If you’ve watched my YouTube channel, also called Journeys in Darkness and Light, you know I spent a lot of time discussing new releases in film noir and neo-noir on physical media. I’ll cover this release in my June New Releases video, but let’s take a deeper dive here with a collection called Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XIX, releasing on June 18 from Kino Lorber.
If you’re new to film noir you’re probably thinking, “Nineteen volumes of film noir?” Look, we’re not even scratching the surface. Even if we limit ourselves to American film noir from the classic era (roughly 1941-1959) we’re looking at hundreds of titles. Kino Lorber does a fantastic job of finding and restoring classic and forgotten noir titles (but they also do much more). The folks at Kino are relentless, for which movie lovers should be thankful. It’s all about what they can get the rights to. Many prestige titles like Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, and The Killers have already enjoyed releases from the studios that made them. These Dark Side of Cinema sets are primarily for collectors who already have everything else. You’ll find excellent noir pictures in these sets, but some titles in the previous 18 volumes are “noir-stained,” movies that are primarily dramas or melodramas with some noir elements thrown in. Yet with Volume XIX, we have three strong noir pictures.
Dark City (1950) directed by William Dieterle
After being busted by a police captain and his men, Danny Haley (Charlton Heston, in his first major screen role) and his hustler buddies (Ed Begley, Jack Webb, and Harry Morgan) regroup and target a man named Winant (Don DeFore) in a poker game. Winant does well initially, then gets into trouble when he returns the next night. Big trouble. Things get so bad that Winant’s brother (Mike Mazurki) comes around looking for the gang of hustlers.
Dark City doesn’t exactly boast the greatest script in the world, but it is loaded with a wonderful cast including Lizabeth Scott as Haley’s nightclub-singer girlfriend and Dean Jagger as a police captain. Need more convincing? How about music by Franz Waxman and costumes by Edith Head?
Sure, Lizabeth Scott’s singing (dubbed by Trudy Stevens) nearly every time a scene changes gets tiresome, but I enjoyed watching Heston playing something other than a noble hero. Danny is a con man, but a low-level one, which makes him all the more interesting, far more so than many of Heston’s later roles. Danny also carries a darker side that I won’t reveal here, one that explains, but not necessarily excuses, his behavior. I wish we had seen Heston portraying more characters like this, but I guess someone had to be Moses… It’s also fun seeing Webb and Morgan working together years before reuniting in completely different roles in the TV show Dragnet. Dark City might cover familiar ground, but it’s done well with some nice performances.
Dark City includes a new audio commentary from writer and film historian Alan K. Rode
No Man of Her Own (1950) directed by Mitchell Leisen
(not to be confused with the 1932 film of the same name starring Clark Gable and Carole Lombard)
Barbara Stanwyck’s low, throaty narration begins as the camera takes us from a quiet street up past a perfectly manicured lawn to a sprawling home large enough to house dozens of people. It’s a place, Stanwyck’s voice tells us, of “perfect peace and security. The summer nights are pleasant in Caulfield, but not for us.”
Once inside, Bill Harkness (John Lund) reads a copy of Look Homeward, Angel while a woman (Stanwyck) holds a sleeping baby. Neither of them, however, shows expressions of perfect peace and security, quite the opposite. Harkness peers out the window looking for light and finds none. The woman displays a worried look that gains intensity when the phone rings. She’s waiting for a bomb to drop, and then it does. Harkness picks up the phone, listens, and tells her the police are coming. “Did they say which one of us they want?” she says.
During a flashback, we discover that Helen Ferguson is the woman asking that question. Helen has arrived in New York, trying to convince her boyfriend Steve (Lyle Bettger) to take her in. She’s pregnant with Steve’s baby and has nowhere else to go, but Steve doesn’t care. He’s moved on to another woman. He slips Helen a train ticket to San Francisco and a $5 bill. What a guy.
Although initially a weeping mess, Helen decides to board the train and face the future. She has no idea what’s in store for her, and neither do we.
I’ll stop right there because part of the fun in this melodrama-noir is watching it play out in nail-biting suspense, especially contrasting the level of deception on Helen’s part and those she’s trying to deceive. Helen’s not hateful or manipulative, she’s simply trying to survive and live with the dread of her past catching up with her.
When I attended this film at the Noir City DC festival nearly 10 years ago, writer and film historian Foster Hirsch commented on the clash of two worlds depicted in the film, the Cornell Woolrich source novel I Married a Dead Man, Barbara Stanwyck’s performance, Mitchell Leisen’s direction, and more.
Leisen was an art director and costume designer in addition to being an A-list director for Paramount from the 1930s-50s, known for glossy Hollywood melodramas, musicals, and screwball comedies, not film noir. But he certainly understood the plight of women in trouble. If I had to assign percentages to No Man of Her Own, it might be 60% melodrama and 40% noir. Hirsch may agree with that percentage. He mentioned that the film has dropped out of favor somewhat in noir circles because it focuses on a middle-class suburb that doesn’t look like noir. “That’s the whole point,” said Hirsch.
No Man of Her Own presents the opposition of two worlds: a safe, middle-class neighborhood and the seedy underbelly of noir. Hirsch nailed it, calling the combination “a recipe for absolute disaster.”
The disc includes two new audio commentaries, one from film historian/writer Imogen Sara Smith, and another by film historian/writer Julie Kirgo and writer/filmmaker Peter Hankoff.
Beware, My Lovely (1952) directed by Harry Horner
After an attention-getting opening I will not describe, we find itinerant handyman Howard Wilton (Robert Ryan), a veteran looking for work in a quaint, small town. Young widow Helen Gordon (Ida Lupino) hires Howard for help with a few chores. Helen is friendly, and Howard begins his work well, but we soon suspect something is terribly wrong. Howard swings back and forth between moments of kindness and dangerous rage, often in the same sentence. Helen tries to placate Howard long enough to alert someone to this escalating danger.
Many of the situations in the film may be contrived and unbelievable, but the two leads deliver astonishingly nuanced performances. Ryan is powerful as Howard, a man who both terrifies us and evokes our sympathy. Even more impressively, Lupino responds to Howard’s extremes of rage and calm while looking for a way out of the prison that has become her home.
Beware, My Lovely was a project of The Filmmakers (Lupino and then-husband Collier Young) but Lupino chose to work in front of the camera this time, having already directed four films by 1951. To direct, she picked Harry Horner, the Oscar-winning production designer of The Heiress (1949) and director of The Filmakers’ Outrage (1950). If Beware, My Lovely seems like a two-person play, it was: Mel Dinelli wrote the screenplay based on his play The Man. To give the film a more cinematic feel, Horner added several outdoor scenes and George Diskant’s camera work (as well as a variety of interesting lighting set-ups) helps give the film more of a noir atmosphere. Fans of the Nicholas Ray noir On Dangerous Ground (1951) will enjoy comparing the Lupino/Ryan roles with those of Beware, My Lovely. Although it contains some believability problems, Beware, My Lovely is well worth discovering.
The disc contains an archival audio commentary by professor and film scholar Jason A. Ney.
If you’re considering any of the Dark Side of Cinema sets, this is a good place to start. All three films are solid with excellent performances and rewatchability.