Noir Cinema: The Brothers Rico, Nightfall, City of Fear

Concluding our reviews of Columbia Pictures’ Film Noir Classics Volume II collection.

With Warner Brothers’ once-mighty film noir compilations nearing the end of their quality barrel and Fox’s library of single-servings discs seemingly DOA, Columbia Pictures’ recent box set releases have a good claim on sitting atop a genre market that, despite the flood of product available, is nowhere near exhausting itself. It’s been fairly said elsewhere that the studio waited a long while before getting into the back-catalog noir marketplace, yet the second half (or so) of this second volume – we reviewed the first two films a couple of weeks ago – offers some rare and unexpected treats for the noir fan, with only one comparatively weak film in the bunch.

Adapted from Georges Simenon’s bleak novel and arriving pretty close to the end of the classical noir era (and perhaps creaking a bit under the weight of the genre’s advancing years), director Phil Karlson’s The Brothers Rico (1957) nevertheless features one of the genre’s great leading men, Richard Conte, in a storyline that sometimes plays like a coda to both the gangster films of the 1930s as well as the more classical noir cycles of the 40s. It’s overly simplistic and chronologically inaccurate to say it’s a “last call film noir,” but it’s hard not to see it as such while you’re watching.

When his wiseguy brother (Paul Picerni) begs him to find the younger sibling (James Darren) who’s disappeared after driving the getaway vehicle on a contract killing, former mob accountant Eddie Rico (Conte, older than his 1940s heyday but no less commanding as a leading man) gets badgered by his former capo (Larry Gates) to bring the brother back into the fold “for his own good.” Despite a legitimate business and a wife (Dianne Foster) hoping to adopt a child (an odd subplot, especially for the mid-50s) Eddie travels first to New York and then out West on his brother’s trail, uncovering a snarling tangle of duplicity and treachery within the same organization that used to command his loyalty.

Perhaps that sense of changing times fuels the sense of finality to much of the plot – the gangs and fraternal mobs that the Rico brothers grew up within have mutated in the sunshine of 1950s wealth (the film is largely shot in sparkling, sun-drenched Florida towns) into impersonal, ruthless “organizations” with little sense of personal worth or individual dignity. The screenplay’s ‘s sharp contrast between the amiable malice of the organization’s underlings and the Old World emotionality of the Rico brothers’ mother (Argentina Brunetti) drive such comparisons home, as does Conte’s turn as a man slowly realizing the integrity and honor he believed in for much of his life has come to nothing.

Karlson and screenwriters Lewis Meltzer, Ben Perry and Dalton Trumbo do right by the Simenon’s story until a cluttered third act works too hard to shuffle all the plot threads into a happy, Americana ending. As with set companion film Human Desire, cinematographer Burnett Guffey’s composition work is engaging and  flawless, giving the syndicate scenes a flat, sterile look while investing Conte’s boyhood neighborhood and his brother’s hideaway homestead with depth and texture.

Guffey also worked on Nightfall, teaming with director Jacques Tourneur; for the lay audience, Tourneur directed Out of the Past, the 1947 Robert Mitchum thriller that’s become both paragon and poster child for the genre as a whole. The teaming of the two, and with a screenplay from Sterling Silliphant (In The Heat of the Night) adapting George Goodis’ novel, ought to be a better film than it is, even if determining why it’s not seldom proves especially difficult.

Aldo Ray plays James Vanning, a commercial artist from Chicago who stumbles across two stranded bank thieves (Brian Keith and Rudy Bond) while camping in Wyoming with a friend. The thieves kill the friend and leave Vanning unconscious, but a simple twist leaves Vanning with their stolen $350,000. Fleeing to Los Angeles because he suspects he’ll be accused of the murder – the friend’s young wife was making a play for him – Vanning tries to lay low but is soon discovered by a curious insurance investigator working for the bank (James Gregory). He also starts reluctantly, irresistibly pursuing a fashion model (Anne Bancroft) with whom he crosses paths.

Keith and Bond are fantastic as the ruthless, persistent thugs dogging Ray’s every step, and an early interrogation scene at a darkened oil derrick provides the kind of shadowy brutality that will leave noir fans drooling. Keith is sharp as the methodical brains of the two, but Bond brings such sadistic glee to his part that his every movement is chilling:

If only the protagonists were so exciting. Ray was seldom accused of grace or fluidity in his acting, and as the straight-arrow Vanning he’s believable but stolid, though the script sometimes gives him enough edge to allow for desperate outbursts of violence and fear. Bancroft is less compelling as the good girl who falls into Vanning’s orbit and never quite comes out. The film stalls whenever their romance revs up, including a mid-film fashion show that’s as prolonged as it is unnecessary. Gregory’s insurance investigator is no Jim Reardon of The Killers, and most of his scenes – except for a dull domestic interlude with his wife – serve merely to move the plot forward.

Ultimately, all those side elements ballast the film from getting either dark enough or violent enough to really work on its own, with the promised retribution and vengeance taking a last-minute back seat to the extraneous plot motions. Nevertheless Guffey excels at framing both the city and the Wyoming countryside (at times matching or even exceeding George E. Diskant’s glorious rural noir photography of On Dangerous Ground), and Tourneur’s agile manipulation of the flashback-heavy narrative keeps the story crisply suspenseful.

Cool poster, though.

If Nightfall‘s greatest sin is a surplus of its story elements, 1959′s City of Fear labors under a paucity of details. Starved for plot despite a head-swimmingly weird – and incredible – premise and padded out to even its 81 minute runtime, it sometimes succeeds when sticking strictly to the noir playbook. Other times it’s not so competent, with too many stalls and doldrums to allow any real momentum to build under its meager machinery.

Vince Edwards, a little while yet before becoming television’s Ben Casey, stars as an escaped convict racing to L.A. with a canister of what he believes is pure-grade heroin. He plans to cut the dope up and sell it, the better to live in luxury with his sexpot girlfriend (Lee Remick lookalike Patricia Blair), with help from his former boss at a ladies’ shoe boutique (Joseph Mell). But the white powder in the canister isn’t heroin, it’s… well, best to let the film explain:

If you can accept that the government allowed San Quentin inmates anywhere near “the most deadly thing in existence,” you’ll enjoy the film so much more.

The manhunt for Edward’s crazed, ailing Vince Ryker forms the film’s second and third acts, which too often include long, establishing takes that allow suspense or tension to fizzle. Director Irving Lerner often seems at a loss for where to point the camera, and given the obvious small-scale budget that’s somewhat understandable. But given the outrageous premise, the building of desperation – 84 hours to save every man, woman, and child! – seems to deserve more ratcheting.

Regarding the performances, Edwards and Blair are comely in that uniquely 50s American sort of way, sexy without every really becoming carnal, and Mell is ferret-like in his turn as the scheming Crown. And though most of the film’s law enforcement types seem sent directly from central casting, trash film cinemaphiles will recognize Lyle Talbot, co-star of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen or Glenda?, as Police Chief Thorsen. City of Fear isn’t quite on those film’s humble level, and it’s obviously not meant to be great cinema, either. But when matched with the other films in the compilation, its great sin lies in showing its poverty among such proud company.

- Michael Kabel

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Noir Cinema: Human Desire, Pushover

Inspecting two low-key, razor-sharp thrillers from Columbia’s Film Noir Classics II.

Though by the 1950s the popular appeal of film noir cinema continued to warrant big-budget productions including Sunset Boulevard and Ace In The Hole, its broken heart and weary soul remained in smaller-budget, smaller-scale efforts that commonly made up for in story and performance what they lacked in production costs. As Paul Shrader pointed out in his seminal 1972 essay “Notes On Film Noir,” by the 1950s noir had grown self-aware, the films’ characters realizing the despair and “disintegration” of their lives and acting through their end-of-the-line existential contempt.

The second volume of Columbia Pictures’ Film Noir Classics series contains five films from this end stage of the genre’s development, and the best two films contained in its set almost seem to groan under the weight of that ennui. Nevertheless both sets have been shrewdly compiled – perhaps better than their competitor’s offerings – providing noir fans obscure works that nevertheless can satisfy the casual observer as well.

The best of Volume II‘s set, Human Desire, reunites director Fritz Lang with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame in an adaptation of Emile Zola’s 1890 novel La Bete Humaine. Lang had previously and famously directed Ford and Grahame in The Big Heat the previous year, but where that gangland revenge saga prided itself on muscular dramatics and an almost grotesquely heated tone, the focus this time rests on despair and self-recrimination. It’s a smaller, quieter effort, but that shouldn’t be confused in any event with a less worthwhile result. Quite the contrary: that anyone attempted such a uncompromising look at working class squalor during the artificial sunshine of the Eisenhower Era cuts to the heart of noir’s lasting contrarian value, and all three principal actors are at the top of their game.

Railroad engineer Jeff Warren (Ford) returns from years of service in the Korean War to the exact same job he left in the exact same dreary Pacific Northwest town. He’s even boarding with the same family, though their teenage daughter Ellen (Kathleen Case) has matured enough to pursue him with wide-eyed splendor. Ellen wants to give Warren the stable life of fishing trips and evenings at the movie theatre he says he wants, but in short order he’s distracted by Vicky Buckley (Grahame), the sultry wife of his boozy, irascible yard boss Carl (Broderick Crawford.)

When Carl blows his cool and gets sacked, he devises a scheme to use Vicky’s wiles on a local businessman in order to regain his position. But Vicky and the big shot have a sordid past, and Carl realizes too late he’s cuckolded by their affair. Enraged, he beats Vicky and plots the businessman’s murder on the return train from the city. Warren, wandering the train’s corridors, sees a shell shocked post-crime Vicky and, after some introductory kissing, lets himself get used for her alibi.

The two fall in love in short order, holding an illicit romance in some of the least romantic locales imaginable – the railroad break yard, a sleazy apartment in the city, Vicky and Carl’s drab cottage. Nevertheless, Warren gets hooked on Vicky’s charm full throttle. Vicky, an archetypal femme fatale is ever one was put on film, wants Warren to murder her husband so that they can be together, the local gossip be damned, the better to get from beneath Carl’s blackmailing heel.

Warren is tempted, for reasons beyond Vicky’s charms. He’s bitter about his wartime experience, not just the rigors of combat but also the division of wealth and status among the troops. Asked about girls overseas, he bitterly remarks that the officers got all the pretty ones before he arrived. His affection for Vicky reflects that class envy: he doesn’t kiss her so much as try to swallow her whole.

But double crosses and treachery abound, and deciding if Vicky has been completely forthcoming all along is part of the film’s snaky allure. Lang and cinematographer Burnett Guffey fully deploy the rich potential of the trains’ visuals, showing their quick swerves and sudden jerks as lucid metaphors for fate and random twists of circumstance. Moreover, the still locations of indifferent taverns, rustically furnished tract houses and cheap apartments seem ephemeral, ready to be packed up or discarded at a moment’s notice. Human desire is fleeting, the film suggests, and fraught with disaster at a moment’s lapse of judgment.

Similarly, director Richard Quine uses tight, enclosed spaces to structure his enthralling suspenser Pushover, elevating the routine setup promised by Roy Huggins’ script into something else altogether. It’s a sharp suspense film that rests disaster on the timing of an elevator or the turn of a hallway, and makes you feel each tick of the clock along the way. It manages all this thanks in no small part to the precision of Fred MacMurray’s performance as (shades of Double Indemnity a decade previous) a previously straight arrow getting pulled into crooked acts by an irresistible blond (Kim Novak, in her debut role.)

When the early morning bank heist by a ruthless thief (Paul Richards) results in the murder of a security guard, Los Angeles detective Paul Sherman (MacMurray) cozies up to the thief’s girlfriend Lona (Novak) to help set up a stake out of her apartment. Teamed with his cynical partner (Philip Carey) and a veteran (Allen Nourse) with both feet dangling off the wagon, Sheridan finds staying away from Lona harder to do when she’s under his constant inspection. The two slink around the corners of her fortress-like apartment building to see one another, avoiding Sheridan’s colleagues and planning to murder her boyfriend once he shows up with the $200,000 taken from the heist.

Sheridan’s plan to distract his teammates seems foolproof (has anything good ever come after the phrase “seems foolproof”?), but in short order one twist and circumstance happens after another to bring the lovers’ hopes crashing down. The alcoholic detective steps inside a corner bar for a quick nip, missing his cue in Sheridan’s plan; the nurse that lives next door (Dorothy Malone) spots Sheridan coming out of Lona’s apartment. The thief gets caught, but Sheridan impulsively shoots him dead, casting suspicious doubt on his motivations that results in compels him to kill one of his fellow detectives and face the ire of their commanding officer (E.G. Marshall).

It’s the biggest treat of the movie that so much happens so quickly, and with such precision staging that the events never for a moment seem forced. Rather, Quine milks each character’s turn down a hallway or glance at the right moment to be fraught with peril, as indeed it is. In many ways all the characters, in true noir fashion, are trapped in a maze of manipulation and deceit in which each decision plays directly into the last. Cinematographer Lester White makes full use of the noir tropes of wet, glistening city streets but also takes advantage of the small sets and empty spaces of an L.A. that’s still expanding with post-war prosperity. Perhaps most chillingly, the empty darkness of a vacant lot seems to hover constantly on the horizon of every external shot, as if an abyss waiting just in the near distance. Overall, the production looks small-scale and modestly budgeted, but doesn’t look cheap, either.

MacMurray is effortlessly charismatic and repulsive at the same time, coolly planning betrayal with a minimum of moral conflict. Sheridan is something of a stock role, but he and Novak both invest their characters with a strange quality, not entirely unlike sympathy, that brings them the viewer’s support. Malone is perky and all-American, and perhaps reveals the film’s odd comment on gender roles: the women live in comfortable apartments, while the men sit in cold, wet exteriors or hunker in abandoned living rooms, watching them and imagining the happiness and comfort they promise. Carey, Marshall and Nourse are competent in largely stock roles, but their very anonymity works to give them a calm, unassuming universality that for genre fans will work firmly in its favor.

The second half of this compilation’s reviews includes coverage of The Brothers Rico, Nightfall, and City of Fear.

- Michael Kabel

Missing In The Dark

Five film noir classics that need and deserve a DVD release.

For as many great film noirs have received an American DVD release over the last decade – a list that easily runs dozens of titles long – some of the better or more curious examples of the form have yet to see publication. Most of these elusive titles are not famous, and in fact many of them possibly remain obscure even among film noir aficionados. Yet, despite and nevertheless, they’re both eminently entertaining in their own right and dependable – if not superlative – representatives of the genre.

We consider the following five films to be fascinating noir showpieces that have become eclipsed, somewhat, by the fame of their better-known (and, admittedly, better-made) contemporaries. They’re generally less well-known than such genre watersheds such as Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon, nor as critically embraced as, say, Night and The City or Pickup On South Street. But they are fascinating works and successful realizations of noir’s haunting potential and ambience all the same, well worth viewing as they make fleeting appearances on the various cable networks. Sooner or later, hopefully, they’ll take their DVD bow.

1. He Ran All The Way (1951) – After accidentally killing a policeman, desperate small time crook Nick Robey (John Garfield) uses the family apartment of lonely spinster Peggy Dobbs (Shelley Winters) to hide out while the ensuing citywide dragnet cools down. Peggy’s father (Wallace Ford) is leery from the first, but Robey’s charisma and intimidation combine to keep him tenuously, marginally safe, thanks in no small part to the dark fascination he has for Peggy.

Terrified and defiant at the same time, Robey is a loser who’s made a shambles of his life, smart enough to realize it but lacking the moral courage to do anything about it – the prototypical noir anti-hero and fertile ground for Garfield’s electric screen presence.

Providing an eerie poignancy to Robey’s desperation, the role turned out to be Garfield’s last. He suffered a fatal heart attack less than a year later.

2. Cry of the City (1948) – An almost archetypal urban gloom fills Robert Siodmak’s downbeat, melancholy thriller. Smooth criminal Martin Rome (Conte) killed a police officer during a getaway but was wounded himself; escaping custody and attempting to secure a flight for himself and his girlfriend (Deborah Paget), he’s pursued by Lt. Candella (Mature), a childhood acquaintance from the same Italian ghetto. Candella works to find Rome while, in scenes contrasting the city’s menace, attends to Rome’s family with an almost tender deference.

At the time of its release the film won praise for its bleak, uncompromising depiction of urban poverty and the wide array of disreputable personalities living in the city’s edges. Though less revered than Siodmak’s other noir entries (The Killers, Criss Cross), its pervading sense of desperation and, as author Colin McArthur points out, the “almost metaphysical hatred” with which Candella pursues Rome make the film completely riveting viewing.

Conte would team with Jules Dassin for the masterful Thieves Highway as his next release, while this film won Mature the critical praise that had eluded him for his previous turn in Kiss of Death.

3. Union Station (1950) – When a secretary (Nancy Olson) believes two fellow passengers aboard a California commuter train are involved in criminal activity, she enlists the help of Los Angeles’ Union Station police lieutenant (William Holden) to locate them. The men have kidnapped the blind daughter of the secretary’s wealthy boss, and with help from a wily city detective (Barry Fitzgerald) the police race to locate the missing girl, using whatever means necessary to secure her safety and punish the kidnappers.

Director Rudolph Mate (D.O.A.) uses the spacious, labyrinthine corridors and atria of the famous train depot to underscore a sense of frenzied movement and steely momentum. The police, far from the guileless upholders of law and order typical of 50s police fare, approach their work with the same ruthless tenacity as the criminals. Critics have suggested the film played an influence on later, more cynical noir artists, including perhaps most notably James Ellroy. It’s not hard to see why, especially in the similarities that Fitzgerald’s outwardly kindly, pragmatically ruthless Inspector Donnelly share with Ellroy’s Captain Dudley Smith.

4. The Blue Dahlia (1946) – Exemplifying noir’s recurrent theme of post-war disillusion with American society and the veterans who were left to fend for themselves, Raymond Chandler’s original screenplay depicts a returning bomber pilot (Alan Ladd) attempting to solver the murder of his philandering wife (Doris Dowling.) Teaming with her boyfriend’s estranged wife (Veronica Lake) and his two crew mates (William Bendix and Hugh Beaumont), he tries to track down the gangster that may be responsible.

Chandler’s trademark blend of weary romanticism and brittle cynicism translate well to the big screen, though George Marshall’s (Destry Rides Again) direction is straightforward almost to a fault. Ladd is perhaps a bit too laconic to really inhabit the complexities of his character, while Lake is gorgeous and fetching as always. The truly weighty performance, however, belongs to character heavyweight Bendix. He gives his brain-damaged attack dog of a veteran equal parts sorrow, rage, and confusion.

Of all the films on this list, we understand this film’s absence from DVD shelves the least. It’s received at least one release overseas, and the far less-satisfying Ladd-Lake collaboration This Gun For Hire has been available in the United States for years.

5. The Naked Alibi (1954) – A B-movie in probably every sense of the term, this lean and gritty suspenser casts Gene Barry as Al Willis, an ostensibly upright (if hard-drinking) citizen hiding a dangerous secret. After the cops who roughed him up are killed, he’s perused to a seamy border town by the police chief (Sterling Hayden) who holds him responsible. Once free of his familiar setting, Willis’ psychotically violent true personality emerges, and he’s reunited with his torch singer girlfriend Marianne, played with almost preternatural sexiness by noir siren Gloria Grahame. The climactic rooftop pursuit is edge of the seat cool and intense at the same time, even if for some its plot details too closely resemble those of fellow Grahame showcase The Big Heat.

For the film’s nightclub performance pieces, director Jerry Hopper (The Atomic City) wisely allows the notoriously self-conscious Grahame to lip synch, evading the same pitfall that so harshly damaged her career after Oklahoma!, released the following year.

If you know of any online petitions to get these or other films published, pass it along and we’ll be sure and post them here on the blog. In the meantime, we’ll be back next week. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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Film Noir Cinema: Ray of Night

Remembering the early noir work of legendary director Nicholas Ray

Though the public is probably best familiar with his seminal 1950s classics Rebel Without A Cause and King of Kings, and film historians point to his groundbreaking Bigger Than Life and Johnny Guitar, film noir aficionados know Nicholas Ray for his innovative, revelatory direction of such classics as In A Loney Place and They Live By Night, among others. Completing seven noirs between 1948 and 1952, Ray’s sensitivity to the isolation felt by the the nation’s youth, his fascination with sexual identity, and his willingness to depict violence would influence both the French New Wave (especially Jean Luc Goddard) as well as Arthur Penn, Terrence Malick, and the new generation of American filmmakers of the 1960s and 70s.

A libertine sometimes as infamous for his decadence as respected for his body of work, Ray came to filmmaking only in his mid-30s, having studied for a time as an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright and working in radio and on Broadway. In 1944 he learned to direct film by following Elia Kazan through the making of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, that director’s own first feature. In time Ray would do most of his best work at Howard Hughes’ RKO Pictures, where Hughes’ influence likely protected his hedonist lifestyle from attracting unsavory publicity, directing whole films and parts of films as Hughes demanded.  

The Live By Night (1948) – Ray’s début feature begins with a dizzying overhead chase sequence and doesn’t break tension for a moment throughout. Teen escaped convict Bowie (Farley Granger) and gas station attendant Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell) fall in love and go on the run after Bowie participates in a bank heist gone bad; the ending (shown below) is not “happy.” Violent and shocking in its criticism of law enforcement and “the system,” its early impressionism directly influenced later works such as Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands. Robert Altman made Thieves Like Us, his own version of Edward Anderson’s source novel, in 1973.

Knock On Any Door (1949) – Humphrey Bogart stars as a successful corporate attorney compelled by guilt to defend a Skid Row youth (John Derek) charged with the murder of a police officer. The film remains notable for its complicated structure and intricate plot, even while its aggressive social commentary and heavy pacing make it seem melodramatic and pedantic by modern standards. Still, Bogart is masterful as always, and the final courtroom speech prefigures later cinema courtroom barnstorming including Compulsion, A Time To Kill, and dozens more.

A Woman’s Secret (1949) - This “women’s noir” only marginally fits inside the genre, thanks to Ray’s moody mis en scene and the complicated interpersonal dynamics between stars Maureen O’Hara and noir arch-femme fatale Gloria Grahame. The two play singers at different ends of the same career – O’Hara on her way down, Grahame on her way up - and in love with the same man (Melvyn Douglas). The plot and suspense are fairly straightforward, though all the principals give solid performances. Ray married Grahame shortly after production concluded, a miserable union for them both that began and ended in adultery.

In A Lonely Place (1950) – The marriage lasted long enough, however, for Ray to get Grahame into the role that would become her finest performance. Co-star Bogart wanted his own wife Lauren Bacall for the part of Laurel Gray, the steadying presence that promises to redeem screenwriter Dixon Steele (Bogart) after years of self-destructive rage. Based on Dorothy B. Hughes’ pulp novel, the story is the stuff of which Gender Studies dissertations are made: full of exploration into gender roles, emotional and sexual dominance, and Freudian symbology. Ray expresses such moody ideas through careful screen composition, stark pacing, and by finely tuning Grahame and Bogart’s chemistry.

The Racket (1951) Ray returned to the noir genre after the melodrama Born To Be Bad and the war actioner Flying Leathernecks, reteaming with those films’ Robert Ryan to remake the 1928 silent movie about a crime boss (Ryan) on a collision course with an honest police captain (Robert Mitchum). Under Hughes’ micromanagement Ray directed only part of the film, and his style never entirely meshed with co-director John Cromwell’s more straightforward aesthetic. The stars’ performances are meanwhile odd and uneven, turning what should have been a promising rematch (after the two squared off in 1947′s semi-noir Crossfire)  into a routine genre exercise.

On Dangerous Ground (1952) – The fourth Ray-Ryan collaboration produced some of the actor’s best work, playing a live wire police detective sent from the city into the hinterlands as much to avoid a brutality inquiry as to solve a murder. While pursuing a suspect with assistance from the victim’s father (Ward Bond), Ray’s detective falls for the suspect’s blind sister (Ida Lupino), a relationship that threatens his precarious self-respect while simultaneously tempting him with a cleaner way of life. Working from an adapted script by A.I. Bezzerides, Ray takes the noir out of the city and into the countryside, finding  just as much isolation and paranoia in the wide open spaces as the tight corners of the city, and just as much human capacity for violence and cruelty. Bernard Herrmann’s tripwire-taut musical score brings everything together.

Macao (1952) – Sometimes considered a road company Casablanca, this adventure in the titular Far Eastern port stars Mitchum as an ex-G.I. and Jane Russell as a nightclub singer falling in love while while falling over each other in a seedy casino. Grahame appears as the moll of a local crime boss, while William Bendix also co-stars as an undercover cop. The sexual equilibrium between the leads harkends back to Ray’s earlier work, but the framing of the exotic port of call never really gets below the setting’s surface. Still, fans of the stars will find it entertaining nonetheless.

Ray filmed Rebel Without A Cause in 1955, but innuendo surrounding an illicit romance between he and 16-year-old star Natalie Wood, along with increased substance abuse, took its toll on his reputation. After collapsing on the set of 1963′s 55 Days in Peking, he went more than a decade without a directing credit, eventually settling down to a teaching position at Binghampton University. That career too was rocked with controversy, when footage from the student film We Can’t Go Home Again displayed Ray smoking marijuana with his students. His last film effort, 1979′s experimental Lightning Over Water, was completed with assistance from long time fan Wim Wenders. Ray died of lung cancer that same year.

- Michael Kabel

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Up All Night With Too Many Movies

Five films we recently recorded and then stayed up too late checking out.

What film insomnia sometimes feels like.

For the movie addict, DVR’s are the enemy of sleep. With their easy to use onscreen plot summaries and simple recording features, it’s nothing to set something to record, day or night, and come back to it when you’ve got the time. Besides the premium networks, Fox Movie Channel, American Movie Classics, and the incomparable Turner Classic Movies all show dozens of films a week, most of them – to us, anyway – too tempting not to hit the jolly, candy-like record button.

We’ve recently checked out these five films, going over them in multiple sittings and then browsing the web for background information to give their virtues and faults some (often much-needed) context. A few of them are markedly better than others, while one or two are just about at their proper level as a late-late-LATE feature. But, we realize every old film is probably somebody’s favorite, and the opinions below are just our own.

FM (1978): Long on style and short on character development, this loose dramedy is a pleasant enough romp about disc jockeys at a freewheelin’, free-format Los Angeles radio station, one seemingly a million miles away from both the disco and punk revolutions. The rambling plot sometimes tries too hard to embrace Robert Altman’s formlessness via legendary cinematographer John A. Alonzo’s (Chinatown) direction, while too many characters clutter up the proceedings. Cleavon Little and Martin Mull do impress, however, as jockeys using their star power mostly to get laid. Thoughts before turning off the light: A missed opportunity to make a true cult classic, unfocused and trying too much at once to settle on a tone or meaning. Like the vanished AOR format it celebrates, it’s only fun until something comes on you don’t care for.

Music Within (2007): A feel-good, true-story movie that wants you to like it, and you want to, too, except it doesn’t quite come together like it should, despite a hell of a lot of advantages. Ron Livingston (Band of Brothers) stars as Richard Pimentel, who overcame a strained childhood with a schizophrenic mother and then almost total deafness sustained during the Vietnam War to crusade for disabled persons’ rights. The film follows Pimentel as he gives up a safe corporate job to follow his dream and talent of public speaking, as well as his long friendship with a writer almost completely debilitated by cerebral palsy (Michael Sheen). Thoughts before turning off the light: Too many cliched scenes and too much underwritten dialogue spoils a great story. Though it’s not exactly the case, in retrospect two-thirds of the film seemed to take place in musical montage. Pimentel, for all his accomplishments, probably deserves a better tribute. Livingston is almost always better than the films in which he appears.

Thieves Highway (1949): When his truck-driver father is crippled by a crooked San Francisco fruit merchant (Lee J. Cobb), war veteran Nick Garcos (Richard Conte) drives a truckload of apples up the pre-freeway California coast to get even. Gorgeously directed by noir master Jule Dassin (The Naked City) and tautly written by A.I. Bezzerides, adapting his own gritty novel. The performances are all flawless, especially Valentina Cortese as a hooker put into Garcos’ line of fire and Millard Mitchell as the doomed trucker trying to do right by the Garcos family. Thoughts before turning off the light: Criterion deserves props for including this film in its catalog; the chase sequence was riveting.

A Woman’s Secret (1949): A singer with a burned-out throat (Maureen O’Hara) stands accused of shooting her more successful, though far more uncouth, protege (Gloria Grahame). Her piano player lover (Melvyn Douglas) sets out to prove her innocence, instigating a series of flashbacks. Director Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without A Cause) does the best he can with the potboiler material, though there’s a going-through-the-motions feeling throughout. Grahame, always disdainful of her singing voice, lip-syncs her musical numbers. (The film’s production brought about Ray and Grahame’s disastrous marriage). Thoughts before turning off the light: Were it made today, this sleek little b-movie would be a centerpiece of any ratings period for the Lifetime Movie Network, or even a comeback project for Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony.

Deterrence (1999): Set in the then near-future world of 2008, the nation’s first Jewish president (Kevin Pollak) and his staff scramble to deal with Iraqi aggression while stranded in a snowbound Colorado diner. Far from having a mandate, President Emerson is an appointed veep who came to the office through attrition, and his races, ethnic and campaign both, only complicate the rapidly escalating tension. Critic-turned-filmmaker Rod Lurie (The Contender) wrote and directed this, his debut feature, and his grasp and reach haven’t quite come together yet. Pollak is energetic, while Timothy Hutton is convincing as his pragmatic chief of staff. Thoughts before turning off the light: The ending is a total cheat, as frustrating as a lesser episode of The Twilight Zone but without the creepy ambience; Pollak’s presence is missed on the current movie landscape.

For what little it’s worth, here’s what up next in our DVR queue: The 70s sci-fi classic Westworld; The ebullient mystery Shadow of the Thin Man; Noir heavyweights Sterling Hayden and Dan Duryea facing off in Manhandled; and the early-career Marilyn Monroe suspenser Don’t Bother To Knock. Feel free to post your own recommendations below.

- Michael Kabel
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Woman On The Verge: Gloria Grahame

Five haunting performances from film noir’s troubled femme fatale.

She wasn't hard to look at, either.

Hollywood too quickly forgets its stars, discards its leading women quicker still, and is sometimes merciless with performers considered “difficult.” Possibly no other actress of the post-war generation was so under-appreciated, or so self-sabotaging, as frequent film noir temptress Gloria Grahame.

Beginning as a contract player in light comedies for MGM (discovered by no less than Louis B. Mayer himself), her screen persona – made of equal parts fragility and resolve, mixed with a beauty that suggested the girl next door gone a little astray  -  never entirely caught hold with the public, even as she worked in classic films with the biggest movie stars of the era. Still, she was able to create a unique place for herself in film history, part sex symbol and part actor’s actor, combining the sensuality of Marilyn Monroe with the craftsmanship of a trained stage actress.

Grahame’s big break came in 1946 while on loan to RKO Pictures, playing party girl Violet in Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. She worked constantly through the late 40s and into the early 50s, despite personal problems, crippling self-doubt, and a stormy reputation that dogged her career. A marriage to Rebel Without A Cause director Nicholas Ray (the second of four) began in trouble and ended in lurid scandal, though he directed her in In A Lonely Place, probably her best performance.

The five films below represent some of her best and also some of her most defining work. All are available on DVD.

Crossfire (1947): RKO bought out Grahame’s contract in 1947, rushing her into this mystery about returning G.I.’s and the murder of a sympathetic Jewish civilian. Grahame’s role, as a weary dance hall girl longing for a better life, formed the beginning of her noir screen persona: the slightly damaged goods trying to regain her footing in the tough man’s world of the city. Her time before the camera amounts to one long dialogue with troubled GI Mitchell (George Cooper) and a few other small scenes, so that her part is ultimately little more than a reprise of It’s a Wonderful Life‘s Violet. Nevertheless, she’s irresistable when compared to the middle class entitlement of Mitchell’s bland, Donna Reed-esque wife (Jacqueline White).

The film belongs to its male stars, Roberts Mitchum, Young, and Ryan, three tough men at odds over the brutal crime. Yet Grahame’s performance remains the most memorable, full of longing and the self-defensive cynicism that would become the trademark of dozens of film noir “dames” yet to come.

In A Lonely Place (1950): Grahame met Ray while co-starring in his “woman’s noir” A Woman’s Secret the year before, and the director would later refer to that first film as “a disastrous experience, not least of all because I met her.”  Their second collaboration, based on the pulp novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, was by contrast a noir masterpiece: dark and romantic, with wry and melancholy comments both on the movie industry and about the gender roles found in even casual relationships. Off camera, Grahame struggled for co-star Humphrey Bogart’s acceptance throughout production, largely because Bogart had campaigned unsuccessfully for wife Lauren Bacall to get her role.

Lucky for Grahame that didn’t happen. Playing the salvation-promising Laurel Gray oppostie Bogart’s explosive screenwriter Dix Steele allowed her to project calm and poise after years of vamping. The scene below comes just after Gray provides Steele with an alibi in the disappearance of a nightclub hat-check girl:

The Bad and The Beautiful (1952): Grahame spent the two years after In A Lonely Place going through the bad girl motions in routine fare like Macao and The Greatest Show On Earth, but rebounded by joining the ensemble cast of Vincente Minnelli’s meaty show business expose. The rise and fall of a studio executive (Kirk Doulgas) is told through the reminiscences of a director (Barry Sullivan), a screenwriter (Dick Powell), and an actress (Lana Turner). The twist is that all three have good reasons to hate him, as their flashbacks illustrate.

Grahame plays the screenwriter’s lascivious, slightly manipulative Southern debutante wife, bringing more versatility and charm to the character than was probably intended. It’s a small but crucial part, as her fate defines the executive’s ultimate act of treacherous ambition. By making the character so endearing, so out of place among the Hollywood shark race, Grahame helped move the whole movie where it needed to go – no small accomplishment considering her heavyweight costars. The Academy noticed, awarding her the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

The Big Heat (1953): Fritz Lang’s furious tale of a cop (Glenn Ford) out for vengeance against the gangsters who killed his family includes so many archetypal noir story elements that it can function as an introduction to the genre all by itself. It’s a violent, stark, brutal film, muscular and remorseless in the self-assured way only 50s cops dramas could manage.

Playing the sexpot bad girl yet again, this time Grahame’s floozy gets the chance to repent after her thug boyfriend (Lee Marvin) scalds her face with a pot of hot coffee. But previous to that she’s his equal in malice, blowing through his cash and mocking his fear of the syndicate leaders that outrank him.

Grahame, versatile as ever, makes her previously amoral character capable of provoking real pity once she’s disfigured. Her revenge, fueled by self-loathing,  is chillingly convincing – and no wonder. Always conscious of her looks and disdainful of a creased upper lip she considered ugly, Grahame resorted to plastic surgery and cotton implants to straighten out her lipline. At least one botched procedure left her upper lip paralyzed and her face seemingly frozen.

Odds Against Tomorrow (1959): Grahame’s career cooled following a disastrous turn as Ado Annie Carnes in Fred Zinnemann’s screen adaptation of Oklahoma!, amid reports of difficulty on the set and fights with co-stars. Four years later, director Robert Wise cast her in a small but memorable role in his noir about a gang of payroll robbers derailed by the slow-boiling racism of its members (Robert Ryan and Harry Belafonte.) Grahame’s role is once again small, but helps embellish the monstrous egotism of Ryan’s ex-con antagonist.

Considered by some the last true noir of the genre’s classic 1950s era, the film was also Grahame’s final screen appearance for seven years. She turned to television and stage work both in the United States and Britain, eventually making something of a shabby return to the screen in 70s B-movies such as Chandler (1972) and Mama’s Dirty Girls (1974). She died of peritonitis after surgery for stomach cancer, aged 57,  in 1981.

- Michael Kabel

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Put The Summer Heat On Ice With Classic Film Noir

Five films to cool off the steamy mid-summer nights in the naked city.

These films are our "big combo."

Despite its shadowy milieu, film noir is the cinema of heat: the heat between a man and a woman, the friction between men on collision courses, the burning need for vengeance or justice or just getting a little distance from your circumstances. It’s the perfect kind of film to relax with during the summer, when nerves and patience already run short – preferably with a whirring ceiling fan overhead and a tall glass of something chilled.

We’ve grown accustomed to Warner Brothers releasing their Film Noir Classic Collection box sets each July, but it looks as if they’re not doing that again this year. So we’ve put together our own five-pack of classic and semi-classic films to get you through the night.

1. Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) This ain’t the storybook you had as a kid. When a hard-boiled detective with one too many brutality complaints accidentally kills a murder witness, he must frame an innocent man for the crime – even as he falls in love with the man’s daughter.

One of several noirs and neo-noirs by writer-director Otto Preminger and starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney (the others include the classic Laura), the film is noir at its most primal. Yet the story remains nuanced and memorable long after viewing, thanks to compelling performances from every cast member. Though Mitchum and Bogart are most commonly considered noir’s reigning heavyweights, Andrews’ incredible reserve and depth help make him the thinking man’s noir anti-hero. DVD: Part of Fox’s “Fox Film Noir” library.

2. Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) Though many count 1955′s Atomic Age-themed Kiss Me Deadly as the last great noir of the classic period, Odds Against Tomorrow better deserves that title, looking ahead as it does to the Civil Rights Movement while still retaining noir’s classic themes and motifs. Harry Belafonte, Ed Begley Sr. and noir titan Robert Ryan conspire to rob a small town bank. But Ryan’s ex-con is a hardbitten racist, and the tension between him and Belafonte’s gambling addict simmers into a twist ending that M. Night Shyamalan only wishes he could concoct. Noir siren Gloria Grahame and Shelley Winters glimmer and tempt as women drawn into Ryan’s self-destructive orbit. DVD: Available from MGM.

3. Black Angel (1946) When a gadabout is falsely convicted for the murder of a blackmailing nightclub singer, his loyal wife (June Vincent) teams with the singer’s alcoholic ex-husband (the underrated Dan Duryea) to prove his innocence. Together they infiltrate a nightclub run by a powerful gangster (Peter Lorre), even as the ex-husband’s alcohol-racked memory begins to reveal the killer’s true identity. Haunting and memorable without lapsing into sentimentality or melodrama, the film remains undercelebrated but a must-see nonetheless, especially for the lush cinematography and the fine performance by the all-but-forgotten Vincent. DVD: from Universal.

4. The Blue Dahlia (1946) Not to be confused with Brian De Palma’s 2006 flop The Black Dahlia, this sharp edged, brittle bit of noir reunites frequent co-stars Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake in Raymond Chandler’s original screenplay about a returning World War II fighter pilot investigating the murder of his dissipated wife. Chandler’s script is reflective of his Philip Marlowe novels’ serpentine plots and crisp dialogue, while Ladd and Lake’s chemistry lights up the screen as it did in This Gun For Hire and The Glass Key.

In real life, a bartender gave Hollywood starlet Elizabeth Short the nickname “The Black Dahlia” because the movie was playing at a theatre down the street. Short liked the name, keeping it until her gruesome murder the following year. DVD: Somehow, The Blue Dahlia is yet to come to DVD. Just the same, it’s still widely available on VHS.

5. Kiss of Death (1947) An imprisoned jewel thief (Victor Mature) testifies against his cohorts to get early release after his wife’s suicide leaves their children indigent. Once on the outside, he works undercover to help the District Attorney (Brian Donlevy) bring down psychotic killer Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark).

The film belongs to Widmark, who plays the well-named Udo with such wide-eyed glee that Mature’s straight-jawed line delivery is almost completely overshadowed. You probably won’t ever forget the scene where Udo giddily throws a wheelchair-bound old woman down a flight of stairs. DVD: Also part of Fox’s “Fox Film Noir” library.

- Michael Kabel

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