More noir for November.

The Long Night (1947), directed by Anatole Litvak. This is a remake of Marcel Carne’s Le jour se Leve (1939), although the Fascist implications are muted here. The acting is fine, Henry Fonda as Joe and Barbara Bel Geddes as Jo Ann are convincing. Then we have Vincent Price as smarmy magician Maximilian and Ann Dvorak as Charlene. Charlene is a character who is under developed, and perhaps this is true to a lesser extent with the other characters. What we have is a noir, and the lighting and camera work make this clear, that focuses on star-crossed lovers. The main character, Joe, is a murderer who elicits our sympathy. As with many remakes, The Long Night offers nothing new. It is efficient and impressively constructed, but so was the original. We have some strange goings-on here with the police spraying Joe’s apartment with bullets, and Joe shooting Maximilian after relatively little provocation. From another perspective, the police action and the lying Maximilian give us something contemporary to chew on. Perhaps this film has Fascist overtones after all.

 

The Raging Tide (1952), directed by George Sherman. This noir may be Sherman’s best work, although much of the credit must go to Russell Metty’s cinematography. The film boasts excellent lighting and compositions, familiar with the genre. We do have dark city streets, but we also have the open sea and a fishing boat. The plot has gangster Bruno Felkin (noir stalwart Richard Conte) murdering someone in the film’s opening frames, then finding himself on the run. We even have a bit of voice over, something the film drops before long. Since all roads and other means of travel, aside from water, are covered by the police, Bruno hides away on a fishing boat owned by crusty Swede Hamil Linder (Charles Bickford, by golly) and his son Carl (Alex Nicol). Rounding out the cast are Shelley Winters as Bruno’s girl, Connie Thatcher, and Stephen McNally as Lt. Kelsey. The script has some fine moments, especially when Connie and Lt. Kelsey are onscreen. Conte’s Bruno is a stone-cold murderer with a soft heart, if you can get you mind around this. His time on the fishing boat makes him appreciate hard work, and he comes to admire Hamil, while seeing just how much of a sap Hamil’s son Carl is. Bruno serves as something of a mentor to Carl, both in a bad way and a good way. The plot has Bruno saving Carl, literally. As noirs go, this one is well worth watching.

For the Defense (1930), directed by John Cromwell.  Suave William Powell plays slick William B. Foster, a hot-shot defense lawyer who thinks he is above the law. He also thinks his girlfriend, Broadway star Irene Manners (Kay Francis), will stay with him despite his wish to remain unmarried. He is wrong on both counts. Something of an early film noir, For the Defense finds lawyer Foster caught in a tangle he cannot extricate himself from. His conceit catches up with him. Irene accidentally kills a man while she is driving one night. The man with her takes the blame, and Irene asks Foster to defend this man. This is where things go awry, as you would expect. Kay Francis and William Powell make a fine couple. The film has something to say about corruption in the judicial system, and it does this efficiently. Cromwell’s use of back projection is excellent, especially for a film made in 1930. All in all, this is a slim film that holds up well.

Take One False Step (1949), directed by Chester Erskine. William Powell and Shelley Winters make a strange pair in this man-on-the-run movie about a university professor, Andrew Gentling (William Powell), who runs into an old flame while in Los Angeles on a fund-raising trip. The meeting does not go smoothly, and Gentling finds himself in a jam, a suspect in the old flame’s disappearance. Why he does not simply go to the police and give his account of meeting Catherine Sykes (Shelley Winters) is beyond me. But if he had, then we would not have the story of his attempt to prove himself innocent, his encounter with a mean German Shepherd, his night time meeting with a hoodlum resulting in fisticuffs, his wild ride in the night ending with a bump into a tree and a barking dog, his tense meeting with a young boy while stopped in a lineup of vehicles being checked by the police, his close encounters with two police detectives, played by James Gleason and Sheldon Leonard, and his final encounter with Ms Sykes. As noir films go, this one is flimsy, but fun. As we would expect, William Powell fits the role of a professor well. As for Shelley Winters, she manages the whiny inebriate irritatingly well. Chester Erskine ain’t no Hitchcock, but he manages to give us an engaging film, thanks to an entertaining cast.

 

Chicago Confidential (1957), directed by Sidney Salkow. This is a neat combination of police procedural and film noir. It stars Brian Keith as Jim Fremont, state’s attorney, and Beverly Garland as fiancé and secretary of Artie Blane (Dick Foran). Blane is a union boss framed for murder by racketeers who want to take over the union for their nefarious purposes, girl smuggling being one of them. The film has a voice over by an unknown narrator, some dark streets, and noir shenanigans. The cast has several familiar faces, especially Elisha Cook, Jr, as Candymouth Duggan, a drunk who finds a murder weapon and becomes tangled with the bad guys and does not end well. Other familiar faces include Douglas Kennedy as Blane’s rival for top boss of the union, Jim Bannon as a pilot, Beverly Tyler as Sylvia Clarkson, a witness for the prosecution, Dennis Moore as the jury foreman, and Jack Lambert as a tough bad guy. Much depends upon the forensic people being able to identify a voice on a tape recorder. We see police work up close. This film offers familiar fare for its time, but it does so with verve. Satisfying.

The Body of My Enemy (1976), directed by Henri Verneuil. What distinguishes this film is its structure. It slides back and forth in time to tell the story of Francois Leclercq (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a man wrongly convicted of murder who, as the film begins, has served seven years in prison. He returns to the town of Cournai, a textile centre that has changed considerably since Leclercq went to prison. Of course, he is seeking revenge on those who framed him. From this beginning, we move back in time to Leclercq’s childhood, then his rise to nightclub owner and lover of the town’s wealthiest man’s daughter, Gilberte Liegard (Marie-France Pisier), all the time keeping the story going in the present. The film is stylish in a Seijun Suzuki sort of way, with a hulking former bouncer turned cross-dresser and female dominatrix, a performance by Frida de Dusseldorf, la strip-teaseuse, and impressive locations. The story has a noirish tone. Instead of Gauloises, Belmondo smokes Marlboro cigarettes to remind us of the American noir connection. The target here is the bourgeoisie. Leclercq’s hatred of the wealthy is what has motivated him since childhood. All if this is well and good, except that all the characters, including Leclercq, are unlikeable. The young woman Leclercq meets near the end of the film may be an exception, although her naivete is likely going to derail her life as the last shot fades away.

Sudden Fear (1952), directed by David Miller. This RKO thriller has an excellent final twenty-five or thirty minutes. The finale is set up with a sequence in which Myra Hudson Blaine (Joan Crawford) thinks through her plan to murder her cheating husband, Lester Blaine (Jack Palance), and pin the murder on Lester’s lover, Irene Neves (Gloria Grahame). In her imagination, Myra’s scheme works like clockwork (a clock does feature prominently). Of course, when she tries to make her plan work in actuality, things go wrong, but perhaps not in the way you might imagine. Anyway, why is Myra setting out to “do in” her husband. Well, he is a cad of the highest order. He is also a good actor. But the main reason is that he is planning to do away with Myra in order to get her fortune for himself and his girlfriend, and Myra knows this. She knows because of a dictation machine that has inadvertently recorded a conversation between Lester and Irene in which they declare their love and resolve to arrange an “accident” for Myra. Much of this is reminiscent of Hitchcock. Crisscross, get it? The final minutes are well worth waiting for, and the longer build-up to the suspenseful climax is not without interest, especially if you find the facial expressions of Joan Crawford engaging. We get many close-ups of Ms Crawford. Mind you, we also have a number of shots that allow Jack Palance to express menace or concern or affection. The film is often taken as an example of film noir, and the final sequence does have all the attributes of noir, askew camera angles, lighting, dark streets, and so on. The earlier part of the film, however, is thorough melodrama, shot with full lighting, bright rooms or sunny days.

 

Crime Against Joe (1956), directed by Lee Sholem. This low budget noir has ambitions that do not quite make the grade. The story gives us war veteran and would-be artist Joe Manning (John Bromfield) who finds himself in a pickle after a night of drinking, a night in which he not only goes on a bender and has a fight, but in which he also kindly escorts a sleep-walking woman home. That same night, a woman is murdered, and Joe had been seen talking with her in a bar. Joe is accused of the crime and arrested. A local girl who works at a drive-in, Frances ‘Slacks’ Bennett (Julie London), gives Joe an alibi. He is allowed to go free, but only until the girl’s alibi for Joe proves false. To make matters worse, the father of the sleepwalking young woman lies to the police about seeing Joe that night. Then we have the matter of Joe’s “battle fatigue,” what we would now call PTSD. We have much to-do about a high school pin found at the scene. Ultimately, the mystery is not particularly mysterious. There are three characters Joe thinks may have killed the woman, but I figured out early on that none of these fellows were the perpetrator. The actual killer is someone else who proves not too difficult to discover. The cinematography is quite good and the location shooting in Tuscon is impressive. All in all, a serviceable little noir.