After saving her from a group of hooligans, Irish sailor Michael O'Hara (Orson Welles) is hired by Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth), wife of disabled criminal defence attorney Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane), to work on her husband's yacht as they sail from New York to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. Attraction grows between Michael and Elsa during the voyage, but Michael soon finds himself tangled up in a scheme by Bannister's partner George Grisby (Glenn Anders) to fake his death that goes disastrously wrong. Based on the novel If I Die Before I Wake by Sherwood King, this was rather controversial at the time due to Welles getting his famous wife (they were amicably divorced by the time it was released) to bleach and cut her legendary long red hair. The script employs all the usual tropes of the noir genre, almost like Welles was playing it safe in order to get commercial hit (something that frequently eluded him), only really flexing his creative muscles in the direction, notably that famous (often imitated) climactic showdown in the hall of mirrors.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Navy sailor Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd) returns home to discover his wife has been cheating on him. The next day she's found murdered and he's the prime suspect. Marshall's direction has less life in it than the murder victim while Raymond Chandler's script, which wasn't finished when filming started and then had to be changed at the last minute because the studio wanted a different killer, is just aggressively tedious. This was the third of four films starring Ladd and Veronica Lake, who were paired up because Lake was the only actress short enough to make Ladd look tall. They know how to banter, but there's really nothing to either of their characters. Lake's is just a complete irrelevance, there simply so the leading man has someone to smooch in the end.
Rating: ⭐⭐
Polly and Ray Cutler (Jean Peters and Casey Adams) arrive at Niagara Falls for a delayed honeymoon, but find the cabin they'd reserved still occupied by the unstable George Loomis (Joseph Cotten) and his beautiful, but unfaithful wife Rose (Marilyn Monroe). Niagara is a fairly standard noir, but there are a couple of things about it that really standout. First there's all that lush technicolour photography, a major departure for a genre deeply rooted in German expressionism, that the filmmakers take full advantage of to really show off the irresistible allure of their leading lady. Originally Polly was going to be the main character and played by Anne Baxter, but after she dropped out Peters replaced her and the film was reworked as a starring vehicle for Monroe, then one of studio's rising stars. This is a rare chance to see her cast as the villainous seductress, someone who plays the innocent all the while smiling with delight at the torment she inflicts on her husband as she plots his murder.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
American Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) works as the manager of an illicit high class casino in Buenos Aires for his friend Ballin Mundson (George Macready), but their friendship sours when Ballin introduces Johnny to his new wife Gilda (Rita Heyworth), who also happens to be Johnny's old flame. Lots of noir cliches, very slow and overlong with an incredibly rushed ending, it has endured as long as it has mostly just for being a Rita Hayworth showcase. Every scene with her is electric, especially when she starts taking her gloves off during THAT dance number.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
After his partner is killed, private detective Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) is pulled into a twisted case involving several shady characters and the hunt for a legendary lost treasure. Not all femme fatales are sultry sex bombs. Some play the meek and innocent victim who lure men with more chivalry than sense to their doom, and the undisputed queen of them is Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon. Bolstered by a pair of scene stealing turns by Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, this is the quintessential noir detective drama that established newbie John Huston as one of Hollywood's biggest directors and turned Bogie into a cinematic legend.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) falls hard for the scheming Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) and is drawn into her plot to murder her husband for the insurance. One of the appeals of classic film noir is that it was one genre in Hays Code Hollywood that could get away with having protagonists who are just truly terrible people, and they don't come more terrible than Stanwyck's scintillatingly ruthless housewife, who turns every man she meets into putty, ready to commit murder at the drop of a towel, which is especially impressive with that hairdo (an intentional choice to show how tacky she was). This was the film that really put Billy Wilder on the map and is the noir that all others have been chasing ever since, but never quite catching.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
After trying to escape his past by hiding out working in a small town gas station, Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum) recounts the story of how he life was turned upside down when he was hired by Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) to find his girlfriend Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) after she put a bullet in him and ran off with $40,000 of his money. Jacques Tourneur was best known for atmospheric horror films like Cat People (1942) and Night of the Demon (1957), but also found time to make this stylish noir classic, bringing along his Cat People DP Nicholas Musuraca to provide all that gorgeous monochrome cinematography. Greer's Kathie is one of cinema's most poisonous femme fatales, a burning flame that Mitchum's laconic gumshoe is irresistibly drawn to again and again. Why? Baby, he just don't care.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Mark Greig has been writing for Doux Reviews since 2011 More Mark Greig
I could watch The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity a hundred times and never be bored. They are just brilliant. Bogart's final scene with Mary Astor is just ... well, classic. 'I hope they don't hang you, Precious, by that sweet neck.'
ReplyDeleteI've added Out of the Past to my list, along with The Lady from Shanghai and Niagara, none of which I've seen. Looking forward to them!
The only one here that I've seen is The Maltese Falcon and it's excellent. My mom loves that period of movies and especially mystery style movies like that, so I had a lot of exposure to it as a kid.
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