“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 11th entry. I have a soft spot for this stuff and find there’s very little of it out there, particularly on Blu-ray. This is the 13th entry in the series that I hope continues for many years to come.
Here are the films collected here:
Step Down To Terror (1958)
“He’s obviously in there with her but might be willing to kill her if he has to.”
The first thing you’re going to notice about Step Down To Terror is a sense of deja vu. You see, it’s an “unofficial” remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s wonderful Shadow Of A Doubt. I say unofficial because this film isn’t based on that film so much as the story that both films derive their origins from. Both films are based on the Gordon McDonnell story. Step Down To Terror was originally optioned by producer Russ Hunter, with Donna Reed attached to appear in the staring role. The production was put on hold while she had a child. The production ended up moving on without her. The McDonnell story was also filmed in 1974 as Strange Homecoming with Robert Culp, a 1991 Shadow Of A Doubt with Mark Harmon, and not related to 1995’s Shadow Of A Doubt with Brian Dennehy. It was last remade in 2013 with Prison Break’s Wentworh Miller.
Johnny Walters, played by Charles Drake, is a murderer who stalks women, then kills them for their valuables. The papers are dripping with his crimes, and he knows he’s at least a suspect when he notices two detectives are dogging his steps. He decides to slip away to his mother Sarah’s (Hutchinson) home in California. There he hopes to lay low until the heat clears. The family is delighted that he’s coming home after six long years, particularly his sister-in-law Helen, played by Colleen Miller. His brother has died, leaving her a widow and single parent to a young son, Doug (Kelman), and they all idolize Johnny, and the ladies think he’d make a fine role model for young Doug. There’s even a hint of romance between Johnny and Helen.
It all starts to turn bad when the crimes just can’t be left behind. He rips an article out of the newspaper about the crimes that describe an emerald ring that was one of his “keepsakes” and has now given to Helen. She starts to get suspicious and notices the stolen ring from a dead woman could well be the gift he gave her. Johnny is on edge, and it’s not going unnoticed. He’s particularly driven into a rage when he sees Doug riding his new bike. It’s a trigger for Johnny, who suffered serious injury as a child from a bike accident. Things get worse when Sarah hears that the family has been chosen by the local paper as a “typical American household”. It’s a contest they don’t recall entering. Johnny gets nervous when the reporters show up to interview the family and take pictures. Johnny stays out of sight, but the reporters are being pretty persistent to see everything and everyone. Johnny has good reason to be afraid. They are detectives, and Johnny is one of two suspects in the murders, and eventually Helen finds out the truth. She starts falling for one of the detectives, Mike Randall, played by Rod Taylor. As Helen gets closer to Mike and more convinced that Johnny is a killer, she offers him a deal. She’ll keep quiet about what she knows, namely that emerald ring, if he just leaves so that his arrest doesn’t upset Sarah and Doug. Of course, Johnny sees only one way out. He tries to kill his sister-in-law, but it’s Mike who comes to the rescue. A second attempt on her life leads to some poetic justice and a happily-ever-after ending for the family.
Colleen Miller is a standout in the film. While she didn’t have a ton of success in Hollywood, this is a film that should have put her on a better career path. It’s her changing feelings about Johnny and her growing suspicions. Like the character of Tessa Wright from the Hitchcock film, this is where all the suspense and tension resides, and both actors pulled off the role flawlessly. While this film doesn’t have the depth of Hitchcock’s masterpiece, it’s not because of the leading lady’s performance. Hitchcock just knows how to string along an audience and hit them at all the right emotional beats. This film is nicely done but is never as compelling as Shadow Of A Doubt.
There are minor changes in the story. The relationships are different, and I actually like the idea of the criminal being the brother of her dead husband more than the uncle that Charlie relates to in her film. But Charlie is more innocent and vulnerable, and it makes her far more suspenseful to watch. Family friend Lily is played by Jocelyn Brando, the sister to the Don himself. The cinematographer is Clifford Stine, who would end his career with a bang, shooting Spartacus and Patton, but horror fans know his work on The Creature Walks Among Us, The Deadly Mantis, and The Mole People. He was talked into coming out of retirement for Earthquake. Director Harry Keller would make a name for himself in later life with comedy classics like Stripes and Stir Crazy. Of course, Charles Drake had a prolific career. He did a lot of TV, mostly westerns, but notably Star Trek and Mission Impossible. His film career included Valley Of The Dolls with the future Charlie Manson victim Sharon Tate and Lee Grant.
The film holds its own and shouldn’t be taken in so much as a remake but as a good example of some of the many variations the elements of film noir, such as a femme fatale who isn’t dangerous as a cold-hearted killer or other criminal, but a woman dangerous to the film’s villain.
The Night Runner (1957)
“A patient responded favorably to treatment and was interviewed on October 4th, last. At a staff conference held by Dr. Emmett Rayburn, patient appeared rational, intelligent, optimistic. Release recommended.”
The Night Runner was based on a short story by Owen Cameron he published in Cosmopolitan in 1955. For director Abner Biberman, it was one of only a handful of films he directed, all in the mid-1950’s. The majority of his career would be spent on television episodes of such shows as Hawaii-Five-0, Gunsmoke, and Gilligan’s Island. It was quite a diverse television career. The Night Runner was a rare entry into film noir for the director, who never really got to leave his mark, dying rather young in his 60’s.
Roy Turner (Danton) is a mental health patient who has had violent schizophrenic episodes, and he is being released against the advice of his doctor, Dr. Crawford (Stephenson) who believes he needs at least six more months of treatment, but the bed is needed, and he’s pressured to go along with the release. He has experience as an aerospace engineer, but he can’t handle the interview processes and ends up jumping on a bus to get away from the big city and hopefully his demons. The bus makes a lunch stop at a picturesque town called Seaport. The beach environment appears to relax him, and he meets a friendly car mechanic, Hank Hanson (Jackson) and his young wife, Amy (Anders), so he decides to stay and is directed to a hotel just a short walk away. It’s out of season, so he gets a good deal on a room. Later he comes upon the owner’s daughter Susan, played by Colleen Miller, who we just spent time with in Step Down To Terror. Here she’s a relatively carefree spirit who quickly befriends Roy, much to the discomfort of her father Loren Mayers, played by Willis Bouchey. It looks like Roy is planning to put down roots. He’s falling hard for Susan, and Hank helps him get a job at the Martin Engineering plant, the town’s big employer.
“Closed for business on account of Roy Turner.”
Loren is getting more and more concerned about the couple’s relationship, and he ends up opening Roy’s mail, which includes a letter from Dr. Crawford. Now that he knows about Roy’s battles with mental illness and violence, he decides to take action. He confronts Roy, which leads to Roy murdering the old man. Roy tries to cover up the act and make it look like a robbery by taking the money out of the cash box. What Roy doesn’t know, but we do, is that Susan had accidentally spilled nail polish on some of the bills, and when Roy turns up with them, she starts to think he killed her father. The Hansons try to tell her it’s some kind of mistake, and she starts to let down her guard until she discovers a partially filled out registration card from the night her father was killed. It was a couple that Roy sent away saying they were full, and while they didn’t see the crime, they know that Roy was present when he said he wasn’t. Combine the two pieces of info, and Susan is on to the truth. His only recourse is to kill Susan, but does he have the heart to do it?
Colleen Miller sure has bad taste in guys. She finds out her brother-in-law and mentor to her young son kills women to steal their stuff, and now she falls for a guy who is just crazy, and it gets her father killed. In both cases the guys try to knock her off, and it’s just luck that she makes it to the end of the movies. Yeah, this is very much the same part for Miller in both films in this collection and is likely a big reason they were both included together. Again, she didn’t do too many movies, so it’s nice to get a couple of them right here together. It’s also worth noting that Miller’s character here is a painter. Miller was also a painter. Again she played a femme fatale who was dangerous to the bad guy.
You might find some intersections here with Universal’s Creature From The Black Lagoon. Some of the music from the film is used here. Also Ray Danton, who plays Roy, was married to Julie Adams, who played the female lead and was the attraction of titular creature. As for Danton, he was mostly a television guest star who did star as one of my favorite actors, George Raft, in The George Raft Story. This is also the first feature film for actor Harry Jackson, who was mostly a television actor who played diverse roles in shows like Hazel, The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Perry Mason.
Spy Hunt 1950
“Two black panthers. Two faces of evil with their graceful necks seemingly surrounded by civilization with colorful brass-studded collars.”
Maybe it’s the absence of Colleen Miller in this “odd film out”, but it goes much deeper than that. I found this to be one of the least interesting films that I’ve come across in these Film Noir Collections by KL Studio Classics. I struggle with the idea of even calling it a film noir movie. It doesn’t really have a lot of those elements, and in the end it just seems like a lot of uninteresting characters roaming the hillsides, hunting for a couple of kitties. Spy Hunt is more William Castle than Fritz Lang, and might fare better today as a A&E quasi-reality show. The film is based upon the novel Panther’s Moon by Victor Canning, and this was the film’s shooting title.
It’s the height of the Cold War, and a couple of black panthers make for an excellent chance to smuggle to traditional micro-film across multiple borders. The plans are in their collars, and the idea is who would even think to look there, and if they did, who’d be stupid enough to try to take it from them?
It’s Catherine Ullven (Toren) who slips the microfilm into the collar of one of the cats. The cats are being transported back to America by Steve Quain, played by Howard Duff. He’s broke and needs the money he’ll get to transport the cats, or he’ll be stuck abroad with no way to get home. Unknown to Catherine, one of her co-conspirators has been tortured into revealing the plans. That man, Steve (Douglas) manages to escape along with the panthers when sabotage sends the train over a cliff. Now there are the many sides of the situation hunting the panthers in the cold mountains. A few of them are killed by the cats. It’s a literal game of cat and mouse, and the plot gets so overcomplicated that it’s too easy to lose interest in the film, and it was a burden on my attention, to be sure. This one is along for the ride, but the first two films make the price of admission more than a good value.
After 13 collections, each with at least three films, there’s bound to be a stinker in there somewhere. That hasn’t soured me at all on these collections. There are far more gems than duds, and I await each new collection with anticipation. If you’ve been adding these sets to your own film collection, all I can say is that, “You are very lucky, indeed.”
