Noirvember #2: The House on Telegraph Hill (1951)

the house on telegraph hill

I know I said I wasn’t going to write about every movie I watched for Noirvember, yet here we are. I definitely won’t be writing full reviews of everything. Like tonight I’m too tired to say much. But I’ll say a little.

The House on Telegraph Hill was directed by Robert Wise which is why I decided to watch it. He directed the wonderfully spooky haunted house movie The Haunting (not to mention West Side Story, The Sound of Music and a bunch of others) which is why I watched it.

It is about a woman, Victoria (Valentina Cortese) who survives a Nazi concentration camp, and takes on the name of her friend who died there. The friend was American. When she arrives in San Francisco she discovers the friend (and thus her) has inherited a lot of money. She marries the man who has been taking care of her son, only to later discover that he is perhaps not quite what he seems. She’s pretty sure he is going to murder her.

It is a bit slow-moving and the intrigue never quite intrigues. The performances are fine and Wise’s direction is good. It isn’t bad, but neither is it all that good.

Noirvember: The Big Clock (1948)

Knowing that I’m a big film noir fan, my wife recently bought me a bunch of postcards with film noir posters on them. Some of them I’ve seen, some of them I haven’t. A big chunk of my list of films to watch this month comes from those postcards. This is one of them.

Ray Milland plays George Stroud an editor at a big magazine in New York City. His boss Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton) is tyrannical. He’s the type of guy who calls a meeting to yell at everybody because subscriptions are down, then demands they come up with immediate solutions only to berate them when they respond. He doesn’t berate George because he’s just got a major lead on a missing person’s case. Janoth demands that George stick with the case even though he has a vacation planned for the next day.

George can’t miss that vacation. He’s missed too many vacations with this job, including his honeymoon. His wife is none too happy with him. He quits the job, but still misses his train. A glamorous woman, Pauline York (Rita Johnson) overhears his predicament and sees it as an opportunity. She’s Janoth’s secret lover and she’s ready to sell him out. She wants George to tell the story.

She gets herself murdered. Janoth learns that someone was seen leaving her apartment not long after the time of death. He forces George to supervise a team of reporters to figure out who that man was.

Spoiler alert: that man was George. He spends the rest of the movie trying to find himself.

The Big Clock is a lot of fun to watch. Milland and Laughton are terrific. Elsa Lanchester, in a tiny role, steals the show. It is one of those films that’s really quite good, but there is some little something that keeps it from being great. Still, it is a swell time at the movies.

Noirvember (2022)

Now that 31 Days of Horror is officially over we can now move on to Noirvember. That’s an amalgamation of Film Noir + November. Film Noir is a cinematic genre without a solid definition. When filmmakers were making film noirs during what is now considered the classic period (the 1940s and 1950s) the term wasn’t widely known. It was coined by a French critic in 1947 but was not widely used until the 1970s. Noir is the French word for black and even though the films are usually shot in stark black and white he was talking about the character’s dark night of the soul.

The fims are usually, but not always, crime dramas. They usually, but not always, follow a police detective or a private detective as they solve a case, or just as often they follow the criminal. There is often (but not always) a love interest, and if that’s a woman, she is usually a femme fatale. The criminal is often a bit of a schmuck. They are always cynical and hard-boiled.

Many of the plots come from the hard-boiled literary school of authors like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Jams M. Cain. Classics of the genre are Double Indemnity (1944), The Third Man, Mildred Pierce (1945), and The Maltese Falcon (1941).

I love a good film noir, probably even more than I love a good horror movie. I’ve participated in Noirvember for the past several years and just like my 31 Days of Horror list I made a Letterboxd list of films I’d like to watch this month. This year I tried to include a lot of relatively obscure films in the list. I’ve seen most of the classics and I want to broaden my knowledge base of the genre. I know I won’t watch all of these films, and I will watch many other films that aren’t on this list. But it is a good place to start.

I will be writing about many of the movies I watch for this theme. I’ll try not to bomb you with quite as many reviews as I did last month. But I can’t really make a promise about that.