Life's a Noir

George Raft’s career was well and truly on the downslide when he signed a three-movie deal with Lippert Pictures in the early 50s. The third of these films was the British-Italian-American co-production The Man from Cairo, and it’s rather fun.

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"THE LADY VANISHES" (1938) Photo Gallery

Here is a GALLERY featuring images from Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 classic movie, "THE LADY VANISHES". Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave starred.

When a movie has a title like Fingerprints Don't Lie you can pretty much guess that it’s going to turn out that fingerprints can indeed lie. And that is the case here. But how can fingerprints lie?

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Most accounts I’ve read of Seijun Suzuki's career suggest that after making a series of very successful crime thrillers for Nikkatsu he fell out of favour when he developed his own idiosyncratic, outrageous and somewhat surreal personal style in movies like Tokyo Drifter (1966) and Branded to Kill (1967). Which may be so, but that personal style (in a less developed form) is already clearly present as early as 1960 in Take Aim at the Police Van.

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I’ve always maintained that if you’re a halfway competent film-maker you can’t make a bad film from a Cornell Woolrich story. RKO’s 1949 thriller The Window, directed by Ted Tetzlaff, tends to support that theory.

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Otto Preminger’s Daisy Kenyon is essentially a women’s picture made in a film noir style. Made at Fox in 1947, this is also a superb example of Preminger’s film-making at its best.

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Rusty Knife is one of five movies presented in the Nikkatsu Noir boxed set by Criterion in their “budget” Eclipse series.

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Payroll is a 1961 British crime thriller with at best marginal claims to be a film noir but it does have some interesting features. It can be seen as a heist movie (and a very good one) but it can also be seen as a revenge movie. Unusually for 1961, it has a woman as the righteous avenging angel.

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Please Murder Me is an ingenious little 1956 murder mystery with noir overtones and a clever plot gimmick.

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His Kind of Woman is one of those films that can best be described as a glorious mess. It is in fact two different films spliced uneasily together, films from entirely different and incompatible genres, but both films are terrific and compulsively watchable.

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