Pick Up Alley (1957)

Pick Up Alley (1957) is a black and white Cinemascope Euro Yankee and Limey narcotics violence against women police procedural film noir so paradoxically conspicuous and elusive as the Euro American production circulated under the blunt sobriquet Pick Up Alley (1957), though it materialised originally beneath the more institutional title Interpol (1957). 

My Darling Clementine (1946)

My Darling Clementine (1946) is a poetic, mythic Western rather than a noir-inflected one. But yet it surfaces in film noir lists as crossover material, and the big critickers of the century do like to hat-tip it as a noiresque style of western adventure.

I’m curious about the film noir style in My Darling Clementine, noting moody cinematography, deep shadows, lawlessness, and moral ambiguity. Characters like Doc Holliday and Linda Darnell enrich this dark, personal narrative.

Although My Darling Clementine (1946) is most often celebrated as a classical John Ford Western rather than a noir-inflected film, a few stylistic and thematic elements overlap with the film noir sensibility. Below are some of the key noir-like components you can find in the film.

The Las Vegas Story (1952)

The Las Vegas Story (1952) is a lousy husband cop-on-the-strip romance thriller set amidst the Hoagy Carmichael Vegas nights of yore, when the air was clear and hot and Hoagy Carmichael played the merry songs on his drinking and playing room keys.

Starring Victor Mature as a sour-faced doubtful package of twitching male unease and noir never-come-lately star of many other styles, the top-billing Jane Russell.

Now there's a rule on the here-hold her old noir blog of yore, about what it takes to get your name a category tag. And so it is generally the case that to be in this blog you must have been involved in at least three film noir titles, and of course, so long as the era is betwits and between the years of 1940 and 1960, the definition of film noir even hereabouts is not that fixed and fairly malleable at times.

Kiss of Death (1947)

Kiss of Death (1947) is a psychopathic traumatic sttol-pigeon crime procedural film noir, featuring Victor Mature as a troubled ex-con; Brian Donlevy as a firm, fair and forgiving Assistant DA; Richard Widmark as a crazed psychopath; and Collen Gray as a sweet and innocent goody-two-shoes, the type of woman in fact beloved of all film noir scenarios, the guiding angel flying in the fateful face of sexual lust and loose living.

An all-American woman perhaps, certainly offering morality and everything else in line with the cinematic Code of operation.

The semiotic valuations which lead to the promotion of one family ideal, and the extinction of African American life in the process, was a bold attempt by Hollywood to attempt to mythify the American way of life into a set of values that all would adopt.

While similarly in this case being spooked up to high heaven by the emerging figure of the psychopath. And that with one of the greatest psychopath's in film history. Noir is its own set of cultures and ideas, and is roughly speaking, a set of conventions defining perception in limited and predictable ways within just about any picture of American life you might care to inject it into.

Violent Saturday (1955)

Violent Saturday (1955) is a blast of colour at the end of the film noir cycle. 

Cultures rural and urban, religious and criminal, collide in a film that promises violence, and delivers; and which promises thrills in the disruption of our regular programme of Americana.

This Americana may be well delivered under the banner of 'Saturday', as this allows us normality at its most normal.

It's an odd ride, with a heist and some well-sketched small-town life, with the local pervert as randomly drawn as the local religious farmers, in this case captured in a one-off performance for all the ages, by Ernest Borgnine, playing Mr Stadt, the Amish farmer.

I Wake Up Screaming (1941)

Who wakes up screaming?

Is it Betty Grable as Jill Lynn, whose sister Vicky Lynn has been murdered after having been glamorized and launched into the entertainment world?

Is it Victor Mature as Frankie Christopher, who is accused of Vicky's death, an innocent one minute, guilty-as-sin film noir sap the next?

Is it Carole Landis as Vicky Lynn, who is the murdered girl, whose story the film closely follows as she rises via the graces and guiles of some scheming and powerful showbiz guys, to the heights of glamour and glory?

Or could it be Laird Cregar as Ed Cornell, the creepy devil of a cop, one of the best cops in all of film noir, the relentless, forceful, fearless demon-driven cop who will wait to the end of time to get his man?

Finding out who wakes up screaming in I Wake Up Screaming from 1941, an absolutely excellent early film noir, is a colourful mystery, winding and surfacing amid the shades of weirdness that make up this ahead-of-its-time film noir thriller.