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FILM
NO I R
101
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M AR K FE RTIG
I
t’s my mother’s fault. She had a thing for Dana Andrews.
When I was a kid my mom’s stash of videocassettes was peppered
with Andrews movies: State Fair, Curse of the Demon, Elephant
Walk, The Best Years of Our Lives, and, of course, Laura. Andrews had
been in Hollywood for well over a decade before Laura made him a
star. Although he was good looking and a skilled actor, not to mention
a trained singer, he didn’t catch on with audiences until he took on the
role of Detective Mark McPherson in director Otto Preminger’s 1944
film noir. McPherson was gruff and unflappable. Relentless. Fixated
on the girl whose portrait hung over that posh Manhattan fireplace.
I too was swept away by Laura Hunt, but there was something about
the inscrutable cop that was even more compelling to me than Gene
Tierney’s beauty. McPherson didn’t resemble the police officers of other
classic films I had seen, men who appeared to have marched
right off of department-recruiting billboards. They were
MARK
good natured, grinning, self-effacing, and morally upright
pillars of the community—I thought they were frauds. McPherson,
on the other hand, was the real thing. He was rude. He brooded. He
fiddled incessantly with a handheld bagatelle baseball game. He was
even a little perverse—tumbling for the woman whose murder he was
investigating. I didn’t know it at the time, but as I watched McPherson
falling for Laura, I was falling in love with film noir.
Thirty years later my mother is gone, but I remain an inveterate
devourer of the classic films she introduced into my life, especially film
noir. I typically watch five hundred movies for the first time each year,
most of them produced before 1970. I’ve also begun to resemble one of
Andrews’s obsessed detectives when it comes to tracking down hardto-find titles and completing monumental movie lists. Regardless of
whatever viewing challenge I saddle myself with, I invariably return
to the shadowy back alleys and complex heroes of film noir. When it
comes to the crime and noir films of the 1940s and 1950s, whether
from MGM, Monogram, or any other studio in the Tinseltown pecking
order, I have damn near seen them all.
Much of the reason film noir persists in popular culture is because
it begs to be defined; yet, it paradoxically resists our best efforts to do
so. It’s the subject of countless scholarly and popular books; passionate
fans argue over is-it-or-isn’t-it titles on social media and Internet
message boards. Noir is subtle, complex, and frustratingly enigmatic,
and unlike other kinds of films it thwarts standard genre definitions.
Comedies make us laugh; horror movies frighten us. We all know a
musical when we hear one. Westerns are largely a matter of period and
setting; gangster films have, well, gangsters. Crime, betrayal, and moral
ambiguity are the ties that loosely bind noir films together, though too
6
often individual titles are identified (or misidentified) by the presence
of the kind of tropes—private eyes and femmes fatales—that have long
since become pop culture clichés. A crime movie becomes a film noir
when certain narrative, thematic, and iconographic forces fuse, clash,
or agitate against one another, creating a uniquely dark, moody, and
undeniably alluring atmosphere that also quietly, almost subversively,
raises questions about the status quo in mid-century America.
The forces I mentioned above converged in Hollywood moviemaking
in the years surrounding the Second World War, creating the zeitgeist
from which film noir would emerge and flourish for nearly two decades.
Some of these forces were the disillusionment and pessimism lingering
from the Great Depression; the popularity of hard-boiled writers such
as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain; the
disconcerting wartime experience of the American
FERTIG fighting man and his difficulty readjusting to civilian
life; a new generation of independent, professional,
often dissatisfied women; the public’s armchair fascination with
Freudian psychology; Cold War paranoia over the atomic bomb and the
threat of domestic Communism; the suspect veracity of the American
Dream; urbanization brought on by war production, followed later by
the rise of suburbia and runaway materialism; and many others. Within
the movie industry additional circumstances fostered the development
of film noir, including the deterioration of the studio system and an
increased need for low-cost or B pictures; advances in film processing
and more portable camera equipment; a weakened Production Code; the
demands of more sophisticated ticket buyers; and most importantly, the
Hollywood arrival, from war-torn Europe, of a cohort of extraordinarily
gifted but cynical filmmakers.
Film Noir 101 is a celebration of noir’s classic period from the
early 1940s to the late 1950s—of the movies themselves and of the
glorious posters the studios created to market them. And when I say
glorious, I mean the gun-waving, fedora-wearing, loot-grabbing, carcrashing, legs-showing, bare-knuckled glorious iconography of the
film noir style, presented through a collection of carefully selected and
meticulously restored (by yours truly) American movie “paper.” The
one-sheets contained in this book offer up a bank vault’s worth of midcentury art and design, featuring stunning illustration, photography,
and typography, all too often created in anonymity by studio-employed
artists who were unfortunately not permitted (unlike their European
counterparts) to sign their work.
In the best examples of film noir posters, form follows function.
Elements such as claustrophobic compositions, off-kilter angles, and
the interplay of light and shadow are employed, just as they are in
noir movies themselves, to underscore certain thematic elements.
One of the finest examples of the relationship between film and poster
occurs in the design for 1946’s The Killers. The movie tells the story
of a love-struck ex-boxer called Ole “Swede” Anderson, played by
Burt Lancaster, who throws his life away after being betrayed by Ava
Gardener’s delightfully wicked femme fatale, Kitty Collins. The movie
is renowned for its opening sequence, in which two hired assassins
arrive in the small town where Anderson has hidden out, and blast him
to bits—an act to which he offers no resistance. The poster is a visual
feast, depicting a smitten Anderson utterly captivated by the woman
he loves. Yet Kitty ignores his embrace and gazes indifferently into the
distance. Meanwhile, the two killers of the film’s title stalk the poster’s
lower corner, guns drawn, just itching to commit murder. Their shadows
slash diagonally upward through the composition, enveloping Kitty and
the Swede in a swath of darkness that clearly portends their doom.
Often the most original and striking designs were for the humblest
films. Lacking the big-time movie stars of prestige productions, B pictures
simply had to try harder. Freed from the obligation to plaster headliners’
names across the tops of the posters in 144-point type, poster artists
were able to focus instead on the titillating power of sex and violence
in order to capture the attention of ticket buyers. Get a load of the raw,
come-hither sexuality of actress Ida Lupino on the poster for Private Hell
36; then check out noir’s deadliest female, Peggy Cummins, on the mindboggling poster for Gun Crazy—she dares you to look away. There are
nearly one hundred firearms on display in these posters—Kiss Me Deadly
alone boasts six of them, in addition to illustrations of Mike Hammer
making love to two different women! There’s only one revolver on the
poster for Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker, but the designer has brilliantly
(and oh-so-subversively) placed it in our hands, making us the criminal.
Violence is routine subject matter on noir posters, and, as if in an effort
to stymie their newfound independence, it is often directed at women.
Glenn Ford slaps Rita Hayworth on the poster for Gilda and then mauls
Gloria Grahame in the art for The Big Heat. The most startling example
occurs in 1949’s Too Late for Tears, in which Dan Duryea brutally beats
Lizabeth Scott. Perhaps the most unsettling poster belongs to 1952’s The
Sniper, where the sexualized targets of the title character’s murderous
outbursts are shockingly framed in the crosshairs of his rifle. No poster
in the collection, however, captures the moody ethos of film noir better
than the unusual, full-bleed design for 1947’s Kiss of Death, which, like
the overwhelming majority of noir films themselves, is rendered entirely
in black and white.
One of the great joys to be found in film noir comes from unearthing
new titles and discussing their bona fides. Certainly those already
familiar with many of my selections will find a few of them arguable.
I realize that my choice to omit Carol Reed’s brilliant The Third Man
or Jules Dassin’s The Naked City will raise an eyebrow or two among
those in the know. But my overarching goal with this project was to
establish a robust, manageable set of noir films for new viewers to
explore, even including a few entries from Poverty Row studios.
Most of the best-remembered noirs were prestige pictures with lofty
production values and big stars such as Humphrey Bogart, Robert
Mitchum, Barbara Stanwyck, and Rita Hayworth, but many were
modest, low-budget movies featuring wonderful performers long
since forgotten by the general public. I’ve been careful to include
compelling entries from little outfits such as Allied Artists, Republic,
and Eagle-Lion. Are all of these movies good? “Good” may be the
most meaningless word in the English language (or at least the most
improperly used), but the short answer is no. Few people consider
Pickup to be a good movie (quite the contrary, it’s delightfully bad),
but if you want to call yourself a film noir aficionado, you simply can’t
do so until you’ve seen a Hugo Haas picture. And besides, just wait
until you see the poster! Ultimately a list of films such as this one is
subjective, but I’m confident that any noir expert will agree with the
overwhelming majority of my picks. However, if you disagree feel free
to stop by my blog Where Danger Lives (wheredangerlives.blogspot.
com) and give me hell. I can take it.
In the meantime, here’s how I see film noir: it’s the hard liquor
of crime films. Imagine a barroom where each of the iconographic,
thematic, and narrative elements of noir is embodied in the countless
bottles of booze lined up behind the bar. (By the way, go ahead and light
up. Smoking isn’t just allowed here—it’s encouraged.) There are bottles
containing betrayal, alienation, obsession, and bad luck. There’s one
for the hoodlums, another for the armored car heist, and an expensive
selection of black widows in velvet-wrapped decanters. On the rail the
bartender keeps the back alleys, the flashbacks, and the voice-overs.
The cops are on tap, along with the private dicks, the soldiers, and the
insurance men. That black jug in the corner is full of shadows. It’s all
spelled out on these labels: the sex, the violence, the streets and pulsing
neon lights of the asphalt jungle. That dusty, almost empty bottle on
the top shelf ? Inside is one last shot of redemption, but it’s terribly
expensive stuff. Give your order to Gloria, the cocktail waitress. She’ll
bring you anything but coffee. I think the bartender’s name is Billy.
He’s an old pro—a magician with these bottles. If the ingredients come
together just right, if the drink is plenty strong, and if the aftertaste is
a little bitter, then you’ll know it’s a film noir. Pull up a stool—the first
round is on me. We’ll drink a toast to my mother.
7
Sudden Fear
101
100 Born to Kill
Framed
99
98 Somewhere in the Night
Pickup
97
96 Loophole
Side Street
95
94 The Blue Dahlia
Appointment with Danger
93
92 Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
101 Sudden Fear
1952 | RKO Radio Pictures | Director: David Miller
What better way to begin than with a darkly romantic crime picture from RKO—film
noir’s most prolific studio—headlined by the likes of Joan Crawford, Jack Palance,
and the inimitable Gloria Grahame? Joan plays San Francisco heiress and smash-hit
playwright Myra Hudson, who denies aspiring actor Lester Blaine (Palance) the lead
in her latest Broadway play because she doesn’t think his stony features are romantic
enough. Yet when Myra and Lester bump into each other aboard the 20th Century
Limited—bound for the West Coast—she falls in love with him. They marry, but it soon
becomes clear (to the audience, at least) that Lester only wants Myra’s money and that
he and girlfriend Irene (Grahame) are willing to kill her to get it. Can Myra figure out
what’s happening in time to save her life?
The film noir world is a dark and menacing place. Its protagonists, including Myra,
are often trapped in desperate situations over which they have little control. Usually
their dilemmas are the result of some past blunder—though not always. Often fate
selects them—as Al Roberts famously says in Detour—“for no good reason at all.”
However, within the construct of 1950s social mores, Myra may be partly responsible
for her predicament. Perhaps she is being punished for allowing herself to be taken in
by Lester, when her first impression of him told her otherwise. Or maybe her error is
more subtle: by waiting so long to marry and start a family, especially considering her
tremendous wealth, Myra has given the cold shoulder to the social obligations of the
American Dream. Throughout the classic noir cycle, the American Dream is a decisive
factor in the fates of characters from all walks of life—those who turn their backs on it,
those who flout it, and those who want it too badly.
Few performers in Hollywood history could carry a film as well as Joan Crawford, who
dominates movies such as Sudden Fear and Mildred Pierce. Consequently, Crawford’s
film noirs usually flip traditional gender roles: Myra is Sudden Fear’s protagonist, making
Lester an homme (rather than femme) fatale. Crawford herself never played a film noir
black widow, but the delightful Gloria Grahame did, and she functions as one here. But
without a male protagonist to exert her sexual power over, Gloria Grahame’s Irene uses
it to manipulate Lester.
One way in which Sudden Fear is exemplary (though it doesn’t fully materialize until
late in the film) is the expressive, low-key lighting that epitomizes noir’s visual style.
The film’s tense finale, a cat-and-mouse chase through the forbidding nighttime streets
of San Francisco, heightens our sense of Myra’s sudden fear and her close brush with
death—which she escapes only through a deliciously ironic twist.
his stature as an actor; he was no Olivier, but he offers a powerfully menacing presence
in noir films such as Dillinger (1945), The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947), and Born to Kill.
Born to Kill opens in Reno, where social climber Helen Brent (Claire Trevor) is waiting
for her divorce papers to come through. Sam Wilde (Tierney) has a thing going with
Helen’s neighbor Laury, who tries to make him jealous by stepping out with another
man. It works—Sam bludgeons Laury and her beau to death. Helen finds the bodies
but fails to contact the authorities; she’s sick of Reno and wants to get back to her
wealthy fiancé in San Francisco. After committing murder, Sam just wants to get out of
town. They meet aboard the train and are pulled together like a pair of magnets. Helen
keeps mum about her pending nuptials, but Sam is undeterred when he hears the news.
Rather than punching out her fiancé, Sam shifts his attention to Georgia (Audrey Long),
Helen’s lifelong benefactor. Sam marries Georgia and moves into the house, but he and
Helen soon discover that they can’t seem to stay away from one another.
Famously grumpy New York Times critic Bosley Crowther hated Born to Kill, calling
it “a smeary tabloid fable.” Crowther is absolutely right, but it’s Born to Kill’s gaudy
outrageousness that makes it such a delightfully offbeat film noir. Claire Trevor, a
superlative actress (and Oscar winner), chews the scenery. Tierney spews the kind of
tough-guy dialogue that only he could get away with. Iconic character actors Elisha Cook
Jr. and Esther Howard add to the kooky vibe. Born to Kill is so over the top at times that
it verges on camp, but the chance to watch Tierney and Trevor drag each other through
the gutter is too good to miss.
99 Framed
1947 | Columbia Pictures | Director: Richard Wallace
Hollywood studios have always been guilty of finding something that works and then
beating audiences over the head with it. Such was the case with the man-woman murder
blueprint James M. Cain sketched out in his novels. The black widows of Cain’s Double
Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice exploit the sexual weakness of their male
suitors in order to get rid of an unwanted spouse and score a pile of loot at the same
time. (Cain was wise to Hollywood; in 1946 he tried, unsuccessfully, to copyright this
premise.) The plot of Columbia’s Framed is indebted to Cain, but at the same time it
has enough star power and originality to stand on its own feet, particularly in its offbeat
femme fatale—who is unusually happy to do her own killing.
Mike Lambert (Glenn Ford) struggles to keep his delivery truck between the lines as
it barrels down the side of a mountain. The runaway rig finally crashes into the back of
a pickup truck in the middle of the town square. Mike is peeved with his employer for
saddling him with such a jalopy, but he nevertheless uses his own money to make good
on the pickup’s damages. He’s arrested for vagrancy anyway: fifty dollars or ten days
in jail. Broke, he opts to do the time, but is shocked when leggy blonde waitress Paula
(Janis Carter) volunteers enough dough to get him off the hook. Mike is naïve (and
good looking) enough to think that Paula has eyes for him, but he soon learns that she
and Steve Price (Barry Sullivan), the local bank vice president, have something far more
deadly in mind.
Framed is an absorbing movie that serves up one of noir’s deadliest vamps. Paula
schemes, manipulates, and double-crosses, dreaming of a lush life far away from the
two-bit mining town in which she feels trapped. Paula is a classic femme fatale insofar
as she doesn’t give a damn about Mike or Steve—men are just a means to an end. But
unlike her fellow femmes fatales, unwilling to spoil their manicures, Paula happily gets
her hands dirty, whether it’s with a spoonful of poison in the coffee or a pipe wrench in
the backseat.
100 Born to Kill
98 Somewhere in the Night
1947 | RKO Radio Pictures | Director: Robert Wise
1946 | Twentieth Century-Fox | Director: Joseph Mankiewicz
Lawrence Tierney was just about the nastiest piece of work to ever take the lead in a
crime film. Writer Eddie Muller, who knew him and did Born to Kill’s DVD commentary,
called Tierney “the meanest man in motion picture history.” Tierney seemed hell-bent
on living a life that mirrored his on-screen roles. He drank too much, got into too many
fights, and did his fair share of jail time—some sources report at least a dozen arrests,
mostly for brawling. Yet Tierney’s reputation for bombast and vitriol shouldn’t diminish
Oh, sweet amnesia.
In Somewhere in the Night, a Marine (John Hodiak) wakes up in a field hospital with
his head bandaged and his jaw wired shut. He can’t remember a thing, but his wallet
says that he’s George Taylor. Also nestled in the billfold is a painful Dear John letter that
makes George think that he must have been a first-class jerk before he enlisted. After
George musters out of the service he returns to Los Angeles and tries to unravel his past
113
who, when his temporary deafness passes, continues to feign the disability in order
to hear what people are saying about him. Haas plays the railroad worker who briefly
loses his hearing; Michaels is the scheming young wife who tries to get the new man
on the job to kill him. Like most of Haas’s films, Pickup is gaudy, over the top, and both
intentionally and unintentionally funny. Michaels alone is worth whatever effort it takes
to see Pickup—take one look at the jaw-dropping poster and you’ll know what I mean.
with nothing more to go on than the name of a mysterious old acquaintance: Larry Cravat.
George’s search for Cravat leads him through a gauntlet of seedy locales before it finally
begins to pay off, but when it does, George discovers that he himself is closely linked to
both an unsolved murder and a missing suitcase crammed full of thousand-dollar bills.
In the years after the classic film noir period came to an end, amnesia was happily
relegated to television soap operas. But in the period during and just after the war,
the physical and psychological damage caused by combat was at the forefront of the
public’s mind. Such trauma became commonplace subject matter in Hollywood film
noirs hoping to depict the difficulties faced by servicemen trying to reenter civilian life.
In Somewhere in the Night, George Taylor’s amnesia is a metaphor for their struggle.
Nice-guy actor John Hodiak convincingly pulls off the confusion and bewilderment felt
by a generation of young men who went off to fight and came back to a country so
fundamentally changed that they couldn’t recall what it had been like before they left.
In a duality peculiar to film noir, Somewhere in the Night both undermines and props
up feelings of postwar optimism. It reminded audiences that America didn’t exactly
resemble the utopia it was often made out to be. Crime was still plentiful, and the
underworld remained the province of smooth gangsters, hookers, and con artists—even
odious war refugees—all willing to murder for a suitcase full of tainted Nazi money. The
world of this film is as uncertain as its title; even its hero may not be worth caring about.
Nevertheless, if George Taylor can survive the gut-punch of his homecoming, the fates
appear willing to offer him—and all the other boys who wish they could forget—a clean
slate and a chance to start over.
96 Loophole
1954 | Allied Artists Pictures | Director: Harold Schuster
Loophole presents a textbook film noir hero: an unlucky victim of circumstance,
implicated in a crime he had nothing to do with. But what makes it really special is its
villain. Rarely has implacable fate been distilled into such a singularly menacing form
and set loose upon the innocent, as it is here—all the more troubling because this
human pit bull is supposed to be one of the good guys.
Bank teller Mike Donovan (Barry Sullivan) and his wife Ruth (Dorothy Malone)
watch their humble slice of the American Dream wither away after two grifters (Don
Beddoe and Mary Beth Hughes) pilfer fifty grand from Mike’s window at the bank. Mike
panics and fails to report the shortage until the following morning, making himself a
suspect in the eyes of the cops. Although they eventually clear him of any wrongdoing,
insurance investigator Gus Slavin (the inimitable Charles McGraw) remains convinced
that Mike was in on the heist. Slavin railroads Mike out of his job at the bank, and then a
succession of others, until the Donovans are forced to sell their house and move into a
tiny apartment. Slavin believes that an unemployed Mike will eventually have to dip into
the proceeds of the robbery in order to make ends meet. In order to reclaim his life and
get Slavin off his back, Mike will have to solve the crime himself.
In film noir, it can be difficult to tell the difference between those on either side of
the law. Slavin is an authority figure, but he has clearly lost his way. He’s not the only
such figure in classic noir, but most of noir’s unhinged policemen (there are plenty,
and we’ll encounter a few in the entries to come) have committed a crime that requires
them to die before the end titles roll. Slavin’s infraction is minor—he can’t differentiate
between the guilty and the innocent—so he is allowed to live, setting up one of noir’s
most unsettling endings. As the film’s narrator delivers the ominous final line—“Mike
Donovan’s sitting on top of the world . . . or is he?”—we notice Slavin inexplicably
lurking on the sidewalk outside Mike’s bank, forcing us to ask ourselves how, in such a
world, can innocent people ever feel safe?
97 Pickup
1951 | Columbia Pictures | Director: Hugo Haas
Here’s to you, Mr. Haas. You can’t call yourself a film noir fan until you’ve seen a Hugo
Haas picture. If the dozen or so noirs that Haas wrote, produced, and directed during
the 1950s are “bad” movies, they are delightfully, endearingly bad. A book such as this
would be diminished without paying the Czech émigré what he ached for but didn’t get
during his time in Hollywood: a little respect.
Like Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, and Robert Siodmak, who made many of noir’s greatest
movies, Hugo Haas fled Europe for Hollywood because of the Nazis. He had been a
major star in Czechoslovakia throughout the 1930s, but in the American studio system
he was relegated to supporting roles. Haas, however, had larger aspirations, so he
invested his life savings in his own production company and began to make crime films.
It’s obvious that he didn’t have the talent (or the budgets) of the filmmakers listed
above, but he matched them in determination. His critics will tell you that Haas was
little more accomplished than Ed Wood and that he recycled the same movie over and
over and over, but his admirers will beg you to take a closer look. Sure, Haas tended
to cast himself as a middle-aged continental who gets roasted by some greedy blonde
bombshell (usually played by Cleo Moore), but his movies also occasionally have
moments of keen insight into the peccadilloes of American life and culture, the sort of
excesses only an outsider could see.
It’s not Cleo Moore but Beverly Michaels who stars opposite Haas in Pickup, the
writer-director’s first foray into film noir. The movie is a strange amalgamation of The
Postman Always Rings Twice and Hlídac c. 47, a Czech novel about a railroad worker
114
95 Side Street
1949 | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer | Director: Anthony Mann
Although film noir is often discussed alongside the gangster films of the 1930s, it’s
important to recognize the differences. Gangster movies deal with larger-thanlife hoodlums and organized crime syndicates; film noir explores what happens to
regular folks who get in way over their heads. Such is the case in Side Street, when an
underemployed father-to-be steals to make ends meet.
Part-time mailman Joe Norson (Farley Granger) and his wife Ellen (Cathy O’Donnell)
are expecting a baby any day now. One day Joe happens upon an unlocked office on his
route, momentarily left vacant by the seedy lawyer who works there. Joe had recently
seen the attorney stuff some cash into a locked filing cabinet. Desperate to score a few
hundred bucks, he breaks open the drawer and flees with an envelope containing . . .
thirty grand. The huge amount brings Joe to his senses, and he nervously attempts
to return the envelope. But the cash is connected to blackmail and murder, and the
crooked counselor refuses to accept it, suspicious that Joe might be working with the
police. But before his thugs can track down the jittery mailman and retrieve the money,
Joe manages to make himself the most wanted fugitive in New York City.
Many noir films (Kiss of Death and The Sound of Fury, for example) deal with veterans
similar to Joe, whose drastic situations compel them to commit a crime. But Side Street
is atypical in that Joe’s conscience gets the better of him before any lives are lost. Joe’s
remorse allows us to see him as a victim of circumstance, and we fear that his momentary
lapse of judgment will result not only in his death, but possibly those of Ellen and his
newborn baby. In the New York City of Side Street, there’s nowhere Joe can turn for help.
Manhattan’s looming skyscrapers make the humans on the streets below seem pathetic
and inconsequential; against such an imposing backdrop, what can one individual do to
save himself? Surely he can’t go to the police. In Side Street nobody trusts them; in a key
scene when Ellen learns that her call to Joe is being traced, she frantically screams at him
to run. Like nearly every other noir protagonist, he has to go it alone.
and considered himself the most insecure guy in Hollywood. He developed a drinking
problem, and by 1953, when he played the hero in Shane—which many consider one of
the great films—his career was in decline. He’d be dead just ten years later, a victim of
a toxic combination of alcohol and his own self-doubt.
In Appointment with Danger Ladd plays Al Goddard, a brass-knuckled postal inspector
working his way to the bottom of a colleague’s murder. Although lacking in the pervasive
sense of doom or the machinations of destiny present in many better noirs, Appointment
with Danger nonetheless rates a spot in this countdown. Goddard is an archetypal film
noir cop. Consumed by his job and obsessed with getting his man, his relentlessness
and cynicism create a pronounced disconnect from the thankless society he serves.
Goddard, along with The Big Heat’s Dave Bannion, is the mean uncle of the generation
of flatfoots that would populate the neo-noir films of the 1970s—men such as Dirty
Harry Callahan and Popeye Doyle—whose hang-ups often put them on the wrong side
of their by-the-book superiors.
Although Appointment with Danger is a fairly conventional cops-and-robbers movie, it
confirms the influence of noir sensibilities on the character development and visual style
of mid-century Hollywood. Industrial Gary, Indiana, becomes a nightscape every bit as
compelling as New York or Los Angeles: dark, foreboding, lit by pulsing neon. The film
also has a supporting cast culled from the noir hall of fame, including Paul Stewart, Jan
Sterling, and Dragnet’s Jack Webb and Harry Morgan, cast here as a pair of hoodlums.
After watching them in Appointment with Danger you’ll never look at a pair of bronzed
baby shoes the same way again.
94 The Blue Dahlia
1946 | Paramount Pictures | Director: George Marshall
There are plenty of mediocre, even bad, noir films that are nonetheless noteworthy,
though few have the prestige of 1946’s The Blue Dahlia. Headlined by Paramount’s two
incandescent stars, Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, and boasting a screenplay by none
other than The Big Sleep scribe Raymond Chandler, it’s hard to imagine that such a movie
could somehow disappoint. Yet in spite of its flaws (most notably an ending that verges
on the ridiculous) The Blue Dahlia is a significant film noir, if only for its depiction of the
unexpected surprises awaiting the vets who came home from the Second World War.
Johnny Morrison (Ladd) and his pals (William Bendix and Hugh Beaumont) have just
arrived in Los Angeles after surviving more than one hundred B-24 missions over the
South Pacific. Anxious to reunite with his wife, Helen (Doris Dowling), and comfort her
after the wartime loss of their infant son, Johnny gets a kick in the teeth when he finds her
drunk and in the arms of another man. This awful homecoming becomes horrifying when
Helen angrily blurts out that their little boy didn’t succumb to diphtheria as he had been
told; he was killed in a drunken smash-up after Helen couldn’t find a babysitter! Johnny
gets his gun, but leaves after deciding that his wife isn’t worth a bullet. The following
morning he hears on the radio a report of her murder and, knowing that he’ll be accused,
decides to take it on the lam. Fortunately for him, he catches a ride from a beautiful and
willing blonde (Lake). Together, can they discover what really happened to Helen?
The Academy Award winner for Best Picture of 1946 was The Best Years of Our Lives,
a superlative film that follows three returning servicemen who have a difficult time
readjusting to civilian life. The Blue Dahlia turns this premise upside down. Johnny is the
most “normal” character in the film, comfortably untroubled by his war experience (that
trauma is embodied in the William Bendix character). Yet the life he returns to bears no
resemblance to all of those idealized Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post covers—
it’s more hellish than anything he could have imagined during combat. If The Blue
Dahlia does nothing else, it validates the gnawing feelings of servicemen who looked
around at their fellow Americans and quietly wondered, “Is this what we fought for?”
93 Appointment with Danger
1951 | Paramount Pictures | Director: Lewis Allen
Let’s talk about Alan Ladd for a moment. Following his breakout performance in 1942’s
This Gun for Hire, Ladd quickly became Paramount’s golden goose. By the end of the
1940s he was the most bankable movie star in the world. Raymond Chandler once
derisively described the five-foot-three actor as “a small boy’s idea of a tough guy.”
Audiences didn’t care; they lined up to see Ladd in anything—one studio mogul often
called him “The Indestructible Man.” Yet Ladd fretted incessantly about his acting ability
92 Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
1956 | RKO Radio Pictures | Director: Fritz Lang
In director Fritz Lang’s American swan song, reporter Tom Garrett (Dana Andrews)
witnesses an execution and appears to be so affected by the experience that he decides
to frame himself for an unsolved murder in order to expose the fallibility of capital
punishment. After Tom is tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, fate drops a monkey
wrench into his plan, leaving him unable to establish his innocence.
With the exception of the campy Decoy, the self-important Beyond a Reasonable
Doubt is the most far-fetched movie included in this book. The plot contains so many
implausible whoppers that it’s difficult to discuss the story without ruining it—my
initial inclination was to exclude it from consideration altogether. On second thought,
I recognized that, although nearly all movies require at least a little willing suspension
of disbelief, few crime films pose such interesting questions about the moral relativity
of guilt and innocence, which is one of the defining characteristics of classic film noir.
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt explores the complexity and far-reaching ramifications of
a murder case, from the initial discovery of the crime through to the moment of the
killer’s execution. The film’s excellent poster uses the versatile motif (and not yet the
cliché that it is today) of puzzle pieces to indicate the multitude of issues at play in
this complex universe: the police investigation, the frame-up, and the crushing moral
burden of the life-and-death questions involved. In the end, Tom Garrett’s future is
placed in the hands of a lone individual, and it becomes evident that the film has been
building steadily toward this singular moment of angst, the results of which will almost
certainly surprise you.
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