Crime on Film

2026-03-28T22:42:00.000-07:00

Crime tourists, Part I: Yanks behaving badly in foreign lands

2026-03-04T10:49:00.000-08:00

Orson Welles, ‘The Third Man’ (1949).

By Paul Parcellin

Film noir loves morally sketchy locales — the kind of places where law and order is on life support and police can be manipulated like a vending machine. Like America’s Wild West, post-war Europe and Asia’s rubble strewn roadways were a magnet for drifters, bootleggers, grifters and fugitives in need of a hideout. Those undesirables were likely chased out of Brooklyn, Chicago or wherever they were working an angle and needed a new ’hood in which to roost.

The French coined the term film noir, and the Yanks (and others) returned the favor by exporting their rogues to distant lands already in the throes of great distress. Not exactly an even trade, but it makes for colorful drama:

Glenn Anders, Orson Welles, ‘The Lady from Shanghai.”

‘The Lady From Shanghai’ (1947) 

“The Lady From Shanghai” feels like a feverish nightmare narrated in voice-over by a speaker with a less than convincing Emerald Isle brogue. Minute by minute the stuff happening onscreen grows stranger as the film ambles toward its highly surrealistic conclusion.

When Irish sailor Michael O'Hara (Orson Welles) rescues damsel in distress Rosalie Bannister (Rita Hayworth) he doesn’t anticipate the deep bed of quicksand he’s about to land in. O’Hara is attracted to Rosalie, who is in a May-December marriage to Atty. Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane). Her husband is well aware of their flirtations, and O’Hara rightly senses trouble ahead. Despite his misgivings, he reluctantly accepts a job as an able seaman aboard Bannister’s yacht. The plan is to sail from New York to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. Along the way Bannister's law partner, George Grisby (Glenn Anders), joins the travelers and makes a stunning proposal to O’Hara, offering him $5,000 if he’ll pretend to murder him. Meanwhile, private eye Sydney Broome (Ted de Corsia), who has been watching from the sidelines, offers O’Hara a stern warning about Grisby and the double cross the unbalanced attorney has planned. Once in foreign waters, the Americans onboard seem to compete for the title of most underhanded, and it’s a close contest. Watch for the famous hall of mirrors finale. Quite a way to end a movie.

William Bendix, Jane Russell, Robert Mitchum, ‘Macao.’

‘Macao' (1952) 

American drifters, corrupt cops and nightclub parasites people Macao, then under Portuguese rule. The location has all the atmosphere needed for an exotic adventure story. Gambling, booze, westerners in white linen suits and Panama hats abound. A New York undercover police officer is killed in the opening minutes, and before long three new arrivals to the island are swept up in the unlawful activities that thrive in this land of the unprincipled. Former U.S. Signal Corps Lieut. Nick Cochran (Robert Mitchum) arrives by ferry for no certain purpose other than staying far away from New York, where the police want to ask him unpleasant questions. Also aboard the ferry is nightclub singer Julie Benton (Jane Russell) and salesman Lawrence C. Trumble (William Bendix), who is hawking an odd assortment of wares.

Every crime story needs a tough-guy gangster, and Vince Halloran (Brad Dexter), who runs a local casino, is just that. Halloran, who’s got problems of his own, suspects Cochran is out to get him, and he tries to persuade the drifter to blow town. But Cochran wants to stick around and get to know the nightclub chanteuse better. Predictably, friction results.

Richard Widmark, ‘Night and the City.’

‘Night and the City’ (1950) 

Con artist Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) uses up every morsel of good will he might receive from friends as he scrambles to host wrestling matches in post-war London. Fast talking only takes him so far, and he’s stepped on some important toes. Given Harry’s slippery ways, it’s a cinch he’s worn out his welcome in his native land, America.

This is one of Widmark’s most stellar performances. As Harry, he’s a mixture of smug, self-assuredness and raging self doubt. London is still shaking off the dust and rebuilding after innumerable German bombing raids. Like the city, Harry is in survival mode, living by his wits. But there are only so many lies and double crosses he can get away with before it’s time to pay the piper. And Harry’s bill is long overdue.

Gene Tierney, Ona Munson, ‘The Shanghai Gesture.’

‘The Shanghai Gesture’ (1941) 

In Shanghai, an occupied zone overseen by Western forces, American gamblers, hustlers, and ethically challenged refugees behave atrociously in an exotic moral vacuum. Ground zero is a decadent, tiered casino crammed with tuxedoed high rollers. It’s a vortex of moral decay that sums up the mood in Shanghai. Seen from above, the gaming area resembles a giant funnel positioned to send a motley platoon of con artists straight down into the bowels of hell. Casino owner and resident dragon-lady "Mother" Gin Sling is being forced to move her gambling joint out of its well positioned location and into Shanghai’s Chinese sector. Wealthy English entrepreneur Sir Guy Charteris is buying up property and wants her out. Meanwhile, "Poppy" Smith (Gene Tierney) arrives, fresh out of an exclusive Swiss boarding school. She romances with shady poet "Doctor" Omar (Victor Mature) and develops a strong affinity for alcohol and gambling. Complications and double crosses abound as we learn that some of the characters here have met earlier and are not having a happy reunion.

Humphrey Bogart, ‘Tokyo Joe.’

‘Tokyo Joe’ (1949) 

Ex-Air Force Col. Joe Barrett (Humphrey Bogart) returns to Tokyo after the war and finds that the nightclub he owned in earlier times, Tokyo Joe’s, is intact and being run by an old friend. But his wife, Trina (Florence Marly), a nightclub chanteuse whom he thought died in the war, is alive and in his absence has divorced him and remarried. Joe has a predictably awkward meeting with the new hubby. But he’s determined to get her back, and his 60-day visa doesn’t allow him much time to iron out the details. He enters into a business deal he hopes will buy him time to stay in the country longer. Trouble is, his new partner plans to operate a shady air transport company with Joe serving as the figurehead owner. In desperation, Joe is willing to exploit occupied Tokyo’s gray economy as a means to reunite with his ex-wife, who seems to have settled into her current marriage quite comfortably. Little does Joe know that there’s a dark spot on her past.

Joseph Cotten, Trevor Howard, ‘The Third Man.’

‘The Third Man’ (1949) 

Battle scarred as it is, post-war Vienna is an astonishing panorama of ornate facades, wide boulevards and grand Baroque palaces. Amid the imposing appearance of this imperial city, gangsters run a cornucopia of illicit rackets that puts an ugly face on the war-torn metropolis. Into a raucous tangle of humanity steps an innocent American, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), author of many a dime novel of the American Wild West. He’s come to Vienna at the urging of an old pal, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who says he’s got a job for him. Turns out, this Austrian city is every bit as untamed as the cattle rustlers and gunfighters that spring from Holly’s pulp-fiction imagination. Barely in town long enough to catch his breath, Holly gets some bad news. It seems that Harry has, as Holly might write in one of his paperbacks, bitten the dust, the victim of a freak traffic accident. Holly meets Harry’s lady love, Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), and begins poking around when the facts of Harry’s demise don’t appear to add up. But an earth shaking revelation brings the whole story into focus. Let’s just say that the European gangsters in this mixed up town have nothing on one American hoodlum, who’s operating a particularly sleazy criminal enterprise there. Incidentally, the American hoodlum makes one of the greatest entrances in film history.

Next time, in Part II, we’ll look at films about Americans in foreign lands fighting the forces of crime, corruption and oppression.

New York noir: 20 films that explore the big city's dark corners

2026-02-11T01:37:28.014-08:00

John Garfield, Thomas Gomez, ‘Force of Evil’ (1948).

By Paul Parcellin

It might not come as news to you that noirs set in New York City look a lot different from the ones taking place in Los Angeles. The City of Angels is a sun bleached sprawl of low buildings between the ocean and desert. New York is a vertical jungle of high rises and red brick walk-ups, wrought iron fire escapes and wide avenues. It boxes you in with concrete, brick and glass that lets in just a few shafts of dusty light. Trains roar overhead on steel trestles with an insistent racket that drowns out the steady growl of street traffic.

Claustrophobic and murky even in daylight, the New York of noir seems to exist in a world that has broken free of its solar orbit. It’s a place to get lost in, but not a spot where you can hide for very long — its streets are teeming with snitches who’ll give you up in a heartbeat.

Here’s a sampling of films noir with a New York accent:

Allen Baron, ‘Blast of Silence.’

“Blast of Silence” (1961)

Hitman Frankie Bono (Allen Baron) returns to his hometown, New York, Christmas week but his visit is hardly festive - he’s there to kill another mobster. He coldly stalks his quarry, yet seeing the old neighborhood stirs up troubling memories.

“Cry of the City” (1948)

Hardened criminal Martin Rome (Richard Conte) is awaiting surgery after taking some slugs in a shootout with police. He may hold the key to a jewel robbery and murder, for which a man is on death row. His childhood friend, police Lt. Vittorio Candella (Victor Mature), is determined to get to the bottom of it all.

“The Dark Corner” (1946)

Art dealer Hardy Cathcart (Clifton Webb) jealously watches over his straying trophy wife Mari (Cathy Downs) and sparks a chain of events that put private eye Bradford Galt (Mark Stevens) on the spot. Galt’s gal Friday, Kathleen Stewart (Lucille Ball), provides support.

William Challee, Bill Williams, ‘Deadline at Dawn.’

“Deadline at Dawn” (1946)

Sailor Alex Winkley (Bill Williams) and dancehall girl June Goffe (Susan Hayward) spend a long night trying to solve a murder. He woke up with a pocketful of cash he received from the victim. Now he's only got until daybreak to figure it out.

“Force of Evil” (1948)

Leo Morse (Thomas Gomez), a small timer in the numbers racket, is like a pressurized canister of hydrogen about to explode. His brother, crooked lawyer Joe (John Garfield), is the spark that sets him off. A two-fisted dramatic powerhouse.

“House of Strangers” (1949)

Banker Gino Monetti (Edward G. Robinson) is in hot water with the authorities over his questionable business practices. His son, attorney Max Monetti (Richard Conte), defends Gino in court and watches his father's back as Max's siblings scheme.

“I Walk Alone” (1948)

The hootch business is unrecognizable to Frankie Madison (Burt Lancaster) after 14 years in the jug — it's gone corporate. Frankie wants his cut, but Noll “Dink" Turner (Kirk Douglas) ain’t paying. B-list Burt and Kirk, but still hard-boiled.

Jamie Smith, ‘Killer's Kiss.’

“Killer’s Kiss” (1955)

Stanley Kubrick's sophomore effort is about a boxer (Jamie Smith), a gangster (Frank Silvera) and a taxi dancer (Irene Kane). The script isn't rock solid, but the film's atmospheric depiction of New York's seamier side makes up for it.

“Kiss of Death” (1947)

As delinquent psychopaths go, Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark) is the unabashed supreme leader in his field. Maniacal laugh? Got it. Unbridled cruelty to the infirm? You know it. It's a bone-rattling performance that elevates "Kiss of Death” to dizzying heights.

“The Naked City” (1948)

Veteran Det. Lt. Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) and his green partner Det. Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor) investigate the murder of a former model. Along the way they discover a swindler and a rash of jewel thefts that may be related to the killing.

Harry Belafonte, Ed Begley, Robert Ryan, ‘Odds Against Tomorrow.’

“Odds against Tomorrow” (1959)

Racist ex-con Earl Slater (Robert Ryan) reluctantly agrees to knock over a bank with David Burke (Ed Begley) and Johnny Ingram (Harry Belafonte), who is black. But the undercurrent of hatred threatens to scuttle Burke's flawless plan.

“Phantom Lady” (1944)

It's a no-no to be seen in public wearing the same accessory as another. Identical chapeaus roil the waters in “Phantom Lady" (1944), a story of murder, gaslighting and a fashion faux pas. The film also boasts one of noir's wildest jazz band scenes, to boot.

“Pickup on South Street” (1953)

Pickpocket Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) inadvertently swipes microfilm from a spy ring courier. Street peddler Moe (Thelma Ritter) can help G-Men recover top-secret information after she figures out that Skip is their man. But her info ain't free.

Joan Bennett, Edward G. Robinson, ‘Scarlet Street.’

“Scarlet Street” (1945)

Aging Sunday painter Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson) is putty in the hands of two sharpies, Kitty March (Joan Bennett) and Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea). New York, Milwaukee, and Atlanta banned the film in early 1946 due to its dark plot.

“Side Street” (1949)

When you think you're stealing $200 and it turns out to be 30 grand instead, that's good news … maybe. Not so for Joe Norson (Farley Granger), who snags a bundle of loot from a mouthpiece with some very bad cohorts.

“Sorry, Wrong Number” (1948)

Crossed wires allow Leona Stevenson (Barbara Stanwyck) to overhear talk of a murder plot. While faulty phone service can be a drag, being a target for murder is worse. And hubby Henry J. Stevenson (Burt Lancaster) has left her home alone.

Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster, ‘Sweet Smell of Success.’

“Sweet Smell of Success” (1957)

Some would argue that "The Sweet Smell of Success" (1957) isn't noir. Balderdash! It's got the look and feel of noir, plus it includes J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), a ruthless gossip columnist who’s got sleazy press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) on the ropes.

“Where the Sidewalk Ends” (1950)

New York Police Det. Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) finds that his family history can be like a noose around his neck. He violently lashes out at criminals because his father was one. Before long, that gets him into some very hot water.

“While the City Sleeps” (1956)

At the Kyne media syndicate, it's not enough to merely report the news, editors must solve a string of hideous crimes. In "While the City Sleeps" (1956), the "Lipstick Killer" terrorizes the city as the half-wit son running the news operation seems determined to fail.

Bobby Driscoll, ‘The Window.’ (1949)

“The Window” (1949)

Young Tommy Woodry (Bobby Driscoll) witnesses his neighbors kill a drunken sailor, but no one believes him. When Tommy is left home alone the murderous neighbors pay him a visit. They aim to silence him for good, and he's left to fend for himself.

'Ivy' is pure evil under shimmering gaslight

2026-01-21T09:41:17.219-08:00

Joan Fontaine, 'Ivy' (1947). A black widow dressed in white.

By Paul Parcellin

Contains spoilers

“Ivy” (1947)

Even before the action begins we get the message that something is rotten in Edwardian London. A swelling orchestra plays a dramatic score. On screen, an ivy vine and an ornate vase are the backdrop for the opening credits. But as the segment ends the mood turns dark. The orchestra drops into deep ominous tones and the vase morphs into the faint image of a human skull. The message is abundantly clear: brace yourself for a horror show.

Similarly, Ivy Lexton (Joan Fontaine) seems pleasant enough at first glance, but when her true character is revealed our first impressions of her implode. She’s not forthcoming about herself, but a fortune teller she visits knows the score. The seer gives her the good news but can’t bring herself to reveal the bad. And as we’ll see, things will be very good, then very bad.

Behind Ivy’s genteel appearance her conniving mind is working overtime. She’s after the stuff femmes fatale yearn for: money, luxury and status. Beneath her upper crust manners and good breeding she’s a cold, calculating predator. Her love of riches, glittering gowns, oversized hats and jeweled handbags drive her to use ruthless tactics on those around her — materialism gone mad, you might say.

Fontaine, Richard Ney. Ivy tends to her bedridden husband.

By all appearances she’s blissfully wed to Jervis Lexton (Richard Ney), although Jervis drops hints that she’s nearly spent them into the poorhouse. He seems to accept her foibles with mildly exasperated resignation. But the more we learn about them the worse the picture gets. As the fortune teller revealed, she’s got another man on the side, physician Roger Gretorex (Patric Knowle), and she’s sniffing around for yet another, a wealthy and dashing aviation entrepreneur, Miles Rushworth (Herbert Marshall), whom she’s dying to sink her teeth into.

Due to her profligate spending, she and hubby reside in a dingy hovel that looks barely one step above an almshouse. After meeting Rushworth at a social gathering she charms the aviation man into granting hubby a decent job at his company. They move into more suitable quarters, a stark white apartment, the stunning creation of art director Richard H. Riedel and producer William Cameron Menzies [Menzies won a special Academy Award for his production design of “Gone With the Wind” (1939)]. The place is surreally impersonal and spooky, with its white festoon architectural ornaments (they look like icy funeral wreaths). Ivy resolves to get rid of her spouse and paramour and throw herself at Miles, who’s too principled to carry on with a married woman. She figures out a way to ditch both inconvenient men in her life in a cold heartedly conceived twofer.

Ivy prepares a brandy for her husband.

For a while she maintains her false front and almost no one sees through it. But that changes thanks to Roger’s overbearing mother, Mrs. Gretorex (Lucile Watson), an observant maid, Martha Huntley (Sara Allgood), and a seen-it-all-before police officer, Inspector Orpington (Cedric Hardwicke).

Frequent Hitchcock collaborator Charles Bennett [“The 39 Steps” (1935) and “Foreign Correspondent” (1940)] wrote the screenplay based on the novel “The Story of Ivy” (1927) by Marie Belloc Lowndes. Sam Wood, whose credits include such diverse films as “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” (1939) and “A Night at the Opera” (1935), helmed this production.

Fontaine's competitive sister, Olivia de Havilland, was originally set to play the title role, but at the last minute pulled out. She was concerned that audiences would stay away from the film due to the unsympathetic nature of the lead character. She also worried that the role would be a career killer. The sisters were feuding and de Havilland’s agent offered the role to Fontaine — an act of retribution? Fontaine gladly accepted. It turned out that de Havilland’s instincts were correct and the film was not a commercial success. Never mind, “Ivy” is still a cracking good noir featuring a luminous Joan Fontaine performance, an absorbing story and arresting scenic design.

U.K’s Powerhouse Films is scheduled to release “Ivy” in a limited edition Blu-ray disc Feb. 16, 2026. It’s a high definition remaster with original mono audio featuring audio commentary with academic and film curator Eloise Ross. Now the bad news: many Powerhouse releases, including this one, are Region B discs and won’t play on most U.S. Blu-ray devices. But if you’re in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Australia or New Zealand, or have a Region B or region-free player, you’re in luck. However, an Australian region-free Blu-ray (Imprint Films) was released in April, 2025, and can be purchased on Amazon and eBay.

Live it up! 11 essential nightclubs of noir

2026-01-07T14:14:03.583-08:00

Karen Morley, 'Scarface' (1932).

By Paul Parcellin

In noir, nightclubs are smokey hideaways where criminality thrives under moody lighting. Ritzier than typical barrooms, they are havens for hedonists and the racketeer elite.

Crucial to these nightspots are floorshows. A chanteuse may whisper a torch song designed to torment an ex-lover sitting ringside. Her words spell out jagged details of his predicament, defining his emotional state or perhaps the moral decay that engulfs him.

In noir, entering a nightclub is like stepping into hell’s waiting room. It may be steamy and dazzling at first, but all exits lead to damnation.

Here are the top 11 nightclubs of noir, hot spots where the underworld cools its heels and lives are sometimes broken:

Osgood Perkins, Paul Muni, Karen Morley, 'Scarface.'

‘Scarface’ (1932)

The Paradise is everything a swank gangster nightclub should be: an orchestra wails swing jazz numbers, swell looking couples fill the dance floor, guys are clad in their formal best, ladies sway to the rhythm in chic evening dresses. Wiseguys Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins) and Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) spar over glamor girl Poppy (Karen Morley) — Tony, an upstart, comes out on the winning end, but egos are bruised. “Scarface” wasn’t the first crime movie to use a nightclub setting, but it sure knows how glamorize the seductive charm of such establishments. Without warning, shots are fired, a gunman is subdued, the orchestra plays on and patrons carry on unruffled. How gangster can you get?

Roger Duchesne, 'Bob le Flambeur.'

‘Bob le Flambeur’ (1956) (‘Bob the Gambler’)

Bob Montagné (Roger Duchesne) is a former bank robber earning his keep at all night poker matches and other games of chance. A suave sophisticate, he’s respected as a prince among thieves. No one can cross a cafe floor and command the respect Bob receives from fellow larcenists, gamblers and even the police. His nightclub of choice is Jour et Nuit (Day and Night), but he’s a creature of the latter. Sleeping when the sun rises, he only comes alive when the lights of Montmartre twinkle at dusk. Parisian cafes, bars and nightclubs are his domain. When his luck turns bad he looks for alternative means to pay his debts. That one last big score is the thing that tempts graying outlaws, even retired ones, and Bob is no exception.

Frank Bigelow (Edmond O'Brien) puffs on a cigarette
at the Fisherman. 'D.O.A.' (1949)

‘D.O.A.’ (1949)

Calling San Francisco dive bar the Fisherman a “nightclub” is stretching the definition of the term until it screams. But the F’man’s got a stomping jazz sextet that cannot be denied a mention here. The joint’s a beatnik hangout where straight-arrow accountant Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) wanders in and sips a beverage that changes his life forever. The place is a seething mass of hipsters grooving to the bebop beat as the band blows a frenzied set that sends the bohemian crowd into orbit. The atmosphere is claustrophobic and the scene teeters on chaos, much like Frank’s immediate future.

Edward G. Robinson, 'Little Caesar.'

‘Little Caesar’ (1931)

The hoods hang out upstairs at Club Palermo, a gangster stronghold in the big city. Stickup man Caesar Enrico “Rico” Bandello (Edward G. Robinson) pokes his beak in to talk with crime boss Sam Vettori (Stanley Fields), who runs the club and uses it as a front for his illegal operations. Rico passes muster and is immediately introduced to the rest of the gang. Besides being an entertainment spot for the corrupt, the club becomes the incubator that helps Rico launch his criminal career. At the club downstairs he eventually commits a brazen and violent act in public that shakes up the city’s mobster elite and catapults him to the top of the syndicate.

Cathy Rosier, Alain Delon, François Périer, 'Le Samouraï.'

‘Le Samouraï’ (1967)

Martey's, an upscale Parisian jazz lounge, attracts a more refined crowds than do other nightspots mentioned here. But criminals operating behind the scenes are a continuous presence there. Hired killer Jef Costello (Alain Delon) visits the establishment to carry out some business for an employer. He isn’t the kind of assassin you’d expect him to be. Jef lives the austere life of a Buddhist monk and adheres to the code of the samurai. He’s an outsider among criminals in this nocturnal playground. Vocalist and keyboard player Valérie (Cathy Rosier), who performs at the club, witnesses something she wasn’t meant to see, and Jef soon finds that he’s the one being hunted.

Richard Widmark, Mike Mazurki, 'Night and the City.'

‘Night and the City’ (1950)

The Silver Fox nightclub sits among the cheap clip joints of London’s Soho district. It’s where low rent hustler Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) hangs out, ever on the lookout for a fast buck or a get rich quick scheme. Harry uses his gift for gab to pry loose greenbacks from the unwary, especially his lady friend. He’s in his element at the Silver Fox, a place where bar girls fleece tipsy customers, sweet talking them into buying overpriced champagne and chocolates. Everyone there is either a crook or a victim. Beneath his bravado, Harry fears he’ll ultimately be one of the latter. When he schemes to become a professional wrestling promotor things don’t go his way. Unfortunately for him, he’s burned too many bridges to get a free pass this time.

Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, 'The Big Sleep.'

‘The Big Sleep’ (1946)

Crime kingpin Eddie Mars’s Cypress Club plays host to the denizens of a dark side. In it, illegal gambling is the main attraction and all things illicit are for sale. In between crooning pop tunes for the punters, rich girl Vivian Sternwood (Lauren Bacall) tries her luck in the casino. When she pockets a thick wad of cash at the roulette wheel she nearly gets robbed, but private dick Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) steps in and saves her bacon. Their liaison leads to a well remembered steamy conversation of double entendres involving race horses and jockeys. The Cypress is not the kind of place where Vivian or her younger sister, Carmen (Martha Vickers), should frequent, but these girls do love trouble.

Richard Widmark, Ida Lupino, 'Road House.'

‘Road House’ (1948)

Jefty's Road House isn’t a swank, big city club. It’s a backwater joint with a bowling alley. A love triangle with Chicago songstress Lily Stevens (Ida Lupino), club owner Jefty Robbins (Richard Widmark) and club manager Pete Morgan (Cornel Wilde) sets the drama in motion. In one of its best scenes, Ida Lupino makes a lukewarm crowd sit up, take notice and applaud when she sings “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).” She isn’t a trained vocalist, and her two-pack-a-day voice radiates a world-weary sense of dissatisfaction, which is what makes the scene work. It’s all about heartache and raw emotions and she’s got a hell of a story to tell.

Raymond Burr, 'The Blue Gardenia.'

‘The Blue Gardenia’ (1953)

Loneliness seems to float in the air like clouds of cigarette smoke as Nat King Cole warbles the film’s title song in the softly-lit Blue Gardenia club, a South Seas-themed watering hole. It’s a romantic setting, but one couple is having a difficult time of it. Calendar artist Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr) plies Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter) with cocktails. Norah hesitates to imbibe, but Harry is insistent. The music and atmosphere reflect the isolation Norah feels, and the club resonates her emotional distress. Matters get worse when a dark crime is committed and a memory blackout obscures the events of the previous evening.

Magali Noël, 'Rififi.'

‘Rififi’ (1955)

L’age d’Or (The Golden Age) is an ironically appropriate name for the nightclub of choice for a band of French jewel thieves who are casing out a stronghold of precious stones. Aging gangster Tony "le Stéphanois" (Jean Servais) is persuaded by his buddies to help rob an exclusive jewelry dealer. Tony wants to go for a bigger score than just the ice in the store window: their target switches to the retailer’s highly secure vault. It’s a flawless plan, or so they think, but relationships with women in their lives complicate matters. Viviane (Magali Noël), a chanteuse at the club, performs the film’s memorable title song, describing the plight of a woman in a relationship with a roughneck gangster. She ought to know — her beau is in on the heist.

Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, 'Gilda.'

‘Gilda’ (1946)

Rita Hayworth’s iconic hair toss helps make her vocal rendition of “Put the Blame on Mame” sizzle in what is perhaps the greatest noir nightclub moment of all time. She’s voluptuous, self assured and more than a bit dangerous. The scene is packed with drama as Johnny Farrell (Glen Ford) looks on with fury and ringsiders scramble for the gloves and necklace she tosses their way. Make no mistake, she weaponizes her performance in a psychological battle with Johnny and her husband, Ballin Mundson (George Macready). When she asks the gentlemen in the house to help undo the back of her black strapless gown she may as well be lighting the fuse on a powder keg.

Burn, Hollywood, burn! Four noirs reveal the horrors of the screenwriting trade

2025-12-26T11:34:21.770-08:00

Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, ‘In a Lonely Place’ (1950).

By Paul Parcellin

You’ve probably heard that screenwriters get little respect in the big town, and by many accounts that’s true. They labor in isolation, punching out fresh ideas, pouring their deepest emotions onto their pages only to have their hearts broken.

Their masterpieces are rewritten by faceless studio hacks who turn them into pale shadows of what they were.

Or at least, that’s how screenwriters tell it.

Samuel Goldwyn used to call his writers schmucks with typewriters. When he wanted refurbished versions of recent hits he’d tell them, “Give me the same thing, only different.”

Writers were, and still are, famously powerless in the picture biz. They’re one of the most essential and least appreciated cogs in the movie making machine.

Each of the four movies below offers a powerful and fairly unvarnished view of the rough treatment the Hollywood studio system could dish out, and no doubt still can.

The writers behind these films, the ones who actually pounded out the pages, not the ones on screen, obviously took glee in mauling the Hollywood establishment. They draw blood. It’s fun to watch:

Bogart and Grahame, 'In a Lonely Place.'

‘In a Lonely Place’ (1950)

Director Nicholas Ray channels the Dorothy B. Hughes novel, starring Humphrey Bogart as Hollywood scribbler Dixon Steele, a tightly wound script jockey in a creative slump. Steele loathes the studio system and the egotistical no-minds who seem to thrive in it.

One evening Steele hosts a young woman at his apartment whom he tasks with summarizing a novel for him, a piece of drivel the studio wants him to adapt. And why not? She thinks the book is swell, and Steele can’t bear to waste time poring over the dreck. The next day the girl turns up dead and Steele is a suspect. He was one of the last to see her alive, and it’s well known that he’s an angry and violent bugger.

He meets Laurel Grey (Gloria Grahame), a neighbor who provides him with an alibi that keeps him out of the pokey for that murder rap, for the time being at least. A romance between them blossoms, but under these circumstances how long will it be until it dies on the vine?

This was the first film to roll off the production line of Bogart’s independent company, Santana Pictures Corporation, and with its downbeat ending the public stayed away. A pity. Bogart thought it was a failure. How wrong he was.

Gloria Swanson, William Holden, 'Sunset Boulevard.'

‘Sunset Boulevard’ (1950)

The same year that Bogart’s Dixon Steele dodged police investigators, screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) has the opposite problem. He can’t get arrested in this town (L.A.). Producers aren’t interested in his latest stuff, a rehash of something that wasn’t very good to begin with. Worse still, repo men are after his car, and in Los Angeles losing your car is like getting your legs cut off.

He blunders into the crumbling estate of former silent screen siren Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) and talks his way into rewriting a putrid script the lady penned. It’ll be a vehicle for her return to Hollywood immortality, she thinks.

Gillis has a couple of B-pictures to his credit and is just about washed up in his short, anemic screen career. But he sees this odd turn of events as an opportunity to stay afloat financially for a while. Gillis thinks Norma is a soft touch, but it turns out she’s a lot more than the poor sap bargained for.

The delusional prima donna browbeats hapless Gillis into becoming her full-time bunk mate, and it slowly dawns on him he ain’t the one pulling the strings in this puppet show.

Norma finally gets the closeup she’s been craving, but not before Gillis takes an unscheduled dip in her swimming pool, a few bullet holes pumped into his torso. Turns out, the writing game is tougher than it looks.

John Turturro, Jon Polito, 'Barton Fink.'

‘Barton Fink’ (1991)

Broadway playwright Barton Fink (John Turturro) wants to create a new kind of theater, one aimed at “the common man.” Or so he thinks.

His new hit, about regular folks, is the toast of the Great White Way. Trouble is, his patrons are the kinds of monied twits he despises.

Fink, a thinly veiled caricature of socially aware playwright and screenwriter Clifford Odets, answers the call to come write for the pictures in Hollywood. It’s against every fiber of his bohemian being, but he rationalizes that he’ll pocket enough moolah to write scores more socially relevant plays.

Set in the early 1940s, the dawn of American film noir, Fink arrives in Los Angeles like a fish rocketed out of its aquarium and plopped into the middle of the desert. He meets a gaggle of characters who disappoint and frighten him, much like the New York contingent did.

There’s the blowhard, pushy studio chief (Michael Lerner), the respected author who’s churning out tripe for the movie mill (John Mahoney), and back-slapping, rotund insurance salesman Charlie Meadows (John Goodman) who is staying next door to Fink at a gothic horror show of a hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

Assigned to write a wrestling picture, Fink’s adventure in the screen trade soon goes horribly wrong. He becomes enmeshed in a genuine noir nightmare — fitting for this time and location.

Did I mention that this is a Coen brothers' film? The surreal irony, their trademark, bleeds off of the screen as we witness Fink’s descent into the netherworld. They don’t call this town “Hell A” for nothing.

Tim Robbins, Vincent D'Onofrio, 'The Player.'

‘The Player’ (1992)

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Robert Altman’s poisonous valentine to Hollywood, which came out at the peak of spec script fever.

Studio executive Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) is receiving threatening mail from an anonymous screenwriter who claims Mill snubbed him. The movie exec is rattled and tries to track down the one who’s sending him the nasty stuff. The problem is, out of the dozens of writers he’s ghosted, which one is harassing him?

Mill’s investigation leads to screenwriter David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio), who certainly does despise Mill, but is he the one threatening to do away with him? Mill’s luck keeps getting worse. The buzz around town is that a new executive at the studio, Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher), is going push Mill out.

Meanwhile, the cops show up and start asking the beset executive some difficult questions about himself and Kahane. And things don’t end up so good for Kahane, either.

As the song says, “There’s no business like show business,” and that’s probably a good thing.

Believe it or not, Jan. 5 is National Screenwriters Day. Its purpose is to honor the writers behind the stories, dialogue and characters in films and TV. You might consider taking a screenwriter to lunch on that day. He or she could probably use some nourishment and a shoulder to cry on.

‘Scarlet Street’ at 80: Flirtations with a femme fatale can often lead to trouble — and sometimes murder

2025-12-09T10:00:00.000-08:00

At her service. Joan Bennett, Edward G. Robinson, 'Scarlet Street' (1945).

By Paul Parcellin

Contains spoilers

When “Scarlet Street” premiered 80 years ago this month it was not uniformly praised by critics, and several cities outright banned it due to its dark content. The film hinted at such taboo topics as sex out of wedlock and prostitution, and featured a capital crime that went unpunished in the conventional sense.

New York, Milwaukee, and Atlanta thought it too controversial and forbade local screenings. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called it “a sluggish and manufactured tale,” while Time magazine called the plot “clichéd,” adding that the story focuses on “dimwitted, unethical, stock characters.”

Times have changed and so has the critical response to the film. In later years Cinema Journal called it “a dense, well-structured film noir,” and the Chicago Reader included the film in its list of the best American films not included on the AFI Top 100. TCM Noir Alley host Eddie Muller includes “Scarlet Street” among his top 25 favorite films noir.

Looking back on it eight decades after its release, “Scarlet Street” is relatively tame compared with contemporary fare, yet it’s understandable that its gritty themes of vice and corruption must have been a shock to the American public in 1945.

Fortunately, preservationists rescued it from public domain purgatory. Kino Lorber’s 2024 release in 4K UHD and Blu-ray is sharp and clear and the sound is crisp. It’s a pleasure to view it as it was meant to be seen upon its release so many years ago.

“Scarlet Street” (1945)

Mild mannered Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson), a cashier with a flair for art, is unhappily married to shrewish Adele (Rosalind Ivan), who keeps him on a short tether. His life changes one night when he rescues a damsel in distress, Kitty March (Joan Bennett), who’s being accosted on a dark Greenwich Village street.

Coincidentally, earlier that evening Chris glimpsed his boss’s blonde paramour and wondered aloud what it would be like to be loved by a young beautiful woman (love is probably the last thing on the blonde bombshell’s mind). Then fate seemed to drop Kitty, the woman of his dreams, at his feet.

Lies and misunderstandings

Kitty, whom we easily infer is a streetwalker, mistakenly thinks Chris is a prosperous artist. Flushed with the excitement of meeting an attractive woman, he does nothing to dispel her false image of him. In one exchange she hints to starry-eyed Chris that she’s a lady of the night, but he doesn’t get it. He guesses she’s an actress, which she is, but not in the traditional sense.

Later, Kitty’s pimp boyfriend Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea at his smarmiest) hears opportunity knocking and convinces her to take the sucker for all he’s worth, and she does so while keeping Chris teasingly at arm’s length.

Dan Duryea, Joan Bennett. Kitty and Johnny Prince.

“Scarlet Street” is a study of the ways people delude themselves, embracing comfortable lies that warm them and offer false hope in their hours of despair.

Misunderstandings abound. Chris mistakenly believes that Kitty might love him, as she strings him along and bleeds him for cash. Johnny is her one true love, Kitty thinks, even when he slaps her around. He lives off of her earnings and calls himself a man of leisure, and sporting a jaunty straw boater he dresses the part.

Flawed first impressions

Johnny and Kitty, out of delusional thinking or plain stupidity, believe that they’ve hit the jackpot with Chris as their patsy. The misconception starts when Kitty and Chris first meet. He’s just been feted by his employer and happens to be gussied up in a tuxedo. That’s enough to convince her that he’s in the chips.

Even Adele is delusional in her idealization of her deceased husband, Patch-eye Higgins (Charles Kemper), a police detective who took an ill-fated dip in the Hudson. She torments Chris with her worshipful praise of the dead hubby while castigating the nebbish painter for his shortcomings. Higgins’s portrait hangs over the mantlepiece as a reminder to Chris of the low esteem in which his wife holds him.

Chris in exile. A bathroom Rembrandt.

“Scarlet Street” could be taken as a dark comedy. The same wrong-headed ideas and miscommunications in the hands of, say, Preston Sturges or Ernst Lubitsch, would be uproarious. Here, they are bathed in pathos, even when director Fritz Lang tosses in an occasional chuckle or a sudden upbeat shift in the plot.

In an unexpected turn of events, Chris’s paintings are well received by the art establishment, but only after Johnny schemes to make art-world big shots think that Kitty painted them. The selfless Chris is pleased, not angry, that his paintings are finally being seen, even if Kitty is given credit for them. But he admits that gallery owners wouldn’t be interested if they knew he painted them.

Awarding undue credit

But a beautiful young woman can grab the art world's attention, especially when a respected critic takes a romantic interest in her. Kitty is capable of sleeping her way to the top, but artistic talent is another matter. In the film's pessimistic but probably largely true vision of the art game, we get a hint of the way art stars are made, and how almost inevitably their work ends up in the hands of the undeserving.

The film is based on the French story “La Chienne” (literally The Bitch) by Georges de La Fouchardière. Director Jean Renoir adapted the novel to the screen in “La Chienne” (1931), which presents the female lead, Lulu (Janie Marèse), explicitly as a prostitute, something American production codes at the time would prohibit.

Chris's portrait of Kitty.

This is Lang’s second go-around with this cast. In “The Woman in the Window” (1944), Robinson, Bennett and Duryea play roles similar to those in “Scarlet Street.” The story is much the same, too, with manipulative Alice Reed (Bennett) upending the life of Prof. Richard Wanley (Robinson) and crooked ex-cop Heidt (Duryea) making a tragic situation worse.

Both films feature painted portraits of femmes fatale, each inaccessible behind plate glass storefront windows. In both films Robinson is tempted toward adultery and his flirtations result in shattered lives.

Greatly different endings

Adapted from J. H. Wallis's 1942 novel “Once Off Guard,” “The Woman in the Window” has a twist at the end that gives the film an upbeat conclusion, unlike “Scarlet Street,” which comes in for a hard landing, leaving Chris humiliated and psychologically broken.

“Scarlet Street” might seem like an uncompromised do-over of “The Woman in the Window,” yet Lang maintained that the film’s upbeat coda was his choice, not something forced on him. So be it, but clearly, “Scarlet Street” has the better ending.

Dec. 28 marks the 80th anniversary of the “Scarlet Street” theatrical premiere.

A cunning serial killer is on the loose and police are baffled

2025-11-12T10:00:00.000-08:00

Song Kang-ho, 'Memories of Murder' (2003).
Searching for clues and coming up empty.

By Paul Parcellin

‘Memories of Murder’ (2003)

Bodies are popping up with terrifying regularity in a small South Korean city and the local police force has few clues to go on. Young women are being raped and strangled, their bodies abandoned in little traveled spots, and public hysteria is growing.

It’s the late 1980s and Korea has not yet emerged from authoritarian government control. Small-town crime fighting methods are, shall we say crude? This wave of murders is not the kind of business the local lawmen are used to handling, and it shows.

A challenging balance

Director-screenwriter Bong Joon Ho, whose film “Parasite” (2019) won four Academy Awards including Best Picture, infuses “Memories of Murder” with social commentary, police procedure and dark comedy, mostly at the expense of the thread-bare, chronically disjointed police force tasked with bringing a killer to justice.

A terse, reflective take on the policier, Bong’s 2003 masterwork walks a thin line between mystery and black comedy. It’s a murder investigation in a world that seems to be spinning off its axis, and we’re never sure of where exactly things will land.

Ko Seo-hie, Song Kang-ho, Kim Roi-ha.

Lead detective Park Doo-man (Song Kang-ho, Bong’s frequent collaborator), and fellow investigator Cho Yong-koo’s (Kim Roi-ha) methods mirror the oppressive regime that’s running the country. They beat and torture suspects to make them confess and occasionally plant evidence.

Police under pressure

Park, an amalgam of cockiness and pent up frustration, is bedeviled by an investigation that can’t seem to move ahead. Lambasted by his superior, Sgt. Shin Dong-chul (Song Jae-ho), he’s saddled with a woefully understaffed, under equipped department — he has to hitch a ride on a farmer’s tractor to visit the site of a murder. His squad can’t even protect the crime scene from news reporters and rubberneckers who trample and destroy evidence.

Shot in color, the film has the look of a black and white print. Murky blue-gray and pea-soup green tones give the police station interior a gloomy, closed-in look. Even expansive fields, industrial areas and wooded groves seem unkissed by sunlight. If you had to choose a grimy color palette that would give the feeling of hopelessness, this is it.

Kim Roe-ha, Song Jae-ho, Song Kang-ho. Another grim discovery.

Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyung), a detective from Seoul, is brought in to jump-start the investigation and he’s soon at odds with Park. Seo knows a thing or two about scientific detective work, while Park works on instinct — he’s convinced that he can spot a guilty party simply by staring into his eyes. His stare-downs are often a prelude to beating confessions out of suspects.

Seo is disturbed by the brutality Park and Cho regularly dish out to unfortunates, adding friction to his tenure at this backwoods constabulary. Even he, as a newly arrived officer, is mistaken for suspect and handed a beatdown.

A ray of hope

The detective squad is almost exclusively a boys’ club, but the one woman on the force, Officer Kwon Kwi-ok (Ko Seo-hie), comes up with an ingenious theory, which Park ridicules, of course. But guess which one of them proves to be correct.

Adapted from the 1996 play “Come to See Me” by Kim Kwang-lim and loosely based on South Korea's first confirmed serial killings, “Memories of Murder” is set in Hwaseong, located on the coast of the Yellow Sea. It’s a city with pockets of industry and vast farmland and many places for a serial killer to stash bodies. As the list of victims grows, suspects are apprehended and questioned with no tangible results.

Kim Sang-kyung, an outsider in the department.

In his desperation Park is willing to accept flawed confessions from several suspicious types, to no avail. As the investigation plods on the detectives’ use of intimidation and brutality backfires when a viable lead that could crack the case is suddenly gone. It’s a shocking turn of events, but it’s doubtful that the local lawmen will change their ways anytime soon.

No easy answers

“Memories of Murder” leaves us with a bag of complex questions. Are the Hwaseong lawmen’s unethical tactics and jaw-dropping violence an outgrowth of their frustration with a barely functional system? Undoubtedly, but their cruel methods can’t be blamed entirely on the authoritarian government running the country. Seo, who comes from the big city, is shocked at the sight of abuses that we can presume don’t go on in the Seoul police department.

But even Seo, the most rational one of this ragtag crew, has his breaking point when faced with a plodding investigation going nowhere and a sly suspect who just might be the perpetrator. And if Seo can be tempted to cross ethical lines, perhaps we might, too.

‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’: A Tinseltown Allegory that Ends Unhappily Ever After

2025-10-22T00:31:00.000-07:00

Michael Sarrazin, Jane Fonda, 'They Shoot Horses, Don't They?' (1969).

Harrowing Tale of Dance Marathons and the Depression-Era Downtrodden. But Those Marathons Remind Us of Something Else — the Studio System at its Most Heartless

Contains spoilers

By Paul Parcellin

"They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” is a noir tragedy about exploitation of the desperate and beleaguered in Depression-era Los Angeles, right? True, but that’s only part of the story.

Based on the 1935 novel by hardboiled scribbler Horace McCoy, the movie’s plot revolves around the very real and very savage dance marathon competitions of the 1920s - ’30s.

They were grueling, days-long endurance challenges witnessed by audiences of paying customers. Exhausted contestant couples shuffled and foxtrotted their way toward death’s door in hope of being the last ones standing as the orchestra played on.

A possible dream come true

Winners would grab a sack of prize money — in theory — and stave off starvation another day. Others left through the back door, sometimes on gurneys.

The film does double duty, not only as a historic document of unencumbered human depravity, but also as an allegory for the movie biz, particularly the old Hollywood studio system, and maybe the entertainment industry as a whole.

Not convinced that there’s a connection between marathoners dancing themselves to death and the movie industry? Try this on for size:

Dreamers and the destitute

Robert (Michael Sarrazin) and Gloria (Jane Fonda) are beaten down by life. Both are hayseeds dwelling on the fringes of Hollywood’s motion picture industry. Unlike the naive Robert, Gloria has been around long enough to be exhausted by false promises and rejection. Her personal life is in ruins when fate pushes the two of them together, thrusting them into the dance marathon spotlight. They make a cute couple but there’s no romance between them. It’s all about keeping up an image that’s appealing to the gawkers.

Jane Fonda, Red Buttons, Susannah York, Michael Sarrazin.

Survival is the object

Beneath the surface, their’s is a strategic partnership. Each depends on the other for strength when despair sets in, and it does visit often.

The two are like the stars and starlets whose off-screen relationships (genuine or not) were often manufactured for the gossip rags and manipulated by the studios to fit the images crafted by Hollywood publicity departments. Actors were matched up, packaged and kept beholden to the studio for ongoing exploitation.

Making a show out of their pain

Contestants push themselves to physical and emotional collapse for a small chance of taking home a cash prize. It’s a lot like the struggles of actors who sacrifice a lot for a small chance of becoming a star.

Meanwhile, the contest's promoter and emcee, Rocky Gravo (Gig Young), keeps the audience entertained with periodic announcements highlighting juicy tidbits about the contestants’ personal woes and real life tragedies.

Personal privacy be damned

The most private details of contestants’ lives are like breadcrumbs the emcee tosses to the crowd to keeps them engaged, much like studios of bygone days, shaping rising stars’ public images and exploiting their personal lives to sell tickets.

Gravo spells out the contest’s dramatic core in his patter to the audience.

“Here they are again, folks! These wonderful, wonderful kids! Still struggling! Still hoping! … the marathon goes on, and on, and on! How long can they last?”

Like a prizefight, the marathon is buoyed by the palpable drama of contestants' suffering and their inevitable collapse, which holds the audience in suspense.

Susannah York, Michael Sarrazin, Bruce Dern, Bonnie Bedelia.

Torturous antics for cheap entertainment

Dancers are initially sweet-talked into signing up for these punishing competitions, usually unaware of what's in store for them. The audience demands to see human agony and the competitors are pushed to give the crowd what it wants. It's a bit like the studio system’s restrictive contracts and bullying tactics that kept actors working endless hours, wringing every last dollar of value out of them.

An astonishing admission

Backstage at the marathon, Robert is dumbfounded when Gravo refers to the supposed competition as a “show” rather than a contest.

“They don’t give a damn whether you win,” says Gravo. “They just want to see a little misery out there so they can feel a little better, maybe.”

The spectacle of physical decline

Scenes show contestants’ bodily deterioration — they grow paler, shakier, more broken — while the show’s lights stay bright and the emcee sets an upbeat tempo.

In a parallel universe, the studio system thrives on the gradual burnout of its labor — stars aging, being pushed past their limits — while the machine presents a glossy, unaffected front. Their bodies become the product, worn down for continued profit.

The big break that never was

The down-and-out dancers take a shot at winning a jackpot. If they come out on top their woes will go away, or so they think. But the game is rigged. Fame and wealth are elusive. Most go back home to Iowa or wherever, or maybe land on the streets. The big payoff is a prize that never materializes.

Movie biz promises of a “next picture” or a “breakout role” keep actors in their place and hopeful despite the abuse they suffer.

As Gloria observes, “Maybe it’s just the whole damn world is like Central Casting. They got it all rigged before you ever show up.”

Gig Young, the puppetmaster pulling the strings.

The emcee is like a studio exec

Gig Young, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor as the emcee, is appropriately oily as the character who controls the rules, shifts the goalposts and “packages” human misery into an entertainment product — much like movie producers who shape or kill careers.

The marathon organizers abruptly change the rules, limit rest periods and adjust incentives to strain contestants’ endurance.

It's all too similar to studio contracts and brutish demands that set long work hours, introduced unpredictable script rewrites and image “retooling.” Except for top-tier actors, talent had little say about work conditions.

The audience is part of the exploitation

In a scene showing the publicity campaign promoting the marathon we see the audience’s voyeuristic fascination interspersed with shots of photographers and newsreel coverage.

A woman volunteers to sponsor Robert and Gloria and seems absorbed in the illusion of a romantic relationship between them. In moments of audience participation, spectators are told that their enthusiasm “keeps the dancers going,” as if their passive gaze helps ease the suffering on the dance floor, thus relieving them of any guilt that might impede their enjoyment of such savage entertainment.

Reaching the breaking point

Gloria, finally broken and unable to escape the vicious cycle she’s stuck in, makes a final dreadful choice and Robert becomes a party to her collapse.

The dance marathon disguises cruelty under a veil of competition, similar to the way Hollywood glamorizes the struggle of hopefuls who are ultimately exploited and often tossed away.

In the end, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” is one of the least romanticized depictions of the Gold Age of Hollywood to hit the screen. “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) and “The Day of the Locust” (1975) similarly take a hard look at Hollywood's decadence and exploitative practices.

In all, we may love the movies, but when it comes to seeing how the sausage is made, not so much.

Mark Stevens: his quartet of searing films noir still light up screens today

2025-09-25T00:15:00.000-07:00

Lucille Ball, Mark Stevens, 'The Dark Corner' (1946).

By Paul Parcellin

Mark Stevens made a string of taut crime dramas in the 1940s and ’50s that still resonate today. He acted in dozens of films, from westerns, war pictures to musicals and comedies, and directed two of his self-produced noirs as well as some hardboiled television series.

Born Richard William Stevens in 1916, he adopted "Mark" as his show business handle after Daryl Zanuck suggested he take on Dana Andrews’s character's name in “Laura.” His family lived briefly in Cleveland before his parents divorced and his mother brought him to England. She remarried and they settled in Montreal.

A devastating injury

In his youth Stevens distinguished himself in competitive swimming and diving until he severely injured his back in a diving accident. He endured a number of surgeries that eventually returned him to normal mobility but his injury kept him out of the service. While convalescing he frequented movie houses and developed a love of cinema.

His first acting roles were in community theater and he later performed with a stock theater company. Setting his sights on the big time, he moved to New York but fell upon hard times and returned home to Montreal. He saved his pennies and bought a train ticket to California where Warner Brothers eventually gave him a screen test and made him a contract player.

On the screen, then out the door

He appeared in “Destination Tokyo” (1943) with Cary Grant and John Garfield, and “Objective, Burma” (1945) with Errol Flynn. After two years of bit roles he complained to the studio’s top dog Jack Warner that his career wasn’t advancing as quickly as he’d like. Warner rebuffed him, and in protest Stevens played hooky from his job, after which the studio dropped him.

But as one door slammed shut another opened at 20th Century Fox, where among other projects, he acted in a pair of solid noirs, “The Dark Corner” (1946), and “The Street with No Name” (1948).

A promising start with Fox

Eager to capitalize on the surprise hit, “Laura” (1944), Fox assembled a similar array of characters for “The Dark Corner” with Stevens in the role of Bradford Galt, an inexperienced yet somehow world-weary and cynical private eye. His recent hire, secretary Kathleen Stewart (Lucille Ball), is perky, wise cracking and street smart — just the kind of gal for Galt. Five years before her “I Love Lucy” debut, Ball gives us a taste of her acting chops and a touch of slapstick comedy — keep an eye out for the scene in which when she swings wildly in a batters cage.

The story gets cracking when Galt slaps around a mug in a white linen suit (William Bendix) who’s been tailing him. Of course, that’s not the last he sees of Bendix, who turns in his signature tough guy performance.

Different story, familiar characters

The story revolves around effete art dealer Hardy Cathcart (Clifton Webb), Galt’s former partner, Tony Jardine (Kurt Kreuger), and Cathcart’s wife, Mari (Cathy Downs). Webb is virtually repeating his role as acid-tongued gossip columnist Waldo Lydecker in “Laura.” Alas, Ball, Webb and Bendix steal every scene they’re in, but Stevens still makes a strong enough, if not stellar, showing as the jaded shamus.

Top of the heap, at last

He finally gets top billing in “The Street with No Name,” but, once again Stevens is both blessed and cursed to appear alongside co-star Richard Widmark. Widmark’s on-screen charisma is like a blindingly brilliant light that leaves Stevens’s solid performance a bit in the shadows.

Richard Widmark, "The Street with No Name" (1948).

G-man goes undercover

In “The Street with No Name” FBI agent Gene Cordell (Stevens) infiltrates a vicious gang operating in a seedy anywhere-America city. Head crook Alec Stiles (Widmark) runs a boxing gym and commands a band of robbers. Lloyd Nolan plays the same FBI Inspector Briggs of “The House on 92nd Street” (1945) and Ed Begley is the police chief.

The film’s stunning look, crafted by cinematographer Joseph MacDonald, creates shadowy dive hotel rooms, dark, forbidding alleyways and menacing skid row streets with astonishing artistry.

Gunplay and fisticuffs

It’s a tight action drama with a slug-fest boxing match and a noir shootout, appropriately, in a gloomy factory. Unfortunately, Stevens apparently didn’t live up to Fox’s expectations of a leading man and loan-outs to other studios began until his contract lapsed.

After Fox, he found work with the “three little majors,” Universal, Columbia and United Artists, and with low-budget B-movie factories on Poverty Row. Most notably he appeared in a noir for Columbia, “Between Midnight and Dawn” (1950), with Edmond O’Brien, in which he plays a rookie cop paired with O’Brien, patrolling city streets on the graveyard shift.

Mark Stevens, Edmond O'Brien, "Between Midnight and Dawn" (1950).

Cops in a radio car

The film is a police procedural wrapped around a buddy movie with a documentary style opening. The film’s staccato newsreel-like footage gives way to a smoother paced story of police officers trying to tame the influence of organized crime in their city. A sub-plot offers some rickety comedy involving Stevens’s Rocky Barnes awkwardly wooing police radio dispatcher Katherine Mallory (Gale Storm). The light humor seems inconsequential, but Katherine becomes more significant to the film’s emotional backbone in the later part of the story.

The green and the disillusioned

O’Brien’s Patrolman Daniel Purvis is street smart and cynical, while Barnes is as yet unscathed by bitter experience on the force. When the crime fighting duo arrest racketeer Ritchie Garris (Donald Buka) things get serious and a revenge drama is set in motion. The cast turns in solid performances all around as the film comes to a tense climax.

After “Between Midnight and Dawn,” television roles followed for Stevens. In 1953 he took over the lead role in NBC-TV’s detective drama “Martin Kane.” He stayed with the show just one season, 40 episodes, but it provided him the security of a steady paycheck as he made plans for the future.

Mark Stevens, Trudy Wroe, "Big Town" (1954).

A leap into ‘Big Town’

It was a big risk, but the following year Stevens bought a half-stake in the TV series “Big Town” (1950-1956). The series, which ran on CBS (1950-1954) and NBC (1954-1956), is built around a crusading news reporter fighting corruption. Stevens appeared in 82 episodes. In his second season he began writing, directing and producing episodes, which would prove to be a key to his later success in film and television.

Out for revenge

Back on the big screen, Stevens directed and starred in “Cry Vengeance” (1954), a revenge thriller he made for Allied Artists, formerly Monogram Pictures. In it, San Francisco ex-cop Vic Barron (Stevens) is haunted by his past. He crossed mobster Tino Morelli (Douglas Kennedy) and soon thereafter his family was killed in a car bombing that left him disfigured. The mobster framed him for a crime he didn’t commit and Barron served three years in prison.

We meet him as he’s released from lockup and filled with a desire for vengeance on Morelli. But is he after the right man? Barron’s search for the culprit brings him all the way to Alaska, but finding the perpetrator behind the bombing proves more complicated than he anticipated.

Mark Stevens, "Cry Vengeance" (1954).

A company of his own

Following “Cry Vengeance, he formed Mark Stevens Productions in 1955 with ambitious plans for films and TV series as well as an expansion into the music publishing and record distribution businesses. Most of these ventures didn’t pan out, with the exception of the noir “Time Table” (1956). This time, Stevens directs and stars, playing insurance cop Charlie Norman who is assigned to investigate a train heist that turns out to be more than what meets the eye.

Robbery on the rails

The gang pulls off a complicated railway robbery that depends on adherence to a strict timetable — if one move goes wrong a chain reaction would quash the caper. The film features a gripping 10 minute robbery sequence that showcases Stevens’s directing style. We learn about Charlie, who’s obsessed with status and material wealth. He’s jumpy and craves success — perhaps a bit like the real-life Stevens. He spells it all out in a short burst of anti-establishment dialogue: “For me, patience in poison!”

Just one film completed

The taut thriller would be Mark Stevens Productions’s lone completed project. It’s unclear what exactly brought about the company’s demise, although it’s likely that Stevens invested too heavily in his productions. “Time Table” stands as a shining example of Stevens’s craft (at times, he claimed the company produced others).

Off to distant shores

The production company’s failure was enough to make Stevens flee to Majorca, Spain, where he eventually retired. Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s he returned to the states periodically for TV guest spots, mostly on westerns. He appeared in “Fate is the Hunter” (1964) with Glenn Ford, and back on the continent he appeared in a string of forgettable European movies.

He popped up now and again in TV guest spots on “Kojack,” “Simon and Simon” and “Magnum, P.I.” His final TV appearance came in 1987. He died of cancer in 1994 at age 77.

Two Super-Charged Road Movies Take the Not So Scenic Route Through America

2025-08-28T01:37:00.000-07:00

Barry Newman as Kowalski, 'Vanishing Point' (1971).
A high-speed chase through the desert turns him into an overnight folk hero.

By Paul Parcellin

“Vanishing Point” (1971)

The hyperkinetic, blind radio disc jockey Super Soul (Cleavon Little) is a lot like an evangelical preacher without the fire and brimstone. He’s part guardian angel, part voice of God to renegade automobile delivery driver Kowalski (Barry Newman) who, to put it mildly, is having an extremely tough day.

A slightly burned around the edges Kowalski (he doesn’t seem to have a first name) returns from an exhausting delivery and insists on taking another assignment post haste.

He grabs a white 1970 Dodge Challenger that’s due to be delivered in San Francisco and sets out to tear-ass across the desert to California with a pocketful of bennies as his only companion.

The hopped-up Kowalski makes a bet with his speed dealer that he can drive from Denver to San Francisco in 15 hours.

Spinning his tires and dodging the police, Kowalski tunes in to Super Soul on the car radio and discovers that the disc jockey is following his progress via a police scanner. The radio man cheers for the erratic driver as sheriff departments and highway patrol squad cars try in vain to chase him down.

Cleavon Little as Super Soul.
His on-air raps are a guiding beacon for Kowalski.

The jive-talking announcer comments on the hero’s actions like a Greek chorus and sets up the movie’s underlying theme. In his blisteringly paced, funky online patter, Super Soul calls Kowalski the “last American hero” and “the last free soul.” Both are dubious titles for a man wired on amphetamines and driving someone else’s car like he’s been fired out of a cannon.

Like “Two-Lane Blacktop,” the other movie discussed below, “Vanishing Point” is about freedom, but in an early 1970s countercultural way, meaning the word comes packed with contradictions, misconceptions and exaggerations. Yes, Kowalski is busting out of the norm, but, not to be too materialistic, aren't you glad that’s not your car he’s driving?

Both films feature square pegs who’ve dropped out of society and live on the road. Highways and byways are commuting channels for most of us, but for these chronic nomads the road is a place that simply brings them to another road, another diner, another filling station. There’s no destination, really. Constant motion is the objective.

Some might connect this with the restless energy of post-World War II America that inspired Jack Kerouac’s cross-country journeys, but it ain’t the same ball of wax. There’s no aesthetic pleasure taken from these motor-driven marathons; no awe at the vastness of the American landscape, no hopefulness and youthful optimism are present here. Any sense of joy and wonder was long ago deposited in a landfill. There’s only raw speed, the smell of burning rubber and a mad desire to shake free of society’s constraints.

All eyes are on Kowalski.

Kowalski, a former cop who raced cars and motorcycles and is a decorated war hero, is angry at the corruption he’s seen and bad breaks he’s had. We flash back to his days as a policeman, when he stops his superior officer from roughing up and raping a suspect, and was summarily drummed out of the force.

At first it’s hard to understand why he’s made such a risky, indeed foolish bet. There’s no logical reason other than his compulsion to push himself to the limit. It’s just his way of shutting out the world, and like the drugs coursing through his veins, it's effective for a while, until it isn't.

We cheer him on at first as he evades the Keystone Kops-like bumbling of small town heat who can’t figure out how to stop him. Kowalski does everything from jetting off the road into rocky desert terrain to taking the car over some pretty sick jumps — the car’s owner would no doubt suffer a brain hemorrhage at the sight of the suspension-smashing abuse the pristine muscle machine suffers. Somehow, the car looks none the worse for wear. Is the seemingly indestructible white muscle car a symbol of freedom — who knows?

Dean Jagger as the Prospector and Barry Newman as Kowalski.
Capturing poisonous desert snakes.

The ever intrepid Kowalski presses on and encounters, among other strange sights, a naked girl on a motorcycle (Gilda Texter) and a grizzled prospector (Dean Jagger), who captures poisonous snakes and sells them to a religious cult that has set up camp amid the cacti and sage brush.

At this point we might begin to wonder if these encounters are real or just the hallucinations of a buzzed hop head who’s spent too much time in the hot sun.

The heat is on and Kowalski is in the skillet.

Things get stranger still when he encounters a woman by the roadside (Charlotte Rampling). She gives him some pot to toke on and spends the night with him. In the morning she’s gone. So, was she real or some kind of omen? It’s anybody’s guess (For some reason this sequence appears only in the film’s UK cut).

“Vanishing Point” was reviled by some critics who saw it as a downward regression that started with Steve McQueen’s “Bullitt” (1968). That’s the film that knocked everyone’s eyeballs out with stomach-churning, daredevil stunt driving in the ferociously steep hills of San Francisco. Doubters lamented that movies had become nothing but smash-’em-up thrill porn. In recent times “Vanishing Point” has won a legion of admirers, including Quentin Tarantino, and is a bonafide cult classic.

It may not hold up as the spiritual experience that some suggest it is, including the film’s director, Richard C. Sarafian, but “Vanishing Point” is wall-to-wall action. Just don’t rely on it as a guide to cross-country travel.

Dennis Wilson, Laurie Bird and James Taylor, 'Two-Lane Blacktop' (1971).

“Two-Lane Blacktop” (1971)

Monte Hellman didn’t have a complex story in mind when he made “Two-Lane Blacktop.” He says it barely has any plot and he’s right on the money about that. It’s a movie about street racers, a subculture of amateur drivers who run unsanctioned drag races. There isn’t much money in it — the faster of two cars wins whatever scratch gets wagered, a few hundred bucks at best.

The four main characters are the Driver (James Taylor) the Mechanic (Dennis Wilson), the girl (Laurie Bird) and GTO (Warren Oates). Among them, Oates was the only actor with bonafide screen cred. Taylor is a popular singer-songwriter with hit records, and Wilson, who died in 1983, was a drummer and vocalist for the Beach Boys. Bird was a model who later appeared in Hellman’s film “Cockfighter” (1974) and played Paul Simon’s girlfriend in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” (1977). She gives a remarkably natural performance in here.

The Driver and the Mechanic work the local street racing circuit like pool hustlers. They travel in a rebuilt 1955 Chevy. With its dull primer gray finish and prominent hood scoop the car doesn’t look like much. But it’s got a growling 454 V8 engine that blows the doors off of all challengers.

What happens next is simple. The four of them converge — the Driver and the Mechanic pick up the hitchhiking Girl; GTO and the two drag racers cross paths on the road and irritate each other until GTO challenges them to a cross-country race that starts in New Mexico and finishes in Washington, D.C. The winner gets the other’s pink slip — ownership of the car, that is.

That’s about it. There’s some minor drama when the Girl sleeps with the Mechanic — the Driver was sweet on her but didn’t speak up quickly enough. But emotions among the three are muted. Even the race itself ends up petering out long before either car reaches the finish.

Warren Oates as GTO in Two-Lane Blacktop.

“Two-Lane Blacktop” was green lit post “Easy Rider” (1969). Universal wanted to capitalize on the momentum of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper’s counter-culture motorcycle odyssey that proved a surprise hit.

But the studio hated Hellman’s finished product and barely promoted it. It flopped at the box office and was the last theatrically released film he helmed with major studio support. (He did, however, direct second-unit work and filled in, uncredited, with another project for a major.)

Another roadside diner.

Unlike other films of its ilk, “Two-Lane Blacktop” is an unromanticized view of outsiders living on society’s edge. All four characters seem to exist only on asphalt (much of it was shot on the old Route 66). There may be towns with real homes and people leading normal lives somewhere near the highway but we rarely see them. The four wanderers only exit their vehicles to eat diner food and refuel. At one point the girl hops out to panhandle when funds get low.

Each seems to exist in his or her own private haze. Their relationships are tentative — the Girl switches cars to ride with GTO but that flirtation is short lived.

The film defines each of them by the functions they fulfill. When the tires need to be changed the Driver sits on the roadside watching the Mechanic do the labor. He only drives, you see. GTO is merely the man with the orange Pontiac GTO muscle car — how much more early 1970s can you get? The Girl is the fickle love interest whose allegiances shift on a whim.

Laurie Bird as The Girl, 'Two-Lane Blacktop,'

GTO is the most verbose of the four. He’s a good ole boy who talks hitchhikers’ ears off, regaling them with grandiose stories about himself that are pure fantasy. He picked up his spanking new car in Bakersfield, or maybe he won it in a Vegas craps game.

He’s a live wire and the diametric opposite of the taciturn Driver and Mechanic. Beneath the surface he’s just another homeless traveler whose lonely life has defaulted to a nomadic pilgrimage to nowhere. It’s a cinch that all four never see anything more exotic than a lunch counter, a Stuckey’s and an Esso station.

Many have called this the most genuine of road movies and that may be true (when I’ve watched every road movie ever made I’ll get back to you). For a scripted drama it often feels like a documentary. The movie has a lulling pace occasionally interrupted by bursts of fuel-charged speed. It all seems like a dream induced by gasoline vapors.

In the end, all four go their separate ways, and not much is likely change for this quartet. The road goes on forever and there are no exit ramps.

Imposter noir: 51 films about swapping, losing and faking identities

2025-08-06T23:28:00.000-07:00

Olivia de Havilland, 'The Dark Mirror' (1946).

"There is only one plot – things are not what they seem."

— Jim Thompson

By Paul Parcellin

Let’s say you’re a character in a film noir. It’s likely that someone who you’re rubbing elbows with is not who they say they are. For that matter, you may not be who you claim to be, either. Or, stranger still, you may be using an alias because you can’t recall who you really are and bad people are trying to do you harm.

Unlikely, you say? Guess again. Noir characters often shed their identities and don new facades. It’s just a matter of faking the paperwork (in the movies, at least).

But there’s a huge pitfall in the identity switching game: Whomever you’re fixing to impersonate may be sitting on a powder keg, and suddenly, you’re in a dangerous game of musical chairs.

Take note that when it comes to false identities, stolen identities, memory blackouts and the like, director Alfred Hitchcock is the ringmaster extraordinaire of it all. Sir Alfred clocks in here with a whopping seven identity switcheroo films. Was he obsessed? You be the judge. Here are 51 films in which identities are stolen, faked and erased from the mind:

“Across the Bridge” (1957)

A wealthy businessman (Rod Steiger) hops a train to Mexico to evade embezzlement charges. Enroute, he steals another man’s identity, but that only complicates matters. Ken Annakin directs.

“The Big Steal” (1949)

An Army lieutenant (Robert Mitchum) accused of robbery pursues the real thief on a frantic chase through Mexico, aided by the thief's fiancee (Jane Greer). Meanwhile, the lieutenant appropriates an Army captain’s (William Bendix) identity. Don Siegel directs.

“The Bigamist” (1953)

A man (Edmond O’Brien) is secretly married to two women, and carefully maintains two separate identities. But he feels the pressure of his deceit. Ida Lupino directs.

“The Case of Charles Peace” (1949)

Businessman Charles Peace (Michael Martin Harvey) leads a double life. By day he's a respected local businessman, but by night he's a professional thief who lets nothing, not even murder, stop him from getting what he wants. Norman Lee directs.

“The Chase” (1946)

A drifter (Robert Cummings) takes a job as a chauffeur, becomes entangled in a criminal scheme, and wonders if he’s losing his grip on reality. Arthur Ripley directs.

“Chase a Crooked Shadow” (1958)

At Kimberley Prescott’s (Anne Baxter) villa, a stranger (Richard Todd) shows up and claims he is her brother who supposedly died the previous year in a car accident. Michael Anderson directs

“Crossroads” (1942)

A diplomat (William Powell) suffers amnesia and is blackmailed over a possible criminal past. The mystery hinges on whether he’s someone else entirely. Jack Conway directs.

“The Dark Mirror” (1946)

Identical twins (Olivia de Havilland), one good, one possibly a murderer, swap identities to confuse authorities. Robert Siodmak directs.

“Dark Passage” (1947)

A man (Humphrey Bogart) convicted of murdering his wife escapes from prison, changes his face with plastic surgery and assumes a new identity while working to try to prove his innocence. Delmer Daves directs.

“Dead Reckoning” (1946)

A soldier (Humphrey Bogart) searches for another serviceman (William Prince) who has run away just before receiving the Medal of Honor. There’s a dark spot on the fleeing soldier's past and Bogart investigates. John Cromwell directs.

“Dead Ringer” (1964)

A woman (Bette Davis) kills her wealthy twin sister and takes her place. But her plan is more complicated than she anticipates. This crime drama is steeped in gothic atmosphere and deception. Paul Henreid directs

“Detour” (1945)

An unemployed pianist (Tom Neal) hitchhikes across the country. Along the way he assumes a new identity and his troubles grow deeper by the hour. Edgar G. Ulmer directs.

“Dishonored Lady” (1947)

A beautiful editor at a fashion magazine (Hedy Lamarr) has a breakdown due to the pressures of her work and her disappointing love life. A psychiatrist recommends that she start life fresh by moving into a smaller apartment and under another name. Robert Stevenson directs

“Foreign Correspondent” (1940)

On the eve of World War II, a young American reporter (Joel McCrea) tries to expose enemy agents in London. Kidnapping, deceptive identities and treason come to light. Alfred Hitchcock directs.

“High Wall” (1947)

A man (Robert Taylor) accused of murder suffers from amnesia and tries to recover his memory and his true identity to prove his innocence. Curtis Bernhardt directs.

“His Kind of Woman” (1951)

Deported gangster Nick Ferraro (Raymond Burr) plans to re-enter the United States with the aid of gambler Dan Milner (Robert Mitchum). Milner is unaware of the scheme he’s taking part in. John Farrow, and Richard Fleischer (uncredited) direct.

“Hollow Triumph” (1948) a.k.a. “The Scar”

A criminal (Paul Henreid) assumes the identity of a psychiatrist he resembles, complete with a self-inflicted facial scar. But his plan has a major flaw. Steve Sekely directs.

“House of Bamboo” (1955)

Planted in a Tokyo crime syndicate, a U.S. Army Investigator (Robert Stack) goes undercover in search of answers in the death of an Army official. Samuel Fuller directs.

“The House on Telegraph Hill” (1951)

Concentration camp survivor Victoria Kowelska (Valentina Cortese) becomes involved in a mystery after she assumes the identity of a dead friend in order to gain passage to America. Robert Wise directs.

“I Walk Alone” (1947)

An ex-con (Burt Lancaster) returns to claim part of a business, only to find the books and identities have been manipulated. Byron Haskin Directs.

“Jail Bait” (1954)

Vic Brady (Timothy Farrell) draws young Don Gregor (Clancy Malone) into a life of crime. He then blackmails Gregor's plastic surgeon father (Herbert Rawlinson) into fixing up his face so he can evade the cops. Edward D. Wood Jr. directs.

“Kansas City Confidential” (1952)

An ex-con trying to go straight (John Payne) is framed for a million dollar armored car robbery and must go to Mexico in order to unmask the real culprits. Incidents involving disguise, hidden identity and mistaken identity prevail. Phil Karlson directs.

“Lady in the Lake” (1946)

The editor of a crime magazine (Audrey Totter) hires Phillip Marlowe (Robert Montgomery) to find her boss’s wife. But there’s murder afoot, and the private eye finds himself smack in the middle of it. Identity switching plays an important role in this mystery. Based on Raymond Chandler’s novel. Robert Montgomery directs.

“Macao” (1952)

Nick Cochran (Robert Mitchum), an American exiled in Macao, has a chance to restore his name if he can help capture an international crime lord. Cochran goes undercover while trying to woo the beautiful songstress Julie Benson (Jane Russell). Josef von Sternberg directs.

“The Maltese Falcon” (1941)

San Francisco private detective Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) takes on a case involving three eccentric fortune hunters (Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Elisha Cook Jr,) and a compulsive liar (Mary Astor). The object of their quest is a priceless statuette. John Huston directs.

“The Man Who Cheated Himself” (1950)

A cop (Lee J. Cobb) helps his lover cover up a murder and tries to lead the investigation, effectively switching from lawman to suspect. Felix E. Feist directs.

“Ministry of Fear” (1944)

Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) has just been released from an asylum during World War II in England when he accidentally stumbles onto a dangerous underground organization. Fritz Lang directs.

“The Narrow Margin” (1952)

A woman (Marie Windsor) planning to testify against the mob must be protected against potential assassins on the train trip from Chicago to Los Angeles. Richard Fleischer directs.

“Nightfall” (1956)

Through a series of bizarre coincidences, an artist (Aldo Ray) finds himself falsely accused of bank robbery and murder and is pursued by the authorities as well as the real killers. Jacques Tourneur directs.

“No Man of Her Own” (1950)

A pregnant woman (Barbara Stanwyck) adopts the identity of a railroad-crash victim and starts a new life with the woman's wealthy in-laws. But she finds that maintaining her ruse is more difficult than she imagined. Mitchell Leisen directs.

“North by Northwest” (1959)

A New York City advertising executive (Cary Grant) goes on the run after being mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies, and falls for a woman (Eva Marie Saint) whose loyalties he begins to doubt. Alfred Hitchcock directs.

“Out of the Past” (1947)

A former private eye (Robert Mitchum) living under a false identity escapes his past to run a gas station in a small town. But his past catches up with him and must return to the life he tried to leave behind. A gambler (Kirk Douglas) and a duplicitous dame (Jane Greer) await his arrival. Jacques Tourneur directs.

“Seconds” (1966)

An unhappy middle-aged banker agrees to a procedure that will fake his death and give him a completely new look and identity. But it comes with its own price. John Frankenheimer directs.

“Shadow of a Doubt” (1943)

A teenage girl (Teresa Wright), is overjoyed when her Uncle Charley (Joseph Cotten) comes to visit the family in their quiet California town. But slowly she begins to suspect that he harbors a dark secret and isn’t exactly who he seems to be. Alfred Hitchcock directs.

“Somewhere in the Night” (1946)

George Taylor (John Hodiak) returns from World War II with amnesia. Back home in Los Angeles, while trying to track down his old identity, he stumbles upon a murder case that’s gone cold and a hunt for a missing $2 million. Joseph L. Mankiewicz directs.

“Spellbound” (1945)

A psychiatrist (Ingrid Bergman) becomes involved with the new director of the hospital (Gregory Peck) where she practices. But she discovers that her new beau has a dark side. Alfred Hitchcock directs.

“Stolen Face” (1952)

A doctor (Paul Henreid) repairs a female inmate's disfigured face to match the lovely woman (Lizabeth Scott) who left him. He marries the inmate and learns that beauty is only skin deep. Terence Fisher directs.

“Stolen Identity” (1953)

A jealous concert pianist (Francis Lederer) murders his wife's lover, then frames an innocent taxi driver (Donald Buka) for the crime. Gunther von Fritsch directs.

“Strange Impersonation” (1946)

A research scientist (Brenda Marshall) conducting experiments on a new anesthetic finds herself being blackmailed by a woman (Ruth Ford) she accidentally knocked down with her car. Anthony Mann directs.

“The Strange Mrs. Crane” (1948)

Jenny Hadley (Marjorie Lord) settles into a comfortable existence with a new identity as Gina, the wife of politician Clinton Crane (Pierre Watkin). Blackmailer Floyd Durant (Robert Shayne) threatens to reveal her criminal past. Sam Newfield directs.

“The Stranger” (1946)

An investigator from the War Crimes Commission (Edward G. Robinson) travels to Connecticut to find an infamous Nazi. Amid the bucolic countryside, danger lurks. Orson Welles directs and co-stars.

“Tension” (1949)

A meek pharmacist (Richard Basehart) creates an alternate identity under which he plans to murder the bullying liquor salesman who has become his wife's lover. John Berry directs.

“They Won't Believe Me” (1947)

On trial for murdering his girlfriend, philandering stockbroker Larry Ballentine (Robert Young) takes the stand to claim his innocence and describe the actual, but improbable, sequence of events that led to her death. Mistaken identity is a major plot twist. Irving Pichel directs.

“The Third Man” (1949)

Pulp novelist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) travels to shadowy postwar Vienna, only to find himself investigating the mysterious death of an old friend, Harry Lime (Orson Welles). The films plays heavily with false appearances and coverups. Carol Reed directs.

“The 39 Steps” (1935)

A man in London (Robert Donat) tries to help a counter-espionage agent (Lucie Mannheim), but when the agent is killed and the man stands accused, he must go on the run to save himself and stop a spy ring that is trying to steal top-secret information. Alfred Hitchcock directs.

“This Side of the Law” (1950)

A drifter (Kent Smith) is bailed out of jail by a lawyer (Robert Douglas), who hires him to impersonate a millionaire until the man can be declared legally dead and the estate settled. However, the man soon finds out that things are not exactly how they seem. Richard L. Bare directs.

“The Two Mrs. Carrolls” (1947)

An artist (Humphrey Bogart ) forms an attachment with a woman (Barbara Stanwyck) on holiday in the country. As the relationship develops, his behavior and information about his past cause her increasing concern. Peter Godfrey directs.

“Vertigo” (1958)

A former San Francisco police detective (James Stewart), struggling with his personal demons, becomes obsessed with a hauntingly beautiful woman (Kim Novak) he’s been hired to tail. Alfred Hitchcock directs.

“Walk Softly, Stranger” (1950)

An ex-hood (Joseph Cotten) hopes to start a new life under an assumed name in a small town but his past catches up with him. Robert Stevenson directs.

“The Woman on Pier 13” (1949) a.k.a. “I Married a Communist”

Successful, newly-married Brad Collins (Robert Ryan) once belonged to the Communist Party. He’s been living under an assumed identity, but now the party will stop at nothing to use him. Robert Stevenson directs.

“The Wrong Man” (1956)

Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda) is mistaken for an armed robber and arrested. But how can he prove that he’s innocent? Alfred Hitchcock directs.

There are undoubtedly many more films that deal with identity and impersonation. What would you add to the list, and which are your favorites? Shout it out in the comments section.

‘Pale Flower’: Gambling dens, yakuza and a mysterious woman who lives on the edge

2025-07-21T17:20:00.000-07:00

A taste for danger. Saeko (Mariko Kaga), "Pale Flower" (1964).

By Paul Parcellin

“Pale Flower” (1964)

It’s clear from the start that Masahiro Shinoda’s “Pale Flower” isn’t your typical yakuza picture — the kind that’s simmered in the Japanese underworld’s intricate codes of conduct, with a lead character who agonizes over prickly themes such as honor and loyalty.

“Pale Flower” covers the same slice of society as other yakuza films, but the soundtrack tips us off that we’re in for something different. Avant-garde classical composer Toru Takemitsu’s jagged, dissonant orchestral score is unlike anything we’d expect to hear in a crime film, regardless of its country of origin. It grabs our attention immediately and won’t let go.

A vision of Japan's underworld

Like Western films of its ilk, “Pale Flower” has a shadowy noir look, nervous edits and dreamy, hallucinatory imagery. It’s a vision of the Japanese underworld as Jean-Pierre Melville or Robert Bresson might have pictured it.

Saeko (Kaga) and Muraki (Ryô Ikebe) on the streets of Yokohama.

Much like his European counterparts, director Shinoda, a founding member of the Japanese New Wave of filmmakers, infused “Pale Flower” with a sense of alienation and dislocation, reflecting the aftermath of brutal warfare in bygone times.

This is a gangster movie and a love story mashed into one, and if that sounds pretty conventional, it is — at least on the surface. But it’s also the story of Japan after World War II, defeated and held under the sway of the United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War era.

Audio mosaics of layered, electronically enhanced sound that help define the overall feel of “Pale Flower.”

There’s a sense of ennui among the citizenry of Yokohama, where the story is set. Clocks keep ticking but time stands still, and denizens of this metropolis seem to exist in a state of suspended animation. Gangster business carries on, but emotional relationships seem stunted. The populace is numb, still recovering from a stunning wartime defeat. Traditional rituals and customs are practiced, but have a hollow ring.

Defining a mood with sound

The soundtrack reflects that dreamy yet unsettling mood, blending practical audio effects with orchestrated music. Takemitsu didn’t simply compose the score after the film was finished, he took part in the film’s development process, crafting audio mosaics of layered, electronically enhanced sound that help define the overall feel of “Pale Flower.”

Saeko and Muraki in a game of chance.

In gambling den scenes, a central focus of the film, players shuffle what are supposed to be stiff, almost wooden, cardboard playing cards, known as hanafuda (in this case tile playing cards were used to accentuate the sound). Adding juice to the audio track, an electronically enhanced sound recording of two tap dancers seamlessly merges with the cacophony of clicking tiles. The result is a hypnotic percussion sequence that adds a surreal touch to scenes of drop-dead serious gamblers attending to business.

Another visually and sonically arresting scene takes place in a shop full of clocks. Their kinetic ticking, like the clicking and clacking of gambling cards, reminds us that clocks move forward, even if life here seems to stand still.

Apart from its rich and varied tapestry of sound, “Pale Flower”’s on-screen action is mostly restrained and many scenes are dialogue heavy. But just as the drama begins to trail off an impromptu car race, nestled between more muted sequences, provides an adrenaline rush. The gasoline fueled competition is more than just squealing tires and revving engines. Like almost every facet of Shinoda’s film, the racing sequence offers rich details about the characters.

Muraki, out of prison and back to gang life.

Saeko (Mariko Kaga), the mysterious love interest of fresh-out-prison Muraki (Ryō Ikebe), has a childlike, giggling manor. But her naive appearance masks her true self. She’s a thrill seeker addicted to danger and risk taking. Muraki, older and hardened to the ways the underworld, is deliberate in his actions and careful in each step he takes. But they bond over a shared sense of despair and boredom. Both lead lives of material comfort that lack intrinsic value.

Saeko, however, is more of a puzzle ... we see nothing of her life outside of her and Muraki’s nocturnal wanderings.

The source of Muraki’s depression stems from the crime that put him in prison — killing a member of a rival crime family. He learns that while he was in prison the dead man’s crime family merged with his gang, so the killing and the time he served had no strategic purpose or importance.

Saeko, however, is more of a puzzle. She seems to come from a family of means, but other than an unexpected, nerve racking encounter between her and Muraki in a public place (others are around so they pretend to be strangers), we see nothing of her life outside of her and Muraki’s nocturnal wanderings.

Their go-to respite, gambling, is the one activity that they enthusiastically share, but it’s not without its difficulties. It’s OK for a woman’s to be in a gaming room as long as she’s there to attend to a male gambler. But a female gambler is almost too much for the yakuza to stomach. The card tables are crowded with tattooed mobsters stripped to the waist, a virtual mountain of sweaty flesh which all but surrounds the delicate blossom as she takes her place with the boys. And she never bats an eyelash.

Stepping up her game

With Muraki speaking for her, Saeko is allowed to step up to increasingly higher-stakes betting. Muraki and her romance is mostly under wraps, almost non-existent you might say. Their shared malaise and gambling den outings are more important than love and sex. Saeko’s fixation with taking increasingly greater risks is sated by Muraki’s mob status, which opens gambling den doors. But he does so with growing misgivings. In her he sees a moth tempted by an open flame.

Based on an original story by Shintaro Ishihara, the film was scripted by Ataru Baba. Shinoda reworked the script significantly and Baba was not pleased with the result. He decried the film’s dynamic editing and soundtrack, which he felt obscures his interpretation of the story. Also troubling to the screenwriter was the film’s emphasis on nihilism, which was merely implicit in the script he labored over.

But nihilism is indeed the guiding force in “Pale Flower.” Consequently, bored, disenchanted risk-takers will in time face the peril their activities invite.

A troubling omen appears in the betting parlors when Yoh (Takashi Fujiki), a heroin addict who fled Hong Kong after committing two murders, lingers on the periphery of the gaming tables. He’s like an ever present angel of death who’s come to perch in their roost, casting a shadow that will forever fall over them.

In the meantime, Muraki’s present milieu is something like that of post-war Japan itself: both are shadows of their previous selves, and laboring to adapt to an inhospitable world. Like Japan, Muraki is unsure of his path forward, but is painfully aware that all things can change in an instant.

‘The Killers’: A much loved noir that’s the spitting image of another American classic

2025-07-03T01:10:00.000-07:00

Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, ‘The Killers’ (1946).

By Paul Parcellin

“The Killers” (1946)

Some say “The Killers” is the “Citizen Kane” of noir, but how can that be?

One is a beloved noir, the story behind a brutal murder of a washed up prizefighter. The other, a fictional biography of a media tycoon, loosely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst. It’s like comparing doughnuts with dirigibles, isn't it?

Not exactly. The key to their kinship is the way the two films tell their stories.

Here’s the rundown on 'The Killers':

The violent death of the Swede (Burt Lancaster) in the first dozen minutes or so of “The Killers” launches an investigation. But it's the preamble to the murder that draws us in. It starts when two hitmen come looking for Swede at the diner he’s known to haunt.

Charles McGraw, William Conrad, Harry Hayden, ‘The Killers.’

They terrorize the staff and a young customer and announce that they’re going kill the former boxer turned filling station attendant. The customer, Nick Adams (Phil Brown), gets to Swede’s rooming house before the killers do, but his warning to the condemned man is pointless.

“Once, I did something wrong,” Swede tells the youthful Adams.

The Swede (Lancaster) awaits dark visitors.

Swede doesn’t budge, but instead awaits the inevitable as the gunmen creep up the stairs. He grips the bedpost until the two torpedos burst in and fire. In one of noir's most famous close-ups, we see his grasp on the post release as his life slips away.

Based, in part, on a Hemingway short story

The film is based on an Ernest Hemingway short story of the same title. The opening sequence in the diner is faithful to the book, but the rest of the script is original material.

The screenplay was written by Richard Brooks and then heavily re-worked by Anthony Veiller and his frequent collaborator John Huston. Only Veiller is credited on the final film. Huston went uncredited due to his contract with Warner Bros.

Everett Sloane, Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Ellen Lowe, ‘Citizen Kane’ (1941).

Hemingway’s part of the story, just the tip of the iceberg, is the culmination of a years-long series of events. The bulk of the film, which explains what led to the murder, owes a lot to “Citizen Kane” (1941). In both strikingly similar films an investigator pieces together the story of a deceased man, around whom a mystery swirls.

Investigator steps in, post mortem

After newspaper publishing magnate Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) dies of natural causes at an advanced age, a newsreel company reporter pokes his nose into Kane’s life, interviewing those who knew him best.

Swede’s death barely captures the attention of local law enforcement. The only one interested is insurance investigator Jim Reardon (Edmond O’Brien), who needs to find a mystery woman who’s due to collect the payout from Swede’s life insurance policy.

Cryptic final utterances

Both Kane and Swede utter puzzling last words just before they die, and both films involve a quest to find the meaning of those words. Swede’s “Once, I did something wrong,” contrasts with Kane’s short and sweet one-word finale, “Rosebud.”

It turns out Kane’s last gasped syllables are packed with delicious meaning and irony (which I won’t go into here lest I dish out two spoilers for the price of one).

Both stories are told in a series of flashbacks, a noir staple, that we see as each interviewee spills his or her chunk of the story. All of the fragmented, nonlinear pieces coalesce into complete, or near complete, portraits of the two men.

Witnesses speak, but are they reliable?

Mind you, there’s good reason to question the reliability some of the witness’s accounts of the facts. Yet both films seem to take those recollections at face value, each building toward a revelation about those cryptic last words both men spoke.

Edmond O'Brien, Ann Staunton, 'The Killers.'

Reardon figures out what Swede meant about his doing “something wrong.” It isn’t like the Sphinx-like riddle that the newsreel reporter is tasked with unscrambling. He discovers a richly detailed story of Kane, but never finds out what “Rosebud” means, and he gives up, defeated.

A revealing view of Kane's clutter

But when the camera takes a God's-eye view of the grim cleanup of Kane’s earthly possession, we see the humble object, which obviously held great symbolic importance to the fabulously wealthy media magnate, and occupied his final thoughts. It’s as sad and touching a moment as you’re likely to see on screen, describing the core of the man and what drove him forward in his remarkable life.

A mountain and a molehill? Perhaps not

The Swede’s story, tragic as it is, isn't as broad in scope as the newspaper mogul’s sprawling, tainted saga. Swede’s gritty tale is a eulogy to a wounded, gullible has-been who was putty in the hands of a gorgeous, evil woman (Kane had his women problems, too). Still, “The Killers” is a top shelf noir that set a standard for the classic era of films like it.

And as it turns out, both Swede and Kane had this in common: Despite living widely disparate lives, both men, once mighty, go out lonely and haunted, not with a clap of thunder but with a whimper.

Off the Hook: A bedridden heiress glimpses the face of doom in ‘Sorry, Wrong Number’

2025-06-17T21:17:00.000-07:00

Barbara Stanwyck, ‘Sorry, Wrong Number’ (1948). Crossed phone lines deliver chilling news to a woman stranded in her apartment.

Post war prosperity,

women’s position
in society go
under the microscope

Contains some spoilers

By Paul Parcellin

‘Sorry, Wrong Number’ (1948)

Barbara Stanwyck plays Leona Stevenson, a woman distinctly different from cold blooded Phyllis Dietrichson, whom Stanwyck portrayed in “Double Indemnity” four years before. Leona is no femme fatale — she’s a femme in jeopardy.

That alone ought to make us feel sympathy for her, but she’s hard to warm up to.

At first glance Leona is churlish, short tempered and demanding. But she’s also a bedridden invalid, apparently neglected by her businessman husband and left alone in a sprawling New York apartment. Her bedside phone is her lone companion.

One night telephone lines get crossed and she overhears a couple of mugs plotting a murder. It gradually dawns on her that someone's planning to make her the guest of honor at a deadly soiree.

Ann Richards as Sally Hunt. The film's flashbacks are channeled through phone calls.

She tries to tell the police, who take her for a crank, and as the night wears on her worries turn to panic, and finally, terror — Stanwyck’s transition from panic to terror is something to see.

Prosperity and women's place in society

That’s not to say that “Sorry, Wrong Number” is merely a nail-biter or a horror film. Beneath its thriller surface the film turns a gimlet eye on post war prosperity and women’s position in the society. In flashbacks, we get a fuller picture of what led up to Leona's terrifying night alone in her apartment as well as the mores of the times.

It’s the latter half of the 1940s and there’s a paucity of marital bliss among the folks we meet. By all appearances, affairs and marriages of convenience are rife in post-war America, where power, position and money are within reach, and joy is all but a distant memory.

Burt Lancaster and Stanwyck. Husbands order their downtrodden wives around like domestic servants, but that's not the case with Leona.

Here, most everyone is a bully or a victim. Husbands order their downtrodden wives around like domestic servants, while the breadwinner’s job is of paramount importance. Household management and child rearing are undervalued maintenance work that the little lady performs without complaint, or else.

Henry is the poor son-in-law who’s been shunted off to the back office, pushing papers in dad-in-law’s mega firm, and he’s pissed.

Leona is the exception. When she strong-arms her husband, Henry (Burt Lancaster), into submission, we see how deeply dissatisfied he is with their materially comfortable, yet emotionally vacant life. Leona, the “cough drop queen,” is the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, James Cotterell (Ed Begley), who heads a medical supply and pharmaceutical corporation.

Henry is the poor son-in-law who’s been shunted to the back office, pushing papers in dad-in-law’s mega firm, and he’s pissed. But it’s precisely because of his vacuity and lack of ambition that he landed where he is. It's unusual to see Lancaster play the emotional and moral weakling, but he makes his journey from average shmo to the pawn of evil men seem credible and tragic.

Lancaster as Henry, a willing prisoner of his father-in-law's fortune.

His type is frequently seen in noir — the unexceptional man who believes he deserves something better. But now, Henry, the seemingly dormant volcano of frustration, is ready to blow his top. Before long he makes foolish choices that put himself and others in harm’s way.

As he’s making his furtive moves we can almost empathize with him, even if we can’t abide by his actions. His hands are tied, or so he believes, and there’s little chance of getting out of his predicament without taking drastic measures.

Flashbacks conveyed in phone conversations

Back in the present, Leona is prisoner in her bedroom, and only in flashbacks do we see her freed from the constrictions that have left her all but immobilized. The flashbacks, seen from various characters’ points of view and conveyed in phone conversations, reveal her backstory.

Her mother died giving birth to her, and she was raised by a well meaning but distant father. You might think that her frustration and pain as a bedridden adult are the source of her sour and demanding personality, but in flashback we see that she’s difficult even at her best.

Stanwyck, Lancaster, Richards. Leona steals her friend's beau at a dance.

She snubs a college friend, Sally Hunt (Ann Richards), whom Henry is courting, and brazenly steals him from her. Later, once they become an item, she browbeats her father into accepting Henry into the fold.

The old man doesn’t believe Henry’s good son-in-law material, and it turns out he’s right. Henry isn’t really attracted to Leona, but an heiress is an heiress, and he adapts. Meanwhile, her dad is carousing with a lady young enough to be his daughter — no one’s perfect, you see.

“Sorry, Wrong Number” favors dialog over movement, yet director Anatole Litvak maintains Hitchcock-like suspense and conjures up a persistent sense of dread about Leona’s fate.

While the most tense and dramatic parts of the story take place in the present, in Leona’s opulent room, flashbacks give us breathing space, taking the action (not that there’s a lot of it) out of the confined bedroom and placing it in the outside world.

Because it was adapted from a radio drama, “Sorry, Wrong Number” favors dialog over movement, yet director Anatole Litvak maintains Hitchcock-like suspense and conjures up a persistent sense of dread about Leona’s fate. Although she’s difficult and a bottomless pit of need, we stay sympathetic with her as the present threat against her grows.

But a devastating revelation, seen in flashback, alters our view of the stricken heiress, from pitiful to pathetic with a wisp of malevolence thrown in for good measure. (I’ll avoid spoilers here).

Harold Vermilyea, Lancaster. Henry's impulses lead him down a less righteous path.

The stunner brings a sea change to Henry’s outlook on his relationship with his wife. The dam breaks, and the years of frustration and rage he’s been holding back begin to rush to the surface.

He makes unsavory, foolish choices, as noir antiheroes do, morphing from beleaguered trophy husband to unwitting villain, and realizing that his underhanded actions have gotten him in over his head.

With friends like these ...

His new friends are gangsters and when they try to squeeze money out of him he caves in to their pressure. But what happens next is yet an added layer of irony that he couldn’t see coming, and it makes the story all the more tragic.

Leona is scheduled to receive an uninvited visitor at 11:15 p.m. and like the grim reaper himself he will work efficiently and leave little trace of his clandestine operations. As the clock runs down, Leona can only hope for a visit from a hero who will save her from this fate. But in her world, heroes are in short supply.

‘Out of the Past’: 13 Signs that Jane Greer is About to Destroy You

2025-05-28T00:19:00.000-07:00

Jane Greer, 'Out of the Past' (1947). Dressed in mink and deadly.

Warnings abound,
but the only thing
Mitchum can sputter
is 'Baby, I don’t care'

Contains spoilers

By Paul Parcellin

‘Out of the Past’ (1947)

You can’t say that Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) had no way of knowing what he was in for. A shamus ought to be able to see things that a civilian would miss, even when he’s dazzled by the gorgeous and perfidious Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer). How inevitable was it that love smitten Jeff would step off the edge of a cliff once he met this dame? If the sweet-talking Kathie were a bottle of cologne her scent would be called “Eau de Damnation.”

Jeff is a former private detective who lives in a small town under an assumed name. We soon learn why he’s gone into hiding. Through a quirk of fate he’s forced to see his loathsome former boss, gambler Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), in Lake Tahoe. On his way there, Jeff spills the back story to his girlfriend Ann Miller (Virginia Huston), who comes along for the ride, and we see the story in a long flashback sequence.

Three years before, Sterling hired Jeff to find his lady friend, Kathie, who’s been missing ever since she stole 40 large from him and left him with a bullet hole ventilating his gut. He survived, of course, and Jeff accepts the well paying gig. (Favorite line of dialogue: Jeff asks Sterling why he doesn’t send his henchman, Joe Stefanos (Paul Valentine), to find Kathie instead of him. Sterling replies, “Joe couldn’t find a prayer in the Bible.”)

Jeff follows her trail to Acapulco, finds her and then falls for her. Instead of bringing her back to Sterling they begin an affair.

Of course, it’s all going to go wrong for Jeff and pretty much everyone else connected to him and Kathie. It’s all because he ignored warning signs, some small, subtle, symbolic, even. Others are Jumbotron, skywriter, Fourth of July fireworks huge.

See for yourself. Here’s a rundown of the warnings that Kathie Moffat is no Rebecca of Donnybrook Farm, and that Jeff ought to get the hell out of Dodge, pronto:

Greer, Mitchum. Out of the clear sunlight and into the shadows.

Her entrance: Jeff waits for her to show up at an Acapulco cantina, and like magic she does. The joint is a dark, cool respite from the blazing Mexican sunshine. Kathies steps inside, as if she were fated to cross that threshold and meet Jeff. As she does, we see her emerge from the brilliant daylight into the saloon’s darkened reaches. She’s at home in the shadows and her innocent appearance will prove deceptive. (Subtle, but telling.)

A risky bet: Jeff and she meet up again a couple of nights later, and she takes him to a gambling joint where there’s lots of action around a roulette wheel. Is rendezvousing with her a gamble in itself? You bet. She’s a gangster’s on again, off again moll, and said gangster would take a dim view of their fraternizing.

Greer, in front of a curtain of fishing nets.

Spider and the fly: When they finally have a nighttime canoodling session on the beach, fishing nets are draped all around them. Guess who’s going to get caught in her web. (There’s still time to run, Jeff.)

Caution takes a holiday: They lay their cards on the table. She knows Jeff has been tasked with bringing her back to Sterling. She denies that she robbed the gambler. “Don’t you believe me?” she asks, her voice dripping with innocence. Love-stupid Jeff responds, “Baby, I don’t care.” (Spoken like a true fall guy.)

Acapulco after dark: Jeff, in voiceover, remarks that he never seems to see Kathie during the daytime, only at night. He doesn’t even know where she lives and won’t follow her to find out, as a detective might. (Hello? Possibly she’s living a double life of her own?)

Greer and Mitchum: Life's a gamble, but the house always wins.

The big question: As his relationship with Kathie and his entanglements with Sterling and other ne’er do wells grow heated, Jeff denies his gut instincts. But in voiceover he asks himself, “How big a chump can you come to be?” (If you have to ask … )

Kathie’s surprise: Jeff’s former partner in the detective business, Jack Fisher (Steve Brodie), who’s now working for Sterling, tries to blackmail Jeff and Kathie. He and Jeff get into a fistfight at a secluded cabin. Kathie’s on the sidelines taking it all in, and just as Jeff begins to take command of the fight she shoots Fisher dead. In cold blood. Jeff is in shock. Now there’s a gal you’d better keep an eye on.

Liar, liar ... : After the brawl comes to a bloody end, Jeff and Kathie decide to split up and chill out for a while. She takes off, then Jeff finds her bank book. Lo’ and behold, she’s got 40 big ones stashed in her account. Just the amount that Sterling accused her of stealing. She swore to Jeff she didn’t take the money. Could she have lied about it? The evidence keeps piling up, but lovestruck Jeff … (well, you know.)

Kirk Douglas, Greer, Mitchum together — awkward!

Back in the fold: The flashback is over and we’re back in the present. Jeff has told his story to his lady love. She drops him off at Sterling’s luxurious Tahoe home. It’s been a while since he and Kathie parted ways, but to his shock and dismay Jeff finds that Kathie’s back once again at chez Sterling and has rekindled her affair with the gambler. Jeff, about to sit down to breakfast on the terrace, suddenly loses his appetite. (Played for a chump again.)

Guess who!: Jeff reluctantly accepts another assignment from Sterling. This time he’s supposed to grab incriminating documents that could put Sterling in prison. But something seems off. He senses that Sterling plans to frame him for a murder. Unexpectedly, Jeff bumps into (who else?) Kathie. Clearly, she’s knee deep in the whole sordid affair. She says that she and Jeff can start over again as a couple. Despite her traitorous behavior, he seems to buy her story. (Oh, Jeff, what can we say?)

The Affidavit: Kathie claims that Sterling forced her to sign an affidavit that pins two murders on Jeff. She’s really on Jeff’s side, she assures him, it’s just that Sterling has forced her to cooperate with him. (Yeah, right.)

Greer, Paul Valentine. The ole double cross.

Another double cross: Kathie directs henchman Joe Stefanos to follow Jeff back to the town where he resides and kill him. (This one’s hard for Jeff to rationalize). But things don’t go as planned and Jeff cheats a close call with the reaper.

The truth comes out: Jeff discovers that Kathie has killed Sterling. She tells Jeff that he can run away with her or take the rap for three murders, each of which she either committed or had a hand in. She sums up their made-in-hell relationship: “You’re no good and neither am I. That’s why we deserve each other.” Jeff might beg to differ, but rather than debate the matter he secretly dials the phone while she’s upstairs packing. They hop in a car and leave. Seeing a police roadblock ahead, Kathie realizes that Jeff dropped a dime on her and she shoots him, then fires at the police. A machine gun rakes the car with bullets, killing her.

On the road to doom.

It’s as if Jeff realizes that the only way to end Kathie’s reign of terror is by sacrificing himself. Earlier in the movie he mutters that he’s doesn’t mind dying, so long as he’s the last one to go. He almost made it, missing the mark by mere seconds. Fair enough. Sometimes being the next to last gets the job done all the same.

The Big Knockoff: 14 Films With Armored Car Heists

2025-05-11T01:56:00.000-07:00

Burt Lancaster, Tom Pedi, “Criss Cross” (1949).

Rolling bank vaults
a favored target

of daring hijackers

By Paul Parcellin

If the movies are any indication, the 1940s and ’50s, especially the ’50s, must have been the golden age of armored car robberies — they were getting knocked over like clay pigeons in a shooting gallery.

A common armored car robbery movie plot: Ex-con, recently paroled, finds a crummy job. Meets a girl. Wants to impress the girl. Gets hungry for a big score. Joins a gang with a big scheme to tip over an armored vehicle. Risks life in prison or death (but what the hell). By showtime no one in the gang trusts anyone else in the gang. Ex-con doesn’t even trust the girl. The robbery goes down. Things go badly.

It’s fun just to see a complex heist plotted out in the low-tech middle of the last century. No closed circuit video, no satellite tracking devices, no cell phones — almost like robbing a stagecoach. Yet lawmen always seem to bust up those carefully laid plans.

With that in mind, here are 14 films from the days when we had a bumper crop of armored car robberies, at least in the movies:

Paul Fix, David Oliver, Irving Pichel, Robert Wilcox, “Armored Car.”

“Armored Car” (1937)

Police Detective Larry Wills (Robert Wilcox), eager to prove himself, takes an assignment to infiltrate a gang that specializes in violent armored car robberies. The gang appears to have inside information and it might be coming from someone working for the armored car company. Likewise, gangster Tony Ballard (Cesar Romero), who sets up the robberies, begins to suspect there’s a mole in his crew.

George Raft, Humphrey Bogart, “Invisible Stripes.”

“Invisible Stripes” (1939)

Cliff Taylor (George Raft), gets out of prison and is determined to go straight, but finding work proves tough. His younger brother, Tim (William Holden), is in a dead-end job facing financial pressures. Cliff veers back into the dark side, reconnecting with his old associate Charles Martin (Humphrey Bogart), who is set to rob an armored car carrying payroll money. Cliff wants to give Tim enough cash to help keep him out of crime. But his good intentions end up backfiring.

Humphrey Bogart, Chick Chandler, “The Big Shot.”

“The Big Shot” (1942)

Ex-con Duke Berne (Humphrey Bogart) wants to go straight, but then he reunites with old flame Lorna (Irene Manning) now married to shady attorney Martin Fleming (Stanley Ridges). She wants Duke to help her escape her loveless marriage. Martin uses his legal front to run a criminal enterprise and recruits Duke to take part in an armored car robbery. Duke resists, but caves in to protect Lorna.

Yvonne De Carlo, Burt Lancaster, “Criss Cross.”

“Criss Cross” (1949)

Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) rekindles his relationship with his ex- Anna (Yvonne De Carlo) but she’s married to gangster Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea). Slim finds Steve with Anna, and thinking fast, Steve tells Slim he came to propose a heist. The plan is to rob the armored car that Steve helps guard. Staging the robbery with Slim also allows him to stay close to Anna. But the holdup spins out of control and betrayal and double crosses doom Steve and Anna to a tragic end. 

Armored Car Robbery

“Armored Car Robbery” (1950)  

Criminal mastermind Dave Purvis (William Talman) organizes a gang to rip off an armored car outside a Los Angeles stadium. When the heist goes down a policeman is shot and killed. Det. Lt. Jim Cordell (Charles McGraw) vows to bring the killers to justice. Purvis tries to double cross his gang and escape alone with the cash, but Cordell’s dogged police work leads to a final showdown. The film’s semi-documentary style, it’s tight 67-minute runtime and its focus on police procedure and criminal psychology make it a standout among its peers. 

Wally Cassell, Steve Cochran, Richard Egan, Edward Norris,
Robert Webber, “Highway 301.”

“Highway 301” (1950)  

George Legenza (Steve Cochran) and his gang operate across Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, committing a series of robberies and murders. They’re cold-blooded and efficient, leaving a trail of bodies behind as they evade law enforcement. The film’s most intense action centers on the gang’s attempted armored car robbery. Legenza plans it carefully. He predicts that it will be their biggest score yet 

Richard Basehart, Marilyn Maxwell, “Outside the Wall.”

“Outside the Wall” (1950)  

Larry Nelson (Richard Basehart), paroled after serving time for manslaughter, is determined to go straight. He takes a job at a rural sanitarium and soon discovers that the facility is being used by a gang planning an armored car robbery. The criminal ring operates under the cover of legitimate medical care, and Larry slowly becomes entangled in their scheme, especially when he falls for a nurse (Marilyn Maxwell) who may not be as innocent as she seems. 

Lawrence Tierney, Marjorie Riordan, “The Hoodlum.”

“The Hoodlum” (1951)  

Hardened criminal Vincent Lubeck (Lawrence Tierney) is out on parole after serving a sentence. His straight-arrow brother gives him a job at his gas station, but Vincent, bored with the job, takes an interest in the armored car that makes regular stops at the bank across the street. He sets up a heist, and as the robbery unfolds things spiral out of control. Betrayal and needless bloodshed doom the caper. 

John Payne, Lee Van Cleef, “Kansas City Confidential.”

“Kansas City Confidential” (1952) 

Tim Foster (Preston Foster), a masked mastermind, plans a precise armored car robbery. To keep identities secret and prevent betrayal, he recruits three criminals — each masked during the planning and unaware of the others’ identities. The heist is executed with military precision, netting over a million dollars. Meanwhile, Joe Rolfe (John Payne), an ex-con working as a florist delivery driver, is unwittingly caught in the aftermath. 

Noble 'Kid' Chissell, Jack Daly, Douglas Kennedy, “The Big Chase.”

“The Big Chase” (1954) 

Det. Sgt. Dave Welton (Jim Davis) has to put his wedding plans on ice when a tip-off warns that an armored car robbery is in the works. Two-bit hood Benny McBride (Lon Chaney Jr.) is knee-deep in the planned heist that is being set up by gang leader Gus Henshaw (Anthony Caruso). Benny, desperate for money to support his pregnant wife, gets in over his head with the hardened criminals. 

Tony Curtis, George Nader, “Six Bridges to Cross.”

“Six Bridges to Cross” (1955)

 Jerry Florea (Tony Curtis), unable to resist the lure of fast money, falls in with a Boston gang planning a massive armored car robbery. The scheme includes using the city’s bridges and escape routes to their advantage. A big cash payout is at stake in this tension-filled operation, and it comes off without a hitch. But as the police close in, loyalties are tested. 

Max Showalter, “Indestructible Man.”

“Indestructible Man” (1956)  

Ruthless gangster Charles “Butcher” Benton (Lon Chaney Jr.) is a sentenced to “the big sleep” for an armored car robbery in which he killed several guards. After the execution, a mad scientist uses electrical treatments to bring him back from the dead. But the reanimated gangster has become an indestructible killing machine. That’s bad news for the mugs who double-crossed him. 

“The Rebel Set” (1959)  

Struggling writer John Mapes (Don Sullivan), angry rebel Ray Miller (Richard Bakalyan) and poor little rich kid George Leland (Jerome Cowan) hang out at a beatnik coffeehouse run by Mr. Tucker (Edward Platt). Mr. Tucker ropes the beatnik trio into a scheme to rob an armored car aboard a passenger train. The gang manages to steal the money, but paranoia, betrayal and guilt rattle the operation. 

Herman Boden, Jack Dodds, Mamie Van Doren, Marc Wilder,
“Guns, Girls and Gangsters.”

“Guns Girls and Gangsters” (1959) 

Recently released con Chuck Wheeler (Gerald Mohr) hatches a bold plan to knock over an armored car loaded with casino cash during the New Year’s Day money run. Chuck reconnects with his old flame, Vi Victor (Mamie Van Doren), who’s now involved with gangster Joe Darren (Lee Van Cleef). The robbery goes down, but all three players have their own private schemes in mind.

Cameron Prud'Homme, John McIntire, “Naked City, ” Episode, “Nickel Ride.”

Bonus: vintage TV 

“Naked City” Episode: “Nickel Ride” (1958)

Detectives visit the aging captain of the Staten Island Ferry at the same time that armed robbers are executing a daring heist of an armored car traveling on the ferry.

‘Gun Crazy’ Has a Classic Robbery Scene … But We Never See the Actual Holdup

2025-04-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

John Dall, Peggy Cummins, 'Gun Crazy' (1950).

For a dizzying moment
spectators become
accomplices to a crime

By Paul Parcellin

“Gun Crazy” (1950)

The thoroughly American story of violence and rebellion that is “Gun Crazy” influenced generations of filmmakers since its release and laid the groundwork for many a crime picture to come. One of its most obvious kin is probably Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) (the berets and sweaters worn by femmes fatale in both films are a visual link between the two).

In “Gun Crazy,” one scene in particular, a robbery that takes place off camera, stands out as the most recognizable and influential in noir.

Cummins as Laurie,
sideshow queen.

Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) is a carnival sharpshooter dressed in a cowgirl outfit performing in the sideshow. Bart Tare (John Dall) faces off with her in a shooting contest and the competition takes on an erotic charge. It’s lust at first sight for this all-American couple with a gun fetish and they get hitched on the spur of the moment. But Laurie wants diamonds and furs and she browbeats Bart into sticking up stores, which they do before stepping up to the big leagues.

Frequently celebrated for the groundbreaking cinema it is, the Hampton robbery scene, the sharp shooting pair's first bank stickup, resonates with a kind of ragged energy. Director Joseph H. Lewis shot the entire robbery sequence, more than three minutes in duration, in one long take with a camera in the back seat of the getaway car.

Dall as Bart,
born to shoot.

Lewis was unsure if the bank scene would work. So he shot a test scene with a hand-held 16mm camera and used high school kids as stand-ins for the two stars. The film's producers, the King brothers, Morris, Frank and Hyman, were impressed.

The getaway car is a stretch Cadillac with the rear seat removed to make room for Lewis and other crew who were crowded into the back. They mounted the camera on a greased wood platform so that it could be moved easily. Microphones hidden in the sun visors picked up dialogue and two sound men stationed on the roof with boom microphones recorded the sounds of the car.

The result is a scene that almost leaps off the screen. It feels authentic and raw due largely to its unscripted elements. As Bart and Laurie approach the bank, a car pulls out of a parking space and they pull into it. This was not prearranged (if no parking space was available they planned to double park). The patter between the two novice bank robbers, both before and after the heist, is improvised. No one, other than the bank’s staff and the police, knew that a film was being made — some on the street thought they were witnessing a real robbery.

Laurie and Bart, on the lam and incognito.

Once the robbery gets under way, Laurie waits in the car while Bart ducks into the bank. Both are clad in cowboy outfits, finally acting out the roles of real desperados that they’d only been cosplaying for carnival crowds. The American myth of the old west, with its history of violence and lawlessness, is the larcenous duo’s fantasy come to life.

Despite the buildup to the big event, we never see the heist take place — an unconventional move on the filmmaker’s part. This is due, in part, to the film’s budget restrictions, but Lewis’s unconventional approach has a payoff.

We spend the duration of the robbery with Laurie, who stays cool when things start to go south. A cop strolls into the shot and lingers in front of the bank as Bart is inside. She hops out of the car and chats with the peace officer, then takes swift action once Bart barrels out of the bank.

As they make their getaway, she turns to see if the cops are on their tail. Facing the camera, she grins, thoroughly enjoying the intense and dangerous dash from the law. It’s a carefully designed shot. Bart’s eyes are on the road and he doesn't see Laurie’s thrilled expression as they flirt with disaster. Had he realized that she's an adrenaline junky, and a dangerously unbalanced one at that, would he have dropped her and run the other way? Probably not, but this revealing, reckless moment makes it plain that their criminal partnership is teetering on the edge of destruction.

With the camera stationed behind the couple, the audience sees the entire scene from the back seat of the getaway car, which makes viewers not only spectators but virtual accomplices to the crime.

Although more common today, this kind of offbeat camera placement was more of a novelty in 1950. Of course, “They Live By Night” (1948) includes a robbery scene in which the camera stays trained on the car rather than recording the holdup that's under way. In "The Killers" (1946), a robbery scene is shot in one long take. But neither of those films use the more daring camera placement of "Gun Crazy," putting it inside the moving vehicle and taking us, the audience, along for the ride.

A narrow escape.

Quentin Tarantino doesn’t specifically mention “Gun Crazy” as a direct influence on “Reservoir Dogs” (1992), or the film's off-screen diamond heist. But he's a “Gun Crazy” admirer [he also cites Stanley Kubrick’s “The Killing” (1956) and Lewis’s “The Big Combo” (1955) as influences] so it’s not a stretch to imagine that he borrowed a page from Lewis’s playbook and left the heist to the viewer's imagination.

Like “Gun Crazy,” “Reservoir Dogs” focuses on the aftermath of a crime and the relationships among characters rather than the details of the crime itself. Both films were made under tight budgets, so eliminating an extra expense would be an attractive option for both directors.

The "Gun Crazy" bank robbery scene evolved as it was revised and reworked from its original form. Blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo rewrote MacKinlay Kantor’s script and mostly left the robbery scene intact. Kantor had written a longer, more comedic exchange between Laurie and the policeman, but Trumbo trimmed it down.

It was Lewis’s idea to make it all one continuous shot, from the pair approaching the bank, to the robbery and finally the getaway, and those may be the film's most revealing moments. While the robbery takes place offscreen we’re given a chance to size up Laurie and calculate her and Bart’s odds of survival. Clearly, neither of them will be robbing banks for long.

‘The Long Good Friday’: A Gangster Noir That Saw the Future

2025-04-12T22:50:00.000-07:00

Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, "The Long Good Friday" (1980).

Mobster’s World
Blown to Bits
in an Easter
Wave of Terror 

Contains spoilers

By Paul Parcellin

‘The Long Good Friday’ (1980)

As Good Friday approaches it’s fitting that we look at one of the slender number of crime films set on the holiest of Christian holy days. In filmdom, the connection between religious rites and acts of criminal savagery can be jarring (think of the baptism scene in “The Godfather”) and, by some viewers’ standards, just this side of blasphemous. But the marriage of the odious and the sacred often underlines the hypocrisy of those who tread on both sides of the fence.

In “The Long Good Friday,” which saw its U.S. debut 43 years ago this month, London crime kingpin Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) faces a disastrous Easter weekend as he watches his criminal empire disintegrate. A stubby, barrel chested Tasmanian devil of a man, Harold is about to launch a multi-billion dollar redevelopment plan. The project is designed to revitalize London’s then desolate Docklands property and fill his pockets with more cash than an East End geezer such as he could dream of.

The idea is to remake himself into a legitimate businessman, more of less, with the help of some startup cash from the New York Mafia, a detail that casts doubt on his grand plans.

It’s 1979 and the Docklands and its surrounding area is depressed after the shipping industry moved on to larger, more suitable ports. With astonishing accuracy “The Long Good Friday” foretells the city’s future after the conservative government redeveloped the property into a sterile haven for the upper classes, a real-life outcome that would line up well with Harold’s planned cash grab.

Harold makes his pitch,
the Tower Bridge looms behind him.

We meet Harold after he touches down in a Concorde, returning from a secret mission in the States. He wastes no time getting down to business, entertaining guests on a cruise aboard his yacht on the Thames. Among the invited are corrupt cops and city officials as well as New York gangster Charlie (Eddie Constantine). With the zest, if not the eloquence, of an evangelical preacher, Harold pitches his scheme to rebuild part of the city in time for the upcoming Olympics (a London setting for the Olympic Games is purely fictional in this time frame). His goal, he says, is to make England a dominant European country again. As he speaks, he’s framed by the Tower Bridge which looms behind him, but as the craft glides onward the bridge recedes into the background and Harold stands alone, proclaiming his grand ideas and giving the impression that perhaps he’s grown too big for his britches.

Hoskins, as the blustery, violent and highly temperamental Harold, is the very embodiment of a gangland boss. But his inflated sense of self importance, his arrogance and overconfidence are among his greatest weaknesses and are instrumental in his ultimate downfall. He’s a character who can only be matched is sheer hutzpah by Edward G. Robinson’s Rico Bandello, another bullying fireplug who dominates the mob in “Little Caesar” (1931).

P.H. Moriarty, Helen Mirren, Bob Hoskins, Brian Hall

Keeping Harold anchored to terra firma is his girlfriend, Victoria (Helen Mirren), who, unlike Harold, the plain spoken ruffian, is educated and comes from a good middle class family. The role of Victoria was originally written as Harold’s bubble headed slice of arm candy, but Mirren fought with director John Mackenzie, insisting that the character take on a more consequential role in the story, and it’s a good thing that she did. Victoria is Harold’s guiding light, and later when she begins to lose her composure as Harold’s world crashes down around him, we know that things are bad. A side note: The world of mobsters is one that the actress knew first hand. In the scene aboard the yacht, some real gangsters were brought on as extras, and they were all familiar with Mirren’s uncle, who was himself a member of the London underworld.

A bomb set off in a pub is meant for Harold.

Once Harold’s luck takes a turn for the worse, things come apart in rapid order. He hopes to dazzle the visiting money men, but inexplicably, bodies begin to drop and bombs detonate as he and Victoria try to make nice with the visiting Mafioso, hoping in vain that they won’t notice that something’s terribly wrong. But a bomb in the pub where he and the New York contingent plan to dine is proof positive that Harold’s plans are being swept away like beach stones in a tsunami. The bombings are a clue to who’s behind the mayhem — the story was pitched to producers as “terrorism meets gangsterism.” Incidentally, the pub that’s leveled in a bomb attack was merely a set, but must have been a convincing one because passersby popped in from time to time expecting to be served drinks.

Understandably, Harold’s at wit’s end and means to find out who’s liquidating his close associates and trying to wipe him off of the map. “I’ll have his carcass dripping blood by midnight,” he growls.

An interrogation in the slaughterhouse.

In one of the film’s more visually arresting and grotesque scenes, he rounds up a band of his associates and dangles them upside down on hooks in an abattoir, hoping to scare the bejesus out of them and learn who’s betraying him (If these are his pals, we’d hate to see what he does with his enemies).

Conditions get worse still for one fellow who endures some stigmata body modifications on a warehouse floor, a scene reminiscent of a real-life incident perpetrated by notorious gangster twins Ronnie and Reggie Kray, who lorded over London’s underworld in the 1960s. The film’s replication of that occurrence is a fitting if shocking development in this Easter tale beset by paranoia and blood letting.

Harold is continually one step behind his mysterious tormentors, but finally learns that, after a series of fumbled actions and misunderstandings, the IRA has put him in its crosshairs. Blinded by his arrogance, he opts to take an ill-advised path to sew up his problems, a drastic move that demonstrates Harold’s delusional thinking.

Although the film was completed in 1980 it wasn’t released in the U.K. until the following year and didn’t premiere in the U.S. until 1982. Britain’s ITC Entertainment originally backed the production, but got cold feet after seeing the final cut. The film’s political undertones and graphic violence prompted the firm to refuse the film a theatrical release. But Handmade Films, the company founded by former Beatle George Harrison, acquired the rights and agreed to distribute it. The delays, however, only served to build the public’s anticipation of its release and helped secure the film’s cult status.

For those curious about the real-life Docklands development project, which became Canary Wharf, the film predicted with surprising accuracy the project which didn’t begin until after “The Long Good Friday” was filmed. Unfortunately for many, much of the housing lost to the developer’s wrecking ball was replaced with high end living quarters and commercial buildings. Opinions on the project’s success are mixed, with some lauding the rejuvenation of the downtrodden docks, and many feeling that the working class was steamrolled over in this bid to create valuable properties and big profits.

While many of the Docklands denizens’ lives were adversely affected over time by the project, Harold’s world falls apart before his eyes, and in a most dramatic manner. As the film ends, he’s trapped in his fancy automobile, framed this time not by the magnificent Tower Bridge, but by the vehicle’s windshield, and he’s behind it, under glass, as it were. There’s no wiggle room for him to get away. Victoria is spirited away in another car and Harold, alone and vulnerable, is in the hands of one of his tormentors (Pierce Brosnan, in his first film role). There’s little else for him to do but ponder his past and try to work out how he ended up at this juncture. He’s been roused from his reverie and his dream may one day be realized, but by someone other than himself.

When Gangsters Collide with the Dark Side: 65 Mobbed Up Films Noir

2025-03-30T14:22:00.000-07:00

Jean Hagen, Sterling Hayden, "The Asphalt Jungle" (1950).

In Noir, Racketeers
Aren't Like the Ones
In Your (Grand)Father's
Mob Pictures

By Paul Parcellin

Gangster films were already a cinematic staple when a new kind of crime film began to emerge in the early 1940s. Films noir captured the popular imagination for a couple of decades after World War II. While some of the post war films are about mobsters, they’re different in tone from 1930s gangster films. Warner Bros. gangster movies, the gold standard of the era between the world wars, are rags to riches tales about rough guys with machine guns blasting their way toward prosperity, a scenario that must have appealed to Depression era audiences.

James Cagney, Jean Harlow,
"The Public Enemy" (1931)

Noirs of the 1940s and ’50s that include gangsters distinguish themselves by leaning toward existential questions and characters’ internal conflicts. Gangsters of the 1930s are not complicated people. They know what they want — booze, broads and moolah — and they know how to get them. James Cagney never agonized over morality as a Prohibition era bootlegger. Ditto for Edward G. Robinson.

Noirs explore the blurred line between cops and criminals, sometimes with wrongly accused men on the run or in prison, and naive dupes lured into hornets' nests by seductive women and the promise of easy cash. Usually, they involve ordinary, relatable characters caught up in extraordinary circumstances.

While gangster films are usually about syndicates of organized criminal enterprise, noir gang activities are often one-time operations, heists aimed at the big score, a last job sketched out by graying thieves eying retirement after a lifetime of criminal mischief. They’re about flawed people who want to lead more normal lives, as opposed to old time gang kingpins, who revel in the mobster lifestyle and lead excessive lives of tacky luxury.

With that in mind, here are 65 noirs with gangsters, syndicate bosses and average, unassuming fall guys who stumble into the dark side (and gangster films with a noirish edge). It's not a complete list. Feel free to mention others that aren't included:

“Paper Bullets” (1941)

Dorothy Adams serves time on a bum rap and emerges from the joint a hardened criminal who rises to power in the local crime organization.

"Dangerous Mission” (1954)

A police officer tries to shield a young lady who witnessed a mob killing. She splits from New York with a hitman in hot pursuit.

“Hoodlum Empire” (1952)

After World War II, ex-mobster war hero Joe Gray goes straight, to the dismay of his New York mob boss uncle who's afraid that his nephew will testify against his outfit before a Grand Jury.

“A Bullet for Joey” (1955)

A police inspector discovers a plot to abduct a nuclear physicist. Mobsters, spies and a seductive blonde all play a role in the plot.

“Machine-Gun Kelly” (1958)

Public Enemy number one, George “Machine-Gun” Kelly, launches a crime wave in 1930s America.

“The Hoodlum” (1951)

Career criminal Vincent Lubeck is out of the slammer and on parole but he still organizes a tricky armored car robbery.

“Deported” (1950)

An American gangster sent back to his home country falls in love with a widowed countess.

“Johnny Rocco” (1958)

A gangster and police look for a gangster's son who witnessed a murder. The question is, who will find him first?

“Baby Face Nelson” (1957)

One of the most notorious gangsters of 1930's Chicago, George "Babyface" Nelson, earns his reputation by masterminding a number of brutal robberies.

“Forbidden” (1953)

Eddie Darrow, searching for a mobster's widow in Macao, gets wrapped up in a casino owner's business.

“Hell on Frisco Bay” (1955)

After five years in prison, ex-cop Steve Rollins is paroled and searches for the San Francisco mobsters who framed him for manslaughter.

“Thunder Road” (1958)

A Korean War veteran comes home to the mountains and takes over the family moonshining business. But gangsters want to muscle into his territory and the cops want to lock him up.

”Dillinger” (1945)

Notorious bank robber John Dillinger begins his life of crime as a petty thief, meets his future gang in prison and eventually masterminds a series of daring robberies.

“One Way Street” (1950)

After stealing a gangster's money and his girlfriend, a doctor heads for a small village in Mexico.

“The Naked Street” (1955)

A mobster springs a condemned murderer because the jailbird got his sister pregnant.

“The Gangster” (1947)

A cynical gangster who controls the Neptune Beach waterfront runs a numbers racket with the local soda shop owner. The police are in his pocket and the local hoods are on his payroll.

“Macao” (1952)

American Nick Cochran, living in exile in Macao, has a chance to restore his name by helping capture an international crime lord.

“Tight Spot” (1955)

A female inmate is whisked out of prison and into a police-guarded hotel until the district attorney can convince her to testify against the mob.

“The Trap” (1959)

In a remote Californian desert town, a lawyer arranges for a wanted mobster to skip the country via a small airstrip, but the local sheriff and his deputy throw a wrench into the plan.

“Decoy” (1946)

A mortally-wounded female gangster recounts how she and her gang revived a killer executed in the gas chamber to try to find out where he buried a fortune in cash.

“The Racket” (1951)

Two honest New York cops try to stop a crime syndicate from moving into their precinct, while preventing a corrupt prosecutor from being made a judge.

“Desperate” (1947)

A young married couple flee the police and a gangster who’s out for revenge.

“Suddenly” (1954)

Three gangsters trap a family in their home as part of a plot to kill the president of the United States.

“711 Ocean Drive” (1950)

An electronics expert creates a gambling broadcast system for a crime boss, then takes over the operation when the boss is murdered.

“M” (1951)

In this American remake of the 1931 German thriller, both the police and the criminal underworld stalk a mysterious serial killer who preys on little girls.

“House of Bamboo” (1955)

Planted in a Tokyo crime syndicate, a U.S. Army Investigator probes the death of a fellow Army official.

“Party Girl” (1958)

Atty. Tommy Farrell defends crooks. Vicki Gaye wants him to go straight, but mobster Rico Angelo disagrees.

“New York Confidential” (1955)

A top syndicate crime boss and his corrupt politicians make multi-million dollar deals and order murders until the vicious pattern finally catches up to them.

“The Glass Key” (1942)

A crooked politician finds himself accused of murder by a gangster whom he refused to help.

“His Kind of Woman” (1951)

A deported gangster's plan to re-enter the United States comes to a head at a Mexican resort, and gambler Dan Milner is stuck in the middle.

“The Street with No Name” (1948)

An FBI agent infiltrates a ruthless gang, but a mysterious informant funnels information to the hoodlums that puts his life at risk.

“Johnny Eager” (1941)

The step-daughter of a district attorney falls in love with a gangster on parole whom her father sent to prison.

“Border Incident” (1949)

Mexican and American federal agents tackle a vicious gang exploiting illegal farm workers in Southern California.

“The Damned Don't Cry” (1950)

A New York socialite climbs the ladder of success, man by man, until a life among rich gangsters gives her what she thought she always wanted.

“The Mob” (1951)

A policeman botches a murder case and is suspended from the force. It’s a ruse that allows him to go undercover and identify the mysterious crime boss of the New York waterfront.

“The Enforcer” (1951)

A crusading district attorney finally gets a chance to prosecute the organizer and boss of Murder Inc.

“The Big Combo” (1955)

A police lieutenant is ordered to stop investigating deadly crime boss for lack of hard evidence against the mobster. Instead, he seeks information by pursuing the mobster’s girlfriend.

“The Lineup” (1958)

A psychopathic gangster and his mentor retrieve heroin packages carried to the United States by unsuspecting overseas travelers.

“Criss Cross” (1949)

An armored truck driver and his ex-wife conspire with a gang that wants to rob his truck.

“High Sierra” (1941)

After being released from prison, a notorious thief is hired by his old boss to help a group of inexperienced criminals plan and carry out the robbery of a California resort.

“The Narrow Margin” (1952)

A woman planning to testify against the mob must be protected against potential assassins on the train trip from Chicago to Los Angeles.

“Key Largo” (1948)

A drifter visits a hotel run by the family of a war buddy who was killed in action. A Chicago mobster and his gang have taken over the place.

“Force of Evil” (1948)

An unethical lawyer wants his older brother to become a partner with a big-time client in the numbers racket.

“The Big Heat” (1953)

Tough cop Dave Bannion takes on a politically powerful crime syndicate.

“White Heat” (1949)

A psychopathic criminal with a mother complex makes a daring break from prison and leads his old gang in a chemical plant payroll heist.

“Don’t Touch the Loot” (“Touchez pas au grisbi”) (1954)

An aging, world-weary gangster is double-crossed and forced out of retirement when his best friend is kidnapped and their stash of eight stolen gold bars is demanded as ransom.

“The Killers” (1946)

Hit men arrive in a small New Jersey town to kill an unresisting victim, and insurance investigator Reardon uncovers his past involvement with beautiful, deadly Kitty Collins.

“This Gun for Hire” (1942),

When assassin Philip Raven shoots a blackmailer and his beautiful female companion dead, he is paid off in marked bills by his treasonous employer who is working with foreign spies.

“Nobody Lives Forever” (1946)

Ex-GI Nick Blake gets involved in a scheme to fleece a rich, young widow, but finds himself falling for her, much to the displeasure of his racketeer cohorts.

“Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye” (1950)

Starting with a violent prison break, clever, ruthless Ralph Cotter corrupts everyone around him.

“Night and the City” (1950)

A small-time grifter and nightclub tout takes advantage of some fortuitous circumstances and tries to become a big-time player as a wrestling promoter.

“The Asphalt Jungle” (1950)

A major heist goes off as planned, but then double crosses, bad luck and solid police work cause everything to unravel.

“Bob le flambeur” (1956)

An aging gambler loses a pile of cash and decides to return to a life of crime, this time robbing a highly secure gambling casino.

“The Killing” (1956)

Career criminal Johnny Clay masterminds an audacious racetrack robbery committed in broad daylight with a packed house of spectators.

“Out of the Past” (1947)

A private eye hiding out in a small town is discovered by one of the last people he ever wanted to see again, and is sent on a mission to find a gangster’s runaway moll.

“Ride the Pink Horse” (1947)

Lucky Gagin arrives in a New Mexico border-town seeking revenge against mobster Frank Hugo. But FBI agent Bill Retz watches over Gagin and tries to keep him on the right side of the law.

“Kansas City Confidential” (1952)

An ex-con trying to go straight is framed for a million dollar armored car robbery and must go to Mexico to unmask the real crooks.

“He Ran All the Way” (1951)

A cop killer meets a young woman and he forces her family to hide him from police who are scouring the area to find him.

“The Big Sleep” (1946)

Private eye Philip Marlowe is hired to get a spoiled heiress out of trouble with gamblers and blackmailers.

“Kiss Me Deadly” (1955)

Mike Hammer picks up a hitchhiker and is lured into a Cold War nightmare that centers around a briefcase full of hot nuclear soup.

“Brighton Rock” (1947)

Gang leader Pinkie Brown murders a news reporter then tries to cover up his crime. But the police, some witnesses and another gang all make his life rough.

“Lady Gangster” (1942)

A woman acting as a decoy in a bank robbery is arrested. But she grabs $40,000 of the loot from her accomplices before she's carted off to prison.

“The Crooked Way” (1949)

A war hero recovers from amnesia and is confronted by his criminal past, a stellar example of the ever popular amnesia noir films.

“The Chase” (1946)

A mobster's chauffeur gets involved with the boss's fearful wife, and (as you might expect) it turns into a nightmare.

“Highway 301” (1950)

A violent gang robs banks and murders anyone who might identify them.

Barber Aims to Be a Dry Cleaner, Blackmail, Murder and Suicide Result

2025-03-07T17:00:00.000-08:00

Frances McDormand, Billy Bob Thornton, "The Man Who Wasn't There" (2001).

Why Did an Acclaimed

Coen Brothers Noir
Tank at the Box Office?

Contains Spoilers

By Paul Parcellin

‘The Man Who Wasn’t There’ (2001)

Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) is the kind of guy who can enter or leave a roomful of people without a single soul taking notice. He’s got a knack for blending into the background, barely leaving an impression with anyone who cares to chat or even glance in his direction. Potted plants make a bigger splash at a party than Ed.

On-screen, he utters few words, but in the film’s voice-over narration, which Ed delivers with a laconic edge of existential dread, he’s a blabbermouth, relatively speaking. His patter fills in the story’s blank spots as he offers wisps of gossip and terse assessments of the people in his life. In Billy Bob Thornton’s wonderfully restrained performance, Ed smokes and listens while others do the talking.

It’s an intriguing if odd setup for a noir, for sure. Still, “The Man Who Wasn’t There” had a lot going for it, yet, audiences didn’t warm up to the film and the reasons for that are buried in the details. (More about that later).

Ed cuts hair in his brother-in-law, Frank Raffo’s (Michael Badalucco) barbershop and barely pays attention as Frank yammers on incessantly about Canadian fur trappers, Russian A-bombs and the like. That Ed is chained to a motormouth of Frank’s intensity is a textbook example of what hell on earth might be like. It’s the core of the film’s darkly humorous undercurrent, where the line between comedy and tragedy is as thin as a straight razor’s honed edge.

Ed’s wife, Doris (Frances McDormand), has a drinking problem and is having an affair with her blowhard boss, Big Dave Brewster (James Gandolfini), who runs a local department store where Doris keeps the books.

Ed and Doris live in a modest suburban bungalow in Santa Rosa, Calif., and in the voice-over he sums up his domestic life without a trace of enthusiasm: “The place was OK, I guess; it had an electric ice box, gas hearth and a garbage grinder built into the sink. You might say I had it made.”

Ed Crane plies his trade.

Ed is in many ways a puzzle: he doesn’t seem to mind Doris’s cavorting about town with a married man, in fact the Cranes host Big Dave and his missus, Ann (Katherine Borowitz), for a dinner party where it’s painfully obvious that Ed and Dave’s wife are cramping the adulterous pair’s style. For her part, Ann is as disconnected from her spouse as are Ed and Doris.

Despite his lethargy, a spark of ambition still smolders within Ed. He wants to do something with his life, but thus far the dark cloud hovering over his head keeps him from making a move.

Jon Polito
as Creighton Tolliver

Things change one day when Creighton Tolliver (Jon Polito), an out of town entrepreneur who’s sniffing around for startup money wanders in for a trim and pitches his scheme to open a dry cleaning shop. Ed takes an interest in Tolliver’s proposition, which at first seems like a ray of hope in Ed’s gloomy world. But the actions he takes will soon get him into hot water.

He successfully blackmails Big Dave with anonymous threats to expose Dave’s affair with Doris, then hands the loot over to Tolliver, buying his way into the dry cleaning business. This is the stuff of a James M. Cain or Raymond Chandler novel, dripping with dramatic possibilities, including marital infidelity, icy indifference to murder and larger than life characters with a yen for quick cash.

Overall, the critical reception was positive. Joel Coen won the Best Director award at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. The BBC, the Guardian, the Austin Chronicle and the National Board of Review all named it one of the best films of the year. Roger Deakins was nominated for Best Cinematography at the Oscars. Yet upon its initial theatrical release, “The Man Who Wasn’t There” failed to catch on with the public.

James Gandolfini, as Big Dave Brewster.

Despite its finely detailed channeling of 1940s noir, the film also includes some oddball elements. Joel and Ethan Coen, who wrote produced and directed the film, were inspired by a grab bag of pop culture material: 1940s-‘50s films noirs, ’50s science fiction films with flying saucers and body snatchers and oddities such as personal hygiene and driver’s education films — perhaps noir traditionalists were put off by the mixing of genres.

Tony Shalhoub
as Freddie Riedenschneider

The idea for the barbershop setting evolved, in the Coens’ typically idiosyncratic manner, from a piece of set dressing used in their film “The Hudsucker Proxy” (1994), a 1950s poster of men’s hairstyles, which is reflected in a witty montage of haircuts seen in the opening minutes.

But the film’s highest trump card is its authentically 1940s atmosphere, due in large part to Deakins’ classic noir lighting techniques, bathing the frame in inky black shadows while paying homage to iconic noir images, including:

“Phantom Lady” (1944): Ella Raines and Alan Curtis appear in near silhouette, a flood of sunlight to their backs visually isolates them in an otherworldly domain. Similarly, in “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” Atty. Freddie Riedenschneider (Tony Shalhoub) is bathed in a beam of light filtering down through a skylight as he confers with Doris and Ed.
“Scarlet Street” (1945): Milquetoast Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson) gives Kitty March (Joan Bennett) a pedicure, much the way that Ed shaves Doris’s legs as she luxuriates in the bathtub. Both shots emphasize that the men are subservient to conniving women.
“The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1946): Femme fatale Cora Smith (Lana Turner) and Frank Chambers (John Garfield), have a car wreck on a quiet country road, much like the crash that occurs near the end of “The Man Who Wasn’t There.”

Scarlett Johansson as Birdy, and Billy Bob Thornton as Ed Crane.

As is the case with Frank Chambers in “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” Ed Crane’s life takes a significant turn when a female enters the picture. By chance, he meets Birdy Abundas (Scarlett Johansson), a high school student who plays Beethoven piano sonatas. On a whim, he decides to take her under his wing and help her establish a career as a concert pianist — whether she wants it or not. After much failure, he’s determined to have a success, but it’s a mentorship he’s uniquely unqualified to manage. Like a typically pushy stage dad pressuring a kid to step into the spotlight he means to do good. But down deep he wants the validation of public acclaim as well as the vicarious thrill of celebrity status. His delusional expectations, no doubt, include piles of money that his protege will rake in.

They travel together to San Francisco where Birdy is to audition for a big shot piano instructor, which turns out to be a bust. As they return home, a confused Birdie, guilty over her failed audition, tries to give Ed some unwanted sexual gratification as he’s negotiating the turns of a country road, causing the car to wreck. The accident, almost a carbon copy of the one in “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” injures them both and dooms Ed.

Roger Deakins' classic noir lighting.

It isn’t until the film’s end, after two murders and a suicide, we begin to get the picture: Ed’s gloomy voice-over narration is a first-person article he’s writing for a men’s magazine as he marks time in a death row prison cell. He’s supposed to tell the readers how it feels to be awaiting execution. But it turns out they picked the wrong writer for the assignment. Ed delivers the bare facts only. He’d probably prefer to let someone else fuss over the tough stuff, like feelings. That’s not his strong suit.

Audiences may have been put off by Ed's opaque motivations, many of which are open to speculation. We are left to wonder what dramatic turn in Ed’s life caused him to recede into the background and become a spectator, viewing the events of his life from a distance like a shy apparition, taking it all in and sending out little. The answer is likely buried so deeply that Ed himself doesn’t know, and that’s the way it will stay for eternity.

Is "The Man Who Wasn't There" a film noir homage or is it satire? It's both, because you couldn't create such a smartly detailed satire without having an abiding love and admiration for the original material on which it is based. But you can take it either way. As Ed might say, it doesn't matter much to me.

‘Murder by Contract’: This Guy Kills Me

2025-03-02T01:27:00.000-08:00

Vince Edwards, Caprice Toriel,
'Murder by Contract' (1958).

Dreams of a suburban home,
picket fence and a garden
can lead a man to homicide

By Paul Parcellin

"I want to be a contractor,” announces Claude (Vince Edwards), a determined, 30ish guy in the middle of an unusual kind of job interview at the start of “Murder by Contract” (1958). The shot cuts to an abrupt closeup as he utters those words, emphasizing that this is a turning point in his life, the first step on the way to becoming a professional hitman.

It may have taken a lot of thought before making his decision, but we’re never sure because almost all of Claude’s past is cloaked in mystery. In the course of the meeting he reveals to his interviewer, a retired real estate man named Mr. Moon (Michael Granger), that he never writes anything down, meaning he doesn’t leave a paper trail. But that could also describe his shadowy presence as a man with no personal history, certainly none that he’s willing to share. What we do know are the meager facts he reveals and whatever else we can glean from his actions.

He’s got a decent paying job with benefits, but wants to buy a house and needs more money to do so. As a potential hitman, his vocation puts him well outside the mainstream, but his basic middle class aspirations are rather, well, mundane. Underneath the bravado, Claude is just a square. He’s after that thing described in a trite couplet we love to parrot, the “American dream,” the only difference being that he’s willing to take a route that is untraversable for most of us.

His interviewer asks him what makes him different from others. “I don’t make mistakes,” he says. We gather that from the methodical way he operates, the careful, almost ritualistic way he dresses prior to his interview. Those lacking a more conventional moral code cling tightly to a rigid order of their own, you see.

Claude's exercise regimen echoed in 'Taxi Driver.'

Mr. Moon tests Claude’s mettle by making him wait for the phone call that will offer him an assignment, and Claude’s self-confidence and determination remain in place like a wall of granite.

He waits at home for the phone to ring, dressed in a jacket and J.C. Penny tie, then doing calisthenics in his shabby rooming-house quarters. By the way, the obsessive workout scenes in “Taxi Driver” (1976), in which Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) exercises feverishly in his own scruffy room, were inspired by Claude’s workout regimen, according to director Martin Scorsese, who maintains that “Murder by Contract” had a greater impact on him as a filmmaker than any other feature film.

Murder in a barber shop.

When Claude finally makes the grade as a hired killer, he dispatches a couple of targets in a businesslike manner, staying perfectly cool in each of apparently his first two professional killings. The film’s scenes echo Claude’s economy of style, just showing enough to give us the idea of what is about to happen, particularly when violence occurs. We never see much of the rougher stuff, but are chilled when Claude, posing as a barber, strops a straight razor as a target relaxes in the chair, languidly unaware of what is to come. He used the tools at hand and never carries a gun lest he be stopped and searched.

So many blanks are left for us to fill in that “Murder by Contract” feels as edgy as French new wave cinema. It wouldn’t look out of place on a double bill with Jean Pierre Melville or Robert Bresson’s work of that same era. In fact, Claude’s zen-like focus on his new vocation seems echoed by Jef Costello (Alain Delon) in Melville’s “Le Samourai” (1967).

When Claude’s unseen employer is finally convinced of his reliability, Claude is sent to Los Angeles on a special contract, the details of which he doesn’t learn before accepting the job. In the City of Angels he meets up with two handlers, George (Herschel Bernardi) and Marc (Phillip Pine) who are meant to oversee Claude, but Claude turns the tables on them. Befuddled and nearly at the end of their rope, the two don’t seem so much like gangsters, more like student teachers trying to keep the class bad boy under control.

Herschel Bernardi, Edwards, Phillip Pine, the killer and his handlers.

Their interactions bring a touch of wit that a story as grim as this needs. Fitting in perfectly with the film’s minimalist style, the musical soundtrack by Perry Botkin, which is often a single guitar, is as spare as it is effective — think of Anton Karas’s zither soundtrack in “The Third Man” (1949).

Director Irving Lerner hit a home run with this, one of his handful of gritty crime dramas. Before directing “Murder by Contract,” Lerner made documentaries, produced and edited films, then shifted gears with low-budget feature films including “Edge of Fury (1958) (sharing directing credits with Robert J, Gurney, Jr.), “City of Fear” (1959) as well as a number of dramas, war pictures, westerns and TV shows. With “Murder by Contract,” he handles with assurance what must have seemed like edgy material in 1958. Lerner’s confidence is reflected in Claude, who is unconventional and sure of himself to the point of cockiness.

Claude is a bit of a rock star compared with the two mob errand boys, and they both know it. George comes to admire Claude while Marc is fairly disgusted with him. His opinion doesn’t improve when Claude insists on relaxing instead of going to work. He swims at the beach, goes deep sea fishing and whacks golf balls at a driving range — Claude enjoys exasperating them both.

As cool and detached as he appears, Claude’s mood changes dramatically when he learns that the person he’s been hired to kill is a woman. She’s the wife of a deceased mobster who’s set to testify against the organization. He doesn’t like the idea of killing a woman, not that he believes it’s wrong, but unlike men, they’re unreliable, he says. You can predict when a man will move and where he will stand, but women move in unexpected ways.

Claude breaks his own rule and uses firearms.

It’s telling that he refers to women as “unreliable,” perhaps alluding to his own relationships with women — perhaps even his mother. His rage comes to the surface when a room service waiter delivers a coffee cup with lipstick stains. He denigrates the waiter’s work ethic and remarks that the lipstick was left by “some pig” — he refers to women that way more than once, especially if he believes they have loose morals. Beyond his revulsion over a dirty cup, the lipstick traces convey the presence of a female and that upsets him and temporarily shakes his confidence. But, despite his moralistic judgment of women he’s not above ordering up a call girl when he sees fit.

As his deadline approaches he finally gets down to the business of murder. His target is hiding out in a house nestled away in the Coldwater Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles and is under police guard. That means he must keep his distance while doing the job, but his initial attempts at striking from the hillside above the house don’t go as planned.

Billie Williams (Caprice Toriel) in leopard print, like big game.

He’s forced to take another tack, this time getting close to the woman, and the stress on him is telling. He plans meticulously as usual but is unsteady on his feet.

In what proves to be his downfall, he forges ahead, not only because he faces a dour fate if he fails — by this point his boss believes he’s botched the job and he’ll be lucky to get out of town alive. His obsessive work ethic compels him to complete the job, like any industrious citizen pursuing a comfortable suburban life on a leafy byway. In other words, the American dream.

Headshrinker Noir: 10 Films With Mind Games, Crime

2025-02-16T08:00:00.000-08:00

Ingrid Bergman, "Spellbound" (1945).

From Dedicated Healers
to Evil Control Freaks,
Noir Psychiatrists
Want to Pick Your Brain

By Paul Parcellin

Do all psychiatrists intentionally drive their patients insane and force them to commit awful crimes? In real life it’s unlikely … probably. But in film noir it’s a 50-50 bet. Not that all noir psychiatrists are the same, but they tend to fall into specific groups. One variety is the saintly crusader who tends to be hyper dedicated to healing the afflicted — he or she not only eases troubled minds, but fights crime, too.

Another type is the bumbling screwball, who may be well meaning but often does more damage than good.

Blonde Ice (1948).

Then there's the diabolical narcissist who uses his powers to tap into a patient’s subconscious for wicked purposes. He preys on the vulnerable, who are easy to influence and can be set up as patsies for murder or made to commit crimes. Hypnosis, psychoanalysis and drugs are the tools an evil psyche uses to pry open heads and sprinkle toxic dust inside.

Here is a handful of noirs with shrinks, good and bad. There are many other noirs that focus on psychiatry and mental anguish. Feel free to suggest titles in the comments:

The Good Doctors

Robert Paige, Leslie Brooks, “Blonde Ice.”
She’s full of surprises, none of them good.

“Blonde Ice” (1948)

The film’s icy blonde femme fatale, a shameless gold digger, mercilessly strings along a masochistic suitor. In a moment of clarity he describes her succinctly when he blurts out, “You’re not warm, you’re cold, like ice.” Ignore the hackneyed dialog because he’s got a point. But “cold” doesn’t begin to describe this fair-haired heart crusher. “Psychopath” is a better fit.

She’s a classic femme fatale who uses her womanly charms to get what she wants. When she enters a room the guys’ tongues are hanging out. She’s a dish and she knows it

But a former police psychiatrist is hip to the blonde’s true self. He’s seen oodles of charming cutthroats like her. She’s neurotically fixated on power and wealth, a kind of one-woman wrecking crew lacking a shred of moral fiber. She compulsively pursues men of stature and wealth and then disposes of them. Her ebony dresses remind us of a black widow spider.

Did she have a rough childhood? You betcha, and it may have molded her into the ruthless she-wolf in a mink coat that she’s become. As for the good doctor, he unmasks her and that makes her mighty unhappy, and when she’s unhappy, bad things occur.

Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Ryan, “Caught.”

“ Caught” (1949) 

A car hop gets a taste of the sweet life and it turns to ashes in her mouth. She dreams of a life of mink and diamonds, then meets an overbearing wealthy businessman who dates her but has no intention of making a commitment. That is, until his psychiatrist points out his tendency toward flirtations that never lead to anything permanent. The mogul’s contrarian attitude leads him to marry the girl simply to prove the psychiatrist wrong. Wedded life thereafter is miserable for both parties, and it gets worse when she lands a job as a receptionist for a pediatrician and gets involved with the doc. Here are two takeaways from all this: Don’t do anything rash just to prove your shrink wrong, and secondly, listen carefully to the good advice that you’re paying for. It could save you a lot of trouble.

William Holden, Lee J. Cobb, “The Dark Past.”

“The Dark Past” (1948)

A police psychiatrist recounts a harrowing experience he had when an escaped convict held the psychiatrist and others hostage in a country home. The documentary style film is told in flashback as the psychiatrists recalls why he decided to leave the teaching profession and work with the police. Over the course of one evening the psychiatrist analyzes the escapee’s childhood trauma and manages to cure his recurring emotional disorder. The film makes a case for early psychiatric intervention for youthful offenders, claiming that delinquency can be nipped in the bud when proper treatment is applied. It seems to work well in the movie, at least.

The Quacks

Dana Andrews, Lee J. Cobb, “Boomerang!”.

“Boomerang!” (1947) 

A police psychiatrist plays a marginal role in a preliminary hearing for an accused murderer. The story begins when someone shoots a priest point blank in the head for no apparent reason, although the film offers a theory on the killer’s identity. Flashing back to a time before the murder took place, the clergyman tells a mentally troubled man that he intends to have him committed to an institution. He’s probably the trigger man, but that question is never fully answered. Presented documentary style, the film is based on a true story of a murder in a Connecticut town. An innocent man is arrested and brought to a preliminary hearing where the psychiatrist and others testify, and it looks like the defendant’s goose is cooked. A state’s attorney investigates and finds that there are troubling holes in the prosecutor’s case. Although he plays a minor role, the psychiatrist gets a demerit here for a flimsy evaluation of the accused man. He’s more than willing to rubber stamp the man as guilty without a thorough examination. The film is more about small town politics than psychological motivations behind crime. Suffice it to say that it’s best to steer clear of this quack.

Edward G. Robinson, “Night Has a Thousand Eyes.”

“Night Has a Thousand Eyes” (1948)

A phony psychic suddenly gets true psychic premonitions and his newfound power brings him only misery. He can foresee the deaths of others and that makes him a suspect in the murder of his former vaudeville partner. After predicting the death of the former partner’s daughter, the psychic becomes the focus of a police investigation. A pair of university psychologists are brought in to evaluate the seer, but they can’t rule out the possibility that the psychic has genuine extrasensory powers. They remain skeptical, but they’re unable to explain the weird predictions that come to pass.

Bad Sanitariums

Lucille Bremer, Richard Carlson, Douglas Fowley, “Behind Locked Doors.”

“Behind Locked Doors” (1948)

Evil psychiatrists employed in mental institutions are a subset of headshrinkers. Like their office and couch brethren, they possess a frightening amount of power over those in their care. In “Behind Locked Doors,” a newspaperwoman hires a private detective to be committed to a sanitarium. Inside the locked ward, a corrupt judge on the lam from justice is holed up, and the newswoman means to flush him out. As the private dick soon learns, in this institution psychiatry is a tool of the corrupt, where a patient can be kept on ice after stepping on the wrong sets of toes. The sanitarium director, terrified that his aiding and abetting of a criminal could end his career, is nevertheless beholden to the judge, whose political pull got him his job.

The very real danger for a mole inside an institution is that the psychiatrist is also his jailer. It’s easy and tempting to keep a patient under observation for the financial benefit of it. Sane or not, you may have a long wait for release.

Peter Breck, “Shock Corridor.”

“Shock Corridor” (1963)

Journalist Johnny Barrett aims to expose poor conditions in an institution for the mentally ill, and he also intends to identify a killer at large in that sanitarium. But he’s not entirely motivated by altruism. He wants a Pulitzer, and he’s willing to have himself committed to a sanitarium to earn it. He uses a psychiatrist friend to help him prep for an undercover operation, walking him through drills that will help him convince doctors that he’s mentally ill.

Like the sanitarium director in “Behind Locked Doors,” this one uses his power as a doctor to keep a lid on a big secret. Driven by the fear of tarnishing the institution’s reputation and losing any of the joint’s lucrative patient population, the sanitarium director covers up the murder of a patient named Sloan.

Johnny’s exotic dancer girlfriend is dead against the undercover scheme, but reluctantly aids him. She poses as his sister and both pretend that he harbors an unnatural sexual attraction to her. She swears out a complaint against him and sees to it that he’s committed to the institution where the murder took place.

She worries that the punishing tests he’s subjected to will drive him insane, and she’s not wrong. Here, we have a facility overseen by a corrupt director and managed by an immoral staff where the treatments are as damaging as the trauma that brings patients to the facility in the first place.

Leo G. Carroll, Gregory Peck, Ingrid Bergman, “Spellbound.”

“Spellbound” (1945)

In making “Spellbound,” Alfred Hitchcock employed a psychiatric advisor and hired Salvador Dali to create a dream sequence, making it a richly detailed film about mental illness, psychiatry and sanitariums.

The setting is a sanitarium, and we meet a sadistic and seductive female patient who tries to sweet talk an attendant before gouging his hand with her sharp nails. Other patients include a suicidal man with delusions that he killed his father. Both cases, a charming predator and a man paralyzed with guilt are two personality types upon which the story is built.

The outgoing director of the sanitarium has been dismissed after showing signs of senility, and he’s to be replaced by Dr. Anthony Edwardes. The new director gets off to a rocky start with his inappropriately angry outburst. Dr. Constance Petersen, an attractive, buttoned-down staff psychiatrist, uses the tines of a fork to draw a diagram on a snowy white table linen. Edwardes inexplicably loses his cool and makes a bit of a fool of himself.

Petersen is a reserved rationalist. She deflects another colleague’s advances and he refers to her as the human glacier. She keeps her emotions in check and puts the brakes on when Edwardes nearly immediate attempts to woo her. But it doesn’t take long for him to break through her wall of resistance.

The trouble is, Edwardes’s emotional outbursts are signs of deeply repressed memories and amnesia, and before long both he and Petersen will be questioning his true identity. To make matters worse, there’s been a murder committed and Edwardes is the likely culprit.

Kleptomaniac Patients

Robert Mitchum, Laraine Day, “The Locket” (1946).

“The Locket” (1946)

Kleptomania is just one of the psychological afflictions taking center stage in “The Locket,” a story about a woman with sticky fingers for shiny objects who just can’t be trusted. On her wedding day her psychiatrist ex-husband steps forward to unmask her as a sociopath before she can exchange wedding vows. Her fiancé listens incredulously as the shrink fills him in on the lady’s history. It turns out that swiping rich ladies’ jewelry isn’t the half of her misdeeds. Charming and manipulative, she commits a heinous act and leaves a falsely accused domestic servant holding the bag. The upshot is that she’s such a highly polished liar she fools her psychiatrist husband.

The film is a marvel of complex flashbacks, nested within flashbacks. The psychiatrist tells the groom a tale that we see in a flashback. In it, a visitor tells him of his association with the bride to be, and in that flashback she tells of her traumatic childhood, and we see that in yet another flashback. According to her version of the story, wealthy, abusive high society types (one of whom is the source of her childhood trauma) are the villains.

Each flashback offers a new layer to ponder, but we don’t witness a story taking place in the present, we hear others’ recollections of the facts which may or may not be reliable. Still, the story we see is enough to give you pause on your wedding day.  

José Ferrer, Gene Tierney, “Whirlpool” (1950).

“Whirlpool” (1950)

Psychiatrist Dr. William Sutton is in a battle with smooth-talking hypnotist David Korvo over the well being of the doctor’s wife, Ann. She has the embarrassing habit of shoplifting goods from local stores, and one day she gets caught. Korvo happens to be on the scene and he fast-talks her out of the jam and persuades her to let him treat her neurosis.

The quack therapist hypnotizes Ann, allegedly to treat her insomnia, and he promises to address her kleptomania, as well. Although her husband is a highly respected psychiatrist, she’s embarrassed to tell him about her problems, and Korvo offers her a way to keep it all on the down low.

Both she and Korvo are alike, in a way. They both share a disdain for the people who tend to their needs, the waiters and housekeepers whom they order around with little tact. Ann lives a comfortable life, and her rough treatment of the domestic help seems more a byproduct of her inner turmoil than a mark of entitlement. Korvo, on the other hand, is mean and manipulative when none of his wealthy clients are watching. He can turn on the charm at will when there’s a fat pocketbook to be picked, and all the while he plots sinister ways to take advantage of Ann’s weaknesses.

“Whirlpool” is a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of seeking help from a charlatan, and reassures us that genuine psychiatry offers legitimate treatment.

After enduring a life threatening ordeal, Ann and her husband get to the bottom of her psychological conflicts, although it happens too quickly and easily to be believed. But after escaping Korvo’s clutches she’s earned the right to a happy ending.

Could You Repeat That? — 36 Noirs That Unfold In Flashbacks

2025-02-02T07:00:00.000-08:00

Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, “Double Indemnity” (1944).

They pop up in all kinds of movies and TV shows,
but flashbacks are the stuff that films noir are made of

By Paul Parcellin

Is that film you’re watching a noir? Here’s one semi-reliable way to tell: Look for flashbacks. In noir, flashbacks show us the stuff that gets characters into the mess that they are in, and are no doubt trying to wriggle out of.

Did that someone betray a spouse, steal from an employer or send another to an untimely grave? Or, maybe it’s a poor sap with rotten luck who landed in hot water. Flashbacks give us background information — the essential dirty details in a neat package.

Of course, even a film chock-full of flashbacks isn’t necessarily a noir. Flashbacks pop up in all kinds of movies and TV shows. But, if you’re watching a black and white film in which crime happens, and there’s at least one flashback (extra points if Robert Mitchum is doing voice-over narration), you’re probably looking at a noir.

Flashbacks let stories unfold in fragments rather than in a single straight line. Their unpredictability jacks up our emotions and expectations, reshapes a story’s contours and, if done right, provides us with plot twists we never saw coming.

At first we may feel sympathy for the one in a tight spot. But moods can shift once the facts come out in a flashback. Of course, the opposite is also be true. Villains sometimes morph into angels when we see what they’ve endured.

Having said all that, here are 36 noirs with flashbacks that manipulate the flow of the story as well as our perceptions and attitudes toward it. This is but a fraction of the flashback-heavy noirs available for viewing. Bet you can name a number of others:

Rory Mallinson, Jay C. Flippen, Maureen O'Hara, “A Woman's Secret.”

“A Woman's Secret” (1949)

A failed singer confesses she shot her friend, and in flashbacks we see the events leading up to the shooting. But her manager and a detective doubt her story and cannot establish a reasonable motive.

“Backfire” (1950)

While recuperating from wartime back injuries, a veteran is visited on Christmas Eve by a beautiful stranger with a cryptic message. Flashbacks are used extensively to piece together a fragmented story as characters recount past events.

“The Big Clock” (1948)

The film opens at night with a magazine editor stealthily moving about in the deserted skyscraper where he works. A giant timepiece, which will prove important to the story, looks down on the building’s lobby. A murder investigation is underway and flashbacks add to the pressure principal characters experience.

“Black Angel” (1946)

When a wrongly accused man is convicted of a singer's murder, his wife tries to prove him innocent, aided by the victim's ex-husband. In a flashback, the ex-husband tells the story of the woman’s death from his point of view.

Hume Cronyn, Burt Lancaster, “Brute Force.”

“Brute Force” (1947)

At a tough penitentiary, a convict plans to rebel against a power-mad chief guard. Flashbacks offer insights into the prisoners’ backgrounds, motivations and the circumstance that led to their incarceration.

“Call Northside 777” (1948)

Chicago reporter P.J. McNeal re-opens a decade-old murder case, a perfect opportunity to see the details in flashbacks.

“Confidential Report” (also known as Mr. Arkadin) (1955)

A mysterious billionaire hires an American smuggler to investigate his past, which leads the investigator down a rabbit hole of cold-war European intrigue. As the smuggler interviews others, we see the billionaire’s life in flashbacks

“Crossfire” (1947)

A man is murdered by a demobilized soldier he met in a bar. An investigator puts together the pieces of the puzzle and we see in flashback how and why the crime occurred.

Lee J. Cobb, William Holden, Nina Foch, “The Dark Past.”

“The Dark Past” (1948)

An escaped psychopathic killer takes a police psychiatrist, his family and neighbors hostage. The documentary style film is told in flashback as the psychiatrist recounts his days as a psychology professor, and the events that led him to do police work.

“Dead Reckoning” (1946)

A soldier runs away to avoid receiving the Medal of Honor, so his buddy gets permission to investigate. Romance and death soon follow. We see the story in flashbacks as an investigating officers recounts the facts of his query to a priest.

“Double Indemnity” (1944)

An insurance salesman falls for his customer’s wife and is lured into a murder scheme. When it all blows up in his face he makes a recording of his confession on the office Dictaphone machine and we get the story in flashback.

“Dual Alibi” (1947)

Twin trapeze artists fall out over a lottery ticket and a woman. Flashbacks frame the story and explore themes of betrayal and personality contrasts.

Zero Mostel, Humphrey Bogart, “The Enforcer.”

“The Enforcer” (1951)

A lead prosecutor is frustrated in his attempts to send the boss of a murder for hire syndicate to the chair. He pores over evidence hoping to find a fresh lead, and as he does we see the investigation in flashbacks, and in flashbacks within the flashback.

“Gun Crazy” (1950)

Two gun-obsessed young people launch a crime spree. An extended flashback gives insight into the young man’s psychological makeup and his fascination with guns.

“The House on Telegraph Hill” (1951)

A concentration camp survivor finds herself involved in mystery, greed and murder after she takes on the identity of a dead friend to gain passage to America. We learn of her past history in flashback.

“I Wake Up Screaming” (1941)

Police detectives interrogate a sports promoter accused of murdering a beautiful model. We get the entire backstory as he starts from the beginning and tells what happened in a long flashback sequence.

Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, “The Killers.”

“The Killers” (1946)

Hitmen arrive in a small New Jersey town to kill an unresisting victim, and an insurance investigator uncovers the victim’s past involvement with a beautiful, deadly woman. As the investigator interviews people involved in the case, we see the story in flashbacks.

“Killer's Kiss” (1955)

Standing on a railway station platform, a down and out prizefighter flashes back on the events of the past two tumultuous days. Losing a bout turns out to be the least of his worries.

“Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye” (1950)

A courtroom trial is a fitting starting place to give us the facts of a case presented in flashback. We see that after a violent prison break, a clever, ruthless criminal corrupts everyone around him.

“The Lady from Shanghai” (1947)

In flashback we observe the story of a seaman who is hired to tend to a bizarre yachting cruise. He ends up mired in a complex murder plot.

Gene Tierney, “Laura.”

“Laura” (1944)

A muck-raking journalist tells in flashback of his close personal relationship with Laura, an attractive young woman who meets an untimely end. He’s at odds with a police detective investigating the murder who falls in love with the victim.

“Leave Her to Heaven” (1945)

A writer recounts, in flashbacks, how he fell in love with a young socialite and married her, but her obsessive love for him proved to be the undoing of them both.

“The Locket” (1946)

Just before his wedding, the bridegroom hears a disturbing tale characterizing his beloved bride as troubled and unstable. This may be a record holder of sorts for the most complex structure of nested flashbacks — that is, flashbacks within flashbacks.

“The Mask of Dimitrios” (1944) 

A mystery writer becomes intrigued after the murdered body of a vicious career criminal washes up in the Bosphorus. As he interviews various individuals we see the story in flashbacks.

Joan Crawford, Moroni Olsen, “Mildred Pierce.”

“Mildred Pierce” (1945)

A hard-working mother inches towards disaster as she divorces her husband and opens a restaurant to support her spoiled daughter. The title character tells police about the events leading up to a shooting, and we see them in a series of flashbacks.

“Murder, My Sweet” (1944)

Private investigator Philip Marlowe, facing a police interrogation, spills the story that began with an ex-con in search of his former girlfriend, Velma. A complex web of corruption is unearthed and we see it all in flashback.

“Night Has a Thousand Eyes” (1948)

After a phony stage mentalist mysteriously acquires supernatural powers to see the future, he decides to leave the stage to live a quiet life. Flashbacks are a key element that deepen the mystery and explore the psychological torment of the protagonist.

“No Man of Her Own” (1950)

We’re held In suspense as we learn, in flashback, the story of a pregnant woman who adopts the identity of a railroad-crash victim and starts a new life with the woman's wealthy in-laws.

Jane Greer, Robert Mitchum, “Out of the Past.”

“Out of the Past” (1947)

A small-town gas station owner’s past catches up with him. Formerly a private eye, he’s forced to return to the life he’d been trying to escape. Gangsters and a dangerous woman await his return. Even the film’s title screams flashback, and it dishes them out aplenty.

“Possessed” (1947)

After being found wandering the streets of Los Angeles, a catatonic woman tells a doctor the complex story of how she wound up there. Flashbacks offer insight into her psychological makeup and establish her as an unreliable witness.

“Repeat Performance” (1947)

On New Year's Eve 1946, Sheila Page kills her husband Barney. She wishes that she could relive 1946 and avoid the mistakes that led to tragedy. Presto, her wish comes true and the film becomes a year-long flashback.

“The Second Woman” (1950)

In flashback, we see the story of a woman visiting her aunt in California. She meets a neighbor and begins to suspect that he’s in grave danger.

Barbara Stanwyck, “Sorry, Wrong Number.”

“Sorry, Wrong Number” (1948)

An invalid with an overbearing personality eavesdrops on a phone conversation about a murder plan. Her philandering husband leaves her alone for the evening, and she recalls his suspicious behavior in a series of flashbacks.

“Sunset Boulevard” (1950)

Pitch black humor and an inspired use of flashbacks are both strong elements in this story of a hack screenwriter who tries to save his flagging career with the help of a faded silent film star. She’s determined to return to the screen, but things don’t work out for either of them.

“They Won't Believe Me” (1947)

On trial for murdering his girlfriend, a philandering stockbroker takes the stand to claim his innocence and describe the actual, but improbable-sounding, sequence of events that led to her death. The witness stand is a perfect location to present the story in flashbacks.

“Vengeance Is Mine” (1949)

Believing himself to be dying, a man hires an assassin to kill him so he can frame an enemy for the death. Flashbacks offer gradual revelation of key events and offer psychological depth.

Paul Parcellin writes about crime films and TV. Follow him on Bluesky: @paulpar.bsky.social

D.O.A.: Small Town Man Visits Big City, Murder Follows

2025-01-19T08:00:00.000-08:00

Frank Gerstle, Edmond O’Brien, “D.O.A.” (1949).
The doctor delivers some astonishingly bad news.

Frank Bigelow needs to find the truth,
but he's driven by a deeper motivation

By Paul Parcellin

When you think of noir, it’s probably not 18th century British author Samuel Johnson who first springs to mind. But his most famous quote really nails the crux of “D.O.A.”: “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Apt words for Frank Bigelow ( Edmond O’Brien), the cursed hero of “D.O.A.,” who is under a death sentence, but not the kind that involves a rope. His is a story of rotten luck, an obsessive search for the truth and the mind’s nimbleness as the final grains of sand funnel through the hourglass.

But first, the top reason to see “D.O.A.” is the opening sequence, perhaps the greatest setup in all of noir. Bigelow arrives at Los Angeles City Hall at night, as if drawn in by its illuminated spire, a beacon in the dark. He enters and makes the long trudge through the hallways leading to police headquarters and the camera follows him all the way. Arriving at the homicide bureau, he reports a murder.

Bigelow tells his story.

“Who was murdered?” the head detective asks.

“I was,” he says.

Thus begins one of noir’s most definitive existential crises. A man living under a death sentence has mere hours before he expires. What will he do with his remaining time, we wonder? The lowdown comes in a long flashback in which we learn that the past few days have been a frenzied struggle. Bigelow, a small town accountant, first got sucked into a dark vortex of doom some months ago, long before he realized his predicament. He accidentally landed in the middle a scheme to sell stolen iridium, a valuable metal. He’s innocent of any wrongdoing, but fate cares not about culpability.

Details of the story behind this delayed-action murder get a bit complicated and difficult to digest as the story winds toward its harrowing conclusion. But the backstory is less important than Bigelow’s frenetic struggle to get to the bottom of the mystery that torments him to distraction.

At the story’s core is a powerful obsession with finding the truth and a frenzied investigation that seems imperative, yet pointless. He could have gone to the police immediately but chose to go it alone. You might correctly assume that Bigelow’s head-first dive into the nitty gritty of the case is his way of shutting out thoughts of the Angel of Death’s inevitable visit.

His downward spiral begins when he leaves his loving girlfriend, Paula (Pamela Britton), behind in their small desert town. Frank plans to let down his hair in the big city, San Francisco, while deciding whether or not he will walk the plank with Paula — a plan that, frankly, is a bit on the cruel side. She hates the idea of him cavorting around town, yet feels she has no choice but to let him go get his freak on.

House band, The Fishermen, drive the beatnik crowd wild.

Once in the confines of his big city hotel room he’s up for a bit of sinning, and it turns out he’s come to the right place. By chance, he meets a group of traveling salespeople who are partying like it’s V-J Day, and he’s invited to join the fun.

“Jive-crazy” hipsters dig
the crazy beat at
the Fisherman jazz club.

Drink flows freely and this group of inveterate squares lands at a beatnik jazz bar, of all places. It’s the film’s most surreal and fun sequences as the hep crowd grooves to the frenzied beat of a live sextet blowing hard bop.

Clearly, it’s a square’s idea of what a jazz club is like. The joint is a cartoonish den of iniquity where loose morals and uninhibited self-expression are on display, a place where oddballs and commies probably smoke “marihuana.” Above all of that, it’s a spot to meet “jive crazy” girls, and Frank’s game for that.

Of course, he’s out of his element here. The music makes his head spin, but the possibility of connecting with some counter-culture female companionship makes it tolerable. When at last he’s about to hook up with a mysterious blonde, someone slips him a radioactive mickey that sends his life into a tailspin.

It’s as if he’s being punished for his carnal cravings, and the penalty for straying from his girlfriend is death. But beyond that, we wonder who fed him a nightcap of hot nuclear soup.

We’re left to ponder whether the raucous group that brought him to the bar had any part in the scheme. After all, the head sales nerd persuaded Bigelow to join the group and organized the bar hop. He’s got his wife in tow and at one point he gives Bigelow the stink eye for getting too cosy with the missus — a rather weak motive for murder, but people have killed for less.

It’s not until the next morning that Bigelow realizes that something is off and gets himself examined. The terrifying verdict is in: he’s been dosed with a slow-acting luminous poison and has only several days left to live.

A couple of medical establishments confirm that he’s a goner, and at first he’s in denial. From the dimly lit confines of a physician’s office, Bigelow bolts into the vast, sun-filled concrete cityscape that is somehow as claustrophobic and airless as the doctor’s office. He’s a man trying to outrun fate and it’s hard not to gasp for breath along with him as he scrambles toward points unknown.

Pamela Britton, O’Brien. Frank and Paula meet all too briefly.

A cool factoid is that the shots of Bigelow running down San Francisco’s Market Street were taken without city permits. Those he bumps into are not hired extras but pedestrians who are visibly confused about the jostling they get. Director Rudolph Maté shot the film on a small budget, around $500,000, and made the most of limited resources.

Frank ponders Life.

We witness Bigelow go through the stages of impending death in an extremely compressed timeframe. Pausing at a newsstand bedecked with copies of Life magazine, he watches people interact, but he seems all but invisible to them. He’s like an apparition who observes others but cannot interact with them. His initial terror dissipates and he seems to be wistfully picturing a world in which life will go on without him.

Once the initial shock is absorbed he accepts the bitter reality and snaps into action. In his final hours he’s determined to find out who poisoned him and why they did it. And then … who knows what? Maybe he’ll bring the killer to justice or perhaps he’ll take matters into his own hands. Along the way he acquires a pistol, so both options are open.

This is a drastically different Bigelow than the one who embarked on his junket to San Francisco. He’s focused, emotionally high strung and determined to get answers.

The film's climax takes place in the Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles.

His investigation takes him abruptly from the Bay Area to the City of Angels, and at every turn he encounters another mug or two-timing dame. As the dust begins to settle it becomes clear that there’s a network of people behind the plot against him. But why would they go to so much trouble to kill an accountant from jerkwater USA?

The film’s answer is a bit more complicated than it needs to be, but not quite as byzantine as “The Big Sleep,” perhaps the most convoluted plot in all of noir.

Neville Brand as Chester. He takes
Frank Bigelow for a wild ride.

Bigelow traces the iridium dealers, meets the widow of the man who tried to warn him about impending danger and tracks down the shady characters behind the illegal sale. He gets taken for a ride by psychotic thug Chester (Neville Brand), and survives a shootout in a pharmacy.

Bigelow’s mind has become wonderfully focused as the shadow of death hovers over him. He later expires in the homicide bureau after spilling the story to a roomful of enthralled detectives.

Facing certain death can clear cobwebs from the brain, all right, but too often clarity arrives at the eleventh hour. It’s ironic that had he not gone through this ordeal he might never have realized his feelings for Paula, but by then it was too late. Alas, romance often doesn’t work out in noir.

Frank Bigelow gains a sliver of self awareness only to die an untimely death. That’s a Pyrrhic victory you might say, and Samuel Johnson would undoubtedly agree.

Originally published in the Nov./Dec. 2024 issue of The Dark Pages. Check out The Dark Pages newsletter at: www.allthatnoir.com/newsletter/

Paul Parcellin writes about crime films and TV. Follow him on Bluesky: @paulpar.bsky.social

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