Witness in the City (1959)

Witness in the City (Un témoin dans la ville), directed by Édouard Molinaro in 1959, is included in the recent Kino Lorber French Noir Blu-Ray boxed set.

The screenplay was by the great French crime-writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. I believe it was based on one of their novels. They’re best known as the authors of the source novels for two of the greatest motion pictures ever made, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques and Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Witness in the City begins with a brutal murder of a woman on a train. We see the murderer, Pierre Verdier. There’s no ambiguity. We know it was murder. The case against him is however dismissed for lack of evidence.

The woman was the murderer’s mistress. Her husband Ancelin (Lino Ventura) is not going to take this lying down. Verdier had carried out a perfect murder. Now Ancelin plans a perfect murder of his own.

This all happens right at the beginning of the movie so I’m not giving away any spoilers. All this is just the setup.

The trouble with plans for perfect murders is that when put into practice some minor unforeseen circumstance always gums up the works. In this case it’s a witness. He didn’t see an actual murder, but he saw enough.

The movie is a hunt or rather it becomes a tale of two hunts.

Lino Ventura gives a nicely minimalist performance. It’s as if Ancelin is in some ways dead inside.

Henri Decaë provides some very fine very moody black-and-white cinematography.

There’s an enormous amount of night shooting. The movie really does have a noir city at night feel. There are a couple of scenes involving trains (alway a bonus) but a huge amount of the film takes place in cars, and cabs. The witness is a cab driver. Half the cab drivers in Paris end up being involved.

This is a movie in which characters are always in movement but not actually getting anywhere. They keep ending up driving down the same streets. The streets of Paris are like a gigantic spider web from which there is no escape. No matter how far and how fast you drive you can never leave that spider web. You always end up back where you started. The city will not allow you to escape. Noir cities are like that.

The driving scenes, some involving a dozen or more cars, are extremely well done. They have tension and energy but it’s a frustrated kind of energy. An energy that needs resolution but the resolution seems like it will never happen.

Overall I’m not sure that this ticks enough noir boxes to satisfy film noir purists (there is for example no femme fatale) but it’s definitely a movie that film noir fans will love. There’s as much pessimism as one could desire. There are also some existentialist touches.

Things are not full explained, and this is clearly deliberate. We know what happened on the train at the beginning but not why. Verdier gives his account of the events that led to the murder but Ancelin doesn’t believe him, and Verdier has a motive to lie. On the other hand Ancelin has a motive to lie to himself.

There are some touches that you wouldn’t get away with in a Hollywood movie of the 50s, such as Ancelin’s encounter with a prostitute.

We’re never quite sure if we should be sympathising with Ancelin or not.

Witness in the City is slightly offbeat noir. Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Édouard Molinaro’s Back to the Wall (1958) which is also superb. It’s included in the Kino Lorber set, along with Speaking of Murder (1957) which is not as impressive as the other two movies but still very much worth watching. There are no extras included with any of the three movies.

Back to the Wall (1958)

Back to the Wall (Le dos au mur) is one of three 1950s French crime movies included in Kino Lorber’s recent French Noir Blu-Ray boxed set. It’s based on the novel Délivrez-nous du mal by Frédéric Dard.

It lays out its noir credentials right at the start. The opening scene is not just a night scene, but it’s that film noir kind of night. You know, those nights when you know that bad stuff is going to happen.

Then we see a sinister guy in a trench-coat and he’s clearly up to no good.

We’re not surprised that there’s a murder. At least we assume it’s a murder although we don’t see exactly what happened.

We then get some grisly scenes of the body being disposed of.

It then gets even more noir, with a flashback and voiceover narration.

There’s an adulterous wife, Gloria Decrey, played by Jeanne Moreau during the film noir icon phase of her career. The cuckolded husband knows about her betrayal but his reaction is not quite what we expect. He intends to do something about it but his plan is convoluted and indirect.

There’s a blackmail angle. There’s a sleazy private detective and he’s surprised that what he’s being asked to do is not quite what he anticipated.

It becomes a war of nerves.

What a director doesn’t tell you is just as important as what he does tell you, and being told things can be just as misleading as not being told if the director knows what he’s doing. You’re going to suspect from the start that there may be a bit of misdirection going on but suspecting such a thing does not necessarily help. This movie keeps leading up to obvious plot twists and then the plot twist turns out not to be the one we expected.

We understand part of the motivations of one of the key characters but we don’t know what that person’s actual intentions are.

And there’s plenty of suspicion, guilt and emotional ambiguity.

I don’t know anything about director Édouard Molinaro but he does a confident assured job here, leading us up the garden path with considerable skill. He has a clever literate script from which to work which always helps.

I know almost nothing about Gérard Oury, whose acting career apparently petered out by the early 1960s, but he’s very good here. It’s a very noir performance as a man in control on the surface but in turmoil underneath.

This movie was in the same year that Elevator to the Gallows AKA Lift to the Scaffold (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud) made Jeanne Moreau a huge star. She’s excellent here. Gloria is not exactly a femme fatale, or at least not in a straightforward way, but she has the same kind of disastrous effect on men.

This is a nicely shot and very atmospheric movie.

Back to the Wall is genuine film noir as well as being a clever mystery suspense thriller, and it’s very highly recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray offers the movie in French with English subtitles. The transfer is extremely good (the movie was shot in black-and-white) and thankfully there are no extras.

I’ve also reviewed Speaking of Murder (1957) from this set. It’s not quite as good but it’s well worth a watch. And another French noir very much worth seeing is Witness in the City (1959).

Pale Flower (1964)

Pale Flower is a 1964 Japanese film relased, surprisingly, not by Nikkatsu Studio but by rival studio Shochiku (although it was independently produced). It’s a film noir but not a conventional one and it’s a yakuza movie but not a conventional one.

Muraki (Ryô Ikebe) is a yakuza who had just been released from prison after serving a sentence for killing a member of a rival gang. Now he discovers that the two gangs have joined forces, but there are no hard feelings.

Muraki is obsessed by gambling. He meets a strange girl, a fellow gambling obsessive. Her name is Saeko (Mariko Kaga).

They are drawn to each other, but not just by their shared love for gambling. They both feel somehow doomed, as if their lives have no meaning and no direction and can only end in disaster. The gambling is clearly symbolic - they both have a desire to play for the highest stakes of all, life itself. There are lots of gambling scenes in this movie.

It’s important to note that the plot has not offered us a single reason why these two people see their lives as having no value or purpose. It’s something missing within them.

Perhaps they fall in love. They don’t seem quite sure about that. Perhaps their obsession with each other is like their passion for gambling - it’s just a way to deal with the boredom.

The plot kicks in slowly but this is not a heavily plot-driven movie. The two now united yakuza gangs are facing a challenge from a powerful Osaka-based gang. Muraki will be a key player in the defensive moves against this encroaching gang. Muraki believes he will have a high price to pay but he accepts this with his usual indifference.

Ryô Ikebe as Muraki gives a very noir (and very good) performance. Mariko Kaga as Saeko is rather mesmerising.

Saeko is not really a femme fatale. It’s more that these are two doomed people drawn together, not to try to save each other but to share their doom.

Director Masahiro Shinoda claimed that the background to the movie was Japan’s political position at the time as a not entirely willing U.S satellite which he felt had robbed the country of a sense of purpose. This is the kind of thing that exercises the minds of intellectuals while ordinary people are too busy living their lives. I cannot see any political angle whatsoever to this movie, except perhaps that it does give us a sense of a society adrift, and individuals within that society adrift. But mercifully there’s no overt political content whatsoever.

Although stylistically they are poles apart in its own way this movie is, like Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter and Branded To Kill, an attempt to reinvent the yakuza movie. There’s an intriguing subtly surreal dream sequence.

The film is set in Tokyo but the location shooting was done in Yokohama. It has a very noir look.

It certainly has plenty of noirish impending doom vibes. But it’s not quite straightforward noir. Muraki knows that he’s headed for disaster but unlike the typical noir protagonist he makes no attempts to escape his fate.

Muraki’s motivations are to some extent determined by the yakuza code of honour but to me this doesn’t feel like a conventional yakuza movie, or even a conventional Japanese movie.

I got some rather French vibes from it. A definite whiff of existentialism. If Camus had written a screenplay for a yakuza movie he might have come up with something like this. It doesn’t feel quite Japanese. There’s some Christian symbolism. It seems to be about people finding all the existing belief systems (traditional Japanese values, the yakuza code, Christianity, materialism, consumerism) unsatisfying. So they’re left with a vague existentialism of a warped kind - a death fetish.

There’s also a fascinating hint that both Muraki and Saeko have an erotic interest in death, and particularly in murder. In fact that’s the whole basis for their attraction. Saeko is attracted to Muraki because he killed a man (that’s why he was in prison). But not only that. He enjoyed it. It was the greatest pleasure he had ever experienced in his life. Muraki is attracted to Saeko because she understands how he feels about killing. And then there’s a wildcard in the pack - Joh, a stone-cold half-Chinese hitman also in love with killing.

This is vaguely similar to the territory explored years later in Basic Instinct. In this case we have three characters with a sex-death fetish.

This is a very dark disturbing provocative movie. Very highly recommended.

It’s on Blu-Ray in the Criterion Collection.

The Glass Web (1953)

The Glass Web was a product of that brief period when Hollywood actually believed that a ridiculous gimmick like 3D was going to win back the audiences that had deserted them when television appeared on the scene.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray includes both 2D and 3D versions and I watched it in 2D. The movie includes lots of the silly gimmick shots you expect from 3D.

Don Newell (John Forsythe) is a TV writer screenwriter on a true crime series called Crime of the Week, made by a production company named TVC. It’s a series that claims that it aims for absolute accuracy. Henry Hayes (Edward G. Robinson) is the chief researcher. He thinks that he’s the key member of the production team but he isn’t. He is obsessive about getting the details right. The series is up for renewal and everyone is nervous.

Henry comes up with the bright idea of basing their season finale on a case that is happening right now, a murder case in which a suspect has been picked up but has not yet been indicted. Viewers will in effect be watching the case on TV even as the actual court case will be happening. In reality of course the network’s lawyers would put the kibosh on such a risky idea.

The real-life case involves people actually involved with the production of Crime of the Week.

Both Don and Henry have been having dalliances with TV actress Paula Ranier (Kathleen Hughes). She’s a cheap blonde who is obviously ruthlessly using both men but Don and Henry are the kinds of guys who fall for tramps like Paula. She’s obviously a no-good dame but everything about her is ripe with the promise of steamy illicit bedroom thrills.

It’s no surprise when Paula’s manipulations and attempts at blackmail end in murder. There are several possible suspects, including both Don and Henry.

The key to the movie is when Paula tells Don that she picks her victims carefully - weak men who don’t have the guts to fight back.

As a whodunit this movie flops completely. The identity of the killer is embarrassingly obvious. Maybe the screenwriters didn’t care and maybe their intention was to focus on an innocent man caught in a trap, partly due to his own poor judgment and party due to the schemings of others.

Kudos to Kino Lorber for not trying to pretend that this is a film noir. Its affinities to noir are superficial. And it is entirely lacking in noir visual style. Visually it’s flat and uninteresting.

Playing a sad schmuck who gets taken for a ride by a cheap blonde is something Edward G. Robinson could do in his sleep. He’s OK here but he’s hampered by the overly obvious script. I like John Forsythe as an actor but he’s a bit on the dull side here, although in fairness he is playing a bit of chump.

Kathleen Hughes pulls out all the femme fatale stops. She’s a riot. Paula is a gal who could make doing the ironing seem like a sleazy come-on. There’s no subtlety to Hughes’ performance but the only time this movie comes to life is when she’s onscreen.

The use of a TV studio as a setting provides some interest - this is TV in its infancy when shows were extremely clunky and so it’s quite appropriate that we get the impression that Crime of the Week is a clunky show.

This is a movie that just doesn’t work. There’s no mystery and no effective suspense. It’s just lifeless. The script is feeble. I like Jack Arnold as a director but in this case it feel like something he just did for a pay cheque.

Overall rather disappointing. I cannot recommend it.

For a more favourable review of this movie check out the Riding the High Country blog entry.

Speaking of Murder (1957)

Speaking of Murder (Le rouge est mis) is one of three movies included in Kino Lorber’s recent French Noir Blu-Ray boxed set. But it is most definitely not film noir. It does not possess a single film noir trademark. It’s a tough hardboiled crime thriller based on a novel by Auguste Le Breton.

It’s also a heist movie.

It starts very slowly but when the mayhem kicks in there’s quite a bit of it.

Louis Bertain (Jean Gabin) is an ageing small-time gangster who operates a garage as a front for bank jobs. There are five members in his gang and right from the start there is uneasiness about the possibility of a double-cross.

Frédo is very jumpy. Pepito (Lino Ventura) is very dangerous and very suspicious. The other two gang members are typical hoodlums and are not very bright.

Louis’ kid brother Pierre is a petty criminal just out of prison. Pierre has figured out that he’s not cut out for a life of crime.

Pierre has a girlfriend Hélène (Annie Girardot). For reasons that are not entirely clear Louis hates Hélène and is determined to break up the relationship.

The gang has a major armoured car robbery lined up but it goes wrong and the gang, thoroughly rattled, shoot a whole bunch of people.

Louis is not as smart as he thinks he is or maybe he’s just getting old. The police will soon be closing in. Suspicions and recriminations and nerves lead to more violence. These crooks are vicious and trigger-happy but inclined to make a lot of mistakes.

The plot hinges on the suspicions of betrayal and the growing paranoia verging on panic among the gang members.

There are ample plot twists but you can see them all coming a mile away. There are no surprises in this story.

The interest lies in the gradual disintegration of Louis’ world and the possibility that when things really fall apart he’ll lead others to destruction as well.

The major focus is on the uneasy relationship between the two brothers. That’s handled well. The relationship between Pierre and Hélène could perhaps have been developed a bit more.

Jean Gabin was more or less unknown in the English-speaking world but was a huge star in France. He’s very good here as a man who seems to be totally in control but isn’t.

Italian-born Lino Ventura became one of the great tough guys of French cinema. He’s quite chilling here.

Annie Girardot was another major star in French film and she’s fine as the slightly ambiguous Hélène. Hélène however is not in any sense a femme fatale.

Gilles Grangier was the director. There’s a nice visual set-piece at the end and the action scenes are handled well.

The cinematography by Louis Page is gritty without being noirish.

Speaking of Murder isn’t really anything particularly special. It’s a well-acted well-crafted fairly violent hard-edged crime thriller and it’s an interesting example of the long French tradition of crime cinema. Recommended.

The transfer is extremely good (the movie was shot in black-and-white) and mercifully there are no extras.

Better Jean Gabin crimes movies (with genuine claims to being film noir) are Port of Shadows (1938) and La Bête Humaine (1938).

I’ve also reviewed the superb Back to the Wall (1958) from this set.

Underworld Beauty (1958)

Underworld Beauty, released in 1958, is one of Seijun Suzuki’s very early film noir-inflected yakuza/crime movies made for Japan’s Nikkatsu Studio.

It doesn’t have the wild visual extravagance and experimental boldness of his masterpieces Branded to Kill (1967) and Tokyo Drifter (1966) but don’t be put off by that. In its own way it’s a very cool visually impressive movie with at least a touch of Seijun Suzuki craziness.

Miyamoto (Michitarô Mizushima) has just been released from prison. His first act was to retrieve something very important. A bag of diamonds. He needs them to pay a debt. Not a monetary debt.

Three years earlier he was involved in a robbery. As a result his friend Mihara (Tôru Abe) was crippled. Miyamoto needs to make amends. He may also need to make amends to Mihara’s kid sister Akiko (Mari Shiraki).

Now the diamonds are gone. Well not exactly gone. Everyone knows where they are. Retrieving them will be the problem.

There are assorted yakuza chasing after the diamonds. Akiko’s artist boyfriend wants them as well. The current location of the diamonds introduces the hint of craziness. The plans devised to get hold of the stones add more craziness.

There is a very important fact about diamonds which on two separate occasions becomes a vital and very clever plot point.

These noirish crime movies were hugely popular in Japan in the late 50s and on into the 60s. Arguing about whether these movies such as Underworld Beauty qualify as pure noir is fairly pointless. They were clearly immensely influenced by film noir. The Japanese were able to capture the feel and the look of film noir perfectly - both thematically and aesthetically noir appealed to Japanese filmmakers, and Japanese audiences shared that taste.

In an American movie Miyamoto might have been a man in search of redemption but that’s a rather western Christian concept. Miyamoto is Japanese and he’s a yakuza. He has incurred a debt to Mihara and it must be repaid. That is the yakuza code, which was the yakuza version of the warrior code of bushido. If you owe a man a debt and cannot repay it directly you can repay it to his family. Miyamoto cannot repay Mihara, so it is proper to discharge the obligation to Mihara’s sister. The fact that he does not approve of Akiko is entirely irrelevant. The debt must be paid.

Michitarô Mizushima is excellent. Mari Shiraki is a delight as Akiko - it’s an energetic playful performance. Akiko is not a femme fatale. She’s not a good girl and she’s not a bad girl. She’s just a bit wild but her more likeable side slowly becomes apparent. She’s still a prickly character but (like Miyamoto) we start to admire her spirit.

There are certainly plenty of noir ingredients but there’s also a marked touch of absurdism. Not the touches of surrealism that we get in later Suzuki movies but more a low-key absurdism at time verging on black comedy.

The most remarkable thing about this movie, given that it comes so early in his career, is just how very very Seijun Suzuki it is. It’s not as flamboyant as his great mid-60s films but it’s filled with Suzuki touches and it’s consistently visually exciting. He just had a knack for making every shot look interesting.

It’s shot (beautifully) in black-and-white in the ’scope ratio, a combination that always works for me.

There’s an absolutely superb climactic extended action set-piece.

Despite the noirish touches Underworld Beauty is not quite film noir. It’s a crime movie that is hard-edged at times but with a few romantic touches and it’s just unconventional enough to be really interesting. It’s a truly wonderful movie and it’s very highly recommended.

The Radiance Blu-Ray looks lovely.

I’ve reviewed Suzuki’s two masterworks, Branded to Kill (1967) and Tokyo Drifter (1966) and another of his excellent early Nikkatsu noirs, Take Aim at the Police Van (1960).

And I’ve reviewed other Japanese noirs from this period - the magnificent A Colt Is My Passport (1967), Rusty Knife (1958) and I Am Waiting (1957).

Lust for Gold (1949)

The posters might suggest that Lust for Gold, released by Columbia in 1949, is going to be a western. It isn’t. Not quite. It is set in the West but it’s a thriller and the setting is contemporary. Or at least partly.

The original director was George Marshall but he walked off the set early on and producer S. Sylvan Simon took over directing duties.

The movie is based on the story of a real-life lost mine that has never been found.

The movie is about what the title says it’s about. Gold fever. Somewhere in the vast sprawling expanse of Superstition Mountain there is a lost mine (the legendary Dutchman Mine) and a huge hoard of gold. Enough gold to get twenty men murdered over the previous 70 years. If the Apache legends are correct then a lot more men than that have died for this gold.

And nobody knows for sure that there is any gold. Or if there is any chance of finding it.

Young Barry Storm (William Prince) has just seen the twentieth man die on the mountain. Barry’s grandfather Jacob Walz claimed to be the owner of the mine.

Barry becomes obsessed with finding the mine. He finds an old guy who tells him Jacob Walz’s story. This is not so much a main story bookended by a framing story as two distinct stories taking place decades apart both dealing with a search for the mine. There are multiple murders in both stories.

In 1887 Jacob Walz (Glenn Ford) found the mine. The mine had at that time been lost for many years. He becomes involved with a woman who owns a bakery in the nearby town. She is Julia (Ida Lupino). The connection between Julia and Pete Thomas (Gig Young) guarantees that things will get very messy.

What follows is a sordid tale of human depravity. It’s not just the lust for gold. There’s sexual lust, emotional betrayal, jealousy and a web of deceit.

The plot is delightfully overheated. Both stories have wild crazy endings. In fact there’s a third ending and it’s wild and crazy as well.

This is a fairly rare chance to see Glenn Ford as an out-and-out bad guy and yet in his own strange way he’s an innocent and a victim. It’s a credit to Ford’s subtlety as an actor that he can make us feel oddly sympathetic towards Jacob even after we’ve seen him do some breathtakingly vicious things. Ford really is outstanding here.

Ida Lupino is extremely good as a woman who may be thoroughly rotten, partially rotten or just easily tempted or maybe she’s just out of control and has no idea which way she will jump next.

All the characters are reprehensible and yet all are perhaps victims. Men will do terrible things for gold or sex. And women will do equally terrible things. Although without that gold maybe all of these people would have been decent enough. Or maybe not. They have all been corrupted.

This is not a movie that casts humanity in a very flattering light.

I’m always leery of describing movies as noir westerns because in most cases they don’t really fit the noir mould. Having said that there are of course westerns that contain some of the elements that are found in the crime movies that were later labelled as film noir. During the 40s there had been a slight shift towards darker subject matter and a more cynical pessimistic edge in several genres. Lust for Gold falls into that category. It’s part of a trend that began in the 40s, towards harder-edged less conventionally heroic westerns

Ida Lupino can certainly be seen as a femme fatale here, leading every man she encounters to disaster. It might seem like a stretch to see Glenn Ford as Jacob as a noir protagonist (he’s already a very bad man at the start of the movie) but the argument could be made. Perhaps he could be redeemed by love. He does genuinely love Julia. But choosing Julia as a vehicle for redemption is a bad bad choice.

The plot (or plots) gets crazy enough and events spiral so much out of control that although it seems highly likely that things will end badly it’s difficult to predict exactly how disaster will strike. And there’s at least one wild plot twist you won’t see coming.

Lust for Gold is a rather oddball western-thriller genre hybrid and it’s exceptionally interesting. Highly recommended.

The Spanish Blu-Ray looks great. It includes the original English-language version with removable Spanish subtitles.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

I saw the 1946 Hal Wallis production The Strange Love of Martha Ivers many years ago but remember absolutely nothing about it so seeing it now on Blu-Ray it’s all new to me.

The setting is a small town, Iverstown. We begin with a prologue. It is 1928. Young Martha Ivers is a poor little rich girl living with her sadistic tyrannical aunt. The aunt’s lawyer O’Neil is hoping for a share of the riches to send his bookish timid son Walter to Harvard.

Martha has run away yet again, aided by abetted by young Sam Masterson who shares Martha’s desire for freedom and adventure. Once again Martha gets caught. Then tragedy strikes but maybe it’s good luck for Martha and for the weaselly Walter.

Twenty years later Sam Masterson (Van Heflin) just happens to suffer car troubles and ends up back in Iverstown. He hasn’t seen the place since 1928.

Sam meets an interesting blonde, Toni Marachek (Lizabeth Scott). It’s a pickup, of a sort. Toni has a bus to catch but now that she’s met Sam the bus doesn’t interest her. She wonders if he would object to having a passenger when his car is repaired and he leaves Iverstown. When Lizabeth Scott makes a suggestion like that you don’t say no.

Toni is fascinating, vulnerable, troubled, lonely and desperate. The kind of gal you just know is going to lead you into a whole world of trouble but Sam doesn’t care. He doesn’t even care when she tells him she’s just been released from prison.

Martha now owns and controls Iverstown and she owns and controls Walter (Kirk Douglas). Walter is now the DA but he takes his orders from Martha.

Walter seems much too worried about Sam’s reappearance. Sam finds this puzzling.

Sam, Toni, Martha and Walter are soon caught in an intricate web of jealousy, suspicion, betrayal, guilt and fear. Fear of the past. In their own ways they’re all haunted by the past. It’s also a web of misunderstandings. None of then know as much as the others fear they do.

There are plot twists but it’s the character twists that are most interesting.

These are complicated people with tangled motivations which they themselves don’t fully understand. They’re unpredictable because they themselves have no idea what they’re going to do next.

These are people who might be evil, or mad, or weak, or deluded or just selfish. There are no straightforward heroes or heroines but also no straightforward villains or villainesses.

It’s interesting to see Kirk Douglas playing a weak, cowardly failure of a man. He’s dangerous in the way that cowards are always dangerous.

Van Heflin gives a nicely nuanced performance.

Lizabeth Scott is excellent. Barbara Stanwyck is at the top of her game. You figure one of these two will be the femme fatale, but which one?

This film is at best marginally film noir. It lacks the noir aesthetic. It’s more of a cruelly twisted melodrama than a noir. It does have some noir touches however so if you want to consider it film noir you can.

Either way The Strange Love of Martha Ivers is an extremely good extremely interesting movie.

It’s on Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber.

Night Court (1932)

Night Court (later re-released as Justice for Sale) is a very hard-edged 1932 MGM pre-code crime thriller.

Judge Andrew J. Moffett (Walter Huston) is a night court judge and he’s as crooked as they come. He’s also cruel and vindictive.

He has a mistress, Lil Baker (Noel Baker), whom he has set up in a luxury Park Avenue apartment.

Now there’s going to be an investigation into crooked judges, headed by Judge William Osgood (Lewis Stone) who is something of a rarity - a judge who is not on the take.

Moffett will have to try to destroy as much evidence as possible and he will also have to hide his mistress away somewhere. He can’t afford to allow Osgood to talk to her. She knows way too much of an incriminating nature.

Lil is hiding out in a rooming house. Next door is a young couple with a baby. The wife is a good-natured ditzy blonde, Mary Thomas (Anita Page). Quite by accident Mary happens to see a piece of damning evidence. Moffett plans to deal with Mary by framing her on a nonsensical charge of prostitution but he’ll have to move fast. He’s under surveillance.

Mary’s husband Mike (Phillips Holmes) figures out that Mary was framed and he’s out for revenge but he doesn’t realise just how powerful Moffett is. And while Osgood is working to close the net on Moffett he may have underestimated Moffett’s ruthlessness.

While the ending is a little contrived it is rather cool and very effective with a very nifty surprise witness scene.

This is Walter Huston at his nasty best, a fine portrait of evil and arrogance. Walter Huston was absolutely on fire in the pre-code era, delivering one extraordinary performance after another.

Anita Page and Noel Baker are both quite good. Phillips Holmes overacts but he’s playing man under such extreme pressure that this approach actually works.

This is a very pre-code movie. Once the Production Code came in any mention of the truth about crooked judges, corrupt cops and government corruption was pretty much forbidden. This movie makes it clear that the entire system was corrupt from top to bottom, that it wasn’t just a case of one bad apple.

It’s not just the corruption. The movie takes aim at the way vicious stupid cops target the powerless. The Production Code would never have permitted the criminal justice system to be depicted as it really was, a system that provided justice only for those with money.

It’s also crystal clear that Lil is a kept woman. And there are plenty of quite open mentions of prostitution.

This has some of the feel of pre-code gangster movies but in this case the gangsters are judges, lawyers and court officials. There is also perhaps a slight proto-noir vibe with a young couple hopelessly enmeshed in a web of evil from which there seems no escape.

Put it this way, if you enjoy film noir or early 30s gangster movies you will almost certainly enjoy Night Court. If you’re a pre-code fan as well you’ll love it.

It’s fascinating to me that in the early 30s MGM made some incredibly tough movies (and Night Court is very tough indeed). One that comes to mind is another Walter Huston film, the hard-as-nails The Beast of the City (1932). And they made some seriously wild and sleazy movies, such as Kongo (1932) which starred, yes you guessed it, Walter Huston.

The Warner Archive DVD is obviously an unrestored print but it’s quite acceptable.

Night Court packs a wallop. Very highly recommended.

Other Walter Huston movies made in this same year that showcase his ability to set the screen on fire are Rain and Law and Order (one of the greatest westerns ever made).

The Bribe (1949)

The Bribe is a 1949 film noir based on a Frederick Nebel story.

Whether The Bribe is true film noir or a noirish melodrama can be debated. It does have major affinities with another genre that flourished in the 40s and early 50s - thrillers in exotic settings with an atmosphere of tropical sin and moral corruption. Movies like Macau, The Shanghai Gesture and Saigon.

This is one of those noirs that doesn’t rely on shadows and darkness in the mean streets of a big city. Instead we get the blazing tropical sun, lots of sweat and an exotic atmosphere in which sin and corruption flourish. Passions get overheated.

Rigby (Robert Taylor) is a G-Man investigating a racket in stolen military aircraft engines. The trail leads to South America. To a place called Carlotta. This is definitely the tropics and presumably it’s the Caribbean. It seemed to be a general belief at that time that when Americans went bad, or finally realised themselves to be irredeemable failures, they always ended up in the tropics.

Soon after arrival Rigby encounters Elizabeth Hintten (Ava Gardner). She’s a sultry night-club singer and she gives off major bad girl vibes. But when he gets to meet her Rigby finds that she’s actually really sweet. She’s a really nice girl. That’s it for Rigby. He’s falling for this girl big time.

Her drunken loser husband Tug (John Hodiak) might be a problem, especially given that he’s a prime suspect in the aero engine racket.

There a couple of other shady characters floating about. THere’s a sleazy old guy named Bealer (Charles Laughton) who just oozes moral corruption. He seems too hopeless to be involved in a major racket but the evidence certainly points that way. And then there’s Carwood (Vincent Price), a businessman Rigby met on the plane to South America. Carwood was headed for Peru. His turning up at Carlotta is quite the coincidence.

Rigby is investigating the case but he’s spending most of his time mooning over Elizabeth. And she’s giving off damsel in distress vibes. The unhappy wife, tied to a loser drunk with whom she is obviously no longer in love. Rigby has definite knight in shining armour tendencies, especially when the damsel in distress is both really sweet and smokin’ hot.

Rigby has always been an honest cop and he’s not the sort of guy who would ever turn crooked through mere greed. But there are other inducements besides money. And Elizabeth is very cute.

This was a significant step in Robert Taylor’s reinvention of himself as a battered world-weary cynical anti-hero filled with self-loathing. No more of the lightweight pretty boy stuff. This reinvention turned out to be a brilliant idea. Few actors could portray cynics more successfully. He’s in top form here.

Charles Laughton is of course great fun. Vincent Price is delightfully oily.

This is a very good role for Ava Gardner. Elizabeth is not a straightforward femme fatale. She may not be a femme fatale. She may be the nice girl she appears to be. Rigby is sure she’s not involved in anything dishonest, but he’s not exactly unbiased. Gardner plays it subtle. Rigby wants to trust her and he’s convinced himself that he can trust her but there’s that tiny seed of doubt. The audience is in the same boat.

The odd thing about Ava Gardner’s career is that she gave some of her very best performances in movies that have been underrated and under-appreciated. Movies like Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) and Whistle Stop (1946). She herself was inclined to be dismissive of her acting career, rather unfairly.

There’s a decent crime plot here but this is a character study of a man not just tempted but torn. He doesn’t know which way to jump. He wants to do the right thing but he’s no longer sure what that means.

Robert Z. Leonard is the kind of director usually scornfully dismissed by auteurist critics, and he was certainly no auteur. He was one of those competent craftsmen and there’s nothing wrong with that. Some years earlier he had directed the very underrated pre-code Greta Garbo melodrama Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) and there are some affinities between that film and The Bribe - both deal with moral degradation in exotic settings.

The climactic action sequence really is superbly done.

The Bribe doesn’t tick all the noir boxes but it ticks quite a few of them and whether it’s really noir or not it’s still an excellent movie. Very highly recommended.

The Warner Archive DVD offers a very nice transfer.