WARNER HOME VIDEO’S latest film noir (noirish, really) collection, Vol. 5, brings back in superb prints eight hard-to-find dramas of crime and desperation. Don Siegel’s 1956 Crime in the Streets is a set-bound exposé of juvenile delinquents (young scenery chewer John Cassavetes). In The Phenix City Story (1955), Phil Karlson takes on gambling casinos in a small Southern town. The film establishes its ripped-from-the-headlines bona fides with a long intro by real-life L.A. newsman Clete Roberts before plunging us into some relatively tame sin palaces, but the powers that be strike back with some outbursts of violence that are still shocking, especially when racism is layered on top of corruption.
Gravel-throated, square-headed Charles McGraw plays a dogged cop in Armored Car Robbery (1950) pursuing a slick thief (William Talman, who switched to the other side of law as Hamilton Burger on the Perry Mason TV show) who picks off his own co-conspirators as he sets his sights on a brass-hard blonde ecdysiast played with supreme indifference to any emotion but greed by Adele Jurgens. This is one of those noir-procedurals in which much (maybe too much) time is given over to admiring two-way radios and undercover wiretaps. Desperate (1947) finds a working stiff caught up in a world of crime. Circumstances force schlubby Steve Brodie and his wide-eyed wife (Audrey Long) to flee from both the police and menacing heavy (literally and figuratively) Raymond Burr. This early Anthony Mann feature rambles excessively (what are the police doing while Burr and his henchman hopscotch across country finding Brodie wherever he lands?) but does include some fantastic visual moments using harsh pools of light from a swinging lamp like a strobe to ramp up the menace of Burr’s face.
In both Cornered (1945), with Dick Powell, and Backfire (1950), with Edmund O’Brien and Gordon MacRae, disaffected World War II vets try to exorcize their tortured pasts in ways that only lead to more violence. In Cornered, in particular, Powell’s efforts to avenge his wife (a French resistance fighter) only lead to murky moral waters. A baby-faced psychopath (Marshall Thompson) escapes from a mental ward and takes the sad-sack patrons of a clip joint hostage in Dial 1119 (1950). The set-up is stagey, with each barfly taking a turn in the limelight, but the film views the crisis with a cynical edge, especially when the media and bystanders start to act like spectators at a freak show—a motif that anticipates Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole.
The real find in the set is Deadline at Dawn (1946), based on a story by Cornell Woolrich. An innocent sailor (Bill Williams) can’t remember what happened in the apartment where he went to meet a live woman and left behind a corpse. With the help of a hard-bitten but secretly sentimental dime-a-dance girl (Susan Hayward looking and sounding sensationally sexy), Williams tries to unravel a maze of mixed motives during the course of one night. The film is full of the kind of Manhattan midnight denizens that enlivened Woolrich’s stories, even though their dialogue is sometimes overly mannered in the Damon Runyon vein, thanks to the arch script by playwright Clifford Odets. The action is swift, the photography full of velvety shadows and the story remains gripping all the way to the stroke of dawn. The marvelously menacing mobster with the bug eyes is none other than Joseph Calleia, who toiled as a minor character actor for 30 years before getting the role of a lifetime as Sgt. Pete Menzies, reluctant cats-paw to Orson Welles’ Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil. As a hard guy unconvinced by Williams’ naïveté play, Calleia delivers a memorable cautionary line: “People with wax heads shouldn’t go out in the sun.”
Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 5
Warner Home Video
$49.92
