By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington
The Noir File is FNB’s guide to classic film noir, neo-noir and pre-noir 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
Farley Granger (left) and Robert Walker give pitch-perfect performances in “Strangers.”
“Strangers on a Train” (1951, Alfred Hitchcock). Monday, March 10: 4 p.m. (1 p.m.). With Farley Granger, Robert Walker and Ruth Roman.
Hitchcock starts the story by contrasting the shiny, two-toned spats of Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) with the sensible black dress shoes of Guy Haines (Farley Granger) as each emerges from a Diamond cab. We follow these parallel footsteps as they board the same train, hence the title.
These brief shots contain the crux of the film: Model citizens often hide hard-core badness and the most unsavory renegades and reprobates can surprise you with a virtue or two (especially if we count charm and fashion sense as virtues). Read the full review here.
Thursday, March 6
6 p.m. (3 p.m.): “A Kiss Before Dying” (1956, Gerd Oswald). With Robert Wagner, Jeffrey Hunter and Joanne Woodward. Reviewed in FNB, on May 17, 2011 and Nov. 10, 2012.
Friday, March 7
11 a.m. (8 a.m.): “The MacomberAffair” (1947, Zoltan Korda). Widely regarded as one of the cinema’s best films ever taken from an Ernest Hemingway story, this simmeringly tense, darkly faithful adaptation of Hemingway’s African tale “The Short Happy Like of Francis Macomber” focuses on a dangerous triangle on safari. The potent threesome are a cynical Great White Hunter (Gregory Peck), his boyishly enthusiastic rich neophyte hunter of an employer, Macomber (Robert Preston), and Macomber’s sultry-eyed seemingly ready-to-be-faithless wife (Susan Hayward). They enact a timeless drama surrounded by wild animals and scorching real-life African settings. Few filmmakers are better with jungle beasts and jungle people than director Zoltan Korda (’The Jungle Book,’ “Elephant Boy,” “Four Feathers”), and this may be his best movie.
5 p.m. (2 p.m.): “Count the Hours” (1953, Don Siegel). Tough, lean Siegel “B” about a migrant worker accused of murder in a prejudiced town, and the inferno of a trial into which he and his idealistic lawyer (MacDonald Carey) are thrown. With Teresa Wright and Jack Elam.
Saturday, March 8:
11:45 a.m. (8:45 a.m.): “Dark Passage” (1947, Delmer Daves). With Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Agnes Moorhead. Reviewed in FNB on Dec. 18, 2012.
3:45 a.m. (12:45 a.m.): “Who’s That Knocking at my Door” (1968, Martin Scorsese). Scorsese’s first feature, set in the New York Little Italy neighborhood of his young on-the-prowl life, with Harvey Keitel (his movie debut) and Zina Bethune as a couple trapped in a Mean Streets/Italian Catholic milieu and a violent rape that tears it open.
Sunday, March 9
6 p.m. (3 p.m.): “Spellbound” (1945, Alfred Hitchcock). With Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck and Leo G. Carroll. Reviewed in FNB on Jan. 9, 2013.
8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “And Then There Were None” (1945, Rene Clair). The world’s most popular novelist ever and the Queen of detective stories, Agatha Christie became revered for the masterly way she revealed the “most unlikely suspects” in the climaxes of her stylized murder mysteries. With the exception of “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” she never had unlikelier suspects or a trickier plot than the ones she dreamed up in “And Then There Were None.” Ten strangers are trapped together on an isolated island –all of them past murderers who escaped punishment and all of them being killed off one by one, probably by one of their number. The great, brilliantly eccentric cast includes Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, Judith Anderson, Louis Hayward, Roland Young and C. Aubrey Smith. The expertly adapted and constructed screenplay is by Dudley Nichols.
Monday, March 10
8 a.m. (5 a.m.): “The Window” (1949, Ted Tetzlaff). With Bobby Driscoll, Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale. Reviewed in FNB on Nov. 14, 2012.
4 p.m. (1 p.m.): “Strangers on a Train” See Pick of the Week.
Tuesday, March 11
1:15 a.m. (10:15 p.m.): “Harper” (1966, Jack Smight), With Paul Newman, Janet Leigh, Lauren Bacall and Julie Harris. Reviewed in FNB on Dec. 4, 2012.
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