THE KILLING. United Artists, 1956. Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards, Jay C. Flippen, Ted DeCorsia, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook, Joe Sawyer, James Edwards, Timothy Carey, Kola Kwariani, Jay Adler. Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, with dialogue by Jim Thompson, based on the novel Clean Break by Lionel White. Director: Stanley Kubrick.

   Stanley Kubrick has been one of the most admired and respected film directors for at least twenty years, with a record that few contemporary filmmakers can match.

   His first major critical breakthrough was the striking anti-war film, The Paths of Glory (1957), which can be honorably compared to Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1931) and Jean Renoir’s Grande lllusion (1937), but his acceptance by both critics and audiences probably dates from 1963 and his savagely funny Dr. Strangelove. or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

   This success was comfirmed with one of the most innovative and influential films of the period, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a success that has not been matched for the critics or the public by any of the three films he has directed since then: A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), or The Shining (1980).

   Indeed the massive failure of Barry Lyndon to find an audience in this country and the critical disapproval that greeted his filming of Stephen King’s book, The Shining have appeared to provoke a reassessment of his work by many critics that can probably be best summed up by the observation that there may be less in his films than meets the eye.

   Barry Lyndon was generally thought to be a beautiful but vapid film with an eccentric casting of Ryan O’Neal as the ambitious, doomed Barry, a performance that, according to a similar critical opinion, was perhaps equaled in its inappropriateness by Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

   I don’t intend to devote this column to a defense of Kubrick’s recent films — although I will say that I think Barry Lyndon is one of the most underrated films of the past decade — but rather to turn to his third feature-length film, The Killing (1956).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQXokRldBUo

   The Killing is a black-and-white film (does anyone remember that black-and-white used to be the preferred medium for films?) based on Lionel White’s caper novel, Clean Break, with a script by Kubrick and additional dialogue by writer Jim Thompson.

   After a series of short documentaries growing out of his work as a photographer for Look magazine, Kubrick filmed a claustrophobic war drama (Fear and Desire, 1953), of which there seem to be no prints for public viewing, and Killer’s Kiss (1955), a melodrama of a “girl … kidnapped by the sadistic owner of a dance hall and rescued … by a gallant young boxer.”

   However, The Killing seems to be the earliest film that Kubrick is willing to acknowledge as his own, and, coming at the end of the great period of films noir which preceded Hollywood’s capitulation to the seductions of color, it is one of the best of the post-war “B” films and, in its bold dislocation of chronology, a film that, at moments, has some of the freshness and excitement of the New Wave French films of the late fifties and early sixties.

   The French renaissance was in large part due to the influence of the post-war American “B” films that were a revelation to the directors, and The Killing is clearly, in its conventions and style, related to the work of other American directors of the period.

   The Killing is the story of a meticulously planned impossible robbery: of the office of a race-track whose security is thought to be unassailable.

   While The Killing is a well-crafted caper film that might appear to be limited in conception and execution (a usual criticism of genre films), the boldness of the planning and accomplishing of the robbery are not unlike the risks that Kubrick has taken in film after film: the slave whose vagabond army challenges the legions of Rome (Spartacus); the filming of Nabokov’s perverse and witty Lolita, whose subject was hardly the kind to be approved by the Legion of Decency or the United Mothers of America; the unsettling blend of beauty and violence in A Clockwork Orange and The Shining; the anarchistic comedy of Dr. Strangelove and the Olympian, epic canvas of Barry Lyndon; and, of course, the imaginative rehabilitation of the science-fiction film in 2001.

   All of these films, so stylistically diverse and so difficult for an auteur-oriented criticism to assimilate, are so many challenges to the established and the conventional. They may be thought to be self-fulfilling fantasies, but there is a common thread running through these films from the earliest to the most recent in the impossible attempted and failed.

   But with all of his attraction to the difficult and the resistant, Kubrick’s intelligence is not seduced by these visions. There is a lucidity in his recognition of the traps the great projects pose that is reflected in an ironic detachment that seems to enclose his films, even at their most outrageous and troubling, in a harmoniously balanced form. His comedy sense works against comic release; his sense of the horrific almost seems to be devoid of terror and fear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r69KohzTYfg&feature=related

   The conspirators are led by Sterling Hayden as Johnny Clay, a petty crook whose name is an all to accurate gauge of his prospects. His unimposing gang — Jay C. Flippen, Joe Sawyer, Ted de Corsia, Elisha Cook, Jr. — is perfectly cast from among the character actors who worked in films where their perfect control of an essential character could do much to salvage a film starring Hollywood’s latest vapidly empty romantic team.

   There is not a single flaw in the casting — although the film itself is not without weaknesses — and the most surprising pairing of Elisha Cook, Jr., and Marie Windsor. Cook is a race-track employee whose dream of making it seem to have gone down the same chute as his marriage. Windsor is a posing, mocking bitch who deceives her husband with a small-time hood (Vince Edwards) and betrays the details of the plan her deluded husband reveals to her in an ill-considered moment.

   Windsor is herself deceived by Edwards, a betrayal she is as aware of, at times, as Cook is of her true feelings for him. But the husband and wife are also wedded to their dreams and the flaw in the concept of the robbery is not in the plan but in human nature and, more distressingly, a bored and vengeful deity, Chance, that a dozen times in the film works against the project and its participants.

   Lovers of a tight narrative in which there are no embarrassing moments of slack will not be happy with The Killing, where Kubrick is not afraid to linger over a sentimental scene (involving Flippen’s sick wife) that is ironically countered, by a Cook-Windsor confrontation; to introduce an overly friendly parking-lot attendant to interfere with one of the carefully timed “events,” or a traffic jam to delay Hayden’s return with the money; and, finally, to use a fat lady and a small, pampered dog to expose Hayden in the final moments of the film when he might be close to escaping with the money.

   These gimmicks don’t always work: the parking-lot attendant is played by black actor James Edwards, whose speedy warming-up to a white mobster (they are both cripples) is unconvincing in the climate of the fifties; and the woman and, dog are too obviously planted and the reversal too clearly telegraphed to the audience.

   But it might also be argued that these less-than-convincing details are a perfect demonstration of Kubrick’s belief in an almost diabolically conscious fate that takes its pleasure in blatantly countering the human actors’ futile attempts to work out their own destiny. And the most striking shot in the film looks like a still photograph of the conspirators lying dead in a confused jumble, sprawled near the hoods who came to take the money from them.

   At the center of the film is the performance of Sterling Hayden, an earnest, unpretentious master of the game who can bring off the robbery but not carry off the spoils. Hayden does make a killing, but there is also the brutal slaughter, and it is difficult not to see the climax of the film in the room where the bloodied, wounded Elisha Cook, along with the audience, stares in horror at the tangled bodies, rather than in the impersonal, busy air terminal where Hayden’s final moves are checkmated.

   The final shot is brilliant: as Hayden turns to the doors leading to the terminal, he sees two security men approaching. They frame the words THE END superimposed on the shot and they are the final punctuation for the film as surely as they punctuate Hayden’s collapse. In these final minutes we first seem him from the rear, his body sagging, almost without life, and when he turns to the camera and his captors he turns accepting the defeat that has crushed him.

   There is one technique in particular that sets this film apart from other caper films I have seen. Our pleasure in this kind of film is usually in the planning of the caper and in our close attendance upon its execution and the aftermath. We expect to follow the timed and coordinated execution as if we were ourselves participants.

   Kubrick, in an unsettling and exciting denial of those expectations, films the robbery from different points of view, backing up in time to show the different strategies which lead to the robbery. Kubrick has shrugged off any credit for this technique, saying that it was this narrative shifting that had interested him in White’s novel. The technique may be adapted, but that does not lessen its cinematic effectiveness.

   The Killing is a film with so many fine things that only a few can be noted: the performance by Kola Kwariani as Maurice, a bald, bullet-headed chess player who stages a row to distract the police from Hayden’s moves; Coleen Gray’s small but important role as Hayden’s girl friend who is only on screen in the beginning and at the end but who is a perfect frame as her fears, expressed in her first scene, are realized at the conclusion; the marvelous use of interiors, in particular Hayden’s apartment which seems to be a series of interconnecting rooms that in spite of their perfect articulation are only vaguely defined and have something of the inevitability of a labyrinth; the bar at the racetrack that opens out toward the track like a stage on which some of the most important scenes of the film are played; and the frantic speed of the horses with their anonymous riders, always viewed from a distance, their movements described by an announcer with some of that detachment that seems so characteristic of Kubrick.

   Whatever faults The Killers may have, it is, after thirty years, and a generation’s experiences with Kubrick’s films, an exciting and rich work. The Killers, drawing from the past and revelatory of Kubrick’s future, should not be consigned to fragmented late-night showings on TV and to filmographies. Kubrick remains a challenging and demanding filmmaker, and we should, perhaps, study the earlier movies in his game before we try to judge too quickly the newer ones.

KILLER’S KISS. United Artists, 1955. Frank Silvera, Jamie Smith, Irene Kane, Jerry Jarrett, Mike Dana, Felice Orlandi, Shaun O’Brien, Barbara Brand. Director and co-screenwriter: Stanley Kubrick.

   Recently saw Killer’s Kiss which immediately became my favorite Stanley Kubrick movie, which ain’t saying much, but is intended as a compliment nonetheless. A lot of folks consider Kubrick a genius, and a lot think he’s a pretentious bore; I’ve always thought he had some talent but tended toward self-indulgence, with his failure to capture Nabokov’s Lolita on film particularly disappointing, coming from one as intelligent as Kubrick says he is.

   Anyway, there are a few — a very few — really cheap really good movies to come out of Hollywood, and Killer’s Kiss is one of the tackiest and best. It’s not as good (or as threadbare) as Ulmer’s Detour or Bluebeard, but then nobody could do as much with as little as Ulmer, whose films sometimes amaze one by the very fact of their existence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQePeeM6ElM

   But though not on the same level as Ulmer’s poetic cheapies, Killer’s Kiss is nonetheless right up there with Murder by Contract (1958) and Blast of Silence (’61) as a gritty, stylish thriller done for peanuts.

   The cast is non-professional but talented, with Frank Silvera particularly good as a lecherous dance-hall owner who murders for love, and Irene Kane inadequate but haunting as the neurotic object of his attentions.

   There is some very effective use of seldom-lensed New York City locations — which seems innovative but was probably merely necessary — particularly the roof of a warehouse, which stretches out like some improbable desert before the hero fleeing across it.

   There are also a couple of very visceral fight scenes, the most memorable of which involves the hood and the hero smashing each other with clubs, spears, and plaster mannequins. It makes one realize, with a twinge of regret, how skillful a filmmaker Kubrick could be when he wanted to Show Feelings instead of Explaining Ideas.

   Surprisingly, in fact, Kubrick resists the temptation here to wallow in his own concepts. There is, for example, a part early on where he cuts between the prizefighter hero and the taxi-dancer heroine getting outfitted in their dressing rooms. Almost any other director would have cut back and forth several times, to make sure no one missed the point about professional athletes and prostitutes both being paid to ruin their bodies for the pleasure of strangers, but Kubrick cuts only once, realizes the point is made and gets on with things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkPUWpcYBhE

   Also, this is the only prize-fight movie I’ve ever seen that has only one shot of a spectator grinning while the hero gets his face punctuated. In every other fight movie, the Director’s not truly happy until he’s looked down his nose at fight fans by showing lots of low-angle shots of them porking out and screaming for blood, just to make sure the moviegoers can feel morally superior to them.

   Killer’s Kiss has just the one shot of Silvera getting turned on while he watches the fight on television, a restraint amazing coming from Kubrick.

THE CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS. Galassia Cinematografica, Italian, 1972. Original title: Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer? (or What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood Doing on Jennifer’s Body?). Edwige Fenech, George Hilton, Annabella Incontrera, Paola Quattrini, Giampiero Albertini, Franco Agostini, Carla Brait. Director: Giuliano Carnimeo.

   First impression: Beautifully photographed in sharp, colorful detail from many clever and unusual angles – a visual delight, smashingly so.

   The story: a unknown and unseen killer is stalking the tenants of an upscale apartment house, with many of the victims being terrifically good-looking women with large expressive eyes. It passes enough muster to keep your mind entertained, but you can’t help be aware of all the cliches of the crime thriller genre that went into putting this film together, even as you’re watching.

   The police act sincerely but they talk better than they perform, having a largely carefree attitude toward the deaths. Giampiero Albertini as Commissioner Enci spends as much time on adding to his stamp collection, while his hapless assistant (Franco Agostini) fumbles his way around while doing the actual legwork.

   Two of the good-looking women, Edwige Fenech and Paola Quattrini, roommates who move into the apartment of the second women to be killed, pay only lip service to the idea that maybe that’s not such a good idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1Foq9SfAyM

   There are a lot of suspects – it’s a tall apartment complex, complete with subcellar with lots of spooky (and deadly) machinery to be trapped in – and hints at motive, but when the killer is a madman (or woman), motive is the last thing that matters.

   A small masterpiece of its type (a genre called “Giallo,” as if you hadn’t deduced that on your own by now), humorous and chilling in turn, atmospheric and colorful, and entertaining from beginning to end. Bloody but not gory, and almost tastefully so. (But if Philo Vance is your idea of the ultimate in detective work, this may not be to your taste at all. In fact, I almost guarantee it.)

NOTE:   I wrote this review back in December, but I lost track of it until I was reminded of it last week when I read Sergio Angelini’s review of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) on his blog. I’m far from an expert on Giallo films, so I found his detailed comments on the film to be very informative.

   The movie is available on DVD either by itself or in a box set with three films of the same vintage.

NUDE IN A WHITE CAR. Champs-Élysées Productions, French, 1958. Original title: Toi … le venin. Also released as Blonde in a White Car. Robert Hossein, Marina Vlady, Odile Versois, Héléna Manson. Based on the novel C’est toi le venin… by Frédéric Dard. Director: Robert Hossein.

   Back when I was a teenager in Columbus, Ohio, one of the local TV stations seemed like kind of a slap-dash affair, particularly on weekends, when the station was apparently run by the town drunk and the village idiot, and anything might turn up in the afternoon or late at night, regardless of what was listed in the paper.

   What did turn up generally started at the wrong time and, if it was a movie, came on cut to ribbons, flickering across the little black-and-white screen like a bruised and battered prize-fighter trying to hold up to the last round.

   I particularly recall one Sunday when a Fritz Lang movie was supposed to start at 2:30 PM. Knowing how things were on Channel Six and not wanting to miss any, I tuned in at two o’clock and was treated to thirty minutes of silent footage showing a kid hitting a paddle-ball, followed by the movie promptly starting at 2:30—with the first thirty minutes cut out! Such were weekends at Channel Six.

   So I don’t know if they ever actually showed Nude in a White Car, but they listed it in the paper every six weeks or so, always on a Sunday night/Monday morning at 1 AM, which was quite beyond the viewing grasp of the High School kid I was back in the 60s.

   And I can best leave to your imagination the effect those words Nude in a White Car in tiny print buried in the Sunday Paper TV section had on the fantasies of a tawdry youth like myself. Suffice it to say that the film became something of an obsession with me, and I finally found a DVD of it last year, nearly a half-century after those thrilling days of yesteryear.

   Well, I wasn’t expecting a great deal, and I found the movie (titled Toi, le venin, which loosely translates to “You, Venom!”) rather a mixed bag, with an edgy, hard-boiled attitude, a fascinating premise and somewhat slack execution.

   The premise: Pierre (Robert Hossein) an out-of-work “celebrity” walking the beach at Nice one night gets picked up by the eponymous babe. Following a dark-and-steamy encounter, she forces him from the car at gunpoint, then tries to run him down.

   Well we’ve all had relationships like that, but Pierre is determined to repay the favor. He tracks down the car to an elegant mansion shared by two wealthy half-sisters, Helene and Eva (Odile Versois and Marina Vlady): both blonde, both beautiful and both obviously interested in getting to know him better.

   Which is the one from the car? Well one has been in a wheelchair since she was a teenager and the other just doesn’t seem the type, so it’s Pierre who must get to know them better, then decide what form his retribution will take.

   Up to this point, Nude has been tense, amoral, riveting and sexy. But it soon degenerates into merely sexy as Pierre literally dicks around trying to decide which sister he can trust and which one is a psycho who tried to kill him.

   After awhile, even the sexy bits pale (this was filmed in 1958 after all) and all we get is a domestic triangle, with the attempted murder pushed way in the background. It all gets a bit wearisome, but I have to say the ending is a shocker that caught me off-guard, grimly poetic and just plain nasty, and it’s worth getting around to.

HACKERS. United Artists, 1995. Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Jesse Bradford, Matthew Lillard, Laurence Mason, Renoly Santiago, Fisher Stevens, Alberta Watson, Lorraine Bracco, Wendell Pierce. Director: Iain Softley.

   As a rule, and I don’t have too many rules, but Number Five is that I don’t review movies I don’t understand. But every Rule has an Exception, and so does Rule #5. Movies about computers, computer whizzes and computer geeks I don’t have to understand to review them. I can even enjoy them, but not always.

   Hackers is a movie that falls into the category of “I didn’t really understand the plot,” but I did enjoy it. A lot. The story deals with a worm and/or computer virus dreamed up by some slimy corporate security guy, but which a gang of high school hackers stumbles upon. And (with some travail but not too unexpectedly) they save the day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP6iTjhlOvs

   There is a lot of symbolic nonsense about what you see on the screen when someone is hacking, or at least I think it’s nonsense, but what do I know. Psychedelic images looking very electronic, in other words, but symbolic in the sense that it’s maybe what the hackers have in their brains while they are sitting at their computer screens typing madly away at the keyboard.

   The reason I could enjoy this one is that the gang of hackers, whose actions and life style may or may not be authentic, but which feels authentic, except for maybe the roller skates, is so much fun to watch – their competitiveness, their one-upmanship, and their comradery – along with a romance that begins with hatred at first sight.

   Or at least what feigns to be hatred at first sight, but these are teenagers, and their hormones are all mixed up.

   I’m speaking of Jonny Lee Miller (Eli Stone, to some of us) and Angelina Jolie (Lara Croft, to some other of us, with some overlap, I’m sure). Miss Jolie was all of 20 years old when she made this movie, and from the first moment she’s on the screen, you know that, yes, here is going to be star.

   The computer stuff was outdated even before they finishing filming this movie, so there’s no need to go into any of the details, even if I could (or even if I could fake it), and here it is, well over 15 years later already.

   You needn’t be for a minute concerned about that. If you watch movies for fun and entertainment, this is one for you. Even if you don’t understand what’s going on: the plot, that is – the unimportant, non-essential part. Rule #2: Know which is which.

ALIAS THE CHAMP. Republic Pictures, 1949. Robert Rockwell, Barbra Fuller, Audrey Long, Jim Nolan, John Harmon, Sammy Menacker, Joseph Crehan, John Hamilton, Gorgeous George (George Wagner), Bomber Kulkovich (Henry Kulky). Director: George Blair.

    From Wikipedia:

   In the comments following Michael Shonk’s review of The Hunter, the subject of wrestling came up, prompting me to take a quick look at at c2c DVD I have of Alias The Champ. With a 59-minute running time, little else was possible.

   Briefly, there’s this honest cop (Robert Rockwell, aka Our Miss Brooks’s dense boyfriend Mr. Boynton), who’s out to stop The Mob from taking over honest professional wrestling — brief pause while those of you who’ve fallen out of your chairs laughing can get back in — ­ with the aid of Gorgeous George’s beautiful female manager (Audrey Long).

   After clearing it with the police commissioner (John Hamilton, pre-Superman), Rockwell becomes de facto wrestling czar in order to battle the Mob Guy (Jim Nolan), who suborns a rival wrestler (Slammin’ Sammy Menacker, using his own name — bear this in mind as we proceed) in order to provoke and then discredit Gorgeous George.

   We first see GG in the ring with Bomber Kulkavich (aka Henry Kulky) in a match as close to “the real thing” as a movie can get; At its outset, we hear GG’s deathless line, spoken to the referee: “Get your filthy hands off my hair!”

   After winning this match, GG meets Rockwell, to whom he takes an immediate dislike, especially since he seems to be attracted to the pretty female manager (You may all feel free to make whatever inferences you wish, but this is a 1949 Republic programmer, so I’ll just stay on the surface).

   Anyway, there are some more confrontations between GG and Menacker, including one at a gym that turns into a free-for-all with the added participation of other wrestlers (including the Super Swedish Angel – Tor Johnson), resulting in the Big Match – which ends up with Menacker dead, and GG accused of his murder.

   Yes, Slammin’ Sammy Menacker was an actual pro wrestler (you might remember him as one of the strongmen who did the tug-o-war with Mighty Joe Young {along with Henry Kulky, op cit.}), and he gets “killed off” in this movie.

   So anyway, Menacker is “dead,” GG is in jail, and it’s up to Rockwell to clear him and restore honest wrestling’s reputation. Rockwell does this with the aid of “new technology” — the film of the televised match that was made for the East! (The word kinescope wasn’t used.)

   I’ve condensed the daylights out of this plot, so as not to spoil it for so many of you who might want to track it down. As to the acting … no, it’s too easy.

   But I should mention the director, George Blair, a Republic workhorse who went on, a few years later, to a regular stint on TV’s Adventures Of Superman.

   And I do want to quote another of Gorgeous George’s classic lines, just after one of the face-offs with Menacker, delivered to his concerned lady manager:

   â€œCome, little one. It’s time for my marcelle.”

   I make no judgement. This one you gotta see for yourself.

Editorial Comment: Alias the Champ was the first and only film in which Gorgeous George was to appear.

BEDROOM EYES II. 1989. Wings Hauser, Kathy Shower, Linda Blair, Jane Hamilton. Director: Chuck Vincent.

   Harry Ross is a guy who seems to have an inordinate amount of trouble with women. His ex-wife JoBeth evidently tried to murder him five years before, and now here she is, out of prison. His present wife Carolyn is still in a case of traumatic shock — something to do with another of Harry’s girl friends, Alexandria, who died in a hit-and-run accident the same night he broke up with her.

   And now there’s Sophie, an artist who provides Harry with an overabundance of sympathy soon after he spots Carolyn (also a patron of the arts) in the passionate embrace of her own current discovery. (Nor is Sophie all she seems, either.)

   Harry is also a successful stockbroker who, with his partner, is on the verge of making five million dollars in an illegal inside stock transaction. This makes him especially vulnerable to blackmail, say, but what actually happens is that he ends up being framed for murder, in a sloppy, murky sort of way.

   The sexual activity pictured in this movie — it is rated “R” — is fast and perfunctory. There is also a considerable amount of of promiscuous violence — reason Number Two for the rating. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, each of these two factors often happen in close proximity to each other.

   As far as the people in the movie are concerned, Wings Hauser and Linda Blair both seem to be veterans of this sort of film-making, and they each turn in an adequate, professional-looking job. The others in the cast have moments when they seem alive and functioning, but for the most part they seem to have only been pointed in the right direction, just before the cameras started to roll.

   But then again, that’s why they’re called directors, right?

CITY OF CHANCE. 20th Century Fox, 1940. Lynn Bari, C. Aubrey Smith, Donald Woods, Amanda Duff, June Gale, Richard Lane, Robert Lowery, Alexander D’Arcy. Director: Ricardo Cortez.

   If you know more than the first three names listed in the credits above, you ought to be given a prize for being a 1940s B-movie connoisseur extraordinaire! And in all honesty, most movie-goers today will not even recognize the first three, and this in spite of the fact that in total their combined list of TV and movie credits on IMDB adds up to 412. Not too shabby!

   Of the threesome, it is the best-looking who has the most: Lynn Bari, with 166. (I hope there is no argument as to whether or not she was the best looking.) A dark-haired brunette, she was in tons of B-movies in the 1940s, but to my mind she had the talent (and good looks) to have made the jump to A-status, but for some reason, she never really did.

   I remember her from her days on TV in the 1950s, and a comedy series I’m sure she was in. It must have been one called Boss Lady, on for 12 episodes on NBC in 1952, according to IMDB, but since I was only ten or so at the time, I’m not sure about that. (It is possible that she made such a favorable impression on me, even at that early age, that I remember her from it even today. She was very good-looking.)

   To the film at hand. City of Chance is only 56 minutes long, but in its length it takes in all of the events that take place in one “ordinary” night in an afterhours (and strictly illegal) casino somewhere in the US. (The town may have been named, but if so, it has slipped my memory.)

   The owner is one Steve Walker (Donald Woods), but the real brains behind him is “The Judge” (C. Aubrey Smith), a long-time confirmed gambler who has taken the younger man under his wing. Lynn Bari plays a lady reporter with a nose for news who’s made her way into the place under a false identity. She also has, we soon discover, plans to call in the D.A. and the cops (and her news editor) when she has the evidence she needs to have the gambling place raided.

   Turns out, though, that she and Walker were childhood sweethearts, and part of her motivation in closing him down may be that she is still sweet on him and she has personal reasons for wanting him out of the gambling business for good. Things are a little fuzzy in this regard, as they often are in romantic comedies from the 30s and 40s, but I know I’m 99% right on this.

   Also occurring on this night in question is what happens when Walker turns down a notorious gambler who wants to take over the operation, what happens when a shot rings out, what happens when one half of a newly married couple learns that a blackmailer has certain letters of hers to him, and what happens when the lady reporter learns that she is not allowed to…

   I’ll stop here. As alluded to above, there is as much comedy, of the screwball variety, as there is noir in this film, but I don’t believe that either of the two was the overall intent. The movie’s primary purpose was to be entertaining, and without a overabundance of production values, that’s exactly what Chance in the City is.

   But it’s even better with Lynn Bari in it.

HELD FOR RANSOM. Grand National Pictures, 1938. Blanche Mehaffey, Grant Withers, Bruce Warren, Jack Mulhall, Kenneth Harlan, Walter McGrail, Robert McKenzie. Director: Clarence Bricker.

   Kidnapping is a federal crime, so it stands to reason that Betty Mason (Blanche Mehaffey) is working as a federal agent when she goes undercover to tackle this case. The ransom has been paid, but the victim has not been released. The police suspect the man’s nephew (Grant Withers) as part of an inside job, but Betty is wise enough to keep all her options open.

   I say “it stands to reason” in that opening paragraph, because the storyline of this film is plagued by some of the worst continuity and opening expository material I can think of, poverty row B-film or not. Events happen without explanation to characters who are not introduced, until later. I gave up once and started the film again, which helped a little.

   Once beyond the first 15 minutes or so, it settles down into a fairly enjoyable detective yarn. The lack of money behind the film’s production is an obvious drawback, but there are two good reasons why I can recommend Held for Ransom to you, with only the reservations I’ve stated so far.

   The first is the on-location shooting, that of an authentic mountain resort area around a lake somewhere near San Bernardino (Cedar Lake, IMDB says). It reminded me of several motor trips my family and I took when I was a kid, though we never made to California until the mid-1960s. The old general store with the ubiquitous candy bar ads plastered here and there brought back a lot of memories.

   The other reason — and this is the primary one — is the role of Blanche Mehaffey as a tough-as-she-needs-to-be policewoman, as handy with a gun as climbing out a window on bedsheets tied together and rowing across the lake at midnight. Crime action movies in 1938 like this one did not often have a female in the lead, not without a comedy sidekick or boy friend. This one doesn’t, and it’s all the better for it.

   The curly-haired and good-looking Mehaffey had a long career in silent films, beginning in 1923, but she seems to have made the into the sound era with no difficulties. Unfortunately she made only one more movie after this one, retiring from Hollywood when she was still only 31.

THE LAWBREAKERS. MGM, 1961. Jack Warden, Vera Miles, Ken Lynch, Arch Johnson, Robert H. Harris, Robert Douglas, Jay Adler, Robert Bailey. Theme & background music: Duke Ellington. Screenwriters: Paul Monash & W.R. Burnett. Director: Joseph M. Newman.

   Among several other sources, IMDB says that this film was cobbled together from two episodes of The Asphalt Jungle, a tough, hardboiled crime series shown on ABC in 1961 as a summer fill-in. Combing through the list of episodes and their descriptions, however, the only matchup that fits is that of a single episode, “The Lady and the Lawyer,” the second in the series (9 April 1961).

   Some material may have come from the previous episode, to help establish the characters, but there’s only one real story line, that of a big name attorney who works for the local syndicate on the side. He also has money problems. Trying to support a wife and family as well as a mistress (Vera Miles) extends his resources too far – the lady has expensive tastes – and when desperation sets in, well, that’s where the story begins.

   Jack Warden plays the guy on the other side, a cop, and an honest one. Promoted to Commissioner when his predecessor can’t stand the heat, he proves to be formidable force against crime. He succeeds easily enough in this film, but I’ll have to come up with the rest of the series on DVD before I can tell you how he fares from here on out.

   As a femme fatale, Vera Miles is beautiful and alluring enough, but (to my mind) rather too icy cold to compare with the more sultry ladies who often appeared in the noir films of the 50s and 60s – more of a Grace Kelly type than an Audrey Totter or Marie Windsor. Not that she’s a pushover, by any means, not at all. You have to keep a close eye on women like this.

   There are several killings in the movie, served well by the black-and-white camera work, with one of the dead men being that of Bob Bailey’s character, the latter being one of the better players of Johnny Dollar on Old-Time Radio – he had one of the toughest voices to ever come from a man so slim. His part in The Lawbreakers may have been his longest roles in the movies, even though (sad to say) his character’s part ends so quickly.

   Overall, then, even though concocted somehow from a TV series, the film works well as a film, especially if you like your movies hardboiled and tough, which this movie is, except when Jack Warden breaks down a delivers a sort of sappy soliloquy to the press in a plea for some cooperation. He meant well, but I wish he hadn’t done it.

Note:   For more about The Lawbreakers, check out Mike Grost’s website, and the usual detailed analysis he does of all the movies he covers.