Showing posts with label Ginger Rogers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ginger Rogers. Show all posts

Black Widow (1954)

Black Widow (1954) is a colour DeLuxe mystery Broadway cocktail suicide murder CinemaScope motion picture with film noir leanings. 

Attention spans alerted everyone this slider of a slow noir is another object lesson in the class of colon noirs which feel their way in a cinematic dark so much of the time and are managerially staid with a tragic inability to fill the vacant screen space created by colour-vision and wide screen tech. A double whammy of screen emptiness.

Come diving headlong into the murky waters of a slow burn noir flick that's as sluggish as a slug on a warm sidewalk. This one's a textbook case of those colour noirs that stumble in the shadows, groping blindly through the cinematic darkness, like a gumshoe with one too many shots of rum, yum. Yeah, it's got all the fancy-pants tech — living colour, widescreen — but it's like watching paint dry in a rainstorm. A double-barreled blast of cinematic emptiness that hits you square between the eyes.

Tight Spot (1955)

Tight Spot (1955) is a witness protection prison police tough-talking tough-cop versus mob boss film noir, inspired by Senator Estes Kefauver's tactics in coercing Virginia Hill to testify in the Bugsy Siegel prosecution.

It's based on a play by Leonard Kantor, and so is largely contained within a single set, a luxury hotel suite, and within the mix of styles are touches of screwball romantic comedy, courtesy of Ginger Rogers, and material far darker and more in line with the hand of noir. 

It takes place over a weekend before the start of a mob trial and with crucial witnesses murdered, prosecutor Lloyd Hallett (Edward G. Robinson) has only one long shot left in order to prosecute public enemy and nemesis mob boss Benjamin Costain (Lorne Greene)

Storm Warning (1950)

Storm Warning (1950) is an investigative journalist Ku Klux Klan murder thriller film noir starring Ginger Rogers, Ronald Reagan, Doris Day, and Steve Cochran. 

Directed by Stuart Heisler, it follows a fashion model (Ginger Rogers) traveling to a small Southern town to visit her sister (Doris Day), who witnesses the brutal murder of an investigative journalist by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). 

The cop hard on the case is Ronald Reagan and the unwilling and unstable weak link in the criminal chain is the erratic Steve Cochran — often appearing in a Stanley Kowalski-style white tee-shirt.

The original screenplay was written by Richard Brooks and Daniel Fuchs and is a curiosity in some respects, as it seems to demand interpretation.