For Australian readers, Target is having a big DVD sale starting tomorrow, and you can pick-up a number of  classic noirs for only Aus$8.99 each!

I have identified the following original studio release DVDs from the on-line catalog:

Hollywood:

• You Only live Once
• Gaslight
• The Maltese Falcon
• Key Largo
• The Big Sleep
• To Have and Have Not

British:

• The Fallen Idol
• The Criminal
• The Man Between
• Brighton Rock

Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 5 Release Date: July 13th, 2010
Pre-order from Amazon US$ 39.49 49.98 Free shipping

• Cornered Dmytryk’s atmospheric latin noir thriller. Harry Wild’s expressionist camera-work and a solid turn by Dick Powell add value.
• Desperate
• The Phenix City Story Expose confidential based on true story. Unrelenting and chilling portrayal of decent people fighting crime.
• Deadline at Dawn
• Armored Car Robbery Cops chase hoods on the streets of LA with dark noir atmospherics. A tight 67 minutes of b-movie mayhem.
• Crime in the Streets
• Dial 1119
• Backfire

Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics Vol. 2 Release Date: July 6th, 2010
Pre-order from Amazon US$ 53.95 59.95 Free shipping

• Human Desire Lang’s unrelenting gaze into the dark underside of modern America is stark and without visible shadows.
• The Brothers Rico
• Nightfall
• City of Fear
• Pushover Wide-screen noir. Hip as an LA martini. Bravura direction by Richard Quine. Fred MacMurray & Kim Novak in 1st role: awesome!

Questar Entertainment on May18 will release a 6-DVD Box set of 7 classic films noir. Questar has kindly sent me a complimentary promotional copy.

The nicely boxed set presents each DVD in it’s own case with high quality stills and artwork, and the DVD menu has a cool animated noir motif and voice-over. While the titles are in the public domain and the image quality is variable, all but two of the transfers are of higher quality than files currently available on the Internet. Sound quality on all transfers is very good with no hiss.

The Movies

Disc 1:

DOA ( 1950) ‘I want to report a murder…mine.’ Edmond O’Brien stars as an accountant whose number is up when he is poisoned, and spends his last desperate hours trying to find out who ‘killed’ him and why.

A taut thriller with a bravura performance from Edmond O’Brien as Frank Bigelow. From the Cardinal Pictures factory and directed by Rudolph Maté, this movie packs so much in 83 minutes. It starts off slow, but once the action shifts from a sleepy rural burg to San Francisco and LA, the pace is frenetic. The streets of these cities are filmed in deep focus, and there is a sense of immediacy in every scene.

The image quality is good, but I have seen a better transfer on late-night TV.

Disc 2:

Detour (1945) ‘What did you do with the body?‘ A hitchhiker gets into the wrong car and picks up the wrong woman. Roger Ebert: ‘No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it’.

Edgar G. Ulmer’s cult poverty-row noir .  Filmed on a shoe-string, this story of a guy so dumb he blames fate for the consequences of his own foolishness, is pure pulp noir, with a career-best from Anne Savage, as the street-wise conniving dame, who incredulously falls for the sap.

This is the best transfer of Detour I have seen.

Disc 3:

The Stranger (1946) Orson Welles stars in this tense thriller as a small-town professor who will stop at nothing to conceal his Nazi past, with Edward G. Robinson as the Nazi hunter out to expose him.

A strong thriller with Orson Welles directing and playing the lead in a screenplay by Victor Trivas. Edward G Robinson is solid – as always – as the investigator, with the beautiful Loretta Young perfect as the innocent and loyal wife. Welles’ deft direction and the camera-work of Russell Metty transform an over-the-top thriller into a moody and intelligent noir, where Jungian concepts of the unconscious are woven with a taut psychological study of the deranged mind of a desperate man.

Image quality is good.

Disc 4:

Scarlet Street (1945) stars Edward G. Robinson as a henpecked husband who falls under the spell of a scheming femme-fatale.

This classic film noir from Fritz Lang, shattered the closed romantic realism of Hollywood. It is unremitting in its pessimism. A dark mood and pervading doom are devastating in their intensity.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946 ) Stars Barbara Stanwyck and Van Heflin. A dark tale of small town secrets, obsession, and murder.

A very dark noir rife with fascinating psychological puzzles.

The image quality for these two transfers is poor to fair.  For Scarlet Street (1945) the KINO digitally restored DVD can’t be beat.  I have seen a better transfer of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers on television.

Disc 5:

Killer Bait (aka Too Late for Tears) (1949) stars Lizabeth Scott as a woman who will do anything to keep $60,000 that falls into her lap.

From the opening scene of the silhouette of a car speeding up a winding road on a hill outside LA one dark night, you know you are in noir territory. Soon a preposterous chance event launches a wild descent into dark avarice and eroticised violence as perverse and relentless as fate itself.

Image quality is Ok.

Suddenly (1954) stars Frank Sinatra in his most controversial role as a psycho who holds a family hostage while plotting to assassinate the president.

A fast-paced b-thriller with a viciously violent protagonist.

Image quality is Ok.

Disc 6:

Extras:

• Featurette: What is Film Noir?
• Featurette: Femme Fatale – The Noir Dame
• Film Noir poster gallery
• 38 Film Noir trailers

The two short featurettes are good intros but fairly unsophisticated. What makes them very entertaining is the skillful editing of themed montages of film clips.  There were a few posters I hadn’t seen before in the Poster Gallery.  The trailers included a few sleepers I was not aware of, with the image quality variable.

The Verdict

The high quality of  the packaging make the set compelling, and the better image quality of five of the seven movies over downloads is a definite plus, but the recommended retail price of  US$49.99 is on the high side.  It gets down to how much you value the convenience of easily loading a DVD into your DVD-player and watching the movies on a large screen television.  Amazon is taking orders for the special price of US$44.99.  At this price, with each movie costing you only US$6.42, the set is Ok value.  All  the pictures, bar Suddenly, are essential noirs, and for many chronic noiristas,  a good quality transfer of  Detour would be worth a lot more.

Sony has released a new twin DVD-set of 8 b-girl movies from the Columbia vaults titled Bad Girls of Film Noir.  Mostly pot-boilers, but Night Editor is a must-have cult noir.

Volume 1

Evelyne Keys
The Killer That Stalked New York (1950) directed by Earl McEnvoy

Lizabeth Scott
Two of A Kind (1951) directed by Henry Levin
Bad for Each Other (1953) directed by Irvin Rapper

Gloria Grahame
The Glass Wall (1953) directed by Maxwell Shane

Volume 2

Cleo Moore
Night Editor (1946) directed by Henry Levin
One Girl’s Confession (1953) directed by Hugo Haas
Over-Exposed (1956) directed by Lewis Seiler

Ida Lupino/Cleo Moore/JanSterling/Audrey Totter
Women’s Prison (1956) directed by Lewis Seiler

Noir City 2010

San Francisco’s NOIR CITY 8 film noir series returns to San Francisco’s Castro Theatre January 22-31 2010. The full program is here.

Movies not on DVD on the program:

• FLY BY NIGHT (1942) Dir. Robert Siodmak
• DEPORTED (1950) Dir. Robert Siodmak
• CRY DANGER (1951) Dir. Robert Parrish, newly restored
• THE MOB (1951) Dir. Robert Parish
• THE GANGSTER (1947) Dir. Gordon Wiles
• HE RAN ALL THE WAY (1951) Dir. John Berry
• ONE GIRLS’ CONFESSION (1953) Dir. Hugo Haas
• WOMEN’S PRISON (1955) Lewis Seiler
• RED LIGHT (1949) Dir. Roy Del Ruth
• WALK A CROOKED MILE (1948) Dir. Gordon Douglas
• SLATTERY’S HURRICANE (1949) Dir. Andr? de Toth
• INSIDE JOB (1946) Dir. Jean Yarbrough
• HUMAN DESIRE (1954) Dir. Fritz Lang
• ESCAPE IN THE FOG (1945) Dir. Budd Boetticher

Columbia Noir DVD Set

Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics, Vol. 1 a new noir collectors DVD set has just been released. The films in the set:

• The Big Heat
• 5 Against the House
• The Lineup
• Murder by Contract
• The Sniper

The special features include commentaries by Michael Man, Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, Eddie Muller, and James Ellroy.

This month’s Warner Archive new releases include these never-on-dvd-before noirs.

• BERLIN EXPRESS (1948)
• KILLER MCCOY (1947)
• I DIED A THOUSAND TIMES (1955)
• THE TALL TARGET (1951)
• PAY OR DIE (1960)
• SUSPENSE (1946)
• HIGHWAY 301 (1950)
• LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE (1951)
• THE SEARCH (1948)
• TERM OF TRIAL (1963)

A Woman’s Secret (1949) and Hollywood story (1951), two flicks that carry a film noir classification on IMDB which I watched in the past week, I found  to be hardly noir at all.

A Woman’s Secret, an RKO-feature, has great credentials. The movie is directed by Nicholas Ray from a screenplay from Herman J. Mankiewicz, with photography from George Diskant, and starring Maureen O’Hara, Melvyn Douglas, and Gloria Grahame.  It starts off noir with a shooting off-screen, and the use of flashback in the narrative, but plays out as sophisticated melodrama with a biting wit, and some really funny slapstick when the wife of the investigating cop does her own snooping with a handbag carrying fingerprint powder and a giant magnifying glass. The story of the conflict between a naive young singer (Grahame) and her controlling mentor (O’Hara), has shades of All About Eve but this motif is not taken too seriously.  The two female leads are charming, with Grahame displaying an engaging gift for comedy.  Melvyn Douglas is as debonair as you would expect and takes the role of narrator and referee.  Great fun.

Hollywood Story is a programmer from Universal that has a 50s television feel.  Richard Conte is a producer in LA that wants to make a movie about the murder of a big silent movie director 20 odd years before, and his delving into the past has violent consequences.  A  strictly b-effort that plays well as a whodunit with noir atmospherics, and some really funny lines.

The Classic Film Noir, Vol. 3 2-DVD Box set to be released by VCI Entertainment on March 31, features upgraded transfers of two John Alton lensed movies that have until now been available only as poor quality public domain copies. The films are Bernard Vorhaus’s Amazing Mr. X (1948), also known as The Spiritualist,  and  Anthony Mann’s Reign of Terror (1949), aka The Black Book.   NY Times movie critic Dave Kehr reviews these new releases here (half-way down the page).