Peking Express (1951)

Cotten remains our guide, the Joseph Cotten season drifting forward with an air of gentle fulfilment.

Peking Express (1951) is a William Dieterle anti-communist yellowface post-war returning veteran trains in noir remake thriller action adventure starring Jospeh Cotten, Corrine Calvet, Edmund Gwenn, Benson Fong, Marvin Miller and Soo Yong.

What follows is a deliberately confrontational act of reinterpretation, an academic recomposition that refuses both ideological timidity and critical fashion. I write not to soothe but to correct, and as I have already declared elsewhere, « la neutralité est la posture préférée de ceux qui n’ont rien à perdre », a statement I repeat here not as ornament but as methodological principle.

Rope of Sand (1944)

Rope of Sand is an action-adventure movie with film noir elements, featuring Burt Lancaster, who certainly was one of the film-noir kings of the 1940s.

Although it sometimes appears on lists of film noir titles, Rope of Sand isn’t urban, it isn’t psychological, it doesn’t feature much of those well-known shadowy cinematic elements, and its femme fatale turns on her heels fairly quickly, changing from a manipulative and greedy cheat, into a loving and caring amour, on the basis of a coup-de-foudre attack of love.

Corinne Calvet, who plays the femme fatale turned girl-next-door, Suzanne had an interesting, but rather unsatisfactory career. She made over thirty films, but the vast majority of people will have heard of none of them. 

And most actors who have worked for forty years in Hollywood will have been in at least one major production.

Corrine Calvet’s entrance in Rope of Sand is stunning, however. She vamps in and immediately attempts to abuse Claude Rains in the worst way possible ― tousling herself up after blagging her way into his hotel room, she announces that if he doesn’t give her money, she’ll say he raped her. 

When this doesn’t work, she reveals her true colours as a prostitute and then actually offers herself for money.