When you’re watching thirty-six films noirs over several months, all from the same year, not all of them can be Grade-A noir! The last trio was pretty rough, but I went into this next batch with high hopes – and a little anxiety, for amongst these titles was one “classic” film with which I did not get along in the past. Would watching it with fresh eyes change my mind? Let’s find out . . . 

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New York Confidential

“The circle of self-destruction has claimed new victims. It has stilled the lips that might have revealed the secrets of the syndicate . . .The syndicate still exists. The rules still hold. This is how the cartel works. This is New York Confidential.”

This is a well-cast piece of hokum, based on a lurid 1948 travel guide to all the seamy sights of New York. Evidently, Chapter 25 is all about the Big Apple’s hoodlums and gangsters, but director Russell Rouse and screenwriter Clarence Greene, who had collaborated on a number of noirs, decided to create an original story. Okay – “original” is a misnomer, as this is so loaded with cliches of plot and character that it creaks. What saves it, or at least makes it entertaining to watch, is that cast: Broderick Crawford plays yet another crime boss who’s brutal with his enemies yet soft for his daughter (Anne Bancroft, playing a more interesting variation on the same role she played in The Naked Street), and Richard Conte plays a psychopathic hit man with a heart of gold.

Conte’s Nick Magellan is imported from Chicago to NYC by Crawford’s Charlie Lupo to execute an associate who went rogue. Since Nick’s dad gave Lupo his start in crime, the mob boss has a soft spot for the hit man and hires him to be his new right-hand man. It turns out that Nick returns the affection – his eyes only turn cold and dead when he’s plugging someone. He also resists the advances of Charlie’s daughter and his girlfriend out of loyalty to the boss. 

Of course, that doesn’t stop the wheels of crime from grinding all these characters to dust by film’s end, leaving a cartel filled with middle-aged men, all working from behind the scenes in the D.A.’s office, the police force, the political world, etc. There’s lots of violence,  and the dialogue is delivered quick enough to move the film along. But it’s hard to ignore the whiff of old ideas that have been played out for a while. I like what one critic said about the movie: “Even though the performances were energetically delivered, it still tasted like a stale salami sandwich.” I will say, however, that the film is worth watching for performances of the leading trio and all the somewhat familiar character actors whirling around them. (This is a much better role for Mike Mazurki than he had in New Orleans Uncensored, which we covered last time.) 

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The Night Holds Terror

The home invasion film The Desperate Hours opened on October 5, 1955. This similarly themed noir beat it by nearly three months. Both are based on true life events – two separate incidents that had occurred a couple of years before production.  The main difference between the two films is that Hours was stylishly directed by William Wyler and was a great success, while Andrew J. Stone created something pedestrian and cliched. It’s ironic that the true life incident that inspired this film was evidently much less terrifying than this film tries, mostly unsuccessfully, to be. 

Stone uses a cross between a documentary style, seen in the film’s opening and in the scenes of police investigation, and a standard crime melodrama about a trio of young hoodlums who take a man, Gene Courtier (Jack Kelly) hostage, spend a night in his home terrorizing his children, and then try to ransom him for $200,000 when they discover that his father is wealthy. The Three Bad Boys are divided along familiar lines: Batsford (John Cassevetes) is the ruthless leader, Gossett (Vince Edwards) is the horny sadist, and Logan (David Cross) is the thief-kidnapper-murderer with a heart of gold. 

The dialogue is so banal that I found myself reciting along with it on this, my first-time viewing. Evidently, when the real Courtier was kidnapped, everything went quite smoothly and everyone got along right up to the trio’s capture. Here, everything goes wrong every five minutes as one artificial crisis after another is tossed in our path to move the plot along. Along the way, we learn that young men are hoodlums, that you should never pick up a hitchkiker, that the press can be vicious in their pursuit of a scoop unless you take them into your confidence, and that there’s no reason that the wife of a missing man can’t fix up her hair and add a little lipstick for when she greets the police. 

The most interesting factor here is that this was Cassavetes first credited acting role, and despite the crap dialogue he has to spout, he is fantastic. Thus, a mediocre crime movie becomes the harbinger of a great actor/director to come. That’s not too bad a legacy!

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The Night of the Hunter

Many years ago, I tried to watch this film, but we did not get along. Thus, when I saw it on the list Sergio gave us, I had trepidations. Turns out that my first impressions were similar to the neanderthals who went to the theatre in 1955 to watch Charles Laughton’s first and only directorial endeavor and who left scratching their heads. Fortunately, I have come away from my second viewing enlightened: this is a magnificent picture! Discovering that Cahiers du Cinema named it the second-best film of all time after Citizen Kane makes total sense to me now.

By sheer coincidence, Hunter, like the other two films I’m reviewing this time, is based on real-life events, which were in turn adapted to a 1953 novel by Davis Grubb. The real-life murderer Harry Powers becomes the “Preacher” Harry Powell, (Robert Mitchum) a religious nut (the words “love” and “hate’ are tattooed on his knuckles) who preys on women for flaunting themselves before men. When he’s put in jail for stealing a car, Harry learns that his cellmate, Ben Harper (Peter Graves), who murdered two men for $10,000, has hidden the money away somewhere. After Harper is executed, Harry makes his way to the man’s hometown, ingratiates himself with the townsfolk and seduces Harper’s widow, Willa (Shelley Winters). He marries her, promising to provide a good home for her and her two children, but son John (Billy Chapin) – who knows where his father stashed the money – doesn’t trust the man. John has good reason, as the “Preacher” soon plunges the children into a life of terror. 

Grubb was considered for writing the screenplay, but fortunately this job went to James Agee, who crafted a beautiful, lyrical script. Laughton was inspired by the clarity of the nitrate prints of silent films and hired cinematographer Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons) to duplicate that look. The result drops us into a children’s fantasy world imbued with real-life horror. There are shots that left me gasping as they evoked a dreamlike -or a nightmarish – world: I’m thinking of the image that reveals Willa’s fate, or the shot late in the film after John and his sister flee on a boat and end up hiding out in the hayloft of a barn. We see John waking up as the dawn light shines in the loft window. It’s perfectly beatific – until the the small figure of a man on horseback, singing a familiar and chilling hymn, appears in the distance. 

The cast is excellent, particularly Mitchum and Chapin. In keeping with the theme of silent movies, Lillian Gish turns in a lovely performance as a tough old woman who becomes the children’s savior. And veteran James Gleason, Inspector Piper himself, plays an early protector of John’s. 

Hunter is beautifully filmed and scored. Is it noir? I don’t know, but Mitchum certainly sends the movie spinning in that direction. With its literate script and its combination of Southern grace and gothic suspense, I think the film transcends genre. It’s a terrible shame that poor reviews of the day sent Laughton into a frenzy and ended his directing career on the spot. I can only imagine the amazing films he might have come up with after this.

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The rankings?

1^st place – The Night of the Hunter, because it’s truly marvelous.

2^nd place – New York Confidential, because with two cliché- ridden films to watch this time around, I gave points for the better performances

3^rd place – The Night Holds Terror because I already know very well not to pick up a hitchhiker, even one who looks like Ben Casey!!!

There’ll be three more film reviews coming your way in a couple of weeks.