Screen Savers Movies » Film Noir

The Tall Target (1951)

Jennifer Kurdyla, Editor — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 04:01:11 +0000

Anthony Mann’s thriller The Tall Target is similar in spirit and style to his contemporary film noir works of the late 1940s, including T-Men and Raw Deal. A crackerjack suspense film produced by MGM, The Tall Target also happens to be an uncommonly effective piece of historical fiction and a uniquely vivid period piece. It’s about an assassination attempt on Abraham Lincoln, though it’s set not in 1865 but in 1861. The movie ingeniously covers a subject that is part of our history, but through an episode in which that history is temporarily averted. Lincoln isn’t going to die this time, though the story’s villain will utter this warning: “Mr. Lincoln’s a tall target; there’ll be another day.” The foregone conclusion that Lincoln will be alive at the end of the picture doesn’t prevent it from being a wildly pleasurable ride as one man risks his life to save the nation’s new leader. That character’s name just happens to be John Kennedy, providing the drama with an intriguing accidental resonance. Watching a film about presidential assassination, released in 1951, in which the main character is named John Kennedy is not an experience you’re likely to forget. Set primarily aboard a speeding train, The Tall Target is part of cinema’s long-running love affair with locomotive stories, starting with The Great Train Robbery (1903), and continuing with The Lady Vanishes (1938), The Narrow Margin (1952), and Murder on the Orient Express (1974), to name but a few. The Tall Target is in a class with the best of them.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
© 2008 Hansen Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved.

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Stars in My Crown (1950)

Jennifer Kurdyla, Editor — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 04:01:48 +0000

Some exceptional movies are so gentle, and achieve their effects so delicately, that the mere act of recommending them almost feels like a disservice to their charms. Can such movies bear the weight of high expectations? I fear overpraising MGM’s Stars in My Crown because of its simplicity and modesty, two elements that make it a convincing and winning piece of period Americana. After all, it doesn’t have a big pay-off; it isn’t ambitious; it’s merely a series of lovely scenes strung together. Did I say merely? We must not overlook the effort, however invisible, that goes into the creation of beguiling films like Stars in My Crown—including My Brother Talks to Horses (1946), Margie (1946), and Come Next Spring (1956)—that gracefully bring the past to very specific and evocative life. It’s no small feat to render a long-ago era onto the screen and have it just be. Stars in My Crown is a film that makes you want to go fishing or bake a chocolate cake, even if you’ve never wanted to do these things before. It’s a heartwarmer without goo.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
© 2008 Hansen Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved.

Learn more about Stars in My Crown

The Killing (1956)

Jennifer Kurdyla, Editor — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 04:01:38 +0000

One of the first works of visionary Stanley Kubrick, The Killing is everything that made him famous: aesthetically interesting, subdued, and stylized. While his later works such as Eyes Wide Shut are a bit too overthought for John DiLeo’s taste, this film captures the genius of Kubrick in its clean following of Johnny Clay’s plan to plunder two million dollars from a racetrack after being released from Alcatraz. In Screen Savers, one can see why this film deserves the attention of Kubrick fans just as much as, and perhaps more than, some of his better-known works.

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Pretty Poison (1968)

Jennifer Kurdyla, Editor — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 04:01:57 +0000

In 1968, a little movie named Pretty Poison took this decades-old formula and gave it a bracing spin. The film’s male character isn’t a typically hard-edged realist, but, rather, an emotionally immature arsonist with an overripe imagination. And in place of the expectedly glamorous, experienced woman, there’s a 17-year-old, honor-roll vixen whose ruthlessness is concealed beneath all-American, girl-next-door perfection. Pretty Poison is every bit as eye-opening and disquieting as its classic predecessors, but it ups the ante with comic overtones. Not a flat-out comedy, it’s nonetheless a startlingly funny, offbeat mix of smiles and chills. Made in color (and, therefore, not truly noir), Pretty Poison is played straight, and its twisted story emerges from the most commonplace surroundings.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
© 2008 Hansen Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved.

Learn more about Pretty Poison

Border Incident (1949)

Jennifer Kurdyla, Editor — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 04:01:33 +0000

Ricardo Montalban and George Murphy team up in another of Anthony Mann’s classic films, Border Incident. The film is more than just a story of U.S.-Mexican border crossings, however, because of its film noir mystery and intrigue. While similar to T-Men, Border Incident provides a more humanitarian viewpoint of the particularly modern issue while maintaining is rough edges.

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Criss Cross (1949)

John DiLeo — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 04:01:40 +0000

Universal’s Criss Cross, a textbook example of film noir, features the familiar noir trappings: it revolves around a good Joe who risks everything for a beautiful woman; has an elaborate crime scheme and a sadistic villain; uses narration and flashbacks as storytelling devices; and unfolds with an air of pervasive doom. Criss Cross was directed by Robert Siodmak, a film-noir pioneer with Phantom Lady (1944) and The Killers (1946), the latter an enduring noir benchmark that made names of Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. Siodmak used Lancaster again for Criss Cross, and, though it’s not as renowned as The Killers, it surpasses it. [. . .] Criss Cross derives its power from its sobering and inexorable portrait of what people are capable of doing when in the grip of an obsessive, self-destructive love.

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Pretty Poison (1968): A 1960s Twist on a 1940s Formula

John DiLeo — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 03:05:40 +0000

You know the plot—the one in which a tough, smart, cynical man is duped, and perhaps undone, by a beautiful, deceitful, grasping woman—it’s a staple of black-and-white films of the 1940s, pictures that came to be classified as film noir. Mary Astor feigned helplessness to manipulate detective Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941), and Barbara Stanwyck and Lana Turner got, respectively, Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity (1944) and John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), to assist them in doing away with their husbands. Jane Greer wheedled Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past (1947), and Yvonne De Carlo was bad news for Burt Lancaster in Criss Cross (1949). And what about evil psychologist Helen Walker and her destruction of Tyrone Power in the great Nightmare Alley (1947)? In most of these cases, and countless others, the men—dazzled by beauty, sexual availability, and ego-bolstering tests of courage—are no matches for a femme fatale’s machinations, and they are oblivious to their own susceptibility. In 1968, a little movie named Pretty Poison took this decades-old formula and gave it a bracing spin. The film’s male character isn’t a typically hard-edged realist, but, rather, an emotionally immature arsonist with an overripe imagination. And in place of the expectedly glamorous, experienced woman, there’s a 17-year-old, honor-roll vixen whose ruthlessness is concealed beneath all-American, girl-next-door perfection. Pretty Poison is every bit as eye-opening and disquieting as its classic predecessors, but it ups the ante with comic overtones. Not a flat-out comedy, it’s nonetheless a startlingly funny, offbeat mix of smiles and chills. Made in color (and, therefore, not truly noir), Pretty Poison is played straight, and its twisted story emerges from the most commonplace surroundings.

The Killing (1956): The Emergence of Stanley Kubrick

John DiLeo — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 02:44:44 +0000

When the awesomely revered director Stanley Kubrick died in 1999, months before the release of his long-awaited Eyes Wide Shut, he was as famous for his obsessively long shooting schedules, the increasing number of years between his films, and his reclusive lifestyle in London as he was as the maker of classic films. The Bronx-born director, who made only thirteen features, is most associated with his nonrealistic works: the doomsday satire Dr. Strangelove (1964); the sci-fi art film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); the futuristic and cautionary Clockwork Orange (1971); and the horror movie The Shining (1980). However, the picture that put Kubrick on the Hollywood map bears little relation to the aforementioned titles. The Killing, a black-and-white piece of unglamorized pulp, is about the planning, execution, and aftermath of a racetrack robbery. Kubrick had already made two movies, Fear and Desire (1953) and Killer’s Kiss (1955), but they were child’s play compared to The Killing, probably the last great work of true film noir. Not only is it a visually arresting movie—something to be expected from a 27-year-old wunderkind like Kubrick—but it’s also lean, fleet, and unpretentious, three qualities regrettably missing from Kubrick’s later work. In Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick’s overly painstaking approach resulted in a deadly movie; his talent seemed all but atrophied and his once prodigious sense of humor—see Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove—dried up. Released by United Artists, The Killing is a film that’s so kinetic, jazzy, and in love with filmmaking that it appears to be the official granddaddy to the oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino. Though prized by film-noir aficionados, The Killing still hasn’t received the widespread attention it merits.

The Tall Target (1951): John Kennedy Saves Abraham Lincoln

John DiLeo — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 02:37:18 +0000

Border Incident (1949): Film Noir Meets Docudrama

John DiLeo — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 02:30:34 +0000

T-Men was something of a practice run for Mann’s Border Incident, another socially conscious film noir. Made inexpensively for MGM—a studio whose low-budget pictures looked more expensive than many an A picture made elsewhere—Border Incident is nearly a Southwestern remake of the urban T-Men, as both films follow a pair of undercover government agents who infiltrate a crooked operation. The fresh (and timely) subject matter of Border Incident—abuses at the U.S./Mexican border involving migrant workers—replaces T-Men’s more routine doings. Border Incident has greater humanity and singular flavor, and it keeps its self-congratulatory government-agency uplift to a minimum. Typically, its weakest scenes are those in which the Feds self-consciously assure viewers that the evil depicted is rare, and that there’s nothing to fear with men such as these on the job. Mann’s talents for suspense, brutal action, and the dramatically integrated use of rugged locations—elements that would find their fullest expression when he turned to westerns—are all on view here.