Warner Bros. Film Noir Classic Collection – Volume Five (Armored Car Robbery/Backfire/Cornered/Crime In The Streets/Deadline At Dawn/Desperate/Dial 1119/Phenix City Story/DVD Set)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+    Extras: C-     Films: B

 

 

Once again, Warner Bros has come up with more important key Film Noir releases from the classical period (1948 – 1958) and from four different studios.  Besides the Warner catalog and their Allied Artists holdings, we also get MGM and RKO releases involving some of the most talented people in the industry at the time and some are outright classics.

 

Armored Car Robbery (1950) is one of the less-seen little gems from Director Richard Fleischer and from RKO, made not long before he made the original Narrow Margin.  The great Charles McGraw (T-Men, A Boy & His Dog, Hitchcock’s The Birds) plays a police officer out to avenge his partner’s death against a formidable gangster (William Talman) after the title event in this surprisingly impressive revenge thriller.  Short but effective, it has effective cinematography by Guy Roe (Target Earth) and has a fine supporting cast.

 

Backfire (1950) has the underrated director Vincent Sherman (Underground, Mr. Skeffington) has Gordon McRae as the military friend of Edmond O’Brien trying to prove he had nothing to do with a recent murder, but finds this out in the hospital and is told it is not true.  He finds out otherwise, thanks in part to his nurse (Virginia Mayo) and meets all kinds of characters.  A fine script, good pacing and the right kind of cinematography by Carl E. Guthrie (Caged, House On Haunted Hill) in this Warner release.  Ed Begley and Sheila MacRae also star.

 

Cornered (1945) features Director Edward Dmytryk at his peak with this RKO Noir about revenge as former flying hero Laurence Gerard (Dick Powell) hunts down the Nazi collaborator who killed his wife, but he’ll have to identify him first.  Walter Slezak heads the rest of the cast in this edgy thriller.  Roy Webb (Clash By Night, Out Of The Past, Notorious) did the music and cinematography is by Harry J. Wild (Murder, My Sweet, The Big Steal).

 

Crime In The Streets (1956) is the most recent film in the set and as much a part of the teen crime cycle of the 1950s as Noir, featuring the feature film debut of no less than John Cassavetes as a gang leader who decides to have his group cross a deadly line by killing someone they suspect of being a rat.  Sal Mineo, James Whitmore, Virginia Gregg and Mark Rydell head the cast in this action-packed entry directed by the great Don Siegel (Dirty Harry, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers) for Allied Artists, was lensed by the also-great Sam Levitt (A Star Is Born (1954), Man With The Golden Arm, Two On A Guillotine) and features a music score by Franz Waxman.

 

Deadline At Dawn (1946) turns out to be the only feature film the great stage director Harold Clurman ever helmed, but it is an adaptation of Noir author favorite Cornell Woolrich (under his pseudonym William Irish) by no less than legendary playwright Clifford Odets who had his own Noir history.  A sailor (Bill Williams) is falsely accused of killing the sister of a deadly gangster and only has hours to prove himself innocent before being sent off to duty, if he makes it there alive.  Susan Hayward and Paul Lukas head the cast and Nicholas Musuraca (Cat People, Clash By Night, The Hitch-Hiker) did the cinematography in this RKO release.

 

Desperate (1947) is one (and the first of seven) of the Director Anthony Mann’s Noir entries and he made it just before T-Men and Raw Deal.  A hard working, honest man (Steve Brodie) takes a trucking job to support he and his wife (Audrey Long), but it turns out he is really the driver for a big money robbery, unknowingly driving the getaway car.  When that scheme turns out to be a disaster, the police and gangsters are both after him and his wife, so they go on the run.  Raymond Burr is here in one of his gangster roles and the supporting cast also includes Douglas Fowley, Jason Robards, Sr. and William Challee.  Paul Sawtell (T-Men, Kansas City Confidential) did the music and George E. Diskant (Kansas City Confidential, They Live By Night, On Dangerous Ground, Narrow Margin) is the cinematographer.

 

Dial 1119 (1950) is a bold thriller made by MGM in which a psychotic killer (Marshall Thompson (They Were Expendable) who wants revenge on the doctor (Sam Levene) who put him away and will do anything to get him.  The capable journeyman director Gerald Mayer makes this a good one and the supporting cast includes Virginia Field and William Conrad.  André Previn (Rollerball) did the music score and Paul Vogel (The Time Machine, Lady in The Lake) did the cinematography.

 

Phenix City Story (1955) has the documentary/police procedural approach that eventually ended the Noir movement, but is a fictional story directed by the underrated Phil Karlson (The Brothers Rico, 5 Against The House, Kansas City Confidential) about an organized crime group running the town, then being caught and put on trial.  A genre classic, it was released by Allied Artists and shot by longtime cinematographer Harry Neuman, who began in the silent era, moved to many genre films and movie series, and even shot on big films like High Society (1955), so his idea of a documentary look is uniquely informed and helped this film become so important.  John McIntire, Kathryn Grant and Richard Kiley head the cast.

 

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image on Streets and Story are good and look good, but have their moments of softness and more than expected, so they only sometimes fare better than the 1.33 X 1 image on the rest of the films, which are all shot in black and white and are from fine print sources.  The Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono is clean for its age, but not always as rich as it could be.  The only extras are trailers for Cornered and Dial 1119, but these films should have had at least a few audio commentary tracks.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo