SOME SPOILERS, I SUPPOSE



The second film I've seen this year from the Philly Film Festival. (I was supposed to go see MONGOL last week, but was too damn hungover, embarrassingly enough.) I was very interested in this because I actually have a copy of the Black Lizard reprint and it's a favorite crime novel of mine, an unsung classic of the genre, actually, it uses the heist plot as sort of a pretext in that it's really more of a meditation on the fragility and unexpectedness of life. Worth reading if you can find it, not easy to even score the reprint anymore, though.

They had three 'noir' pictures at the Festival, and I use the scare quotes because I know at least two of 'em ain't. One of 'em was BLAST OF SILENCE, which might be a noir, I dunno, but is extremely obscure -- this is one area I feel I know pretty well, and if I haven't even heard of it...well. (Harrumph.) One of them was DEADLINE U.S.A., which the festival guide persisted in calling rare even though I, personally, have seen it 6,287 times. (It used to play on AMC all the time.) And one of them is this.

These other two movies ain't 'noir'. "Noir" refers to a very specific sort of crime story, and we can all debate what that means, but it's a subset of "hardboiled". It may be snazzier to call a crime movie "noir", but that don't make it right, dang nabbit.

Still, I enjoyed VIOLENT SATURDAY quite a bit. In one of those soapy small towns that seemed to be everywhere in the Fifties (the movie version plays like a mashup of the crime novel and palpitating Fifties O'Hara style melodrama) three hardcases go in to knock over the bank. But you got everyone else's little subplot that has to be resolved in the end, too -- again, we see the spiritual forefather of the Seventies disaster movie are these sorts of stories. Plays out in predictable ways, of course, but I don't think you really go to something like this to be surprised, instead you just want to see if they handle the tropes well. And they mostly do -- while the movie version doesn't have the depth of the book version (and it seems like a bigger town than what I remember from the book, which seemed to be very one horse) it does try for seriousness here and there, in interesting ways.

Filmed in glorious technicolor and Cinemascope, which I wasn't expecting and appreciated -- I think part of the reason I love Fifties-style melodramas is all that glorious technicolor. Richard Fleischer is the director here and he's basically just competent, although he uses cinemascope nicely in a few shots and handles the final shootout very well indeed.

With Victor Mature a little out of his league as The Man Who Must Prove Himself, Ernest Borgnine as an Amish farmer, of all things, Lee Marvin as a hood addicted to nasal spray, and hot to trot Virginia Leith as the hot to trot nurse. Man, is she hot to trot!

doug

I've seen all three of the films you mention and I don't consider any of them noir, not even BLAST OF SILENCE, which was more of an indie New York crime drama, distinguished by lots of b&w location filming, but nothing particularly "noir" in its theme or execution. (Plus, I'm a bit of a purist about noir as a historical phenomenon and I tend to consider anything after 1955, excepting TOUCH OF EVIL of course, as out of the noir timeline.) Just my two cents...

Speaking of '50s crime dramas in color and cinemascope, I want to direct your attention to I DIED A THOUSAND TIMES (1955), directed by Stuart Heisler, a scene-for-scene remake of the b&w pre-war crime drama, HIGH SIERRA (1941), directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Humphrey Bogart. I DIED is quite fascinating, mainly because of its cast and the completely different approaches to the characters they play even though they deliver the same lines. Jack Palance is in the Bogart role, Shelley Winters does Ida Lupino's part and the rest of the cast includes the likes of Lee Marvin, Earl Holliman, Perry Lopez, Lon Chaney Jr., Dick Davalos (who played James Dean's brother in EAST OF EDEN) and, making an auspicious film debut as a teenage hophead at a party, Dennis Hopper! There's an interesting contrast in the way the Southern California locations are filmed in both movies, with color and cinemascope imparting an entirely different, but no less dramatic feel.

Another good '50s crime drama in color and cinemascope is HELL ON FRISCO BAY (1955), set in San Francisco and starring Alan Ladd as a tough cop, Edward G. Robinson as a mob boss, Perry Lopez as a mobster, Fay Wray as an ex-movie star, Paul Stewart, Joanne Dru, William Demarest and Jayne Mansfield.

(Just for the record, I just thumbed through the 2008 Maltin movie guide to check up on FRISCO BAY's cast and--guess what?--it ain't there! So I went and got an older, 1990, edition and looked it up. So the Maltins are getting less and less comprehensive with each new edition.)

. . . the good news is that quite a few of these older titles (pre-1960) are to be found in Maltin's CLASSIC MOVIE GUIDE which was published in 2005 and lists "more than 9000 movies" - in his introduction he says the standard GUIDE was up to 18,000 titles "and it became impossible to add three hundred new titles every year while retaining all of the existing entires" - as well as shifting stuff, this GUIDE contains lots of new entries for many films from this period he/his writers had not previously discussed . . . the bad news is this CLASSIC GUIDE cost $20.00 three years ago - I assume it is still in print . . .

Well, evidently Dave Kehr doesn't agree with me about BLAST OF SILENCE. He clearly labels it "film noir" in his review of the DVD in today's New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/movies/h...ies&oref=slogin