Showing posts with label James Flavin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label James Flavin. Show all posts

Armored Car Robbery (1950)

Armored Car Robbery (1950) is a police procedural heist from the hard school of film noir as it slid painfully from the 1940s to the 1950s, leaving the theater, hitting the television, and features a super full film noir cast and a host of other style details and landmarks.

This is an Austerely Efficient B-Noir. Film noir, as a stylistic and narrative mode, emerged in American cinema as an aesthetic response to postwar disillusionment, embodying moral ambiguity, existential anxiety, and the inexorable descent of its protagonists into fated destruction.

Amongst the myriad offerings of this style, by which there may be about 1,000 relevant films from the 1940s and 1950s, with about and at least 700 of those being of the most importance to the noir crazed academics of the dark and black and white.

The Naked Street (1955)

The Naked Street (1955) is a death penalty pregnancy and child loss crime corruption and extortion frame up film noir by Maxwell Shane starring Anne Bancroft, Anthony Quinn and Farley Granger.

If film noir naming conventions are to be adhered to, then The Naked Street (1955) trumps top in many delightful ways, composed as it is of that favourite noir naming trope — the street.

Lassie slapping noir is a stryle of street noir dirty with villainy and snarls, here delivered by back-handin' Anthony Quinn, some super indented toothy noir by numbers, a film of straight lines.

Studio noir with cool and low down fast action location shooting blended everyday realism with a sense of poetic melancholy. Films of noir often depicted characters living on the margins of society, facing disappointment, disillusionment, and fatalistic views of life.

Nobody Lives Forever (1946)

Nobody Lives Forever (1946) is a returning veteran swindler confidence-man romance drama film noir which like many prime examples of the style from the 1940s discusses the impossibility of going straight and escaping one's past in post-WWII American society that is noir as hell and a constant fateful threat, never to be reconciled with the American Dream.

Nick Blake (played by John Garfield) is a charming and roguish ex-con artist who has just been released from prison. He decides to go straight and live an honest life. However, he is approached by his former partner-in-crime, Doc, with an opportunity for a lucrative con job. The target is a wealthy widow, Gladys Halvorsen (played by Geraldine Fitzgerald), who is seeking companionship and may be susceptible to Nick's charms.

Nick reluctantly agrees to participate in the scheme, but as he spends more time with Gladys, he begins to genuinely fall for her. The two develop a romantic connection, complicating Nick's plans to deceive her. As the con unfolds, Nick faces internal conflicts between his desire for a new, honest life and the pressures of his criminal past.

Desert Fury (1947)

Racy, gaudy and melodramatic, Desert Fury (1947) commences as a somewhat typical if confused film noir.


In full and blazing colour, ripping back and fore across the wilds of the fictional Chuckawalla, and ultimately settles on the fraught mother and daughter relationship between two Golden Age favourites ― Lizbeth Scott and Mary Astor.

The cast is strong ― John Hodiak and Wendell Corey play two barely sublimated homosexual gangsters, while Burt Lancaster has little to do as the local police deputy. 

The crux of the capering belongs to the aforementioned Lizbeth Scott and Mary Astor, two women in search of more than just each others' love.