Time Out of Mind: Not a noir at all, alas

Time Out of Mind (1947), Dir. Robert Siodmak, 89 mins, Blu-ray

While the previous film in Indicator’s Universal Noir Vol.2 box, Lady on a Train, was borderline noir at best, I can’t imagine anyone really having any argument for Robert Siodmak’s Time Out of Mind qualifying as noir in any way at all. This is really just a historical romantic drama, adapted from a popular book of the time written by Rachel Field. Its general thesis is for women to stand by their man, trust their heart and that love conquers all in the end… sentiments that any proper film noir would kick in the trash with utter contempt. I can only imagine that Indicator thought its inclusion worthy if only because it was directed by Siodmak, who had great success in noir with films like The Killers, Phantom Lady, Cry of the City and Criss Cross. As such, I suppose this has some worth as a curio, and certainly its got some interesting moments and direction… characters separated by doorways or windows, for instance, to represent their relationship or social standing/separation. The film also features Ella Raines, so brilliant in Phantom Lady, but alas utterly wasted here.

The plot of Time Out of Mind is pretty dull- it’s 1899, and Christopher Fortune (Robert Hutton) the son of a wealthy shipping magnate in Maine angers his father by preferring a career in music rather than the family business, and is encouraged to follow his dreams rather than family duty by servant girl Kate (Phyliss Calvert) who loves him dearly, but of which Christopher is oblivious.  Kate helps Christopher find the finances to enable him to flee to Paris where he will enrol in a music school. Three years later, he finally returns home, but married, breaking Kate’s heart. The marriage is doomed, as Christopher’s bride is a beautiful, rich but thoroughly nasty, using her father’s wealth to further Christopher’s musical dreams and live vicariously through his success, but Christopher’s heart isn’t in it, he feels a fraud.  Can Kate’s endless love for him put him on the right path to success and happiness?

Hmm, take a guess how this film ends. Hardly your usual noir there. The whole thing is pure melodrama, feels artificial and staged, and you can see where its all going from the start.  It doesn’t work at all, and Siodmak himself dismissed it. There’s indications of where a noir would go with something like this- Christopher’s sister Rissa (Ella Raines) is so obsessed herself with Christopher that her attention is borderline incestuous – so I could imagine this becoming transformed into something genuinely subversive, with three women fighting over a man too self-obsessed to really notice or care, but this was released in 1947, after all, and far too early to expect something like Twin Peaks. Shame- a David Lynchian take on Time Out of Mind would be a film I’d like to see.

As it is, there’s little here to encourage repeat viewings. At least Lady on a Train, likewise hardly noir at all,  was snappily paced, with genuine twists and turns and a captivating leading lady. This film really labours for little reason at all.

I, the Executioner: do bad girls deserve THIS?

I, the Executioner (1968), Dir. Tai Kato, 91 mins, Blu-ray

I sense that as far as this blog goes, 2024 may prove to be a Radiance-dominated year, as other boutique labels divert to films which don’t particularly appeal to me – such as Indicator becoming so obsessed by Jean Rollin films or Mexican horrors (well, I had a good run of Hammer and Film Noir boxsets so can’t complain).

Anyway, here we are, another week, another Radiance release- this time Tai Kato’s neo-noir serial killer film I, the Executioner. As its title likely suggests, this is not a film for the mild-mannered or easily offended, and it is most definitely misogynistic. They certainly don’t make them like this anymore, but thank goodness boutique labels can release them on Blu-Ray…

A woman is stripped and beaten until she writes onto a notepad the names and locations of four other women, whereupon she is then raped, viciously stabbed and finally bludgeoned to death.  So begins a series of murders that upon Police investigation seem to be linked to the suicide of a young man  who jumped off the roof of the same building where the first murder occurred.

Considering how genuinely nasty the subject matter of this film is, it is quite beautifully filmed (in stark black and white, intensifying its highly-stylised, noir feel). There is something quite unnerving about the unusual composition in the framing of most shots -very often the camera is positioned at extremely low angles, looking upwards or from an obstructed viewpoint. Apparently, this was a preference of Kato in his films, here giving I, the Executioner a somewhat experimental look that imbues it with a docu-drama feel that is at odds with the fantastic, exploitive (sexploitive?) subject matter of the narrative. Kato also has a tendency to put the camera right into the action with very extreme close-ups, powerfully heightening the intensity of certain moments.

But its much more than an exploitation b-movie; well, of course it IS an exploitation movie but its more sophisticated than that, preferring to tone down, as it progresses, the graphic violence seen in the beginning of the film in favour of using its narrative to consider then-pressing  topics of sexuality, promiscuousness, pornography and a moral decline of urban Japan. It even manages to subvert something like a gangrape (usually a crime perpetuated by males) into one shockingly actioned by women at a hen-party driven into a frenzy from watching pornography. Evidently the hedonistic liberalism of the swinging sixties was a rather troubling subject in Japan at the close of that decade, some of the resulting changes deemed alarming for society and reflected in films such as this. In this respect, it presumably predates Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, a film notorious for its sexual violence and rather more well-known than this film was.

Watching a film set in Japan often feels like watching some science fiction set on another planet, I suppose this is accentuated when its something made decades ago (I wonder if contemporary Japanese viewers would watch this film with the same nostalgic curiosity that I do when watching, say, a film like Saturday Night, Sunday Morning?).  This film is evidently influenced by Western culture, particularly 1940s/1950s American film noir, albeit this film tackles its subject more graphically than any of those American noir could- so its this weird hybrid, I guess. But in any case, Japanese culture is so very different to Western culture, its endlessly fascinating  exploring it in something like this.

This film is not an easy watch and it feels a little strange to declare it entertaining, given its subject matter, but I thought it was excellent and I’m sure I’ll watch it again several times.  The craft behind it is clearly evident and its much more than just a sleazy b-picture. My only criticism of this Radiance release (incredibly, the Obi-strip assures me it is the first release of this film on Blu-ray anywhere in the world) is that I wish the film had a commentary track. I think a film as bold and odd as this proves to be deserves, even needs, one. I guess Radiance didn’t deem it worthy of the effort/expense, more’s the pity.

How odd though, how these things work out, watching this film so soon after Peeping Tom, and both films sharing the same serial-killer, sexual undertones etc of Hitchcock’s Psycho. I need to turn towards more life-affirming stuff, pronto…

Pietro Germi? Who?

Pietro Germi died on 5th December, 1974. I was eight years old back then; it would take nearly fifty years before I finally even knew he existed. I don’t know why things like that bug me sometimes, but they do. When I was watching Germi in his great noir murder mystery The Facts of Murder from 1959 (a film whose existence itself I have been utterly ignorant of), I kept thinking, wow, this guy is great. The hat, the dark shades, the cigars he smokes, he strikes an iconic and arresting character and performance.  He’s brilliant.

Only later did I realise he also directed the film, one of those rare instances when an actor not only commands the screen in the scenes he is in, but somehow also manages to compose and direct those scenes and the rest of the cast around him. There are traces of Hitchcock in some of the direction, as well as Howard Hawks, and some marvellous shorthand, for instance in the way just the casting alone does so much work establishing the characters. The Facts of Murder is briskly paced and wonderfully realised, it’s a great film.

But only later did I learn that Germi was also a screenwriter and had co-wrote the film too. I mean come on, lead actor, director, co-screenwriter….?  I then learned that he had won an Oscar in 1963 for the screenplay for Divorce, Italian Style in fact, and was also nominated for Best Director for that film too.

So forgive me for thinking, who the hell is this Pietro Germi guy? And naturally following that, that I must be some kind of idiot for having never heard of him before. Well, just further proof that we all live and learn.

The Weekly Summaries (# 17 & 18)

A belated addition to the weekly summaries, mostly due to available viewing time over the first of the two weeks being wholly dominated by a certain TV series (so much so that actually getting back to watching some films the following week proved to feel something like a treat)-

For All Mankind Season Three, 10 episodes, 2002 – Apple TV

54. Six Bridges to Cross (1955) – Blu-ray

55. Abandoned (1949) – Blu-ray

The Last of Us Season One, Episodes 4 – 5, 2023

Citadel Season One, Episodes 1 – 3, 2023 – Amazon Prime

56. Deported (1950) – Blu-ray

Citadel is the latest big-budget ‘event’ series being shown on Amazon Prime (six episodes costing around $260 million seems pretty ‘big’ indeed) and three episodes in its clearly so batshit crazy that I can’t decide if its utter trash or absolutely brilliant. Maybe its both.  I mean, how do you take this stuff seriously anyway? Some kind of bastard-child of The Bourne Identity, Mission Impossible and the sillier James Bond movies, this kind of nonsense operates on some other level than traditional drama, in just the same way as most modern blockbuster movies do. Are we on the brink of the death of western culture or just witnessing some kind of deviously ingenious exercise in exhausting action/spy movie tropes until viewers are beaten into submission?

To be honest, I was thinking For All Mankinds third season was pretty daft and stretching disbelief/goodwill rather too far, but then Citadel came around and set me to thinking that Ron Moore’s alternative history of the space race was actually fairly restrained, all things considered (it would seem that everything is relative, it all just depends upon what you compare things to). To be frank, I did enjoy For Al Mankind; its daft and sprinkled with characters that irritate no end (and a whole new definition of ‘real science’ that makes me wonder what technical consultants actually do) but on the whole… well, there’s certainly something regards how its written, some of the performances,  the narrative arcs and cliff-hangers ensuring its entertaining enough.  I’m wondering with some trepidation just where season four will be going- I’d originally expected the show to be an alternative history of Apollo (which is certainly how it started) but in hindsight, maybe this show should have been titled How the Solar System Was Won instead.

So anyway, film-wise I went back to film noir, finishing the contents of both Arrow’s second noir box with Six Bridges to Cross and finally Indicator’s first Universal Noir collection (curiously both boxes, from two seperate labels, are devoted to Universal Pictures films) with Abandoned and Deported. So those boxes finally completed can join the others on the shelf while I pull down Indicator’s Columbia Noir Vol. 5 set, which STILL, after several months, has two titles I have yet to watch.

Film connections can be a curious thing, as there is a link between Deported and Sirocco, the latter being one of the two films in the Vol.5 box that I haven’t yet seen, finally giving me a genuine push to get around to it (the link is a very sad one, it being that both films starred Märta Torén, a Swedish actress who lived a very short life – she died suddenly at just thirty years old in 1957).

The Weekly Summary

I thought I’d try posting weekly summaries on Sundays, a catch-all to track what I’ve watched, what I’ve missed and maybe comment on stuff when the posting of actual reviews slips.

1.The Web (1947) – Blu-ray

2.Naked Alibi (1954) – Blu-ray

3.Sudden Fear (1952)

Event Horizon (1997) – 4K UHD

4.The Glass Key (1942)

5.Phantom Lady (1944) – Blu-ray

The Rig (Season One) – 2023, Amazon Prime

There’s a (typical of late, really) lot of older stuff there, a continuation of my fascination with 1940s/1950s films and noir in general. I can’t see that changing much, at least in the short-term because I have a few Christmas presents to work through which includes Indicator’s Universal Noir #1, the Godfather trilogy on 4K UHD and quite a few titles bought in 2022 that still sit on the watchlist pile.  As you can see from that list above and its lack of links, I’m already behind on reviews. Hopefully I’ll get that back on track soon. I will just tease that my favourite of the week was probably Sudden Fear and my least favourite was The Glass Key. Biggest disappointment of the week was going to my Tivo, putting on a film I’d recorded on Sky Arts several weeks back, the 1942 noir This Gun For Hire, only to discover they’d substituted it with a documentary about Jackie Kennedy instead. How often does that kind of thing happen?

This week was really one about two noir ladies- Gloria Grahame, who featured in Naked Alibi and Sudden Fear, and Ella Raines, who starred in The Web and Phantom Lady. In each case the first film led to the other. Grahame likely needs no introduction, appearing in  It’s A Wonderful Life and particularly in many noir, including The Big Heat, In a Lonely Place and Odds Against Tomorrow. Grahame is an actress who is as famous/notorious for her real-life escapades as much as anything she did on screen, which I’ll likely get into when I get around to reviewing Naked Alibi and Sudden Fear.  The more I see of Grahame the more I think I need to reassess her appeal/performance’s in general, and find the urge to go back and rewatch those other films I’ve seen her in. Its a curious fact regards watching more films that feature the same actor, that each in turn can offer more perspective on the others, especially when one learns more about their personal lives and careers as a whole. Indicator’s disc of Naked Alibi features a particularly informative video essay about Grahame that concentrates more on her films (and only tangentially covers her  personal life), which immediately sent me scurrying towards Sudden Fear. Again, a great example of the positives of physical media and the often illuminating featurettes and commentaries that they feature (particularly those of Indicator, who have surpassed Criterion -generally considered the benchmark for such stuff- for quality in my eyes).

Ella Raines meanwhile is a particularly interesting case- a very beautiful and very talented actress who almost steals the show in The Web and proves absolutely spellbinding in Phantom Lady, Raines appeared in only about 22 films and a few television series before she retired in 1956. One of those actresses (such as Gene Tierney) who left the business for some reason or other- I like to think of it as favouring the joys of real life over the frustrations of the silver screen, although that isn’t always the case (Gia Scala, for instance) – but it can prove a little frustrating for those film-lovers suddenly smitten, as I was re: Raines, only to discover that their filmography is alarmingly scant.

And now a teaser for next week- catching up on some of those outstanding reviews, some newer films (there’s a 4K disc of Jurassic World: Dominion threatening me with a bad night, and a few things popped up on Netflix), as well as a few more discs to watch such as  Kino’s 4K release of 1970s fave The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and a trip to an actual HMV store for the first time in a few years (will my wallet stand it?).

Just a thought: noir happy endings

Watching Shockproof (review coming soon-ish) I was struck by how a few noir just aren’t allowed to stay true to their narrative and intent, instead hijacked by presumably nervous studio execs and saddled with audience-friendly happy endings. In the case of Shockproof, I’ll get into it in more detail within the review, but suffice to say for about 75 minutes its a great noir about a parole officer gone bad because of his love for a beautiful woman who killed someone, and then in its last five minutes, maybe less, it becomes a different film entirely with a stupid ending that practically ruins the film. I mean, literally I was loving it, the cast, the story and the locations (they even filmed at the Bradbury Building!) and then boom, Game Over.

Its an ending that comes out of nowhere and I can’t see how anyone ‘buys’ it. A pretty much identical thing happens in The Brothers Rico, a edgy noir directed by Phil Karson (The Killers, The Dark Mirror) about an ex-Mafia book keeper who thinks going straight means he has left the mob behind. Its a very dark thriller that is totally undone by a happy ending so blatantly tacked on it almost undermines everything that has occurred before (which reminds me, I really need to rewatch that film and post a review).

One of the most beautiful and intoxicating things about film noir, about great film noir, are the grim, ‘downer’ endings that sometimes frustrate and sometimes disturb but yet always feel fitting and right, like  the ending of Criss Cross, which continues to haunt and disturb me, months after having seen it. Real-life is less like traditional Hollywood films and more like film noir; things don’t always go right, things sometimes get out of control and when push comes to shove, we are all far less in control of our fates than we like to think we are. Very often things go bad, very bad: there is a Truth in that. Noir films often get away with grim endings because they are about bad guys or good guys gone bad or good guys who do the wrong thing for the wrong woman- and the Production Code always stated that films should show that crime doesn’t pay, so hey, they get away with grim endings that ordinary flicks couldn’t. But sometimes the studio execs just can’t let it go.

Which allows me the excuse to mention Blade Runner again (oh yes, yet again) as everyone will recall its own abortive 1982 release version and its own tacked-on happy ending in which Deckard and Rachel are literally driving off, escaping to a happy future into the sunset. I just never appreciated at the time that the film had been shockproofed.

There. ‘Shockproofed’ is a thing now.

Reminiscence 4K UHD (2021)

Lisa Joy’s tech-noir thriller Reminiscence is a film which, like a few this year, I unfortunately missed at the cinema, which annoyed me as it seemed right up my street – someone went and made an adult, intelligent sci-fi thriller and I didn’t get to see it, and like BR2049 it bombed spectacularly. So I was really looking forward to seeing it when it came to home video, and naturally I went the full 4K UHD route (with hindsight its a pleasant surprise it has turned up on the format at all), but it proved rather disappointing.  It turns out that, for all it does well -and it does indeed do some things very well- its badly flawed, unfortunately. It’s not bad, exactly- it just doesn’t tie together somehow, it doesn’t really work, overall, which is frustrating because some elements are very good indeed. Its a case of being clumsy where it really needed to soar, and perhaps being overly familiar.

So many films and tv shows one sees these days, if they aren’t actually remakes or reboots, they still often seem to be a combination of the ‘greatest hits’ of someone’s DVD collection. Maybe its the entertainment industry’s sincerest form of flattery, or a reminder that there really is nothing new under the sun.

Reminiscence is hitched upon the central conceit that an invention enables people to re-live some of their past experiences which can be visualised for others to see and record, and this also enables access to forgotten memories or the ability to vividly recall things otherwise only dimly remembered. The law enforcement agencies use this machine to interrogate suspects who can be prosecuted by the evidence their memories reveal – an inversion of the ‘future crime’ of Memory Report, then, but similarly projecting crimes for others to see and record for evidence, criminals being betrayed by their own memories or those of witnesses.   

The seductive aspect of reliving good memories, especially in the distinctly dystopian world which Reminiscence proposes, reminds one of another tech-noir thriller, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, and its device which enabled the recording of events for others to experience, itself similar to Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm of some years before. Some characters in Reminiscence are doomed to endlessly  return to and re-experience good times in just the same way as Ralph Fiennes’ Lenny in Strange Days, and indeed this is something mirrored by the ultimate fate of this film’s main character, Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman), who can’t let go of his muse, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson) any more than Lenny can shake off his obsession over his own lost love. So Reminiscence seems to come to us now third-hand, almost, rather than be anything actually new, ironically leaking reminiscences of other films-  I don’t really mind that if its done in some new and interesting way, but this is where the film slips up.  While there is some political subtext and a crime to solve, Lisa Joy treats that as secondary to its romance woven through the narrative, and its that which doesn’t entirely convince. Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson are very good actors but they just seem a little too ‘perfect’ to convince as the flawed, haunted characters that Joy wants them to be. There is a feeling that we are always watching beautiful people merely approximating what desperate, hungry and haunted characters might be like were they a little more, well, ordinary like the rest of us. Perhaps this is always true of Hollywood product. 

There is, to be sure, a really great film in here, somewhere. Considering recent world attention on Climate Change and rising sea levels, seeing a film portraying a possible nightmare scenario spun off of that -in this case a half-submerged Miami and days so hot that everyone sleeps in the day and spend the majority of their waking hours during the night-as vividly as this film does is something timely and fascinating. And the reliance of the survivors upon the new technology to re-experience memories and experiences of better times as an avenue of escape is very interesting, and similar to how people during the pandemic have eulogised old pre-COVID traditions and pursuits like, hey, going to the cinema like we used to, or perhaps re-watching films that remind us of better times. There is perhaps a subtext there upon fantasy and escape and what catharsis films themselves provide us, and what a dead-end that may be. 

So what goes wrong exactly? I think its partly the romance that doesn’t wholly convince, and as that’s the central interest for Lisa Joy that’s a pretty fundamental failing. The crime that hangs in the background concerning a wealthy family, an illegitimate child, a bent cop and resultant murders just doesn’t interest either, really. Maybe its just too many balls to juggle in the air; I rather suspect that Lisa Joy has more success with so many narrative threads when she’s spacing them over an eight or ten-episode series on HBO rather than a two-hour movie, and films always tend to need cohesive, satisfying endings, not more mystery boxes. 

As someone who has watched quite a few film noir lately, I also think that Reminiscence could have possibly done without its narration, a noir device that doesn’t, to be honest, really work for me here. I always prefer film-makers to show me, don’t tell me, and the best noir, no matter how complex they may be, can often manage just fine without a voice explaining it all. Maybe I’m wrong and don’t appreciate that post-millennials are lazier. 

Maybe Reminiscence is just another victim of dystopian films just not appealing to audiences right now- maybe we’re swerving back to the days of post-Vietnam 1977 and audiences just want escapist fun. We’re living in a dystopian world as it is, and we know the future increasingly looks bleak; we don’t necessarily need films to remind us, or show us how bad it might get. Or maybe we just want better movies.

Secret Behind the Door (1947)

After what must have been several months or longer, I’ve finally gotten around to watching the fourth and last disc in Arrow’s unimaginatively titled ‘Four Film Noir Classics’ Blu-ray set that I bought last year. This last film was generally regarded as the weakest of the set and I have to agree, although it does have its plus points. 

Secret Behind the Door is a noir from consummate visual stylist Fritz Lang, who was no stranger to the genre and later would direct The Big Heat, the Indicator release of which a few years back blew me away and a film I would count amongst my very favourite noir. Secret Behind the Door is nowhere near as good as that later classic, but it does sport some absolutely top-notch visuals. There are a few shots that are amongst the best of any noir I’ve seen- shots that are framed in a particular way, and so consummately well-photographed with lighting and shadows in selected areas, that tell the story wholly cinematically without any need of narration or dialogue. Visually we see everything regards how characters relate to each other, body language, their positioning relative to each other within the frame, the scaling, lighting… really quite arresting stuff that is sadly let down by a script that borders on the implausible and then jumps off the cliff into the frankly bizarre.

Its perhaps some testament to Lang’s skills as a director and control of the medium that he manages to hold together the film for as long as he does. By the end of the film we’ve somehow passed from dark romantic drama to murderous noir to Roger Corman’s Poe horror territory and somewhere beyond before landing with a terrific thud back into the land of ridiculous romance. I really wasn’t sure what I’d just seen, to be honest. 

Celia Lamphere (Joan Bennett) is a beautiful New York socialite who seems to have finally decided she’s spent too long carefree and single and its time she found the right man: in this case the safe choice of an old friend,  Bob Dwight (James Seay), who works with her wealthy brother. Dwight is besotted by her and is eminently dependable but its clear she doesn’t love him- he’s simply a safe choice. Before she acquiesces to his advances however she goes off on one last vacation/adventure, this time to Mexico where she finds a man who strangely excites her like she’s never experienced before; tall, dark, handsome magazine owner Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave). In just days they marry, but moving to his mansion home near New York she suddenly discovers that not only was Lamphere married, he also has a son and a household full of strange characters including a dominating elder sister and a fire-scarred assistant.

Possibly strangest of all however is her new husband who acts increasingly odd and unhinged, soon revealing his pastime of adding a wing of rooms to his mansion in which famous historical murders of wives by their husbands or lovers took place, a chamber of horrors if you will, but the final room, behind door number seven, remains mysteriously locked and whose contents he refuses to divulge. Something to do with his recently deceased wife, of his new wife perhaps?

Clearly this is a psychological horror dressed up in noir tropes: certainly not an unlikely combination at all and as I have noted, it visually wears its noir stylings spectacularly well. It simply drips noir in most every shot- deep shadows, surreal lighting and framing, exaggerated angles and backlighting accentuating mood and tension. Unfortunately Redgrave doesn’t convince as romantic lead or as twisted, haunted and dangerous male- not that’s he’s really helped by a nutty script that goes dafter with every page. The oddest thing about the film -and likely what saves it at all- is Joan Bennett who seems so intoxicated by the premise that we can almost accept, to our utter bafflement, that she hangs around with her new husband and his deranged family more than a day in his mansion of horrors. I suspect there is a valid reading of the film in which every character is quite insane, including Celia, especially when, at the films end after Lamphere has almost strangled Celia to death and both almost died in a fiery conflagration as the house of horrors burns around them, we finally see them enjoying a second honeymoon back in Mexico. If Celia at this point has not got bountiful reasons to cite for a swift divorce, no-one has. Its like the cinematic definition of jumping the shark, but hey, maybe wives were more forgiving back then.

 

 

Columbia Noir: Framed (1947)

We kick off Indicator’s typically gorgeous Columbia Noir #2 boxset with a really fine effort: Richard Wallace’s Framed, featuring Glenn Ford, a new ‘star’ at the time in his first ‘above the title’ credit, and Janis Carter in a surprisingly nuanced femme fatale role. I’m not entirely sure what I expected – one can never be certain, really, what to expect coming to these features ‘blind’ when they are over half a century old- other than what might be guessed from the stark title, but it actually turned out to be quite subtle. Its relentlessly efficient, telling its story and not getting at all side-tracked with any sub-plots and nor does it divert into back-stories or flashbacks, which could feasibly have been a temptation (we never know much about our lead, Mike Lambert (Ford) even though he seems to be running away from something, and likewise there seems to be more to temptress Paula (Carter) than what meets the eye). This results in a film that intrigues long after it finishes, and I liked it a lot.

Mike Lambert arrives in town in eventful fashion, crashing a freight truck with no-brakes into the back of another. This post-credits sequence is almost like a tease for the later The Wages of Fear; Lambert took the job as a way of getting to the town as its situated in mining country, and he’s a mining engineer looking for work. The trucking company is a shady outfit putting its crews at risk with dodgy trucks, and it refuses to compensate the owner of the vehicle Lambert crashed into. It sums up the efficiency of the film in that it uses this scene to quickly establishes Lambert’s character- once Lambert has eventually managed to extract the wages he is owed from his slimy boss, he hands it over to the guy whose vehicle was damaged, righting the wrong that the trucking company won’t. Clearly Lambert is a man with a moral compass who leans on doing what’s right.

So when Lambert stumbles into the wrong restaurant with the wrong waitress, and comes under her scheming eye, we know that this is a good guy who will be a foil for Paula and her banking executive lover Steve (Barry Sullivan). What we don’t know is if its Lambert’s moral code that will prove to be his undoing as Paula seduces him, nor indeed if Paula has charmed the wrong guy, not appreciating how dangerous it is for her to try seduce a genuine good guy.

Janis Carter proves something  of a surprise. Ford at this point is a known commodity (The Big Heat, The Undercover Man etc) but I’d never seen Carter before and she really impresses. In many ways its an underwritten role -scheming temptress caught between two lovers with a $250,000 fortune hanging in the balance- that could have been a typically noir one-dimensional evil femme fatale, but there’s a subtlety to her character,  not ruthless enough to do what needs to be done in order to successfully walk into the sunset with the cash. Her weakness for Lambert (she has an opportunity to poison him but fails to see it through) proves her undoing. I’m not entirely sure if its scripted shades of character or just simply Carter not having the ability to fully convince as the cold-hearted bitch that the best noir bring to screen, but I’d prefer to think the former. Carter is beautiful and engaging and seems to have some depth as an actress- looking her filmography up afterwards I was surprised, and disappointed, to see that she didn’t have as successful a film career as I would have expected, and Framed is possibly her signature role, eventually moving to New York and a television career before retiring from the profession entirely. Hollywood can be a cold and ruthless place I guess and its not the first time that I’ve seen impressive actresses in old films whose careers never reached the heights that they might have done (most recently Gia Scala in The Garment Jungle).

The cast of Framed is entirely excellent, the script sharp and, as I have noted, totally efficient with no waste at all (it totals just a lean and taut 83 minutes). It manages to pull some genuine twists, with a few moments in which I thought I was one step ahead and then undermining my confidence with another surprising turn. There’s possibly one or two ‘conveniences’ that undermine it from being a genuinely great noir but on the whole I thought it was a solid, engaging thriller that I really enjoyed and look forward to returning to someday. One of the most endearing facets of noir is that one can enjoy the films even more the second time around, and I’m confident such will be the case with Framed. Certainly an excellent opener for this Indicator set.

Columbia Noir: The Lineup (1958)

A case of saving the best until last (although both Drive a Crooked Road and The Gament Jungle make it a close-call) as Indicator’s excellent  Columbia Noir#1 boxset closes with its sixth film, Don Siegel’s crazed-hitman saga The Lineup. Based on a successful 1950s tv show, the film begins like the police procedural I expected it to be. At Pier 39 in San Francisco, a passenger ship arrives; subsequently whilst the passengers are disembarking a suitcase from the ship is stolen by a porter and handed off to a taxi that speeds away, running down a cop- the cops dying action shooting the taxi driver dead results in it crashing.  Two police inspectors arrive investigating the ensuing carnage, and discover that the stolen case belongs to an antique dealer returning from Asia, and that one of the items within it has a stash of illegal narcotics hidden inside. The inspectors deduce that drugs dealers are using tourists as unwitting drugs mules, hiding heroin inside items the tourists buy whilst on holiday in the Far East and tracking them until they arrive safely through US customs.

Unbeknownst to the police, two gangsters, Dancer and Julian, arrive in the Bay area tasked with tracking down the other tourists and relieving them of the hidden drugs. Dancer (Eli Wallach) is a crazy psychopath, being mentored by his elder partner Julian (Robert Keith) who is morbidly fascinated by the last words of Dancer’s victims, scribbling them down into his notebook: The Lineup takes an ingenious turn when it suddenly shifts from a police procedural setting up its premise to focus instead upon the twisted killer duo. Its almost like its two different movies and I have to wonder if writer Stirling Silliphant deliberately chose to write his twisted noir under the false pretence of a movie based on a TV cop show. By the time it hits its stride, the charmless police are forgotten and the crazy bad guys are suddenly the stars. Did the studio really appreciate the film Silliphant and Siegel were making?

This film reminded me so much of Kiss Me Deadly, that insane and violent  noir directed by Robert Aldrich that blew me away last summer. Both films are so very subversive, and so very noir, glorifying in their darkness and shocking in their violence. A particular pleasure of The Lineup is how it predicts thrillers that would follow like Bullitt, Dirty Harry and The French Connection, films that don’t visually nod to noir but nonetheless further the inherent sensibilities of noir. Dirty Harry of course was also directed by Siegel and set in San Francisco, and I imagine watching The Lineup and Dirty Harry together would make for a riveting and successful double-bill. As it is, The Lineup feels very modern and ahead of its time.

And to be certain, the violence is quite shocking in this film- the suddenness of it is quite harrowing, particularly the brutal conclusion of an exchange between Dancer and a villain in a wheelchair. I actually gasped at this scene, wondering if I’d actually seen what I thought I’d seen. Its wonderful when films do that, pulling the rug from under even seasoned movie-watchers such as I.

I understand Eli Wallach was a little dismissive about his role as the psychopath killer in this film, as if perhaps embarrassed by it or feeling guilty. I can see why the intensity of the finished film may have given him reservations afterwards but its in my eyes one of his very best performances (following a start in television, I think this was only his second movie). Quentin Tarantino practically made his career out of making films like The Lineup: I dare say this must be one of Tarantino’s favourite movies as it provided him a road-map for many of his own films. You can certainly see Pulp Fiction‘s Vincent and Jules in this film’s Dancer and Julian.