film noir

WOMAN ON THE RUN – a sassy gal in 1950 San Francisco

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Deenis O'Keefe and Ann Sheridan in WOMAN ON THE RUN
Deenis O’Keefe and Ann Sheridan in WOMAN ON THE RUN

On Friday night, June 5, Turner Classic Movies is presenting one of my Overlooked Noir, in its wonderful film noir series Summer of Darkness.   The character-driven thriller Woman on the Run (1950)  is notable for its San Francisco locations, making it a veritable time capsule of the post-war City By The Bay.

The movie opens with a murder, and the one terrified witness goes underground.  When the police coming looking for him, they are surprised to find his wife (Ann Sheridan) both ignorant of his whereabouts and unconcerned.  While still living in the same apartment, the couple is estranged.  And the wife has a Mouth On Her, much to the dismay of the detective (Robert Keith), who keeps walking into a torrent of sass.

But soon the wife starts hunting hubbie, along with the cops, a reporter (Dennis O’Keefe) and the killer.  It’s a race to see who can find him first.  One character is revealed to be more dangerous than was apparent, and the audience learns this before our heroine does.

One quirky nugget – when she visits his workplace, we learn that his job is making mannikins in the basement of a large department store.

Sheridan is great in this uncharacteristically insolent role.  So are O’Keefe and Keith.  But the real star of Woman on the Run is San Francisco itself, from the hilly neighborhoods to the bustling streets to the dank and foreboding waterfront.  Oddly, the finale is at an amusement park which seems to be Playland At the Beach (but was actually filmed at the Santa Monica Pier).  (Further trivia – that Laffing Sal is the one at Santa Monica, not the one at Playland which now resides at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.)  The only movie that rivals Woman on Run for its depiction of San Francisco in the 1950s is The Lineup.

The story is a taut 77 minutes of mouthy Ann Sheridan, the life-or-death manhunt and stellar period San Francisco.  Woman on the Run is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video (free with Amazon Prime).

Ann Sheridan (far left) sasses Robert Keith (far right) in WOMAN ON THE RUN
Ann Sheridan (far left) sasses Robert Keith (far right) in WOMAN ON THE RUN

The first Orange Is the New Black – coming up on TV

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Hope Emerson and Eleanor Parker in CAGED
Hope Emerson and Eleanor Parker in CAGED

Want to see the prototype for Orange Is the New Black? On September 6, Turner Classic Movies airs the 1950 Caged. Eleanor Parker (who died last year) played the naive young woman plunged into a harsh women’s prison filled with hard-bitten fellow prisoners and compassion-free guards. Parker was nominated for an acting Oscar, but her performance pales next to that of Hope Emerson, whose electric portrayal of a hulking guard also got an Oscar nod. Caged also features the fine character actresses Thelma Moorhead, Jane Darwell (Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath) and Ellen Corby (Grandma Walton here as a young woman). Sixty-four years later, Caged might still be the best women’s prison movie ever.

SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR : how could so much sex and violence be so tiresome?

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Eva Green in the poster for FRANK MILLER'S SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR
Eva Green in the poster for FRANK MILLER’S SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR

Wow, was this ever a disappointment. I loved the first Sin City from co-directors Richard Rodriguez and Frank Miller (the graphic novelist).  And I’m in Sin City’s prime target audience because I love noir sensibility, hard-boiled dialogue and stylized violence in my movies.  But Frank Miller’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is just not engaging.

None of the three story threads is particularly thrilling.  The dialogue is so consistently lurid that it’s just overblown. Powers Boothe – always a wonderful villain – snarls his menacing smile so often that we expect him to grow mustaches and twirl them.  The movie violence is of the splatter variety, and the bloodbath unleashed by Rosario Dawson and Jamie Chung is just silly.  The ultra-sympathetic Denis Haybert is miscast as a monstrous superthug.  Jessica Alba does a convincing job as a stripper but not as an alcoholic.

The whole thing is a stunning waste of a fantastic cast, including Boothe, Haybert, Mickey Rourke, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Josh Brolin, Ray Liotta, Juno Temple and Christopher Meloni. In particular, Meloni and Liotta are not given much to do.  Temple shines as usual as a mistress-for-hire, and Christopher Lloyd sparkles as a particularly unsanitary surgeon.

One remarkable thing – Eva Green (whose character is The Dame to Kill For) plays much of the movie in full frontal (and back and side view) nudity; I can’t remember seeing the body of a major female star displayed so clinically. Now she looks really good naked, but the sheer screen time of her nudity is unusual.  Of course all the women in the movie are objectified – and other than Green’s malevolent and slutty femme fatale, Alba’s stripper, and Temple’s mistress, the female characters are all prostitutes.

If you like noir, then the film looks great: almost all black-and-white except for, occasionally, cherry red cars and vivid lipstick, hair and dresses on the women.  The best I can say about Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is that it’s nasty, brutish and 102 minutes short.

D.O.A.: racing the clock to solve his own murder

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Edmond O'Brien in D.O.A.
Edmond O’Brien in D.O.A.

On August 27, Turner Classic Movies has the gripping film noir whodunit D.O.A., which opens with a man walking into a police station to report HIS OWN MURDER. The man (Edmond O’Brien) finds out that he has been dosed with a poison for which there is no antidote – and that he has only a few days to live. He desperately races the clock to find out who has murdered him and why – all in a taut 83 minutes. Much of D.O.A. was shot on location in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and one SF scene has one of the first cinematic glimpses into Beat culture. The little known director Rudolph Maté gave the film a great look, which shouldn’t be a surprise because Maté had been Oscar-nominated five times as a cinematographer. The next year, he followed D.O.A. with another solid noir, Union Station, with William Holden and Barry Fitzgerald.

(This 1950 version with Edmond O’Brien is the one you want to see; avoid the 1988 remake with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan.)

Noir City: the great San Francisco festival of film noir

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Rififi
I always look forward to the Noir City film fest, which is underway in San Francisco this week.  Noir City is the annual festival of the Film Noir Foundation, spearheaded by its founder and president Eddie Muller.  The Foundation preserves movies from the traditional noir period that would otherwise be lost. Noir City often plays newly restored films and movies not available on DVD.  Here’s one of my experiences from a recent Noir City

Film noir, the genre of cynical stories that are starkly photographed to emphasize the darkness of the plots, originated in the US in the 1940s but was named by the French.  So it’s fitting that this year’s Noir City goes international, sampling film noir from France, Argentina, Mexico, Great Britain, Japan, Spain, Norway and Germany, along with some American noir set in the far East and South of the Border.  I’ll be checking out the Argentinian classics Never Open that Door and Hardly a Criminal, which are not available on DVD.

To see the this year’s Noir City program and buy tickets, go here.

TCM’s June feast of noir

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Humphrey Bogart in THE MALTESE FALCON (1941)

It’s more than a film fest, it’s a feast of film noir.

This June, Turner Classic Movies’ Friday Night Spotlight will focus on Noir Writers.  The guest programmer and host will be San Francisco’s Eddie Muller, founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation.  The Foundation preserves movies from the traditional noir period that would otherwise be lost.  It also sponsors Noir City, an annual festival of film noir in San Francisco, which often plays newly restored films and movies not available on DVD.  (My favorite part is Noir City’s Thursday evening Bad Girl Night featuring its most memorable femmes fatale.)

Muller (the Czar of Noir) has selected films from the work of noir novelists.  Friday night, he kicks off with films from the novels of Dashiell Hammett: the 1931 and more famous 1941 versions of The Maltese Falcon, plus the 1936 version (Satan Met a Lady) and After the Thin Man and The Glass Key.  (Muller informs us that Hammett pronounced his first name da-SHEEL.)

On June 14, Muller continues with the work of David Goodis, The Burglar, The Burglars, The Unfaithful, Shoot the Piano Player and Nightfall.  (You may have seen Goodis’ Dark Passage with Bogie and Bacall.)

On June 21, we’ll see films from the novels of Jonathan Latimer (Nocturne, They Won’t Believe Me) and James M. Cain (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice).

TCM and the Czar of Noir wrap up on June 28 with movies from the novels of Cornell Woolrich (The Leopard Man, Deadline at Dawn) and Raymond Chandler (Murder My Sweet, The Big Sleep, Lady in the Lake, Strangers on a Train).

These two movies aren’t part of the Friday night series, but on June 11, TCM features two of the nastiest noirs:  Detour and The Hitchhiker.

Set your DVR and settle in for dramatic shadows, sarcastic banter and guys in fedoras making big mistakes for love, lust and avarice.

Anne Bancroft and Aldo Ray in NIGHTFALL

Coming Up on TV: 3 noir classics

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OUT OF THE PAST

On May 7, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting three classics of film noir.

You really haven’t sampled film noir if you haven’t seen Out of the Past (1947).  Perhaps the model of a film noir hero, Robert Mitchum plays a guy who is cynical, strong, smart and resourceful – but still a sap for the femme fatale…played by the irresistible Jane Greer.  Greer later reported that she received this guidance from director Jacques Tourneur: “First half of the picture – good girl.  Second half – bad girl.”  Kirk Douglas plays The Bad Guy You Don’t Want to Mess With, emanating a mix of evil and power.  With Out of the Past, Tourneur crafted one of the most dramatically lit and photographed noirs – not one puff of cigarette smoke goes uncelebrated.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE

In The Asphalt Jungle (1950), the crooks assemble a team and pull off the big heist…and then things begin to go wrong.  There aren’t many noirs with better casting – the crooks include Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, Sam Jaffe and James Whitmore.  The 23-year-old Marilyn Monroe plays Calhern’s companion in her first real speaking part.  How noir is it? Even the cop who breaks the case goes to jail.  Directed by the great John Huston.

Every police procedural from 1948 through today’s Law and Order and CSI owes something to the prototypical The Naked City (1948). Tenacious New York City cops solve a murder amid gritty streets and shady characters. Unusual for the time, it was shot on location.   Directed by noir great Jules Dassin, The Naked City won Oscars for black and white cinematography and film editing.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE

The Prowler: Van Heflin takes a dark turn

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Van Heflin (right) in THE PROWLER

On April 30, Turner Classic Movies will be broadcasting the oft overlooked 1951 film noir The Prowler, starring usually sympathetic good guy Van Heflin as the twisted bad guy.  Heflin is a beat cop responding to a call – a woman has reported a prowler outside her house.  By the time Heflin and his partner arrive, the prowler is long gone, but Heflin is lusting after the comely woman (Evelyn Keyes), who is home alone every night because her husband works as an all-night DJ.  Under the ruse of making sure that the prowler has vamoosed, Heflin returns and overcoming her reticence, seduces her.  As befits a film noir, once he finds out about the husband’s insurance policy, sleeping with the guy’s wife just isn’t enough anymore.

It’s a strong screenplay, penned by the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (who also provides the voice of the DJ).  Heflin sheds his usual decency to cast a predatory eye at another man’s wife and stuff.   This isn’t the Double Indemnity film noir sap who does the bidding of the femme fatale; it’s all his idea, and she just triggers his rapaciousness.  Keyes plays a woman who wants to pretend she’s on the level, but kinda knows what’s going on.

And of course, the cop has figured out how to get away with the scheme…except for one thing.

The Prowler has been restored by the Film Noir Foundation and the UCLA Film & Television Archive.  It’s an underrated noir thriller.

Sun Don’t Shine: shaky cam noir

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Kate Lyn Shein and Kentucker Audley in SUN DON'T SHINE

Thirtyish Crystal and Leo are on the run and coaxing his weathered (and probably uninsured) sedan through central Florida.  Crystal is a white-hot mess.  I was going to describe her as needy and erratic, but those adjectives seem inadequate.  She is a unfiltered, explosive bundle of nerves, filled with impulses that are unfailingly ruinous.  The suspense in Sun Don’t Shine stems from whether Leo can navigate an escape path through her emotional minefield; we can tell from the neo-noir undercurrent that she’s going to bring him down no matter what.

In her first feature, writer-director Amy Seimetz combines a command of pacing with a Malickesque visual sense.   Watching her sweaty characters, we can feel both the Floridian humidity and the relief from air conditioning in a tourist trap. (A promising actor, Seimetz just turned in a compelling performance in the controversial Upstream Color.)  

The strength of the screenplay is that the audience only gradually learns why the two are on the run, from what and to where.  However, those revelations are not surprising.  Fortunately, Seimetz has chosen not to send her characters on yet another hyper-violent nihilistic crime spree.

But why doesn’t Leo leave Crystal on the side of the road and drive the hell away?  After about fifteen minutes, we know that’s his only chance.  He’s not very bright, but he is grounded in reality, and we wonder why he is so drawn to this wackadoodle. It may be a fim noir, but she sure isn’t Mary Astor’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy in Maltese Falcon. 

Watching Sun Don’t Shine is a 96-minute simulation of having an annoyingly clingy and scarily volatile girlfriend.  Long ago my friend Steve advised me, “Never sleep with anyone crazier than you are”.  Sage words, my friend.

Sun Don’t Shine is available for streaming from Amazon Instant and other VOD outlets, and is beginning a limited theatrical release.

Coming up on TV: Night and the City

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Richard Widmark running out of luck in THE NIGHT AND THE CITY

On July 15, Turner Classic Movies is showing the under appreciated film noir classic Night in the City (1950). Richard Widmark is superb as a loser who tries to corner the pro wrestling business in post-war London – and, as in any noir classic, it doesn’t end well for the sap.

The American director Jules Dassin had just made the noir classics The Naked City and Thieves’ Highway when he shot Night and the City in the UK. He was blackballed in the McCarthy Era and never moved back to the US.

At the request of a studio exec, Dassin created a role in Night and the City for the stunningly beautiful but emotionally fragile Gene Tierney. The cast also includes real life wrestlers Stanislaus Zbyszko and Mike Mazurki.

Night in the City (along with The Wrestler) represents wrestling on my list of Best Sports Movies, and there’s a clip of an extended wrestling scene from the movie on that page. (Also, Dassin’s Brute Force makes my list of Best Prison Movies.)