As we turn to nine more films this month on our 36-film-list that will form the basis of my Noirvember ’55 Top 13 Films Noirs Draft, my own personal list of favorites is starting to take shape. I only get to select four or five titles on the final draft, but if Sergio or Nick play one of my favorites, I have to find good back-ups. Will a favorite turn up within today’s trio? Let’s find out.

The Phenix City Story

Without taking too deep a dive into politics, it’s hard to miss the relevance of this hard-hitting drama based on the real-life attempt to rid Phenix City, Alabama, known as “Sin City,” of the hold that organized crime had on it for many years, and compare it to the politically expedient shenanigans of our current administration against blue-state cities. It took the assassination of the attorney general who had pledged to finally clean up the town, and the subsequent declaration of martial law, to make a dent in the cesspool of vice that lined the streets of Phenix City. It’s a tough, thrilling story – and a first-time watch for me.

Director Phil Karlson lent his brand of grit to many crime dramas of the 50’s, eschewing the smooth edges of a Preminger, a Wilder, or a Hitchcock. Here Karlson brought his cast and crew right to the source, filming in Phenix City and casting locals in smaller roles and as extras. To lend even more credence to the reality of the situation, Karlson filmed a fifteen-minute “prologue” where a journalist interviews real citizens about the hold organized crime has had on the town and offered it as a “pre-show” to cinema distributors before the main film was run.

The plot travels throughout the populace, pinpointing both those who run the rackets (led by jovial Edward Andrews as a club owner/racketeer) and those who wish to take them down, led by Richard Kiley as John Patterson, a decorated soldier who has returned to his hometown to give a quick hello to his parents before finding a good place to set up his shingle as a lawyer and raise his family. His father, Albert (John McIntire), expects John to stick around and practice law with him, arguing that things aren’t so bad as they seem – if you live on the good side of town and mind your own business. 

But John can’t follow that advice, not after he defends a man being beaten up by mob goons. Before he knows it, John has committed to stay and work with the local reformation league and suggest that his good pop run for attorney general. The mob responds with extreme violence, aimed mostly at children – and it’s awful to behold. Despite his wife and kids begging John to let them leave, John is in the fight for good. He pays a huge price for that, but it never feels like hokey melodrama. After viewing a run of mediocre films noirs based on fact, I’m pleased to say that this is one of the good ones.

*     *     *     *     *

Queen Bee

“Make up your mind. Decide you want the best things out of life, and then go out and get them. You can, you know. Any woman can. You can get anything you want. Even Ty McKinnon.”

To my mind, Joan Crawford’s greatest role wasn’t Mildred Pierce, the part that got her the Oscar she coveted. No, it was Crystal Allen, the scheming shopgirl of The Women. In a world of pampered society women and the girls who served them, Crystal refused to accept her place in the world. She went after what she wanted, and she got it. Her problem – aside from her selfishness – was her perpetual dissatisfaction whatever whatever she did get. How frustrating the world must have been for women like Crystal in the 30’s, where money was tight and the only way a woman could “advance” in the world was to marry well. 

Sergio added Queen Bee to our list, I imagine, because Crawford’s character, Eva Phillips, conforms to a lot of our notions of the femme fatale. I imagine the sets of Miss Crawford’s later films often resembled the nightmare alleys of noir. Everyone had to walk on eggshells around her, for she could flare up at the tiniest sign of disrespect. The story goes that she spent a day off from the set of Johnny Guitar watching the crew film a scene with Mercedes McCambridge and applaud the actress, which infuriated Crawford so much that she broke into McCambridge’s dressing room and slashed her costumes to ribbons. 

Perhaps the studio hoped to recapture the Mildred Pierce magic with this film. Director/screenwriter Ranald MacDougall had written the screenplay for that earlier film. A great portion of the film is dedicated to the weirdly obsessive “mother-daughter” relationship between Eva and her cousin Jennifer Stewart (Lucy Marlow, who looks quite a bit like Ann Blyth, the daughter in Pierce). The difference is that here the “daughter” is an innocent, while the “mother” is a two-faced bitch. 

Queen Bee is Southern Gothic melodrama, not film noir. It’s also very bad – although Marlow and Betsy Palmer, as Eva’s sister-in-law and main adversary, are both quite good, and Crawford is fascinating to behold. I wonder if her contract stipulated that she make a certain number of grand entrances per picture. I wonder how difficult it was to walk up and down those oh so steep main stairs. I wonder if I’ll ever watch this film ever again.

Probably not. 

*     *     *     *     *

Rififi

There’s a very funny moment in my favorite sitcom, The Dick Van Dyke Show, where Rob, Laura, Buddy, and Sally argue over the pronunciation of the Jules Dassin-directed crime dramas Topkapi and Rififi. (Just where do you lay the stress?!?) It’s the closest I have ever come to Rififi – until Sergio put the French crime drama on this list. Dassin, had helmed, amongst other films, several terrific noirs: Brute Force (1946), Thieves’ Highway (1948) and Night and the City (1949). He was continually plagued, and eventually blacklisted, by the House Un-American Affairs Committee and returned to Europe to direct for the rest of his career. 

I heaved a little sigh when I saw that Rififi is nearly two hours long, but as soon as Georges Auric’s tense score hit my ears, I was hooked. The film concerns Tony, a jewel thief who took the rap for his protégé Jo and has recently finished a five-year prison stretch. Now he loses at poker games and has a constant cough that seems as foreboding as Chekhov’s gun. (It turns out to be only metaphorical.) 

Jo, who made Tony the godfather to his young son and sees him as a father figure, wants Tony to go in on an idea his gangster buddy has for a smash and grab of a posh jewelry store, but Tony wants nothing to do with it – until he learns that his old girlfriend Mado has taken up with a crooked nightclub owner. In a sickly erotic scene, Tony brings Mado back to his seedy apartment, forces her to strip off first her jewels, then her fur coat, then all her clothing, beats her, and then kicks her out. This gives him a new lease on the criminal life, and he tells Jo and Mario that he wants to rob the jewelry store. This will be no smash-and-grab, however: Tony is determined to break open the safe and take it all. To do that, the gang adds a fourth member to their team: Cesar is a safecracker; what’ve more, he’s played by the director himself, under the pseudonym Perlo Vita. 

The rest of the film chronicles the heist and its tragic aftermath. It’s most famous for a half-hour depiction of the crime itself, shot in near silence and stunning detail, and inspired real-life criminals to try it out. This led to several countries banning the film, and the L.A. Times review said it was a “master class in breaking and entering as well as filmmaking.” Composer Auric wrote music for the heist sequence despite Dassin wanting it to be unscored. When he watched the rushes, Auric agreed with the director.

Still, this is no Oceans 11, a film that this probably inspired. The word “rififi” roughly translates into “a rumble among men,” and the story is as much about the rough and tumble relationships amongst this community of crooks as it is about the robbery. Tony and his boys manage to commit an audacious perfect crime – until one gang member’s human error starts a chain reaction of events that connect Tony’s rivalry for Mado with the gangster Grutter and Cesar’s lust for girls to the more wholesome relationship between Mario and his wife and the familial love Jo has for his son. 

It’s another masterpiece for our list! Vive la France!

*     *     *     *     *

The rankings? 
1^st place – Rififi – Dassin is one of the greats and must be given more attention! 

2^nd place – The Phenix City Story – a hard-hitting true crime tale. 

3^rd place – Queen Bee – pure, unadulterated trash, and don’t you love it! 

I’ll be back in October with the final nine!!