![]() ![]() Noir wasn’t Robert Wise’s strong suit but he knew how to dress up a flimsy picture. Wise swims in the genre’s amorality, scoring a kitchen brawl to big-band radio tunes, terrorizing a soused matron at a nocturnal beach skirmish, and leaving the last word to Walter Slezak’s jovially corrupt detective. The action shoots from seedy Reno to moneyed San Francisco, where Tierney marries Trevor’s newspaper heiress sister as a way to stay within screwing distance of his perverse “soul mate,” whose lust scarcely diminishes upon discovery of his throttling, stabbing past. The main vipers on display are Lawrence Tierney’s blithely murdering thug and Claire Trevor’s randy socialite, braided together by each other’s lowdown wiles. The usually meek Robert Wise trades his chameleonic tastefulness for full-on, jazzy misanthropy in this nasty melodrama. Gonzalez Born to Kill (Robert Wise, 1947) The set-pieces are fierce, as is the Casablanca tweak of the last shot, and Wallace’s performance-a sad spectacle of a hurting creature caught between light and dark, good and evil-is one of noir’s great unheralded triumphs. The story doesn’t have any of the he-she psychosexual politicking that juices the director’s Gun Crazy, but that’s no loss given this film’s richer returns. John Alton’s lush camerawork is so dominant here you wouldn’t know Joseph H. Caught in the center of this sticky, elastic clutter of light and shadow is Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace), the girlfriend of a mobster with information about a mysterious woman named Alicia that may be of interest to police lieutenant Leonard Diamond (Wallace’s real life hubby Cornel Wilde). Shadows and lies are the stars of The Big Combo, a spellbinding black-and-white chiaroscuro with the segmented texture of a spider’s web. Dan Purvis (Edmond O’Brien) and Rocky Barnes (Mark Stevens) volley for the attention of a young woman who vowed never to date another police officer after the death of her father, but are the guys looking to score a date or a threesome? The film is a comedy with delusions of noir-unessential but good for a laugh given its almost campy scent of obliviousness. #GLENN SANDERS DEEPFOCUS FULL#Gordon Douglas infuses Between Midnight and Dawn with a hammy comic-book sensibility: the opening line (“The big city is full of people and people are full of crime”) suggests something out of a thought bubble, the incessant why-you-dirty-rat noir-speak sticks to the roof of people’s mouths like peanut butter, and a wise-alecky little boy with freckles all over his face looks to be in training pants for a role as one Dick Tracy’s adversaries. Ed Gonzalez Between Midnight and Dawn (Gourdon Douglas, 1950) ![]() Look for more reviews in the upcoming weeks here and on the site’s blog, and for a full schedule of films and ticket information click here. We haven’t seen them all, but we hope this preliminary guide will help you tell the fierce hatchetmen from the namby pamby messenger boys. Ulmer ( Detour), Nicholas Ray’s existentialist primer On Dangerous Ground, and works by the recently departed Robert Wise ( The Set-Up, Born to Kill, The Captive City) and Richard Fleischer ( Trapped, Bodygaurd, The Clay Pigeon). Lewis ( Gun Crazy, The Big Combo), Phil Karlson ( Kansas City Confidential, The Phenix City Story), André de Toth ( Crime Wave), and Edgar G. Sharing space with already-established classics of the genre like the American godfather of the French New Wave, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing are spunkier productions by Joseph H. #GLENN SANDERS DEEPFOCUS SERIES#Of the 70 films playing during the series in the six weeks between May 5 and June 15, more than half are unavailable on video and nearly all will be shown in newly spic-n-spanned 35mm prints, including rarities like Lew Landers’s Man in the Dark (projected in 3D!), Jack Arnold’s The Glass Web and, the rarest of them all, Joseph Losey’s remake of Fritz Lang’s M. ![]() Film Forum’s festival devoted to the “B noir” films of the ’40s and ’50s may be the most important repertory event of the year, and it transmits a very clear message: that the Poverty Row clip joint was a more treacherous and richer place to hang your hat than Casablanca. Your typical B-movie director always had his eyes on the bottom of the barrel (for him, it was the dirty little things that stuck to people’s feet that really counted), but any film connoisseur worth their salt knows that the purveyors of this genre aimed low but shot high. ![]()
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