossed three thugs who now want him rubbed out. Rubbed out he is, but not before he runs into young innocent Eileen. Before cashing in his chips, Dave asks Eileen to take a message to his brother, Jim Connor (John Mills), a song and dance man who works in the nightclub known as The Green Cockatoo. Eileen and Jim go on the run trying to avoid both cops and criminals. What distinguishes the film are the small performances (e.g. the elderly bearded man Eileen meets on the train who rails against the evils of the city, and who leaves Eileen in the station with these parting words: “I cannot give advice; I am a philosopher”), and the expressive lighting and camera work. The fellow who plays Prothero the Butler (Frank Atkinson) delivers a memorable performance. This film looks forward to the more famous Graham Greene scripted film, The Third Man (1949).

Witness to Murder (1954), directed by Roy Rowland. This is a small, no-frills thriller in which career woman, Cheryl Draper (Barbara Stanwyck), finds herself witnessing a murder. She calls the police. They investigate. The alleged murderer is one Albert Richter (George Sanders), a writer and former Nazi. The film’s most startling scene occurs when Richter launches into a diatribe against weak muling and puking humans, a diatribe he speaks loudly and in German! Anyway, the police think the single woman is just being hysterical. Richter sets out to prove that she is nuts. Things get dicey and Cheryl even ends up in a mental institution. Her stay there is traumatic, but short. Mostly, the film is noteworthy for John Alton’s noirish cinematography and the performances of Sanders and Stanwyck. Sanders is at his creepy best, and Stanwyck manages to invest her character with a strength that belies the usual attitude (the attitude manifested in the various reactions to the hysterical female by the police and medical people) toward weak women. Cheryl sticks to her conviction that what she saw, she actually saw. She is not about to be detoured, waylaid, or patronized. All in all, a nifty little gem that was made to compete with another film, Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

 

Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), directed by Otto Preminger. This tension-filled noir features Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews who previously starred together in Preminger’s Laura (1944). Andrews plays detective Mark Dixon who has a mean streak; he likes to knock bad guys about, a trait that threatens to get him into trouble, a trait he apparently inherited from his criminal father. And get into trouble he does. He accidentally kills a guy named Ken Paine (Craig Stvens), and instead of just calling in the incident, he concocts an elaborate plan to cover up Paine’s murder. This plan manages to implicate Paine’s father-in-law, the innocent Jiggs Taylor (Tom Tully). And, of course, Dixon finds himself attracted to Jigg’s daughter Morgan (Tierney). We have the familiar noir situation with our hero caught in a tangled web. Dixon’s fear is that he takes after his father who was a criminal who set another criminal, Tommy Scalise (Gary Merrill) up in business. Scalise is now in Dixon’s cross hairs. Scalise has a habit of sniffing from a nasal drop. He comes across as sexually ambiguous. All this, Dixon’s conflicted personality, Morgan’s trust, Jigg’s innocence, Scalise’s henchmen (lead by Steve, an uncredited Neville Brand), tight close-ups, dark rooms and streets, make for a memorable noir. The film ends on a subtle note as a door closes on Dixon.

 

The Second Woman (1950), directed by James V. Kern. The 1940s and 50s saw Hollywood take an interest in psychoanalysis, and The Second Woman is definitely a film that takes interest in the mental state of the protagonist, Jeff Cohalan (Robert Young). Cohalan is an architect who lives in a modern house on the rocky coast of California. His fiancé has died in a car crash about a year before the main action of the film takes place. He meets a young woman who is a certified financial accountant. This is Ellen Foster (Ellen Drake) who is visiting her aunt. Once Cohalan meets Foster strange things begin to happen: an expensive piece of china is broken, Cohalan’s rose bush dies, his horse breaks a leg in his stall, his dog dies, and a painting somehow fades. Why is all this happening, and who is behind the strange goings-on? Meanwhile Cohalan and Foster begin a romance, Foster also begins detective work to find what’s behind the mysterious happenings, and Cohalan finds discomfort and disappointment in his work. A local doctor takes an interest in Cohalan and asserts that he suffers from paranoia. Things look pretty bad when someone tries to kill Foster. Cohalan will have to take things into his own hands to find out what is happening. Foster, however, is not about to cease trying to help. We have shades of Hitchcock’s Rebecca here in the location and the psychological machinations. Not a bad little noir.

 

Cage of Evil (1960) directed by Edward L. Cahn. This low-budget noir is predictable, a voice-over telling us at the outset that detective Scott Harper (Ron Foster) will go over to the dark side. Harper is a seven-year veteran of the police force hoping for promotion. His hot head, however, is a liability and he fails to achieve promotion despite doing well on the examination. Finding himself investigating a jewel robbery and murder, Harper begins a romance with the bad guy’s moll, Holly Taylor (Patricia Blair). She proves to be a femme fatale, and Harper finds himself drawn into the nefarious deeds of the baddies. You know things are not going to end well. The film has the elements of film noir: femme fatale, man caught in a web from which he cannot escape, gangsters, crooked police, and downbeat ending. Strangely, its daylight scenes in Los Angeles do not feel like noir. Conclusion: this is a noir and yet not a noir. Odd. And, as I say, the plot is predictable. All the players are earnest, and the 70-minute running time goes by briskly. I watched it while riding a stationary bike, and it was diverting enough.

 

The Young Savages (1961), directed by John Frankenheimer. A social drama from a time when such films were popular. Think non-musical West Side Story. If there is a problem with this film, it is earnestness. It tries to be hard-hitting, and for the most part, it is. The cinematography is gritty and has expressionistic flourishes; the location shooting in New York works well. Burt Lancaster is Hank Bell, a prosecutor with the D.A.’s office who finds himself prosecuting three thugs from the Italian street gang, the Thunderbirds. One of the kids is the son of Bell’s one-time girlfriend, Mary diPace (Shelley Winters). This kid, along with two others, murder a blind Puerto Rican boy in the film’s startling opening scene. Things appear cut and dried: these thugs murder the boy because he is Puerto Rican. Of course, the truth is more complicated, and it is the truth that Hank Bell wants to discover. The Puerto Ricans have their gang, the Horsemen. When we do learn the full context of the boys’ actions, we can see that life in the slums is a tangle of hate and fear and poverty and desperation. Such emotions are best communicated in the leader of the Thunderbirds, Arthur Reardon (convincingly played by John Davis Chandler). To complicate matters even farther, we have a minor plot dealing with the District Attorney’s campaign for Governor. The courtroom part of the film is dramatic and powerful. The plot moves to a satisfying, yet troubling conclusion.