10 Favorite B Noirs with Eddie Muller

B movies once landed Eddie Muller in trouble—with a noir dame, no less. 

At the launch party for his 2001 book Dark City Dames, he’d assembled such screen veterans as Jane Greer, Ann Savage, Audrey Totter, and Evelyn Keyes. “When I had them all together,” Muller remembers, “at some point I said, ‘And they all cut their teeth making B films…’ And Evelyn Keyes just looked daggers at me, grabbed the microphone, and said, ‘I never made a B movie.’”

Keyes’s fiery reaction suggests how much baggage the term B movie carried within the studio system. “I had to backtrack, because Evelyn started at the top,” Muller says. 

In retrospect, however, he points out that the timely 1948 virus outbreak noir The Killer That Stalked New York, starring Keyes, teeters on the edge of the B realm. “They spent some money making that film, but it’s 80 minutes long, I’m sure that it got a release as an A picture, but probably quickly hit the circuit in the bottom half of double bills.” 

As Muller notes, “It’s hard to determine these things, because you don’t know unless you look at the interoffice memos at the studios and see how they were selling it. Or newspapers of the day are great, because you can see: What was the double bill? What was on the bottom half of the double bill?”

Indeed, a quick search of newspapers shows that by 1951 The Killer That Stalked New York, its release delayed due to similarities with Panic in the Streets, was being advertised as a supporting feature for such movies as King Solomon’s Mines, Kansas Raiders, Grounds for Marriage, and, most eerily, Lullaby of Broadway.

Over Zoom I sat down with the Film Noir Foundation founder, TCM host, and author of the recently re-released Dark City to discuss some of his favorite B crime flicks and the importance of B movies in general. 

It didn’t make Muller’s list of favorites here, but The Spider (1945) is a fun Fox B noir that he put on my radar.

To start off, how should film fans define a “B movie”?

EM: I always have to advise people to be careful of how they classify B movies. Technically a B movie was made for the bottom half of a double bill, and it had to fit certain requirements in terms of length. Because of that, fewer resources were given to the B movies than A movies.

They were almost entirely genre pictures: a B Western or a B crime picture or a B jungle story or adventure story. So there’s an interesting corollary between genre fiction, like you would see in pulp magazines, and B movies. And people’s attitudes about them are somewhat similar. Like genre fiction isn’t taken as seriously as literature. A movies are A Place in the Sun and B movies are… Decoy or something like that! Who’s gonna take that movie seriously?

I’m glad that finally at this stage people are starting to understand what a B movie is. When I was growing up there were so many “scholarly” books about the movies that lumped all crime movies in as B films. That’s not the case. Paramount had a B unit, and Double Indemnity was not made in the B unit at Paramount. That’s as A as A gets!

Armored Car Robbery (1950) was directed by Richard Fleischer who, like Robert Wise, Anthony Mann, and Joseph H. Lewis, among others, distinguished himself with stylish B movies and rose to become an A-list director.

What’s special about B noir? 

EM: For more sophisticated film watchers, I think the thing that is so appealing about B movies is that once you know that’s the terrain you’re in, that it’s impoverished to begin with, then you start to really appreciate the creativity that the filmmakers bring to it. 

It’s also like sports: the B movies are somewhat the minor leagues and you see a lot of directors learning their craft and making B movies and if they can, with no money, bring something a little more exciting to the material, then they get noticed and they get called up to the big leagues. And watching that is kinda thrilling. That’s what I really enjoy about B movies: seeing people being creative and resourceful with limited means.

Janis Carter’s femme fatale is perversely interested in murder in Night Editor (1947), a Columbia B with cinematography by Bernard Guffey and Philip Tannura.

To describe films falling in the gray area between A and B, this term of “nervous A” sometimes comes up. How do you distinguish the B from the nervous A? 

EM: With a nervous A, it’s my impression that you may be catching actors on the way down. They don’t want to say it’s a B movie. They got somebody with a name, but they weren’t a draw any longer.

Back then when television wasn’t so prevalent, a lot of the nervous As or A pictures that had a shorter running time would be rereleased on the bottom half of a double bill. Whereas later on in the 1950s, it would be sold to television and it wouldn’t have as much of a second life in the theaters.

Sometimes it’s just a subjective thing. Like, this thing just looks really good. They got this cinematographer who was on the cusp of going to A pictures. And you see that at Columbia with B movies shot by Burnett Guffey who would soon be their A cinematographer.

Nervous As are not made by design. That designation is applied after the fact. There are a lot of factors involved.

A classic example of what we’re talking about is Gun Crazy, which began as a King Brothers film at Monogram, and then they wanted to get out of the B rut. So they got MacKinlay Kantor, who wrote The Best Years of Our Lives, to write that, and their expectation was, “We’re making an A picture.” Then Monogram got folded into United Artists, so that it could actually be an A picture by the time it was released. But United Artists screwed up the whole release of the film and it ended up being stuck with this status as a B movie. They pulled it back, and by the time they did release it, it was on the bottom half of double bills, getting much better reviews than the films on the top half of the double bills.

Or all of a sudden they realize that they’ve caught lightning in a bottle, and this actor’s performance is incredible. Like Dillinger with Lawrence Tierney, which was the King Brothers as well. They made this as a B. They spent no money on that. But then they see Tierney’s performance and think, “We can sell this. Let’s put this out as the top half of double bills.” That damn thing ended up nominated for an Academy Award! Kind of amazing for a B film.

William Gargan and company in The Argyle Secrets (1948), the Film Noir Foundation’s latest restoration.

Tell me about Film Noir Foundation restorations of B movies. Are these films more at risk and in need of preservation efforts? 

EM: It definitely seems that way. And a lot of B movies are not going to be saved, because they slipped through the cracks. Interestingly enough, the noir stuff plays the best for a modern audience, so we’ve been successful saving these movies. But a lot of Westerns are not going to be saved. A lot of jungle movies are not going to be saved. Since there’s so much that’s incorrect in those movies, they wouldn’t be as valued. That plays a big part in it.

A lot of people in the movie business could raise enough money to make a B to get going, but those films, because they’re not produced by a major studio, they’re only distributed by the studio, they become at risk. When those distribution deals have ended, that’s where we go looking, especially when it’s Hollywood noir or American noir, because some of these movies are not made in Hollywood. 

It’s all about how they were distributed. A lot of films that we have rescued are independently made films. The Argyle Secrets, our latest restoration, was produced by Film Classics.

I can talk about it now, because I saw the restoration! It turned out great. I never want to talk about a restoration until I actually see it done. It looks better than any B movie has a right to.

Cy Endfield, the director, who was a magician, was so clearly enamoured of this waterfront set they created—that’s a miniature—that he actually does an entire camera move drifting through and around this set with a little toy ship! And when it’s shot in 35mm, you can kind of get away with it, with the lighting and everything. Which is one of the things you have to be careful of when these films are digitized: that you don’t digitize them in too much definition, because then the jig is up. You can see that everything is fake when the definition is too acute.

Endfield wasn’t even trying to hide that it was a miniature, like, “I’m going to do a one-minute tracking shot through this miniature, because somebody spent all the time to make all these little barrels with the ropes around them and the twinkling lights in the background. Great work, guys! We’re gonna exploit this.” I found it very amusing. I love that stuff. 

But there’s nobody safeguarding that movie. That’s where we come in. We’ve learned about the life expectancy of these films. If they’re not properly cared for, they will disintegrate.

And without further ado, here are 10 of Eddie’s favorite B crime movies, in chronological order.

The Stranger on the Third Floor (Boris Ingster, 1940)

EM: I have to pick, from 1940, Stranger on the Third Floor, because so many people now want to say, “Oh, that was the beginning! That was the start of it all.” Which isn’t really the case, but it’s such an outrageous example of expressionism used in an otherwise completely B story. There’s no budget or anything in that movie. It’s a true B film. But it hits all of those boxes that we talked about earlier. Immensely creative, so much talent is being shown off in that movie. It’s a great noirish story. 

And it allows Peter Lorre and Elisha Cook Jr. to be in the A picture that kicks things off, in The Maltese Falcon, and the B picture. So it’s like the Peter Lorre-Elisha Cook Jr. double bill. You can sort of start the American noir movement with those two. 

There were some very heady intellectual contributors to that film. Nathanael West worked on the screenplay. Frank Partos wrote it. Boris Ingster was a disciple of Sergei Einsenstein, and he had all kinds of ideas about cinema that were outside the mainstream. It’s always fun when one of those people gets their hands on the controls, and it’s usually a B movie.

Street of Chance (Jack Hively, 1942)

EM: This Paramount B film is important in the noir scheme of things, because it was the first adaptation of one of Cornell Woolrich’s “Black” novels, The Black Curtain. Amnesia is vitally important to film noir. As Lee Server said, it’s film noir’s version of the common cold.

The thing I always loved about Cornell Woolrich stories is the premise is so great and then he has to explain it. At some point you have to explain what’s actually happening and it never quite works. Here the guy realizes he’s been a different person for three years. He has an accident and you think he’s going to lose his memory in this accident, but instead he regains his memory and realizes, “I used to be somebody else!” Wow, that’s a great setup.

I don’t really associate Claire Trevor with B movies. She had already made Stagecoach and Dead End at this point. But this is pretty much a B movie. Jack Hively, the director, was not a big-time name. It’s not a great Woolrich adaptation by any means, but the film is significant and it has a very grungy B movie quality to it.

Fly By Night (Robert Siodmak, 1942)

EM: I really have to talk about this movie, which I discovered, much like Quiet, Please: Murder!, years ago by booking it without ever having seen it. This was the last great B movie that Robert Siodmak would direct before Joan Harrison brought him in to direct Phantom Lady, and from then on he was an A-list director.

Fly By Night could be my favorite B movie. It’s extremely well-crafted, beautifully photographed by John Seitz before he did Double Indemnity. This film looks totally noir. 

It’s sort of a cheap redo of The 39 Steps with Richard Carlson as the Robert Donat character and Nancy Kelly in the Madeleine Carroll role. It is so much fun. It’s very much a Hitchcock-style film. An innocent man gets thrown into this intrigue with spies and then he’s on the run.

The interplay between Richard Carlson and Nancy Kelly is everything you want in a B movie, where he rips off the bottom of her dress. Like in The 39 Steps, they’re constantly shoved into these close quarters in a very sexy way. I’d only really seen Nancy Kelly as the mother in The Bad Seed, and this movie kind of took me by surprise, how utterly charming she is and what a great comedienne she is. 

I’m proud of the fact that I’m the only person who’s shown this movie in the past 25 years or something. I don’t know what the deal is. There’s one print at Universal, and I have to stop showing it at a certain point because I’m the guy who’s going to wear this film out! 

But somebody needs to digitize this and get it out on Blu-ray. For God’s sake, it’s a Robert Siodmak film! And his direction is spot-on. Siodmak, unlike Fritz Lang, can do comedy. He has great timing in this film and his choice of angles to play up the comedy—like something’s happening in the foreground, they can’t see what’s going on in the background—and that whole scene on the car carrier is masterful. 

I don’t want to keep talking about it, because people can’t see it. I’m going to campaign to have that shown at the next TCM Classic Film Festival…

The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson, 1943)

EM: You have to have a Val Lewton on here, so it’s going to be The Seventh Victim, which is a film that I dearly love because it’s a horror-noir hybrid. I can’t for the life of me figure out why people ask me, “Is it noir?” Because of course it’s noir! It’s about a bunch of devil worshippers, but it’s not like Curse of the Demon where suddenly the demon appears at the end of the film. These are just a bunch of crazy people in Greenwich Village who have their weird secret society. 

There are set pieces in that movie that are just as good as it gets in a B film. The walk into darkness, where the detective walks into the perfume factory and disappears into darkness. The stuff with Jean Brooks on the street being followed. And the ending of that movie is one of my favorite creepy endings in cinema. It’s all done in this incredibly sophisticated, arty way that you don’t see in a lot of B films. Val Lewton was an absolute genius, and credit to Mark Robson and Nicholas Musuraca, who photographed it. And Kim Hunter gives a great performance.

Destiny (Julien Duvivier and Reginald Le Borg, 1944)

EM: I’m going to try not to say too much about this, because it’s like a secret film of mine. It stars Gloria Jean, who was Universal’s backup to Deanna Durbin. It’s a totally bizarre film, but the history makes it even weirder. The movie itself is about a crook who comes into a small rural town and is taken in by a farmer and his blind daughter. The crook is going to steal from them, but the girl is so good, so pure, like beyond Snow White pure, that nature comes to her rescue and gets even with the guy who’s doing these horrible things. I’m making it sound silly, but the original version of this film was so dark.

It was originally part of another film: Flesh and Fantasy, released the year before, which had big stars. It’s an anthology film of beautifully connected stories about fate and “Does the supernatural exist?” and all this kind of stuff. This story about the blind girl was part of Flesh and Fantasy, but Universal executives thought it was too weird, and they cut it off to make it a separate B movie. But it wasn’t long enough to be a movie so they concocted a whole story about the crook, played by Alan Curtis, that’s directed by somebody else. 

So Flesh and Fantasy was directed by Julien Duvivier, the great French stylist, and the second half of Destiny is him. The first half of Destiny is Reginald Le Borg. And no one is ever going to confuse Reginald Le Borg and Julien Duvivier as directors! 

There’s 30 minutes of BS to get to Gloria Jean in this movie. Unfortunately, the way the original film is supposed to end is not how Destiny, the B film, ends. There’s a happy ending in the B film. It is not a happy ending in the original—I mean, it’s happy in the sense that he gets his just desserts. Alan Curti had some guts to play that. You feel so sorry for him in Phantom Lady—and then ahhh! He’s wretched in this movie. It’s fascinating to see how they picked the movie apart, put it back together, and had Reginald Le Borg shoot stuff that softens everything in the B movie. 

I have tried my damndest to get Universal to restore Flesh and Fantasy to its original form and put all four stories back. The actual script exists that shows what it was supposed to be like without the goofy framing device of the guys in the men’s club with Robert Benchley. It was a film so far ahead of its time. Like the original Twilight Zone. I really wanted all this to happen while Gloria Jean was still alive, because it crushed her that they did this. She wanted to be in a movie with Barbara Stanwyck and all these great actors. But they cut it up and they dumbed it down and they put it out as a B movie.

It still has a lot of great stuff in it. The special effects at the end of that movie are extraordinary. Duvivier and Gloria Jean were fabulous, convincing you that this was real, that she has this power. They made magic together. The audiences that I’ve shown it to sometimes get a chuckle out of it when the squirrel comes and sits on her shoulder, but it’s kind of amazing. It really is an incredible film. I understand why, when Universal butchered it, that was it, Duvivier left America and said, “If this is the way they make movies in America, forget it. I’m going back to France.” He made a lot more great movies in France, but he could’ve been making those films in America. 

Jealousy (Gustav Machatý, 1945)

EM: I write about this Republic picture at some length in the new edition of Dark City. There was no mention of this film in the original edition of the book, because I had not seen it. But we did find a print at the British Film Institute. 

The thing that separates Jealousy from other B movies is Gustav Machatý, the director. He was a Czech emigré most famous for directing Ecstasy with Hedy Lamarr, which is this arty porn film of the early 1930s, a really good movie also. Jealousy is the artiest B movie of the time. His direction is so strange.

It’s a murder mystery from a story by Dalton Trumbo. There’s a very strong female character at the center of this. Jane Randolph plays a taxi driver in L.A. Any movie with a female taxi driver, I’m there! It’s the best. This taxi driver’s husband is an angry, embittered writer, a European expat who is unappreciated by the crass, lowbrow Americans. 

So this movie has a lot of subtext going on about displaced Europeans in southern California. Hugo Haas is the husband’s best friend. There’s this whole thing about the European subculture in Hollywood, just out of place. It’s the Old World in this New World, and they don’t fit at all. And that’s the director of this film as well. 

Machatý uses all kinds of techniques: weird Dutch angles, moving camera when there’s no real need for the moving camera. There are some shots that are in slow motion for no apparent reason. He believed in poetic cinema more than prose cinema. When he’s relying on the visual stuff, it’s ingenious. And then when it’s people talking, he has no grasp of how to handle a conversation. He doesn’t know how to do it! Like, why is the camera looking at that while they’re talking? Whenever there are expository passages of dialogue, he has no interest in it whatsoever. 

The relationship between Janet, the taxi driver, and her husband is perhaps a little farfetched, but I don’t know that I’ve seen another film that was more effective in talking about those displaced Europeans who came to America to work in the movie business. It has such a genuine feel of being lost and out of place. Jealousy is one of the few movies that dealt with it directly. And by juxtaposing it with Jane Randolph who is so all-American, like, “Come on, you can do this! Just pull yourself together!”

Decoy (Jack Bernhard, 1946)

EM: Speaking of extraordinary female protagonists! Jean Gillie gives Ann Savage a run for her money as the meanest woman in the history of movies. Decoy is a picture that… either I get that thing on Noir Alley in 2022 or I quit! Because I am determined to get that movie seen by more people. It’s just insane. It’s a completely berserk movie. 

Jack Bernhard, the director, and Gillie were married. He was a pilot and they met in England during the war. He brought her to Hollywood and this is one of the few films that she made. He directed another film that I really like, The Hunted with Preston Foster and Belita. Those are the two really good noir films on his resume.

If people are unfamiliar with Decoy, all I will say about it is the plot. There’s a gang of criminals and the loot from their heist has been buried, but nobody has the map to where the money is except this guy on death row who’s about to be executed. They have devised a way to resuscitate this man post-execution so that he can lead them to the money. 

I’ve shown this film with Stanley Rubin, who wrote the script. Stanley would go on to become a very successful producer. He produced The Narrow Margin. But this is when he was starting out and Decoy was one of his first films. And he had such a good sense of humor about himself and his career that when I said, “Stanley, we want you to be our guest. We’re showing Decoy, ”he was like, “Oh my God! You’re going to show that film?” But he appreciated how great Jean Gillie is in that movie. What a shame that she died so young. 

Imagine if they had made a film in which Lawrence Tierney’s character in Devil Thumbs a Ride meets Jean Gillie’s character in Decoy and they go on a crime spree together. That would be unreal. Not gonna see that, but we can dream.

High Tide (John Reinhardt, 1947)

EM: This is a movie that we’ve restored. It’s kind of a newspaper noir. It stars Lee Tracy, who is one of my favorite stars from the 1930s. And it shows how that Lee Tracy character, the ambulance-chasing newshound of the 1930s, became this drunken newspaper guy in the 1940s who is not to be trusted and has no ethics. 

One of the things I love about B movies is when you try to tell a super complex story in a limited amount of time, you make jumps in logic. I knew I wanted to restore this movie because of its pedigree. It checked off all my boxes: newspaper movie, gangsters, Lee Tracy. And we’re watching the film and I go, ‘Did we lose a scene? What’s happening? This just jumped forward so far in the plot!’ Then it backtracks, and it all works in the end, but in terms of the narrative structure of the film there’s a point at which you’re wondering, “Where am I? What’s going on in this movie?”

I also love the framing device in that movie, because it’s one of the best ever. Lee Tracy and Don Castle are driving in this car, and it crashes off the coast road into the rocks and then the tide is coming in. And the story is told in flashback as these guys are trapped in the car with the water rising. That is great B movie making right there.  

The Guilty (John Reinhardt, 1947)

EM: Obviously I love it, because it’s a film that the Film Noir Foundation restored. It’s based on a short story by Woolrich. This one really captures the feel of his work. Grungy, sweaty, nightmarish. It doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. And all of that is good. 

Bonita Granville plays twins, and this is a long way from Nancy Drew! It’s great to see her playing the bad girl. Of course, if women are twins, one is good and one is bad, right? But there’s this wonderful thing where you lose track of who’s who. And you really don’t know which woman Don Castle is dealing with. It’s part of the weird, nightmarish appeal of this film. You start to question what’s going on in the film. Is this whole thing… just made up? 

It’s the ultimate unreliable narrator film. Because Don Castle narrates the whole thing, and at a certain point you start questioning his sanity. I don’t know if this guy is for real or not. When he’s talking about the sisters, they’ve set up the sisters to be antagonists, but you start doubting that. Maybe there isn’t a bad sister. Maybe it’s all in his head, because he’s vying for these women with his buddy, played by Wally Cassell, who’s really great in the film as well. 

It’s one of the better Cornell Woolrich adaptations and I’m pleased to say it will be coming out on Blu-ray! As will High Tide.

The Spiritualist, aka The Amazing Mr. X (Bernard Vorhaus, 1948)

EM: This is a bit of a “nervous A,” if you want to call it that. It makes a perfect double bill with Nightmare Alley, because they’re both about charlatans who prey on people thinking that they can see into the future and connect with the spirit world. It has a very charming performance from Turhan Bey as the spiritualist, and two really good actresses: Lynn Bari and Cathy O’Donnell.

John Alton photographed it, and in some respects this may be John Alton’s best work as a cinematographer. It’s directed by Bernard Vorhaus. They actually worked together in Argentina in the 1930s, and Bernard Vorhaus was the guy who essentially brought John Alton to Hollywood. The cinematography in this is magic. 

It’s written by Crane Wilbur, who was the king of prison movies, but he was also obsessed with magic and hucksterism and tricking people. He loved the mechanics of tricking people. That’s what this movie is all about, how this guy cons his way into the lives of these two women and convinces them that he can communicate with the dead husband. It exposes all of that, pulls back the curtain in a very entertaining way.

Destination Murder (Edward L. Cahn, 1950)

EM: I have to pick one movie by Edward L. Cahn, who’s like one of the most prolific directors in history, but nobody talks about him. He was a workhorse. He could make bad movies, but he just made movies! And some of them are extraordinary. Some of the movies he made in the early 1930s, you would’ve thought that this guy would become one of the great directors of all time, but no. 

Destination Murder one of those movies that could just be totally dreck, just nothing, but you can always count on Cahn to put something goofy in the movies that made them special, whether that was him or the writers. Don Martin was pretty good at writing creative B stuff. Like Stanley Clements as the hit man who kills the guy during intermission of the movie at the beginning of the film. And then you have Albert Dekker and Hurd Hatfield as the two crooks who have this very strange relationship. “Armitage says this! Armitage says that!” No character in the history of movies has referred to himself more in third person. “Moonlight Sonata” figures prominently in the film. The whole thing with the player piano is just nuts.

Joyce Mackenzie is really pretty good. I’m seeing a pattern here: a lot of films with female protagonists, like Margaret Tallichet in Stranger on the Third Floor, Kim Hunter in The Seventh Victim, Jane Randolph in Jealousy… so that’s interesting to note. That was not something I was looking out for when I was making this list, but there you have it!

Where can you find the movies? Half of them are currently available to legally purchase or view in Region 1.

• The Stranger on the Third Floor is available to buy for online streaming or as a Warner Archive DVD
• The Seventh Victim is available to buy for streaming.
• Decoy is available to buy as a Warner Archive DVD.
• The Spiritualist is in the public domain and available for free on YouTube.
• Destination Murder is available to buy as a Warner Archive DVD.

As for the rest, well, you’ll have to go into some dark corners of the internet to find ’em outside of a film festival…

“I feel like it’s inexhaustible”: An Interview with MoMA’s Dave Kehr on Fox Films and Rediscovered Treasures from Classic Hollywood

As I’ve attended film festivals over the years, Fox movies from the early 1930s have surprised and intrigued me. Rare Fox films—ranging from the bizarrely poignant sci-fi diplomatic thriller Six Hours to Live to the silly yet sultry tropical melodrama The Painted Woman to the pert, frothy Lillian Harvey musical My Weakness—top my personal list of “I sure wish I could see that again.”

Fox pre-Codes pushed the envelope with a panache and inventiveness that matched and often surpassed what other studios were doing at the time. However, movies made by Fox in the early 1930s rarely turn up on TCM. Comparatively few have made it to DVD or Blu-ray.

In 2019 a massive merger gave Disney control over Fox’s library. Like many classic film fans, I was concerned about what the merger would mean for Fox’s vibrant swath of film history and our access to it. Would our niche dollars matter to a corporate behemoth?

It was a heartening sign for cinephiles when Dave Kehr, a curator in MoMA’s Department of Film, announced that a trio of pre-Code Fox rarities would be streaming on MoMA’s Virtual Cinema (available to MoMA members in the U.S.). Even better, the beauty and sophistication of these films shine in 4K digital reproductions of MoMA’s own nitrate prints. After watching these wonderful films, streaming until May 20, I wanted to know more.

Kehr graciously agreed to answer my questions about Fox Film, MoMA’s nitrate holdings, the museum’s new streaming platform, and what it takes to get films on there. 

First off, tell me a little about MoMA’s Virtual Cinema streaming platform.

Dave Kehr: Well, this was something we started in response to the pandemic. A lot of archives and museums in our position have done this, to try to stay in touch with our audience during the shutdown. It’s hopefully something we’ll be able to keep doing, because it does expand our reach quite a bit. 

It’s a great way of getting our restorations out across the country. That’s my main interest, but the annual New Directors, New Films series was all online this year. We have a pretty steady beat of experimental films, documentaries, and such like. And the older stuff is where I concentrate my fading energies. It’s a nice way of getting beyond Midtown Manhattan, which is kind of what our audience had been restricted to for a while now.

Distribution is not what it used to be. We don’t have the same circuits to get films to revival theaters. DVD kind of disappeared. I know there are a lot of people, particularly outside of New York, interested in classic film. And it’s nice to bring some variety into that community, so I’m glad for the opportunity.

Fox films from the 1920s and 1930s aren’t in circulation the way some other studios’ output from the period is. What are cinephiles missing in that Fox availability gap? 

DK: By and large, this stuff has not been seen for reasons that are mysterious to me. They were briefly on television in the 1970s, a few of them. There were actually some theatrical distribution of a few of them in the 1970s, and then it just stopped. Even though Fox has all the rights, they never have turned up on TCM, with maybe one or two exceptions. Very little on disc. They’ve just dropped out, and it’s such an important part of film history.

Particularly since Fox was developing Movietone at this time, which was the much better sound system than the now more famous Vitaphone at Warner Brothers. Movietone was recording sound on film. Vitaphone was recording sound on disk. You could record sound on film in the camera, so you didn’t have to have all these cables running out the sound truck, with the disk and the needle, which is what Warner Brothers had to do. We know the Warner Brothers films, because those survive, those are on TV constantly.

But the Movietone film was a much better technology that allowed the camera almost perfect freedom from the beginning. Some 1929 Movietone film might begin with a 5-minute single take on a crane. I’ve always thought they were kind of thumbing their noses at Warners, like, “you guys can’t do this,” you know? “But look what we can do over here.” 

I think the history of film sound would be a lot different if historians had had access to these titles. I just feel part of my mission in life really is to get this stuff back out so people can see it so it can become part of the history. And it’s very gratifying.

What would you say to classic film fans whose idea of pre-Code content is defined mostly by what they’ve seen on TCM?

DK: You ain’t seen nothing yet! Raoul Walsh pre-Code is like nothing you’ve ever seen! You could not believe what he was getting away with. Jaw-dropping. If you like that kind of ribald, basic, dirty jokes sensibility, there’s some wonderful stuff that was never on TV, I’m sure, because you couldn’t show it on TV. It was too much. I’d love to get some of that stuff up [on Virtual Cinema], and I’m sure we will.

Unfortunately, people have the impression that only Warner Brothers and MGM, and maybe RKO, that constitutes Hollywood. But that’s just a very small portion of what was going on. Getting Fox back and Colombia back and Universal back… it would just create a much fuller picture. 

I’ve spent many, many years working on this and I’ve got to say, I feel like it’s inexhaustible, with so much there, and so much that people haven’t seen.

How did you select the 3 titles for the current collection of Fox pre-Code rarities? 

DK: I picked them out of these larger series that we’ve shown at the theater in MoMA, because these were good audience films, because I know that people like them. They’re unknown titles or lesser-known titles that are tremendously entertaining and engage people and hopefully arouse their curiosity to see more of that.

Sherlock Holmes was directed by William K Howard. Almost completely forgotten because his Fox films were just lost for so long. Very inventive, very stylish, lots of fun visual touches, interesting use of sound in 1932.

Quick Millions is a gangster film starring Spencer Tracy. The director, Rowland Brown, was an interesting character in his own right, who apparently had some gangland associations and a very hot temper that meant he only completed three films in his entire career. You see Quick Millions next to the Warner Brothers gangster films, which are more well known, obviously, and this one has no sentiment at all. There’s no lovable mamma. Everybody is as hard as nails and these decisions are, “Just kill him, just kill him.” It’s brutal, it’s so cold.

Again, the direction is very interesting, unique in that this guy was not a trained filmmaker, and he’s kind of making it up as he went along. He found some really interesting and unusual things to do. It’s nice to bring it back into the conversation.

Me and My Gal is one of my favorite Raoul Walsh films. Just one of those rollicking Raoul Walsh comedies, full of movement and action. Wonderful relationship between Joan Bennett and Spencer Tracy.

Raoul Walsh is your Twitter avatar, so he’s a director I do associate with you! For those who mostly know Walsh as the director of Warner Brothers films, like The Roaring Twenties and High Sierra, what should people know about this earlier stage of his career at Fox?

DK: The Warner Brothers films are great, but that’s one 10-year period in a career that lasted 50 years. He was one of the pioneers. He started directing in 1915. Tragically, most of that went up in the Fox fire. We’ve only got a couple of those early silents, but by the mid-1920s, with What Price Glory?, he’s a major director. He’s discovered his style, which is this sense of life in his films. The tempo, the movement, the forward propulsion, the way he uses background action to play down the sides of the frame, the sense of life happening all around.

Yeah, he’s one of the great masters to me. A very distinctive way of filming. And you can tell it’s so natural to him. He’s not sitting down and scratching his head and saying, “Where do I put the camera next?” He just knows. That kind of utter assurance is very rare. And easy to take for granted because it’s not calling attention to itself. Which is one of the reasons why it’s great: because it feels so natural and invisible, and that’s very hard to do.

I love the way he sees people. He really enjoys people. He likes being around them. He likes their company, and he shares that with you. I like being in his company. It’s such a great world to me. I don’t think I really want to live in a world full of drunken Irish mobs but in the movies? It’s just terrific.

All three of the Fox titles on Virtual Cinema were scanned from nitrate prints in MoMA’s collection. How did MoMA come into possession of so many Fox nitrate prints?

DK: MoMA has a particular history with the Fox Film Corporation, which was what 20th Century Fox was before Darryl Zanuck, when William Fox was running the company. And it was one of the earliest [film] companies, started in 1915, very prosperous until Fox got into some financial shenanigans in the early thirties, surrounding sound processes. 

In 1937, after it passed to 20th Century Fox, there was a catastrophic vault fire in the Fox warehouse, which was at Little Ferry, New Jersey. It destroyed absolutely everything, all the negatives there, all the surviving prints, basically all of the Fox Film Corporation. It is the worst fire that I know of, and there are a lot of them in Hollywood history. Entire careers vanished.

We have two of Theda Bara’s films that survive out of 30, I think. Some stars, we have no trace of them. George Walsh, Raoul’s younger brother, was a major star. Not one of his silent films survives.

It’s particularly tragic for people interested in directors. Because Fox was known as the directors’ studio. Directors got a lot of leeway there, a lot of freedom to make things they wanted to make, in the way they wanted to make them. It was the cradle for John Ford, for Howard Hawks, for Frank Borzage, for Raoul Walsh. William Dieterle worked there. Famously Murnau worked there for a while. It just goes on and on.

And these films were thought to be gone until the early 1970s. It turned out there was still a bunch of nitrate sitting around the Fox Studio in Los Angeles, and a guy named William K. Everson, who was a famous film collector and film buff, he got wind of this and went to Eileen Bowser, who was then the head of our collections at the museum. And between the two of them, they got all of these prints out of Fox.

This was at a time when people were just destroying nitrate, because they thought it was dangerous, which it is, but they just had no sense of what they were destroying when they’re getting rid of this stuff.

So this meant rescuing 7th Heaven and Iron Horse, stuff that we take for granted now, But back then people thought it was lost. And you can imagine the excitement when, suddenly, there was this trove of a couple of hundred titles. Movies no one ever thought they would see, suddenly available.

MoMA made safety film backups for all of this. Fox got a copy in return. They’ve got most of them out there. Some went to Eastman House, some went to UCLA, but we kind of made sure we got the best ones. The museum has been working on restoring these ever since.

What kind of restoration was involved for these Fox titles?

DK: Some are just impeccable with your perfect, mint condition prints like the print of Sherlock Holmes that’s up now. Not a single issue. Just scanned it, and, wow, it looks great. And others are in tatters. Some films where we had the domestic negative and only the foreign language soundtrack. Films would have a whole scratch down the whole print, like John Ford’s The Brat, and we had to digitally remove that scratch from every frame.

It took a lot of work to get Transatlantic. We had the foreign versions and no domestic version. So we had to piece it all together from the French and the Spanish. We had the English soundtrack, thank goodness, but no, they don’t really match up, using different takes and things.

That was a lot of very tricky work, but it came up magnificent, and it looks like an Orson Welles Film from 1931 with the deep focus stuff. Those super long takes, it really is exceptional. Now you can see it really really well for the first time.

As we continue to work through this big body of films, new stuff is turning up all the time. 

After all the archives spent most of the latter part of the 20th century preserving that stuff photochemically, suddenly, we’ve got to do it all over again. Because digital is just replacing it. Attached as we all are to film, it isn’t the way most people see movies anymore, and if you want to be able to share your libraries, you’re going to have to start digitizing them.

And that’s very expensive. Very slow process. We were able to do the last batch, about eight or so, thanks to support from 20th Century Fox. But in the meantime, 20th Century Fox got sold to Disney. So, we’re kind of starting over. We started a relationship with Disney, hopefully we can continue to do this kind of work. It’s very early. Hollywood is going under a very serious transformation right now. And worrying about deep library titles is something they are just not doing. It’s a transitional period, but hopefully it will pay off in terms of much greater access and much better copies for these films.

Are MoMA’s Fox nitrate prints projectable? Could they ever show up at something like Nitrate Picture Show?

I would not project them anywhere, even if they are in perfect condition. Every time you run a nitrate print through a projector, you’re damaging it, and these are just too valuable. They’re unique. I think at Nitrate Picture Show, they usually show stuff that exists in multiple prints, but these don’t. It’s just one copy. If anything happens to that, there’s no recourse. 

So we don’t lend those out ever to be shown, unlike some of the Warner Brothers titles. We have a beautiful nitrate Casablanca that gets shown every once in a while, super special conditions. 

But even so, I’m kind of reluctant to let those out of our clutches, just because we need to know what the films are supposed to look like. Our best record of what that movie looked like in 1942 are those first-generation prints from 1942. And you need that standard to compare and make sure the contrast is right. The right timing in the lab, this was very delicate work, and a lot of what you see now is just a straight scan. Not too sharp, which happens a lot with digital restoration. People over-restore. 

The idea of digital is to try to create the sense of a film print, not make it look like a TV show which happens all too often when people go too far with the digital restoration process. When they take out the dust particles and the scratches, they also take out a lot of the grain. So it looks like video. It doesn’t look like film anymore. The trick is to preserve enough of that grain to make it seem like a movie, to keep the pixels kind of alive on the screen instead of just video, dead, soulless, cold! [laughs]

NF: Is there anything else about Virtual Cinema or the Fox films that you’d want people to know?

Just that they exist. And we’re trying to get them out there. There’s a lot of good stuff in those films [within our collection] that have not even been restored yet. 

The more response we get, the more viewership we get for the work, it encourages our donors to support this work, so it’s important for us.

We’ll continue. Absolutely, there will be more Fox stuff, in the future, hopefully the near future.

A preview of what might be coming to Virtual Cinema… Kehr plans to offer MoMA’s restorations of several Fox silents, including Borzage romances 7th Heaven and Street Angel as well as John Ford’s Three Bad Men. “It’s such a good movie,” Kehr says of the latter. “Ford is 90% there already by 1926.” Beyond Fox, a new restoration of pre-Code dazzler Her Man will be available to stream in late May. Another rarity that Kehr dreams of premiering on Virtual Cinema is Universal’s recent restoration of By Candlelight, a James Whale film that Kehr describes as “a musical in which nobody is singing.” 

For what it’s worth, I have zero plans to get to NYC in the next year, but I bought a MoMA membership just to access Virtual Cinema. To the surprise of probably no one, I’d recommend it.

This interview has been lightly edited for organization and flow.

Stitch Goddess: Joan Crawford, Old Hollywood’s Most Famous Knitter

Joan Crawford’s cameo in It’s a Great Feeling (1949) hilariously plays on her star image as a larger-than-life melodrama queen. She launches into a speech right out of Mildred Pierce, waves off Doris Day when the peppy hopeful tries to rein her in, and expertly slaps both Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan. “I do that in all my pictures,” she cracks with airy self-awareness then jauntily makes her exit.

But the cameo shows another aspect of Crawford’s life that would’ve been well known to her fans and regular movie magazine readers. When a cut reveals mink-wrapped Crawford behind Carson and Morgan, she’s knitting—cute little aquamarine socks on double-pointed needles, no less. Many movie stars knitted, but Crawford was indisputably the stitch goddess of Hollywood. 

Crawford’s knitting was news to fan magazines. Screenland practically had a dedicated Joan Crawford knitting beat. In 1934, Weston East devoted several lines to her prolific gift knitting:

“Joan Crawford is knitting her fifth baby blanket…. Joan always gives blankets to her friends’ babies—and her gifts are particularly valuable because she knits every blanket herself. Joan is getting so adept at knitting that she can now turn out a blanket, working between scenes and at home at night, in about twelve days.”

A testament to Crawford’s staying power, Screenland was still reporting on her knitting 15 years later, in 1949:

“Joan Crawford, who likes to knit almost as well as act, is now carting around two knitting bags on account of she’s working on so many different things and likes to switch from one to another.”

(Show me a knitter who can’t relate to that though.)

The same year Screenland was all abuzz over a rare malfunction in Joan’s typically flawless stitchcraft:

“Joan Crawford was so nervous at the preview of ‘Flamingo Road’ that she actually dropped a stitch in her knitting—unheard of for Joan, who’s so expert she can knit blindfolded in a dark cellar at midnight.”

That might be the most badass description of needlework proficiency I’ve ever read.

Crawford’s constant knitting made an impression on her costars. Sometimes too much of an impression; George Cukor asked her to leave the set of The Women because her loud clickety-clack was, perhaps intentionally, fraying at Norma Shearer’s nerves. Fred MacMurray remembered Joan’s stitchwork as a sign of her boundless energy, “As soon as we’d finish a scene, out would come her knitting and she’d get to work on that.”

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. recalled Crawford almost constantly knitting during their marriage. She, in turn, told Charlotte Chandler that she brought her knitting to Pickfair to cope with her unease among the in-laws: “I could keep my hands busy, because I was so nervous.”

My favorite Crawford knitting anecdote comes from the uncertain period between her arrival at Warner Brothers and her Oscar triumph. And it involves her famous rival Bette Davis, also a knitter. Cal York of Photoplay reported: 

“Those who waited for the guns to explode when Queen Crawford met up with Queen Davis on the Warner lot can relax. We understand a pair of knitting needles have brought the two together. It seems Bette knitted a sweater that turned out not so well and Joan is now unraveling and doing it over for Bette. Will they be that amiable over a coveted movie script, one wonders?”

My confidence in this anecdote is strengthened by others I’ve heard of Crawford going out of her way—maybe even going overboard—to pay her respects to Warners Brothers’ reigning diva. Nevertheless, it’s wise to take fan mags with a grain of salt. Is this story true? Well, let’s just say I want to believe.

Norman Lloyd: 3 Essential Noirs

Actor, producer, director, and living chronicle of Hollywood history, Norman Lloyd turned 106 today. If I had to name the most charming man on the planet, he’d be the first person to come to mind. Back in 2014, I listened to him give a 1-hour interview at the TCM Classic Film Festival. A packed theater sat spellbound as he wove confidently in and out of stories and stories within stories. His eloquence and joie-de-vivre were inspirational.

In Golden Age Hollywood, Lloyd’s lanky physique, hawkish profile, and curly hair made him look a bit like Leslie Howard’s punk kid brother. The character actor shined in quirky supporting roles, such as the comic relief minstrel in Technicolor swashbuckler The Flame and the Arrow and Chaplin’s Limelight. But shady or unhinged roles suited Lloyd best in his youth, before he acquired the genteel, benevolent aura of a beloved emeritus professor with a salty wisecrack up his sleeve.

No, not noir, but I couldn’t resist including this shot of Technicolor Norman Lloyd The Flame and the Arrow (1950)

He made his film debut for Hitchcock in Saboteur (1942) as the titular villain. Everybody remembers his spectacular death plunge from the Statue of Liberty’s torch. But his quiet moments impress me more: his satisfied glance out a taxi window at the sunken ship; his sour flirting technique with pert Priscilla Lane; the way he drawls, “I don’t like autumn.” Poster boy for the banality of evil, his smug, vaguely sleazy Axis agent blends into a crowd of normal people, like a traveling salesman but for catastrophe.

Since Lloyd’s birthday falls in Noirvember, I figured that I would mark his birthday by recommending three of the best noirs in which he appeared. I’d consider all of these somewhat underseen. His small but wryly intriguing contributions to their ensembles hint at the charisma and wit of the man himself. 

All three films relate to the rise of McCarthyism that would jeopardize Lloyd’s career, since he was an active member in left-leaning artistic circles. Reign of Terror parallels the fear and tension of the blacklist era; the original title was even The Black Book. M and He Ran All the Way show the incisive talent of two directors who would soon have to flee the country to find work. Norman is a survivor of those dark days, reflected in the darkness of these films.

Reign of Terror (Anthony Mann, 1949)

Truly one of a kind, this period thriller is essentially noir in powdered wigs. You’ve got all the laconic jabs, elaborate shadows, amorality, and dread of a 20th century crime drama, only unfolding during the French Revolution. 

However, the fusion of John Alton’s virtuosic noir lighting with the cloaks and muskets of 1794 endows this film with a disorienting, foreboding grandeur—no small feat, considering its low budget and short shooting schedule. The history-book-meets-comic-book fantasia of this film never fails to stun me, no matter how many times I watch it. Whenever I recommend this movie to someone who hasn’t seen it, the reaction is always, “How the hell hadn’t I heard of this before?”

At TCMFF I saw Norman Lloyd introduce the film, and he explained that the producers wanted to recycle a costly set built for the Ingrid Bergman Joan of Arc. It takes a special plot to repurpose a period French city set. “So it was decided to chop someone’s head off,” Lloyd joked. 

As in his gritty Westerns, Mann packs Reign of Terror with some graphic violence for the era, including not one, but two men taking bloody pistol shots to the face right in the camera. The gallows humor—or guillotine humor—and abundant innuendo would make a late 18th century caricaturist smirk.

Where to watch for Norman: Lloyd plays Tallien, a real historical figure who helped end Robespierre’s dictatorship. As he savors brandy-soaked cherries in a tavern, his louche nonchalance adds to the ambiance of paranoia. Can the hero really trust him? Later, Tallien supervises as his men attack Charles and rough him up as a possible Robespierre spy. Finally, he makes the most of a big fulminating close-up in the National Assembly, shaking his fist and rising to topple the demagogue.

M (Joseph Losey, 1951)

Remaking Fritz Lang’s masterpiece was a ballsy move, to say the least, but Losey’s version justifies the decision. While I recognize the innovative early-talkie brilliance of the first, all said and done, I probably prefer the later one. In any case, rather than try to reproduce Lang’s chilly, expressionist approach, Losey turned the story loose in the streets with engrossing location footage of a now-bygone L.A. The documentary realness of the backdrop makes the events all the more disturbing.

David Wayne’s whimpering, deranged child killer is as pathetic as an animal in the last stages of rabies. During the climactic underworld trial, a drunk, debased mob lawyer redeems himself with a speech that fiercely challenges the morality of capital punishment. The surprising warmth and big-hearted empathy of this M heightens its tragedy.

Where to watch for Norman: Manager of a floating craps game, Lloyd’s crook loafs around the head mobster’s boardroom with the other grotesque underlings, including Raymond Burr and Glenn Anders. 

He Ran All the Way (John Berry, 1951)

John Garfield’s last film knocked the wind out of me when I first saw it at the Egyptian Theater. And Norman Lloyd was in the house too, waving dapperly at the hoards of admiring TCMFF attendees! 

In this bleak home invasion noir, a robber on the lam manages to smooth-talk his way into a happy family’s apartment to hide out after a botched robbery. James Wong Howe’s cinematography captures the textures of New York City and the claustrophobia of the apartment.

Garfield’s thuggish criminal on the lam manages to be both achingly poignant and frighteningly brutal. While we pray for the family to get through this, we’re also forced to confront the unfairness of life, to see familial love and comfort as privileges bestowed on some and not others. Soon-to-be-blacklisted director John Berry exposes how social inequality breeds violence, begetting a cycle of abuse and trauma. In some cases, when all you know is pain, all you can do is hurt others. 

Where to watch for Norman: Lloyd’s small-time crook only appears in the first part of the movie, but his pivotal role catalyzes all that follows. His brains convince Garfield’s brawn to attempt the crime that goes horribly wrong.

Norman Lloyd as captured by my camera on the red carpet in 2018

I Got a Review Stuck in My Teeth

I once knew a guy, a film major, who complained in a college class that the people in old movies were too witty and well-spoken. It irked him. Those characters weren’t real enough. His declaration knocked me for a loop, because he had pinpointed exactly what I do like about studio-era movies. Maybe it’s an acquired taste, this yen for characters who crack wise at all hours of the day, fluently converse in saucy innuendo, and/or muse to themselves in elaborate metaphors.

But surely viewers way back in old Hollywood’s heyday didn’t raise an eyebrow at that, right? The heightened language was generally accepted as part of the fun and games, like rear projection and soundstage interiors? Well, that’s what I figured, until I found a fan magazine review of Criss Cross that suggests otherwise.

In the March 1949 issue of Modern Screen, critic Christopher Kane devoted an unusually large proportion of his narrow-column review to the language of Criss Cross, which apparently vexed him:

Some of the most fantastic dialogue in the whole wide world turns up here. Our hero, Burt Lancaster, comes home to Los Angeles… only to discover that he’s still haunted by memories. He talks to himself. It goes like this. “You’re eating an apple. You get a piece of the core stuck between your teeth. You tear a piece of cellophane off a pack of cigarettes, try to work the apple out. The piece of cellophane gets stuck too… I knew I was going to see Anna…” A little later one of the other characters involved says (of Lancaster) “He’s got her in his bones.” And while you’re attempting to figure out whether she’s in his teeth or in his bones, the story unwinds.

Despite Kane’s snarky dismissal of the whimsical writing, he remembered it rather accurately. In fact, I can’t think of any other fan magazine reviews I’ve read (and I’ve read many) that get so hung up on language. I guess it got stuck in Kane’s head… like a piece of an apple core in Burt’s teeth. The critic’s vivid recall (assuming he didn’t take notes in the theater) unintentionally affirms the creativity and cleverness of the script.

I don’t know if the apple/cellophane voice-over monologue came from novelist Don Tracy, screenwriter Daniel Fuchs, or from Bill Bowers, who contributed additional dialogue. In any case, the description of a low-level annoyance that frays on your nerves is deeply relatable. Who hasn’t had something stuck in their teeth, then somehow made it worse by trying to get it out? Both mundane and poetic, the language fits an earthy guy like Steve, as he sums up the enervating spell of his ex-wife. For my money, that passage of voice-over is one of the best things in a movie full of excellent material.

Mr. Kane clearly didn’t see it that way. He concluded his review thus: 

So you know Burt’s going to get it in the end—either from the cops or from Dan [Duryea]’s gang (Dan’s still alive and kicking). So you know, but you don’t really care.

Speak for yourself, Mr. Kane! If Burt Lancaster doesn’t melt your heart at the end of Criss Cross, I don’t trust you one bit. Your assertion sticks in my craw. (Even if I do appreciate the insight that, yes, noir language was too heady for some people even when it was written.)

Playing with Dynamite: Noir’s Explosive Metaphors

“Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be,” wrote surrealist André Breton in L’amour fou. Of those three qualities, the paradoxical “fixed-explosive” fascinates me most. In French, it’s actually “explosante-fixe,” the order of which makes more sense, although “fixed-explosive” certainly sounds better in translation. As an illustration of “fixed-explosive” beauty, Breton provided a 1934 Man Ray photograph of a flamenco dancer, caught with her arms outstretched and her ruffled skirts suspended like the plumage of an exotic bird in flight. 

Breton’s selected image, conveying both fiery movement and stillness, reminds me of pictures and posters of Rita Hayworth dancing, especially as Gilda. Frozen yet incendiary. More broadly, “fixed-explosive” aptly describes noir’s beautiful schemers. Femmes fatales blaze with bad intentions and unholy allure, even when motionless. Their beauty is all the more enticing because it is fiercely destructive. Think of Jane Greer, braced against the cabin wall with the shadows of a fire and fist-fighting men flickering over her, as she coldly lines up her shot. The women of noir, and the situations they ignite, are surely dynamite.

Given how much noir focuses on “l’amour fou,” on passion beyond reason, it’s fitting that metaphors of dynamite crop up so memorably in the language of noir. Money, beauty, compromising information—it’s all dynamite. Anything worth having also threatens to blow up in your face. Indeed, dynamite metaphors in noir dialogue and voice-overs are rarely hyperbolic. More often than not, the “dynamite” in question does detonate and wreck the lives of everyone involved. Though identified, the danger is rarely defused.

The recurrence of noir’s dynamite metaphors reflects crime fiction’s demand for constant, feverish excitement. Raymond Chandler wasn’t making a recommendation as much as he was summarizing the “fantastic elements” and expedient suspension of logic in pulp writing with his oft-quoted line, “When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.” Well, if you’re writing hardboiled dialogue, when in doubt, compare something to dynamite. You’d be in swell company, as the 6 examples below indicate.

The Maltese Falcon (1941): Sam Spade emphasizes the stakes of the situation to Brigid, now that the cops are grilling her former associates.

In the novel, Hammett’s dynamite metaphors serve as bookends to Spade’s relationship with Brigid. After her first visit to Spade and Archer’s office, Spade cautions his horny partner Miles not to “dynamite her too much” when he accompanies her that night. Little does he know that she’ll be the one to blow Miles away…

Double Indemnity (1944): Walter Neff worries that his victim’s grieving daughter Lola will spill her story about big bad stepmom Phyllis and her little black hat to Keyes and the police.

The Big Sleep (1946): Dynamite is something rich girls like to play with—or have to play with, if a wild sister lands herself in serious trouble and needs to be protected. They’re lucky they’ve got Philip Marlowe in their corner. Driving back from Mona Mars’s hideout, Marlowe starts to interrogate Vivian, but decides that he’d rather defuse the dynamite with her. Again, excitement over explanation…

They Won’t Believe Me (1947): Recounting his myriad sins and screw-ups for the benefit of a jury, homme fatal Larry Ballentine flashes back to his wife’s bargain: a fresh start and a partnership in his own investment firm, if he sheds his nasty habit of cheating. However, temptation beckons, in the form of shapely working girl Verna. Larry’s explosive metaphor here foreshadows the fiery twist of fate that puts him on the fast-track to a murder charge.

Too Late for Tears (1949): Painfully clueless Arthur Palmer warns his avaricious spouse about the dangers of keeping the bag of money that somebody mistakenly tossed into the backseat of their car. The joke’s on Arthur, because the real ticking time bomb in this movie is the blonde beside him.

Highway Dragnet (1954): Wanted man Jim Henry, stranded in the desert with a fearful model, ruefully explains that he only picked up a blonde floozy in Vegas. “I didn’t kill her, Susan. I didn’t even know her. All I did was buy her a drink. One drink…”

Once you start listening for “dynamite,” you’ll hear it everywhere. Stay safe, mugs, and have a dynamite Noirvember!

Film Noir Valentines, Volume 2: For the Hep Kittens and Non-Turnips in Your Life

Philip Marlowe striking a match on Cupid’s stony butt cheeks in Murder, My Sweet rather neatly sums up film noir’s irreverence towards the more delicate notions of love. Go home, arrow boy. You’d better come packing heavier artillery in this part of cinema.

And yet most of noir’s greatest hits are defined by romance, no matter how rotten at its core. In the volatile chemistry of noir attraction, the people who make you feel most alive are often the ones most likely to kill you.

Characters tend to love and/or lust like there’s no tomorrow. With their surreal badinage and doomed desires, these courtships come across as sick parodies of respectable romances. In its purest (or most impure) form, noir seems to say, “You wanna see what love really looks like? It’s not for the faint of heart.” The unhealthy eroticism of noir serves as a cathartic escape valve for the negative impulses lurking inside all of us—

Oh, I give up. Let’s dispense with the polite thinking, shall we? I just wanted to have a good time and make some more shoddily satirical noir valentines, so I’ll spare you the rationalizations.

My first batch of noir valentines in 2015 barely scratched the surface. So here are 15 more bitter little billets-doux with an emphasis on films and stars I neglected last time. Hopefully they’ll amuse you as much as they amused me. To paraphrase Alicia from Notorious, there’s nothing like a valentine to give you a good laugh.

Please note that I do not endorse toxic relationships, crimes of passion, eyelash-induced high treason, phony mentalism, or the overuse of first-person POV camerawork. You are strongly advised to seek help before embarking on any kind of partnership with a hot psychopath.

Stanton Carlisle deploys a classic play from The Homme Fatal Handbook in Nightmare Alley (1947).

Who wouldn’t be inspired by a hep kitten in a slinky black dress? Cliff the drummer gives Carol a suggestive musical tribute in the jive demimonde of Phantom Lady (1944).

Nobody understands sociopathic housewife Jane like sleazy crook Danny in Too Late for Tears (1949). And that’s why he has to die.

“Soulmates, huh?” Sam in Born to Kill (1947) is a vicious murderer, but, as it turns out, Helen is kind of into that. At least he’s not a total turnip like her fiancé.

International man of mystery Dimitrios Makropoulos leaves a trail of destruction in the wake of his luscious lashes and dangerous charms in The Mask of Dimitrios (1944).

Platinum blonde temptress Cora just might have an ulterior motive in wanting Tom to profess his undying love in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).

What can I say? Lake and Ladd bring out a less cynical side of me. Especially with dreamy dialogue from Raymond Chandler in The Blue Dahlia (1946).

Maybe this one doesn’t totally make sense, but neither does the decision to shoot almost all of The Lady in the Lake (1946) from Marlowe’s perspective. We can be grateful for Audrey Totter giving us a masterclass in eyebrow acting, though.

Scheming Kitty March from Scarlet Street (1945) finds another way to dominate her hapless sugar daddy Chris Cross.

Sparks fly when Bruno meets Guy in Strangers on a Train (1951). This is clearly the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

It’s Bogie and Bacall, so I guess we can forgive the warm and fuzzy denouement of Dark Passage (1947).

Perhaps no poor sap in film noir tugs at my heartstrings more than Steve Thompson in Criss Cross (1949). And looking at his gorgeous femme fatale ex-wife, Anna, one can’t quite blame him for his terrible choices.

Things get steamy for Lily and Pete in Road House (1948). Who knew that bowling lessons could eventually lead to this?

Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950) may want a Valentino, but she’ll settle for Joe. He looks thrilled.

For my money, the real love story of Mildred Pierce (1945) is between the only two non-awful characters: Mildred and Ida. Galentines or valentines? Well, I’ll let you decide…

In the unlikely event that you want to send one of these to somebody, you can save the files (I think right-click and save should work), pull them into your device’s free image editing software, and type names in the To and From fields.

Just don’t blame me if the recipient blocks you… They clearly weren’t noir material.

Favorite Film Discoveries of 2019: Adventures with Angels, Dates with Devils

The Greeks had a word for it: pharmakon. A poison which may also be a cure. A cure which may also be a poison. Plato associated the term with writing, and Derrida concluded, by extension, that “the god of writing must also be the god of death.” Most writers I know would agree. At least some of the time.

Film, another medium of substitution, deception, and instability, is a pharmakon in my life too. It shatters me, piques me, messes with me, hypnotizes me, pulls me outside of myself, distracts me from my day job, and generally gives me reasons to keep on living.

My yearly roundup of favorite new-to-me films often betrays some loose theme or pattern. The 2019 harvest yielded a high proportion of poisoned apples: movies reveling in temptation or moral extremes. Wickedness took many forms, from voluptuous demoness Elena Sangro to hedonistic lord of the manor David Farrar to noir’s ne plus ultra bad boy Lawrence Tierney. Fortunately such unlikely angels as Bebe Daniels, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Joel McCrea, and Ann Sheridan were on hand to balance the cosmic scales. So here’s to the things that poison us and the things that keep us alive. May they forever intertwine in cinema.

1. Maciste all’inferno (Guido Brignone, 1926)

What’s it about?

Powerful demons mingle with mortals to ensnare souls. When big hunky superhero blacksmith Maciste intervenes to save his cousin from dishonor, the baddies transport him down to Hell. But those devils get more than they bargained for.

Why do I love it?

If some maniac decided to adapt Dante’s Inferno as part of the Marvel Extended Universe, the result still couldn’t touch this wild adventure from the silent Maciste series. Once we get to Hell, the sheer surreal saturnalia on display stands as a testament to just how trippy silent popular cinema could be—and frequently was. A hellish vamp’s kiss transforms Maciste into a demon with shaggy legs and horns. Bevies of brimstone beauties vie for his attention. Our musclebound hero leads a demon army to victory in an intra-Inferno civil war. A demon’s face, punched concave by Maciste, rebuilds itself in a spellbinding close-up.

At the beginning of the year I watched a whole bunch of silent movies about Hell to research a piece for SF Silent Film Festival. As you might expect, that involved many hours of wallowing in guilt and despair. Rather refreshingly—even blasphemously—Maciste all’inferno was the most fun I had in Hell all year. It shows sympathy for the damned, yet treats Hell like some weird adult theme park designed by Doré for demons. Given the playfulness and overt sensuality of its spectacle and inventive special effects, the film’s creators were clearly more interested in delivering pleasure than preachments.

Federico Fellini mentioned Maciste all’inferno as his earliest film memory and a lifelong influence on his work. That explains a lot. The silent film’s panoply of grotesque eroticism and nimble leaps between fantasy and reality—or merely different registers of reality?—feel distinctly Fellini-esque.

Where can you see it?

It’s on YouTube.

2. Midnight Mystery (George B. Seitz, 1930)

What’s it about?

Pulp novelist Sally Wayne and her gaggle of murder-obsessed friends are enjoying a quiet weekend in a creepy island castle. Sally’s rich stick-in-the-mud fiancé decides to stage a phony murder to teach Sally a lesson, but when a real body turns up, he’s the prime suspect.

Why do I love it?

The Gothic elegance of this early talkie, with its cavernous Max Rée art direction and creeping camera movements, nourishes me as pure cinematic comfort food. There are silhouettes and self-playing pianos and clanging buoys and opulent candelabras and howling winds and a villain eavesdropping from an overstuffed armchair. But plenty of movies have “atmosphere in chunks,” to borrow a phrase from the script. This old dark house movie earned a place in my heart because its girl sleuth heroine enjoys an unusually triumphant fadeout. When we celebrate the maturity of pre-Code films, we’re often talking about sex, drugs, and hard-hitting social commentary. But this modest comedy thriller arrives at something quietly progressive even for its anything-goes era: a worldly woman who single-handedly cracks the case and makes her man eat his words.

To love studio-era cinema, you have to inoculate yourself against groan-worthy, tacked-on endings in which sharp dames renounce their identities and accept their role as some schmoe’s passive helpmate. Midnight Mystery, however, concludes with a different balance of power. Sally’s morbid, melodramatic mind enables her to unravel the mystery and catch the killer. In a sly turn of psychological Judo, Sally leverages the villain’s lustfulness and exhibitionism against him and extracts a public confession. “I learned the trick writing thrillers, dime novels, trash,” she explains. This is where we expect her to add, “And no more! I’ve had enough of murder” etc. etc. But, lo and behold, her fiancé capitulates instead: “I give in. I don’t deserve you in a thousand years…. Detect all you want. And I hope all our ten children are detectives.” Corny? Sure. But his humble embrace of Sally’s trashy passion—he wanted her to bust up her typewriter a few reels ago—goes against the grain of so many glib Hollywood endings.

Betty Compson digs into the screwball feistiness of her character with gusto. Though her cutesy voice can grate on one’s nerves, her expertly staged histrionics at the end more than compensate. As the suave murderer, Lowell Sherman infuses his part with devious glee—campy enough to be humorous but lecherous enough to be a threat. At one point he picks up a silk stocking of Sally’s from the back of a chair and rubs it appreciatively between his fingertips. Why, he even glances towards the camera, as though he’d like to be considered for inclusion in your Best of Pre-Code sizzle reel.

Where can you see it?

It’s on ok.ru. Since it’s an RKO Radio film, I have no idea why it’s not on Warner Archive DVD. Maybe some rights issue? In any case, I’d buy it.

3. Men in Her Life (William Beaudine, 1931)

What’s it about?

Betrayed by a gold-digging lothario and stranded in the French countryside, broke socialite Julia Cavanaugh befriends Flash, a vacationing bootlegger with social aspirations. Julia jumps at the chance to earn money working as a one-woman finishing school for the clearly smitten Flash. Though they fall for each other, class differences and Julia’s past indiscretions threaten their happiness.

Why do I love it?

In essence, it’s “My Fair Gangster”—an irreverent, gender-flipped riff on the Pygmalion formula. But instead of watching an overbearing professor sculpt a spirited guttersnipe into a lady, we savor the gentle chemistry as a ruined debutante gives her big lug client a crash course in etiquette. By helping Flash navigate the glitterati in Paris, Julia builds a sense of self-efficacy and gains perspective on the superficial life she used to know.

Who would’ve suspected that Charles Bickford could carry a rom-com as a leading man? Not me, surely. Yet his guileless toughness and aw-shucks delivery made this obscure Columbia film a major highlight at the most recent Capitolfest. As his lady love, the luminous Lois Moran conveys her character’s inherent grace and bruised uncertainty.

With its sharp dialogue and wacky situations, this breezy send-up of class relations, scripted by Robert Riskin and Dorothy Howell, deserves a mention in the history of screwball comedy. Although it veers into drama towards the middle and courtroom drama at the end, the humor of Flash and Julia’s courtship and their adventures among the vapid socialites in Paris remain the most rewarding and memorable aspects of the film. The fact that a coarse crook turns out to be the truest gentleman of all strikes me as quite a Riskin-esque reversal of conventions. When Julia finally proposes to Flash with the same routine he had practiced on her earlier in the film, you could feel the audience at Capitolfest sigh out a collective “Awwww” before such cuteness.

Speaking of overturned conventions, the film doesn’t hide that Julia spent the night with a faux-noble seducer. The whole plot hinges on it. But that doesn’t matter to Flash. The fallen woman nabs a rich, lovable man who worships her and would literally kill for her. And they live happily ever after. Now that’s pre-Code.

Where can you see it?

Maybe at some rare film festival or archive screening. I would love to see this get a DVD or Blu release.

4. Union Depot (Alfred E. Greene, 1932)

What’s it about?

Rakish vagrant Chick comes into possession of some stolen money and decides to spend the night with Ruth Collins, an out-of-work chorine. Once they’ve gotten over the misunderstanding that she’s a sex worker, Chick resolves to set things right for Ruth and get her on the train to Salt Lake City for a job. But the cops, crooks, and Ruth’s stalker have other plans.

Why do I love it?

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. orders “a flock of hot biscuits” from a train station lunch counter. That’s all I need in a movie.

Seriously, though, if you could harness the charm that Dougie Jr. and Joan Blondell exude and somehow convert that into fuel, we’d never have an energy crisis again. These are two world champions of sparkling for the camera. It’s awfully sweet to watch them sparkling at each other. And I’m simply mad about train stations, even recreated on sound stages. This film evokes the romance of the criss-crossing destinies they contain. I’d need to watch the film again to get the whole story straight. It’s a speedy tangle of assumed identities, stolen goods, bums, hookers, investigators, and a pervert in dark glasses, all handled with the pacy vigor we crave from a pre-Code Warner Brothers film. Despite the morass of plot, the emotional through-line—Fairbanks behaving like a cad then spending the rest of the movie trying to prove his nobility to Blondell—stays strong and poignant. You catch yourself rooting hard for these two crazy kids. Which makes the ending quite a blow.

Pre-Code movies did so much of what New Hollywood movies get credit for inventing. And they often did it in half the runtime. Union Depot leaves viewers with the jarring sense of “wait, that can’t be the end” as the credits flash up. Its wrenching, unsentimental conclusion reminded me of those oft-cited gut-punch denouements from films of the 60s and 70s. Admittedly, there’s far less cynicism here, since Fairbanks Jr. does enjoy his shining moment as Blondell’s champion. But as Ruth speeds away towards a precarious future on that midnight train to Salt Lake, Chick ends up right where he started, maybe worse off. He’s a vagrant with zero prospects. His dream girl left, never to see him again. Being a hero might feel swell for a second, but in practical terms? It doesn’t mean a thing. So he flips up his collar, shrugs off despair, and walks into the night with nobody but fellow bum Guy Kibbee to split a cigarette with. Forget her, Chick. It’s Union Depot.

Where can you see it?

It’s available from Warner Archive.

5. Counsellor at Law (William Wyler, 1933)

What’s it about?

Jewish lawyer George Simon rose from humble origins to become one of New York’s most sought-after attorneys. Now that he’s on top, however, his professional rivals are out to get him with a vengeance. He’s got a Society Register wife who doesn’t much like him. And a good deed he committed in days gone by—fraud to save a weak man in a jam—is coming back to haunt him…

Why do I love it?

Because it kept me on the edge of my seat and held my emotions hostage until the very last moment. Though categorized as a drama, its level of tension and relentless drive seem more in tune with what we’d call a legal thriller today. I went in expecting something preachy and/or badly stereotyped, but the joke’s on me, and I’ve rarely been happier to be wrong. William Wyler was a great director. We all know that. But only lately I’ve realized how early he was a great director. When I saw The Storm in 2018 at Capitolfest, the film suggested that his talent for shaping cinematic space and building suspense through subtly shifting relationships was already crystallizing in 1930. Well, Counsellor at Law is a leap ahead of The Storm. A work of staggering assurance and efficiency, this film would be the crowning achievement of many directors’ careers. Wyler, as we know, was warming up.

Barrymore, an actor whom I love but do not usually associate with restraint, rose to the occasion in portraying George Simon. He’s exasperating and irresistible, hilarious and tragic, icy and passionate, naïve and cynical. A seductive monument of contradictions. But never a caricature. The images of the film that I remember most are a swooping crane shot towards Barrymore, then a close-up of his eyes shining like star sapphires (on nitrate), as the idea of suicide comes to him. Barrymore may have never been better, or realer, onscreen than at the moment when, manning the switchboard in his empty office, Simon gets a call that devastates him. And he finds that, in the eyes of the frivolous woman he married, he’s no more worthy than the little boy who got his start manning that switchboard decades ago. Everybody, from chirpy office lady Isabel Jewell to blasé wastrel Melvyn Douglas, is on point in Counsellor at Law. They’re like gears in some giant, rhythmic, artful machine. But Bebe Daniels, playing Simon’s sharp but soulful secretary, nearly steals the show as the heart of the film. We cannot help but love Simon because she loves him, and we can tell that so fine a person as her could only love someone whom she truly respected.

The script by Elmer Rice, adapted from his own stage play, is a race car engine that Wyler drives with aplomb. Without leaving a posh Manhattan office, gleaming in its sleek Deco majesty, the screenwriter and the director create a fluid, exciting space where worlds collide. In George Simon’s waiting room, a communist agitator clenches his fists at the the bourgeois prattle of Simon’s two revoltingly pampered step-children. Indeed, Counsellor at Law boldly interrogates some big social and ethical issues. What is success, really, in a society where success often means disowning parts of your identity? Should you die fighting an oppressive system tooth and nail, or can you do good by working within that system? Is it worth it? But the film lets those questions hang in the air, raising them but refusing to settle them. Thank heavens. Answers are usually far less interesting than questions anyway.

Because it dares to stand on the window ledge of despair, preparing to splatter our hero all over the pavement, this movie truly earns it last-minute His Girl Friday-esque ending. The flawed, tormented lawyer finds his match in the vivacious, brainy beauty who was 10 feet away the whole time. The joyful rush of that long-overdue recognition sends you back into reality still keeping time to the beat of this exquisitely rhythmic minor masterpiece.

Shoutout to my Nitrate Picture Show pals Emily West, Harry Eskin, and Jay Patrick who loved this as much as I did!

Where can you see it?

It’s on DVD from the Universal Vault Collection.

Photo by John Springer Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images

6. Mary Burns, Fugitive (William K. Howard, 1935)

What’s it about?

Mary runs a coffee joint in the country while romancing out-of-town mystery man Babe Wilson. After a shootout at Mary’s shop, her gangster boyfriend leaves her to take the heat. Branded a “gun moll” and sent up to the big house, Mary escapes… by the grace of the cops who hope she’ll lead them to Wilson. Mary never wants to see him again—but he’s not through with her by a long shot. As the poor gal’s cellmate summarizes, “Aw, Mary. Men’ve been kickin’ dames around since the days of Eve.”

Why do I love it?

William K. Howard, whom James Wong Howe called the best director he ever worked with, was a poet of celluloid celerity. What I’ve seen of his early 1930s output practically lunges at you with its synergy of camera movements, brisk cutting, and tensely stylized compositions. All of those elements—along with a top-notch performance from Sylvia Sidney and a roller-coaster plot—make Mary Burns, Fugitive a gripping programmer both in style and substance.

From the bucolic opening scenes, Leon Shamroy’s cinematography imparts a sense of vague ethereality to what might’ve been a purely gritty yarn of crime and suffering. Sometimes that dreamlike, spiritual quality gives Mary’s torments a halo of martyrdom, but sometimes it’s just intoxicating to the eye. Particularly during the expressionistic prison break scene. Mary and her roommate sneak through corridors of stark shadows, dart through fog occasionally pierced by searchlights, then dive into the water and swim through shimmering waves towards their rendezvous. It’s like a crime melodrama evanescing into a dream.

Sylvia Sidney may have given more great performances in now-obscure 1930s movies than some bigger stars (and more acclaimed actors) gave in their whole careers. Her fey, childlike face and air of gentle sincerity made her a natural to play decent dames who fall, and fall hard, for rotten men. She hits her courtroom breakdown just right with ripped-from-the-headlines naturalism. Her voice rises to a pitchy wail and her face contorts into an unglamorous sob of confusion and shame. But Sidney usually communicates Mary’s sorrow quietly, with hushed agony. As life kicks her around, her suffering turns inward. But you can hear the stifled tears choking her. You can feel the jagged shards of broken dreams cutting ever deeper into her soul.

Alan Baxter, aided and abetted by clever lighting, strikes an appropriately loathsome note as Wilson. He doesn’t come off as particularly tough or charismatic, especially not next to hardboiled henchman Brian Donlevy, but he sure is mean. He resembles more of a snarky, entitled college kid than what I’d expect a bank robber to be like. As a casting and performance choice, it’s actually kind of brilliant, even if I don’t 100% buy it. Portrait of the gangster as a spoiled brat. (See? I don’t always root for the bad guys.) The moment when Mary realizes what Wilson is—punctuated by a noirish close-up of his suddenly defiant pretty-boy killer face—is chilling, because he does look like a different person than the carefree lover he was 5 minutes ago.

Mary’s final face-off with her bad-to-the-bone ex brings the film to a satisfying, Temple Drake-ish close. Wilson forces Mary to humiliate herself by fawning on him in front of her new love, but the gangster’s sadism proves his undoing. After shrinking from confrontation for so long, Mary seizes the moment and becomes the agent of her own justice, retribution, and freedom.

And I can’t finish this capsule without a nod to Melvyn Douglas’s Adirondack-style mountain lodge, which is truly the stuff of fantasies.

Where can you see it?

I caught it on TCM last summer. Maybe it’ll air again. It’s also floating around the internet…

7. Internes Can’t Take Money (Alfred Santell, 1937)

What’s it about?

In his first film appearance, Dr. Kildare helps a paroled mother find her missing daughter and escape the clutches of a lecherous racketeer. Does the doctor dare to call in his own underworld connections and save the day?

Why do I love it?

Perhaps the biggest hit of this year’s Capitolfest, Internes is exactly the kind of movie I’m thinking about when I lament “they don’t make ‘em like that any more.” That is, a gratifying 80-minute crime melodrama with hardly a dull moment. From its opening credits, overlaid on shots through the windshield of an ambulance speeding through city streets, this movie hooks you. And through a magical marriage of great acting and superior filmmaking craft, it never lets you go until the end credits roll. Clearly I need to dip more into the oeuvre of director Alfred Santell. He invests this bizarre tale of barroom surgery, sexual blackmail, grateful gangsters, and a missing daughter with muscular B-movie momentum while giving the tear-jerker scenes room to breathe.

I will never look at kitchen utensils the same way again after watching Joel McCrea improvise an operating room in a bar. “Get me a lime squeezer!” barks Dr. Kildare, preparing to save a hemorrhaging mobster with a MacGyver-esque assortment of found objects. One wonders, did the young doctor spend all his precious drinking time pondering, “How could I use that for surgery… you know, if it should ever come up?” Some contrivances are so much fun that you welcome them with open arms as contrivances. This is one of them.

McCrea in Boy Scout mode can wear thin on me, but his chemistry with Stanwyck lights up the screen. For instance, the physical contact of dressing an infected wound on her wrist becomes an unlikely but undeniably smoldering conduit of sexual tension. It’s also a wry inversion of that old ministering angel trope. How many times have we seen a battered tough guy melt as some radiant young beauty tends his wounds? But here it’s fresh-faced doctor McCrea tenderly succoring the downtrodden but unbroken Stanwyck.

Even with Kildare riding through the film like a knight errant in scrubs, Internes delves into dark territory. Degradation looms over Stanwyck as she deliberates whether to sell herself to a slimy, popcorn-munching racketeer in order to see her daughter again. German-born cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl, who’d shoot Among the Living and The Glass Key a few years later, cloaks the desperate ex-con mother in an aura of noirish desperation. Curtains of rain stream down the windows and cast shadowy waterfalls around Stanwyck as she pleads with the villain. No dice. He wants his payment in dollars or flesh. “You’d like to kill me, wouldn’t ya?” he gloats. “You’re a mind-reader,” she snaps back. As she contemplates her meager options, she watches the lights of a roaring elevated train go by outside the window of her dim, cramped apartment. The shot I recall most vividly from the film is a bleak slice of urban alienation. We see an abstracted misty street at night with glowing lamps and storefronts. A snack vendor, in silhouette, cooks popcorn over a whistling open flame. Stanwyck, in a shiny black raincoat, walks slowly past, then doubles back, and buys a bag of popcorn—the racketeer’s favorite—in a gesture of symbolic defeat. What an oddly wonderful movie.

Where can you see it?

I’m pleased to report that it’s available from the Universal Vault Series. Physical media for the win!

8. Quiet, Please: Murder (John Francis Larkin, 1942)

What’s it about?

Forger, thief, and murderer Fleg steals a rare Shakespeare folio and proceeds to sell several fake copies to collectors. Then Fleg’s lover and partner in crime, crooked manuscripts expert Myra, sells one of the phonies to a Nazi collaborator—who wants a payback in blood. Myra, a shady investigator, and Nazi henchmen all converge in the Los Angeles Public Library. Fleg impersonates a detective and holds everyone under blackout conditions while looting rare manuscripts and making mischief.

Why do I love it?

Slinky, sardonic criminals Gail Patrick and George Sanders come across as a pulpy, psychopathic variation on Nick and Nora Charles. (Or Joel and Garda Sloane, given their focus on manuscripts. But who the hell knows them?) Fleg and Myra swap urbane threats instead of cute quips and get their kicks from committing crimes instead of solving them. Double-crosses are perhaps the sincerest form of foreplay in their amoral universe. The more grandiloquent of the pair, Sanders purrs out some of the kinkiest dialogue this side of the Production Code: “You’re dangerous to my interests. And it excites me to play with my own life. The way we live is a constant threat to our security. But we love it—giving and taking pain.”

There’s a special place in my heart for movies with book-related skullduggery, and Sanders and Patrick’s sinister standoffs in the Public Library will delight anybody with a similar book fetish. The film doesn’t totally jell or live up to its potential, but I cannot hold trivial concerns like those against a movie that manages to mix such an exotic cocktail of bookish and lurid. Or one that leans so enthusiastically into nastiness. Even our nominal “hero,” a smarmy, unlikable investigator, delivers Myra to her death in a ruthless move that leaves us with nothing to cling to at the end but the Dewey Decimal System.

Director Larkin and DoP Joseph MacDonald endow this oddball B thriller, largely set in a fixed location, with plenty of angular shadows and darkly dramatic early noir atmosphere. Gail Patrick, resplendent in a sparkly tiara and evening gown, stalks among the stacks and lurks behind bookshelves. Lit from below by candlelight, a ghoulish George Sanders holds court by menacing his lover and two inconvenient witnesses with torture by harp string. The urban walk-of-doom ending even anticipates The Seventh Victim. Gail Patrick leaves the library and strides down eerily empty streets while trailed by a Nazi assassin. Spoiler: he gets her. Which is a shame really, because Myra and Fleg deserved another 2 or 3 movies in which to fleece rich book collectors, betray each other, and rack up their body count as a form of couples therapy.

Where can you see it?

It’s-nay on-ay Outube-yay. (At least as of this writing.)

9. The Devil Thumbs a Ride (Felix Feist, 1947)

What’s it about?

After some light robbery and murder, Steve Morgan gets a ride from a tipsy traveling salesman and invites two hitchhiking dames they meet along the way. As the cops close in, the killer pressures his unwitting companions to take shelter at an isolated beach house. Sure, this is going to end well…

Why do I love it?

Strange as it sounds, I owe a lot to that scary bastard Lawrence Tierney. After I watched this sick little movie, he invaded my nightmares and jolted me out of a wretched 8-month run of writer’s block. Call it an exorcism: I wrote almost 4,000 words about this Devil and haven’t stopped writing—mostly about noir—ever since.

The Devil Thumbs a Ride provides the key link in Tierney’s transition from old-school gangster in Dillinger to noir’s most depraved fantasy figure in Born to Kill. As it happens, Devil is so harrowingly good that it prompted me to revisit Born, which had failed to impress me around a decade ago. Turns out I adore it now. Few couples in noirdom can compete with Trevor and Tierney thirstily baiting and berating each other between illicit lip-locks. But if Robert Wise’s class-conscious A noir complicates Tierney as a kind of beast in captivity, Feist’s gleefully trashy 62-minute B noir unleashes him in a more natural habitat.

He gets to hit-and-run his way through a seedy, unhinged playground/obstacle course in a vehicle that seems bespoke to his ferocious dirtbag appeal. The confined spaces accentuate his hulking presence. There’s a tough dame to admire him—as one bullshit artist to another—and a starry-eyed nice girl for him to charm, then pulverize. The masculine cast of domesticated dorks, card-playing cops, trigger-happy patrolmen, and cartoonish yokels all serve to emphasize his steely, entertaining badness. In the midst of this chaos and opportunity, he’s more relaxed, funnier, and thus scarier when he goes in for the kiss or the kill. Which are similarly brutal in this movie.

Where can you see it?

An old TCM print is floating around ok.ru. Or you can get a Region 2 DVD. The Film Noir Foundation has restored it, but to see that version (I haven’t, alas) you’ll need to attend to a non-U.S. screening.

10. Woman on the Run (Norman Foster, 1950)

What’s it about?

Eleanor Johnson’s husband witnesses a murder and hides out somewhere in San Francisco. The police want to bring him in, make him testify, and put his neck on the line. And gangsters want to kill him. Eleanor isn’t exactly crazy about the guy herself, but the more she learns about the tight spot her husband’s in, the more she wants to save him. A wisecracking reporter offers to help Eleanor find her hubby and stay ahead of the cops, but can she trust him?

Why do I love it?

Norman Foster evidently learned a thing or two from collaborating with Orson Welles, because this is a damn near perfect thriller. Think of it as a women’s drama reborn as a chase film in the key of Welles minor. Complete with canted angles, a darkly carnivalesque set piece, and oodles of slow-burning suspense.

My favorite subtype of noir centers on stand-up gals who pursue intensely personal investigations—quests, really—through dark labyrinths of danger and deceit. Or, to generalize, girl sleuth movies. Woman on the Run presents us with a most unusual “girl sleuth” variant, in that there is nothing girlish about her at all. On the contrary, she’s a prickly, childless wife in a burnt-out marriage. Shorn of her bombshell locks and sporting an unsexy assortment of bulky coats and dresses, Ann Sheridan nails the bone-tired air of a woman who’s had the romance worn right out of her.

Compared to girl sleuths like winsome secretary Ella Raines, earthy nighthawk Susan Hayward, and streetwise knockout Lucille Ball, Sheridan cuts a dramatically less hopeful and glamorous figure. Even June Vincent in Black Angel passionately throws herself into the glitzy nightclub demimonde to save her husband’s neck; her determination and energy are unwavering. By contrast, Sheridan is sick to death of almost everybody except her dog. The story works because you sort of believe that she might give up on her husband. You know, if she got too tired or ran out of cigarettes.

I like to think of noir’s girl sleuth movies as twisted fairy tales that confront the heroines with riddles and seemingly insurmountable challenges. In Woman on the Run, we even get a devastatingly charming wolf in disguise and a life-giving potion: the ampoules of heart medicine that Eleanor needs to smuggle to her husband. Eleanor’s quest takes the form of a life-or-death scavenger hunt bound up with the enigma of her bitter, failing marriage. That unrealistic conceit results in one of the more nuanced and narratively creative depictions of a troubled marriage in film noir.

Instead of watching a marriage fall apart from beginning to end or through flashbacks, we acquire more haunting insight into Eleanor’s troubled relationship with her husband through his absence. We never see the couple interact in person until the very end. Instead, their story comes to us through fragmented clues. A cryptic letter. A dirty apartment with a cramped kitchen and cupboards full of nothing but dog food. The scornful head of a mannequin. Paintings and sketches that chart the trajectory of a promising but unfocused career circling the drain. The short story-like anecdotes that Eleanor recounts and tries to decode in an attempt to figure out where her husband first “lost” her. This is couples therapy as a puzzle box, an apt fusion of noir’s penchant for jigsaw narratives and the snarled messes of resentment that long-term relationships can become.

A movie about second chances on the edge of an abyss, Woman on the Run stands as a reminder that toughness and tenderness often intertwine in noir. David Bordwell recently pointed a finger at the “cult of noir” for making us underrate gentler genres—especially cozy family sagas—in favor of forceful, action-oriented movies. (Touché, I guess? Look at this list…) Now, I’m not going to make the case that film noir is actually warm and fuzzy. God forbid. But what of the world-weary, wised-up, bittersweet brand of tenderness that belongs to noir? Out of the Past leaves us on a note of melancholy affection beyond the grave. Shadow of a Doubt is the dark double of Meet Me in St. Louis. Inscrutable and laconic though they often were, Lake and Ladd clicked as a screen couple largely because of their moments of surprising tenderness and vulnerability.

Like Raymond Chandler wrote, in a letter reflecting on his wife’s death, “All us tough guys are hopeless sentimentalists at heart.” Some tough dames are too. And so it is with Woman on the Run. As this rueful wife scours the city of San Francisco, she summons up her memories of marriage and discovers, almost too late, how much tenderness she still harbors for her imperiled dreamer of a husband.

Where can you see it?

The FNF/UCLA restoration is available on DVD/Blu from Flicker Alley. It also shows up on TCM occasionally; it was my favorite Noir Alley discovery of last year. For the love of all that’s good and holy, do NOT watch one of the murky prints circulating on YouTube, etc. I tried to watch it that way years ago and couldn’t make it more than 5 minutes in.

11. Gone to Earth (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1950)

What’s it about?

A witchy fox-loving peasant girl in turn-of-the-century Shopshire vacillates between repulsion and attraction to the fox-hunting local squire. Which complicates things after she weds the chaste new vicar. Sure, it sounds banal, but it is really a poem woven around the titillating tropes of a tawdry romance novel.

Why do I love it?

Because it may be Technicolor’s finest hour. I had procrastinated seeing this one for a while, and that paid off because I had the privilege of seeing it at the Nitrate Picture Show. There were colors I have never seen before. Colors stolen from some fairy realm or—same difference—from the mind of the film’s whimsical heroine, a woman clearly tuned to a higher frequency. The limpid blues, torrid yellows, and rosy but forbidding pinks of Shropshire skies. The dusky cobalt of Jennifer Jones’s skirt as she casts a midnight spell. The amber glow of a sunset on fox fur. The look of white lace in the bare afternoon sunlight.

And is there any cinematic image of lost innocence more heartbreaking yet erotic than Jones standing tiptoe on grass, only to be scooped up by squire Farrar—who crushes her dropped bouquet of scarlet flowers with his shiny brown boots?

Where can you see it?

It’s on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber.

12. The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, 1953)

What’s it about?

A bounty hunter reluctantly joins forces with a prospector and a caddish cavalry officer to bring a killer and his girl accomplice back to civilization. But can the captors hold it together as the desperado attempts to divide and conquer?

Why do I love it?

Bumpy road trips with charismatic killers make for great cinema, as far as I’m concerned. Here it’s wily outlaw Robert Ryan toying with the nerves, egos, and lives of his traveling companions. Not unlike Tierney in Devil, Ryan infuses this bad hombre with such virile, animalistic arrogance that it’s almost impossible to look at anything else when he’s onscreen. But Ryan’s Ben Vandergroat is a more complex beast, with an emotional range from cringing self-pity to lustful jubilation; even three tough men on high alert can’t keep this scruffy, protean trickster down for long.

I’m fascinated by intimidating performances that involve some kind of physical limitation, like noir’s wounded gangsters who can conjure even more menace when hiding out or hospitalized. Similarly, Ryan projects such power and mastery over the situation even when tied up and thrown around like a sack of potatoes that you know you’re in the presence of one dangerous dude. Dig the way that, never so smarmy but in defeat, he pulls his own wanted poster out of his pocket with his teeth, then grins with the knowledge that he has shot his pursuer’s plans to hell. Or the cocky glances he flashes towards his fellow travelers as Janet Leigh gives him a shave or a back rub, as if to say “Don’t you wish you were in my filthy hide right now?” Or how he smirkingly tells his rambling hard-knocks life story while feverish Jimmy Stewart slips further, further, further on his sabotaged saddle and topples off his horse.

Leathery, damaged, and volatile, the Jimmy Stewart of Anthony Mann’s gritty Westerns has become my favorite Jimmy Stewart. And yet, listen to the yearning tenderness in his voice when he talks to Janet Leigh about nursing cattle through the winter. More than any man who ever graced the screen, Stewart made the prospect of settling down seem like another warm, romantic adventure rather than an end to it. (Me, I probably rather go ride-or-die with Ryan, but I can appreciate a good pitch when I hear one.) I have to hand it to Janet Leigh too. She could very easily have been merely another item thrown on the scale of the film’s high stakes: death, money, and the woman. With her delicate features accentuated by cropped hair and men’s clothes, she’s a wildcat-fierce slip of a thing who can hold her own against Stewart and his posse. And yet she captures that lost-girl devotion to father figure Ryan, devotion so intense that she refuses to see how he sees her.

Oscar-winning cinematographer William C. Mellor envelops almost every shot in breathtaking Technicolor vistas of rugged natural splendor. This pure, epic scenery provides an ironic backdrop for Ryan’s machinations. We get the mythic West of storybook illustrations wrapped around Mann’s sordid West of cheap life and dirty death.

Where can you see it?

It’s on DVD and available to purchase on YouTube.

The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947): Bad Trip

The killer admires himself in the gas station mirror. He straightens his tie and eyes his reflection with a flicker of pride, as though working out which angle would look best on his Most Wanted poster.

While bad hombre Steve Morgan adjusts his fedora and exhales billows of smoke, the camera invites us—or perhaps dares us?—to drink him in. Think of it as the tough guy equivalent of a femme fatale applying her lipstick or running a brush through her luscious locks.

Meanwhile, James ‘Fergie’ Ferguson, the tipsy sap who ill-advisedly gave Steve a lift, coos to his wife on the phone, despite the intrusions of a nagging mother-in-law. Steve shoots a sly glance towards the camera with the hint of a mocking smile. What a swell sucker he picked.

Just 5 minutes into the movie, we’ve got the low-down on Steve Morgan. Heck, in the first 20 seconds after the credits, we hear Steve’s snarling voice pulling a stickup, right before he shoots the manager and leaves him to die.

But these lovingly captured moments of before-the-mirror posturing and carnivorous glee tell us a whole lot more about Steve as the film’s perverse main attraction. Brought to life by the dangerous Lawrence Tierney, he’s the pin-up boy from hell. He’s a barrel of laughs and razor blades. He’s a hunky psychopathic tomcat. And the world is full of mice.

Adapted from Robert DuSoe’s novel, Felix Feist’s The Devil Thumbs a Ride is an icky little movie, a heady cocktail of chuckles and dread. Through some unholy miracle, screenwriter-director Feist managed to pack two car chases, a dragnet manhunt, a stomach-churning woman-in-jeopardy sequence, and maybe the worst house party ever into a lean, mean 62-minute runtime.

This pulpy, high-octane B noir from RKO flirts so outrageously with comedy that you may not see its nastiest blows coming. Deranged tonal shifts and a farfetched plot make The Devil Thumbs a Ride more disturbing than many comparatively somber and cohesive entries in the noir canon. Murder, sadism, depravity, greed, and betrayal: that’s business as usual. But peppered with wacky sitcom-style hijinks? Now that’s twisted.

This is a movie where the bad guy brazenly runs over a cop then convinces his three passengers to roll with that, because he’s just a poor misunderstood soul, see? A movie where the psycho-killer has to take a break from assaulting someone to scrub a liquor stain off the rug while pouting like a scolded little boy. Where a life-or-death warning is scribbled on a piece of paper torn from a hideously racist novelty notepad in a sleazy beach house. Where the good-time gal briefly checks out from the movie to read Balzac (tee-hee!) in her pajamas then exclaims, “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” upon learning that someone has been brutally slain. Like I said: icky.

More than mere cheap thrills, all the inappropriate comedy softens the viewer up for a shock with few equals in studio-era cinema.

Here’s the setup: traveling salesman James Ferguson (Ted North) is driving home to the ever-loving arms of his wife—on his birthday and anniversary, no less—when he picks up Steve, a hitchhiking robber on the lam. (Good call, Fergie. He has an honest face.) When the men stop for gas, two stranded dames, hardboiled blonde Agnes (Betty Lawford) and soft-spoken brunette Carol (Nan Leslie), ask for a ride. Sizing up Carol, Steve ushers the pair into the car, and Fergie, being an easygoing schmoe, doesn’t object.

Meanwhile the gas station attendant recognizes Steve from a radio bulletin and joins forces with the cops to hunt the criminal down. With the dragnet tightening, Steve persuades the crew to hide out in the unoccupied beach house bachelor pad owned by Fergie’s colleague. What could possibly go wrong?

If that plot sounds unbelievable, I urge you to park your skepticism at the credits. And remember: while normal people act pretty stupid in this movie, normal people act pretty stupid in real life too. The traits that Steve exploits—from mistrust of authority to thundering denial in the face of unpleasant facts—are present, more or less, in all of us.

The architecture of the film’s suspense turns the viewer into Steve’s accomplice; we know what he knows and what his companions apparently don’t. Willingly or not, we’re hep to his jive.

When the heat is on for Steve, the audience starts sweating. When he smirks, we’re in on the joke. We see Steve breaking bottles on the tires of Fergie’s car to prevent any members of his party from making a sudden exit. So, a few minutes later, when Fergie finds out about the flats, Steve’s wry, wolfish gaze over the poor sap’s shoulder is a private punchline for those of us keeping score at home.

Whether he’s spinning a sob story about reform school or swiping Fergie’s identity right in front of him, Tierney’s Steve lies with such fluency that I, like Sam Spade wondering at Miss Wonderly, can’t resist chuckling, “You’re good. You’re very good.”

Indeed, Devil toys with the viewer’s tendency to identify with—or at least enjoy the antics of—a charming psychopath, that evergreen pop culture favorite. At the risk of overanalyzing a B noir, the push-pull of attraction and repulsion towards Steve operates as a meta commentary on cinema’s addiction to violent men. This Devil reels us in with the promise of a good time, only to leave us grossed out by how far we’ve gone with a killer.

Most subversive of all, Devil reminds us that reality doesn’t respect the Production Code. And clutching the guardrails of conventional moral wisdom might lead you right off a cliff. Almost like a matched-pair experiment, the film’s two main women take contrasting approaches to being cooped up with a killer, and let’s just say it turns out far better for one of them. Virtue might be its own reward, but sometimes it’s incompatible with survival.

Worth the price of admission then as well as now is Lawrence Tierney. One contemporary trade journal reviewer advised, “Plug Tierney as the screen’s new ‘tough guy.’” Interestingly, Tierney doesn’t engage in much tough guy business. He doesn’t throw a punch or fire more than a shot until the very end. Yet he radiates the promise of toughness, a laid-back assumption of dominance and ownership over everyone and everything around him.

Consider the speech Steve lavishes on Carol, minutes after they’ve met. Taking up more than his share of the backseat, he praises her hair, her teeth, her skin, and “them hard-to-find Technicolor eyes.” An actor bent on winning our sympathy, or simply building up his appeal to the female public, might be tempted to wring this spiel and its glib cosmetic-commercial poetry for a little romantic kick.

Feist and Tierney, however, understood that this is not so much a string of compliments, or even a proposition, as a threat. He delivers the lines with a combination of oleaginous sensuality and deadpan calculation that would be humorous if it weren’t so creepy. Behind him, a silhouette of his fedora and head crowds the tight frame further, as though his dark intentions had materialized into a shadowy form. Make no mistake: Steve is itemizing her attractions like he’d make a mental note of jewels in the window of a store he’s planning to rob.

As an antisocial nightmare hitchhiker, Steve is a male counterpart to the volcanic Vera from Detour. Both of them hijack their weak-willed drivers, wheedle their captive audiences off the road, and trap them in claustrophobic private hells of booze and bad vibes. Both fuel their respective films with exhilaratingly unwholesome rock-and-roll energy. And both incarnate the underbelly of post-WWII America, but from different gender perspectives.

Just as Ann Savage’s Vera seemed to erupt with the long-silenced fury of a million women harassed, abused, and exploited, Tierney’s Steve incarnates the mid-century straight male id, the essence of toxic masculinity in a sharp suit and fedora. Rather than mere parallels, a cause-and-effect relationship connects these two landmark psychos of the noirverse. Men like Steve are the reason why Vera is, well… Vera.

Steve stands in stark contrast to the two cloyingly domestic men who round out the main cast: Fergie, a devoted married man, and Jack, the boyish gas station attendant who proudly displays a photo of his little daughter. (A photo which Steve cruelly mocks: “With those ears, it won’t be long before she can fly.”) Bookended by these happy hubbies, our resident psychopath comes across as the return of a collectively repressed killer instinct. After all, when you ship out thousands and thousands of men to shoot people in a strange land for a few years, not all of them can come home and settle down to become a Fergie or a Jack. There are bound to be complications.

In 1946, according to the Motion Picture Herald, the Office of War Information communicated with Hollywood because “Washington felt it would be a good idea for the screen to prepare the population for the arrival home of a large category of veterans in the psycho-neurotic category.” A dirtbag like Steve probably wasn’t what the OWI had in mind, but “having started delving into the realm of abnormal psychology, Hollywood’s considerable colony of writers kept right on delving,” the Herald dryly noted.

Savage’s Vera and Tierney’s Steve Morgan operate outside the margins of polite society; yet both hitchhikers paradoxically serve as bleak, noirish parodies of awful spouses. One can imagine a henpecked husband in 1945 recognizing his own ball-and-chain in shrewish Vera, as she nags Roberts to the breaking point with her get-rich-quick schemes. Steve’s habit of ordering women around—and slapping them when they don’t comply—casts him as an abusive husband figure.

Once they reach the beach house, Steve starts barking orders at Agnes and Carol like a domineering hubby fresh from a long day at the office. “Look, baby, you heard me: bring over that bottle and two glasses,” he snaps to Carol. A few scenes later it’s Agnes’s turn to play wifey. He literally tells her to get in the kitchen and make him a sandwich: “Hey, Aggie, if you’re cleanin’ out the icebox, how about whippin’ me up a cheese on rye?” (Because murder apparently works up an appetite? Look, I warned you this movie was icky.)

Regardless of what Steve might represent, Feist makes the most of Tierney’s intimidating physical presence and his unusual face, which could morph from stone-cold handsome in one shot to downright gruesome in the next. Or within the same shot, for that matter. When he first makes a move on Carol at the beach house—only to be interrupted by the doorbell—he’s all matinee idol in profile, then all craggy villain from the front.

Cameraman J. Roy Hunt’s lighting takes the title literally, amplifying the diabolical impact of Tierney’s mug. During tense moments, Hunt shines vampirish beams around the criminal’s eyes or makes him glow and leer like a possessed waxwork figure.

Lately I’ve been noticing how much more men’s hair seems to move in film noir compared to other classic films, but Steve’s hair in The Devil Thumbs a Ride might set the record for most activity. A big mass of wavy dark hair often escapes its Brylcreem bonds to hang rakishly across his forehead. That says something about him: even this man’s hair is out of line. It’s 1947; hair isn’t supposed to work like that. If a man’s hair moves this much in a studio film, he’s Trouble with a capital T. Not that we need any more confirmation.

For a lot of this movie, Steve has command of our eyeballs. A professor of mine once pointed out how much of The Big Sleep consists of Bogie walking across rooms, because Hawks knew Bogie looked good doing it. Feist capitalized similarly on Tierney here. Even when the movie parks itself in an isolated location, Steve’s self-assured gestures and perambulations maintain a sense of entertaining movement, whether he’s lighting cigarettes, surreptitiously locking doors, disabling phones and getaway vehicles, or rifling people’s pockets.

Some actors can play scary. Some actors are scary. Tierney belongs to the latter category. Nowadays it’s a meme to joke about wanting celebrities to murder you; Tierney’s star image got there about 70 years ahead of the curve. Ironically, the run of destructive behavior and arrests that derailed Tierney’s career also boosted his mystique and secured his place in noir history. Part of the morbid thrill of watching Tierney lies in wondering exactly where the actor ends and the performance begins. As Quentin Tarantino quipped, when Gerald Peary asked about the cantankerous Reservoir Dogs gang boss in a 1992 interview, “Do you remember his 1947 film The Devil Thumbs a Ride? That could almost be entitled The Lawrence Tierney Story.”

In fairness to Tierney, hell-raiser though he undoubtedly was, he didn’t see himself in this Devil and told Rick McKay that he “resented” the film: “I thought of myself as a nice guy who wouldn’t do rotten things. I hated that character so much but I had to do it for the picture.” Perhaps that’s how he channeled such ferocity for the role.

He’s more or less the whole show in The Devil Thumbs a Ride and arguably more in his element here than in the lurid Born to Kill, made the same year. As social-climbing, murder-happy Sam Wild, Tierney got to rack up a higher body count, indulge in more onscreen violence, and lounge on beds while smoldering with forbidden proto-punk allure. But Sam’s muddied motivations and sheer recklessness dealt the actor a tricky hand to play. Though Tierney makes an electrifying homme fatal, Sam is way out of his depth and not exactly blessed in the brains department. Luckily, his other assets convince couger-ish divorcee Helen Brent (Claire Trevor) to cover for him, even as she reminds him, between kisses, of what an awful bungler he is. Tierney probably never topped the bloodthirsty heat of That Scene In The Pantry with Trevor. Maybe nobody has. But he’s a fish—a shark, surely—out of water in his big A-picture showcase. Robert Wise emphasized Tierney’s garishness in the mausoleum-like trappings of wealth and power that don’t truly belong to Sam.

Despite how he felt about Devil, Tierney manages to seem more at ease, and thus more frightening, as vicious bastard Steve Morgan, unhampered by long-range social aspirations. His occasional awkwardness, a liability in Born to Kill, only added to his unvarnished scariness and verisimilitude as Steve. At times you feel as though you’re watching an escaped psycho-killer who just wandered onto the set and started doing his thing.

The Devil Thumbs a Ride gave Tierney the chance to hone the lethal charisma that catapulted him to fame in surprise box office hit Dillinger (1945). Though supported by such old pros as Edmund Lowe, Elisha Cook, Jr., and Eduardo Ciannelli, Tierney carries the film on the strength of his desperado swagger. Photoplay reviewer Sara Hamilton wasn’t too impressed by the film, but rather taken with the star: “The lad looks good in both the longshots and close-ups.” Sure, he guns down a bunch of people and chops up his moll’s boytoy with an axe, but it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for him in the end, holed up in a garret then led to his ignominious death, like a prize bull to the slaughterhouse.

The success of Dillinger—along with Tierney’s reputation for brawling and boozing—contributed to his typecasting as criminals and tough mugs. “For some reason they always cast me as the mean asshole,” a still-pugnacious Tierney lamented to Eddie Muller in 1999. Well, not always. He did play a few heroic guys in his prime and imbued them with more endearing flair than I would’ve expected. Yet an air of menace and haywire virility clung to Tierney, onscreen and off.

In Bodyguard (1948), he’s a 1940s Dirty Harry who gets kicked off the force after belting his superior in the jaw—which makes him suitable for framing when the boss turns up dead. In Step by Step (1946), he’s a damsel-saving, Nazi-punching ex-Marine who travels with an adorable dog. And even so, you can’t quite blame the aforementioned damsel (Anne Jeffreys) for locking her door and pushing a chest of drawers in front of it before she can sleep easily in the same hotel suite with Tierney.

After watching The Devil Thumbs a Ride, you definitely won’t blame her. Because (spoiler alert) all the film’s queasy comedy temporarily comes to a screeching halt when Steve, having eliminated all apparent obstacles, decides to force himself on Carol. Once Agnes shuts her door on them, the situation escalates rapidly, as brassy swing music—Steve’s choice to set the mood—blares shrilly from the radio.

Realistically blocked with struggles shown mostly from an unromanticized distance, this attempted rape scene hits hard even today. “Don’t make me chase ya, baby. It’s not gonna help,” Steve snarls, pushing Carol towards a divan and wrestling her arms down.

Just as he gets Carol in a headlock, the music breaks for a news bulletin. Steve lets go and Carol darts away to hear a warning about a guy called Steve Morgan who killed a theater manager and won’t hesitate to kill again. The camera tracks into a stunned close-up of Carol. A scenario that seemingly couldn’t get any worse somehow did. She’s trapped with a potential rapist. In a locked room. In the middle of nowhere. And it turns out he’s a murderer too.

Suddenly the film’s whole structure of identification shifts. The audience is no longer Steve’s knowing accomplice, but Carol’s paralyzed ally. We’re in the moment with her and this monster, and it’s scary as hell. Mercifully, Fergie returns, but not before Steve clips Carol on the jaw—loudly enough to make the viewer flinch—and warns her to “keep that little trap of yours clamped up tight.” Unaware of what he’s interrupting, Fergie proceeds to bawl Steve out for being an untidy guest.

Now ensues a white-knuckle scene of Hitchcockian normalcy-gone-wrong as Carol tries to signal to Fergie how much of a jam they’re in—without alerting Steve—while they clean up the beach house. She scribbles a note to warn Fergie, crumples it up, and passes it to him, along with the vacuum cleaner. But the note tumbles to the floor.

Clueless Fergie runs the vacuum and nudges the balled-up note closer… closer… closer to Steve as Carol watches in horror. Again, swing music from the radio frets on the viewer’s nerves, its cheeriness mocking the direness of what we’re seeing.

Steve picks up the piece of paper. And promptly tosses it in the fire. Phew.

Relieved but desperate and disgusted, Carol snatches a makeshift map and dashes out of the house. Steve, squatting on the floor, relaunches his aggressive pitch, now in the form of lewd life coaching: “You wanna be an actress, ya gotta live. What’d’ya think makes those love scenes in pictures look so real? Experience! Nothing but!” Turning his head and realizing that Carol’s about to escape his clutches and probably contact the cops, he runs after her, much to Fergie’s puzzlement and dismay.

Since the film has pivoted to Carol’s perspective, nothing bad will happen to her, right? Wrong. Dead wrong.

After a scene at police headquarters, we’re back to the beach house. Steve returns. Alone. Sullen. Casually dabbing blood from the scratches on his face. The canary is missing, and he’s got yellow feathers sticking out of his mouth. It’s both a punchline and a punch in the gut.

Obvious though the implication is, I confess that my brain refused to add it up for a few minutes. I thought, “Oh, good, she fought him off.” Because that’s how these movies have trained my brain to work. In an ordinary old Hollywood film, we’d find out that Steve only beat Carol up and locked her in the trunk of the car or something. While such a contrivance would stretch our disbelief (think Mrs. Vargas in Touch of Evil), we’d be grateful enough to accept it.

But no.

When Fergie goes to look for Carol, we find out that this is no ordinary old Hollywood movie. That grating, upbeat swing music drifts eerily from the house. And then Fergie sees something off-screen; the camera tracks into a shocked close-up as dramatic music drowns out the radio. It’s bad. Really bad.

Carol is dead. Floating face-down in the lagoon with bruises on her jaw and God only knows where else. A sweet little gal who didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and put up a fight.

Even once the edgy shock of this thriller wears off, it rewards repeat viewings to notice how Nan Leslie mines the more interesting aspects of her ill-starred character. Instead of a mere sacrificial lamb for the big bad wolf to destroy, Leslie astutely portrays Carol as a gentle, intelligent girl marked by a hard-knocks childhood. Pay attention to her firm refusal in the backseat of the car when Steve tries to push a “snort” of brandy on her. Then watch for the aching, silent, oh-no-not-again sadness that Carol exudes while Steve plies the alcoholic nightwatchman with booze. Like she’s having flashbacks to the home she ran away from.

Carol knows—knew—that this can be a cruel world. She had almost certainly slapped a guy for getting fresh before. Yet, as is so often the case in real life, the lost girl did gravitate towards the big, handsome, morally bankrupt guy who built her up and played her compassion like a virtuoso. “Background and environment can do strange things to people. I know because, as a child, I had a difficult time myself,” Carol says to Steve at one point, sympathetically handing him a cup of coffee. As she rationalizes his actions with this choice bit of pop psychology, the sweetly romantic strains of “Dreaming Out Loud” play on the radio in ironic commentary. Steve’s expression of stifled amusement is priceless. I can stop selling her a bill of goods, he seems to be thinking; she’ll do all the work for me. Primed by her own “background and environment,” Carol convinces herself that he can’t be all bad, then gets killed finding out that, yes, indeed he can. The fact that Carol is ultimately too decent to fathom what she’s up against—that her empathy causes her downfall—makes her fate all the more disturbing.

According to the strict moral laws of the day, Carol committed no major transgression. The film doesn’t try to victim-blame her, which is significant, given that classic Hollywood films often threaten sexual violence, but rarely inflict it on characters we care about. (The bogus implication, in most cases, is that being good is enough to save you.) Weird and wild though it seems, Feist’s no-holds-barred noir is not inconsistent with the world we inhabit; sometimes bad things happen to good people, simply for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

At this point, there’s only one lady hitchhiker standing, so let’s spare a moment for Agnes, the film’s second most chilling character. Despite her bargain-basement Blondell mannerisms and general 1930s throwback vibe, as this thread discusses, she’s no chorus girl with a heart of gold. She’s a peroxide Judas Iscariot, ready to sell you out for a pair of stockings. When Steve is assaulting Carol, Agnes peers out from her cozy pajama party of one in a side bedroom. Does she say, “Quick, Carol, hide in here” or “Hey, give it a rest, Steve. The kid said she’s tired”? Nope. She says, “Ain’t a lady entitled to some privacy? Close that door.” So much for solidarity, sister.

After emerging from her beauty rest, Agnes teasingly addresses Steve as “Romeo,” then gushes “You’re a right guy!” when he volunteers to filch some stockings for her. Steve lights her cigarette in a shot of sinister communion, strangely dark and classically noirish for the well-lit beach house, that cinches their bond of shared rottenness.

Unlike Steve, Agnes appears to have a working set of moral gears; she just doesn’t bother to wind them up too often. I detect a hint of reproach in her voice as she asks, “Why’d you have to give it to the kid?” after Fergie discovers the body. Agnes listens to Steve’s too-convenient explanation and decides not to probe further, lest she end up floating in the lagoon herself.

From the way she purses her lips, we know that she knows there was a lot more to Carol’s death than a misplaced punch on the jaw, but she aligns herself with Steve nevertheless. And takes his blood money. And tackles the role of Mrs. James Ferguson with riotous gusto, simpering over Carol’s fate while accusing the real Fergie of Steve’s crimes. Agnes, for goodness sake, Carol’s cold, wet corpse is lying on the sofa. Being a cynical survivalist is one thing, but you don’t have to be so damned enthusiastic about it.

While the film’s too-neat wrap-up informs us via newspaper that Agnes is facing jail time for her misdeeds, that fate strikes this viewer as a weak comeuppance. I’d still rather be in Agnes’s shoes than Carol’s. Better a perfidious floozy behind bars than an angelic waif 6 feet under. By denying the audience the fair outcomes it expects from Breen-sanctioned Hollywood movies, The Devil Thumbs a Ride thumbs its nose at the idea of a just universe with a cohesive moral logic. Sometimes the only one with his eye on the sparrow is the predator preparing to devour it. God is nowhere to be found in this film, but the devil? He gets around. And that, friends, is the true meaning of noir.

Perfect movies have their place, but sometimes a flawed, outlandish, off-kilter one haunts you more. Just how much of an impression did this nasty B noir make on me? Well, a few nights after I first saw it, I had a bad dream that late-1940s Lawrence Tierney was threatening me. I woke up right then, which is fortunate. Based on this movie, I wouldn’t give myself great odds.

Where can you see it? The Devil Thumbs a Ride is not currently available on a legit Region 1 DVD. I shelled out for the Region 2 Spanish DVD. It’s crisper and much easier on the eyes than some of the pixelated DVR-ed prints around the internet. The screenshots in this post show what that DVD looks like (though I color-corrected the bluish tint).

Update from Eddie Muller on Twitter: “This was just restored through a partnership of the Library of Congress and Film Noir Foundation. Only problem is that rights issues prevent us from screening the film in North America.”

Darn. I hope they resolve those issues in the future. Because more people deserve to see this vividly messed-up movie looking as good as possible.

“Like a Big Family”: The Former Child Actors of Father Goose Share Fond Memories at TCMFF

Biting one of the most famous people in the world, even if they know you have to do it for a movie, would be a daunting prospect for most people.

But that was the task facing Sharyl Locke during the making of Father Goose (1964). Playing Jenny, the youngest of the film’s gaggle of international schoolgirls, Locke had to express her traumatized character’s anger and fear silently. And occasionally with her teeth.

“I had to bite Cary Grant,” Locke remembered. “And when I bit him the first time, I was apprehensive, and I didn’t want to hurt him. So I just kind of barely bit him when he put his finger up. And he says, ‘No, hon, you need to bite. I want to be able to see those teeth marks!’”

So Locke took the hint and chomped down for the benefit of the camera’s harsh scrutiny. And Grant gave her high marks for realism.

“Once I did bite down,” she said, “[Grant] went around the whole stage showing everybody. ‘She did bite me! She did great! Isn’t that great?’”

At the TCM Classic Film Festival, three of the former child actors from Father Goose shared stories in conversation with Leonard Maltin. Locke was the only one who pursued acting, building a resume that ranged from voice-overs on Chevrolet commercials to a role in the William Castle thriller I Saw What You Did.

By contrast, Laurelle Felsette Johnson and Nicole Felsette Reynolds, who played the twins Angelique and Dominique, never set out to be actors. Their Father Goose roles found them instead. When the casting call went out, the French-born sisters lived in L.A. but spoke French at home.

“We didn’t have an agent or anything,” recalled Felsette Johnson. “One day an agent was looking for twins who spoke French, because that’s what the script asked for. This agent called the French Consulate who replied, ‘We don’t have any twins who speak French, but we have sisters that look alike.’

“So the agent called us. We went to meet with Mr. Nelson, the director, and then we went to meet with Mr. Grant. I was so shy. I brought my autograph book, thinking, ‘We probably won’t get this role, but at least I’ll get his autograph!’ But I didn’t dare ask him for it until we wrapped and finished up the movie. And then we did a screen test and we were told that we were picked.”

Thus began a nine-week odyssey that took the girls from Universal Studios to Jamaica to shoot one of the most charming family comedies ever committed to film. It must be a surreal experience to travel the world with movie stars, be immortalized in a hit movie, then return to your everyday existence.

“How do you look upon it today?” asked Leonard Maltin. “As an adventure in your young life?”

“You want the truth?” returned Felsette Reynolds.

And here a “Yes!” rose from the audience. But it was a “Yes” laced with unease.

When you love a movie as much as many of us love Father Goose, you worry about what you might learn—especially when the movie involves children. Could you ever look at a film the same way if you knew that it put a damper on someone’s childhood (or worse)? Fortunately, any such fears were quickly dispelled by the answer.

“We got out of school!” enthused Felsette Reynolds, gushing with the glee of a little girl unleashed on an island paradise. “We had five weeks in the studio with a teacher that was worthless. I still cannot do long division because of her. And then we had four weeks in Jamaica which was really being on vacation.”

Felsette Johnson picked up the story of their off-screen hijinks: “We were very well behaved when we were at Universal Studios for the first five weeks when we weren’t on set. We were in the trailer in the classroom—one classroom for all seven of us. And that’s why we never learned anything!

“But when we got to Jamaica the director had brought two children. The producer had brought two children. So there was a whole gang of us. When we got off the set from working and we were back at the hotel, we had the complete run of the place. There was not a nook or cranny that we left unexplored! In fact, we broke the elevator.”

Apart from the occasional smoke-filled room of poker players or screening of a risqué Liz Taylor movie, practically nothing was off limits to this exuberant girl gang. In fact, the Father Goose crew got in the spirit with them: “In the evenings the crew would make us up,” recalled Felsette Johnson. “Everybody was staying at the same hotel. And they would make us up like a vamp or a mustachioed man or with bleeding knees and faces and stuff. So it was a lot of fun. We had a very good time.”

The most well-known story about the making of Father Goose centers on the tense scene where Walter Eckland’s dinghy—overloaded with seven schoolgirls and their teacher—nearly capsizes in the wake of two large ships. Filming in a large studio tank didn’t quite go as planned. And hilarity ensued.

As Locke recalled, “When were at the sound stage where they filmed all of us in the dingy and when the boats were going by, that was on the screen [rear projected]. But there was a wave machine. I don’t know if it was operated by a person or if it was automatic or whatever it was, but it malfunctioned and it kept making waves and it sank our dinghy while all of us were on it.”

When the boat began to take on water, Locke got an impromptu lesson in the value of a good behind-the-scenes story from her co-star. “I knew how to swim and I started to go,” she remembered, “Cary Grant told me, ‘Do not go! This is great.’ And I said, ‘But I know how to swim!’ And he said, ‘That’s okay! It makes a great publicity picture.’”

Locke and company continued to splash around and allowed themselves to be valiantly “rescued” by the crew, as publicity cameras snapped away.

Felsette Johnson spoke warmly of Leslie Caron, who starred as the prim school teacher Miss Freneau: “As much as she was aloof, she was also a generous person.”

Caron sprinkled moments of learning and fun throughout the shoot for Felsette Johnson and her sister: “I took a liking to her, and she took a liking to me. As soon as she knew and learned that we were studying ballet, in between takes, because, you know, they do three, four, five six, takes, she would show me how to point my toe or do an arabesque. I got the special privilege of being able to visit her in her private trailer while she got her hair done or makeup done or she was running lines. And for a nine year old kid to be next to such a star, that is just so cool!”

And Caron stepped in—literally—to coach Felsette Johnson during a tricky moment towards the end of the film. “In the scene where we have to run back into the hut because the plane’s coming in, the director Mr. Nelson said to me, ‘You have to trip.’ And as a nine year old girl, you don’t want to trip! That’s geeky. That’s embarrassing in the schoolyard. You know, it just wasn’t working. So Leslie Caron said to him, ‘Shoot this. This will work.’ And he called, ‘Action!’ And as I turned around she stuck her foot out. And I went flying.”

Caron, with her extensive dance training, no doubt knew how to trip someone for maximum visual impact—and minimum physical risk. As Felsette Johnson pointed out, the anecdote shows Caron’s dedication to helping the children give their best, most believable performances.

Beyond the cast’s headliners, the interviewees remembered how the crew went out of their way to make the girls comfortable, even as they managed a difficult shoot. “In Jamaica they were wearing shorts and they were all shirtless. And we had a lot of shots with water,” explained Felsette Reynolds. “Half of them were wading into the water up to their waists. The camera was on a raft, especially that last scene when he comes in and turns over our little dinghy.”

The little girls in the cast, however, had to deal with a special challenge in those watery scenes. “We were wearing really heavy suits. I mean, they were truly wool. They were really thick.”

So the crew stepped in with a breezy solution: “They made us these little dresses that we wore when we didn’t have to wear our wool or his outfits [clothes borrowed from Walter Eckland on the island]. And we called them our ‘pinkies.’”

The design of the dresses helped ensure continuity between the studio and location footage. “They were seersucker but with long sleeves, because everything had to match the takes we had done in the studio so we couldn’t get any sun. We couldn’t get tan.

“The only one who could get any sun was Cary Grant. He would sit there with his reflector.”

Well, there have to be some perks to being a star…

“They were all really wonderful to us,” summarized Felsette Reynolds. “It was like a big family. We called it the Father Goose Company.”

At the TCM Film Festival, actors often discover, to their humbled surprise, that audiences still cherish a film they made decades ago. As Felsette Johnson said after watching Father Goose with the TCMFF audience, “When you’re nine years old, you make a movie. You know what was filmed. You know what wasn’t filmed. And you watch it with your family and you don’t get the jokes or the laugh lines! It’s terrific to hear you guys react so positively to this movie.”

In this instance, the delight goes both ways. It warmed my heart to learn that this film brought such joy to its child stars—because it imbued my childhood with vicarious adventure. In Leonard Maltin’s words, “It’s such fun to watch this film. It’s really nice to hear that it was a nice experience for all of you. That makes it even more pleasurable.”