Tag: film noir

Noirvember: The Night of the Hunter (1955)

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Apologies for not getting a Friday Night Horror movie up this week. I had planned to make this film that post as it blends both elements of film noir and horror, but Friday turned into a very long day. Work was a series of mistakes and irritations and then my daughter performed at the high school football game. I was happy to support her but by the time we got home, I was nothing but exhausted. I did manage to watch this, but there was no chance my brain could come up with something to write about it.

Four days later and here I am.

I think The Night of the Hunter was the very first film noir I ever watched. I can’t be quite sure of that because I didn’t always know what film noir even was so it is possible something else was seen earlier than this, but I don’t know what that would be. I don’t even know exactly when I first watched this film. I remember being spellbound by it, but nothing surrounds that memory to give me a clue as to what time frame it occurred. At a guess, I would say college or maybe just after.

It doesn’t really matter, but I like tracking these things. It was definitely early days in my life as a cinephile. I had started watching classic movies and understanding them as art, but not so early that watching a film like this was a revelation.

I hadn’t watched this in years and maybe it is a revelation. It’s just so damn good. So strange in some ways, and beautiful. It was the first and only film ever directed by actor Charles Laughton. It bombed at the box office and they never gave him another chance in the director’s chair. I weep at what we missed because of that.

Robert Mitchum plays Harry Powell a man who uses the veil of religion to lure women into his snare, marry them, kill them, then leave with their money. He’s got Hate tattooed on one hand and Love on the other. He loves to tell a flamboyant story about how Love conquers Hate which generally enthralls the listener.

While in prison for theft he meets Ben Harper (Peter Graves) a man sentenced to be hanged. In his sleep, Ben mumbles something about the $10,000 he stole and something else about his kids knowing where the money is hidden.

That’s all Harry needs to go on the prowl again. Once he’s out he finds Ben’s wife Willa (Shelley Winters) and quickly seduces her. Well, maybe seduce isn’t the right word. He woos her, talks her into marriage and then basically casts her aside. There is one chilling scene, their wedding night, where she comes in ready for the lovemaking and he lectures her that sex is but for childbearing, and since she’s already got two there is no need for them to consummate their marriage.

The kind veneer disappears for the children as well quite quick. At first, he acts as a loving father and gently works for them to spill the secret of the money, but wen that doesn’t work he gets angry and mean. The girl, Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) dotes on Harry, but the boy, John (Billy Chapin) knows what’s up.

Soon enough the kids are on a skiff floating down the river, desperately trying to escape the murderous grip of Harry. They wind up at the home of Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish) a widow who lost her own child to the Depression and has started taking in homeless children. There they find kindness, grace, and love.

But while the story is really good, the filmmaking makes this a true classic. It is very theatrical in its production. The sets look stagey. Even the supposed outdoor scenes have an artificiality to them. It is designed to constantly remind you that what you are watching isn’t real, it is a story. A morality play. But it is also gorgeously put together.

There is a scene that takes place in Harry and Willa’s bedroom. It is a strangely shaped room with a sharply angled ceiling and a high window. Light shines brightly through that window but shadows loom. The camera sits way back, through what would have to be a wall. blackness frames the room, again as if we were watching a play.

Another scene is shot inside a screened-in porch at Rachel Cooper’s house. She sits in a rocking chair with a shotgun in her lap. Outside stands Harry Powell, waiting. The light inside the porch is off. We see her in shadow. A streetlight illuminates the preacher. Then a young girl enters with a candle. Now we see Rachael more clearly but it darkens our view of Harry Powell. The candle is blown out and he’s gone. It is masterfully staged.

Everything about the film is masterful. Robert Mitchum has never been more menacing. Shelley Winters never more vulnerable. And Lillian Gish is an angel.

It is a great movie. A great film noir. One of the very best.

Noirvember: The Face Behind the Mask (1941)

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Welcome to Noirvember my friends. We begin my most favorite month with a pretty good little film starring Peter Lorre.

He stars as Janos Szabo a just off-the-boat Hungarian immigrant. He is full of hope and love for his new home in New York City. With only a few bucks in his pocket, he’s also relying on the kindness of strangers. Sometimes he finds it.

Sometimes he don’t.

A kindly police officer gives him a meal and directs him to a comfortable, but cheap hotel. A fire is accidentally started by another tenant and Janos’ face is badly burned. His hands, which are full of skill; in clockmaking and airplane mechanics – jobs he had in Hungary, were untouched in the fire.

He should be able to find a job easily. But because of his face, he is turned away at every corner. Desperate, he goes to the docks to throw himself off. There he meets Dinky (George E. Stone) a small-time crook who knows what it means to be at the end of his rope. They become fast friends.

At first, Janos pushes back against Dinky’s criminal instincts, but unable to find a job and desperate to receive an operation that might fix his face, he eventually relents.

Turns out Janos is really good at crime. He becomes the boss of a gang and begins rolling in dough. The plastic surgeon is unable to repair his face, but he gives him a pretty good-looking face mask to wear. But it isn’t enough. People still notice. People still stare.

Then he meets Helen (Evelyn Keyes) who is blind. They fall in love and Janos must decide between his life of crime and the woman he loves.

Peter Lorre is wonderful in the role. His transition from the naive innocent at the beginning of the film to the hard-edged criminal at the end is masterful. But he also maintains a warm heart that we see in his scenes with Helen. Evelyn Keyes is lovely as well.

The story is fine. There are some nice moments and the final scenes are terrific. It takes a fascinating look at the immigrant experience, and how our society so often grinds them into criminals. It really puts Janos through the wringer at every opportunity.

But there was something about it that didn’t quite work for me. Something in the filmmaking I think. It never grabbed me and completely pulled me into the story. But it is a fine film to start Noirvember off with and a good one for Peter Lorre fans.

Noirvember: All the Films

Several years ago film critic Marya E. Gates created the hashtag #noirvember. That stands for film Noir + November. I’ve played along for the last four or five years and two years ago I started blogging about it.

Here’s the list of films I’ve covered so far.

Berlin Express (1948)
Beware My Lovely (1952)
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)
The Big Clock (1948)
Black Angel (1946), Second Review
The Black Glove (1954)
Blackout (1957)
The Blue Gardenia (1953)
Blueprint for Murder (1953)
Brighton Rock (1948)
The Dark Corner (1946)
Dark Mirror (1946)
Dear Murderer (1947)
The House on Telegraph Hill (1951)
Human Desire (1954)
The Face Behind the Mask (1941)
Fallen Angel (1944)
The First Power (1990)
Guilty Bystander (1950)
Johnny Allegro (1949)
The Killer is Loose (1956)
Man on the Run (1949)
Night and the City (1950)
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
No Way Out (1950)
Odd Man Out (1947)
Pitfall (1948)
Reign of Terror (1949)
Rusty Knife (1958)
So Long at the Fair (1950)
Targets (1968)
This Gun For Hire (1942)
Woman on the Run (1950)

Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XX

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Alan Ladd was one of the great film noir actors. He had a star-making turn as a contract killer in This Gun For Hire alongside Veronica Lake. He made three more noirs with her and continued to star in various noirs throughout his career. Kino Lorber presents two of those films in this set (Captain Carey, USA & Appointment with Danger) and then there is one film without him (Make Haste to Live).

The two films with Ladd are pretty good and the other – not so much. But I continue to love this noir sets from Kino. You can read my full review here.

Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XVII

Edward G. Robinson is one of my favorite actors. He became famous for portraying snarling, and deadly gangsters, and he’s great in that type of role in films like Little Ceasar and Key Largo (1948). But he made all types of other films from film noirs to comedies to heartfelt dramas. One of my favorite roles of his was his very last, the bookish best friend of Charlton Heston in Soylent Green (1973).

This edition of Kino Lorber’s long-running noir series stars Robinson during a dark period of his career. He’d been blacklisted by HUAC and could only find jobs with poverty row studios in low-budget b-pictures. These are certainly not his best films, but I just love that they are getting the Blu-ray treatment. You can read my full review here.

Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XVIII

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Kino Lorber has been putting out these film noir sets for a few years now. I love them. I’ve watched most of them and reviewed more than a few. The thing with them is that they are collecting the b-sides of film noir. The best films in the genre get their own single releases. They get special editions. These films get packaged together in a set of three.

Naturally, not all of them are going to be good. In fact, I only liked one film in this entire set – Crashout (1955). But the other thing about these sets is that I love that they keep putting them out. I love that these mostly forgotten films are getting nice little Blu-ray releases even if they don’t get a lot of special features and come in sets of three.

You can read my full review of this set here.

They Drive By Night (1940)

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Humphrey Bogart is my all-time favorite actor. He was one of the biggest stars of Hollywood’s golden age. But he didn’t start out that way. He actually languished for over a decade before becoming a star. He spent most of that time being billed third or fourth in gangster pictures. They Drive By Night helped push him into the spotlight. It was not a gangster picture, and while he was still third-billed the movie was a big hit and it showed off his range. A year later he’d star in The Maltese Falcon and the rest is history.

George Raft is the star of the picture. And Ida Lupino. The film is a mix between a social message movie and film noir. It’s pretty good.

You can read my full review here.

Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XIX

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I’ve reviewed a bunch of these film noir sets from Kino Lorber over the last few years. Not all of the films are great, some of them are pretty lousy if I’m being honest, but I love that these films are getting released in HD.

This set features stars such as Charlton Heston, Barbara Stanwyck, Lizabeth Scott, Robert Ryan, and Ida Lupino (those last two are in Beware, My Lovely a film I reviewed last Noirvember).

All three films are pretty good if not exactly true classics. You can read my full review here.

Murder Mysteries In May: Blood Simple (1984)

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Rare has a debut film been so self-assured, so completely full of what would become the filmmaker’s regular themes and style than the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple. It isn’t their best film, but it is a great one, and it is absolutely through and through a Coen Brothers movie.

The title comes from a line in Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest in which a character starts getting a little punchy after being involved in a series of murders. The plot is original, but it was clearly influenced by another hard-boiled crime writer – James M. Cain, with bits of Jim Thompson thrown in for good measure.

The Coens would return to the hard-boiled film noir well many times in their careers. Their third film, Miller’s Crossing stole plot points from two Hammett novels – Red Harvest and The Glass Key. The Big Lebowski is a modern, stoner retelling of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Neither Fargo, No Country For Old Men, nor The Man Who Wasn’t There seem directly influenced by any hard-boiled novel that I know of, but they fit right into that milieu.

But let’s get back to Blood Simple. The plot finds a sleazy bar owner named Julien (Dan Hedaya) hiring Loren Visser (M. Emmett Walsh) an even sleazier private detective to kill his wife Abby (Frances McDormand in her first film role) who is cheating on him with his barkeep Ray (John Getz).

One of the many joys of the film is following its labyrinth plot so I don’t want to spoil anything, but I will say things do not go as planned. Like so many noirs none of the characters are particularly bright, and rarely do they actually understand what’s going on. I don’t think either Abby or Ray ever realized that Loren even exists.

All of the Coen’s style is here, even if it is in a slightly rougher form. There are a couple of bravura shots that feel like first-time directors trying to show off what they can do, but they are pretty impressive all the same.

The entire cast is fantastic. Frances McDormand immediately shows herself to be one of the greatest actors of a generation. But the movie belongs to M. Emmett Walsh. He’s great in everything, but he’s particularly slimy here (and wonderful).

It is a terrific film, one that keeps getting better everytime I watch it and an absolutely smashing debut for some of my favorite directors.

Murder Mysteries In May: Cover Up (1949)

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In my review of the 1935 adaptation of The Glass Key, I mentioned a scene in the 1942 remake that starred William Bendix. In that scene, Bendix plays a thug who gets to slap around Alan Ladd’s character. He does so with such gusto that he nearly steals the movie. It made me an instant fan.

I’ve since watched 11 films starring the actor where he’s mostly played tough guys, loveable lugs, and the like. He was a bigger man physically, and not exactly handsome so he fits the role of the heavy, but there is a goofy warmth to him, which makes him interesting.

In Cover Up he plays Larry Best the sheriff of a small, Midwestern town investigating a murder. Except he doesn’t seem all that interested in investigating it at all.

It is actually an insurance investigator, Sam Donovan (Dennis O’Keefe) who does most of the investigating. The dead man was shot and the sheriff ruled it a suicide. The trouble is the gun is nowhere to be found, and there are no powder burns on the body which would indicate being shot at close range. When Sam pushes Larry for answers he just shrugs it off. In fact, no one in the town seems all that interested.

Turns out the dead man was good and hated by pretty much everyone. Clearly, he was murdered and clearly, it is being covered up. Almost everyone in town is helping with the cover-up because whoever killed him is well-liked and the dead man deserves to be dead. To a normal investigator, this would be enough. Suicide prevents an insurance pay out and that’s that.

But Sam is no normal investigator. He pursues the matter strongly even if murder means a double indemnity payout. The film owes a clear debt to Double Indemnity but it is nowhere near as good.

Naturally, there is a girl. Anita Weatherby (Barbara Britton) becomes the love interest. She’s also the daughter of one of the prime suspects. But there is little heat between her and Sam and almost no cleverness to their dialogue. Even my beloved William Bendix doesn’t add much. He’s fine, but rather more reserved than usual.

The mystery is serviceable and it is set at Christmastime which adds a nice holiday theme to what is really a rather cozy film noir. That’s the thing, it isn’t a bad film, it is exactly the kind of movie you might throw on during the holidays while you are at your in-laws, full of ham and good cheer.