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Film Noir File: Does Gilda still sizzle? Put the blame on Rita

November 14, 2014 by Film Noir Blonde

By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington

Pick of the Week

Rita Hayworth was Columbia Pictures’ top female star in the mid-1940s.

“Gilda” (1946, Charles Vidor). Tuesday, Nov. 18. 12:45 a.m. (9:45 p.m.). “Gilda” is all about Gilda and that’s the way it should be – for any femme fatale and particularly for Rita Hayworth the most popular pinup girl of WWII, a talented entertainer and Columbia Pictures’ top female star in the mid-1940s. With Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford and George Macready. Read the full review here.

Friday, Nov. 14

1:45 a.m. (10:45 p.m.): “Wild Boys of the Road” (1933, William Wellman). In the 1960s, campus radicals, anti-war protestors and other rebels were crazy about this movie. And it still holds up today, both as blistering melodrama and as powerful populist moviemaking. The story still stings: In the depths of the Depression, two buddies (Frankie Darro and Edwin Philips) hit the road to help their strapped parents. On their way from the Midwest to New York City, they pick up a girl hobo played by Dorothy Coonan (Mrs. Wellman), and endure hardship, starvation, police brutality, rape on the train (by guard Ward Bond) and some particularly well-staged riots. One of Wellman’s best pictures, along with “Wings,“ “Public Enemy,” “The Ox-Bow Incident“ and “The Story of G. I. Joe.” You‘ll be amazed at how this movie gets to you.

Saturday, Nov. 15

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “On the Waterfront” (1954, Elia Kazan). With Marlon Brando, Lee J. Cobb, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden and Rod Steiger. Reviewed in FNB on June 5, 2014.

Eva Marie Saint and Marlon Brando star in “On the Waterfront.”

10 p.m. (7 p.m.): “Dead Ringer” (1964, Paul Henreid). With Bette Davis, Karl Malden, Peter Lawford and Jean Hagen. Reviewed in FNB on March 25, 2013.

Sunday, Nov. 16

10:45 p.m. (7:45 p.m.): “Nights of Cabiria” (1957, Federico Fellini). With Giulietta Masina, Amedeo Nazzari and Francois Perier. Reviewed in FNB on April 10, 2014.

Preceded at 8 p.m. (5 p.m.) by “Sweet Charity,” Bob Fosse’s sizzling Broadway musical redo of “Nights of Cabiria” (book by Neil Simon, sings by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields), starring that super-terrific lady of the evening Shirley MacLaine as Charity.

4 a.m. (1 a.m.): “Mafioso” (1962, Alberto Lattuada). With Alberto Sordi, Norma Bangell and Gabriella Conti. Reviewed in FNB on Jan. 22, 2013.

Monday, Nov, 17

10 p.m. (7 p.m.): “Sunrise” (1927, F. W. Murnau). With Janet Gaynor, George O’Brien and Margaret Livingston. Reviewed in FNB on Nov. 3, 2012.

Tuesday. Nov. 18

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “Casablanca” (1942, Michael Curtiz). With Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Conrad Veidt. Reviewed in FNB on Aug. 25, 2012.

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Filed Under: Classic Noir Reviews Tagged With: Charles Vidor, film noir, Gilda, Glenn Ford, TCM

Film Noir File: Terrence Malick’s ‘Badlands’ is a dark poem of killers on the run

November 5, 2014 by Film Noir Blonde

By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington

Pick of the Week

“Badlands” (1973, Terrence Malick). Friday, Nov. 7. 12:30 a.m. (9:30 p.m.).

Kit and Holly are played by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, the first lead roles for either of them.

The late 1960s and early 1970s, in America, were marked by violence and loneliness, war and craziness, and wild beauty. We see a portrait of a lot of that trauma, in microcosm, in Terrence Malick’s shattering 1973 classic, “Badlands.” Set in the American West of the 1950s, it’s the story of two young people on the run: Kit, who works on a trash truck and tries to model himself after James Dean, and Holly, a high-school baton twirler with a strange blank stare, who thinks Kit is the handsomest boy she’s ever seen.

Driving stolen cars, Kit and Holly embark on a savage cross-country trek.

These two moonchildren run off together after Kit fails to reconcile Holly’s mean, smiley-sign-painter father (Warren Oates) to their relationship. Then, plumb out of arguments, Kit shoots him dead and burns his house down. It’s probably Kit’s first murder; he’s such a weirdly polite guy that it’s hard to envision it otherwise. But soon he develops a taste for slaughter. And he and Holly embark on a savage cross-country trek by stolen cars, one that includes the massacre of many people, including Kit’s best (only) friend Cato (Ramon Bieri).

Kit appears to be killing not out of need or fear, but out of some perverse pleasure he gets from pulling the trigger and making a soul disappear from a body. “He was the most trigger-happy person I’d ever seen,” says Holly, in her flat, unemotional voice. Kit and Holly are played by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, the first lead roles for either of them.

Read the full review here.

Thursday, Nov. 6

Burt Lancaster stars in “Brute Force” by director Jules Dassin.

8:15 a.m. (5:15 a.m.): “Brute Force” (1947, Jules Dassin). With Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, Yvonne De Carlo, Charles Bickford and Ann Blyth. Reviewed in FNB on Aug. 15, 2013.

10:15 p.m. (7:15 p.m.): “Bullitt” (1968, Peter Yates). With Steve McQueen, Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Vaughn and Robert Duvall. Reviewed in FNB on Oct. 27, 2012.

12:15 a.m. (9:15 p.m.): “The Third Man” (1949, Carol Reed). With Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Alida Valli and Trevor Howard. Reviewed in FNB on Oct. 12, 2013.

Friday, Nov. 7

8 a.m. (5 a.m.): “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955, Nicholas Ray). With James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo and Dennis Hopper.

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “Detour” (1945, Edgar G. Ulmer). With Tom Neal and Ann Savage. Reviewed in FNB on Sept. 27, 2011.

9:15 p.m. (6:15 p.m.): “The Hitch-Hiker” (1953, Ida Lupino). With Edmond O’Brien, Frank Lovejoy and William Talman.

10:45 p.m. (7:45 p.m.): “Gun Crazy” (1950, Joseph H. Lewis). With Peggy Cummins, John Dall, Morris Carnovsky and Russ Tamblyn.

Saturday, Nov. 8

6 a.m. (3 a.m.): “His Kind of Woman” (1951, John Farrow). With Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, Vincent Price and Raymond Burr. Reviewed in FNB on Dec. 18, 2012.

6 p.m. (3 p.m.): “Saboteur” (1942, Alfred Hitchcock). With Robert Cummings, Priscilla Lane, Otto Kruger and Norman Lloyd. Reviewed in FNB on Oct. 18, 2014.

10:45 p.m. (7:45 p.m.): “The Big Knife” (1955, Robert Aldrich). With Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Rod Steiger and Shelley Winters. [Read more…]

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Filed Under: Classic Noir Reviews, Neo Noir Reviews Tagged With: Badlands, film noir, Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, TCM, Terrence Malick

Film Noir File: Welles’ magnum opus, Halloween nightmares

October 29, 2014 by Film Noir Blonde

By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington

Pick of the Week

“Touch of Evil” (1958, Orson Welles). Wednesday, Oct. 29. 10 p.m. (7 p.m.).

“A little old lady walked down Main Street last night and picked up a shoe. That shoe had a foot in it. I’m going to make you pay for that, boy.”
Detective Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles)

Orson Welles and Charlton Heston lock horns in “Touch of Evil.”

In two Hellish border towns, one in California, the other in Mexico, a grotesque and loony gallery of rogues, cops, narcs, city bosses, gangsters, juvenile delinquents, psycho motel clerks and ladies of the evening are thrown together, when a wealthy banker, Rudy Linnekar, is blown to smithereens at the border. We watch a bomb being planted in his car (from above, in one of cinema’s greatest long-take, moving-camera shots) by a shadowy, not-quite-seen killer.

On the killer’s trail, in what seems only minutes after that explosive opening, is the local star police detective, Hank Quinlan (writer-director-star Orson Welles), a mountainously fat, savagely cynical but brilliant cop, who specializes in cracking the most mysterious crimes and nailing the wiliest killers. In this case, Quinlan fingers a good-looking Mexican shoe clerk (Victor Millan) who was sleeping with Linnekar’s daughter (Joanna Moore) and who has a shoebox full of dynamite in their motel room.

Only one problem: An upright, unshakably honest narcotics-cop named Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston, at his most righteous) – who’s visiting the town with his gorgeous blonde wife Susie (Janet Leigh, at her liveliest) – knows that the dynamite was planted. And if Quinlan planted the evidence on this murder, maybe he, and his hero-worshipping partner Menzies (Joseph Calleia) have been faking things for years.

Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh (as Mike and Susie Vargas) have much to fear.

What follows is a war of nerves (and of guts and morality) between two great cops, one of whom may be a murderer.

Around them is the rest of one of film noir’s greatest casts: Akim Tamiroff as Uncle Joe Grandi, the local sawed-off Little Caesar, Valentin de Vargas as Uncle Joe’s lady-killing leather-jacketed nephew, Dennis Weaver as the nervous “night man” at the local motel, Mercedes McCambridge as the most blood-freezing lesbian biker ever, and a couple of salty old pros from “Citizen Kane” (Joseph Cotten and Ray Collins). And, in one of her (and our) favorite performances, Marlene Dietrich as Tana, the sultry, sardonic madame who plays the pianola at her high-style whorehouse and makes great chili. She tells her old flame Quinlan, “You’re a mess, honey.”

The Universal studio execs of 1958 made a mess of “Touch of Evil,” in its original release, ordering reshooting and recuts. But it’s long since assumed classic status and been put back in the shape it’s believed writer-director-star Welles wanted.

We actually owe the existence of “Touch of Evil” to Charlton Heston. He was hired to play the hero, Vargas, in an initially unpromising adaptation of Whit Masterson’s paperback thriller “Badge of Evil,” after Welles was already cast as Quinlan. Heston then insisted that Welles direct it as well.

Marlene Dietrich as Tana plays the pianola and makes great chili.

Welles was still in his prime when he made “Touch of Evil” and he did it with a flair, panache and unflagging invention. He displays a mastery of staging, of camera placement and of bravura acting from the incredible cast that has seldom been matched in the canon of noir. (Russell Metty photographed it and Henry Mancini wrote the score.)

The movie is a masterpiece of pulp and expressionism. Just as with “Citizen Kane,” you can watch it over and over again, and still find surprises. The ending is both melancholy and exhilarating.

It’s wonderful that Welles got this last big studio chance. But it’s sad too, because we know that he was never able to make a go-for-broke super-Hollywood studio film like this again. No one was better at it.

Some aficionados think “Touch of Evil” is the very pinnacle of film noir. Even if it isn’t, it’s a movie that takes the whole notion of noir (the melding of hard-boiled crime stories and expressionist high style technique) to one of its craziest, wildest, most brilliant extremes.

“He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?”
Tana (Marlene Dietrich)

Wednesday, Oct. 29

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “Psycho” (1960, Alfred Hitchcock). With Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles and Martin Balsam. Reviewed in FNB, on July 7, 2011.

12 a.m. (9 p.m.): “Act of Violence” (1948, Fred Zinnemann). With Van Heflin, Robert Ryan and Janet Leigh. Reviewed in FNB, on Aug. 4, 2012.

1:45 a.m. (10:45 p.m.): “Harper” (1966, Jack Smight). With Paul Newman, Janet Leigh, Lauren Bacall and Julie Harris. Reviewed in FNB, on Dec. 4, 2012.

Friday, Oct. 31

Horror Halloween Marathon

“Cat People” (1942, Jacques Tourneur) is a purrfect choice for Halloween.

11 a.m. (8 a.m.): “Cat People” (1942, Jacques Tourneur). With Simone Simon, Kent Smith and Tom Conway. Reviewed in FNB, on July 20, 2014.

3:15 p.m. (12:15 p.m.): “Dementia 13” (1963, Francis Ford Coppola). With William Campbell, Luana Anders and Patrick Magee. Reviewed in FNB, on June 12, 2014.

4:45 p.m. (1:45 p.m.): “Carnival of Souls” (1962, Herk Harvey). An anguished young woman (Candace Hilligoss) nearly drowns and then makes her way to a small city. It’s mysteriously inhabited by ordinary-looking but strange people who seem to be the citizens of some other, more dangerous place. (The eerie, smiling little man who follows her all around is played by the writer-director, Herk Harvey.) This is a legendary low-budget horror classic, and few films of its type are scarier.

6:15 p.m. (3:15 p.m.): “Repulsion” (1965, Roman Polanski). With Catherine Deneuve, Yvonne Furneaux and Ian Hendry. Reviewed in FNB, on Oct. 27, 2012.

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “Night of the Living Dead” (1968, George Romero). With Duane Jones and Judith O’Dea. Reviewed in FNB, on March 27, 2012.

5:15 a.m. (2:15 a.m.): “Eyes Without a Face” (1959, Georges Franju). With Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli and Edith Scob. Reviewed in FNB, on Nov. 4, 2011.

Saturday, Nov. 1

6:15 p.m. (3:15 p.m.): “Point Blank” (1967, John Boorman). With Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson and Carroll O’Connor. Reviewed in FNB, on Jan. 28, 2013.

11:45 p.m. (8:45 p.m.): “North by Northwest” (1959, Alfred Hitchcock). With Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason.

4 a.m. (1 a.m.): “The Honeymoon Killers” (1969, Leonard Kastle). With Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco. Reviewed in FNB, on July 21, 2011.

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Filed Under: Classic Noir Reviews, Neo Noir Reviews Tagged With: film noir, Halloween, Orson Welles, TCM, Touch of Evil

Film Noir File: Have a Happy, Haunting Halloween with Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’

October 23, 2014 by Film Noir Blonde

By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington

The Film Noir File is FNB’s guide to classic film noir, neo-noir and pre-noir on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). All movies below are from the schedule of TCM, which broadcasts them uncut and uninterrupted. The times are Eastern Standard and (Pacific Standard).

Pick of the Week

“The Birds” (1963, Alfred Hitchcock). Saturday, Oct. 25. 5:45 p.m. (2:45 p.m.)

Most critics attacked “The Birds.” But movie audiences flocked to it.

A smug, snobbish, stylishly beautiful, and very, very blonde San Francisco socialite named Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) chases a cocky lawyer she’s just met named Mitch (Rod Taylor), to his family home in scenic Bodega Bay, to mock him with a gift of love birds in a cage. Once they’ve reconnected, Mitch and Melanie commence on what first seems a typical Hollywood movie romance, with typical Hitchcockian mother problems (Jessica Tandy). And there’s another woman – Mitch’s old flame, a gorgeous brunette schoolteacher (Suzanne Pleshette).

Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren and Alfred Hitchcock on location for “The Birds.”

Suddenly, inexplicably, the uncaged wild birds of Bodega Bay – crows, sparrows, sea gulls – start massing into murderous flocks or going on solitary raids, attacking Melanie and everyone else. As the attacks escalate in fury, their hapless human targets become immersed in an avian nightmare from the sky where no one is safe.

Perhaps most terrifying is the famous scene when Melanie sits on a bench outside the school to pick up Mitch’s kids, while, in the schoolroom, the children chant a doggerel nursery rhyme and behind Melanie masses of crows gather and perch, waiting quietly on the schoolyard jungle gym. Chaos ensues, with typical Hitchcockian invention and panache.

Masses of crows gather and perch, patiently waiting to attack.

Back in 1963, critics, especially the more intellectual ones, generally attacked “The Birds.” But movie audiences flocked to it and that is the verdict that has lasted. The source of Evan Hunter’s screenplay was a novelette by Daphne du Maurier (“Rebecca”). The crisp and crystalline color cinematography is by Hitch regular Robert Burks and the menacing, shrieking bird sounds were created by Hitch’s masterly composer, Bernard Herrmann. Happy Halloween!

Saturday, Oct. 25: Horror Day

2 p.m. (11 a.m.): “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (1982, Terry Hughes & Harold Price). A film of the celebrated Harold Prince Broadway staging of Stephen Sondheim’s very dark musical play about the notorious killer-barber Sweeney Todd. With Angela Lansbury and George Hearn from the original stage cast.

4:30 p.m. (1:30 p.m.): “Mad Love” (1935, Karl Freund). The most stylish film version of novelist Maurice Renard’s eerie horror tale “The Hands of Orlac,” in which a murderer’s hands are grafted onto the wrists of a famed concert pianist and amputee (Colin Clive) by a mad doctor (Peter Lorre), with an unspeakable yen for the pianist’s wife (Frances Drake). This one has a brilliantly maniacal performance by Lorre, and it’s a masterpiece of noir photography by German expressionist cameraman-turned-Hollywood-director Freund and his great cinematographer Gregg Toland (“Citizen Kane“). With Sara Haden and Edward Brophy.

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “The Haunting” (1963, Robert Wise). With Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson and Russ Tamblyn. The second great American horror movie of 1963. (See “The Birds” above.)

Sunday, Oct. 26

10 a.m. (7 a.m.): “In a Lonely Place” (1950, Nicholas Ray). With Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame and Frank Lovejoy.

Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner star in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” from 1941.

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1941, Victor Fleming). The often-filmed Robert Louis Stevenson thriller about the good doctor whose potion turns him into a bad man. Spencer Tracy’s Jekyll-Hyde is much more realistically and psychologically played than the classic hammery of predecessors John Barrymore and the Oscar-winning Fredric March. Tracy does him with less extreme makeup, as a brilliant, sensitive but tormented Victorian Britisher beset with repressions and secret desires that explode into evil with the creation of Hyde. Fleming directed this movie near his “Gone with the Wind”-“Wizard of Oz” heyday and, though it’s a bit slow in the beginning, the last 30 minutes are a noir triumph. The excellent supporting cast includes Ingrid Bergman (as Hyde’s terrorized sex victim Ivy), Lana Turner, Donald Crisp and C. Aubrey Smith. (Off-screen, Bergman reportedly had affairs with Fleming and Tracy.)

2:15 a.m. (11:15 p.m.): “Diabolique” (1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot). With Simone Signoret, Paul Meurisse, Charles Vanel and Vera Clouzot.

4:15 a.m. (1:15 a.m.): “Gaslight” (1944, George Cukor). With Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Joseph Cotten, Dame May Whitty and Angela Lansbury. Reviewed in FNB on August 26, 2012.

Monday, Oct. 27: Jack Carson Day

Jack Carson died on Jan. 2, 1963, the same day as noir star Dick Powell. Carson was 52, Powell was 58.

12:30 p.m. (9:30 a.m.): “Mildred Pierce” (1945, Michael Curtiz). With Joan Crawford, Jack Carson, Ann Blyth, Zachary Scott and Eve Arden.

Tuesday, Oct. 28

6 a.m. (3 a.m.): “Nosferatu” (1922, F. W. Murnau). Regarded by many critics as one of the greatest German films – and one of the greatest horror movies – of all time: F. W. Murnau’s hypnotic, brilliantly visual, unacknowledged adaptation of Bram Stoker’s vampire classic “Dracula.” Murnau’s Nosferatu, the mysterious Max Schreck, is one of the eeriest, creepiest, most frightening horror film monsters ever. He really looks as if he’d just crawled up out of a grave to kill you and drink your blood. And if you want a quick one-stop lesson in German film expressionism, here is a consummate example. (German silent, with intertitles and music score.)

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Filed Under: Classic Noir Reviews, Neo Noir Reviews Tagged With: Alfred Hitchcock, Daphne du Maurier, F.W. Murnau, film noir, Halloween, neo noir, Nosferatu, Rod Taylor, Suzanne Pleshette, TCM, The Birds, Tippi Hedren

Film Noir File: Hitchcock’s favorite: ‘Shadow of a Doubt’

October 9, 2014 by Film Noir Blonde

By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington

The Film Noir File is FNB’s guide to classic film noir, neo-noir and pre-noir on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). All movies below are from the schedule of TCM, which broadcasts them uncut and uninterrupted. The times are Eastern Standard and (Pacific Standard).

Pick of the Week

“Shadow of a Doubt”
(1943, Alfred Hitchcock). Sunday, Oct. 12; 8 p.m. (5 p.m.)

Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright star in “Shadow.”

A bright and beautiful small town girl named Charlotte “Charlie” Newton (Teresa Wright) is bored, bored with her well-ordered home in her pretty Norman Rockwellish little city of Santa Rosa, California. It’s a place where trees line the sunlit streets, everyone goes to church on Sunday and lots of them read murder mysteries at night. Charlie has more exotic dreams. She adores her globe-trotting, urbane Uncle Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten) – for whom she was nicknamed – and is deliriously happy when he shows up in Santa Rosa for a visit.

But Uncle Charlie has some secrets that no one in his family or among their friends knows about. Not Uncle Charlie‘s adoring sister (Patricia Collinge), nor his good-hearted brother-in-law (Henry Travers), nor their murder-mystery-loving neighbor Herbie (Hume Cronyn), nor Charlie herself.

Uncle Charlie, who conceals a darker personality and profession beneath his charming persona, is on the run, pursued by a dogged police detective (Macdonald Carey), who suspects him of being a notorious serial killer – a murderer who seduces rich old widows, kills them for their money, and whose signature tune and nickname come from Franz Lehar’s “Merry Widow” waltz. As handsome, cold-blooded Uncle Charlie, Cotten, who called “Shadow” his personal favorite film, is, with Robert Walker and Anthony Perkins, one of the three great Hitchcockian psychopaths.

“Shadow of a Doubt,” released in 1943, was Hitchcock’s sixth American movie and the one he often described as his favorite. As he explained to Francois Truffaut, he felt that his critical enemies, the “plausibles,” could have nothing to quibble about with “Shadow.” It was written by two superb chroniclers of Americana, Thornton Wilder (“Our Town”) and Sally Benson (“Meet Me in St. Louis”), along with Hitch‘s constant collaborator, wife Alma Reville. The result is one of the supreme examples of Hitchcockian counterpoint – an American small town nightmare: with a sunny, beguiling background against which dark terror erupts.

Friday, Oct. 10

6:30 p.m. (3:30 p.m.): “Illegal” (1955, Lewis Allen). Edward G. Robinson in one of his better later roles: as a district attorney turned big-bucks defense attorney for mostly rich guilty clients, who tries to regain his integrity with a sensational murder trial. Directed by Lewis Allen (“Desert Fury,“ “Suddenly”); based on Elliot Nugent’s 1932 “The Mouthpiece.” With Nina Foch (the defendant), Jayne Mansfield, Hugh Marlowe and Albert Dekker.

Sunday, Oct. 12

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943, Alfred Hitchcock). See Pick of the Week. [Read more…]

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Filed Under: Classic Noir Reviews, Neo Noir Reviews Tagged With: Alfred Hitchcock, film noir, Joseph Cotten, Shadow of a Doubt, TCM, Teresa Wright

Film Noir File: Marvelous mystery appears in ‘Lady Vanishes’

October 4, 2014 by Film Noir Blonde

By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington

Pick of the Week

“The Lady Vanishes” (1938, Alfred Hitchcock). 10 p.m. (7 p.m.) Saturday, Oct. 4.

“The Lady Vanishes” is full of tricks and surprises.

In “The Lady Vanishes,” his marvelous 1938 mystery classic set aboard a train racing though the Balkans, Alfred Hitchcock pushes the romantic-comedy-thriller form to near perfection. It’s one of the most purely entertaining movies he ever made, and it can be watched over and over again with no diminution of pleasure. With Michael Redgrave, Margaret Lockwood, Paul Lukas and Dame May Whitty.

Read the full review here.

Sunday, Oct. 5

10 a.m. (7 a.m.): “Scarface” (1932, Howard Hawks). With Paul Muni, George Raft, Ann Dvorak, Karen Morley and Boris Karloff. Reviewed in FNB on July 17, 2014.

12 p.m. (9 a.m.): “Cool Hand Luke” (1967, Stuart Rosenberg). With Paul Newman, George Kennedy, Jo Van Fleet, Strother Martin and Dennis Hopper. Reviewed in FNB on March 21, 2014.

Tuesday, Oct. 7

7:45 a.m. (4:45 a.m.): “The Letter” (1940, William Wyler). With Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, Gale Sondergaard and James Stephenson. Reviewed in FNB on Sept. 19, 2012).

9:30 a.m. (6:30 a.m.): “The Maltese Falcon” (1941, John Huston). With Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Elisha Cook, Jr. and Ward Bond. Reviewed in FNB on March 11, 2014.

1:15 p.m. (10:15 a.m.): “The Unfaithful” (1947, Vincent Sherman). With Ann Sheridan, Lew Ayres, Zachary Scott and Eve Arden. Ann Sheridan, with lots of oomph, takes over Bette Davis’ old role (and Jeanne Eagels’) in this Americanized remake of the film versions of the classic W. Somerset Maugham short story “The Letter.” (See above.)

3:15 p.m. (12:15 p.m.): “Where Danger Lives” (1950, John Farrow). With Robert Mitchum, Faith Domergue and Claude Rains. Bob Mitchum on the run with one of his blander leading ladies, Faith Domergue. No “Out of the Past,” but it holds your interest.

4:45 p.m. (1:45 p.m.): “Strangers on a Train” (1951, Alfred Hitchcock). With Farley Granger, Robert Walker, Ruth Roman and Leo G. Carroll. Reviewed in FNB on April 14, 2011.

6:30 p.m. (3:30 p.m.): “A Kiss Before Dying” (1956, Gerd Oswald). With Robert Wagner, Jeffrey Hunter and Joanne Woodward. Reviewed in FNB on Nov. 10, 2012.

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Filed Under: Classic Noir Reviews Tagged With: Alfred Hitchcock, film noir, TCM, The Lady Vanishes

Film Noir File: ‘Strangers on a Train’ just the ticket for suspense

September 26, 2014 by Film Noir Blonde

By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington

Pick of the Week:

“Strangers on a Train” (1951, Alfred Hitchcock). Saturday Sept. 27, 3:30 p.m. (12:30 p.m.). With Farley Granger, Robert Walker, Ruth Roman, Marion Lorne and Leo G. Carroll. You can read the full review here.

Saturday, Sept. 27

1:15 p.m. (10:15 a.m.): “Under Capricorn” (1949, Alfred Hitchcock). With Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten and Margaret Leighton. Reviewed in FNB on Nov. 17, 2012.

5:30 p.m. (2:30 p.m.): “North by Northwest” (1959, Alfred Hitchcock). With Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Martin Landau and Jessie Royce Landis. Reviewed in FNB on Nov. 17, 2012.

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “Laura” (1944, Otto Preminger). With Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price and Judith Anderson. Reviewed in FNB on April 18, 2014.

Monday, Sept. 29

2 a.m. (11 p.m.): “The Informer” (1935, John Ford). With Victor McLaglen, Heather Angel, Preston Foster and J. M. Kerrigan. Reviewed in FNB on Dec. 12, 2012.

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Filed Under: Classic Noir Reviews Tagged With: Alfred Hitchcock, film noir, Strangers on a Train, TCM

Film Noir File: Ryan seethes with rage in ‘Crossfire’

September 23, 2014 by Film Noir Blonde

Last Friday was my birthday and I have been having much fun celebrating. As a result, the Film Noir File has just one entry!

Tuesday, Sept. 23, 12:15 a.m. (9:15 p.m.) on TCM:

“Crossfire” (1947, Edward Dmytryk). Based on the novel “The Brisk Foxhole” by the young Richard Brooks and directed by Edward Dmytryk in what many feel was the best period of his career, this is the famous postwar thriller about an anti-Semitic murder and the returning American soldiers mixed up in it. Co-starring Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, Robert Young, Sam Levene and Gloria Grahame.

The film is moody and gripping, filled with noirish dark-hued scenes, and the entire cast is excellent. But the performance everyone tends to remember best is Bob Ryan as the anti-Jewish soldier – a role that Ryan packs with seething, psychopathic hatred and rage. Incidentally, in Brooks’ original novel, the murder victim was not Jewish, but homosexual.

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Filed Under: Classic Noir Reviews Tagged With: Crossfire, Edward Dmytryk, film noir, Gloria Grahame, Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, TCM

The Film Noir File: ‘To Have and Have Not’ and ‘Key Largo’ showcase noir’s top couple

September 11, 2014 by Film Noir Blonde

By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington

Pick of the Week: Two Classics from The Couple: Bogart and Bacall
Bogie. Bacall. The Ultimate Film Noir Couple. At their best. Need we say more?

Director Howard Hawks discovered Lauren Bacall and cast her opposite Humphrey Bogart. They fell for each other while making “To Have and Have Not.” She was 19.

“To Have and Have Not” (1944, Howard Hawks). Tuesday, Sept. 16, 10 a.m. (7 a.m.).

With Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Walter Brennan, Hoagy Carmichael and Marcel Dalio.

“Key Largo” (1948, John Huston). Tuesday, Sept. 16, 12 p.m. (9 a.m.). With Bogart, Bacall, Edward G. Robinson, Lionel Barrymore, Claire Trevor and Thomas Gomez.

Friday, Sept. 12

Miriam Hopkins

12:45 a.m. (9:45 p.m.): “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1931, Rouben Mamoulian). Fredric March won the Best Actor Oscar for playing those exemplars of good and evil, alter-egos Jekyll and Hyde, in this dark and very stylish version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic about the potion that turns a good man into the devil incarnate. With Miriam Hopkins as Hyde’s sad, beauteous victim Champagne Ivy. For Jerry Lewis’ daffy version of this tale, try his 1963 comedy classic “The Nutty Professor,” on TCM this week at 8 p.m. (5 p.m.), Thursday, Sept. 11.

2:30 a.m. (11:30 p.m.): “The Story of Temple Drake” (1933, Stephen Roberts). A grim pre-Code adaptation of William Faulkner’s shocker about Deep South rape, scandal and murder, and the weird relationship between rich girl Temple (Miriam Hopkins) and the brutal gangster whom Faulkner called Popeye (Jack La Rue).

3:45 a.m. (12:45 a.m.): “Freaks” (1932, Tod Browning). With Olga Baclanova, Wallace Ford and Harry Earles. Reviewed in FNB on April 18, 2013.

Saturday, Sept. 13

Catherine Deneuve stars in “Belle.”

8 p.m. (5 p.m. ,.): “Belle de Jour” (1967, Luis Bunuel). With Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli, Genevieve Page, Jean Sorel, Francisco Rabal and Pierre Clementi. (In French, with subtitles.) Reviewed in FNB on March 8, 2013.

Monday, Sept. 15

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “Background to Danger” (1943, Raoul Walsh). With George Raft, Brenda Marshall, Sydney Greenstreet and Pater Lorre. Reviewed in FNB on Jan. 9, 2013.

Tuesday, Sept. 16

A shot from Lauren Bacall’s modeling days.

6 a.m. (3 a.m.): “The Confidential Agent” (1945, Herman Shumlin). Classy but somewhat turgid adaptation of one of Graham Greene’s spy “entertainments.“ With Charles Boyer, Lauren Bacall and Peter Lorre.

10 a.m. (7 a.m.): “To Have and Have Not” (1944, Howard Hawks). See Pick of the Week.

12 p.m. (9 a.m.): “Key Largo” (1948, John Huston). See Pick of the Week.

Wednesday, Sept. 17

6:30 a.m. (3:30 a.m.): “The Asphalt Jungle” (1950, John Huston). With Sterling Hayden, Jean Hagen, Sam Jaffe, Louis Calhern and Marilyn Monroe.

10 a.m. (7 a.m.): “The Narrow Margin” (1952, Richard Fleischer). With Charles McGraw, Marie Windsor and Jacqueline White.

11:30 a.m. (8:30 a.m.): “The Blue Gardenia” (1953, Fritz Lang). With Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Nat “King” Cole and Raymond Burr. Reviewed in FNB on May 22, 2013.

1 p.m. (10 a.m.): “Suddenly” (1954, Lewis Allen). With Frank Sinatra, Sterling Hayden, James Gleason and Nancy Gates. Reviewed in FNB on April 23, 2012.

4 p.m. (1 p.m.): “I Died a Thousand Times” (1955, Stuart Heisler.) With Jack Palance, Shelley Winters, Lee Marvin and Lon Chaney, Jr. Reviewed in FNB on Jan. 15, 2013.

6 p.m. (3 p.m.): “Al Capone” (1959, Richard Wilson). With Rod Steiger, Martin Balsam and Fay Spain. Reviewed in FNB on May 29, 2014.

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “Billy Budd” (1962, Peter Ustinov). With Terence Stamp, Robert Ryan, Ustinov and Melvyn Douglas. Reviewed in FNB on Nov. 10, 2013.

10 p.m. (7 p.m.): “The Great Sinner” (1949, Robert Siodmak). Dark costume drama with eye-catching Siodmak direction and an extraordinary cast: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Melvyn Douglas, Walter Huston, Ethel Barrymore, Agnes Moorehead and Frank Morgan. In novelist Christopher Isherwood’s offbeat screenplay, Peck is obsessed with Gardner and with gambling.

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Filed Under: Classic Noir Reviews Tagged With: film noir, Howard Hawks, Humphrey Bogart, John Huston, Lauren Bacall, TCM

The Film Noir File: Huston works the angles in ‘Asphalt Jungle’

September 4, 2014 by Film Noir Blonde

Pick of the Week

“The Asphalt Jungle” was a hugely influential thriller.

“The Asphalt Jungle” (1950, John Huston). Thursday, Sept. 4, 10:30 p.m. (7:30 p.m.). With Sterling Hayden, Sam Jaffe, Jean Hagen, Marilyn Monroe, Louis Calhern. Reviewed here.

Thursday, Sept. 4

4:30 p.m. (1:30 p.m.): “Obsession” (1949, Edward Dmytryk). A classic noir helmer, Edward Dmytryk, puts a classic noir ham, Robert Newton, through the agonies of mad marital jealousy in this lesser known, but gripping thriller. With Sally Gray and Naunton Wayne.

6:15 p.m. (3:15 p.m.): “The Sniper” (1952, Edward Dmytryk). Arthur Franz plays a psychologically disturbed sniper, picking off his victims from the upper stories, in this solid Dmytryk noir thriller.

Shirley MacLaine plays the party girl who loves Frank Sinatra to pieces.

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “Some Came Running” (Vincente Minnelli, 1958). Frank Sinatra plays a World War II returning vet and prospective novelist who goes back to his bourgeois Midwestern hometown. There he becomes involved with his stuffy, square relatives and neighbors (Arthur Kennedy and Martha Hyer), a charming gambler (Dean Martin), and an adoring party girl (Shirley MacLaine) who loves him to pieces. One of the great underrated American ‘50s movies, it’s as good as any of Douglas Sirk’s romantic melodramas. In some ways, this picture is just as much a classic as “From Here to Eternity.” And, if Shirley, as Ginny, doesn’t make you cry, you have no heart. From James Jones’ novel (as was “Eternity.”)

10:30 p.m. (7:30 p.m.): “The Asphalt Jungle” (1950, John Huston). See Pick of the Week

Friday, Sept. 5

12:15 p.m. (9:15 a.m.): “Safe in Hell” (1931, William Wellman), With Dorothy Mackaill and Donald Cook. Reviewed in FNB on May 6, 2013.

Saturday, Sept. 6

4:15 a.m. (1:15 a.m.): “Caged” (1950, John Cromwell). With Eleanor Parker, Agnes Moorehead and Hope Emerson. Reviewed in FNB on July 13, 2012.

Sunday, Sept. 7

12 p.m. (9 a.m.): “And Then There Were None” (1945, Rene Clair). With Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, Judith Anderson and Louis Hayward. Reviewed in FNB on March 5, 2014.

Tuesday, Sept. 9

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “The Stranger” (1946, Orson Welles). Orson Welles plays a mad post-World War II fascist who’s hidden himself in a peaceful New England city. He‘s about to marry Loretta Young and is being pursued by a relentless cop, Edward G. Robinson. Welles’ most conventional thriller was also his most popular with audiences. It’s no “Touch of Evil,” but it still plays well.

11:45 p.m. (8:45 p.m.): “The Pawnbroker” (1964, Sidney Lumet). With Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Brock Peters and Juano Hernandez. Reviewed in FNB on June 28, 2014.

Wednesday, Sept. 10

2:30 p.m. (11:30 a.m.): “They Made Me a Fugitive” (1947, Alberto Cavalcanti). From Cavalcanti, the director of the classic French documentary “Rien que les Heures,“ this is a good British noir, in the Carol Reed vein. Trevor Howard is an embittered escaped con, wrongly convicted of murder, who breaks out and goes after the real killer. With Sally Gray.