By Michael Wilmington & 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
Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon star in this noir comedy.
“Some Like It Hot” (1959, Billy Wilder). Saturday, March 2, 1:15 p.m. (10:15 a.m.)
The place: Chicago. The color: a film noirish black and white. The caliber: 45. The proof: 90. The time: 1929, the Capone Era and the Roaring Twenties, roaring their loudest. We’re watching “Some Like It Hot” and Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are playing Joe and Jerry: two talented but threadbare Chicago jazz musicians working in a speak-easy fronted as a funeral parlor. Joe, who plays saxophone, is a smoothie and a champ ladies’ man. Jerry is your classic Jack Lemmon schnook, with a couple of kinks thrown in.
Curtis and Monroe on the beach, filmed at San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado.
After getting tossed out of their speak-easy band jobs by a police raid and accidentally witnessing the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (ordered by their ex-employer, George Raft as natty gangster Spats Colombo), they flee to Miami. They’re chased by the gangsters and the cops (Pat O’Brien as Detective Mulligan) but the guys are disguised as Josephine and Daphne, musicians in an all-female jazz orchestra.
The star of Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators, songbird and ukulele player Sugar Kane, is the Marilyn Monroe of our dreams. Sugar has a weakness for saxophone players. Josephine and Daphne have a weakness, period. Director Billy Wilder, who made lots of gay jokes in his time, deliberately keeps his two cross-dressing stars straight.
Read the full review here.
Wednesday, Feb. 27
10 p.m. (7 p.m.): “The Third Man” (1949, Carol Reed). With Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles.
12 a.m. (9 p.n.): “The Fallen Idol” (1948, Carol Reed). With Ralph Richardson and Michele Morgan.
Thursday, Feb. 28
7:45 a.m. (4:45 a.m.): “The Lavender Hill Mob” (1951, Charles Crichton). Alec Guinness is a mild-mannered bank clerk who masterminds the robbery of a London gold bullion bank. Stanley Holloway, Sidney James and Alfie Bass are part of this film’s unlikely mob. From the Ealing Studio in its glory years: One of the funniest and most enjoyable of all comedy heist thrillers.
10: 45 a.m. (7:45 a.m.) “The Ladykillers” (1955, Alexander Mackendrick). With Alec Guinness, Herbert Lom and Peter Sellers.
Friday, March 1
3:30 p.m. (12:30 p.m.): “Hangmen Also Die!” (1943, Fritz Lang). The radical German playwright Bertolt Brecht was one of the writers on this grim World War 2 saga of the anti-German resistance in Czechoslovakia. The plot trigger is the real-life assassination of the brutal Nazi leader Reinhard “The Hangman” Heydrich. With Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan, Anna Lee and Dennis O’Keefe.
12:45 a.m. (9:45 p.m.): “Witness for the Prosecution” (1957, Billy Wilder). With Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich and Tyrone Power.
Saturday, March 2
3:30 p.m. (12:30 p.m.): “The Fortune Cookie” (1966, Billy Wilder). With Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.
2 a.m. (11 p.m.): “The Train” (1965, John Frankenheimer). It’s the end of World War 2. The Nazi Army is fleeing Paris, and an art-loving German general (Paul Scofield) is making off on an express freight train, with many of the great French paintings of the city’s museums. A resourceful French railway boss and resistance leader (Burt Lancaster), who knows nothing of art, is trying to stop him. An underrated Frankenheimer thriller, loaded with nonstop tension and thrills, and a great cast that includes French acting legends Jeanne Moreau and Michel Simon.
Sunday, March 3
10 a.m. (7 a.m.): “Topkapi” (1964, Jules Dassin). After “Rififi,” this is Dassin’s second classic heist movie. The robbery is just as complex and suspenseful, but the story is lighter, more humorous: a sumptuously shot color travelogue/thriller, set in Turkey. The swag this time is a precious artifact, an emerald-festooned dagger in a heavily guarded Constantinople museum. The movie is based on master spy-writer Eric Ambler’s 1962 novel, “The Light of Day.” With Melina Mercouri, Maximilian Schell, Akim Tamiroff, Robert Morley and Peter Ustinov – who won an Oscar for his witty portrayal of the nervous, sleazily opportunistic British hustler/smuggler Arthur Simpson.
From FNB readers