Noir City 2020.01: The Black Vampire & Panic

Hey, this technically makes it a Boston-area festival, right?

Okay, that's a reach, as is "this probably would have been the lineup for Noir City Boston at the Brattle", but so what? If there's any series festival shrugging off borders is worthwhile, it's this one.

I've got to admit, watching the first couple night's worth has been fun, but I'm kind of glad that Eventive is letting one rewatch within 48 hours after pressing Play, because I started Panic way too late and dozed off a lot during it, and watching it a second time in the morning just wasn't the same. I suspect that the best thing to do if you go in and out during a movie is write it off and come back later, but with a limited rental like this, I had to do it right away but wasn't really in the mood to either give that second all my attention or half-watch it.

Still, they're both nifty little movies, and if you read this while the series is still going on (link through the 29th), you can see them with the introductions from Eddie Muller and some interesting post-film material, from talk about the Argentine film industry of the 1950s to discussion on the history of subtitling

El Vampiro Negro (The Black Vampire)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 November 2020 in Jay's Living Room (AFI Silver/Noir City International, Eventive via Roku)

There are some who will say that El Vampiro Negro is the best version of its tale, and while that's a stretch - Fritz Lang's M is a legit classic - this Argentine take on the story from 1953 nevertheless makes a much stronger case for its own existence than many remakes do. It's a smart update of the story which doesn't lose its way for having a lot to say.

It can't escape the inevitable comparisons to its predecessor, of course, in part because star Nathán Pinzón - described in the post-film discussion as an avid cinephile - is seemingly determined to not just play the same part that Peter Lorre played, but to be Peter Lorre in M. It's not quite mimicry, but there's nevertheless a sense that he is pointedly making the same choices and using that performance as a guide wherever he can, and why not? Not a lot of people in Argentina can easily see a 20-year-old German film, and this is his chance to bring something he loves to them. It's not Lorre - it evokes him well enough but doesn't quite have the same "born-for-this" feel that Lorre brigns to it, especially if you've seen the original.

But it doesn't quite matter, because the serial killer in this movie is almost secondary; the film's true villain, arguably, is Prosecutor Bernard (Roberto Escalada), he may not be corrupt but he is always ready to bring the full force of his office to bear if it will help him resolve his case, and that's doubly so if he sees someone as his societal inferior. As such, he sets his sights on Amalia (Olga Zubarry) early on; a single mother who works as a nightclub singer in a club owned by a former drug trafficker (Pascual Pellicota), and who as such has no reason to believe that her precarious position will be helped by doing the right thing. And while director Román Viñoly Barreto and co-writer Alberto Etchebehere were likely pushed to make some changes by mid-century censorship requirements, they're able to be subversive and clever in how they do it: The mob as in organized crime isn't going to be the ones that do the work the police can't in this movie, but the overlooked people - folks with disreputable jobs, the homeless, the disabled - will.

That occasionally makes for a movie that gets a little wobbly when it gets to the child murders that supposedly drive the plot; there's a good argument for the filmmakers not engaging in lurid exploitation, especially since the theme of pitting the privileged against the displaced means that Ulber will be lashing out in a lot of the same ways the underdogs are. It doesn't reduce the horror of the serial killing to a plot device, but it does kind of show that there's enough going on that some things get pushed back a bit.

Panique (Panic)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13-14 November 2020 in Jay's Living Room (AFI Silver/Noir City International, Eventive via Roku)

Notably based on a George Simenon novel from outside his Inspector Maigret series, and it's one of those odd postwar French movies where there's this broad amorality and paranoia that sometimes seems peculiar from 75 years later, oddly dry even for noir.

Part of the thing that makes it so is that while all three leads are good in their parts, only Viviane Romance's Alice seems well-rounded throughout; she's aloof at some points but even as she's working a cynical seduction, she's got genuine affection for the boyfriend who was part of the gang that had her spending a year in jail and a believable as she starts to develop a soft spot for their patsy. Michel Simon is a guy whose charisma comes through as Monsieur Hire - it's not hard to see how he was a big star despite being kind of an odd nebbish in this film. He plays the sort of protagonist who is midway between hero and antihero, right below abrasive but just not-friendly enough that one can see why he's still an outcast. Paul Benard, meanwhile, is a guy you buy as Alice's no-account (and then some) boyfriend Freddy, but he's still someone you're told is charming rather than one where you believe it.

Director Julien Duvivier and co-writer Charles Spaak can't help but see the war over their shoulders as they make the film, and it's maybe a little bit more believably frustrating now than it has been at many times since. Freddy's blunt, seemingly transparent riling up of the townspeople who are already on edge seems kind of ham-fisted, as is the way it rapidly becomes a game of telephone, but it's not like what's going on in the real world is that much more sophisticated. What is a real delight is the town itself, apparently close enough to Paris or some other city to be on the Metro but still isolated; it may be filled with easily duped people but hits a real sweet spot between feeling like something created for the film and real, cozy enough to seem like a set but big enough for a finale. It's a nifty environment to lose yourself in even when you know what's under the surface, and the big finale is one where you can see a lot of the tricks but it's still stitched together into something that's more than a bit impressive in its scale.

This Week in Tickets: 3 June 2019 - 9 June 2019

Nothing better than living in Noir City for the weekend.

Well, sort of. An actual noir city would be a dangerous place where you can't trust anyone and life is cheap, but the Brattle when they're showing noirs all weekend is pretty nice.



The week started well with me finally catching up to Booksmart, which is absolutely as funny as advertised. By the way, did you know MoviePass is still a thing? I've probably gone a couple months without using it, but the $11 ticket covered membership this month. After that, work and weird start times kept me at home and watching baseball and catching up on a year's worth of Elementary (sneakily the best part of the twenty-first century Sherlock Holmes revival), and when I got out to the theater on Thursday, it was to catch Dark Phoenix, which… Wasn't very good. At all. But, I've seen all the other X-Movies on the big screen, and if this is the last (depending on whether or not New Mutants ever sees the light of day), I might as well complete the set, and I would be busy for the next few days.

Why? Because it was crime time at the Brattle, with Noir Alley host Eddie Mueller and his Film Noir Foundation crew there for the second annual Noir City weekend, this one devoted to film noir of the 1950s and cleverly programmed so that, after an initial 1948 movie, the next would be from 1952 and then we would advance a year after that before arriving in 1960 late Sunday night. The lineup contained more that I'd seen before than last year, but most were well worth checking in on again, with the full ten-film slate (organized into double features) consisting of Trapped, Turning Point, City That Never Sleeps, Pushover, Kiss Me Deadly, A Kiss Before Dying, The Burglar, Murder By Contract, Odds Against Tomorrow, and Blast of Silence. Looks like I screwed up my scrapbooking up there, but it happens.

Much of it was on film, and the presentation accidentally gave a demonstration of something interesting: Apparently, the Brattle had just replaced one part of one of the two projectors in their setup, and as they switched from one to the other, the look of the film would change just enough to require a couple seconds of acclimatization. Ned commented that they would probably have to replace the reflector on the other projector to get them to match.

That would be enough crime for most, but am I going to miss a cops & robbers import from Hong Kong? Of course not, even if Chasing the Dragon II: Wild Wild Bunch wasn't very good. Had to get out of the apartment early for that, because the MBTA has not been reliable lately.

Hopefully, a ton to go up on my Letterboxd page with the big movie weekend coming up..

Dark Phoenix

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 June 2019 in AMC Boston Common #18 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

This likely isn't the worst of the X-Men movies, if only because Apocalypse was bad enough to completely flee one's memory, while this at least has the pretty decent shuttle rescue sequence. One good scene is better than nothing.

Otherwise, though, it's pretty rough. The story it loosely adapts is grandiose and epic in a way this film can't manage, and writer/director Simon Kinberg never really comes up with a more human-scale point of entry that doesn't feel half-baked. Neither Sophie Turner nor an utterly wasted Jessica Chastain makes either woman aiming to control this Phoenix Force the least bit interesting, and there's not a single returning cast member that seems to have anything more to give these characters. Kinberg just really doesn't seem to get action at all, from the motivation to the staging to the cutting of it.

The movie is kind of interesting as an example of the strain put on superhero universes, though: On the one hand, it's an amusing introduction to how 30+ years of continuity will always be forced into a 10-year window no matter how absurd it is; on the other, it's an example of creators retelling an important story after a reboot. It never works, whether in comics or any other medium.

Trapped

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 June 2019 in the BrattleTheatre (Noir City, 35mm)

Trapped is a fair enough "crime does not pay" flick that certainly has its moments even as it kind of plods its way through a basic plot about cops and counterfeiters using each other to track down a set of excellent twenties, back when getting passed a counterfeit of that denomination could really mess your business up. Richard Fleischer can shoot the heck out of a crook being cornered like a rat in a trolley yard, for instance, despite the fact that Lloyd Bridges was allegedly ill, meaning the film had to be rejiggered to make its schedule. Bridges himself is a great hard-bitten crook, so well-suited to the role of a working-class villain that it's a shame he's less well know for those.

It's bland, though. Once the story runs out of switch-ups, the lack of a really great central caper shows, characters plodding on toward an underwhelming finale. Striking leading lady Barbara Payton doesn't have much to do, which is a shame; she had a mess of a career and life, but the camera loved her, and she made a better moll than most.

The Turning Point

N/A (out of four)
Seen 7 June 2019 in the BrattleTheatre (Noir City, DCP)

Apparently I was just not up for this as the back end of a double feature, nodding off several times. It's a nice-enough looking movie, but very dry and possessed of the sort of idealism that feels awfully grim without offering up much in the way of hope.

City That Never Sleeps

* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 June 2019 in the BrattleTheatre (Noir City, DCP)

Here's a neat little noir that has a bunch of little betrayals add up to a big mess - cops cheating on their wives, girlfriends having someone on the side, a small-time crook looking to get something over the big boss. It all happens over the course of a night, with things having been a certain way for a while and not coming to a boil so much as moving forward. It's small potatoes but involving.

That smallness is what makes it work; the film is built out of what seems like what would be another movie's minor characters, and zooms in nicely. Meanwhile, it has a nifty conceit with narration by the city itself, a hint of the supernatural, and a somewhat unexpectedly hard edge to its last act as an actor reduced to playing a mechanical man finds his survival dependent on whether or not he's even recognized as human. It's harsh for a movie where the city itself seems to be looking out for some of its citizens, but life's hardly fair in Noir City.

(Less cool: A bit of a "bow to your husband's male fragility, ladies" resolution is implied, and this guy doesn't seem worth it in the slightest.)

Pushover

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 June 2019 in the BrattleTheatre (Noir City, 35mm)

Pushover has as good a last act as a movie has ever had, the whole thing a finely-tuned machine that never seems too perfectly set up but whose mechanics are so flawless that they're a delight to watch even though one likely has no sympathy by the time they're playing out. By then, it's completed its corruption of Fred MacMurray's cop and successfully sidelined what seemed like the main plot, and it's just a matter of watching Richard Quine push pieces around the board all but perfectly.

Plus, there's the absolute delight of a knows-she's-perfect Kim Novak in her first role seeming to relish playing this temptress. She may be up to no good, but it's delicious watching her dispense with an obnoxious guy at a bar or blow off the cops.

What I wrote back in 2006

Kiss Me Deadly

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 June 2019 in the BrattleTheatre (Noir City, DCP)

The absurd ham-handedness of this is part of what makes it a classic, more so than if it had been played slick or grimier. It's the logical endpoint of a small-time private eye getting in over his head, in this case so far over that what will likely destroy him and everyone he knows is practically abstract It's messy and violent and crass, and that's just the perfect sort of cynicism for this movie to have.

It's also tremendously entertaining; Ralph Meeker makes Mike Hammer a crude blunt object of a P.I., and he's weirdly charming even as he properly registers as despicable at times. Maybe it's that Velda likes him; Maxine Cooper is a stealth MVP as Hammer's secretary and partner in crime, making her self-aware but also something of a romantic, and her knowledge that no good will come from her love for Hammer is heartbreaking even when the rest of the movie is looking to make the audience snicker.

A Kiss Before Dying

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 June 2019 in the BrattleTheatre (Noir City, 35mm)

I'm not sure this truly qualifies as noir even without considering it's widescreen and color; its universe doesn't seem lacking in morality, but rather to have one horrible exception in Robert Wagner's Bud Corliss. It's very much what Eddie Mueller called a "murder drama" at last year's Noir City Boston, and a pure sort that hasn't evolved into noir yet. In a way, it's almost inverted, with the cruelly cynical first half giving way to a back end that never seems to have the same sort of fatalism, in part because Virginia Leith's Ellen Kingship is just a more capable heroine than the sister played by Joanne Woodward.

It's a fun little thriller, though, with a cast willing to play big but not broad, with Jeffrey Hunter a fine addition to the list of people who would have made good Clark Kents if they'd been making big-budget superhero movies at the time. It's a bit goofy in its final scene, but manages to be 85-odd minutes of pulpy fun before that, using its split story and short run-time to make sure it never bogs down.

The Burglar

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 June 2019 in the BrattleTheatre (Noir City, 35mm)

It's only been a few years since I last saw this one, and I didn't quite love it as much this time, but it's solid as heck crime and kind of fun for how its leads are playing not so much against type as a little off from where you'd expect: Dan Duryea is in the lead, and Jayne Mansfield hasn't slotted into the flirty comedies she'd become known for. Still sexy as heck, but messed up and tending toward the dramatic. It's easy to see why studios would move her to lighter fare, but she makes the whole thing feel torn up and tragic.

What I wrote back in 2015

Murder by Contract

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 June 2019 in the BrattleTheatre (Noir City, 35mm)

A stylish indie thriller that anticipates the talky hitman movies that would flood the multiplexes thirty-five years later, Murder by Contract feels like it should loom larger in film history than it does; you can almost watch it constructing an archetype even as it builds hitman Claude's character from its origins. Unfortunately, it's kind of dull; Claude isn't really injected into a particularly interesting story and spends much of the movie killing time rather than people, and there's not a real payoff for what's going on.

It's a bummer, because there's fun stuff to be found here, with the odd couple backing Claude up a great pair to play against his sociopathy. There's also a late thread about the targeted witness going stir-crazy, but it never feels truly important, much like the rest of the film.

Odds Against Tomorrow

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 June 2019 in the BrattleTheatre (Noir City, 35mm)

As part of a generation that mostly knows Harry Belafonte from "The Banana Boat Song", it always takes me aback just how cool he is, especially in his prime. Belafonte is an effortlessly charming actor who can give his nightclub singer an edge without making him completely unsympathetic. On top of that, he's the producer and driving force behind the film getting made in the first place.

(And, yes, that's "is", not "was"; he's kind of great when he pops up in BlacKkKlansman)

And it's just generally a terrific little noir, able to manage both its slow burn and explosive finale very well indeed. It's a simple heist but in some ways that simplicity is almost charming, because only some of the folks involved really have the stomach for hurting people. It's what makes the harsher moments so painful, because it puts the ugliness of another character's racism in sharper relief.

Blast of Silence

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 June 2019 in the BrattleTheatre (Noir City, 35mm)

There's something about Blast of Silence that seems a lot more genuinely misanthropic than most movies of its genre but still oddly enjoyable. The second-person narration is a constant hammering at how subhuman its antihero feels, there's a specific unappealing sort of grime, and no pleasure taken in the work of a gun for hire. It's mean and pathetic and you can see how miserable people are exploited.

It's also lean and self-aware in its darkness, though, which gives the audience something to work with, and that the audience knows that any sort of hope being offered is almost certainly forlorn doesn't make it less genuine. The movie also winds up benefiting from the director stepping in to star after Peter Falk dropped out; his uncertainty and seeming inexperience plays as genuine asocial behavior rather than something constructed (and sixty years on, it's kind of hard to imagine Falk not being Falk in the role).

Noir City: Boston - Murder, My Sweet, Strangers in the Night, The Killers, So Dark the Night, Force of Evil, The Guilty, Try and Get Me!, and Shakedown

I've been flirting with the idea of going to the main "Noir City" festival in San Francisco for a few years, even before I got to experience the Castro at the silent film festival, and maybe I'll do it some year - it sure looks like it would be nicer weather than Boston that week. I kept putting that off, though, and that seemed okay when they made the announcement late last year that it would be coming for me, settling in for a weekend at the Brattle Theatre, which seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

Unfortunately for me, it ran into my Red Sox 10-game package, so I missed Friday night, which I was kind of okay with - I've seen The Glass Key a few times - but still left me plenty of noir to see, with two double features per weekend day. The double-feature format was one of the neat things about this particular series, in that they were pairing "A" and "B" movies and doing it as single-admission double features, with Ned mentioning that the idea was rare enough that they occasionally get calls at the Brattle asking if you have to watch both ("yes, at the beginning of the first movie, seat belts automatically fasten and don't let you out until after the second").

Ned wasn't the main host, though, as the FIlm Noir Foundation's "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller was there to introduce each one. I'm afraid I'm not familiar with him because my cable package doesn't include Turner Classic Movies (Comcast bundles it with five college sports channels I will never watch, and I've got good rep theaters nearby), so I never see his "Noir Alley" presentations. He's got a lot of fun anecdotes, although I'm kind of a "get to the movie" guy, myself.

He did deliver one bit of information that I felt like I should have known, that being what these movies were called at the time. "Film noir" didn't enter the lexicon until a decade or so later, when French critics and filmmakers started examining them and incorporating their influence directly. American studios called these films "murder dramas" and "crime thrillers", the former tending to feature amateurs and being marketed to women, the latter about career criminals and marketed to men. The Killers, he noted, was successful and seminal because it functioned as both.

Me, I'm now just looking for a reason to use "murder drama" in its proper context.

Murder, My Sweet

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 June 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Noir City: Boston, 35mm)

This is the less celebrated of the two Philip Marlowe movies released in 1944, and for good reason, but it's still a good piece of crime cinema with an enjoyably likable Dick Powell as Marlowe and a lot of good bits around him. I was pretty darn enthusiastic the last time I saw it (at the HFA's "Five O'Clock Shadow" program in 2015) and not quite so enamored this time around, but it's still pretty terrific.

At times, it's a little too ambitious in trying to replicate Chandler's prose or create a filmic equivalent, but that's better to try than homogenize it. Still, for my money, this movie is all about poor Moose, a hulking brute who I suspect wasn't quite the fool Marlowe meets before he became a crook (I'm retroactively saying he's got CTE) and is now a sad, lovelorn loose cannon after doing his time. He's the tragic result of Chandler's predilection for ending chapters by knocking someone unconscious, and you have to hope that any woman Marlowe meets will be the one who helps him escape that fate.

Full review on EFC, from 2015

Strangers in the Night

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 June 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Noir City: Boston, 35mm)

This thing is utterly bonkers, an amateurish-seeming B movie that would likely collapse even further if it ran more than its 56 minutes, but it's a (sometimes literal!) trainwreck you can't look away from. The plot is daffy but kind of compelling, and it's got a bunch of people both in front of and behind the camera doing their level best even when the star is wooden and the story sloppy.

And it is a complete mess, taking bits from other, better stories and cobbling them together into something with a soldier (William Terry) who meets a nice lady doctor (Virginia Grey) on his way to meet the girl he corresponded with during the war, only to find she's not around but her mother (Helene Thimig) practically worships at the girl's portrait like it's an altar. What's going on is obvious enough that characters seem like they have to be really oblivious to miss it, there are a lot of things that don't even play natural by Gothic standards, but there are some surprisingly good bits buried inside the accelerated, often abrupt story, and the filmmakers fully embrace how nutty thing are by the end, which is the only way to go.

And make no mistake, that finale is something. It goes from a scene that deserves heckling to laying out just how silly its events are without shame. There's a moment during the finale explanation when the filmmakers cut to a genuinely hilarious "uh... what?" blank look on the characters' faces, just before a delightfully over-the-top coup de grace. It sends you out amused, if nothing else.

The Killers

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 June 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Noir City: Boston, 35mm)

An all-time classic noir, described in the introduction as the intersection between "murder dramas" and "crime thrillers", and as such featuring something for everyone, even before considering how downright genteel criminals apparently were then - no worries about being seen or eliminating witnesses. It's awful clever in how it sneaks the love story you don't expect in under the one you do.

This time around, I'm really stuck by what the filmmakers did with shadows. They're deep and eye-catching toward the start, quietly receding as the investigation yields greater clarity. The use of flashbacks is more clever than I remembered, too, using narration to keep the big heist less suspenseful because it turns out to be less important than everything else, but even in that sequence never failing to draw the audience in.

What I thought when I saw it in 2012

So Dark the Night

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 June 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Noir City: Boston, 35mm)

Well, at least that didn't turn out to be the solid hour and a half of franglais I was initially fearing, even if it often seemed headed in that campy direction early on, with the filmmakers occasionally seeming unsure whether the accents and production design was enough. So there's that.

Instead, it seemed like someone trying to do Hitchcock without his incredible talent - director Joseph H. Lewis and his collaborators have just enough ambition to set up some memorable shots and they make the same blunt attempts to craft a monster out of deviant psychology, but the characterization and storytelling panache that disguises how little is actually happening as the filmmakers try to make things simmer just isn't present. It's like the people making the movie gets so excited by the possibility of its twist ending that they can't help but blurt it out early.

Force of Evil

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 June 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Noir City: Boston, 35mm)

Sometimes a dry story about how the numbers racket worked, sometimes a flick that has more genuine style and personality than 90% of its competition. I ultimately liked its potential more than the thing itself. I some way, that's to be expected because this seems to be far more a passion project than most noirs, with the director not just credited with the script, but co-writing it with the writer whose research inspired the story. It a world of competent programmers, this is the work of someone with something to say and a strong desire to make an impression.

I'm also kind of impressed with just how thoroughly and flagrantly predatory its antihero was to the sweet love interest, though. I'm not sure whether it was meant to be a further illustration of how John Garfield's Joe Morse is an amoral man in a scuzzy business or if it was 1948 and this was supposed to come across as flirtatious, but it worked as the former 70 years on.

The Guilty

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 June 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Noir City: Boston, 35mm)

Efficient bit of film noir that could probably get more use out of having its two female leads be twins, especially since the main femme never seems quite so fatale as she's meant to be; this could have been a really terrific double performance for Bonita Granville, although having the focus be so solidly on "bad girl" Estelle may give her the chance to make her a bit more nuanced than a movie where the contrast between the twins is the focus. It makes me a bit curious to see what Cornell Woolrich's original story ("He Looked LIke Murder") was like - did it spend as much unnecessary time on whodunit material that isn't really important, or less? The film never seems to find what it means to focus on.

It's a bit hindered in other ways - the budget and necessary restraint where violence is concerned makes the audience take more on faith than they should, and some of the acting is kind of rough. There are enough good performances and run-down ambiance (the introduction focused on how miserable Woolrich's world could be) for an ambitious B, though.

Try and Get Me! (aka The Sound of Fury)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 June 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Noir City: Boston, 35mm)

Try and Get Me! is more than a trifle heavy-handed (to put it mildly), especially once a thoughtful professor starts putting the moral lesson of the film into so many words. Director Cy Endfield and writer Jo Pagano (adapting his own novel) are foregrounding social concerns that will probably always be relevant, and even when Jiminy Cricket in the form of an Italian physicist (Renzo Cesana) who knows reporter Gil Stanton (Richard Carlson) from the war isn't talking about the need for the press to show restraint, they're making progressive points. It's why the movie sometimes seems to struggle a bit; the stories of Stanton and factory worker turned getaway driver Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy) are linked, but neither seems like much as they're advancing individually

Still, it's tough to deny the effectiveness of the final riot that comes when the two collide; it's a big scene with a bunch of extras that feels like it belongs in a Technicolor epic rather than a a B&W crime movie, although it's not entirely unexpected, given how well the early crime hits are executed. Much of the cast is businesslike, but Lloyd Bridges is kind of a hoot as the reckless crook who pulls Howard into a life of crime. The most wonderfully black-comic moment belongs to Adele Jergens as the Bridges character's girlfriend, dressed to the nines and enjoying the camera when the press starts to cover the arrest and trial.

It inevitably winds up three or four movies stitched together, but does do most of them well.

Shakedown

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 June 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Noir City: Boston, 35mm)

Pure pulp, this film is, introducing an unscrupulous lead and then not choosing to complicate him at all. Photographer Jack Early (Howard Duff) is a bastard from the start, but a talented enough one to make the audience buy his rise and identity with his ambition, and the filmmakers find just the right way of building him from maybe being inexperienced and desperate to enjoyably ruthless to downright villainous. Duff's not quite charismatic enough in the role to become a great anti-hero, but he's good enough, especially as the filmmakers show every female head turning, one of the more overt uses of male sex appeal in the genre - how often is the good-looking guy a woman's potential downfall?

The film doubles down on that, diving into the muck with the same sort of recklessness as its protagonist, making the danger of it a bit of fun. There's a lot of fun had with the gangsters, who are in their way more honest than the photographer who sees a way to extort them, but not so much that a viewer can't enjoy Early getting one over on them. It's not quite so much fun to watch him try and do the same with the two women who catch his eye. Both Peggy Dow and Anne Vernon are sexy as heck and their characters more so for being witty, capable, and not entirely ready to fall for Jack.

It ends just as abruptly and madly as it started, with double-crosses, violence, and a capper that is only wonderfully nuts than the one in Strangers in the Night because there's a scene where the characters acknowledge the irony rather than a quick "The End". It's just ridiculous enough at that point to be unambiguously fun pulp, but a little excess winking doesn't hurt it too much.