The Arsenal Stadium Mystery (1938)/Highly
Dangerous (1950)/The Long Memory
(1953/VCI DVDs)/Weird-Noir: Six B-Movies
(1953 – 1963/Image DVD)
Picture: C+/C+/C+/C Sound: C+/C+/C+/C Extras: D/D/C-/D Films: C/C/C+/C
What is a
Film Noir and how does it differ from a simple crime or detective film? We recently received two different kinds of
films to cover that will help us demonstrate that complex question, though
answers will be limited because it is very complex to explain what Noir really
is.
First we
have three mystery films from England,
then six short low-budget B-films from the U.S.
and we’ll start with Thorold Dickinson’s The
Arsenal Stadium Mystery (1938) which is just before Noir began in the U.S. and is not
only a mystery film, but focuses more on the sport of soccer being played
here. Even very popular then, British
films of the time sometimes would not do a genre straight out and include
additional footage, details and even a sense of living for its audience that
was a hallmark of the country in its late years as the most powerful in the
world before WWII began.
Leslie
Banks (The Most Dangerous Game, the
original Man Who Knew Too Much) is
the star and detective trying to find out how a player suddenly died when he
was in perfect health and why.
Unfortunately, the game footage goes on too long affecting the mystery
side of things and though this is average, but has some good moments just the
same. It is also not visually or
thematically dark.
Roy Ward
Baker’s Highly Dangerous (1950) has
Margaret Lockwood as an expert on plants and bugs asked by the British
Government to go on a mission to finds out how an East Block Cold War enemy
nation is getting a deadly disease through wherever they want in a germ warfare
ploy. Reluctant at first, she goes and
is accompanied by a man (Dane Clark) who tries to help.
This one
is also not very thematically dark and visually is limited as such, in part
because it is trying to be like a Hitchcock film, but the results are uneven
despite the stars (also including Marius Goring and Wilfred Hyde White) being
sop good. Baker can direct, but this has
not aged well either. There is enough
fun for serious mystery fans to give it a good look, but others might not be as
entertained.
John
Mills plays a former convict who wants revenge in Robert Hamer’s The Long Memory (1953) which actually
has some Noir themes and some Noir shots, but it also is not totally a Noir, is
not dark enough and its ending rings false as compared to how good the film
gets. Davidson (Mills) is out of jail
and that means out for revenge, so this is more brutal and realistic than the
prior films, but also reminds us that Noir only made it into so many British
films because it is mostly a U.S. phenomenon and not one Hollywood invented,
but happened though some complex and even political circumstances.
This is
the best of the three British entries here and also has a fine supporting cats
including Elizabeth Sellars and Geoffrey Keen, but it also comes up short and
this in part is from what we could consider British cinema’s attempt to do
Hollywood-safe storytelling, even when some things get dark.
SO that
brings us to the Weird-Noir: Six
B-Movies DVD set which has some much lower-budget, lower quality and very
short films from 1953 to 1963. So why
are these films weird? Besides being
bad, they are late in trying to do what so many better films did before
them. They are also more exploitive than
grade-A films would be and rougher, which sometimes means showing the ugly side
of life as real Noirs did.
Arthur J.
Beckhard’s Girl On The Run (1953)
takes place at a carnival and the title lady is actually the girlfriend of a
boyfriend/criminal who is hiding there, so she stupidly joins the chorus girls
there (!) and it is not long before police and other criminals alike show
up. It can be eerie and interesting (a
then-unknown Steve McQueen shows up as an extra) and it is seedy, but it is not
great storytelling. Still, I liked how
dark it could get.
William
Martin’s The Naked Road (1959) has a
woman held by a judge in jail until the man she is with pays for a speeding
ticket, but it is really an arrangement to push her into prostitution! This is creepy and can be disturbing, but
plays more like an outright crime film than a Noir. Still, it has some moments worth seeing and
is disturbing.
Irving
Berwick’s The Seventh Commandment
(1961) is about a successful preacher with a dark secret past that catches up
with him when a former female friend wants to extort money from him, among
other things. It has some Noir elements,
but is more of a drama with crime in it and some phony religious context that
holds it back.
Bernard
Wiesen’s Fear No More (1961) is the
best film here as a nice young woman is running an errand while on a train when
a dead woman shows up and she is framed for the murder. She is on the run when she befriends a nice
Hispanic man (racy for the time) who is interested in her intimately and is a
good guy. She has some dark secrets of
her own, but something very ugly is going on.
Will she be able to figure it out against the odds? Not bad and a pleasant surprise.
Donn
Harling’s Fallguy (1962) has a
teenaged man help in an auto accident only to find himself entangled in
corruption, murder and gangsters. More a
gangster genre thriller than a Noir, it is not as good as Fear No More and in the end, is mixed at best, but it is mixed
enough to qualify as weird.
Finally
we have Ned Hockman’s Stark Fear (1963)
has Beverly Garland as a mentally tormented housewife whose husband (Skip
Homeier) disappears, but she is so much a woman who loves too much that she
goes looking for him, yet he is actually planning to murder her. That might work until another man (Kenneth
Tobey) gets involved. This is not a Noir
either, though it could have been and that is the problem. With the best cast of the six films here,
this is one of the more watchable films in the set, but it is not dark enough
and along with script issues, holds it back form being better. However, its flaws also make it weird…
The 1.33
X 1 black and white image on all the films shows their age, but the British
films are comparatively more expensive productions from the Rank catalog while
the six American B-Movies are lucky
to survive, so they are not going to look as good as the British releases. Still, Video Black is decent in all
cases. The lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
on all the films show their age, but the B-Movies
again show their budget limits despite being newer productions. For some reason, Long Memory is here in better PCM 2.0 Mono, but it is not cleaned
up enough to be the “sonic champion: on the list, but it has some of the best
audio moments of all the DVDs. Just as
well, Long Memory has a Photo
Gallery. Otherwise, there are no extras on
any of the releases here.
- Nicholas Sheffo
