The Film Noir Classic Collection: Volume 5 (Warner)

The most famous artifacts that we have retroactively branded as film noir, from the iconic (The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity) to the cult (Gun Crazy, Kiss Me Deadly) to the rediscovered oddities and minor classics (Murder By Contract, Blast of Silence) have largely arrived on DVD but the joys of exploring this unique cinematic slice of American cinema in the shadows is discovering nuggets of lesser-known films and their own attitudes and shades of gray. This set of eight films features one bona-fide classic of the genre and one minor masterpiece of noir mood and doom.

Richard Kiley stands up to the Phenix City rackets

Phil Karlson’s The Phenix City Story (1955) is one of the most hard-hitting crime films of its era, a ripped-from-the-headlines drama of a town (Phenix City, Alabama, located near an army base to serve of less savory needs of our men in uniform—booze, girls and gambling) run by the rackets, inspired by real-life events and directed in a semi-documentary style with a tabloid punch. In fact it opens with real documentary reporting (by Clete Roberts) in an arch, overlong prologue that seems designed more to justify the violence to the censors than prepare audiences for the film to follow, but it serves its purpose in reminding us that the stakes are not just movieland stories but a real community under the thumb of the rackets. To further the identification, Karlson shot the film on location in the town and included locals as extras and bit players in the cast.

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In his overly-passionate defense of the Auteur Theory, Andrew Sarris opened with the dubious assertion that the weakest film by a great director is, by definition, better than the greatest film by a lesser director. (“Am I implying that the weakest [John] Ford is superior to the strongest [Henry] King? Yes!” from “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962″.) A close reading finds this less a manifesto than a purposeful overstatement of the case from which to begin the debate, but it’s still a statement that launched many a spirited argument. But he does get at one of the joys of auteurism that I am constantly reminded of while digging through the lesser works of favorite directors: even minor films can offer major pleasures—in a particularly wily characterization, a sensibility adding richness to an otherwise conventional story, a shrewdly directed scene. They may not elevate a film to greatness (or even necessarily goodness) but they can provide a certain charge to a viewer ready to take it in and, as these pieces bounce off our experience absorbing other films by said director, they accumulate a kind of resonance. Which is not to say that it makes the film any better so much as it enriches our experience with it. Sometimes that is enough to make my evening’s viewing a real pleasure.

I’m not trying to make a case for the following films, recently made available through VCI and Warner Archive, as undiscovered classics, merely putting the pleasures I had watching them into perspective.

Fifth Avenue Girl

Fifth Avenue Girl (Warner Archive), Gregory La Cava’s slight but deftly executed 1939 comedy depression-era comedy, is born of the same cloth as his earlier My Man Godfrey: eccentric and idle rich, straight-talking poor, witty lines and an underlying economic anxiety threatening everybody. Walter Connolly plays an industrialist whose money has simply brought him loneliness and isolation and Ginger Rogers is the level-headed but unemployed working girl he hires to stir things up in his distracted family. This is more low key and less snappy than Godfrey, in part due to a second string cast of supporting performers (Tim Holt as the playboy son, Kathryn Adams as the dizzy socialite daughter, James Ellison as a rabble-rousing chauffeur who speaks in Bolshevik slogans). But Rogers is cheerfully sardonic as the spunky woman who poses as a mistress and Connolly a pleasant and down-to-earth patriarch in a family lost to their meaningless diversions, and La Cava creates a unique chemistry between these two folks: unlikely friendship and an appreciation for one another’s company. And watch for Jack Carson as a ukulele-playing sailor on the park bench.

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Film noir was the term that the French gave to a particular strain of American crime movies in the forties and fifties, defined by its shadowy style, largely urban settings and mood of doom and corruption. But another strain of film noir also flourished in the fifties, films shot on location with an almost documentary quality, where psychopathic gangsters walked the city streets in broad daylight like a virus. These styles intermingled as more films embraced the expressionistic qualities of locations, but Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics I (Sony), the fourth collaboration between Sony and Martin Scorsese’s non-profit film preservation organization, The Film Foundation, spotlights three films that embraced the docu-noir style of daylight thrillers with darkly psychotic characters.

Arthur Franz is "The Sniper"

The Sniper (1952), produced by Stanley Kramer and directed on location in San Francisco by Edward Dmytryk, has a much edgier atmosphere and modern feel. Adolphe Menjou’s police detective has seen everything, but the spree of a woman-hating psychopath troubles him because (police psychiatrist aside) he can’t understand the motivation. The direction straddles the studio model of storytelling and the immediacy of low-budget location shooting and Dmytryk punctuates the violence with vivid explosions of brutal force without showing a drop of blood. Don Siegel’s The Lineup (1958), also shot on location in San Francisco, stars Eli Wallach as a killer on the trail of smuggled heroine shipments ready to kill anyone in his way. It’s low budget theatrical version of a TV series, but Siegel makes it all about the killers and gives the film a matter-of-fact violence that gives the film a life of its own. Murder by Contract (1958), by contrast, is almost laconic it its story of a self-made assassin-for-hire (Vince Edwards), an almost existential figure who is happy to share his philosophy while on a job to silence an inconvenient witness. Irving Lerner’s direction is almost hypnotic as he matches the deliberation of his killer with meticulous direction: every murder is so carefully set up that we never need to see the follow through. All three of these films take place mostly in the daylight and all have a crispness to them that the shadowy studio noirs don’t.

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