Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947), John Rawlins.

X-Ray hears the password at Wood Plastics, Inc.

All eyes are on the villains in this film (an unusually cool Boris Karloff as Gruesome, and craggy faced  Skelton Knaggs as X-Ray) who are far more captivating than the heroes Dick Tracy, Tess Truehart et al. This is a little different from some B-movies, in which everyone is dull as dishwater.  Ralph Byrd played Dick Tracy for much of his career but frankly, I just didn't think he had the jaw OR the nose for the part!  Playing a blandly assuaging type, he parades around with a smirk for many scenes, poking fun at the Irishness of Pat Pattin, Plainclothesman (who swears he hasn't had a single beer since he started the job).  Anyway, Gruesome stumbles across nerve gas which he and dive-bar pianist Melody use to rob a bank, killing a guard while making their hasty exit.  All the scenes with the veteran character actors move swiftly, but the story sags when it gets to Tracy.  In one spot, he alternately whines and threatens a woman who is an unwitting accomplice in the crime.  Nice tactics, Dick!  Well, at least this one didn't have a lot of rubber prosthetics flapping off of Al Pacino's mug!

The Damned Don't Cry (1950), Vincent Sherman.

 
Or, as it screeches on the box in lipstick red cursive: "The damned don't cry [EXCLAMATION POINT!]"  Just the right tone of batshit!  Hugely enjoyable women's melodrama with enough mobster action to keep your date happy too.  Joan Crawford shakes off her dusty, hardscrabble life and cheap husband (cripes, even her parents are packed into their tarpaper dump) and decides that she deserves more.  Making a series of moral missteps in her quest for dough she becomes entangled in the affections of the stone cold head of a crime syndicate.  Crawford -who was forty five at the time of  filming (!)- almost plays several different characters:  the naive housewife,  a gum-smacking model, an elegant society heiress and she waltzes through endless divine sets.  I love the story of the American nobody who apes the better classes in an unrelenting, nail-breaking climb upwards.  Is she wrong to want MORE?  Is the only way for a divorced woman to get more to sell out?  We can't help but cheer her on as she uses and dumps every sleaze-bag and chump that come her way.  She meets her match in David Brian or "George Castleman," the man at the centre of power.  Their first discussion sees him crack a window and ask in a snide voice what kind of perfume she's drenched in (must have been some kind of Axe Body Spray for angry 50s chicks).   Priceless!

The Lineup (1958), Don Siegel / 5 Against the House (1955), Phil Karlson.

Reno, Reno, Reno, baby, Reno, Reno, Reno!

Finishing up the first volume of my Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics set, I'm licking my chops ready to start the second.  I found 5 Against the House the weakest film of the whole collection.  The title alone screams heist, but none of this gets going until Kim Novak and boyfriend Guy Madison have canoodled for a half-hour or MORE.  Zzzzzzzzz.  Actual heist concept these middle aged "college kids" (Korean war vets) dream up is totally corny and doomed to fail.  You know, you just never hear about Reno anymore.  Does anyone still go? 

The Lineup by contrast, while not a perfect film, is pretty darn slick.  Based on a popular TV show, there's an obligatory but completely pointless line up scene which must have been there just to satisfy studio execs who wanted people to make the connection between the film and the show.  Filled with gorgeous location views of San Francisco, the story turns on a completely hokey concept:  that an Asian based heroin trade would plant teeny quantities of drugs on unsuspecting tourists and then employ psychos to retrieve it once they are back home in America!  OK, but listen-- Eli Wallach as said psycho, his elderly mentor and their "wheelman" make this too thrilling!   Bonus:  crazed banter between noir buff Eddie Muller and author James Ellroy on the commentary track make this an incredible package.  I'm your kind of people, guys! 

 That's some collision!  From The Lineup

Slaves in Bondage (1937), Elmer Clifton.

I wish I could walk right into nightclub scenes of 30s and 40s movies, past the characters and the plot, pick up an imaginary cocktail and hang out & listen to the performance onstage.  I can't think of better accompaniment to a dinner than professional dancers and musicians.  Unlike the diner, these deco clubs seem not to exist anywhere anymore.  The shot above is from a beautiful scene in Slaves in Bondage:  a sensual tango accompanied by soft xylophones.   I always wait for characters to comment on these amazing acts - they rarely do.   In this scene, our villain says, "I'm bored.  Let's get out of here."  What!  

Slaves in Bondage is supposedly an exploitation flick about prostitution rings.  It's actually a decent mystery with likable leads.  Condemned in '37 as "wholly objectionable" by the National Legion of Decency, this film would likely earn a PG-13 these days.  All the risque material fits with the narrative - hardly exploitative.  (OK, there's that one spanking scene - big whoop).  Lona Andre has cartoonish cute looks and her character is no dummy.  A manicurist in a barber shop, she twigs onto the fact that one of her best paying (and overly attentive) customers has sidelined her journalist boyfriend by saddling him with a pocket of marked bills.  While this client (Wheeler Oakman, playing Jim Murray) is the nominal bad guy, house madame Belle Harris (played by Florence Dudley) is the more disturbing character who does all the hands-on work finding naive young ladies desperate to make a few dollars.  There's a sizable cast of fascinating nobodies but I especially liked the hopeless acrobats, even though we never discovered if they ever paid the rent!

  

A Successful Failure (1934), Arthur Lubin.

Lovely Ruth thinks twice about Mr Pencil Mustache's latest offer, one which does not involve marriage.

Dreaming of having his own humour column, henpecked Ellery Cushing cranks out one-liners by day in his study.  By night he is a copy editor at the local newspaper until he's canned by a cranky, penny-pinching boss.  Cushing is rescued from poverty by an old newspaper buddy who helps him parlay his mountain of jokes about the follies of domestic life into a new job in radio.

Crumpled old Cushing is the timid voice of traditional values that keep his family together.  William Collier Sr does a good job depicting the exhausted head of the family, a man struggling against the challenges of modernity.  His pretty daughter Ruth is steps away from a ruined life at the hands of a millionaire creepster, and his son Robert is an enthusiastic but naive supporter of "proletariat" politics; both hound him for money and are apparently too lazy to actually look for work.  More typical of earlier Monogram productions (i.e., Beggars in Ermine), this film recognizes the contemporary politics and events of mid-30s America.  In fact, A Successful Failure is explicitly anti-Communist.  By the film's end Cushing has denounced rabble rousing, decried the fall of Wall Street and praised the New Deal.   Despite the reactionary tone that makes an everyday father a "successful failure," the film likely struck its contemporary viewers as realistic and relevant. 

You can tell they are Communists, because they meet in the dark with torches!

Isle of the Dead (1945), Mark Robson.

Sadly, one of the weakest Lewton films.  One-dimensional story basically laid bare from the opening title card, so every subsequent plot point can be easily guessed.  Lewton recycles from his earlier works and Karloff is no great asset, sporting a curly mop of grey hair that makes him look like a depressed clown.  Apparently Karloff suffered from spinal pain that necessitated surgery around the time of filming, but still, this film is a mess!

The Seventh Victim (1943), Mark Robson.

The Seventh Victim alternates between silly and labyrinthine, seemingly portentous but ultimately devoid of meaning.  It may be rich for Lewton analysts, but in terms of a viewing experience for anyone seeking a concrete tale it will be unsatisfying.  Private school student Mary searches for her older sister Jacqueline, who has gone missing.  None of the facts that are offered to the audience makes much sense and are often contradictory.  Events that are depicted as mysteries worth solving become non-events that are casually revealed later.  Edward G Bansack claims that the film was heavily edited and key scenes were removed, which may explain the apparent fast pace of the film and some of the gaps in the logic of the story.  However, if the film is largely close to Lewton's original vision, it is a fascinatingly early example of someone deliberately playing with film narrative; fascinating especially because of the presumably straightforward expectations of both the studio that funded the film and the audiences that went to see it.  Some scenes are simply jarring and creepily surreal:  why was a policeman instructing Mary to call the police about her sister's disappearance?  How did Redi get into Mary's apartment?

As Bansack writes about the film's conclusion, "strangely, by this point in the film we have little concern for any of the remaining characters...even The Seventh Victim's main character, Mary, becomes less important, her callow romance with Ward bordering on the trivial. These artificial wrap-up scenes... are merely perfunctory and add nothing positive to the film." The biggest letdown was for me the infantile scene in which the devil worshipers are chastised by a recitation of the Lord's Prayer!  I tend to write off incomprehensible films with fatalistic characters as metaphors for life's journey (surely the fact that Jacqueline stays with a family that runs a restaurant called Dante's must count for something?) but who will ever truly know the meaning of this film - we do know that it was RKO's custom to simply provide Lewton with a title, asking him to fill in the rest!