Category Archives: Noir Month

The Big Steal
Directed by Don Siegel
1949/USA
RKO Radio Pictures
First viewing

[box] Lt. Duke Halliday: [to Joan] I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t like to turn around, Chiquita. Besides that there’s a guy behind me with a gun. Remember?[/box]

In the build up for my repeat viewing of Out of the Past, I thought I’d take a look at Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer’s other pairing.  While this one is pleasant enough, it doesn’t hold a candle to the 1947 classic and barely earns a noir classification in my book.

Mitchum plays Lt. Duke Halliday.  Duke is being framed by Jim Fiske (Patrick Knowles) for robbing a $300,000 Army payroll.  He chases Fiske to Mexico.  En route he runs into Army detective Capt. Blake (William Bendix) and steals his credentials.  When Duke catches up to Fiske he meets Joan Graham (Greer), to whom Fiske owes money.  Most of the movie is taken up Duke and Joan chasing Fiske with Blake in close pursuit.  With Ramon Navarro as a Mexican police official and John Qualen as a fence.

This is a cross between a romantic comedy and a caper action film.  Most of it takes place outdoors in the bright Mexican sunshine.  There is no femme fatale and no doomed protagonist.  There is a bit of noir photography toward the end and plenty of subterfuge.  It fits my broad definition of film noir as it is included in the Keaney Film Noir Guide.  It’s OK for a Saturday afternoon entertainment but nothing very memorable.  Jane Greer somehow has lost the luminous beauty she has in Out of the Past.  Part of it is undoubtedly the lighting.  She also is not flattered by dark lipstick.

The production history set forth in the commentary is pretty interesting.  Howard Hughes bought RKO the same year this was made.  Robert Mitchum, the studio’s biggest star, was arrested for possession of marijuana shortly before this was to go into production. Hughes decided to bet on Mitchum’s continued popularity and left him in the film. However, Lizbeth Scott, who was slated to play the Greer role, did not want her name linked with Mitchum’s and pulled out.  Several other actresses then refused the role.

Greer had previously been Hughes’ girlfriend but was now married.  Hughes had called her into his office and told her she would sit out her contract and not work again for the studio. He was forced to eat his words to get his movie made.  The movie started production and then Mitchum was sentenced to 60 days jail time.  Some of the contortions forced on the filmmakers undoubtedly affected the outcome of the finished film.  For example, Bendix and Mitchum share almost no screen time and there are less action scenes than had been planned.

Clip

This Gun for Hire
Directed by Frank Tuttle
1942/USA
Paramount Pictures
First viewing

[box] Philip Raven: You are trying to make me go soft. Well, you can save it. I don’t go soft for anybody.[/box]

Alan Ladd’s screen magnetism made him a star his first time out in this sometimes hokey but enjoyable early noir.  The film also was the first in a series pairing Ladd with co-star Veronica Lake.

I honestly thought I had seen this one before but obviously had only heard the title as I thought Ladd played a private detective!  In fact, his character, Philip Raven, is a hired assassin who does in a blackmailer who holds proof that a chemical company has sold defense secrets to the Japanese.  Despite his cool killing, we know that deep inside he is good because he is kind to small kittens.  The bad guys at the chemical company double cross him by paying him off in bills they promptly report as stolen to the police.  Raven is now hell-bent on revenge.

Seperately, a U.S. Senator approaches nightclub singer Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake) to investigate the chemical company and its agent Willard Gates (Laird Cregar), who also happens to be a nightclub owner.  Of course, Ellen is in love with the police detective (Robert Preston) who is assigned to the investigation of supposed robber Raven.  All these coincidences reach a perfect storm of implausibility when Ellen and Raven chance to sit next together on a train.  Ellen attempts to make a better man of Raven as he holds her hostage while attempting to evade the police and exact his revenge.

Despite several eye-rolling moments, there is much to like about this film.  I especially enjoyed Laird Cregar as the cowardly, peppermint-munching Gates.  Ladd had undeniable charisma, so much so that the filmmakers couldn’t quite make him a villain.   This muddles the conclusion of the film quite a bit as the filmmakers couldn’t let him off the hook for his bad deeds either.

Clip – Alan Ladd meets Veronica Lake – and a historic pairing is born

Nightmare Alley
Edmund Goulding
1947/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Repeat viewing

[box] Stanton Carlisle: It takes one to catch one.[/box]

I radically revised my opinion of this deeply cynical carnival noir for the better after a several year hiatus.  I liked it so much this time I can’t imagine what I was thinking before.  I must have been in a bad mood.

Tyrone Power gives a career-topping great performance as womanizing carnival barker Stanton Carlisle, who seizes the main chance by romancing mentalist Zeena (Joan Blondell) to gain access to a code that enabled her and now alcoholic partner Pete (Ian Keith) to hit the big time as a mind-reading act.  Stanton is not above pushing Pete over the edge with a quart of moonshine to get him out of the picture.

In the meantime, Stan is two-timing Zeena with Molly, a beautiful hootchy-cootchy dancer. When he gets what he wants out of Zeena, he promptly ditches her for Molly and they strike it rich doing a mind-reading act in big city nightclubs.  But Zeena’s tarot cards have predicted a big fall for Stan and he may have met his match in the lady he seeks to exploit when he decides to turn spirtualist.

This is a profoundly bleak movie, haunted as it is by the specter of the carnival geek, an “attraction” consisting of a man-beast who bites the heads off of chickens, played by a carnie who has sunk so low he will work for a bottle a day and a place to sleep it off.  (Funny how the word geek has morphed in the last 66 years!)  It was not too surprising to learn that both the director and the author of the source novel committed suicide.  This may have turned more people off alcohol than any movie but The Long Weekend.

Tyrone Power is a revelation in this.  I had never really “got” his appeal but he is both absolutely gorgeous in his many t-shirted scenes and shows off some real acting chops here.  Joan Blondell and Ian Keith are stand-outs as the over-the-hill vaudevillians.  The story and dialogue are deliciously hard-boiled.  Proceedings are slightly marred in the last 60 seconds by a ray of hope that appears from nowhere in Hollywood fashion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aVfqtQaiac

“Trailer”