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Powerhouse Indicator’s first foray into the Universal library yields six noir thrillers, all crime-related and all different: the list introduces us to scheming businessmen, venal confidence crooks, black-market racketeers, a femme fatale, a gangster deportee and baby stealers. The B&w features are enriched with some of the best actors of the postwar years, and the titles themselves are a litany of vice and sin: The Web, Larceny, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, Abandoned, Deported and Naked Alibi.

Universal Noir #1

Region B Blu-ray

The Web, Larceny, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, Abandoned, Deported, Naked Alibi

Powerhouse Indicator

1948-1954 / B&w / Street Date November 14, 2022 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £49.99

Starring: Ella Raines, Edmond O’Brien, Vincent Price, William Bendix; John Payne, Joan Caulfield, Dan Duryea, Shelly Winters, Dorothy Hart; Joan Fontaine, Burt Lancaster, Robert Newton; Dennis O’Keefe, Gale Storm, Jeff Chandler, Raymond Burr; Marta Toren, Jeff Chandler, Marina Berti, Richard Rober; Sterling Hayden,...

This grouping of Bogart’s Columbia output has one bona fide noir, a pair of exotic ‘romantic intrigue’ thrillers and three social issue pictures. It’s a good set, with films directed by John Cromwell, Nicholas Ray and Mark Robson, and with leading ladies Lizabeth Scott, Florence Marley, Marta Toren, Jody Lawrance and Jan Sterling. And the Powerhouse Indicator extras are especially well curated. Watch out — it’s Region B only.

Columbia Noir #5 Humphrey Bogart

Region B Blu-ray

Dead Reckoning, Knock on Any Door, Tokyo Joe,

Sirocco, The Family Secret, The Harder They Fall

Powerhouse Indicator

1947-1956 / B&w / 1:37 Academy & 1:85 widescreen

Street Date June 27, 2022 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £49.99

Starring or Executive Produced by Humphrey Bogart

For an established actor who really didn’t break through as a starring leading man until age 41, Humphrey Bogart sure gave us a legacy of prominent movies. As movie stars go he...

This strange blend of French série noire and English Brit noir was filmed in glowing Technicolor on location in Holland and Paris. Runaway bookkeeper Claude Rains teams up with the highly fatale Märta Torén, evading the law in pursuit of the good life promised by a valise packed with money. Georges Simenon’s crime tale has an undertaste of Poetic Realist rebelliousness.

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By

Blu-ray

ClassicFlix

1952 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 82 min. / The Paris Express / Street Date May 29, 2018 / 29.99

Starring: Claude Rains, Märta Torén, Marius Goring, Herbert Lom, Anouk Aimée, Felix Aylmer, Ferdy Mayne, MacDonald Parke, Lucie Mannheim, Eric Pohlmann.

Cinematography: Otto Heller

Film Editor: Vera Campbell, Arthur H. Nadel

Original Music: Benjamin Frankel

From the book by Georges Simenon

Produced by Josef Shaftel, Raymond Stross

Written and Directed by Harold French

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By is from a 1938 novel by Georges Simenon, one of...

On its way to Italy the title of this little known 1952 film about an American reporter in Paris got changed from Assignment - Paris to Destination Budapest. Perhaps, in the midst of the cold war, Budapest was more alluring and dangerous than Paris, which certainly suits the typically dramatic artwork of the great Anselmo Ballester (1897-1974). What Leonard Maltin describes as a “fitfully entertaining drama of reporter Dana Andrews trying to link together threads of plot between Communist countries against the West” looks, in Ballester’s hands, like the most torrid of noirs. As in his great poster for Affair in Trinidad, Ballester renders his male lead in monochrome, all the better to highlight his leading lady, here resplendent in a tight yellow sweater and a shimmering green skirt (who ever painted the folds of women’s clothes more transcendently than Ballester?).

The Ballester website maintained by his grandson Claudio...