Joan Crawford won an Academy award in 1945 for Mildred Pierce, and, two years later, she was trying her utmost to win another. Her gripping, melodramatic star turn helped make Possessed a hit and a prime example of post-war film noir. Crawford can’t find happiness with either Van Heflin or Raymond Massey, and her fiery emotions drive her into a lethal frenzy. Based on Rita Weiman’s book One Man’s Secret, Possessed is told almost entirely in flashbacks, the goal being to figure out what drove Crawford’s character crazy.
Nick Cherney, in prison for embezzling from Torno Freight Co., sees a chance to get back at Johnny Torno through his young priest brother Jess. He pays fellow prisoner Rocky, who gets out a week before Nick, to murder Jess...who, dying, tells revenge-minded Johnny that he'd written a clue "in the Bible." Frustrated, Johnny obsessively searches for the missing Gideon Bible from Jess's hotel room. Meanwhile, Nick himself gets out with murder still in his heart. But another factor is in play that none of them (except the murdered Jess) had planned on.
The primary protagonists in this routine drama are two French journalists, Delmas (Pierre Grasset) and Moreau (Jean-Pierre Melville, the director), and also the city of New York at night. The two journalists are on the trail of a story -- a French diplomat has disappeared from the U.N. for no apparent reason. As they wander through the city tracking down the reason for the disappearance, the journalists eventually discover that the diplomat has met with foul play. Now the two men have a serious disagreement. Delmas wants to take photos of what happened and use them to create sensational headlines and plenty of attention, but Moreau wants them both to cover up what they have found and bury what they know.
99 River Street is one of director Phil Karlson's brutal, sweaty excursions into film noir, and it has as many detractors as it has admirers. Certainly, there's a lot to applaud in River, starting with the economical way in which Karlson tells this complicated story. Karlson, as usual, is in love with close-ups, and there's a reason for it: they force the audience to concentrate on the character at hand, to experience his experience in a direct and no-nonsense manner.
MY BROTHER'S WIFE, Wishman-heads are back in safe territory with plenty of cutaways to paintings, chairs, and shoes and awkward dubbing. But more than a roughie, this film is Wishman's take on the 40s film noir genre, with a doomed love triangle, scheming criminals, hard-boiled dialogue and a number of far-fetched plot twists amidst the typical Wishman trappings. To keep the plot moving, a cast of familiar faces play each sad and pathetic character. To play the unhappy hausfrau, Wishman tapped June Roberts, a baby-faced nude model whose figure could cut glass and who bears a striking resemblance to Mike Vraney and Something Weird's #1 lady, Lisa Petrucci. Roberts would also grace the films of Barry Mahon, Michael Findlay, and Joseph Mawra, but her talents would be best tested by sexploitation maestro Joe Sarno in a leading role in MOONLIGHTING WIVES and supporting roles in FLESH AND LACE, THE NAKED FOG, RED ROSES OF PASSION and THE LOVE MERCHANT.
Marvellous anti-Nazi propaganda film structured as noir thriller, with Donlevy as the man who assassinates Heydrich in Prague in 1942, hiding out with the Resistance when the Gestapo implement a retributory reign of terror in the city. Brecht, who originally worked on the script with Lang, claimed that his ideas were betrayed by the final product; but Lang's insistence that for most of the film he did employ the writer's work seems borne out by many fine sequences, with the taut, typically Langian action often interrupted by speeches that comment both didactically and intelligently on the proceedings.
Producer Val Lewton once more utilized leftover Magnificent Ambersons sets for his psychological horror piece The Seventh Victim. Kim Hunter arrives in New York's Greenwich Village in search of her errant sister Jean Brooks. Gradually, the naive Hunter is drawn into a strange netherworld of Satan worshippers. The story is a bit too complex for its own good (especially with only a 71-minute running time to play with), but editor-turned-director Mark Robson and screenwriters Dewitt Bodeen and Charles O'Neal keep the thrills and shudders coming at a satisfying pace. Lewton regular Tom Conway offers his usual polished performance, while veteran character actresses Isabel Jewell and Evelyn Brent look appropriately gaunt and possessed in the "cult" sequences.
Out of the Past is so perfect a film noir that it is considered practically a textbook example of the genre. In his first starring role (it had previously been offered to John Garfield and Dick Powell), Robert Mitchum plays Jeff Bailey, the friendly but secretive proprietor of a mountain-village gas station. As Jeff's worshipful deaf-mute attendant (Dick Moore) looks on in curious fascination, an unsavory character named Joe (Paul Valentine) pulls up to the station, obviously looking for the owner.
Questioned as a murder suspect, solid (but drunk) citizen Al Willis attacks his police questioners, is beaten, and swears vengeance against them. Next night, Lieut. Parks is murdered; Willis is the only suspect in the eyes of tough Chief Conroy, who pursues him doggedly despite lack of evidence. The obsessed Conroy is dismissed from the force, but continues to harass Willis, who flees to a sleazy town on the Mexican border. Of course, Conroy follows. But which is crazy, Conroy or Willis?
Director Yves Allégret and screenwriter Jacques Sigurd followed their successful Dédée d'Anvers (1948) with this bleak noir melodrama featuring rising star Gérard Philipe. It is a film that is characteristic of its time – grim, hopelessly pessimistic yet still offering a glimmer of hope for the future. Whilst the film reflected the post-war mood well, it was not a great success with the French public. By 1949, poetic realism was well and truly dépassé. The film’s commercial failure belies the fact that this is easily amongst Yves Allégret’s better works, even if it has been virtually forgotten.
...follows a young woman named Claire who is on a quest to find her scientist father who abandoned her and her brother several years earlier when she was still a teenager.
The world is in the grip of an unnamed disease that has driven humanity to the brink of desperation. Claire’s father has developed a serum called “The Drip” that keeps the disease at bay to those who use it constantly, but leaves them literally ‘numb” to life and quite useless.
Dana Andrews is a former journalist who's so anxious to match the success of his first book that he allows himself to confuse hubris with good intentions. After setting off on a ridiculously convoluted scheme to generate material for his new book (by undermining the state's capital punishment policy), he soon comes to realize that fate, she is fickle, and justice, she is blind.
Dillinger, the was the ninth effort from the enterprising King Brothers, and their most financially successful film to date. Lawrence Tierney became an overnight cult favorite with his gritty portrayal of maverick bank robber John Dillinger, though top billing is bestowed upon Edmund Lowe as gang chieftain Specs. The film traces Dillinger's criminal career from his first petty theft to his spectacular 1934 demise outside Chicago's Biograph Theater (incidentally, this film was banned in Chicago for several years). Anne Jeffreys plays Dillinger's fictional moll Helen, while Elisha Cook Jr., Marc Lawrence, and Eduardo Ciannelli go through their usual crime-flick paces. The film's set piece is an elaborate armored-car holdup, lifted in its entirety from footage originally shot for Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1937). Screenwriter Philip Yordan, fresh from his Broadway triumph Anna Lucasta, earned an Academy Award nomination for Dillinger.
Swift, brutal, and black-hearted, Allen Baron's New York City noir Blast of Silence is a sensational surprise. This low-budget, carefully crafted portrait of a hit man on assignment in Manhattan during Christmastime follows its stripped-down narrative with mechanical precision, yet also with an eye and ear for the oddball idiosyncrasies of urban living and the imposing beauty of the city. At once visually ragged and artfully composed, and featuring rough, poetic narration performed by Lionel Stander, Blast of Silence is a stylish triumph.
A movie truly ahead of its time, Ace in the Hole (also known as The Big Carnival) turned out to be too bitter and cynical for moviegoers in 1951. An unrelenting portrait of media sensationalism and the human obsession with tragedy that propels it, the film is based on a true story that also spawned Robert Penn Warren's novel The Cave. Director, screenwriter, and producer Billy Wilder suffered perhaps the biggest commercial and critical failure of his career with Ace, losing much of his standing at Paramount, even though the movie was released between two of his most enduring and popular triumphs, Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Stalag 17 (1953). Ace was perhaps not up to the standard of those works, but it clearly stands as one of Wilder's many achievements. It's hardly surprising that this film failed to find a mainstream audience, despite the added attraction of emerging star Kirk Douglas in the lead. American culture wouldn't be ready for such a large dose of pessimism until the 1970s; even then, a film such as 1976's Network, which clearly paralleled the tone of Wilder's effort, was dismissed by many viewers as too hysterical. - Brendon Hanley
In the swift, cynical Sweet Smell of Success, directed by Alexander Mackendrick, Burt Lancaster stars as the vicious Broadway gossip columnist J. J. Hunsecker, and Tony Curtis as Sidney Falco, the unprincipled press agent Hunsecker ropes into smearing the up-and-coming jazz musician romancing his beloved sister. Featuring deliciously unsavory dialogue, in an acid, brilliantly structured script by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, and noirish neon cityscapes from Oscar-winning cinematographer James Wong Howe, Sweet Smell of Success is a cracklingly cruel dispatch from the kill-or-be-killed wilds of 1950s Manhattan.
Baazi, the first film by acclaimed director Guru Dutt, who made some of the most politically conscious films in India during the turbulent times of Nehru's leadership, follows a young man forced by circumstances into a life of crime. Faced with dire poverty, Madan (Dev Anand) has taken to gambling, and soon wins enough to open his own casino with the money he wins. When he meets sophisticated doctor Rajani (Kalpana Kartik), the two are instantly attracted to each other, but their different social classes and backgrounds make their union impossible. Instead, Madan takes up with Leena (Geeta Bali), a free-spirited girl who teaches him that, just as in gambling, to get what he really wants he must go all in. But when tragedy strikes and Madan is framed for murder, Inspector Ramesh (Krishan Dhawan)--the man Rajani's father wants her to marry--steps in. He understands that Madan is not the criminal that society wants to believe he is, and works to clear his name.
Louis Bertain, a respectable garage owner by day, is the head of a band of notorious crooks by night. When a hold-up goes badly wrong, Bertain’s younger brother Pierre is suspected of having sold them out to the police. He was, after all, recently picked up by the police and then released after questioning. When he is finally caught by Commissaire Pluvier, Louis discovers that he has been betrayed not by Pierre but by another member of his gang…
