BOB LE FLAMBEUR. Mondial, France, 1956; William Mishkin, US, 1959, as Bob the Gambler. Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy, Roger Duchesne, André Garet, Gérard Buhr, Guy Decomble. Director: Jean-Pierre Melville.

   One of the advantages of being something of a round peg in a department of square holes is that I am occasionally allowed to teach something that “nobody else” has any interest in doing, like the course on French Film that I have just finished teaching.

   Most of the films are by directors like Renoir, Clair, Virgo, Carne, and Ophuls, but I always manage to slip in a genre film by a director not many people would consider essential. In past years this meant films by Clouzot (Le Cor beau and Jenny Lamour).

   This year it was Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1955 thriller, Bob le flambeur (Bob the Gambler), a film that Melville had repudiated before his death in 1972 (“I will not allow this film ever to be screened again”) but that many critics now consider to be his finest achievement in a series of studies of criminals and the criminal milieu.

   Ostensibly, Bob the Gambler is an extended character study leading to a climactic caper, the robbery, by a team of well trained specialists, of the casino at Deauville.

   But Melville manages to undermine almost every cliche of the caper film with a rigorously analytic style that manages to distance the spectator from the characters and cut away from the caper at the climactic moment, only returning to it in the final moments to dispense almost briskly with the basic plot elements and provide a final, comically ironic look at the protagonist, Bob the gambler.

   Melville, in an interview, related how, after seeing Huston’s film The Asphalt Jungle, he realized that he no longer wanted to — or could not — make a classic caper film. He decided instead to make what he called a “comedy of manners” (“comedie de moeurs”), but most American viewers will probably, like the students in my class, find this an odd film indeed.

   Melville’s film preceded New Wave films like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Godard’s Breathless by about four years, but the look of the film (shot on location in the streets and buildings of Montmartre) and the use of a jazz sound track seem to look forward to the innovative filmmaking of the late fifties and early sixties.

   The credits are presented over shots of Montmartre from the “heights” of Sacre-Coeur (the church) to the “depths” of Place Pigalle, a moral distance underlined by the matter-of-fact narration of Melville.

   But the spectator who expects an explicit moralistic study of the contrasts between the sacred and the profane will be disconcerted as the camera prowls restlessly along the streets, into the back rooms of cafes and restaurants, with Sacre-Coeur only present as a shape dimly glimpsed through the closed curtains of Bob’s elegant apartment.

   The affection the camera shows for the landscape may be disconcerting to the viewer who is looking for a narrative thread that will engage him, but location filming is a prominent feature of New Wave films, as in The 400 Blows, whose “travelogue” beginning is reminiscent of the beginning of Bob, all the more so in that both films benefited from the same superb photographer, Henri Decae.

   The final shot in Bob is of an empty car parked on a lonely stretch of beach and completes a circle initiated by the documentary shots of buildings at the beginning of the film.

   The inner life of the characters is never explored in a way that is satisfying to the viewer, and it is perhaps appropriate that the frame is emptied of people at the beginning and the end.

   The viewer expecting the tight plotting of Hitchcock or the claustrophobic, fatalistic character study of Huston, will be disappointed. In Melville’s work, fate is chance, but the camera lingers on geometric patterns (wall-paper, windows, a floor covering) that suggest an intercrossing of plot lines that will only be evident on repeated viewings.

   The characters are elusive and the “content” of their relationships is like a crossword puzzle that may or may not be correctly filled in by the spectator.

   Melville’s expressed wish that the film not be re-released has been ignored. The formal, discreet patterns of this apparently open but controlled narrative with something of the look of a photograph by Walker Evans have lost none of their capacity for frustrating the viewer accustomed to the heightened, mounting suspense of Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) or Kubrick’s The Killing (1956).

   All three of these films are about defeat and loss, but Bob manages to retrieve an ironic victory from a failure, and the sardonic humor of this victory appears to clash with the conventions it has intermittently adhered to.

   In Breathless, Goddard paid tribute to Melville by including, a reference to the character, Bob (Roger Duchesne), and by using Melville to play the role of a novelist interviewed by Patricia, the young American with whom the small-time Parisian hoodlum, Michel, has fallen in love.

   She betrays Michel, echoing the thematics of betrayal in Bob, where Anne (Isabelle Corey) betrays Paulo and Bob’s careful planning, but the final irony is perhaps Melville’s attempted betrayal of his beautiful and still fascinating portrait of Bob the gambler and his Parisian milieu.

   And one can only wonder to what extent Godard was again tipping his hat to Melville when one of his characters comments that he and his friends avoid Montmartre, which is dangerous for them and their “kind.”

   But Godard met successfully the cinematic challenge of his gifted predecessor and his tribute is, finally, the best witness to Melville’s achievement.

BRUTE FORCE. Universal International, 1947. Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, Charles Bickford. Yvonne De Carlo, Ann Blyth, Ella Raines, Anita Colby, John Hoyt, Howard Duff, Whit Bissell, Art Smith. Director: Jules Dassin.

   A movie that takes place almost entirely behind the walls of a prison is not likely to have many women in it, and if it weren’t for brief flashbacks, there wouldn’t be any at all. Anyone in 1947 who paid 25 cents to see Yvonne De Carlo in this film should have marched right up to the box office afterward and demanded his money back.

   In spite of the posters and lobby cards, a prime example of which you can see below, Miss De Carlo graces the screen for less than five minutes, but I have to admit, she makes the most of them.

   In this movie she plays the Italian girl friend of the GI in World War II (Howard Duff) who took the rap for her after she shot her father when he broke down and tried to turn him in to the authorities.

   In fact, it seems that the women in their lives are part of the stories of all of the men in Cell R-17, in one way or another.

   Some are weak (Whit Bissell) and some are strong (Burt Lancaster), but none are really evil — except perhaps Joe Collins (Lancaster), who seems to be a leader of a small gang but whose soft spot is a crippled woman whom he loves (and who does not know what he did for a living).

   No matter. When Burt Lancaster glowers at you, with those dark accusing eyes, you know you’ve been glowered at. This seems to have been only his second movie, the first being The Killers (1946), and if his performance in that earlier picture didn’t make an impression on the movie-going public, this one surely did. Joe Collins means to escape, and he doesn’t care how.

   Standing in his way, however, is not the weak-kneed warden, who simply wants everyone to get along — including Gallagher, the grizzled but pacifistic Charles Bickford who’s in charge of the prison newspaper and expecting to get a parole any day now. No, the other person whose role in this movie you will remember for a long time is Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn), the slim but sneering and slickly sadistic head of the prison guards whom everybody locked up inside hates with a passion, to the utmost fiber of their being.

   Some prisoners break under his thumb of iron, some don’t. The ending of this movie — I don’t think it will surprise anyone if I say that indeed there is a break-out eventually does take place — is filled with the chaos of lights blazing, sirens wailing, and the sound of gunfire ringing off the walls.

   Who gets out, who survives? That I can’t tell you, but I can tell you this. No one walked out of the movie when it was playing, and no one asked for their money back. (That the movie gets a little preachy toward the very end is forgivable. No one paid any attention to that anyway. Prison life was hard in 1947, and while it may have changed, it never got any easier.)

BLAST OF SILENCE. Universal Pictures, 1961. Allen Baron, Molly McCarthy, Larry Tucker. Screenwriter & director: Allen Baron.

   Before it appeared on Turner Classic Movies last week, I’d never heard of this movie. Totally obscure, I would have thought. Not so.

   It turns out that this is an authentic Cult Classic, and it’s out on DVD from Criterion. I wouldn’t have guessed, but you can look it up, and if you keep looking, you can find any number of reviewers who will gladly tell you how wonderful this low, low budget movie is — a black-and-white film, a throwback to the noir era that was all but over in 1961, and (really!) a transition into the brand new “New Wave” age of movie-making.

   As for me, I wouldn’t go that far. Or would I?

   If you were to analyze only the story itself, I have a hunch that you might not go that far either.

   A hit man from Chicago by the name of Frankie Bono (Allen Baron) and a loner by profession, comes to New York to take out a two-bit hoodlum, only to get sidetracked, if only temporarily, by Lori (Molly McCarthy), a girl he once knew.

   The only other major character is Big Ralph (Larry Tucker), an obese and grotesquely sleazy kind of fellow (or vice versa) who lives in an apartment filled with pet rats in cages and whom Bono needs to provide him with the equipment he needs to do his job (complete with silencer).

   Things do not go well with either Lori (based on a huge misconception of her actions on Frankie’s part) or Big Ralph (an even bigger misconception on Big Ralph’s part).

   This is all to the good, and you should take me at my word on this, but there are only perhaps about 15 to 20 minutes of action, if that’s what you’re looking for. Much of the rest of the 77 minutes or so of this movie consists of watching Frank make his way around New York City, both on foot and behind the wheel of a car, stony-faced and doing his utmost to appear professional behind the anonymous voice of Lionel Stander who narrates the tale, often in rather poetic terms, as if he’s taken up residence inside Bono’s head, much as The Whistler did with the many guilty protagonists in his long-running Old-Time Radio series.

   Samples follow:

    “Remembering out of the black silence, you were born in pain.

    “You’re alone. But you don’t mind that. You’re a loner. That’s the way it should be. You’ve always been alone. By now it’s your trademark. You like it that way.”

    “If you want a woman, buy one. In the dark, so she won’t remember your face.”

    “‘God moves in mysterious ways,’ they said. Maybe he is on your side, the way it all worked out. Remembering other Christmases, wishing for something, something important, something special. And this is it, baby boy Frankie Bono. You’re alone now. All alone. The scream is dead. There’s no pain. You’re home again, back in the cold, black silence.”

   The jazzy score, early 60s style, matches the narration perfectly, and the action, when it occurs, is usually dispassionate and ugly. It’s also terrific to see the streets of Manhattan as they actually were in the 1960s: the stores, the pedestrians on the streets, and the actors whose single appearance in a film was Blast of Silence.

   Once caught up in the tale, you’ll stay hooked, even if Frankie’s so-called professionalism seems far too cursory. The devil’s in the details. No hit man worth his pay would be as careless in his career as Frankie is and survive to take another paycheck. That’s one side of the story.

   And perhaps one should not complain. If there’d been the money to do this movie right, it wouldn’t have come out as right as it did. I think that the reviewers who rave about the film do so for one large reason. Once you watch it, you’re not likely to forget it.

THE SECRET SIX. MGM, 1931. Wallace Beery, Clark Gable, Lewis Stone, Jean Harlow, Ralph Bellamy, Marjorie Rambeau, Johnny Mack Brown. Screenwriter: Frances Marion (later the author of a novelized edition). Director: George W. Hill.

    I stumbled onto the last half of this crime film in Paris, while I was checking channels to find something other than the French-dubbed American TV series that seem to dominate French television.

    The film was shown in the original English-language version and featured an impressive cast, as enumerated above, including Johnny Mack Brown in a non-Western role.

    Beery and Stone form an unlikely pair as a crime Syndicate ganglord and a crooked lawyer opposed by a masked group of concerned citizens. Harlow is the good/bad girl, and Gable the undercover agent working to dethrone Beery and expose Stone.

    Pre-classic-period MGM films don’t turn up on American TV these days, and it was a pleasure to see even part of this skillful thriller by another director previously unknown to me.

[EDITORIAL COMMENT.]   This was written, of course, before Turner Classic Movies came along. The Dark Ages are over, and movies of the same era as The Secret Six can be seen on TV several times a week. Nor are films with stars such as this one obscure any longer, even if the stars weren’t stars at the time. With both Gable and Harlow in the film, it’s easy to find stills taken from it to go along with reviews like this one.

    Here’s another:

BORDERTOWN. Warner Brothers, 1935. Paul Muni, Bette Davis, Margaret Lindsay, Eugene Pallette, Robert Barrat, Soledad Jiménez. Suggested by the book Border Town, by Carroll Graham. Director: Archie Mayo.

   This was recently shown as part of TCM’s Latino Festival that’s been going on all month long, and if I may say so, there’s something of mixed message made by this movie. The focus of the films in this series is how Latinos, in this case Mexican-Americans, have been portrayed on the screen.

   How it works out in this case, I’ll get back to — with a small CAVEAT that more of the story line is going to be hinted at, if not revealed, than is customarily done on this blog.

   Paul Muni, who was Jewish and a Hollywood superstar in the 1930s, plays Johnny Ramirez in Bordertown, a young resident of Los Angeles’s Mexican Quarter who after five years of hard work, earns his law degree from a small but apparently reputable night school. As in Crime and Punishment, reviewed here not too long ago, the opening scenes are of the graduating ceremony.

   And as with Raskolnikov in that other film, getting a degree is not the same thing as making a success of yourself. Johnny’s first appearance in court is a disaster. Summarily disbarred, he heads for Mexico and in a town just south of the border where he works his way up from a night club bouncer to a 25% partnership.

   And where the boss’s wife (a blonde and coolly calculating Bette Davis) has eyes for him, which is where the noir aspects kick in. Luckily for Johnny, he is unaware of what you’ve already probably gathered happens next.

   His eyes are instead on Dale Elwell, the female socialite who was on the other side of his one and only courtroom case (Margaret Lindsay), but who comes slumming down to see Johnny’s new casino, built with you-know-who’s money.

   As I warned you earlier, I’ve already told you more of the plot that I should and normally would, but I think in this case, no matter how little I told, you’d fill in much of the details on your own anyway – and besides, you need the Big Picture.

   The black-and-white photography is fine — even in the silent era, cameramen at the major studios really knew their business — but as for the story itself, there is not a subtle line or scene in this movie. Once started, you will have the continual feeling that you know what exactly will happen next, and it does.

   Not that that’s a real complaint. I enjoy stories with romantic — and deadly — triangles like this, and if they hadn’t been filmed many times before this movie was made, they’ve certainly been made many times since.

   So, except for the ending, I enjoyed this film. In terms of Latino images, there’s nothing too preachy about the injustices that poorer Mexican-Americans faced in a elite world of wealthy WASPs in the 20s and 30s, or at least I didn’t find it so, but the ending? It can take the wind right out of your sails. It took quite a few more years, apparently, before interracial romances would be deemed fitting and proper subject matter for movie viewers to see.

   Whatever message may have been intended before the final scene, if there was one, is quickly whisked away, and very nearly without a trace.

PostScript. I’ve just discovered an almost three minute trailer for the film on the Amazon page offering the DVD for sale. I suspect that you hunt around, you may find more of the movie available online. Check YouTube and similar sites.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. Columbia, 1935. Peter Lorre, Edward Arnold, Marian Marsh, Tala Birell, Elisabeth Risdon, Robert Allen, Douglass Dumbrille, Gene Lockhart, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Based on the novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Director: Josef von Sternberg.

   To begin with, the novel’s 600 to 800 pages long, depending on the size of font used and how wide the margins are. If a film adaptation is only 90 minutes long, as is this US version done in 1935, answer yourself this: how much of the book could be crammed in?

   So, OK, let’s let that go, and talk about the movie as a movie. It was one of the earliest films that Peter Lorre made in the US, and as a leading man yet, in the role of criminology student Roderick Raskolnikov, who commits a murder and almost, but not quite, gets away with it.

   Dogging his trail is Edward Arnold, as Inspector Porfiry Petrovich, not necessarily following the academic approach espoused by Raskolnikov, who as it becomes clear, is a rival in more ways than one.

   In spite of first appearances, Porfiry is gradually seen as a student of human nature, allowing his prey to alternate between arrogance and fear by using only one simple method: by allowing him to remain free — and thereby trapping and convicting himself by his own hand.

   A role that was meant to be played by Peter Lorre, perhaps, who does both arrogance and fear very well, and yet, in Crime and Punishment, he shows he has a human side as well, committing the murder of the miserly lady pawnbroker (Mrs. Patrick Campbell) yes, but giving the young streetwalker Sonya (a radiant Marian Marsh) all of the money given him earlier in return for pawning his father’s watch. (It is interesting to note how Sonya’s means of earning a living manages to be very conveniently skipped over.)

   The film came along far too early to be classified correctly as noir, perhaps, but there are a number of elements that could easily make it fit (one might argue) into the category.

    Not only the story itself, with Raskolnikov continually finding himself sliding into the abyss of his own mind — a quiet kind of desperation — but the black-and-white photography is also quite magnificent, showing the better parts of the unknown city (Moscow?) where the story takes place, as well as some of the worse, including Raskolnikov’s rather squalid apartment, for which, in spite of his brilliance, he cannot even pay the rent.

   So, my final comment and overall impression? A very entertaining film, a movie that when I started, I intended to see only the first ten minutes as a preview, but which I forgot myself and watched all the way through to the end instead.

CAPTAIN APPLEJACK. Warner Brothers, 1931. Mary Brian, John Halliday, Kay Strozzi, Alec B. Francis, Louise Closser Hale. Based on the play of the same title by Walter C. Hackett. Director: Hobart Henley.

   As a play, Captain Applejack opened on Broadway at the Cort Theatre on December 30, 1921, and ran for 195 performances.

   The story was soon thereafter the basis for a silent film, although why they changed the name to Strangers of the Night (Louis B. Meyer, 1923) I do not know. The main players in the cast were Matt Moore as Ambrose Applejohn, Enid Bennett as his ward Poppy, and Barbara La Marr as the vampish Anna Valeska, who in one evening gives Ambrose the thrill of several lifetimes.

   None of the actors’ names in the paragraph above mean anything to me, I apologize for saying, and in fact, the first three names I’ve listed for this 1931 sound remake meant just about as little when I started watching this movie last night. I’ll get back to them shortly.

   It’s one of those old British mansion movies, built upon the edge of the cliff – the mansion, that is – and the one night that the owner Ambrose Applejohn (John Halliday) will remember forever is a dark and stormy one.

   It begins with Ambrose telling his Aunt Agatha (Louise Closser Hale) and his ward Poppy (Mary Brian) that he’s selling the house and striking out on a tour of the world on a quest for adventure and excitement.

   Little does he know … there’s a knock on the door. Enter the beautifully exotic Madame Anna Valeska (Kay Strozzi), seeking not only shelter from the storm, but from the villain of the piece, a chap by the name of Ivan Borolsky. Adventure has fallen into Ambrose’s lap, and he doesn’t even have to leave home.

   Of course he is neither as brave and stalwart as he says he is, or would like to be, and if I haven’t told you that this is a comedy, I am right now, and even alone in the room I was in, I laughed out loud several times.

   Any movie with a butler named Lush (Alec B. Francis) has to be a comedy, wouldn’t you agree? Nor is Madame Valeska the only one to knock on the door. Soon there is a whole household full of guests, some welcome, some not. Did I mention that Polly is jealous of Madame Valeska? I have now.

   Without telling you more than I should, there is a reason for all of the guests and intruders, and the reason has to do with the fact that Ambrose Applejohn is a direct descendant of a cruel pirate named Captain Applejack. There is also a map of sorts.

   This is a very entertaining film, albeit noticeably stagey, with a bit of advice that anyone younger than 40 or 50 will probably be bored to abstract fidgetry. That this is a pre-Code film should also be mentioned, with blouses cut lower than they might have been a few years later, and a pair of male hands that do not always stay out of bounds where they belong.

   The photo of John Halliday may have come from the film. If not, it’s very close. His career extended from 1911 to 1941, with perhaps his best-remembered role being that of Katharine Hepburn’s father in The Philadelphia Story (1940).

   Mary Brian’s wholesome good looks once graced the cover of Picture Play, as you’ve already seen somewhere up above. She started her film-making days playing Wendy Darling in a 1924 silent version of Peter Pan; her final performances were as Corliss Archer’s mother in the 1954 TV sitcom series.

   As for Kay Strozzi, in spite of her beautifully exotic appearance (early 1930s style), she made only one other movie, a Bette Davis film called Ex-Wife (1933). Otherwise she seems to have been a Broadway performer, which I can understand, and a soap opera star on the radio, which I don’t.

AMONG THE LIVING. Paramount, 1941. Albert Dekker, Susan Hayward, Harry Carey, Frances Farmer, Gordon Jones, Jean Phillips, Ernest Whitman. Director: Stuart Heisler. Shown at Cinevent 20, May 1988.

   Story: One of two identical twin brothers, mentally insane, has been hidden away from the world for twenty-five years. When he escapes, the good twin is blamed for the other’s crimes.

   This uneven but interesting film, directed by Stuart Heisler, also responsible for The Monster and the Girl (Paramount, 1941), begins with a marvelous tracking shot, traveling from a gloomy mansion to a graveside burial service.

   There are at least two other scenes in the film that are also visually exciting. In the more memorable, Albert Dekker, playing the psychotic twin of the good/bad pairing, is tracked by an overhead camera shooting at an angle as he pursues an increasingly frightened woman along dark, deserted, rain-glistening back streets.

   The camera-work is intermittently superb; the back-lot theatrics of this Southern Gothic thriller are something else again in spite of an interesting cast, with Dekker flanked by three attractive actresses, Susan Hayward, Jean Phillips and Frances Farmer, with Phillips particularly effective as the girl pursued by Dekker.

   The program notes, written by William Everson, characterized this appropriately as a “blend of film noir and horror,” but it’s the film noir elements that are the more arresting.

BEWITCHED. MGM, 1945. Phyllis Thaxter, Edmund Gwenn, Henry H. Daniels Jr., Horace McNally, Addison Richards, Kathleen Lockhart, Minor Watson. Screenwriter & director: Arch Oboler, based on his story for radio, “Alter Ego,” starring Bette Davis.

   Giving away the entire story line, but what can I do, this is probably the first film about dual or multiple personality disorder, well before either Lizzie (with Eleanor Parker), and The Three Faces of Eve (with Joanne Woodward) both of which came out in 1957, some twelve years later.

   Phyllis Thaxter plays Joan Ellis in Bewitched, a slim young girl engaged to be married who hears voices in her head – or rather one other voice, that of “Karen” (an unbilled – and unseen, alas – Audrey Totter), and who runs away to New York City from her small town in the Midwest to escape it (or her, as the case may be).

   But there, while possessed by Karen, she commits a murder, and it’s bang up to midnight on Death Row as an elderly but sage psychiatrist (Edmund Gwenn) tries to convince the governor that a pardon might be in order.

   A couple of scenes suggest this movie might be called a film noir, although a minor one. The first in particular – a rainswept street with Joan huddled in an alleyway as she tries to escape the demon inside her – suggests there might be more to the movies than there turns out to be.

   But double alas, no. Arch Oboler, noted for his work on early 1940s radio, primarily as a writer and producer for the famed horror series Lights Out, turned more and more heavy-handed as time went on, and the movie Bewitched is no exception.

   Determined that a moral be raised and stated (if not overstated) in many of his later productions, Oboler manages to suck much (but not all) of the enjoyment out of what could have been a first rate thriller. Granted he was working on a budget, but none of the parts of this film seem to jell.

   Nor should anyone come away from watching this film thinking that exorcising extra personalities from someone so afflicted can be as easy as talking to them sternly.

   No self-respecting mystery-oriented blog, especially one that also covers crime films, should be in existence very long without a discussion of Noir and “What’s a Noir Film?” breaking out.

   It’s been touched on now and again here on Mystery*File, but while you may not have noticed, a lengthy conversation recently took place here, one that covered the subject more intensely than has ever happened before.

   And, of all place, in the comments section of an old review I posted of Phantom Valley, a Durango Kid movie released by Columbia in 1948.

   Here’s the last paragraph, in which I said of the leading lady:

    “Virginia Hunter is very pretty and attractive, but she seems to have had only a short career in films. Her roles include at least one other Durango movie, several Three Stooges shorts, and a small part in the noir thriller He Walked by Night (1948). Mostly B-movies, looking down through the rest of the list, and often small uncredited parts at that, but she makes the most of this one.”

   Since some interesting things were said, I’ll let those who commented take over from here:

MIKE GROST: “The IMDB says Virginia Hunter has tiny roles in Caught and The Reckless Moment, two films in the genre variously known as melodrama / romantic drama / Women’s films / soap opera. Both were directed by Max Ophuls. Ophuls is one of the most admired directors today, and his works are considered major classics. There are many books on him, including Max Ophuls in the Hollywood Studios (1996) by Lutz Bacher.

    “I don’t remember Virginia Hunter in Caught at all. She must have had a very small part.”

WALKER MARTIN: “Mike, concerning Caught and The Reckless Moment, I agree with your use of the word ‘melodrama’ but I’m not so sure about the words ‘romantic drama/ Women’s films/soap opera.’ I viewed both these films about a year ago during my present habit of watching a film noir movie just about every night on dvd (these two films are on British PAL discs). They are definitely film noir with Caught starring James Mason and Robert Ryan and The Reckless Moment starring James Mason and Joan Bennett.

    “Both films are listed in such basic film noir references as Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference by Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward and Film Noir Guide by Keaney. You are right about Max Ophuls being one of the great directors but I guess we have to agree to disagree about these movies being women’s films or soap opera.”

DAVID VINEYARD: “The Reckless Moment is based on a novel by Elizabeth Saxnay Holding, The Blank Wall (1947). The Brooklyn-born Holding was married to an Englishman, and author of several well received novels pioneering the field of psychological suspense. The film is clearly in the noir mode with iconic noir actress Joan Bennett in the lead as a woman being blackmailed by James Mason. Anthony Boucher and Raymond Chandler were both champions of Holding’s work with Boucher crediting her with virtually creating the modern novel of psychological suspense.

    “Caught, while also clearly in the noir mode, is also clearly a modern gothic in it’s plot of a young woman (Barbara Bel Geddes) who discovers her husband (Robert Ryan) isn’t who she thought he was and falls for the doctor(James Mason) who suspects foul play, but her escape is complicated because she is pregnant by her husband. It’s based on the novel Wild Calender by Libbie Block.

    “Both films are generally listed in most noir reference books, though they might fit in a sub-category from the usual crime, spy, and private eye fare we tend to think of as noir. Other films in this more romantic noir mood include Fallen Angel, Leave Her to Heaven, Angel Face, and No Man of Her Own (based on Cornell Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man).

    “Though they are both pre-noir (officially noir begins with 1946’s Murder My Sweet, though plenty of films before that have noirish elements)these more romantic and femme centered noirs were often a mix of elements from Rebecca and Mildred Pierce, though they often featured iconic noir actresses such as Bennett, Bel Geddes, and Barbara Stanwyck.

    “And before everyone piles on to mention the countless films that came out before 1946 that clearly have noir elements, the date is not entirely arbitrary. The term was coined by the French and was not used or recognized as a specific genre before that date. I can think of any number of films before Murder My Sweet I would call noir too, but film historians point out that noir couldn’t technically exist until the term was coined, however many films we think of as noir may seem to fit the pattern.

    “I lean to including the pre-noirs in the general accepted genre, but don’t stretch quite as far as some so called noir collections on DVD that frankly seem to be pushing the boundaries to any film that deals with a crime and makes use of shadows in their cinematography.

    “A perfectly good example would be Scotland Yard Inspector with Cesar Romero, which is available in one of the Film Noir sets. The film is an entertaining British B mystery in the Peter Cheyney mode, but it isn’t noir by any means.

    “Noir is more attitude than subject matter, and as the old line goes, you know it when you see it. Some of these definitions would include any film that was in black and white and wasn’t a comedy, musical, or western.”

WALKER MARTIN: “Yes, we can argue all day about what is film noir and what period constitutes the film noir years, etc. I often see critics saying 1941-1959 is the basic film noir era. However, I have seen movies prior to 1941 that I would call film noir and I’ve seen alot of movies after 1959 that are certainly film noir or neo-noir. To try and pin down the exact definition or period will drive us crazy.

    “For instance one of my favorite reference books is Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference by Silver and Ward. Since 1979, I have been checking off the films as I view them, listing the date viewed and my grade concerning quality. Sometimes I scribble a comment such as ‘This is not film noir.’

    “A couple nights ago was the most recent time that I wrote this comment. I finally found a poor print of Thunderbolt, a 1929 early sound movie starring George Bancroft and Fay Wray. Despite Silver and Ward listing it in the book, there is no evidence that this film is anything more than a crime/prison drama. Yet they see some type of pre-noir element that justifies inclusion in the encyclopedia.

    “I’m pretty liberal in what I include as film noir and I have to be, otherwise I would drive myself mad. The main thing is I enjoy this type of movie.”

MIKE GROST: “I’ve never seen The Reckless Moment. It’s good news that it is at last out on DVD!

    “It’s certainly true that Caught is widely viewed as a noir. But I’ve always been a bit skeptical. Films like Fallen Angel or Mildred Pierce have murder mysteries in them. Everyone agrees they are noir.

    “But there is no crime or even violence in Caught. It’s about a woman and her romantic affairs.

    “Caught does have some character types we associate with noir. Robert Ryan’s nasty millionaire shows the ‘alienation and obsession’ Alain Silver rightly associates with noir. And the film is often dark in mood.

    Still, I think ‘noir’ is best restricted to films with actual crime elements. Maybe we can all agree that Caught is ‘noir-like’…

    “I last saw Thunderbolt (Josef von Sternberg, 1929) in 1972. Thought then it was a masterpiece! This is another film that badly needs to get back in circulation. Sternberg was a giant of the cinema.

    “Have no opinions about whether is is pre-noir. Was astonished back then by its rich use of sound. It seems like one of the most creative and emotionally laden of the early talkies.

    “Hardly anyone in Hollywood used the term noir, even after the French coined it circa 1946. Silver and Ursini’s Film Noir Reader 2 presents strong evidence that Hollywood called such films ‘crime movies,’ and thought of them as a distinct genre. IMHO ‘film noir’ is a great catchy name for this genre, and better than simple ‘crime movies.’ But the genre pre-existed its name. Films like The Stranger on the Third Floor and This Gun for Hire, made long before 1946, sure seem like film noir to me.”

DAVID VINEYARD: “I agree about stretching the limits of noir to include films made before and after the general cut off points. Certainly some of the pre code films have noir elements, as do films like Lang’s You Only Live Once and Fury (though I think in all honestly both are really crime drama and social drama respectively).

    “Even strict constructionists who insist on the 1946 date will admit (reluctantly) that if The Big Sleep had been released in 1945 before Murder My Sweet instead of delayed a year (the 1945 cut has been restored) it would be the first true noir, but then the French invented the term to refer to a type of film that clearly goes back at least to the thirties and which they imitated in films like Jour le Seve and La Bete Humane (which Lang remade as a noir with Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, and Broderick Crawford).

    Anthony Mann’s westerns since under that definition a western couldn’t be noir, though there are certainly noirish elements in many of them (and directed by notable noir directors).

    “And in relation to the article, if it’s based on Cornell Woolrich isn’t it film noir by definition? The Falcon Takes Over and Time to Kill from the Michael Shayne series based on Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely and The High Window both have noir elements just by the nature of the stories, but though they are superior B series entries I don’t think either one is really noir. What is and isn’t noir is likely to be argued for a long time.

    “I would likely agree to limiting noir to crime films, though in the case of Caught the combination of the actors involved — especially Robert Ryan — the look of the film, and director Max Ophuls there is certainly a case to be made for calling it noir.

    “Even within the strictest definition of the genre there are films as diverse as the nihilistic Detour, the docudrama style of He Walked By Night or Lineup, and the moody romance of Out of the Past that are noir icons, but have little in common other than crime and being filmed in black and white. I suspect in the case of noir the answer lies in the eye of the beholder within some general guidelines.”

LUTZ BACHER: “In Caught, Virginia Hunter plays ‘Lushola,’ the inebriated woman who keeps interrupting Lee and Quinada at the bar in the Nightclub scene. In Reckless Moment, she’s seen more briefly at the juke box in the hotel bar (the second bar scene, near the end), repeatedly saying ‘same song again.’”

    Me, Steve, again. Thanks to all who commented, with a special tip of the cap to Lutz Bacher for the definitive answer to who Virginia Hunter played, and when, the question which began this entire conversation!