The love between a sultry cabaret singer and the manager of a road-house is thwarted by the jealous and vengeful owner (1948 20th Century Fox Directed by Jean Negulesco 95 mins)

A melodrama made memorable by a bravura performance from Ida Lapino as a cynical cabaret singer who finds love.  Her rendition of “One for My Baby” with a bluesy solo piano accompaniment is arresting, and her sensuality is palpable and provocative. She delivers her cynical lines  with a world-weary cigarette-smokey voice and her one-liner put-downs are delivered with perfect timing.  She is one hot dame, and the passions she arouses are very believable.

Richard Widmark is strong in only his third role as the schizoid road-house owner who covets Ida, but a stolid Cornel Wilde as Widmark’s manager and rival for the singer’s affection is a damper on the action.

The movie is set-bound and it shows, but veteran director Jean Negulesco composes interesting and fluid takes with almost-noir lighting.

Dark Passage (1947)

In his The Evening Class blog, Michael Guillen, has posted a series of reports and interviews from The Dark Cinema of David Goodis series, including introductory remarks to each screening from Eddie Muller and Pacific Fim Archives director Steve Seid:

• The Burglar
• Shoot the Piano Player
• The Unfaithful
• Dark Passage
• Interview With Series Director

A young psychopath with an Electra complex tries to murder her step-mother
(1952 RKO Directed by Otto Preminger 91 mins)

Angel Face is a dark and occasionally chilling gothic melodrama with Jean Simmons effectively cast against type as an ‘enfant-terrible’, and Robert Mitchum as her hapless object of desire and manipulation.  While well-made and with high production values, the film moves too slowly and Mitchum’s trademark laconic persona is a further drag on the action.  The final denouement though half-expected is still a shocker.  But on balance, Preminger’s sardonic detachment, which usually finds favor with film critics, makes the film look and feel one-dimensional.

An interesting costuming twist telegraphs the repression of forbidden sexual desire on the day a fatal plot is executed: the protagonist contrary to her usually modestly feminine attire on this day sports a very tight sweater and a waist-hugging belt.

She wore a street dress of pale green wool and a small cockeyed hat that hung on her ear like a butterfly. Her eyes were wide-set and there was thinking room between them. Their color was lapis-lazuli blue and the color of her hair was dusky red, like a fire under control but still dangerous. She was too tall to be cute. She wore plenty of make-up in the right places and the cigarette she was poking at me had a built-on mouthpiece about three inches long. She didn’t look hard, but she looked as if she had heard all the answers and remembered the ones she thought she might be able to use sometime.

From Raymond Chandler’s short-story Trouble Is My Business (1939)

Highway 301 (1950)

On October 2 the Seattle Art Museum  will start a film noir series Night Wind: The Film Noir Cycle.

Ten mostly rarely screened movies from the early 50’s will screen each Friday until December 2:

October 2: Storm Warning (1951)
October 9: Highway 301 (1950)
October 16: Tomorrow Is Another Day (1951)
October 23: Johnny O’Clock (1947)
October 30: Pickup on South Street (1953)
November 6: The Man Between (1953)
November 13: Wicked Woman (1953)
November 20: Black Widow (1954)
December 4: The Night Holds Terror (1955)
December 11: A Kiss Before Dying (1956)

Full Program

The Director’s cut of Dark City (1998) has been released on DVD this week.  A sci-fi noir from director Alex Proyas, it explores the nature of consciousness and memory in a classic stylised noir city, which is the closest a contemporay color movie has ever come to evoking the look of a 40’s film noir.

It is a visually stunning and enigmatic dream-scape where true identity doesn’t exist, but is the construct of a biochemist in the employ of dark soul-less aliens, who inhabit cadavers, collectively employed in attempting to stave off extinction by reconstructing physical reality and manipulating the brain’s chemistry.  The noir motif of an amnesiac protagonist on the run after he is implicated in the serial killing of b-girls is the arc on which the story is woven.  It is an amalgam of Al Hartley’s Amateur (1994), which preceded it, and The Matrix (1999), of the following year: a brave new world with a ghost in the machine…

References:
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Ghost in the Machine - Arthur Koestler

Michael Clawson has posted to his blog, Pick-Up Flix, a review of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) with an original take on Chinatown as metaphor: “the title refers to a place where law and order (i.e. death) are circumvented by the tragedy and corruption of life. Roman Polanski wasn’t creating just a mystery; he was bowing to the greatness in which mystery thrived — film noir”.

The Film Sufi blog has posted an interesting review of the Val Lewton horror flick, The Seventh Victim (1943) directed by Mark Robson: “one of a string of hypnotic films noir he brought to the screen, coming right after “The Cat People”, “I Walked With a Zombie”, and “The Leopard Man”. What makes this film interesting is the wide gulf separating its virtues and its flaws”.