“In the 1940’s, a new genre – film noir – emerged from the world of hard-boiled pulp magazines, paperback thrillers, and sensational crime movies. These films, tough and unsentimental, depicted a black and white universe at once brutal, erotic, and morally ambiguous.”
Film Noir officially started in the 40’s, but the movement was well underway by the early 30’s. You can trace its roots to the Great Depression and the arrival of the dime pulp magazines. These were highly stylized, mostly mystery stories that provided cheap escapism for the masses who were not having a good time of it. Writers like Raymond Chandler crafted the mold that was easily transferred to the silver screen. These were low-budget films that were intended to be second billing with the more mainstream releases. They were shot quickly. Many have a very flat look, created intentionally. The lighting was often minimal, crafting odd shadows and unusual textures. The dialog wasn’t intended to be natural or realistic. These characters usually spoke in clichés and had names like Mac, Griff, or Dollface. There was often a shade of gray to these characters. Good and evil were not always so clear cut. Gangsters became common themes of the genre. And while the dialog might have been cheesy, the cinematography was often gritty and almost ultra-realistic. At times the films played out like documentaries, often including narration. The narrator would always be a voice of authority; often film reel stars were used. The films were heavily influenced by German Expressionism, perfected by the likes of Fritz Lang in the silent era and carried over to more modern themes. The films always contained a steady supply of stock characters and actors. It was smoky rooms and neon lights. It was a reflection on the times. It was Film Noir.
Kino Lorber has been releasing films in this genre for a while. I’m sorry that I come to this collection on the 8th entry. I have a soft spot for this stuff and find there’s very little of it out there, particularly on Blu-ray.
Here are the films collected here:
Street Of Chance (1942)
Street Of Chance was adapted from the novel The Black Curtain from writer Cornell Woolrich, who gave us such classics as Rear Window and Night Has A Thousand Eyes. Garrett Fort does a wonderfully accurate screenplay and this, at least for me, was the best of the three films in this collection.
Frank Thompson, played by a young Burgess Meredith, is walking by a construction site when an accident delivers falling debris upon him, knocking him to the ground, and when he awakes he appears more than a little confused. He tells the cops he’s Frank Thompson and just wants to go home to his wife, Virginia (Platt) He’s more than a little puzzled that his hat and cigarette case contain the initials D.N. Worse, he arrives home to find that his wife has moved. He tracks her down to find that his “this morning” was more than a year ago, and he’s been missing the entire time. When he discovers that he’s being watched and pursued by gunmen, he sends his wife off to safety and returns to the street where he had the accident to try to find someone who knows him so that he can find out what happened to a year of his life.
It works. He’s recognized by a woman named Ruth (Trevor) who calls him Danny and warns him that it’s not safe for him to be on the street. It turns out he’s been Danny Nearing, and he’s wanted for murder. The guy who has been watching him is Detective Joe Marruci, played by Sheldon Leonard. He finds it hard to believe that even without his memory that he would kill someone. Ruth has obviously been more than a friend to Danny, and she works as an elder attendant at the house where the murder took place. He’s accused of killing a man, but the victim’s wife, Alma Dietrich (Inescort) and the victim’s brother Bill (Cowan) have been having an affair, which gives them plenty of motive for the crime. But all signs point to Frank as Danny. It’s clear he was framed, but by whom?
While atmosphere is such a part of film noir, it’s not the considerable atmosphere of this film that is most compelling. It’s the performances. Burgess Meredith has had a long a successful career, but this little gem turns out to be one of his best, and it is, unfortunately, not widely known. His varying states of confusion mixed with some certainty of who he is inside make this nuanced performance the key to everything. He has great chemistry with Claire Trevor, and the story moves at a rather fast clip. There’s not a wasted frame in the film.
Sheldon Leonard would not go on to be known as much for his acting as his producer credits. He’s the genius who brought Bill Cosby and Robert Culp together for I Spy. Who knows, maybe that’s where The Cos picked up some tips on slipping someone a mickey. He’s also the guy who brought us The Andy Griffith Show and Spin-off with Gomer Pyle. In his last years he guest starred on a few television shows like Sanford And Son and Cheers, where he played into his often gangster roles.
Enter Arsene Lupin (1942)
We’re aboard the Orient Express, and there’s been a crime. No one has been murdered. The crime was theft of a valuable jewel from an heiress Stacy Kanares, played by Ella Raines. There’s no Hercule Poirot to solve the crime. Instead we have Inspector Ganimard from the French police who has spent years trying to catch the infamous Arene Lupin, an international jewel thief. Unfortunately he doesn’t recognize his own prey when he arrives on the scene and pretends to “find” the jewel under the compartment’s bunk. Arsene, played wonderfully by Charles Kovin, has become enchanted with Stacy and decides to follow her to England when he discovers that her cousin Bessie (Sondergaard) is trying to kill her to get her inheritance. He decides to act as her protector, all the while being hounded by Ganimard, who is thwarted at every turn to capture his prize.
I didn’t find this strictly in the film noir field, but there’s enough of the murder intrigue to allow for the selection. The film more concentrates on Lupin’s work to protect the girl and the comedy that ensues with Ganimard’s efforts to catch him. The French likely took some exception to the fact that he’s played in a bumbling way that reminded me of Peter Sellers and his iconic Inspector Clouseu. It doesn’t really fit the kind of character you might expect to encounter in a film noir entry. J. Caroll Naish is a favorite of mine from this era, and I’ve never really seen him in this kind of a role before. He’s been Charlie Chan in the 1950’s series The New Adventures Of Charlie Chan in another ethnic role that couldn’t happen today. He switched to Italians as the titular Living With Luigi series of the early 1950’s. I recall him most fondly from the horror films The Monster Maker, Beast With Five Fingers, and House Of Frankenstein, where he plaid the unloved assistant to Boris Karloff and romantic rival to Lon Chaney, Jr’s Larry Talbot, aka The Wolf Man.
The film recalls several Alfred Hitchcock films with the thief who falls in love with his mark found in To Catch A Thief. There are also elements of Hitchcock’s Shadow Of A Doubt, with a young girl kind of taken in by a criminal. This one plays too often as a farce to work in the selected genre, but there are superior moments of character that work even if the mystery isn’t quite so challenging.
Temptation (1946)
“Men are just begging to be lied to … so I lie. They don’t fall in love with me; they never trouble to know me; they just fall in love. And they’re cheated by their own imaginations. It’s the truth! If I can have everything I want, money, pleasure, admiration, just by a little harmless lying, I’d be a fool not to lie, wouldn’t I?”
Temptation was adapted from the play by James B. Fagan which was based upon the novel Bella Donna by Robert Hichens. He also brought us The Garden Of Allah. The screenplay was written by Robert Thoeren, who wrote the screenplay for the classic Marilyn Monroe film Some Like It Hot. The film is actually a remake of the silent era Bella Donna, the story’s original title from 1923 and a 1934 “talkie” under that same original title.
The film starts in Cairo 1900 with Ruby (Oberon) being visited by Chief of Police Arnold Moss (Ahmed). He obviously knows something scandalous about Ruby and has come to give her a warning that she has just one day to come clean with her husband. He has questions about a small metal box, a box once belonging to a man named Mahoud Baroudi, played by the same Charles Kovin we met in Enter Arsene Lupin in the titular role. It appears Baroudi is dead, and Moss believes she has some important information. It all leads us to a flashback where she tells the sordid story to family friend and doctor Meyer Isaacson (Lukas). It’s a story that starts three years earlier.
Ruby set her sights on the wealthy archeologist Nigel Armine, played by George Brent. She marries him even over Meyer’s advice that she shouldn’t. A doctor’s confidence prevents him from revealing to his friend why he shouldn’t marry her. He does, but she quickly becomes bored with their life in Egypt where he spends his time trying to uncover another mummy in the desert sands. She ends up helping a young girl named Yvonne (Cloutier) who is being blackmailed by Baroudi, which is pretty much how he makes his living. But something happens during the effort, and she and Baroudi fall in lust with each other. When he needs an infusion of cash, he tries to pressure her to poison her husband and let it be blamed on the fabled mummy’s curse. In the end the wrong character might end up getting dead, and there are some legal consequences on top of her secret about to be revealed to her husband. Of course, that metal box figures into the story and its final reveals.
Not surprisingly the film looks and feels less like a film noir movie but more like a Universal classic horror film. There are several reasons for that. International Pictures, who made this film, was merging with Universal, and a lot of the locations and sets are taken from the Universal Mummy series of films including some of the film’s score and that of Bride Of Frankenstein. There’s also a recognizable name in the makeup chair, and that’s master Jack Pierce. This was International’s final film before completely merging with Universal, but it’s clear much of that merger was already happening.
Director Irving Pichel was nearing the end of a long and eclectic career as an actor and director. His directorial debut was the 1932 The Most Dangerous Game that was filmed on the same sets with pretty much the same cast as King Kong. The films were pretty much shot at the same time with even footage and audio cues taken directly from Kong.
The films all come with trailers and Audio Commentaries by film historians. I love that each is given its own disc so that the best possible copies could be delivered. You could call it all an … “Interesting viewpoint.”
