Product Description
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Film Noir Classics Collection, The: Volume 4 (DVD)
Ex-World War II pilot Frank Enley (Van Heflin) is a respected
contractor and family man. Then his troubled, gimp-legged
bombardier (Robert Ryan) shows up with a and a score to
settle. Perhaps neither man is what he seems to be as director
Fred Zinnemann (The Day of the Jackal) guides a searing Act of
Violence, "the first postwar noir to take a challenging look at
the ethics of men in combat" (Eddie Muller, Dark City: The Lost
World of Film Noir). Murder lives on Mystery Street. John Sturges
(The Great Escape) directs a revealing-for-the-era procedural
about a Boston cop (Ricardo Montalban) solving a whodunit with
the help of a Harvard forsensic expert (Bruce Bennett). Welcome
to CSI Noir.
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The fourth volume of Warner Video's Film Noir Classic Collection
boasts ten titles on five double-feature discs--appropriate
packaging for films that mostly run less than an hour-and-a-half
and would have shared the marquee with another picture upon
original release. It's a welcome set, with entries by top noir
directors Anthony Mann and Nicholas Ray, several unheralded gems,
and solid entertainment value in nearly every instance. But
somebody (and it looks as if that's us) ought to mention that
Warners is getting a mite cavalier with the label "film noir."
You can have a '40s or '50s movie that's in black and white,
involves criminal activity, and features stars like Robert
Mitchum or Edward G. Robinson, and still not tap into the pungent
atmosphere, perverse psychology, implacable alism, and
jagged/voluptuous style that are the hallmarks of noir. Indeed,
there are several such movies in this set--and in their non-noir
ways, they're not bad.
Act of Violence (1948) is the real McCoy, albeit so meticulously
directed by Fred Zinnemann in postwar-European style that it's
virtually an art-film noir. Van Heflin plays a model small-town
citizen suddenly confronted with a guilty WWII past, in the dark,
limping, permanently trenchcoated figure of Robert Ryan. The film
systematically dismantles the domestic security of Heflin's life
till he's forced to flee his own home, which has become a trap,
and escape into the nightworld of the big city. Mary Astor is
superb as one of its few sympathetic denizens. Co-featured with
Act of Violence is Mystery Street (1950), a hard-edged movie
about a B-girl's murder and some of the proto-CSI techniques the
use to solve the crime. Directed by John Sturges, from a
script by Richard Brooks and Sydney Boehm, the picture is
enhanced by atmospheric Boston and Cape Cod settings and
camerawork by Mr. Film Noir himself, John Alton.
For case-hardened noiristes, the disc holding Decoy and Crime
Wave is the collection's prime catch. Decoy (1946), like
Dillinger in Volume 2, is an ultra-low-budget offering from
Monogram Pictures and a fascinatingly mixed bag of Poverty Row
production values and flashes of directorial ambition (one night
scene in a woods strongly suggests director Jack Bernhard had
seen Sunrise). Its main attraction is a cold-hearted heroine who
could pledge the same sorority as the dames from Double
Indemnity, Crazy, and The Lady from Shanghai. (Alas,
British-born actress Jean Gillie appeared in only one subsequent
film, dying at the age of 34.) Andre De Toth's Crime Wave (1954)
places us in the awkward position of being grateful for the
chance to see an exciting movie and obliged to disqualify it from
the set: it's closer to the '50s procedural (Dragnet et
al.) than to film noir. almost entirely on location, the
picture virtually reeks of seedy L.A. nightlife and satisfyingly
unreels without benefit of music score. Ted De Corsia, Nedrick
Young, and Charles Buchinsky-soon-to-be-Bronson supply juicy
villainy, with a characteristically unclean contribution late in
the film from Timothy Carey. Gene Nelson plays an ex-con,
resolved to go straight yet being forced to abet his newly
escaped old cellmates, and the world-weary cop keeping tabs on
all of them is Sterling Hayden.
The set's two stellar noir directors share a disc and costars,
Farley Granger and the ethereal Cathy O'Donnell. They Live by
Night (1948) was Nicholas Ray's maiden effort, and kinetically
and emotionally the director found natural rapport with the
spooked-animal vulnerability of his hero and heroine. This was
the first film version of Edward Anderson's Depression-era novel
Thieves Like Us (adapted again a quarter-century later by Robert
Altman), and its tale of a young rural misfit drawn into more
violent crime by older, harder fellow escapees from a prison farm
anticipates the spirit of Ray's '50s teen classic Rebel Without a
Cause. Side Street (1949) is fascinating as a bridge between
Anthony Mann's great series of noirs by John Alton and the
Western genre Mann would soon master. Working this time with a
conventional MGM cameraman (Joseph Ruttenberg), the director
demonstrates that the terrific "eye" that gave us T-Men, Border
Incident, et al. was at least as much Mann's as Alton's, and he
visualizes Manhattan as a collection of jagged skylines and deep,
shadowed canyons. The script (by Sydney Boehm) involves a mail
carrier (Granger) who, worried about taking proper care of his
pregnant wife (O'Donnell), impulsively swipes an envelope full of
money. Hard upon that "one false step," the family man finds
himself caught up in a dark scheme involving blackmail and,
several times over, murder.
Despite a screenplay by Hitchcock collaborator Charles Bennett
and direction by John Farrow (The Big Clock), Where Danger Lives
(1950) is easily the weakest entry in Vol. 4. Robert Mitchum
plays a doctor who saves a would-be suicide, then falls for her
without noticing she's crazy as a loon, and homicidal to boot.
Soon they're on the run, sought by the law and at the mercy of
every larcenous character between them and the Mexican border.
Despite yeoman work by Mitchum and RKO shadowmaster Nicholas
Musuraca, and the too-brief participation of Claude Rains, the
film founders on the femme-ale casting of Howard Hughes
discovery Faith Domergue. A more memorably dodgy female
complicates everybody's life in Tension (1950), the next-to-last
Hollywood film for director John Berry before his blacklisting.
This one's played by Audrey Totter--never a major star, but a
delicious and definitive late-'40s dame (who also supplies sharp
commentary on the auxiliary audio track). Her milquetoast
husband, cist Richard Basehart, sets up a second identity
for himself under which to seek revenge for her numerous
infidelities--till the new man he has become makes the
acquaintance of neighbor Cyd Charisse. (No, Charisse does not
dance, but those awesome legs are nevertheless put to creative
use.) Eventually someone is dead, and cops Barry Sullivan and
William Conrad enter the picture, contributing their own shades
of gray to the noir palette. Another satisfying, little-known
film that collections like this one lead us to discover.
There's also satisfaction to be had from our final pairing,
Illegal and The Big Steal--even if both these titles have to be
turned back at the noir border. Illegal (1955) is the third
version of The Mouthpiece, a '30s play and film about an esteemed
district attorney who falls from grace but rebounds as a
spellbinding defense attorney much-sought-after by the criminal
class. It was probably the best part Edward G. Robinson had in
the '50s, and he's all the reason we need for watching. But the
role and the story predated noir (the previous renditions came
out in 1932 and 1940), and this movie, for all intents and
purposes, postdates noir. In addition, sad to say, it's an
artifact from that era when Warner Bros.' movies had started
looking like the studio's TV shows. By contrast, The Big Steal
(1949) springs from the heart of the classic noir era, was
produced for perhaps the most noir-friendly of studios, RKO, and
even boasts the costars and screenwriter of the sublime Out of
the Past--which is to say, Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Daniel
Mainwaring (a.k.a. "Geoffrey Homes"). The whirlwind first reel
plops us right in the middle of several chases, with as many
switcheroos of allegiance and direction, in pursuit of an "it"
that won't be specified till some time later. All nimbly managed
by director Don Siegel, on location in Mexico yet, and briskly
over with in 72 minutes. But it's a comedy-adventure, not a film
noir. Not even close.
Most of the films come accompanied by authoritative voiceover
commentaries, including contributions by L.A. crime novelist
James Ellroy (on Crime Wave) and surviving cast members Nina Foch
(Illegal) and Audrey Totter (Tension). However, for a sporadic
series of primers on noir style, which feature absurdly florid
lighting of the talking heads and lesson-plan intertitles that
belong on a blackboard, somebody at Warner Home Video should be
taken for a ride. --Richard T. Jameson