Pint-sized film noir icon Alan Ladd (This Gun For Hire, The Blue Dahlia) returns to familiar territory in this adaptation of a novel by Dashiell Hammett. Ladd plays Ed Beaumont, one of these little tough right-hand men that corrupt politicians seemed to rely on in olden times. The corrupt politician is Paul Madvig. Paul’s in the middle of a big governor’s race and is backing the candidate from the “I’m Backed By Crooks” party. Read More

You don’t have to go any further than the opening credits of this one to know that it’s one of the titans of film noir. Based on a novel written by James M. Cain ( The Postman Always Rings Twice), the film was directed by Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard) with a screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep). The only thing you may wonder about is that it stars Fred MacMurray. If you only remember Fred from his days inventing Flubber and advising My Three Sons what to do about their gender confusion, you’ll be pleasantly surprised that Fred makes a very convincing murderer, schemer, and dude who was a little too smart for his own good. Read More

D.O.A. takes on its subject matter with a stark straightforwardness that literally shows the protagonist as a walking dead man. Frank Bigelow gets poisoned by some slow acting stuff that allows him to run around California for a week before croaking, all in an effort to find out who was behind his impending death. Is there a gimmick in the movies (well, short of 3-D or anything William Castle dreamed up) better than this? Shoot, is there a better metaphor for the futility of life than this? Even if the hero triumphs by solving the case, he still loses by ending up dead! All life is pain and suffering and this movie crystallizes the fact that even if you figure out why, it still doesn’t matter! You’re just as screwed! I suppose the case can be made that this movie shows us that its the struggle to understand things that is really the important thing, but I always got the impression that Frank was aggressively pursuing this case (instead of just loading up on chalupas, ice cream and Vanilla Coke until dying like I would have done) because he was pissed that someone messed up his San Francisco vacation. Read More

Humphrey Bogart plays recently returned war vet Rip Murdock. He’s searching for the truth behind the death of Johnny, his best friend from the service. Rip knows that Johnny was a damn good paratrooper and he deserves his Congressional Medal of Honor, even if it has to be awarded posthumously. That’s not so much to ask for a guy who gave everything he had to kick the Ratzis in their Teutonic nads, is it? Read More

Robert Siodmak, who warmed up his film noir chops with Phantom Lady hits his stride in this crime melodrama starring Burt Lancaster, Yvonne DeCarlo, and Dan Duryea. Burt plays a regular guy whose heart still belongs to his ex-wife Anna. Burt’s character, Steve, is a square-jawed type who doesn’t really appreciate anyone telling him what to do and doesn’t appreciate the fact that tight, white, tank top undershirts are supposed be worn underneath something. Read More

Fred MacMurray (Double Indemnity) and Claire Trevor both play undercover agents who go down to Mexico to infiltrate a drug smuggling operation. They arrive separately and unaware of one another’s occupation as drug agents. Of course, they are thrust together and each one thinks the other is a criminal and each one is determined to bring the other in without letting on that he/she is an undercover agent. Along the way they manage to fall in love which only serves to complicate things just long enough to stretch this potboiler out to a robust 88 minutes. Read More

You would think that this has all the makings of a film noir to end film noirs, what with the teaming up of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake with a script by mystery impresario Raymond Chandler. Instead, the thing shoots craps at the end and sort of leaves you feeling cheated. I will have to say though that it took no less than the United States Navy to ruin this movie. Read More

The Big Combo desperately wants to be a dark and violent film noir, but it merely succeeds in being a rather unmemorable crime melodrama, though it is fairly violent. This movie was sold as film noir, had a name that lead me to believe it was film noir, and even featured Brian Donlevy. Donlevy starred with Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd in The Glass Key , a decent film noir, but here he’s purely the second banana and all the fog, shadows, and tough talking can’t disguise this movie for being the pretender that it is. Read More

The most interesting thing surrounding the dull murder melodrama The Big Clock is that director John Farrow and star Maureen O’Sullivan were the husband and wife team that gave filmdom Mia Farrow and more importantly for us, her Zombie star sister Tisa. Other than that, this movie stands out as a creaky, talky, uneventful double cross that for some reason was emblazoned with Universal’s “Universal Noir” packaging. Read More

Black Angel is based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich whose works have provided material for movies as diverse as the classic Rear Window to the atom bomb with Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie called Original Sin. As luck would have it, Black Angel falls closer to the Rear Window side of the coin than to the Original Sin side. Read More