DVR Diary: RED LIGHT (1949)

We often hear about "fate" or "doom" in discussions of film noir, but we hardly ever hear about "providence," and that, if nothing else, makes Roy Del Ruth's Red Light an exceptional noir. Its moral is "vengeance is mine, saith the Lord," and the screenplay by George Callahan and Charles Grayson, adapting a story by onetime cowboy star Donald "Red" Barry, goes about demonstrating the point with the dramatic logic of a golden age comic book. It starts off as menacing as you could ask for, with elite noir baddies Raymond Burr and Harry Morgan unhappily watching a newsreel from a prison projection booth. The news is that a heroic military chaplain (Arthur Franz) has just come home from the war to reunite with his doting older brother, trucking company boss Johnny Torno (George Raft). Burr's character used to work for Torno before he got caught embezzling. He feels entitled to revenge and the newsreel gives him an idea for the perfect revenge. Morgan's character is getting out shortly for good behavior (Morgan says this with as contemptuous a sneer as the words ever got). Willing to do anything for money, for Burr still has his embezzled money stashed someplace, Morgan becomes Burr's perfect weapon. Burr's blasphemous idea is to take revenge on Torno by killing his reverend brother. He doesn't anticipate that Morgan will do something stupid like telling the doomed priest that he's brought him something from Nick -- Burr's character if not Old Nick himself -- before shooting him in a hotel room.

Torno arrives in time to hear his brother's dying words: "the book." Johnny assumes that the priest means the ornate Bible he gave to his brother years ago. Hoping to find some clue to the killing, he pores through the holy book in search of accusatory marginalia and finds nothing. Some time later, it occurs to him that his brother may have meant the Gideon Bible bound to be found in any hotel room. He returns to the death room and finds that book missing, increasing his suspicion that it contains crucial information. By now several other people have occupied the room; one of them must have taken the book. If so, why? Johnny sets out to track down each of the intervening guests, while Nick, now released in his own right, lurks about recklessly, begging Johnny for another chance. The first one Torno finds is showgirl Carla North (Virginia Mayo), whom he recruits as an assistant once convinced of her innocence. Concerned that Torno may be on to something, Rocky (Morgan) stalks our hero and finally has it out with him in another hotel room. Coming out slightly the worse for wear, Rocky decides his best option is to blackmail Nick and cash out, letting him know that he spoke his name to the priest and guessing that the priest wrote it in the book. Nick responds like a Raymond Burr noir villain should and tosses Rocky from the caboose of a speeding train.

Further complications take us to the belated discovery of the genuine Gideon. As a worried Nick watches with others concerned in the case, Torno desperately thumbs through the tome until he finds a handwritten warning, his brother's last message, against seeking revenge. Assured that the priest named no names, Nick attempts an inconspicuous exit, but whom should he find at the bottom of the stairs but battered and bloody Rocky, ready for a little revenge of his own. Nick gets the better of an impromptu shootout, but Rocky, not quite the forgiving sort, lives long enough to denounce his former pal for his own death and the priest's. This sets up a classic set-piece showdown as Torno chases Nick to the roof of his building, where an electric sign advertises his business. Cinematographer Bert Glennon makes the most of the opportunity to play light against darkness as Burr darts between the big glowing letters, looking for the perfect shot at Raft, until an exposed wire becomes his undoing. Once Nick is properly fried and justice is served, the camera pulls back to make sure you see Johnny Torno's ad slogan, "24 Hour Service." This is what Torno had demanded of God in a moment of sacrilegious impatience when he'd been urged to let God do His thing in His own time. Johhny Torno is film noir's Job, driven to curse God for his affliction yet rewarded, on the assumption that he's bowed to his brother's wisdom, with instant justice. Whether he gets the girl, too, hardly matters since there's zilch chemistry between the monomaniacal (or is it just plain monotonous) Raft and the thanklessly-tasked Mayo. What makes Red Light worth seeing is the direction, the cinematography, and above all Raymond Burr, king of noir villains, in fine, foul form. It cannot be stressed enough to those who know Burr only as Perry Mason, old or young, or as that guy in those Godzilla movies, that film noir Burr is a beast who was best when he was bad. He's dependably evil here and ably assisted by Morgan, who for noir purposes was either sinister, stupid, or both. Their vital villainy and the screenplay's eccentric spirituality make Red Light idiosyncratic enough to earn a look from any noir fan.

DVR Diary: A LADY WITHOUT PASSPORT (1950)

 

We see the action through the window of a car as the vehicle pulls up to nab an illegal immigrant. We remain in the car as the suspect breaks loose; the camera pans inside the car so we can look out the back window as he runs into the street and is hit -- in our plain view -- by a car. This is a Joseph H. Lewis film, his first after his sleeper hit and noir classic Gun Crazy, in which he had filmed a bank robbery and getaway from inside the crooks' car. Now he was working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and while the budget may have been small by that studio's standards Lewis must have felt like he was in the big leagues, with all the toys that come with that. He's clearly more interested in the technical and atmospheric effects he can pull off than in the noir-exotic melodrama. Judged by its set-pieces, Lady Without Passport stands comparison with the twin peaks of Lewis's career, Gun Crazy and The Big Combo. But without as potent a story to hold them together, the set-pieces mostly have more technical than dramatic interest.

The story is that INS agent Pete Karczag (John Hodiak) must go undercover in Cuba to investigate a people-smuggling ring, led by a hairdyed George Macready, who'd brought that hapless fugitive from the first scene to America. On location, Pete falls for one of Macready's clients, Holocaust survivor Marianne (Hedy Lamarr, whose recent role in the blockbuster Samson and Delilah was this film's main selling point). That's our triangle, which Pete hopes to break up by convincing Marianne to stay in Cuba rather than pay Macready in the only coin she can afford. Pete's willing to give up his career to keep her in Cuba and stay with her, but our villain figures out Pete's real business and blabs to Marianne to alienate her from him. Now Pete and his INS buddies have to try to catch Marianne and the other illegals as Macready flies them into the U.S. This sets the stage for a setpiece that's at once spectacular and anticlimactic as the smugglers crash-land their plane in the Everglades, after which Macready, his pilot and Marianne hit the water in the only life-raft, after Macready drives away the other illegals with his gun. Lewis films all of this from far above, from the perspective of a government plane. I wasn't sure whether the plane crash was done for real or with models, and I suppose that's a credit to the M-G-M effects department either way. The breakout immediately afterward has newsreel-like immediacy and verisimilitude, since there's no way the actors can play to the camera so far above, but Lewis's staging also leeches the drama (or at least the melodrama) out of one of the big moments of the story. The real dramatic climax comes after Macready has ditched his snake-bit pilot and, with Marianne still in tow, confronts Pete, who has caught up with him finally. The moment is tense and literally atmospheric with expressionistic swamp mist, but it's again kind of anticlimactic, since Macready simply pulls a gun on Hodiak and commandeers his boat, giving up Marianne in the bargain. The punch line is that our hero emptied most of the fuel tank so that the villain will be dead in the water and easily caught, but we don't get to see that. Lewis (or the studio) seems to think the real story is the romance, but John Hodiak simply isn't much of a romantic hero. That leaves Lady Without Passport lacking the heart it wants and the heart of darkness that keeps Lewis's best noirs alive, but it's still a treat to look at just to see a clever, confident director showing off.

DVR Diary: WOMAN ON PIER 13 (I Married a Communist, 1949)

It's hard to imagine many Hollywood movies more reflexively reviled than this Howard Hughes agit-noir from his recently-acquired RKO studio. According to legend, Hughes tried to make participation in the project a test of loyalty for studio talent -- loyalty to himself, I suppose, as much as to the American Way of Life. In general, overtly anti-communist movies get a tougher rap from critics than the overtly anti-Nazi films of a few years earlier. This is because the anti-commie movies are perceived to target not a fighting wartime aggressor but an underdog dissident faction. Regardless of recent histories demonstrating the complicity of American communists in espionage and crimes against international communists, most people's image of an American communist, if they have one at all, is not of a terrorist gangster actively pursuing the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Posterity has deemed the anti-red rhetoric of the scare years disproportionate to the actual threat. As a result, films like I Married a Communist are dismissed as absurdities if not offenses against truth. The fact that the film's title was changed quite quickly to the almost-pointless Woman on Pier 13 suggests that movie audiences during the actual Red Scare may have felt the same way. But rather than debate whether the film was fair to the actual Reds I want to pay attention to what the screenplay (credited to Robert Hardy Andrews and Charles Grayson) actually says and how it may belie our expectations.

I Married a Communist is a bit of a cheat title. It should have been I Married an Ex-Communist, because the object of the title, Brad Collins (Robert Ryan), quit the party in disgust more than a decade before the story starts. Since his street-fighting days as a labor agitator, Brad has risen, with the help of a name change, from stevedore to shipping executive. He's successful and just married to Nan (Laraine Day), the I of the title, when the trouble starts. Just when he thought he was out, the Reds pull him back in. Christine Norman, an ex-flame (Janis Carter) has the dirt on his Commie past, and so does the Party boss Vanning (Thomas Gomez). Since the revelations will ruin his career, and his role in a strike killing may condemn him to the electric chair, Brad must submit to blackmail. The simple part is the 40% of his salary he has to kick back to the Party. But then it gets interesting.

Brad's company is negotiating a new contract with the union. This being a Hollywood picture, the union honcho Jim Travers (Richard Rober) is a former flame of Nan's. But he's a good guy -- the most positive male character in the entire picture. He's not going to start a strike on his own; he believes in negotiation and compromise. But the Party wants Brad to precipitate the strike -- it presumably serves some international strategic purpose, since it will tie up the San Francisco docks -- by taking an intransigent stand against the union, against compromise. Here are two things worth noting. First, the right-wing propaganda of 65 years ago is different from the right-wing propaganda of today in some significant ways. Most notably, and maybe most surprisingly given Hughes's agendas, his anti-communist movie is not hostile to organized labor. In fact, as I suggested, Jim the union leader is the nearest thing to a hero after Nan herself. Meanwhile, the script seems to be telling us that employers who refuse compromise with unions are doing the Commies' work for them. Robert Stevenson directed this film at the cusp of the "Treaty of Detroit" era when management and labor agreed to share the wealth to an unprecedented extent in return for peace on the shop floor and the elimination of communist influence. 1949 was not a period of economic decline for which unions could serve as a scapegoat as they do now. Some observers might expect anti-communism in the McCarthy era -- the Senator from Wisconsin made his big splash into celebrity a year later -- to be synonymous with hostility to organized labor, but on this evidence it simply wasn't so.

While Brad reluctantly carries on his insincere negotiations, Christine jealously turns her seductive attentions to Nan's younger brother Don (John Agar), whom Brad had given a job before the trouble started. She gradually transforms Brad into a radical union agitator who shouts Jim down when the moderate leader pleads for moderation. This process apparently took longer in an earlier cut of the film, since Brad's radicalization and its role in provoking the strike is shown as part of a lengthy montage of snippets of scenes that clearly had important dialogue in them, while ominous music plays. Left intact is Brad's first introduction to communism at one of Christine's parties. This scene is as ideological as the movie gets. It tells us what the writers (if not Hughes) thought communism stood for. What it stands for, apparently, is "the scientific management of society," as one well-fed intellectual asserts. Nothing here about the proletariat or property or capitalism. An initially skeptical Brad senses that this is a form of elitism and tells his interlocutor that "I prefer democracy." So another thing missing that we in 2014 might expect in an overtly anti-communist propaganda movie is a defense of capitalism. Nothing here about "free enterprise," nor even about "freedom." The opposite of communism is "democracy." Communism, then, appears to be a political system above all, characterized by the rule of an elite justified by an appeal to science. This is actually a fair hit against Bolshevism or Leninism and the concept of necessary, incontestable leadership by a vanguard party who would do the dictating during Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat." Sixty-five years later you may be more likely to hear someone say that democracy and capitalism contradict each other, with capitalism getting the better of the argument. 1949 was a different world.

Where the 1949 film gets most outrageous is in its portrayal of blatant gangster tactics by American communists. Some were certainly involved in the sort of labor-dispute street fighting Brad took part in as a young man, but I Married a Communist goes beyond that. Communists are shown murdering a suspected informant, in part as a way to intimidate Brad. The victim is tied up and dumped off a pier as he begs for mercy. Brad, being Robert Ryan, is unimpressed by the attempt to scare him. Later, the Communists begin to devour their own. When Don begins to get wise to how he's been manipulated, Vanning orders a hit on him. The local Reds farm out much of such work to a carny who runs a shooting-gallery concession on the pier. Eschewing the obvious, the hit man kills Don by running him over with a car. Later still, Christine threatens to turn on Vanning, but he dumps her out a high window. The film's conflicts are ultimately resolved by gunplay, Brad killing Vanning while suffering a mortal wound so he can give Nan back to Jim, from whom he took her. In history, you often hear of "purges" among the American communists, but these weren't the sort of purges you had in countries where communists controlled the state and enforced their own laws. American communists who got purged usually formed their own splinter parties, even more futile than the original party. Mine wasn't the most thorough Google search, but I found nothing indicating that American communists killed each other on American soil to enforce party discipline or to punish informants. Actual labor unions seem more likely to have done such things. American communists seem to have been more "community organizers" in the pejorative sense than men of action or the sort of hard cases who carried out revolutions elsewhere. In Russia, Stalin robbed banks and Lenin condoned it. The category error of American anti-communism was to assume that America's communists were the same sort of people, that to be a communist was to be a criminal at heart. That feeling still persists, and so I Married a Communist will not seem quite as alien or surprising in its overall attitude as I'm suggesting here -- and I must also admit that a non-violent finish would have made a weak film only more dull. But my main point remains: to be against communism doesn't mean automatically that you'll also be against other things, or for other things still. An anti-communist movie of 1949 isn't necessarily a right-wing movie by today's standards -- and it's not really a good movie by any standard. But it's very interesting as a historical document and a great example of what movies can tell us about the culture they were made in and how it differs from our own.

Weird Noir: THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT (1961)

With Irvin Berwick's Crown International release from 1961, Something Weird's new Weird-Noir collection really starts living up to its label. The Seventh Commandment is the sort of film that has to have a low budget; it would lose its impoverished, grimy authenticity otherwise. It looks and feels like the movie the characters in the picture might make, filmed in a flophouse, given the opportunity. There's no glamour here, and that makes the femme fatale's pretensions to glamour all the more pathetic and vile. Berwick's picture takes place in a pathetic, vile universe unredeemed by the faith that also pervades it. Here, faith is an accomplice to murder.

The story starts with a plot device out of Gabriel Over the White House: a mediocre man acquires strange, divine powers after surviving a car wreck. Ted Mathews (Jonathan Kidd) is celebrating his graduation from a night-school course in business administration by joyriding with his impatient girlfriend Terry (Lyn Statten) when they collide with another car and go over an embankment. Barely hurt, Ted checks on the other car after verifying that Terry's still alive. He sees an unconscious, bleeding driver and, convinced that he's killed the man, seems to suffer traumatic amnesia, heralded by watery dissolves. He barely acknowledges the still-unconscious Terry before wandering from the accident scene.

Ted's wandering takes him to the trailer of an itinerant preacher with a Noah's Ark on wheels. This modern Noah takes Ted and sets him up as a faith healer. Now called Tad Morgan, he has talent for his work. We see him give hearing to the deaf and life to the limbs of a lame boy as a devout crowd watches slackjawed, arms prayerfully and creepily crossed over their chests. Tad's power keeps the cash flowing in, which he hopes to convert into a children's hospitals.

 

Soon, however, Terry reappears. She's been on a downward spiral since taking the rap for the car wreck. She keeps house with Pete (John Harmon), a wretch who rolls rummies to keep the couple in booze. She approaches Tad for some money, but when she realizes that Tad, barely remembering the accident, still believes that he killed the other driver, who only suffered a concussion, she also realizes that Tad is ripe for long-term blackmail. When she gets impatient with occasional checks -- the booze seems to run out faster and faster -- she decides to marry Tad, to Pete's jealous dismay. But first she has to get Tad seriously, profoundly liquored up. This lubricated courtship climaxes in a travesty of a marriage, Terry propping up a barely conscious Tad while a skeevy JP performs the ceremony, then dumping him to the floor the moment the man pronounces them husband and wife. Through it all, her strange if not inexplicable attraction to Pete persists. Codependence is a hell of a drug.

Having touched bottom, Tad struggles to free himself. Drastic action is necessary. The moment comes on a dark stretch of bridge as a weary Terry sits on the stone ledge and demands a foot rub. Tad complies but starts pressing too hard, until he heaves her over the side and into the drink. He runs repentant back to church, but as if she, too, had been transfigured by that original accident, Terry seems unkillable. Like a raunch Rasputin, or like a wet rat, she rises from the waters and returns home, where Pete has made himself at home, put on Tad's robe, and passed out drunk in the marriage bed. Seeing only the robe, and probably seeing red, Terri gets a gun out of a drawer and fires four shots into her true love.

 

Realizing her mistake, Terry stalks Tad at the church and through a cemetery as the film nears its dark epiphany. Confronting him at last, Terry fires her last two shots, but praise God! Tad's Bible absorbs the bullets. As if possessed, Tad begins reciting the Lord's Prayer as he puts his hands over Terry's throat and chokes the evil life out of her once and for all. He had been given the power to heal, but maybe his mission on Earth was to kill, after all. For now that his work is done, the heart attack hinted at earlier strikes him on the church steps, and his soul departs his body for parts unknown.

The synopsis speaks for itself: The Seventh Commandment suffers from a spiritual confusion that could only come from deep if not uncritical faith. It's all too straightfaced and guileless, if not artless, to be written off as cynical exploitation. It's like a tale told by a raving, repentant drunk, while he's still drunk. Naively depraved, its exploitative moralism is laughably appalling. You may be content to laugh, but you should be appalled. You may be appalled, but you ought to be laughing, too. This film is a genuine nightmare, but for someone to have this nightmare is sort of laughable. What I'm saying is that if you have a taste for something other than good taste, if you're morbidly fascinated by the sometimes feverish sincerity of bad cinema or just like to laugh at it, The Seventh Commandment comes highly recommended.

Weird Noir: THE NAKED ROAD (1959)

According to gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, William Martin's independent feature, now included in Something Weird Video's Weird-Noir collection, was inspired by an Edward R. Murrow radio report on prostitution rings operating near the advertising industry district on Madison Ave in New York City. Writing in July 1959, Kilgallen predicted that The Naked Road would "cause quite a stir" in the metropolis later that summer. This was probably the best publicity the film ever got. If it caused a stir anywhere it played, it was probably nothing a square-up reel couldn't fix. An exhibitor would have been wise to have one on hand, as Naked Road is a textbook case of delivering much, much less than a movie might promise.

The ad-industry angle consists of an agency man taking the heroine, Gay Andrews (Jeanne Rainer), out on a date, only to learn that she won't put out. Taking her home, our Mad Man is pulled over for speeding and conducted to the home of a local justice of the peace, who levies a stiff fine. Mr. Big Businessman doesn't have the ready cash, but the judge lets him go get the money, as long as Gay stays in his custody until the driver returns.

 

The Majesty of the Law

Hours later, another sympathetic speeder sees that Gay's been abandoned, confined to the judge's couch. Taking pity on the girl, he pays the ad guy's fine as well as his own so the girl can be let go. This Wayne Jackson (Ronald Long) takes Gay to a fancy restaurant (see below), but it soon becomes apparent that his motives are even more ulterior than those of the ad guy. Wayne intends to recruit Gay into his "public relations" racket, enticing her with a promise of $1,000 a week and threatening her with "the Treatment." Gay has a pain in her arm when she wakes up in Wayne's apartment. That pain was the first prick of the needle, the first round of the Treatment. But if she agrees to become a whore voluntarily, Wayne will spare her the horror of drug addiction.

 

Wayne takes his victims to the finest places.

A waiting game now begins that rivals Beckett for existential futility. Wayne and his stooge impatiently await Gay's surrender, going so far as denying her food -- though cigarettes are still okay, since they'll help her think. The threat of the Treatment always looms, and Gay finally surrenders. At this point Wayne sets up an impromptu training session, ordering Gay to show his stooge a good time. As the jazz music builds on the soundtrack, Wayne steps into the other room, and we watch him wait until Gay screams. Back in the bedroom, she's smacked the stooge in the face, and Wayne sends him away. Angrily, Wayne reminds Gay of the Treatment, but then informs her that the initial shot had only been penicillin. The waiting game resumes, and might go on forever were Wayne's stooge not caught by an eyewitness, one of Wayne's own hookers, dumping a dead girl's body out a window to simulate suicide.  Wayne rightly chides his flunky for letting someone see him, and warns him that the consequences will be dire if the girl talks -- but the thought of silencing the girl never takes root in either mind. Finally, it's only a matter of waiting for the cops to come....

 

After an hour or so of Naked Road,

you'll probably be ready to chuck it.

 

The weird thing about this would-be noir is how absolutely ineffectual its villains are. Their recruitment process for prostitutes stops short only at saying "pretty please with sugar on top" to poor Gay, whose torture by tedium can only inspire empathy from audiences who watch it, so long as they stay awake. Martin may have convinced Dorothy Kilgallen, without showing her the film, of its relevance, but Naked Road is more nearly a film about nothing.  It appears to have been filmed in people's houses, various rooms passing for offices and restaurants, apart from the closing coup de cinema, for which Martin arranged for the denouement, settling the fate of Wayne's official co-conspirators, to scroll across a New York TV station's electronic sign. If Something Weird deems it "Weird-Noir," that's in spite of Martin's effort to purge the tale of any weird vitality. I suppose there is something weird about Wayne's desultory attempts to dominate Gay, but it's dumb-weird, not weird-weird, if you appreciate the distinction. Naked Road is a truly bad movie, a celluloid void that friends and intoxicants are unlikely to redeem -- though that probably won't stop people from trying.

GIRL ON THE RUN (1953)

It was just about ten years ago when I bought my first DVD player. It was a golden age when amazing new titles appeared in book stores and electronic stores every week. A dependable highlight of each month was Something Weird Video's multi-feature releases, distributed by Image Entertainment, and it was an early sign that the golden age was ending when Image stopped putting them out and Something Weird reverted to mail order and online sales. So it was a nostalgic, heartwarming moment when I learned that Something Weird and Image had rejoined forces, and I now have one of their new releases, a two-disc, six-film collection of Weird Noir B-movies made between 1953 and 1963. There aren't any incredible supplements or easter eggs like there used to be, but when you figure that you're getting six features for the price of two or three back in the day, I can't complain too much, and I'd rather celebrate this mighty team of yore getting back in the retail game.

The oldest film of the six by a good six years is Joseph Lee and Arthur J. Beckhard's carny noir Girl on the Run. This Astor Pictures release (the company later distributed Plan 9 From Outer Space and La Dolce Vita) clocks in at 65 padded minutes, and what story there is seems like an excuse for carnival cheesecake -- not that there's anything wrong with that.

There is a girl on the run in the picture, but the story is more about her boyfriend, journalist Bill Martin (Richard Coogan), who's just lost his newspaper job after seeing his vice-ring investigation squelched by his editor. When the editor turns up dead, presumed-disgruntled Bill becomes a prime suspect, but girlfriend Janet (Rosemary Pettit) has information that points to a hit ordered by the local political boss, Clay Reeves (Harry Bannister). The good guys need more solid evidence to clear Bill and hope to find it at the carnival. Failing that, they hope to infiltrate the show and cross the state line with it to escape Reeves's police goon squad. Meanwhile, Reeves is in a war of wills with the carnival's dwarf boss, Blake (Charles Bollender), who has dirt from a source close to the mysterious vice boss that implicates Reeves and subjects him to blackmail.

 

Little big man: Charles Bollender rules the carny in Girl on the Run.

 

Our heroes manage to infiltrate the carny, Bill as a volunteer fighter who beats the champ and gets hired as a shill, Janet as a reluctant showgirl. In the claustrophobic, cop-ridden environment the characters circle one another, loyalties are uncertain, and every corner promises a twist in the plot. But who cares about all that when the girls are on?

 

Above: Cat-Women of 1953;

Below, Renee de Milo steals the show.

 

Girl on the Run probably passed for "adults only" product in the innocent early Fifties and probably played at the same theaters that ran the burlesque features collected by Something Weird in the past. For such audiences, the highlights of the film have nothing to do with the plot. The main attraction was more likely Renee de Milo as Gigi, the carny's star dancer, who gets two long solo numbers that get the film over the hour mark. Otherwise, she's a spectator for the main story. The rest of the girls are a motley bunch with realistically mediocre figures and talent. They fit in the semi-documentary environment of the picture, which combines actual carnival footage with a bare-bones set representing the space between the tents where characters lurk and stalk each other. The film's been remastered from a 35mm print and looks almost impossibly good, showing off the cinematography of Victor Lukens in its best possible light and darkness. The acting leaves a lot to be desired, with veteran character actor Frank Albertson the only real name in the cast and a high number of bungled line readings from the rest. Steve McQueen is said to be an extra, but I neither sought him out nor noticed him in the film.

The remaining films in the set were made between 1959 and 1963 and will likely show a different sensibility, coming closer to the "Weird Noir" organizing principle than Girl on the Run. The older film has a quaint appeal, albeit more camp than noir, and to say the very least the dancing girls perform with enthusiasm. Think of it as a warm-up for the deeper weirdness to come, but come back soon to see whether Image and Something Weird really live up to their tremendous heritage.

DVR Diary: SHIELD FOR MURDER (1954)

In the year he earned the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Barefoot Contessa -- it can be assumed that three co-stars of On the Waterfront cancelled each other out -- Edmond O'Brien directed himself in this adaptation of a novel by William P. McGivern, who also provided source material for the late noirs The Big Heat and Odds Against Tomorrow. Howard W. Koch, a co-producer of the picture, shares the directing credit, and I can't tell you who directed what. Which one allows the shadow of a boom mike or crane to crawl across the front of a building in the opening scene? Which one stages a remarkable shootout at a crowded high-school swimming pool between O'Brien and a head-bandaged Claude Akins? Which one shot the scene where Akins gets that early beating, a moment of appalling violence despite the absence of any gore because the camera focuses on O'Brien's expression of desperate rage as he pistol-whips Akins and a cohort for what feels like a full minute, cutting only to show the horrified expressions of other restaurant patrons? By no measure is Shield For Murder a polished film, but it probably shouldn't be. Had O'Brien more subtlety as a director or an actor the picture would lose much of its dark turbulence. He plays Barney Nolan, a plainclothes detective grown tired of his work. He's looking for a big payday and a new life and like a fool he thinks he'll get it when he murders a mob bookie with $25,000 on him and tries to cover it up by calling it a line-of-duty shooting of a fleeing suspect. As if the bookie's boss Packy Reed won't guess where the money went once it turns up missing. As if someone wasn't watching the whole thing happen, even if that guy, in a bit of pulpy melodrama, is a deaf-mute. The old man can still read and write, which the plot requires so our default hero, Barney's stolid protege (an inert John Agar) can discover a written account of the crime. Inevitably, Barney sows the wind and reaps a shitstorm, accidentally killing the mute while attempting to convince him to accept a bribe. Another great scene, whoever directed it, is when Barney pushes the corpse down a flight of stairs to simulate an accident, leaps over the body and bolts down a flight of stairs and out into the night. O'Brien is a house afire throughout, embodying the frustrated fantasies of a beaten-down audience and affirming their futility. I've said before that I consider him the definitive noir actor, noir for me being less about cool than about hapless passion and hopeless persistence. O'Brien is the opposite of cool, but the essence (or part of it) of noir. Like a clown in a slapstick silent, only made up in sweat rather than whiteface, he acts out and lashes out and gets his comeuppance as order inevitably prevails, only it isn't very funny and you don't cry, either. Shield For Murder may be O'Brien's definitive noir performance. Directing himself, it should have been, and the fact of his direction, whatever the actual extent of it, is an assurance that he knew himself as a performer and understood his genre. It's the nearest he comes to being an auteur and he lives up to the opportunity. He should've earned something for that, too.

CITY OF FEAR (1959)

Film blogger Maurizio Roca is currently doing a countdown of his top 50 films noirs at the Wonders in the Dark blog Any such project begs the questions: what is film noir? what is it about? when does it begin? when does it end? Any attempt to periodize a genre that was defined by critics after the fact is bound to start a debate. Roca has elected to confine his countdown to English-language films shot in black-and-white between 1941 and 1958, though he concedes that the "classical" period could be extended in time in either direction. Other critics would want to admit foreign-language films like the work of Jean-Pierre Melville or the Nikkatsu Noirs that have recently won recognition here. Others might object to the exclusion of noirs in color on the premise that noir is a matter of theme rather than cinematography. The arguments will go on because noir is a slippery concept encompassing a wide range of influences and going in several directions at once. Thinking about when noir can be said to have ended, it occurred to me that you could define a subcategory of late noirs that have a common apocalyptic mood, by either tapping in to Fifties fears of nuclear war and radiation or by self-consciously declaring a violent end to a style of crime movie. The most obvious examples of what I mean in each respect are Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, with its "Pandora's box" conflagration at the end, and Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow, which turns a botched bank robbery into a miniature race war with an mutually-destructive climax. Add to those Irving Lerner's terse thriller from 1959, the same year as Odds, which substitutes the fear of radiation for fear of the Bomb while telling a tough, traditional crime story.

A common element of these late noirs is the idea that the oldschool criminal is in over his head when he messes, knowingly or not, with forces far beyond his control or ken. Kiss Me Deadly is the model here, as Mike Hammer mulishly carries on his pursuit of a "great whatzit" that could destroy him, but you could also extend the idea back to Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street, in which a pickpocket gets reluctantly mixed-up in a commie spy case. City of Fear may be the most blatant statement of this theme. It opens with Vince Ryker (the conveniently named Vince Edwards) on the lam after a prison break, accompanied by a dying accomplice. Along with his freedom, Vince claims a prize. As we learn later, he'd heard from prison gossip that the infirmary kept a supply of heroin for experimental purposes. On his way out, Vince grabs a cylinder containing what he estimates as a pound of the pure stuff. If he can arrange to have the smack cut and put out on the street, he figures it'll be worth a million dollars to him.

What Vince doesn't know, since he can't open the canister, is that it isn't heroin but Cobalt-60 inside. Having removed the metal cylinder from its lead casing, he's exposing himself and everyone he encounters to dangerous levels of radiation. Allowed to run loose, he could contaminate the entire city of Los Angeles. A police investigation team equipped with Geiger counters sweeps the streets in search of the fugitive, but keeps its work under wraps in order to prevent a panic. The problem with that approach is that they can't make clear to Vince's uncooperative criminal cronies the danger they're in if they deal with him. His moll is already contaminated but won't rat him out. A suspicious shoe salesman assumes that Vince is carrying heroin and looks for ways to get the drugs while getting rid of Vince. Another sleazeball interrogated by the cops assumes that Vince has something important and decides to horn in on his deal with the shoe dealer. Vince himself is paranoid enough as a fugitive, and the radiation poisoning isn't helping matters. On top of that, he has to worry about his cronies double crossing him and taking his precious cylinder. They all behave exactly as you would expect, and because they all want a part of the score no one who knows Vince is going to tell the cops, who face a countdown before the mayor goes public with the threat. A handful of pathetic people are playing their usual petty game for higher stakes than any can imagine....

Vince isn't entirely paranoid. Lots of people are out to get him (above). Below, his moll (Patricia Blair) faces the music from a Geiger counter.

We're in a sleazier place than prime film noir, which rarely deals with drugs in my experience, and the youthful Edwards gives a juvenile-delinquent quality to his delirious protagonist. He is as doomed a protagonist as noir can offer (except maybe for Edmond O'Brien's poisoned hero in D.O.A.), and Edwards gives him just the right blend of stupid bravado and paranoia.

Vince and his precious (foreground)

Director Lerner helps him along with nicely edited sequences illustrating Vince's suspicions as he scans the streets for enemies or flees from imagined watchers. Lerner even jump cuts within shots in an almost avant-garde way to highlight Vince's fragmented, brittle perceptions. The director also makes excellent use of urban locations and hand-held cameras while also getting maximum noir value from cinematographer Lucien Ballard whenever night or shadows fall. Icing on the cake is a young Jerry Goldsmith's bombastic modernist score -- one of his first for a feature film. It sounds like exactly the sort of soundtrack one of my late noirs should have.

Lucien Ballard's cinematography gives City of Fear instant noir cred. Below, production design underlines Vince's paranoia (check out the eye on that sign).

It's possible that filmmakers were making self-conscious noirs (or would that make them "neo-noirs?") by 1959, but a late noir like City of Fear is more likely a self-conscious synthesis, an updating of noir tropes and themes for a modern world that must have made the original noir milieu of the 1940s seem long ago and far away. Just as we began to see "late westerns" around the same time that dealt with the end of the outlaw world of the Old West, late noirs seem to portray the last days of a dying breed -- in that respect, you could also throw in Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, which starts with an explosion. It may be no accident that crime films soon took a nostalgic turn, with many Sixties films dealing with the legendary gangsters and robbers of the Twenties and Thirties. Whether they declared an end to a genre or not, films like City of Fear do seem forcefully to declare an end to an era, and Lerner's film in particular does so in uncompromising fashion.

Holden and O'Brien in THE TURNING POINT (1952)

William Dieterle's 1952 noir is a case of a screenplay trying to do too much at once. About fifteen minutes into it, I thought it had the makings of a great film noir, but by the halfway point -- or should I say "turning point" -- the movie had moved on to other things. And at that point it still had a shot, but before long it was heading in yet another direction. With the cast it had, it should have been much stronger. But let me explain it a bit more. In an American city that looks a lot like San Francisco, law professor John Conroy (Edmond O'Brien) is appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the rackets allegedly led by Neil Eichelberger (Ed Begley). Conroy's girlfriend Amanda Waycross (Alexis Smith) joins him on the job, which reunites him with his old pal Jerry McKibbon (William Holden), now a high-powered newspaper reporter. Adding to the old home week feel, Conroy hires his father (Tom Tully), a veteran cop, to be his special investigator, despite the older man's clear reluctance. Dad's reluctance is explained to us soon enough; unbeknownst to his son, the old cop's been on the take from Eichelberger for years, and he only accepts John's offer so he can spy for the racketeer.

William Holden pauses to watch Tom Tully take a walk in The Turning Point

Right there, I thought, you had potent noir material, but there was already something odd about the film's approach. The father-son story would be plot enough for a noir if the son were the central character, but Turning Point isn't really about John Conroy. Sure, O'Brien gets plenty of screen time, including a great scene in which he interrogates a cagily indignant Begley in a televised hearing, but mostly we see him and everyone else in the film through Jerry McKibbon's eyes. That could still work, since we can still empathize with someone reunited with an old friend who finds out something terrible (Dad's betrayal) the friend doesn't know. But in short order Jerry himself becomes a betrayal, starting an affair with Amanda behind Conroy's back. It turns out, however, that Conroy isn't quite as clueless as he seems. In a nicely written scene, just as Jerry and Amanda try to convince him not to quit the investigation, John makes it clear in one sentence, without histrionics, that he's on to them both. There's something almost Arthurian about this triangle, since all three people are plainly good guys, but there's also something forced about it, since I didn't really feel much chemistry between Holden and Smith.

A demoralized Edmond O'Brien sulks despite the entreaties of his so-called friends.

This being 1952, someone's got to take the fall, but not before more plot complications kick in. Along the way, Conroy's dad has been whacked for threatening to turn, and the man who shot him in a pretend-robbery was in turn shot down on the spot. McKibbon encounters this last man's widow, who can name the second shooter and potentially bring down Eichelberger's empire. Jerry saves her from some goons in a diner but loses track of her. As the widow frightfully makes her way to Conroy's office, McKibbon gets a tip that takes him to a boxing arena, where he's been set up to be taken out, he being the only good guy who can identify the widow. Someone squeals to Conroy, but it's Amanda who rushes to the arena to rescue Jerry, forcing the question of which of the lovers will pay for their indiscretion....

What really hurts the film is that neither Holden nor O'Brien seems fully committed to it. Holden's character is almost voyeuristically omniscient and doesn't seem weighed down by conventional responsibilities. He can come and go wherever he wants, whenever he wants, as if his job was wandering plot device rather than deadline-bound reporter. Holden just seems to float through the picture; even after Sunset Blvd., he doesn't yet command the screen as he would from Stalag 17 forward. Edmond O'Brien, arguably a definitive noir type, doesn't get to play that type here. He has to be a bland authority figure instead, and he invests the part with all the blandness in his power. Alexis Smith's part is simply underwritten; her character is in the picture just so there can be a triangle. The only actor fully on his game here is Ed Begley, who's masterful as Eichelberger. He's convincingly businesslike in his ruthlessness and defensive about his vocation. When you think of all the bluster Lee J. Cobb would have brought to this role you really appreciate what Begley does with it. Tom Tully is also very good as Conroy's compromised father, but we don't really get enough of a character around whom the whole film could have been built.

For the most part, Turning Point isn't noir in the strictest visual sense. It makes effective use of locations like many noirs, but it's low on expressionistic shadows and other obvious noir devices. Director Dieterle does come up with several strong set pieces, including the shootout that kills Conroy's father, the hearing showdown between Conroy and Eichelberger, and especially the climactic sequence at the arena. Dieterle milks this for maximum suspense as a gunman lurks on the catwalk above the action, waiting for his chance to shoot McKibbon, then pursues him urgently as the crowd flows out of the arena following an abrupt knockout. Overall, the film isn't really as bad as my disappointed review may suggest, but given everyone involved, it should have been much better.

THE BROTHERS RICO (1957)

If I've noticed any recurring themes in the films I've seen directed by Phil Karlson, it's an almost paranoid terror at the omnipotence of organized crime. Flourishing in the Fifties, he seems to use crime syndicates and organizations as stand-ins for the reputedly repressive "organization man" lifestyle increasingly decried during the supposedly conformist decade. Karlson's films aren't films noirs as much as they're horror stories about the brutality of power, seedier or sleazier versions of the Orwellian boot stomping your face. They were probably redeemed in the eyes of their original audiences by cathartic comebacks by the oppressed who prove able, against the odds, of sometimes literally beating the system. The Phenix City Story was Karlson's epic expression of these themes, but they echo more intimately in smaller-scaled stories of individuals trapped in seemingly hopeless situations, like the framed fighter John Payne in 99 River Street or the duped mob accountant played by Richard Conte in The Brothers Rico, dutifully delivering his sibling to death.

Conte, a crime-film fixture from the Forties through the Seventies, is Eddie Rico, aspiring to civilian life as a laundry owner in Florida. He has two brothers, both deeper into the mob than he ever was. As he learns when brother Gino arrives in town, they were hired to kill a man, but things have gotten hot since youngest brother Johnny's new brother-in-law got wind of things and threatened to rat everyone out. Gino wants out of the country as quick as possible but doesn't know where Johnny is. The "organization" wants to know badly. Fronted by old family friend Sid Kubik, they tell Eddie that they want to help his brothers leave the country, too, until things cool down. But it's clear to us long before it's clear to Eddie that the organization really wants to kill Gino and Johnny rather than take any chance that these heretofore loyal men might squeal. Sid reminds Eddie of his longstanding loyalty to the Ricos and prevails upon him to travel the country searching for Johnny, even if that louses up the plans of Eddie and his wife to finalize the adoption of a child. Throughout the film, Eddie thinks he's doing right by his family, but he's actually doing everything in his power to destroy it.

Richard Conte as Eddie Rico

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has packaged The Brothers Rico as part of its Film Noir Classics II collection of Fifties crime movies. I'm not sure it belongs in the set. As Martin Scorsese notes in brief remarks about the film, it has little of the trademark expressionistic shadowplay, being instead lit "flat" like a contemporary TV program. Scorsese himself seems at a loss to account for this Fifties trend, but it seems obvious to me that the more artless style is a sort of reaction against the stylization of Forties noir, aiming for a broad-daylight sort of naturalism instead. Somehow this seems more appropriate to the era of the lurid paperback original (Rico itself adapts an American-set Georges Simenon story) and EC Comics than the glamorous chiaroscuro of the previous decade.

More of a disqualification is Rico's use of its hero. I'm inclined to agree with the definition of noir proposed by Otto Penzler in his and James Ellroy's Best American Noir of the Twentieth Century collection, which emphasizes protagonists' inability to restrain their impulses. A noir hero dooms himself by greed or lust, as a rule. But Eddie Rico causes disaster mostly because he's naive and just plain dumb. I wonder, however, if the screenplay makes him look dumber than Simenon's original. The problem with the movie is that we the viewers don't trust Sid Kubik for a second, yet Eddie trusts him implicitly through two-thirds of the picture. Larry Gates gives such a fake performance in his early scene with Conte that we hardly need the proof we get almost immediately that Sid has bad intentions for the Rico brothers. Eddie talks a lot about all that Sid has done for the family, but we needed either a better actor playing Sid or an extra scene or two showing rather than telling why Eddie would consider Sid a friend. Without that, we find it hard to sympathize with or root for someone who just looks stupid.

In this nicely staged scene, Karlson plants his hero in the background to make him look as small as he feels as the big men in the foreground nonchalantly discuss his brother's death.

Worse, once it seems that the only way Eddie can redeem himself is by avenging his brothers, despite an apparently unviolent nature, and at whatever cost to himself, Karlson and his writers go over the top to give a film that seems like it shouldn't have one a happy ending. They also reach past plausibility to give audiences their catharsis, sending a boss like Kubik somewhere he probably shouldn't be just so Eddie can take a shot at him. Then, just as it looks like Eddie will endure a redemptive death, the too-good-to-be-true coda has him and the wife finally picking out a kid to adopt. It may be unfair of me to feel that Eddie doesn't deserve this simply because he was stupid, but the ending just stinks of Hollywood contrivance, and the film would be more noirish without it.

Despite all this, Karlson manages to cultivate that sense of terror in the presence of an implacable system. The organization has spies everywhere. We don't even have to see them tailing Eddie; it's just a given that they'll have men waiting wherever he goes. There's an extended sequence during which Eddie tries to bargain or beg for Johnny's life with an impassive Western criminal who has complete power over the hotel Eddie stays in and the community beyond. For his part the criminal tries to reason with Eddie, urging him to accept the unalterable circumstances and reconcile himself to his brother's doom. Harry Bellaver plays the gangster with an understated sinister stoicism that invests his scenes with an emotional brutality that compensates for the relatively limited physical brutality of this film. Adding to that is the terrified yet indignant performance of James Darren as the youngest Rico. Karlson's film has a lot of the right atmosphere, and Conte does all he can with his thankless starring role, but the weakness of the role keeps The Brothers Rico out of the first ranks of Fifties crime films or Karlson's filmography.

Here's the original trailer, uploaded to YouTube by adlerangriffe.

THE PHENIX CITY STORY (1955)

Phil Karlson takes a huge chance in the opening reel of his based-on-fact crime drama by forefronting the fact. The Phenix City Story opens with its own newsreel; Clete Roberts (whom TV fans will remember playing himself interviewing members of the 4077th on M*A*S*H*) goes to the title town, where the story itself has been filmed on location, to interview some of the real people to be portrayed by actors later, including the widow of Albert Patterson, the candidate for Alabama attorney general who was assassinated on orders from the Phenix City vice syndicate. Conspicuously absent from this round of awkwardly authentic interviews is John Patterson, son of the martyred politician who by the time of filming had become attorney general in his own right. The dignity of his office may have kept the younger man from appearing in the show, but he may also have objected to some sensationalizing of his role in routing the racketeers. In any event, these first minutes are very dry, and have been cut out of some copies of the film. They may have seemed necessary because the story was so well-known nationally, having been covered in the leading magazines and by Pulitzer-winning reporters. The newsreel is Karlson's bona fides, an implicit endorsement by many of the participants in the story that the narrative that follows is essentially true.

After the opening credits come more buildup, now from a narrator who sets the scene. Phenix City is a border town linked to Georgia and Fort Benning by a bridge that brings servicemen to town and, in most cases, to the notorious red-light district along 14th Street, where vice is one of Alabama's biggest industries. After all the hype, one almost expects Phenix City to stand revealed as a bacchanal worthy of DeMille, or at least more Vegas-like than it proves. The reality, according to the movie, was cheaper, grittier, more tawdry overall: a mediocre chanteuse singing the "Phenix City Blues" with a jazz-band backup for a bunch of servicemen while the dice and card tables at the Poppy Club keep busy. This is the crime capital of the nation, "Sin City USA?" This certainly is the place: the film is shot largely if not entirely on location. And despite any initial disappointment at the scale or intensity of vice in Phenix City, the corruption and viciousness gradually grows on you.

The racketeers of 14th Street control law enforcement locally and have pull throughout the state. That means they can and do get away with murder thanks to cooperative or merely cowardly jurors. Old Albert Patterson (John McIntyre) knows the score and is just as reluctant from a pragmatic standpoint to work with the town's would-be reformers as he is from a moral standpoint to collaborate with the big boss, Rhett Tanner (Edward Andrews). His son John, just home from Europe and not necessarily eager to join his father's firm, proves less tolerant of conditions. Having dealt harshly with Nazis, John has little tolerance for Tanner's goons beating up respectable citizens or disgruntled gamblers. He wades in with his fists and finds allies in a Poppy Club patron whose girlfriend is a dealer there and a black janitor who saves John from an attack from behind by way of submitting his resignation. Whether John Patterson's crimefighting career started so dramatically or not, the film version gives Karlson a chance to film one of his patented brutal brawls with frame-shaking impacts and bodies practically falling into the first row of theater seats.

Antagonists: Rhett Tanner (Edward Andrews) makes an offer not to be refused; below, John Patterson (Richard Kiley) studies a fallen foe after a barroom brawl.

14th Street strikes back ruthlessly, first by kidnapping and killing the janitor, Zeke Ward's, daughter as punishment for him and a warning to John Patterson and his small children. Another Patterson ally gets his skull bashed in, but a jury decides that the victim somehow dashed his own brains out falling into a sawdust-covered, rock-free ditch.

The sight of a dead child is a particularly gruesome moment from Phenix City.

The jurors' disregard for the elder Patterson's proofs is the final straw for the old man. He's now convinced that the only way to break 14th Street is to take the reins of law enforcement at the state capital as attorney general. Some viewers may be confused by what follows, since his nomination seems to be equated with his election. Patterson is in fact running in the Democratic primary, which in the days of the "solid" segregationist South and a powerless Republican party was virtually the general election. Though Tanner's goons control the voting in Phenix City itself, beating the tar out of any opposition voters, they can't rig the whole state. Albert Patterson wins the primary and is deemed the "attorney general nominate," a counterpart to "attorney general elect" in other states. His victory gives 14th Street two options. They could throw all their resources behind a Republican candidate who presumably exists, or they can simply kill Patterson.

The Phenix City Story is a successful thriller because Karlson pulls off the great trick of first telling you exactly what will happen and then making the actual happening on film a matter of great suspense. Instead of resignation toward Albert Patterson's doom, the audience has been goaded and galvanized by Karlson's storytelling to root for the good guys to win. You want the old man not to be killed. At the same time, Karlson has told you that the story will end happily, that Phenix City has been cleaned up and 14th Street routed, yet the omnipotent violence of the Tanner gang and the pure inevitability of Albert's destruction leave you wondering how they could possibly lose. As it is, the end came less dramatically than portrayed here. We know that the governor declared martial law after Patterson's assassination, but in the film the arrival of the National Guard to shut down 14th Street looks like mere mopping up after John Patterson and Zeke Ward take justice, if not the law, into their own hands.

Apart from the scandalous history it recounts, Phenix City has a point to make about the rule of law. We're only twenty years but really a world away from the vigilante films of the Seventies set in similar locations, including some films also based on more or less real events. While those later films glorify the act of a citizen becoming judge and executioner, Karlson and writers Crane Wilbur and Daniel Mainwaring take every opportunity to repudiate vigilantism. We're told that vigilante tactics have been tried against 14th Street before, in vain; one can imagine Tanner's goons beating the krap out of the Klan back in the Twenties, if they didn't just co-opt the local klavern. Even on the night of his father's murder, John Patterson has the clarity of mind to talk a lynch mob out of sacking 14th Street, though he'll get to take some non-lethal vengeance on Tanner himself later that night. Zeke Ward has every reason to kill the man who murdered his daughter, but when his wife restrains him and reminds him of the commandment against killing he comes to his senses in time to talk Patteron out of killing Tanner. If you're accustomed to the vigilante style of the Seventies and after it can't help seeming to disappoint, even if you admit to yourself that the film is constrained by history. But the presumably fictional violence Karlson throws in at the end to please the crowd confuses the ultimate message. Did 14th Street fall because someone in authority finally stood up for law and justice, or because someone finally beat the shit out of the head gangster?

In retrospect, a reviewer might raise questions about the racial politics of the film. John Patterson looks like a racial progressive by association with Zeke Ward, but the real man as attorney general and later as governor proved a staunch supporter of segregation and an enemy of the civil rights movement, though the still-living Patterson caught up with the times enough to endorse Barack Obama for President in 2008. Karlson's film left me wondering how race factored into the real Phenix City story. In the film, Zeke Ward and his family are tokens, and we don't know whether other blacks partook in or benefited from vice, or whether any relation between blacks and organized vice influenced white citizens' view of 14th Street. These questions shouldn't color your final judgment of Phenix City as a film, but they're food for thought just the same.

On its own terms, The Phenix City Story works as a hard-hitting, convincingly brutal expose of the American underbelly. Its inclusion in the latest Warner Home Video Film Noir Classics collection (Vol. 5) is justified by the subject matter, if not by the entire checklist of noir archetypes, and by a successful exercise in night-shot noir by Harry Neumann on location in the actual town. On the acting side honors are shared by Richard Kiley's intense heroics and an unexpected, turn against type by perennial fuddy-duddy Edward Andrews as the casually vicious villain. Karlson's film is strong rabble-rousing stuff that'll get you mad, just as the writers and director intended. The compromises it makes at the end leave it a little short of classic stature, but it's certainly worth a look for any fan of American film from the Fifties.