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That movie has so much smoking. More than a pack between them in 100 minutes.
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Nov 5, 2022 07:12
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That describes basically half the movies made in the 40s. Conflict (1945), dir. Curtis Bernhardt  Humphrey Bogart is an engineer who is love with his wife Rose Hobart's sister, Alexis Smith. This engenders the titular conflict, as you might imagine. Sydney Greenstreet also stars as a psychologist  It's decent. Bogart gets to have some fun playing a guy who experiences all sorts of weird stuff and who sort of can't tell if he's going insane. It also looks nice a lot of the time. Unfortunately the plot is kind of dopey: it really just exists to set up the various scenes and although it makes sense it's all pretty goofy and predictable. Still, not bad.  If you compare it to another noir where Bogart plays a husband going sorta nuts due to getting warpped up in a love triangle, The Two Mrs. Carrolls, this one comes out ahead, I guess. So there's that. 77/100
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Nov 5, 2022 13:20
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 Spellbound (1945), dir. Alfred Hitchcock  Ingrid Bergman is a psychoanalyst at a psychiatric clinic somewhere on the East Coast. Gregory Peck soon arrives as the new head of the clinic, replacing Hitchcock regular Leo Carroll. Michael Chekhov, Anton Chekhov's nephew, plays Bergman's former mentor. The plot involves the typical Hitchcock bullshit: mental illness, murder, hidden identities, people being on the run, etc.  As I noted back when I reviewed The Wrong Man, I think I have brain worms or something because I usually can't get into Hitchcock films, and this one is no exception. To its credit, what looks to be the obvious central mystery is cleared up relatively soon rather than dragged out throughout the entire movie, which would've sucked. Still, apart from a couple tense sequences which Hitchcock manages expertly, I find it to be something of a bore, what with all its psychoanalytic baggage, the relatively obvious conclusion when you realize this is going to be one of those movies that pulls most of the punches, etc.  However, like Moontide, this movie has a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali, and wow, it's a stunner! Check this poo poo out! The sequence alone is almost worth the price of admission. If it were the whole movie it'd be a banger. But it's just a short scene. This movie also loses points for a pointless time-wasting overture and an even more pointless opening quote. 62/100
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Nov 6, 2022 15:21
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Since it's Election Day I'm gonna post about one of my favorite neo-noirs, Southland Tales. While the noir aspects kind of get buried under the... everything else, the fact of the matter is that this film borrows as much from noir movies as it does from reality TV. It has an amnesiac protagonist, it centers around a grand political conspiracy, and one of the first scenes in the movie prominently features Kiss Me Deadly, which is heavily mirrored in the film's plot. Plus it's just a good movie and I think more people should talk about it.
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Nov 6, 2022 19:10
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Southland Tales is insane! My Name Is Julia Ross (1945), dir. Joseph H. Lewis  Nina Foch is the titular Julia Ross, an Englishwoman who gets hired as a secretary by May Whitty and George Macready who turn out to have nefarious plans, as she is immediately kidnapped, spirited away to Cornwall, and told that her name is Marion Hughes, wife of George Macready's character, and that she has been experiencing memory loss. Obviously she is not thrilled with this.  This is a fun little thriller. It doesn't really try to make much of a mystery of what's going on: the full motive for the kidnapping takes some time to come out, as do a few other details, but from the first 5 or so minutes we already know something is up and by about 10 minutes she's in Cornwall, so it's all sort of straightforward. Unlike a lot of characters (and especially unlike a lot of women in movies from this era and even today), Foch deals pretty reasonably with the situation. She freaks out and so on, but she does her best to try to escape instead of spending her time going nuts or whatever. I find that pretty gratifying.  Ultimately though there's not going on, and the movie almost entirely lacks the bold chiaroscuro of the best noirs. The soundtrack is pretty flat and the characters are rather two-dimensional. It's fun but mostly forgettable. There is a cat. May Whitty is in this, Gaslight, and The Lady Vanishes, which basically makes her the queen of movies about people being gaslit. 78/100
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Nov 7, 2022 13:48
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TychoCelchuuu posted:
I always thought the "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid" version of this was funny as poo poo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmkbudWbQ9A&t=52s
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Nov 7, 2022 15:13
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Southland Tales is legitimately one of my top 5 of all time. "I'm a pimp, and pimps don't commit suicide."
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Nov 7, 2022 18:33
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 Deception (1946), dir. Irving Rapper  Bette Davis, musician, is reunited with her love Paul Henreid, a master cellist who was stuck in Europe during the war, and whom she thought was probably dead or something. (Wikipedia says he was stuck in Sweden; I got the impression he was in Germany, maybe even in a camp.) Claude Rains is a famous composer who mentored Davis. Henreid's jealousy pricks up, as does Rains's, and noir things ensue.  I think this is really excellent. All three characters are filled out with a great degree of depth and subtlety. You get the sense that even they are not sure what they are going to do next, not because they act randomly but because their various competing drives are so powerfully depicted that it's never clear which impulse will win out. The story is simple but it is told with subtlety equal to the characters and the music part of the plot is handled pretty well: Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the film's composer, wrote a cello concerto for the movie and it sounds pretty decent to me.  Bette Davis lives in a swanky New York apartment[ (which becomes a point of contention) and Claude Rains has a cat (featured a lot) and a parrot (in two scenes, entirely irrelevant to the plot, and almost entirely unremarked-upon). The movie's fourth lead is an Asian character (Rains's butler, Benson Fong) which is some nice diversity. The tagline for this movie is "Bette's B.O. bull's eye." I think B.O. means box office in this context but if you pretend it means body odor then you'll have much more fun. 88/100
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Nov 8, 2022 16:56
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 The Chase (1946), dir. Arthur Ripley  Robert Cummings, an ex-navy sailor in Miami with no money, finds and returns a wallet to Steve Cochran, a rich... criminal, I guess? He's sketchy and commits one definite crime in the movie but it's not clear exactly what his game is except that he pressures people into selling their businesses, or something. Anyways his unhappy wife is Michèle Morgan, and his henchman is Peter Lorre. Cummings is hired as Cochran's driver for his good deed. (He complains that he doesn't want the existing driver fired, but he doesn't really press the point, and the existing driver definitely does get fired, so... gently caress that guy I guess.)  This sucks, unfortunately. The actors are all fine but the plot and characterization are just terrible and it almost never looks nice (although it sometimes does - I like the first two pictures in this post for instance). Cochran is a jerk to one person early on in a pretty effective scene, but after that he never really displays any particular personality at all, nor do Cummings or Morgan. Lorre is slightly sarcastic and otherwise just as much a blank slate. Even worse than the thin characterization is the plot, which I'm going to spoil in the next paragraph, so stop reading if you ever want to watch this to see if you liked it more than I do. There is a dog, at least, and the Miami/Havana setting is a nice change of pace for noir.  Morgan, who feels trapped, convinces Cummings to take her to Cuba for $1,000. He does so, and in the course of three scenes more or less back to back, they go from acquaintances, to "let's gently caress," to "we are in love," all this without a moment's onscreen chemistry. Then in the fourth scene Morgan gets knifed in Cummings's arms. Cummings is accused of the murder, and he tries to clear his name while on the run from the Cuban police, but he fails and is killed by Lorre, the real murderer. Then he wakes up, and it was a dream, I guess because he has PTSD, and anyways now he has amnesia and so he phones his buddy at the navy hospital who treated him for this PTSD earlier. They grab a drink at a nightclub where Cochran and Lorre happen to be hanging out, where Cummings remembers everything and rushes to Morgan to take her to Cuba for real. Cochran and Lorre find out what's going on through an insane coincidence (as does the naval hospital buddy through another insane coincidence, although this doesn't matter). They rush to the docks to stop Cummings and Morgan before they can sail to Cuba, but they crash into a train because Cochran insists on loving flooring it, which he can do because his car is wired up so he can control the gas and brakes from the backseat. Via what I can only assume are psychic powers, Cummings learns Cochran and Lorre are dead, and he and Morgan embrace because now they can make it to Cuba (this despite the fact that they no longer have any reason to go, since the person Morgan is escaping is dead as gently caress). Someone on Criticker describes this movie as "oneiric" which is giving it too much credit, I think. It's like, 10% oneiric unless you count the stupid "it was all a dream" plot, which is of course technically oneiric but not in any interesting way. I guess if the weirdness strikes you as weirder then you might dig it. I didn't. 51/100
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Nov 9, 2022 12:29
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 So Dark the Night (1946), dir. Joseph H. Lewis  Steven Geray, who had a small part in Spellbound, returns in this movie directed by Joseph H. Lewis, director of My Name is Julia Ross. Geray is a Parisian detective who is a master crime solver. He has not taken a break in 11 years and so he heads to the French countryside for some R&R, where he meets Micheline Cheirel and falls in love. Unfortunately she's betrothed to Paul Marion. Then bodies start showing up!  Quite meh. There isn't really any mystery about who the killer is, so that's out of the picture, nor is there much suspense, or romance, or intrigue, or anything, really. It's all rather by-the-numbers and the explanation of what's going on is pretty stupid. The soundtrack isn't great and it doesn't often look great. For some reason a hunchback shows up; a descendant of the Hunchback of Notre Dame I guess.  Everyone speaks English in a French accent, which is kind of amusing. A lot of the actors are of approximately French origin so I guess that might be their natural accent. It's also short, which I guess is a blessing. 62/100
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Nov 10, 2022 13:13
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 The Spiral Staircase (1946), dir. Robert Siodmak  It's 1906 in rural Vermont and someone is killing women with disabilities, which is bad news for Dorothy McGuire, who is mute. She does have Kent Smith, a local doctor, looking out for her, along with the people she works for as a housekeeper: George Brent, his mother Ethel Barrymore, his stepbrother Gordon Oliver, and Rhonda Fleming, who also works at the house. But probably one of them is the killer?  People sometimes label this as a sort of proto-slasher film which makes sense. It has some features of those movies, like a crazed killer lurking around the edges, a female protagonist trying to avoid him, etc. Siodmak is an expert director of noirs but for my money this is one of the lesser ones. There are some very effective scenes and some good music but most of the movie is filler. A lot of the characters are basically cardboard cutouts (watch for the maid who gets comically drunk on brandy for instance) and for some reason Ethel Barrymore is a little psychic.  There is a rabbit and a dog which is nice. I think I probably like this movie less than it deserves. Maybe you'll like it more. I don't love it but it's fine I guess. 71/100
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Nov 11, 2022 11:32
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 Lured (1947), dir. Douglas Sirk  Douglas Sirk directs this remake of a French film directed by the director of yesterday's movie, Robert Siodmak. Lucille Ball is a dancer in London who is recruited by the police, including Charles Coburn and Alan Napier, to help catch a serial killer who lures women via classified ads. Is the killer Boris Karloff, the insane fashion designer? George Sanders, the club owner? Someone else?  A mixed bag. The noir stuff is decent, although there isn't a huge amount of it. There's some humor, which works pretty well too. And there's some romance which is fine. But all of it together is tonally not a great fit, so the whole is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. It gets credit for the mystery being at least a bit less obvious than it often is in films like this: you can sort of guess where it's going relatively early on, but there's enough doubt sewed into the film that it's not a foregone conclusion.  One exception to the whole "the parts work on their own" is a running gag where a police officer keeps trying to solve a crossword puzzle. They do it three or four times and it is not even slightly funny. Karloff has a dog which is great. Not a bad use of time but hardly a classic and definitely not worth seeking out for its noirish qualities. 76/100
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Nov 12, 2022 12:24
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 Framed (1947), dir. Richard Wallace  Noir mainstay Glenn Ford is an out of work mining engineer who shows up in a small town looking to work, although mostly what he's doing is drinking. He catches the eye of Janis Carter (who I think looks like Denise Gough, the ISB officer in Andor) and Barry Sullivan, who have a scheme to use Ford in some kind of bank robbery they are planning. Edgar Buchanan plays a prospector who looks like Stephen Root and another noir mainstay Art Smith has an uncredited cameo as a clerk.  Very decent. Ford is a good noir protagonist; he's competent but not too competent, suspicious but not too suspicious, etc. The schemers are nice villains and the fact that we know they're bad doesn't take the wind from the movie's sails the way it might in similar circumstances. Everything is pretty straightforward: the movie is short and to the point.  The movie opens with Ford driving a truck down a hill with no breaks, which is kind of amusing. At one point he needs money so he walks into a craps game, turns $10 into like $100 in about five seconds, and walks right out. He's just really good at rolling dice I guess. Bonus points for a scene where Carter is thinking about poisoning Ford while making coffee and she looks over to one of the shelves in her kitchen which just has a bottle labeled POISON, like that's a normal sort of thing to have on the shelf in your kitchen next to the oatmeal. 80/100
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Nov 13, 2022 13:13
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 The Fallen Idol (1948), dir. Carol Reed  Noir mainstays Carol Reed (director) and Graham Greene (writer) are behind this story about Bobby Henrey, the son of the French ambassador in London; Ralph Richardson, one of the head servants in the embassy; Sonia Dresdel, his wife; and Michèle Morgan, back again after The Chase, as his lover.  A lot of the movie is more or less told from Henrey's perspective, and he's like 9 years old, so that's kind of interesting. Probably your enjoyment of the film will hinge to a large degree on whether the kid pisses you off or not. He's definitely a kid: kind of annoying, dumb as gently caress, etc. Some of his misbehavior is no doubt due to the fact that his mother has been away for much of his life in some hospital - that's only a small plot point but it looms large in the characterization of the kid.  Like many Graham Greene stories a lot of it hinges on themes like honesty, deception, romance, affairs, and hope plus the lack thereof. There's a snake, and at one point they visit the zoo and there are like 60 animals so I didn't grab shots of all of those. Reed gets the chance to do his characteristic "pretty shots of nighttime city streets" thing. Have a couple more of those. 80/100  
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Nov 14, 2022 14:10
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 Pitfall (1948), dir. André De Toth  Dick Powell has a wife and a kid in LA, where he works for Olympic Mutual Insurance Company Inc., and he's getting completely fed up with the routine of everyday life. Luckily things get complicated when Raymond Burr, a scuzzy private eye who investigates things for the company, tells him where he can find Lizabeth Scott, whose now-incarcerated boyfriend gave her a bunch of stuff with money stolen from the insurance company. Noir stuff ensues.  For my money Scott is one of the great noir actors, and Dick Powell is pretty decent too, so any pairing is going to be fun. Burr is also excellent as a giant scuzzball. The movie is very straightforward and it hits all the right notes, except for a couple times when the soundtrack is dumb. Pretty solid overall.  The high point is the climax, or maybe immediately after the climax depending on how you think about things. The plot is also such that you can't really guess what's going to happen even knowing the Hays Code, which often tips you off in noir stories, although Wikipedia says the director did some stuff to maybe get around the Code, so I guess you shouldn't think you can guess anything no matter what. In general, the simplicity of the movie does it favors. It sketches everything quite well. This also holds it back from greatness, though. It lacks that extra pinch of whatever that you want for all the best movies. Very decent but not one for the ages. 84/100
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Nov 15, 2022 14:47
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 Champion (1949), dir. Mark Robson  Kirk Douglas is the titular champion, a top boxer whose rise to fame the movie chronicles. Arthur Kennedy and Paul Stewart are both great as his brother and manager, respectively. ALso involved are Ruth Roman, Marilyn Maxwell, and Lola Albright, who are women.  A very nice boxing noir. It doesn't always look great, but sometimes it does, and the dialogue isn't always hard-hitting, but sometimes it is. The story itself is hardly anything new but it's told effectively and Douglas is as good an actor as ever.  Dimitri Tiomkin's score is a bit of a failure - far too cheery - as is a weirdly upbeat training montage near the beginning. But those are minor missteps. Some people say the ending sucks but I thought it was quite fine. RKO sued the makers of this movie, arguing that it was too similar to The Set Up, which for my money is an even better boxing noir. 84/100
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Nov 16, 2022 12:52
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 House of Strangers (1949), dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz  Richard Conte has just been released from jail after 7 years. His three brothers are in charge of the family bank, having inherited it from their father, who died while Conte was in jail, and everyone is extremely angry at each other. We flash back to learn what went down, at which point the father, Edward G. Robinson, comes into the picture, as does Susan Hayward, an alluring woman.  Very nice! This is one of those noirs where almost everyone is some kind of jerk or another, and I usually like those. Robinson is excllent as the terrible overbearing patriarch lording it over everyone but especially his four sons, and Conte is great as he typically is. Luther Adler, one of the three brothers, is pretty decent too. There are a couple shots of New York City which are pretty neat, including one near the very beginning where Conte is walking through a crowded street and the camera is bouncing a lot because it's mounted on a car or something.  Robinson, a Romanian Jew, is perhaps a little miscast as an extremely stereotypical Italian dude who speaks with a heavy Italian accent, but I guess without his trailblazing there's no way Chris Pratt would've been cast as Mario. Aside from that, no real missteps. The dialoge is often sharp and the ending is satisfying, in part because you can't really guess how things are going to turn out. Ben Nye did the makeup, which is notable because over the years I've been doing Noirvember he's probably shown up on more than a dozen films I've covered. He has 438 credits on IMDB! 87/100
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Nov 17, 2022 18:00
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 The Big Combo (1955), dir. Joseph H. Lewis  Richard Conte is back as a gangster matched up against police lieutenant Cornel Wilde. Conte is supported by his lieutenant Brian Donlevy and his two henchmen, Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman. He also has a lady friend, Jean Wallace, who I guess Wilde is in love with too.  This movie is gorgeous, from the opening shots of New York which looks stupendous to the shadow and fog infused sets throughout the rest of the movie. Conte and Wilde are nice as usual, and Van Cleef and Holliman are pretty excellent henchmen with some gay undertones. The rest of it is pretty whatever. The plot is very straightforward, the characters rather flat, the dialogue often too workmanlike, etc.  Really not much except something to look at but absolutely worth it to look at it. The score is also pretty good, especially in the opening credits, and it's notable because it's jazzy rather than the typical strings you get in noir. Also notable is that we're into the widescreen era now and, as IMDB puts it, this is "one of the very first American films to imply that women derive pleasure from receiving oral sex." 80/100
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Nov 18, 2022 14:59
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 Whirlpool (1949), dir. Otto Preminger  Gene Tierney is a bit of a kleptomaniac. Richard Conte is back, playing Tierny's husband, a psychoanalyst. Tierney gets involved with José Ferrer, a sketchy kind of psycho-something who uses all sorts of techniques like hypnosis, to help her deal with her problems. Charles Bickford and Barbara O'Neil, a cop and a lady, also end up involved.  Pretty good. The movie spends time with all three leads, one after the other sort of, and it's effective each time it switches. Ferrer is kind of a slimeball and he does a great job playing that, while Conte and Tierney are both decent but pretty flawed. The plot has a bit of goofiness about hypnosis but really much less than you might expect, and generally things are grounded, and nobody behaves in a wacky fashion or anything. The movie is largely about the difficulties women have with being believed, and Tierney does a great job playing the frustration, fear, anger, and resignation.  Ferrer in this looks a lot like his son Miguel Ferrer, so that's fun. Ben Nye did the makeup. 85/100
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Nov 19, 2022 07:53
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 The Raging Tide (1951), dir. George Sherman  Richard Conte and Charles Bickford are back for their second movie in a row with a name referring to a water feature. Conte shoots someone and is on the run in San Francisco. Bickford is the captain of a fishing ship he hides on. Alex Nicol plays Bickford's kid, and Shelly Winters plays Conte's girlfriend. Stephen McNally is the police lieutenant hunting Conte.  This is a lesser-known noir and people don't seem to love it but I think it's pretty great. Conte is very good as a conflicted tough guy, and Bickford and Nicol are a nice father-son pair. There's a lot of bittersweetness and a compelling, tense opening. Winters has a rather straightforward role but she's very effective. It starts out with some voiceover from Conte but that disappears a few minutes in which is kind of weird.  The movie features many nods to neo-noir director Quentin Tarantino in the form of having his name plastered all over, like this example. And I'm sure you will join me in being delighted at the dog in a life jacket who shows up sometimes. Bonus points for this chunky squirrel. A couple interesting things: the movie includes a discussion of "Chinese fortune cake," referring to fortune cookies and it calls out "cappucino" as a drink made with hot chocolate and a splash of bourbon - no coffee involved. The former is perhaps a mistake: there is such thing as Chinese fortune cake but maybe the props department got mixed up and provided fortune cookies? The latter refers to the way Tosca Cafe in San Francisco served cappucinos at the time, and that's still the way they serve them today! How's that for consistency? 83/100
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Nov 20, 2022 14:10
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 The Brothers Rico (1957), dir. Phil Karlson  Richard Conte is back for his final film this Noirvember. He plays one of the titular brothers Rico, a former mob accountant who is not so far removed from the mob that he can say no when they ask him for a favor. Also involved are the other two brothers Rico, Paul Picerni and James Darren; Dianne Foster, Conte's wife; Kathryn Grant,his mother; and Larry Gates, a crime lord he's friendly with.  Pretty good, overall. There's a lot of pathos involved in Conte's struggles in choosing between his wife, his brothers, the mob, his mother, and other competing factors. There's a bit of a jet-setting quality to the film: it takes place in Tampa, Miami, New York, and California, with a few stopovers in the Phoenix airport for a change.  The ending is a little abrupt, especially in the denouement, and the plot is a little sketchy in a coupe places, but otherwise it's pretty good. Some standout scenes include a paranoia-inducing chance meeting with an old acquaintance in the airport and a tête-à-tête with the local mob guy in El Camino, California, although why the mob happens to have a whole operation in the middle of nowhere is a little unclear. 83/100
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Nov 21, 2022 13:23
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 Act of Violence (1948), dir. Fred Zinnemanm  Robert Ryan takes the bus from New York to California to kill Van Heflin. Neither Van Heflin nor his wife Janet Leigh are thrilled about this. Eventually Phyllis Thaxter, a woman involved with Ryan, Mary Astor, a shady woman, and Berry Kroeger, a much shadier man, end up involved.  Very excellent. The characters are simple but effectively sketched, especially the two men, who are played by some of the best noir actors out there. The plot is similarly straightforward but full of tension and a great key idea. The movie looks fantastic a lot of the time.  Quite unusually for a film of this era, all of the credits aside from the title come after the film. The movie features some really neat parts of LA's slums, namely the Bunker Hill area and its famous Angels Flight funicular and 2nd Street Tunnel. This is one of the main settings for The Long Take, that book I posted about at the beginning of the month. The tunnel has also shown up in (among others): THX 1138 (1971), The Terminal Man (1974), The Driver (1978) (a classic neo-noir, although I'm not a huge fan), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), When a Stranger Calls (1979), Blade Runner (1982) (the best neo-noir), Flashdance (1983), The Terminator (1984) (which features a night club named Tech Noir), Repo Man (1984), Rocky IV (1985), Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), Sneakers (1992), Deep Cover (1992) (a truly excellent neo-noir), Demolition Man (1993), Money Talks (1997), Con Air (1997), Gattaca (1997) (noirish), Enemy of the State (1998), Independence Day (1996), Kill Bill (2003), Transformers (2007), Kill Speed (2010), Black November (2012), and Knight of Cups (2015). Thanks Wikipedia! 87/100
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Nov 22, 2022 15:31
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 D.O.A. (1950), dir. Rudolph Maté  Edmond O'Brien is an accountant who has been murdered, which is what he tells the homicide division of the police station he walks into. We then flash back to figure out WTF. Turns out (after some stage setting) he has been poisoned, and he embarks on a quest to figure out what in the world is going on. Involved are Pamela Britton, his secretary slash love interest; Luther Adler, William Ching, Henry Hart, Beverly Garland, Lynn Baggett, and Laurette Luez as people potentially involved, and Neville Brand as a very scummy psychopath.  Lots of highs and lows. The highs: once the poisoning happens and he has between a day and a week to live, the movie kicks into loving overdrive, and the energy plus O'Brien's manic performance is quite enjoyable. Lows: there's some goofiness (including ridiculous slide whistles as O'Brien eyes up women). Also the plot mostly doesn't make any goddamn sense, although it's kind of fun to just be alone for the ride.  The movie features the Bradbury Building, one of LA's most famous movie buildings (perhaps most famous for its big role in Blade Runner). It also has some nice footage of O'Brien running around in San Francisco which was apparently filmed guerilla style. They forgot to copyright it or something so you can find it on YouTube and it got remade a few times. This movie also has a second title screen, at the end, just for fun. 79/100
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Nov 23, 2022 12:43
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I saw an art installation that was three TVs playing DOA at different speeds so it was completely desynced. I've been afraid to watch the actual film ever since.
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Nov 23, 2022 23:33
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It can't hurt you! Although if you're like me you'll have trouble tracking down a decent looking copy. 711 Ocean Drive (1950), dir. Joseph M. Newman  Edmond O'Brien is back as a guy who rises through the wire service gambling racket in California. Also involved are Joanne Dru, a woman; Otto Kruger and Barry Kelley as other people in the racket, and Howard St. John as a police officer focused on taking down O'Brien.  Pretty average. There aren't a lot of surprises in the whole thing, althuogh it's competently done. There's little flair or character or even much excitement up until the climax, which is an excellent setpiece in the Hoover Dam and which goes a long way towards redeeming the rest of the film which is otherwise nothing to write home about.  It's extremely unclear what the title of the film refers to: I don't think that at any point anyone refers to any Ocean Drive, let alone any particular address. The film has a weird commitment to voiceover: there are like 5 or 6 lines of it scattered throughout but mostly it's absent. It starts with this screen which is kind of interesting. A majestic dog is in one scene and then disappears. What happened to the dog?? 76/100
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Nov 24, 2022 11:38
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TychoCelchuuu posted:It can't hurt you! Although if you're like me you'll have trouble tracking down a decent looking copy. I was lucky enough to see it at AFI in Silver Spring a couple of years ago. Hopefully it gets a Blu-Ray someday, though since it's public domain there's probably not enough money to be made from it to raise interest.
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Nov 24, 2022 20:03
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 Backfire (1950), dir. Vincent Sherman  Edmond O'Brien is back as a former gambler turned World War II tank crewmember. It's 1948 and he's waiting for his friend, Gordon MacRae, to get out of the GI hospital in Van Nuys so they can start a business together. MacRae gets better, with the help of the nurse he's fallen for, Virginia Mayo, but by that time O'Brien has disappeared, and the mysterious Viveca Lindfors has shown up in the hospital claiming O'Brien is hurt. Almost immediately O'Brien is also accused of murder by Ed Begly, head of the homicide division, so MacRae sets out to find him and hopefully clear his name. Dane Clark (whom we last saw in Deep Valley and Moonrise) also shows up as another army friend.  It's okay. There are lots of flashbacks, which gives it a sort of interesting structure, but everything else is extremely by the book. MacRae goes to a location, gets a clue, something happens, etc. There is one pretty exciting scene in an office building near the end of the movie but aside from that it's mostly too workmanlike for any real thrills or whatever. O'Brien is probably the standout but he's not in enough of the movie to make things really excellent.  Part of the movie features the Fremont Hotel which was demolished 5 years later. The hotel was in the Bunker Hill neighborhood, which you may recall from Act of Violence. The movie also features some apartments at 1698 North Serrano Ave, which I think have been replaced by a Thai BBQ or something. Briefly there's a dog. 74/100
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Nov 25, 2022 10:23
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 Shield for Murder (1954), dir. Edmond O'Brien and Howard W. Koch  Edmond O'Brien is back as a detective who murders a bookie to steal $25,000. Things almost immediately begin to fall apart, as one might expect in a noir. Marla English plays his girlfriend, John Agar his fellow detective and mentee, and Emile Meyer plays the salty captain detective. Carolyn Jones also shows up in a memorable role as a woman at a bar.  For large stretches the movie is basically competent, with a slight elevation from O'Brien's able acting. In a few points it stretches closer to brilliance, especially as things get closer to the end. The stretches of near-mediocrity hold it back from being truly great, as do a few touches of copaganda. Even though the movie is about a shithead crooked cop who the other cops help cover up for, they also mostly shun him and when things go real bad they all of course turn on him. Overall, the good outweighs the bad by quite a bit, but you sort of sense there could've been a truly great movie here with just a few changes.  O'Brien co-directed this, his first time in the chair. Apart from the title and lead actors, all the credits are at the end, which is unusual. There is also a cold open, again unusual. A model house which plays a large role in the plot can be found at 5909 Culview St. in Culver City. Perhaps more interesting are the Fleur De Lis Apartments at 1825 Whitley Ave in LA where one of the characters lives. The ground floor of that building looks like a church or something. I swear this shot of suspects being rounded up is reused in The Big Combo (which also reused footage from Gun Crazy) but I haven't gone back and checked. 84/100 TychoCelchuuu fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Nov 26, 2022 |
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Nov 26, 2022 14:47
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Digging the posts! That's a lotta noir. I may watch some next month too for some noir...cember?
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Nov 26, 2022 23:33
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 The Shanghai Story (1954), dir. Frank Lloyd  Edmond O'Brien is back as a doctor living in Shanghai who along with other Westerners is captured by the Communist government and held in a hotel so that the Chinese can figure out who (if anyone) is a spy for the West. Ruth Roman is a rich woman who lives in the hotel and who is friendly with the Communists. Many assorted people, few of them super famous, play fellow guest-prisoners or Communist officials. Victor Sen Yung, who has shown up in past years in films like The Breaking Point, Moontide, The Letter, and Woman on the Run has a small part.  It's alright. The Shanghai setting is quite fresh and interesting, but most of the movie takes place within the hotel everyone is stuck in, so the movie doesn't get much use out of the setting. The Commies are slightly too cartoonishly evil; one of them leers over a woman, another refuses to let a child be treated for an illness, etc. There are basically no moral gray areas or intrigue and the romance is pretty perfunctory.  When the movie does venture out of the hotel it's more decent, especially when it's in the streets of Shanghai (although I think maybe that is just a studio in Hollywood). And there's no denying that O'Brien does a decent job, as he usually does. Happily it avoids any serious yellowface, which is kind of a miracle given the time period. I accidentally deleted most of my screencaps so two of the pictures here are very similar... 73/100
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Nov 27, 2022 16:30
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Figured I'm chime in with my takes on Tycho's viewings: A Woman's Face - 68 This Gun for Hire - 72 Journey Into Fear - 86 To Have and Have Not - 77 Conflict - 75 Spellbound - 70 My Name Is Julia Ross - 85 Deception - 77 The Chase - 83 So Dark the Night - 54 The Spiral Staircase - 66 Lured - 73 Framed - 76 The Fallen Idol - 72 Pitfall - 74 Champion - 82 House of Strangers - 56 The Big Combo - 93 Whirlpool - 64 The Raging Tide - 43 The Brothers Rico - 76 Act of Violence - 86 D.O.A. - 57 711 Ocean Drive - 75 Backfire - 72 Shield for Murder - 86 The Shanghai Story - have not seen Pretty close on most, but miles apart on some.
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Nov 27, 2022 20:49
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Always love to get other people's thoughts on the movies, and I'm thrilled to have found a noir you haven't seen!
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Nov 28, 2022 04:50
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 A Blueprint for Murder (1953), dir. Andrew L. Stone  Joseph Cotten's brother has been dead a while. His brother's original wife predeceased him. At some point his brother married Jean Peters, who is now stepmother to Cotten's two niblings, a niece and a nephew. Did I say two? I meant one, because the niece dies like 5 minutes into the movie. Pretty much everyone, Cotten included, is convinced Peters poisoned the niece, and the nephew is probably next, since once they both die, Peters gets to inherit all the money. But there's not enough proof to convict her, and in fact there's not enough proof to make it absolutely 100% sure that she did it. So obviously Cotten is in a bit of a pickle. Gary Merrill and Catherine McLeod play a married couple who help convince Cotten that Peters is a poisoner.  This is an interesting film. It's weirdly straightforward and unadorned. Almost every scene is very matter-of-fact: Cotten's like "wow it seems like she poisoned my niece," etc. while he goes about trying to prove this, trying to get her prosecuted, and so on, but he's relatively unemotional, as is everyone else involved, and there aren't many showdowns between him and Peters, because they spend most of the movie sort of awkwardly dancing around the topic. What, after all, do you say to someone whom you're pretty sure is plotting to kill your nephew, but whom it would be quite impolite to out and out say it, since you have no concrete proof? This plus a plot which actually mostly makes sense lend the whole thing an air of verisimilitude, especially compared to the melodrama and convolutions in typical noir.  Thankfully for the sake of drama, the climax does get more exciting. Overall I enjoyed it a decent amount but it's definitely a strange one and I could imagine someone hating it. Easily the most unrealistic part of the movie is a scene where Monopoly is played and the nephew seems to be having fun. Nobody has fun playing monopoly. This was written by the director, which is always neat. Ben Nye did the makeup. 81/100
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Nov 28, 2022 13:01
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 Niagara (1953), dir. Henry Hathaway  Joseph Cotten and Jean Peters are back, along with Marilyn Monroe and Max Showalter (credited as Casey Adams). Peters and Showalter are a couple on a second honeymoon of sorts to Niagara Falls. Monroe and Cotten are a couple who are already there. Noir things ensue.  Pretty good. Monroe was taking off as a movie star around this time and she's often noted as the standout here, but I think everyone does a good job. Cotten is basically doing the Robert Ryan thing from Act of Violence and I think he's quite effective. Peters is a typical noir woman protagonist and Showalter is kind of hilarious as a guy who doesn't realize he's in a noir. He spends most of his time going "gosh!" at various tourist attractions, laughing like a goofball, and thrilling at the fact that he won a contest for the company he works for, a shredded wheat manufacturer, so he gets to meet the vice president of the company or something.  The plot is nothing new but it basically gives you what you want from a noir, and the soundtrack is neat: it incorporates bells from the local belltower quite well. Maybe it's because I've been watching a month's worth of black and white films but this thing is loving gorgeous. Absolutely stunning colors. Even a shot of a cabin door looks beautiful. It's definitely reveling in the colors, what with multiple shots of rainbows and so on. Anyways that's why there are more pictures here than normal. Ben Nye did the makeup. If you like Niagara noir, another two movies to check out are Last Embrace (which is mostly interesting for being one of Jonathan Demme's first films, and also a relatively early one for cinematographer Tak Fujimoto) and The American Side (which sucks, although it has Robert Forster, Janeane Garofalo, and Matthew Broderick). 82/100  
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Nov 29, 2022 10:26
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It's the last day of Noirvember, and thus the last noir! The Killer is Loose (1956), dir. Budd Boetticher  Joseph Cotten is back as a detective who accidentally kills the wife of Wendell Corey while trying to apprehend Corey for the robbery of a savings and loan place. Corey swears revenge and goes to jail. As you can guess from the title of the film, 2 and a half years later he escapes, and that's bad news for Cotten, and also his wife, Rhonda Fleming, who apparently has been on his rear end more or less constantly because she wants him to quit the force and get a safer job. Alan Hale Jr. and Michael Pate are fellow detectives.  Another pretty good noir. It's rather lean and mean - no wasted time - and it spends as much time on the domestic drama of Cotten and Fleming arguing about whether he should be a cop as it does on the whole "there's a crazed murderer on the loose," which gives it a bit of depth. Its standout feature is easily Corey's portrayal of the criminal. He's nearly blind without his glasses and he has a chip on his shoulder from people making fun of him, and he's both quiet and terrifying in equal parts.  Wikipedia says one critic charged the suburban setting with making the movie somewhat bland, but I think it makes it more interesting: it's nice to see a noir outside of the typical big city setting, and although it doesn't lean as hard into it as it might, the way the friendly neighborhood turns threatening when there's evil about is kind of neat. A dog shows up for a few scenes. 83/100
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Nov 30, 2022 12:16
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As always, Tycho, thanks for the reviews. You've given me a few to track down myself this year.
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Nov 30, 2022 22:33
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November, aka Noirvember, is over. Now it is December, or, as it is also know... Neo-Noirvember. It's time for a month's worth of neo-noirs! And actually I'm going to do a Christmas noir for Christmas. 黒い河/Kuroi kawa (Black River) (1957), dir. Masaki Kobayashi  Fumio Watanabe, a bookish engineering student, moves into a pretty lovely apartment near a US military base. Ineko Arima is a waitress who catches his eye, but she also catches the eye of Tatsuya Nakadai, a local gangster sort of fellow. Noir events ensue.  This is the third movie in a row which is pretty good. Watanabe is decently complex: definitely quite nerdy, but he can also be spiky and even a little violent. Nakadai is absolutely a jerk but he's a believable one. Arima is in a tough position and she ends up driving a lot of the plot in interesting ways, especially at the end, which is excellent.  The movie is like 50% typical noir love triangle and 50% social commentary about the slums near the US military base. Unlike your typical US film, where the Communists are always horrible bad guys, there's a Communist character in here who is basically the only really decent guy in the whole movie. The social commentary stuff is fine but it sort of makes the movie a little bloated and unfocused. There's also some humor which doesn't land very well. This is our first neo-noir but I guess it's basically just a straight up late period noir. Oops. 84/100
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Dec 1, 2022 14:29
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Man, the Blue Dahlia kind of stinks. The Club Owner was pretty cool though
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Dec 2, 2022 06:00
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 錆びたナイフ/Sabuta naifu (Rusty Knife) (1958), dir. Toshio Masuda  Yujiro Ishihara killed someone years ago and now he's out of prison and trying to go straight along with fellow former gangster Akira Kobayashi. Years ago they both witnessed some other gangsters kill someone and frame it as a suicide, along with Jô Shishido. Shishido now tries to blackmail those gangsters , drawing Ishihara and Kobayashi into the mess, along with Mie Kitahara, the daughter of the guy who was killed.  This is the fourth movie in a row which is pretty good! Ishihara does a great job straddling the line as a violent person who really wishes he weren't violent, and the whole movie does a nice job interrogating the costs of violence and what it means to stand up to it. There's a great fight scene that drags on for a while, sort of like the alley scene in They Live. There's also a pretty good truck chase scene.  This is another movie which is pretty much just late noir rather than neo-noir, but we're definitely getting relatively late. It's almost the 60s. Shishido, who mostly has a bit part in this, later shows up in (among other things) a bunch of great neo-noirs like Branded to Kill and Youth of the Beast. 83/100
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Dec 2, 2022 13:17
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 豚と軍艦/Buta to gunkan (Pigs and Battleships) (1961), dir. Shōhei Imamura  Hiroyuki Nagato is a young criminal punk in Yokosuka, where much of his gang's activity revolves around a pig farm which itself is based on some complicated scheme involving the American naval base. His girlfriend Jitsuko Yoshimura works in a bar but is constantly being pressured to effectively sell herself to some American sailor or another. Tetsurō Tamba is the leader of the gang Nagato is in, which is sort of a subsidiary of a larger gang. Many things transpire.  Really stupendous. It's full of humor but far from making things goofy, that only adds to its already incredibly sharp edge. The movie is an extremely energetic condemnation of American imperialism, economic disadvantage, and thug life. It's also definitely our first true neo-noir: I dunno if the À bout de souffle was an influence, but either way there are some crazy cuts in here of the sort you'd never really see in a 40s or 50s noir.  What keeps it from absolute greatness in my eyes are two things, both of which are kind of silly, but I can't help it if I feel how I feel. First, although the humor hits 99% of the time, I think Nagato is maybe like 10% too goofy 20% of the time. It's almost like watching a character from Loony Toons. Tonally I don't think that quite works. Second, I think literally 80% of the dialogue is screamed. Like, everyone spends the whole movie yelling at each other. Stylistically it definitely helps add to the frenzied pacing and atmosphere but it really wore me out! By the end of the film I was gasping for subtlety or at least some peace and quiet. Pigs feature prominently, and the main character wears a baseball cap with the Confederate flag on it. 87/100
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Dec 3, 2022 13:01
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