By Michael Wilmington and Film Noir Blonde
The Noir File is FNB’s guide to classic film noir, neo-noir, sort of noir and pre-noir on cable TV. All movies below are from the schedule of Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which broadcasts them uncut and uninterrupted. The times are Eastern Standard and (Pacific Standard).
PICK OF THE WEEK
Robert Ryan plays the role of Stoker Thompson with dignity rather than sentimentality, with realism rather than melodrama.
“The Set-Up” (1949, Robert Wise). Wednesday, April 10, 2:45 p.m. (11:45 a.m.). Boxing was a sport that the quintessential film noir tough guy Robert Ryan knew very well. Ryan was a four-year college boxing champion at Dartmouth, and later, when he became a Hollywood star, one of his finest roles and movies came in Robert Wise’s low-budget gem “The Set-Up,“ where Ryan played a seemingly washed-up prizefighter named Stoker Thompson – he’s been set up to lose what will probably be his last fight. Stoker’s craven manager Tiny (George Tobias) has been paid to insure Stoker throws the fight, by a crooked gambler (Alan Baxter), who has a big bet against the veteran. Tiny thinks it’s a sure defeat anyway. But Stoker still has his pride, still has his memories of what it was like when he was almost great and he doesn’t want to lie down in the ring, even if the mob will punish him severely if he doesn’t.
The film, which is based on a narrative poem by Joseph Moncure March, plays out in real time, beginning shortly before the fight, ending shortly after it. Wise, who is at his best as a director, gives “The Set-Up” relentless pace, tension, compassion and a marvelously seedy low-life atmosphere of matter-of-fact corruption and impending doom. Audrey Totter (in an untypical sympathetic role for this classic film noir dame) plays Stoker’s worried wife Julie. Wallace Ford is a salty old ring guy and Alan Baxter is Little Boy, the natty gambler who has the bet down and the muscle to back it up.
Ryan, one of the great film noir heavies, could play sociopathic bad guys like few other actors on screen. But here, he endows Stoker with the humanity and the grace under pressure that this great actor always had, but that we rarely see in his classic noir villain roles. Ryan plays this proud, beleaguered, supposedly over-the-hill fighter with dignity rather than sentimentality, with realism rather than melodrama, and with an intimate knowledge of the ways men can inflict bodily harm on each other for money.
Of all those tough and perceptive movies that show the dark side of professional boxing – “Body and Soul,” “Champion,” “Fat City,” “Requiem for a Heavyweight” and the others – “The Set-Up” may be the best. Once you hear the final bell, you’ll never forget it.
Wednesday, April 10: Robert Ryan Day
7:15 a.m. (4:15 a.m.): “Crossfire” (1947, Edward Dmytryk). With Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, Robert Young and Gloria Grahame. Reviewed on FNB November 20, 2012.
8:45 a.m. (5:45 a.m.): “The Woman on the Beach” (1947, Jean Renoir). With Joan Bennett, Robert Ryan and Charles Bickford. Reviewed on FNB November 20, 2012).
10 a.m. (7 a.m.): “Berlin Express” (1948, Jacques Tourneur). WW2-era anti-Nazi international intrigue from Tourneur, the graceful director of “Out of the Past.” With Merle Oberon, Robert Ryan and Paul Lukas.
1:15 p.m. (10:15 a.m.): “Act of Violence” (1949, Fred Zinnemann). With Van Heflin, Robert Ryan and Janet Leigh. Reviewed on FNB August 4, 2012.
4 p.m. (1 p.m.): “Born to be Bad” (1950, Nicholas Ray). A rare femme fatale role for the usually sweet and romantic Joan Fontaine, here playing a ruthless schemer shuttling between wealthy hubby material Zachary Scott and tough lover Robert Ryan.
5:45 p.m. (2:45 p.m.): “The Woman on Pier 13” (“I Married a Communist”) (1949, Robert Stevenson). Robert Ryan is a business guy, labor liaison and blackmailable ex-Commie, married to a good woman (Laraine Day), but pulled back into the Party and its schemes by an old flame/femme fatale (Janis Carter) and the poker-faced deadly head Red (Thomas Gomez, in a rare piece of overplayed underplaying). This notorious bomb is based on a very bad McCarthy-era anti-Commie script, full of clichés and propaganda, that Howard Hughes used to hand around at RKO to try to roust out politically radical directors. If they turned it down (as Joseph Losey and Nicholas Ray both did), he usually fired them. Ray got away with rejecting it, Losey didn’t. The director who accepted the project, and helmed it with a straight-faced lack of involvement that makes it seem even more ludicrous, is Robert Stevenson. He went on to make the Disney classic “Mary Poppins.”
8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “Sleuth” (1972, Joseph L. Mankiewicz). Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine have an actors’ field day in this witty adaptation of Anthony Shaffer’s sophisticated mystery-suspense play: a comedy of manners and murders with more unexpected twists than a maze at midnight, and an ingenious plot that suggests Agatha Christie mixed with Noel Coward.
5:15 a.m. (2:15 a.m.): “Bunny Lake is Missing” (1965, Otto Preminger). With Laurence Olivier, Carol Lynley, Keir Dullea and Noel Coward. Reviewed on FNB December 26, 2012.
Thursday, April 11
1 p.m. (10 a.m.): “Nobody Lives Forever” (1946, Jean Negulesco). With John Garfield, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Walter Brennan. Reviewed on FNB May 4, 2012.
Saturday, April 13
12:15 a.m. (9:15 p.m.): “No Way Out” (1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz). Socially conscious noir about prejudice, with Richard Widmark as a racist criminal/rabble rouser and Sidney Poitier as the African-American doctor forced to tend his wounds. With Linda Darnell, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis.
Sunday, April 14
6 a.m. (3 a.m.): “High Sierra” (1941, Raoul Walsh). With Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino and Arthur Kennedy. Reviewed on FNB June 27, 2012,
8 a.m. (5 a.m.): “The Lady Vanishes” (1938, Alfred Hitchcock). With Michael Redgrave, Margaret Lockwood and Paul Lukas. Reviewed on FNB March 12, 2012.
8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948, John Huston). With Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston and Tim Holt. Reviewed on FNB November 3, 2013.
Monday, April 15
7:15 a.m. (4:15 a.m.): “Caged” (1950, John Cromwell). With Eleanor Parker and Agnes Moorehead. Reviewed on FNB July 13, 2012.
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