Taste of Cinema is back with another list! This one is a pretty basic list, I don’t see to many people arguing with this one. I know some may argue White Heat is not a noir and I noticed the photo they are using for D.O.A. is not from that film, but overall a good list. What do you think?
http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2015/30-essential-noir-films-that-you-need-to-watch/
Crime of Passion is a film noir from 1957 with 3 of noir’s greatest. We Have Barbara Stanwyck, Sterling Hayden and Raymond Burr in a love triangle that can not end well. Gerd Oswald directs this film, written by Jo Eisinger.
This story starts out with Stanwyck working at a paper as an advice columnist for a San Francisco paper. She gets put on a story against her will where she meets a couple Los Angeles cops who fly up about the case. One of the cops is Hayden and Stanwyck falls in love in short time. She soon moves down to Los Angeles and marries Hayden. She has problems getting along with the other cop’s wives and doesn’t handle the stress of being a cop’s wife herself. We soon learn that Hayden’s boss is Burr and an old flame of Stanwyck’s. Burr is also married, his wife is played by none other than Fay Wray. Wray is very sick and this is hard on Burr. Soon Burr and Stanwyck start seeing each other again. This love triangle does not end well and our story really heats up.
This film is short and starts out quit slow, but it heats up in the last half hour. The film plays as a bit of a psychological thriller and Stanwyck is getting the ball rolling on the psychotic femme fatale that we would see in future films like Fatal Attraction.
Hayden is very good playing his every man’s man, as he always does. Burr is real good playing somebody with a lot of power and is very strong, but when he lets his guard down and shows some weakness it is very believable. Stanwyck is good as always and you could watch this again just to get all the little nuances of her performance. Wray plays a smaller part, but does a good job with it.
This is a good film and well worth watching. Just give it some time to get started as the first half of the film is a little dull and slow. It quickly builds to an interesting noir by the end.
Illegal is a film noir from 1955 starring film noir great Edward G. Robinson. This film is also one of the first films of Jane Mansfield’s short career.
The film is directed by Lewis Allen and a screenplay by noir writers W.R. Burnett and James R. Webb based on a story from Frank J. Collins. This is the third time Collins’ story was brought to the silver screen. I’ve never seen the other two films, so I can not compare the three.
This movie starts out with Robinson as a District Attorney winning a case. We see the man convicted going to the electric chair. Robinson is rushing to the hospital where he is given a death-bed confession. He calls the prison and is too late, they have executed an innocent man Robinson got convicted. Robinson quits the office and soon becomes a defense attorney. He is also in love with his assistant, played by Nina Foch who stays at the D.A.’s office and marries another man played by Hugh Marlowe. Robinson uses his great skills to win cases for some of the worst criminals in town. This shows one case after another, won in grand fashion by Robinson. The last case of the film is a very personal one for Robinson’s character and it cranks up the tension and grittiness of the film.
This film is obviously at a lower quality level then we are used to from Robinson. Robinson of course was in some of the greatest pre-noir gangster films and a list of some of the best films noir of the 1940’s. He was then caught up in the McCarthy Un-American Activities Committee. He testified and was absolved of Communist activities, but was never in anymore great films. He did elevate films like this one but was never able to re-gain his standing as one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, playing minor parts in big movies and big parts in small movies.
This is still a good film worth watching for Robinson fans and classic film noir fans. Though it isn’t the same quality of story and production of his earlier stuff, it is still a highly enjoyable performance and film.
Favorite Tidbit: Edward G. Robinson’s character is loosely based on the famous lawyer Bill Fallon, “The Great Mouthpiece” who got gambler Arnold Rothstein off for the “Black Sox” of 1919 World Series fix. His likeness has appeared in a number of films and television series over the years.
I came across this tonight on the good old internet. It is a list challenge to see how many of the 100 Greatest Films Noir you have seen. I didn’t do as well as I would have hoped, but that just means there are more great films out there for me to see!
How many of these have you seen?
http://www.listchallenges.com/100-greatest-film-noirs
I don’t know who made this list of 100 films but I’m sure a few people will disagree with some of the choices. I look at it as finding some films I may have missed and will have to check out, and the ones on the list I have seen I really enjoyed. What do you think of the list?
Where the Sidewalk Ends is a classic film noir from 1950 directed by noir great Otto Preminger. We have more noir greatness in the two leading stars, Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney. All three worked on Laura, returning to work together 6 years later on this film. This is based on a book by William L. Stuart
Some of the small roles that stood out to me is Gary Merrill as our mobster boss and Karl Malden as the cop who just got promoted to lieutenant over Dana Andrews.
This story starts out with Tierney who is accompanied by two other men playing an illegal game of craps. One of them is winning big, real big. He is up $19,000! Tierney starts to go home and one of the men says they can not go yet. He smacks her and the man up $19 grand punches him. The two men fight and our lucky gambler is left unconscious on a couch. We then go to the police headquarters where a murder is reported. Andrews and his partner leave to investigate the case. They find the luck gambler dead on the floor, stabbed in the heart. This is in Merrill’s room where the illegal craps game was being played. We soon see Merrill and Andrews do not like each other and have a history. Andrews goes to the apartment of the other man who was with Tierney and who Merrill says killed our gambler. There is a fight and Andrews accidentally kills his only suspect in a fist fight. Now Andrews has to cover the murder he committed. Will he get away with it? Will Merrill get away running his illegal game and possibly murder himself? How will Tierney react to all of this?
This is another great noir from Andrews, Tierney and Preminger. I felt it was a darker more gritty noir then Laura and well worth watching. The fight scenes are not flashy and play more realistically then what we get today. The style of the film is quintessential noir. This was Preminger’s last of 4 noir films he made for 20th Century Fox in the 1940’s and is one of the best. He went on to make more noir, crime and thriller films well worth watching for other studios. This film is a must see for all classic film noir fans and all fans of film should give it a viewing.
Side Street is a film noir from 1949, directed by Anthony Mann based on a story and a screenplay by Sydney Boehm. This stars Farley Granger as our protagonist and Cathy O’Donnell as his pregnant wife.
This story is confusing and full of plot holes but a fun noir to watch. This film starts with a women blackmailing some important business man. A guy behind a door has a gun to make sure this goes down like it is supposed to. We then find this girl floating in the water, dead! Granger is working as a part-time mail carrier(because a full-time mail carrier would be too honest to do this?) He delivers mail to a lawyer’s office and finds a sign which says “out for 15 minutes and will be back soon”. Granger finds the door is accidentally left unlocked. He goes in the office and tries to open a filling cabinet, it is locked. So he leaves, sees an ax for firefighting and brings it back to open the cabinet. He grabs a file, puts into his bag, not looking at it, and takes off. Now a voice over for the film is telling us our mail carrier has 50 cents in his pocket and would or wouldn’t you in that situation steal a few hundred dollars? There ends up being $30,000 in the file. This is where you have to start suspending your rational thinking! Why would a lawyer with $30,000 in his office not lock the door? But that is not the biggest questions here! How or why does Garager know that in the second drawer down, the last file in the cabinet has any money in it at all? He grabs it without looking in the file and without looking in any other drawer or file? Why does he think there is a few hundred dollars in it and not more, or any for that matter? Anyway he dumps the file, goes to his parent-in-laws where him and his wife now live, because they have lost everything in a failed business and are starting over. His wife is pregnant and due anytime now. He gives her some cash and says she can now get a real doctor and a room at the hospital to have her baby. He tells her, he got a new job up north and a pay advance and has to leave right away to start work. He gives the cash to a friend telling him it is a present for his wife and needs to hide it with him so she doesn’t find it. So as the plot thickens our hero has the police, a lawyer and some murdering blackmailers all looking for him while he runs through the streets of New York City to give the money back to its rightful owner and figure out the mystery on his own.
So this synopsis is just part of the suspend disbelief you need to enjoy this film. If you do I think you will enjoy the ride. It is stylishly filmed and even though you don’t always know quite what is going on and why, it is a fun watch. We also get a few cameo appearances worth seeing. Jean Hagen plays a lounge singer, who is our closest thing to a femme fatale in this film. Charles McGraw plays a small part as a deep voiced hard-nosed cop. Also Paul Kelly as our police captain is very good.
I think most film noir fans will find this film enjoyable, I did. Sometimes life doesn’t make sense so why should a classic film noir?
He Ran All the Way stars John Garfield in his last role. Garfield died of coronary thrombosis at the age of 39. Garfield was a prominent actor in the classic noir period. Shelley Winters also stars as the female lead early in her illustrious career. Character actor Wallace Ford also appears as Winters’ father. This film is based on a book by Sam Ross and directed by John Berry. The film was released in 1951, five years after Garfield’s most famous role in The Post Man Always Rings Twice.
This film starts out with Garfield and his partner robbing a payroll. They are chased and Garfield’s partner is shot. Garfield gets away, but shoots a police officer in the process. He escapes to a public pool and literally runs into Winters. He quickly knows she may be his way to hide out. They go back to her apartment where we and Garfield learn she lives with her parents and little brother. The police officer dies and Garfield is all over the papers as the killer. Garfield takes the family hostage while he hides out there. Will Garfield get away with the loot? Will Winters fall for him as they go off together to live happily ever after? Will Garfield kill any of the members of the family before he gets away? Will Garfield even get away?
The tension is strong for this classic and works very well. It has a simple plot with great performances from the small cast. This is a very good film noir worthy of any noir fan’s time. I wish we had a few more of these films from Garfield before he left us, but we can always go back and watch The Postman Always Rings Twice and the handful of other noir films he has starred in.
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a classic film noir from 1956 starring Dana Andrews and Joan Fontaine. The real story here is this is the last American movie from noir great, Fritz Lang. I got to say Lang went out with a bang. This is an intriguing story with a great ending. This story is written by Douglas Morrow and is amazing.
Dana Andrews is a novelist and ex-newspaperman. He is dating Fontaine who happens to be the daughter of his ex-boss. His ex-boss and future father-in-law is the owner of a large newspaper. His future father-in-law is played by Sidney Blackmer.
We open the movie with an execution, yes somebody goes to the chair in the opening scene. The next scene has Blackmer and Andrews having a drink and discusses capital punishment. They meet Philip Bourneuf who plays the D.A. responsible for the death sentence we witnessed at the beginning of the film. Bourneuf and Blackmer are on opposite sides of the capital punishment fence. Blackmer talks about ways to convert the public to his side of the subject, he only needs the right circumstance. The right circumstance soon comes up! A burlesque dancer is found murdered and there is no suspects. Blackmer talks Andrews into framing himself with the crime. Then when he is sentenced to death, they will bring out all the evidence they planted and of course the how, when and where they did it. This proves they sentenced an innocent man to death and will show the public how capital punishment is a bad idea. Well if your like me, this whole thing sounds like a bad idea! Will they plant enough evidence to get arrested? If he does get convicted will they be able to reverse the verdict before it is too late? What will Andrews’ girl Fontaine think of this when she finds out what is going on?
This is another great noir from Fritz Lang, he was definitely on his game for his last American film, before he goes back to his homeland of Germany. It is worth watching for any of his fans and fans of classic noir. Fontaine and Andrews fans will love this as well. This film has an amazing ending that you will not see coming.
This is a film noir from 1950, directed by John Cromwell, but the real story is who wrote this and how.
This is another great noir written by Virginia Kellogg who also was on the writing team for White Heat and T-Men(both have been reviewed earlier on this site). This one is interesting because Kellogg actually pulled some strings to incarcerate herself in a woman’s prison to write a book. She then made this book into a screenplay for this film. Everything in the book is stuff that really happened while she was in prison, so I imagine most of this movie’s plot lines are actually based on fact, though the story is fictional.
Eleanor Parker plays our main protagonist who is put in prison for being involved in a gas station robbery with her husband. She is only 19 and her husband was killed in the robbery attempt, to top things off, she is pregnant! She is a pretty normal girl, somewhat innocent if you will. She probably shouldn’t be in prison for being an accomplice to an attempted robbery of only $40.
Agnes Moorhead plays the warden who is trying to make things better for the women. She is the bright spot in a dark situation.
Hope Emerson plays one hell of an evil guard in this film. She was Parker’s nemesis throughout the movie.
Parker meets an assortment of criminals while in stir. Most befriend her and she learns a lot about the criminal ways while doing her time. This quote sums it up:
“For that forty bucks I heisted I sure got myself an education.”
This really is a movie about the problems with our prison system, most, if not all these problems have not gone away in the 65 years since this film was made. If you are a fan of Orange Is the New Black you should check this film out to see how things have evolved very little in the past 6 decades. This film should be seen by everybody, noir fan or not. It is an amazing piece of cinema. Parker really does an outstanding job and you can see why she was nominated for an Academy Award for this performance.
Here is a classic film noir from Fritz Lang made in 1944. It stars Ray Milland and is based on a book by Graham Greene. How could you go wrong? Well I would say Lang phoned this one in, if you ask me. I’m not saying it is a horrible movie, but it isn’t the “Masterpiece of Suspense” it is advertised as.
Our story starts with Milland going to the train station and taking a detour to a carnival by the station. He tries his hand at a game where he needs to guess the weight of a cake. He doesn’t win the cake, so he goes to the fortune-teller. The fortune-teller is played by Aminta Dyne but for some reason the fortune-teller changes to Hillary Brooke later in the film. The fortune-teller tells Milland the weight of the cake, he walks out and plays that game again and wins the cake! Another man played by noir great Dan Duryea shows up and the fortune-teller knows she made a mistake. They try to take the cake away from Milland to no avail. Milland gets on the train and a blind man joins him. The blind man eventually steals the cake and runs into a bombing area. There is a chase and the blind man(who isn’t blind) gets blown up. Milland starts to investigate the cake incident on his own and the mystery continues. We have a séance, followed by a murder. We learn Milland has recently been to a mental institution for basically helping his sick wife commit suicide. This has a lot of elements that should add up to a great noir, but for me it felt a little flat.
Marjorie Reynolds plays Milland’s love interest in this. In my opinion Hillary Brooke does a great femme fatale in this, and steals the show, she just isn’t in the film very much.
This is the second time I’ve watched this, I was not impressed the first time I seen it and thought I would give it another shot because I have become such a big fan of Fritz Lang’s stuff. Like I said I’m not saying this is a bad movie, it’s just disappointing given the talent involved. This is worth watching for classic film noir fans and if you want to see everything by Lang. If you are not familiar with Lang I recommend watching some of his other work. Scarlet Street is still one of my favorites of his.
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