Maybe you can help.

   I am going nuts trying to find the title for a crime movie I saw on TV in the mid-70’s. Only caught the last half and I don’t recall any major stars.

   The plot: a group of detectives are in a police office after hours waiting for one of the number to come in. In strolls a woman with a gun and a bottle of nitroglycerin. She claims the detective killed her husband and she’s going to kill him when he arrives. If any of the other detectives interfere, she’ll shoot the bottle of nitro and blow the whole office sky-high. Much tension ensues.

   Does this movie sound familiar?

                   — Tim Mayer

THE BLACKBIRD. MGM, 1926. Lon Chaney, Renée Adorée, Owen Moore, Doris Lloyd. Director: Tod Browning. Shown at Cinevent 35, Columbus OH, May 2003.

   I had seen this film a few years ago, but the Chaney-Browning combination is always a pleasure to revisit. Chaney plays two brothers, one a crippled preacher (The Bishop) who succors the wayward inhabitants of Limehouse, the other a criminal mastermind (the Blackbird), who is the antithesis of the saintly Bishop.

   Chaney’s masterful dual portrayals are well supported by Moore, Adorée and Lloyd, in a complex of relationships that complement Chaney’s Jekyll/Hyde roles. The beginning is particularly striking as it displays a series of close-ups of Limehouse characters, immediately establishing the grotesque strain that is developed in Chaney’s characterizations.

Editorial Comment:   Shown in the photo image above are the three stars of the film, Lon Chaney, Renée Adorée, and Owen Moore. The movie has been shown on TCM; whether recently, I do not know.

THE SCARLET HOUR. Paramount Pictures, 1956. Carol Ohmart, Tom Tryon, Jody Lawrance, James Gregory, Elaine Stritch, E.G. Marshall, Edward Binns, Scott Marlowe, Billy Gray, David Lewis, Nat “King” Cole. Director: Michael Curtiz.

   Sometimes you have to sift through a lot of Fool’s Gold as you make your way through a stack of would-be Film Noir movies on DVD before you find a true nugget, the Real Thing, and this movie is it.

   Apparently it’s all but unknown. Right now there’s been only one person who’s left a comment about it on IMDB (and his opinion is the same as mine – “a small gem”), and no links to external reviews (until this one shows up there).

   The basic plot line sounds like The Postman Always Rings Twice, but (a) there are a lot of variations possible on that particular theme, and this film has them, and (b) as much as I’d like to say otherwise, it’s almost but not quite in that league.

   Carol Ohmart, for example, as the femme fatale, whom Tom Tryon’s character has fallen in love with, has nowhere near the screen presence of Lana Turner, even on the latter’s worse days and Miss Ohmart’s best.

   In The Scarlet Hour the latter’s role is a little too tough and hardbitten if you were to compare her to Miss Turner in Postman, but to her credit, she does manage to get the impossibly handsome Mr. Tryon to fall in love with her.

   Even if she already has a husband. Tom Tryon works for the man (James Gregory), a real estate kind of guy; Tryon’s his top salesman. And neither Ohmart and Tryon have murder on their mind; all they need is the money to run away together.

   Enter a gang of crooks they overhear casing a house. A third of a million dollars; worth of jewels sounds good to them, and hijacking the burglars’ loot after they’ve cracked the safe sounds easy and all but foolproof.

   We know better. Plans like this seldom work out as planned. The husband gets suspicious, for one thing, and suspicious husbands always put rocks in the crankcase.

   We (the viewer) easily find ourselves anticipating a couple of the more immediate outcomes, but probably not the third (speaking for myself, that is).

   There is a fourth important player in the game, which I almost forgot to tell you about, and that is Mr. Tryon’s secretary (Jody Lawrance), who is – but more I will not tell.

   The ending of The Scarlet Hour is also nowhere near as memorable as that of Postman, but it’s nearly as good, and it certainly is as inevitable. Beside my recommendation as spelled out so far, you also get a bonus of Nat “King” Cole singing a song in a nightclub. I’m not sure the plot required a singer in a nightclub, but singers in nightclubs appear in lots of noir films, and this he’s the one in this one. (It was also David Lewis’s film debut, for whatever that particular fact may be worth to you.)

THE SMALL WORLD OF SAMMY LEE. British Lion Films, 1963. Anthony Newley, Julia Foster, Robert Stephens, Wilfrid Brambell, Warren Mitchell, Miriam Karlin, Kenneth J. Warren, Clive Colin Bowler, Toni Palmer, Harry Locke. Screenwriter: Ken Hughes, based on his BBC-TV play “Sammy.” Director: Ken Hughes.

   One of Anthony Newley’s first dramatic roles, and it’s a good one, at least if you were to ask me. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times thought it was a bore, and a reviewer for the Village Voice thought the tawdry portrayal of the Soho strip tease club where Sammy Lee works as the emcee between acts (or compère, to use the big word I just learned) was hypocritical and just plain wrong-headed. “…some of our most distinguished citizens have been devotees of this art form.”

   Without going into the merits of stripping as a fine art as it occurs on some stages, on others tawdry, crude and sleazy are the only words that apply. Not that we see any real nudity in Sammy’s place of employment, but just hanging around backstage through the unblinking eye of the camera is a real, well, eyeful.

   What makes Sammy run, though – this Sammy Lee, not the other one – is that he’s up to his neck in debt to a bookie who’s as tough as they come, and so are the hoodlums who work for him. If he can’t come up with £300 in five hours, his goose will be cooked, figuratively if not literally. To raise the money, he frantically scours his little black book in search of any kind of deal he can come up with: whiskey, bar glasses, watches, you name it.

   Dashing here and there between shows with a breathless kind of nervous energy that will either annoy you immensely (see above) or keep you watching with a kind of fascination not at all unlike watching a train wreck about to happen. Beautifully filmed on location in black and white to a jazzy background beat, with a bit of romance on the side (with Julia Foster as Patsy, a fresh young innocent from the north country), if only he could slow down long enough to know what he has, if only.

   You’ll have to watch for yourself to learn whether he comes up with the money or not. I might warn you that this a noir film from beginning to end, but sometimes reviewers do not tell you the entire truth, lest they give away too much, and this may be one of those times.

   To return to my first paragraph, I don’t know what it means if I were to point out that both reviewers I mentioned were from the US, and a few years back The Small World of Sammy Lee was one of the movies on The Guardian’s list of 1000 films to see before you die. It must mean something, though.

[UPDATE.]   It is now several days after I wrote the first draft of this review. In the version above, I gently chided the reviewer from the Village Voice about his opinion of this film, but he did point out several flaws, as he saw them, in the plot itself.

   I saw them, too, but I’ve been thinking them over, and at the moment I don’t see them as flaws. Sammy Lee may have been a two-bit hustler, if not an out-and-out grifter, but I think he had moral standards. They may not have been your moral standards, nor mine, but he lived his life by them, and I can’t see any reason why I should fault him for that.

THE NAKED KISS. Allied Artists, 1964. Constance Towers, Anthony Eisley, Michael Dante, Virginia Grey, Patsy Kelly, Marie Devereux, Karen Conrad. Screenwriter/director: Sam Fuller.

   The Naked Kiss is every bit as cheap as Murder by Contract [reviewed here ], but more passionate and brilliant by far. Sam Fuller, the writer/producer/director of this thing, is often described as a primitive Genius — sort of a filmmaker savant — but I have always been impressed by his sophistication; Fuller had an uncanny ability to mix metaphors and genres almost at will without ever putting a foot wrong, that seems anything but Primitive.

   The Naked Kiss starts off like a mid-60s Porno Film, with a hooker beating her pimp (make that ex-pimp) nearly to death, and ends up with a soapy, sentimental scene that looks to have been lifted from Peyton Place.

   Along the way, it provides some of the bluntest and most disturbing imagery you can encounter in the movies, juxtaposing crippled children, Beethoven, crooked cops, Goethe, prostitution and… well, not Redemption but Self-Respect.

   This one is photographed by Stanley Cortez, the very best Cheap Photographer in Hollywood, whose credits include The Magnificent Ambersons, Shock Corridor, Night of the Hunter, Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd, and They Saved Hitler’s Brain. Fuller and Cortez were kindred spirits, it seems, and together they turned out a film consistently fascinating to watch as well as to look at.

   Equally remarkable is Constance Towers’ performance as Kelly, the reformed hooker whose efforts to find a place in society initiate the plot. Her face, lovingly framed by Fuller and photographed by Cortez, is one of those miracles that sometimes occur in very good movies: Strong, smooth, intelligent features around the coldest, saddest eyes this side of Marley’s Ghost.

   With a look like that, Towers doesn’t even need a script, much less any acting ability, but the fact that she is here given a role worthy of her talents makes it all the better.

   Fuller’s script is as goofy as ever, a rapid-fire panoply of lines that read more like ultimatums than dialogue, but he and Towers somehow make it all seem extraordinarily Not Dumb.

   Only Fuller could get away with having a hooker who quotes Goethe but mispronounces the name, or showing her vanquished pimp falling on a calendar marked at July 4th (Independence Day, get it?) without seeming unbearably pretentious. Perhaps it’s because he has something to be pretentious about.

PITFALL. United Artists, 1948. Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, Jane Wyatt, Raymond Burr. Based on the novel The Pitfall by Jay J. Dratler. Director: André De Toth.

   Call this one “suburban noir,” if you will, and as I’ve seen it described as by at least one other reviewer, but “noir” it is, there’s no doubt about it. This was co-star Lizabeth Scott’s sixth film, and while her first one. You Came Along, [reviewed here ], was an uneasy combination of comedy and sentimental romance, most of the movies she made from there on were noir all the way, beginning with her second, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946).

   Dick Powell plays an insurance executive in Pitfall, but even though he has a beautiful wife (Jane Wyatt) and a young son at home, somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area, he’s starting to feel caged in, as though life is slipping away, that his opportunity for some adventure in his everyday existence is about to pass him by.

   Enter Raymond Burr, a private eye who’s found the girl friend (Lizabeth Scott) of a guy who’s in jail for embezzlement. The company Powell works for is responsible for the loss, but most of the money was spent on fancy things to give her.

   Powell pays her a visit, and while she agrees to return everything she can, she mocks him lightly for being such a dull, company-oriented guy. Thus challenged, a date for drinks turns into an overnight stay. This does not go well with Raymond Burr’s character, who has had his own eyes on the blonde beauty, and he has already told Powell so.

   Burr beats Powell up rather badly, and when Mona (Lizabeth Scott) discovers the latter is married, she wants the affair to end. Powell agrees, but as far as Burr is concerned, he is not the kind of fellow that takes no for an answer.

   I have discovered that whenever Lizabeth Scott is in a movie like this, she is always the center of attention in the film, as far as I’m concerned. Not quite so, this time. She’s an innocent victim this time, her only fault being that of attracting the wrong type of guy: from the embezzler, to the family man looking for a fling, or Raymond Burr’s character, an ugly hunk of a man whose glowering, hate-filled eyes demand your full attention throughout the film, even though he’s billed only fourth.

   There’s no sympathy in this film for Dick Powell, whose character is shallow and weak and in over his head as far as extracurricular activity is concerned, and he soon comes to know it. But he’s essentially an honest man and he does do his best on Mona’s behalf.

   I can’t tell you how the ending comes out – even whether it’s a happy one or not, for example – but when the tale is over, it is very very clear who – no, sorry, I can’t tell you that either.

   If you’re a fan of film noir, don’t miss this one.

MURDER BY CONTRACT. Columbia Pictures, 1958. Vince Edwards, Phillip Pine, Herschel Bernardi, Caprice Toriel, Michael Granger, Cathy Browne. Director: Irving Lerner.

   Incredibly cheap, unbearably compelling, with Edwards an emotionless Hit Man who is gradually revealed as hopelessly hung up on the trivial details he thinks will become his undoing.

   Story and dialogue are terse and to-the-point as a speeding bullet, and the whole thing is filmed by Lucien Ballard (the second-best Cheap Cameraman in Hollywood) with an eye for Garish Modern that seems unusually perceptive for its time but was probably merely a matter of having to work on Location.

   This is cold, precise film-making at its very best and I recommend it highly.

Editorial Comment:   Murder by Contract is easily available on DVD. It’s one of the films included in the recent box set Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics, Vol. 1 (The Big Heat / 5 Against the House / The Lineup / Murder by Contract / The Sniper).

BLACK MEMORY. Ambassador Bushey, UK, 1947. Michael Atkinson, Michael Medwin, Frank Hawkins, Winifred Melville, Jane Arden, Moyra O’Connell, Sydney James, Arthur Brander. Story, screenplay, assistant director: John Gilling. Director: Oswald Mitchell.

   I’ll go out on a short limb here and say that most of the names in the cast are as unknown to you as they were to me, unless you live in the UK. For several, it was one of their earliest appearances on film.

   It’s a very minor film, a crime drama, but on the other hand, what was the movie industry like in the UK in 1947? You will have to tell me, I’m sorry to say, but maybe making films this soon after the war was low on the list of the country’s priorities.

   The beginning is rather confusing. This is one of the movies in which the explanations come only as the film goes along, and good luck with that if you live in the US and British accents are sometimes decipherable and sometimes you don’t fare so well. A bigger problem, though, is that the copy I have of this rare film is not the best; the picture is somewhat faded and the sound had to be cranked up to ten.

   But given the luxury of watching the first 20 minutes or so of this film again, I took advantage of the chance I had, and I’m fairly certain I can tell you something about the story line.

   During a local disturbance of some sort (drunken louts egged on, perhaps) a man is killed, and another man who is actually innocent is arrested for the crime, tried, found guilty and hung. This takes up all of five minutes or so of running time.

   The son of the man found guilty, perhaps ten or twelve years old, is faced with a dying mother and a gang of local boys his own age who pick on him before they follow him off to a sort of orphanage/reform school, from which he quickly decamps through a open window. Another five minutes has passed.

   Ten years later, story time: The boy (now a young man) returns, takes a room with the family of his mother’s best friend. Of the two adopted daughters, one takes a shine to Danny (that’s his name), but the other, running with a tough crowd, takes up with Danny’s former tormenter, Johnnie Fletcher (Michael Medwin).

   To complicate matters, Johnnie has plans to rob the sewing factory where the two girls work. Assisting him – willingly or not – is one of the men on or near the scene where the murder took place ten years earlier.

   This was billed as a “noir” film when my copy was sold to me on DVD, and if the production values could only have been higher, it may have been a very effective vehicle in showing what life was like in postwar England for the lower classes.

   Unfortunately, it’s only in bits and pieces and occasional places that the plot rises above the purely pedestrian. If I were Leonard Maltin, the best I could give this movie would be 1½ stars out of five and I still think I’d be just a little bit generous if I did. Nonetheless, its historical significance is high, so I was glad to have had the opportunity to have seen it, and you may too.

ILLEGAL ENTRY. Universal, 1949. Howard Duff, Märta Torén, George Brent, Gar Moore, Tom Tully, Paul Stewart. Director: Frederick De Cordova.

   Director Frederick De Cordova is, of course, far better known for his work producing and directing on TV than in the movies, and even then more for his work in comedy (Jack Benny, Johnny Carson) than for fare of a more criminous nature. This semi-documentary near-noir film about illegal immigration into California in the late 1940s was never his usual stock in trade, by far.

   Nor is anything more than average all the way around, even with a host of recognizable names and faces for movies of this type, including star Howard Duff, he with the voice of Sam Spade and the quizzically uplifted eyebrows.

   As a former Air Force pilot Bert Powers, Duff is asked to work undercover to get the goods on a ruthless gang of illegal alien importers — so ruthless are they as to drop their freight out of an open door if they feel the feds are getting too close.

   The reason he’s brought in is because Märta Torén, the widow of a good buddy of Powers, is somehow connected with the gang. And indeed she is, but not willingly, which gives Powers all kinds of false signals, to his complete frustration.

   There’s nothing deep involved in this tale, which is competently told, but unless you’re a fan of any of the players, you’ll forget it almost as soon as the bad guys have been caught. Forgive me for giving the ending away just now, but as you well know, you’d be much more surprised if they weren’t.

OFFBEAT. British Lion Film Corp., 1963. Also released as The Devil Inside. William Sylvester, Mai Zetterling, John Meillon, Anthony Dawson, Neil McCarthy, Harry Baird, John Phillips. Director: Cliff Owen.

   When Scotland Yard finds themselves up against a brick wall in tracking down a vicious gang of thieves and bank robbers, they call in Layton, a loner from MI5 (William Silvester) to work his way into the gang and help bring them down.

   Taking the new name of Steve Ross, Layton finds the gang organized like a business, a well-oiled machine, with salaries, fringe benefits, and best of all, a comradery that Layton has never known before. Well, perhaps, not quite best of all. One of the of the members of his new group of friends is Ruth Lombard (Mai Zetterling), with whom he finds an instant (and mutual) attraction.

   Much of the middle of the film is a caper drama, as the men drill their way into a underground vault filled with jewels – in plain sight, yet. If you thought being a crook meant not having to do manual labor, you would be wrong.

   Does Layton renege on his day job for the Yard, or can he find himself able to turn the gang in when the robbery is done? That’s the question, the key one, and after a slow beginning, I’d have to say that halfway into the film if not earlier, I was hooked to the screen, waiting for the answer. A minor film, to be sure, but recommended, definitely so.