Noirvember 2023 - Rate the last noir you watched

Nice review Dadgumblah! I've not seen Side Street but have heard of it...With your rating I'll bump it up on my noir watch list, which despite me watching a ton of noirs is still really big!

Me, too! I've been writing down titles for a while now and wore out an admittedly flimsy notebook filling it up, and had to buy a new one! I'm still transferring them to the new notebook, and I really look forward to watching them. I draw a line through each watched one, then try to review it here. I hope it's cool that I'm doing it throughout the year and not waiting for Noirvember?

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"Miss Jean Louise, Mr. Arthur Radley."

Every month is 'Noirvember' I'm glad to have someone here posting about noirs! And it's great way to find noirs that other's have liked...I seen yet another Hugo Haas noir and I think it might be my favorite one yet. I'll have to write about asap.

Ooh, please do!

Another one of the seven Hugo Haas and Cleo Moore collaborations. Yes Cleo Moore is an eye full but she can act too, she's actually quite the good actress. I liked that the story is told from her viewpoint and indeed the movie film is her story, which is unusual for a noir. This is the fourth Hugo Haas noir I've seen and I've liked them all...But I might just like this one the best. So far in each noir Haas directs, writes, produces and stars. Each film is like a noir-fable and I liked that about his films. One Girl's Confessionkept me on my toes and surprised me with how events unfolded. There's a beautiful restored print available on Youtube and I believe Internet Archives.

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@Citizen Rules, that sounds really good! I'll watch as soon as I can. I still need to check out Raw Deal, one that I told WHITBISSELL! that I'd watch. It stars Noir regular Dennis O'Keefe, Claire Trevor, Raymond Burr, and further down the line of course, Whit Bissell! So that'll be my next one. I haven't had the chance to watch much of anything lately but I'll get back on track soon. Again, looking forward to One Girl's Confession.

I watched and reviewed Raw Deal in the Noirvember 2022 thread, I really liked that one, you're in for a treat. Here's a link to my review, spoiler free!

CR, you forgot to leave a link. Just saying.

Good grief I can't believe I forgot that. Here it is https://www.movieforums.com/communit...17#post2344217


Notice the image format I used. Even back then I was thinking of what style to use for the Noir Countdown. That was a practice so I could see how it looked.

Very good review! I'm hooked and this will be my next Noir for sure. Claire Trevor, as you may have noted in my comments, is one actress that I can never pin down what age she really is. In Murder, My Sweet I thought she looked really youthful but she looked somehow older in movies before and then right after MMS. So I'll be looking forward to seeing her here as you say she plays the older lady. She reminds me of Jo Van Fleet, who was 40 and 45, respectively, in East of Eden and Wild River, playing much older women (albeit with proper makeup and wig applied). I guess she just had one of those faces that made producers/casting agents say, "Hey, she'd be perfect about 20-years-older!" I'm wondering if that's how they felt about Trevor. Anyway, I'm ready to roll, hopefully tonight after my wife is asleep and I can concentrate on some good Noir!

Raw Deal (1948)



Very good Noir starring Dennis O'Keefe as Joe Sullivan, who is in prison for taking the rap for something his associate Rick (Raymond Burr) did. Joe doesn't blame Rick, thinking he'll be sprung from prison and Rick will give him $50,000 for taking the fall for him. Bad move. Rick has no intention of letting Joe even meet him as they've never seen each other. Joe's woman, Pat Regan (Claire Trevor) comes to visit Joe and tells him that Rick has set up an escape for Joe that very night, and that she'll be waiting outside. When she gets to the prison to tell Joe the news, she's not too happy to see Joe's lawyer's assistant, Ann Martin (Marsha Hunt) leaving. Ann has been visiting Joe instead of his usual lawyer, as Ann has some starry-eyed notion of Joe, going from being a poor kid on the streets who saved some lives and somehow went wrong. She thinks he can be rehabilitated if he keeps "his nose clean" and gets out in maybe three years. Joe may be innocent of the crime he took the fall for but he's no boy scout. Pat doesn't know that Joe has been flirting with Ann during her visits.

Meanwhile, we see Rick and how ruthless he is. One of his henchmen, Fantail (John Ireland), has been goading Rick about his being nervous about Joe's escape. Rick assures Fantail that he's made sure that he'll get out but won't get far. When he finds out that Joe and Pat have slipped past roadblocks and can't be found, he gets real nervous. A woman who is dancing nearby at a party at Rick's accidentally bumps him and a drink gets spilled on him. He throws a flaming food dish on her, burning her. Yeah, Rick is a real bad egg.

Joe and Pat switch cars (read steal) several times and arrive in a stolen cab at Ann's apartment (she was stupid enough to give Joe her address---or was it an accident?) and kidnap her. Pat isn't happy with her being along, just knowing that Ann has the hots for Joe. She's not imagining things. We get to see the trio dodging the law and getting by with close scapes. Then Rick sends Fantail out to "meet" Joe, obstensibly to give him the $50,000 that Rick has no intention of paying. The fight is on and Joe has to battle his way to get to Rick, who is sweating bullets. One of the women gets put in peril, and the other has the chance to let her get rescued or die. Hmm, what will happen? There is action, twists, tension, and a fiery end for someone that is pretty great. The ending reminded me of the last scene of The Roaring Twenties so that may give away something. Still, top-notch stuff.

My favorite line: "Keep your eye on Miss Law and Order here. She may go soprano on us." Touching on that old prison/crime chestnut about people squealing or "singing."
I also liked the street name where Joe and Pat used to reside, Corkscrew Alley. A nice filmic moment from director Anthony Mann is where Pat is sweating out the time to when her and Joe's ship leaves, knowing that she should do something right but is putting it off. We see her profile, with clock on the wall a few feet away, but it looks like they're right beside each other. The next shot we see her guilty face actually reflected in the clock's plastic cover. Nice touches, all.



Going over his filmography, I didn't realize that I've seen Dennis O'Keefe in several films, mainly where he was the second lead, like under John Wayne in The Fighting Seebees (1944), You'll Find Out (1940). where's he's the romantic lead, although he's got a slew of stars ahead of him, including Kay Kyser (the famous movie-star/bandleader) and his band, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and Bela Lugosi. Yeah, it's a comedy, musical, thriller. but it's one of my favorite movies of its type. The 40s and 50s saw him in quite a few Film Noirs, but just as many Westerns, Musicals, and Comedies. The other film I really remember him in was All Hands on Deck (1961), where he was the skipper of a navy ship, and he was flustered at always having to deal with Pat Boone (who was constantly singing), Buddy Hackett (playing a Chickasaw Native American, yep) who is constantly trying to wrangle his pet turkey he's snuck onboard, and Barbara Eden, whom Boone has snuck onboard. But as I recall, O'Keefe was quite funny in it. Ya just got to be in the mood. Still, I'm looking forward to getting into more of his Noirs. He had a wide and varied career.

That's a good one, CR. Haven't seen it in years, so due for a re-watch. It's another film based on a Cornell Woolrich novel. I think that guy supplied the entire output of noir films....

I'd never seen No Man of Her Own until last night I just picked it as I thought my wife would like it and well I like Barbara Stanwyck

You are right! Cornell Woolrich's novels have a slew of films based on them, many of them noirs. This is from Wiki:

• Manhattan Love Song (1934) (based on the novel), directed by Leonard Fields
• Convicted (1938) (based on the short story "Face Work"), directed by Leon Barsha
• Street of Chance (1942) (based on the novel The Black Curtain), directed by Jack Hively
• The Leopard Man (1943) (novel Black Alibi), directed by Jacques Tourneur
• Phantom Lady (1944) (based on the novel), directed by Robert Siodmak
• The Mark of the Whistler (1944) (based on the story "Dormant Account"), directed by William Castle
• Deadline at Dawn (1946) (based on the novel), the only film directed by stage director Harold Clurman
• Black Angel (1946) (based on the novel), directed by Roy William Neill
• The Chase (1946) (based on the novel The Black Path of Fear). directed by Arthur Ripley
• Fall Guy (1947) (based on the story "Cocaine"), directed by Reginald Le Borg
• The Guilty (1947) (based on the story "He Looked Like Murder"), directed by John Reinhardt
• Fear in the Night (1947) (based on the story story "Nightmare"), directed by Maxwell Shane
• The Return of the Whistler (1948) (based on the story "All at Once, No Alice"), directed by D. Ross Lederman
• I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes (1948) (based on the story), directed by William Nigh
• Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948) (based on the novel), directed by John Farrow
• The Window (1949) (based on the story "The Boy Cried Murder"), directed by Ted Tetzlaff
• No Man of Her Own (1950) (based on the novel I Married a Dead Man), directed by Mitchell Leisen
• The Earring (1951) (based on the story "The Death Stone"), directed by León Klimovsky
• The Trace of Some Lips (1952)[9] (based on the story "Collared"), directed by Juan Bustillo Oro
• If I Should Die Before I Wake (1952),[10] directed by Carlos Hugo Christensen
• Don't Ever Open That Door (1952) (an anthology film based on the stories "Somebody on the Phone" and "Humming Bird Comes Home") directed by Carlos Hugo Christensen
• Rear Window (1954) (based on the story "It Had to Be Murder"), directed by Alfred Hitchcock
• Obsession (1954) (based on the story "Silent as the Grave"), directed by Jean Delannoy
• The Glass Eye (1956), directed by Antonio Santillán
• Nightmare (1956) (based on the story), directed by Maxwell Shane
• Escapade (1957) (based on the story "Cinderella and the Mob"), directed by Ralph Habib
• Ah, Bomb! (1964) (based on the story Adventures of a Fountain Pen), directed by Kihachi Okamoto
• The Boy Cried Murder (1966) (based on the story The Boy Cried Murder), directed by George P. Breakston
• The Bride Wore Black (1968) (based on the novel), directed by François Truffaut
• Mississippi Mermaid (1969) (based on the novel Waltz into Darkness), directed by François Truffaut
• Kati Patang (1970) (based on the novel I Married a Dead Man),[11] directed by Shakti Samanta
• Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (1972) (based on the novel Rendezvous in Black), directed by Umberto Lenzi
• You'll Never See Me Again (1973), TV Movie directed by Jeannot Szwarc
• Martha (1974) (based on the story For the Rest of Her Life), directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
• Gun Moll (1975) (based on the story "Collared"), directed by Giorgio Capitani
• Union City (1980) (based on the story "The Corpse Next Door"), directed by Marcus Reichert
• I Married a Shadow (1983) (based on the novel I Married a Dead Man)
• Cloak & Dagger (1984) (story "The Boy Who Cried Murder"), directed by Richard Franklin
• I'm Dangerous Tonight (1990) (based on the story "I'm Dangerous Tonight"), directed by Tobe Hooper
• Mrs. Winterbourne (1996) (based on the novel "I Married a Dead Man"), directed by Richard Benjamin
• Rear Window (1998) (based on the story "It Had to Be Murder"), directed by Jeff Bleckner
• Original Sin (2001) (based on the novel Waltz into Darkness), directed by Michael Cristofer
• Four O'Clock (2006) (based on the story "Three O'Clock")

No Man of Her Own sounds like a great one, CR! Thanks for the non-spoiler review. It's already on my Watch List, so I'm glad to hear it's a winner.

For some reason I was in the mood to see the following film that was made in three-strip Technicolor rather than the usual Noir black and white. And that film is:

Niagara (1953)



This was a highly enjoyable Noir with a nice cast including, of course, Marilyn Monroe along with Joseph Cotten, Jean Peters, and Max Showalter. We have a young couple (Peters and Showalter) traveling to their "real honeymoon" at Niagara Falls, which "coincidentally" dovetails with Showalter meeting with a higher-up in his job (along with his wife), so the two couples take all the tours of the Falls and go fishing, thus really ruining any shot at romance for Peters. It seems Showalter is all gung-ho to meet the businessman from his work as a little sucking-up never hurts. Peters isn't all that excited but she's good natured and she and her husband try to have a good time for a while, seeing the sites. But when they arrive, they find their cabin, which faces the good view of the falls, still taken up by Monroe and her husband Cotten. We see right away that there's something seriously wrong here. He seems to fly off the handle at the least little provocation from his wife, and she seems to get a thrill out of making him angry. But from the very moment she meets Peters and her husband, she starts to lay it on thick about how her husband is not quite right and has been "sick" and needs rest. So Peters and Showalter take another cabin. But Monroe is setting them up as witnesses, obviously.

In a great scene, Monroe gets into her va-va-voomiest (is that a real word?) dress and goes outside in the main courtyard where all the young couples are dancing to records and asks to put on a record she likes called "Kiss." She's also been humming this around Cotten and he doesn't like it. After building him as being "ill," he comes storming out of the cabin and breaks the record to pieces with his hands. Marilyn is gone by that time but Peters and Showalter see it. It's just the beginning of Marilyn's little tricks. Peters is not intimidated by Cotten and even tends to his hand. Showalter comes in and Cotten treats them to the view they would miss by not having their original cabin. Cotten talks about Monroe and loses his temper again and the young couple leave. Later, on a tour of the falls, Peters spies Monroe kissing someone who is not her husband. We, as viewers, are not surprised. Things continue to pile up until we see that Monroe, along with her lover, are planning on killing Cotten and making it look like an accident. But I could see what was coming at this point. Marilyn carries on about her husband being missing, laying it on thick. The police find a body and Marilyn is brought in to identify it. She passes out when she sees it. Then she begins to be haunted by the "Kiss" song from a tower near the falls that plays music.

This doesn't take away from the fun but one thing that does is that (SPOILER!) Cotten, having killed the lover, shows up where Peters is, all alone. Now, the fact that he's folllowing her after she learns he's alive is not surprising but one thing that kind of made me groan was when, after he was supposed to have skipped out, shows up exactly where Peters and her group are---not following them but trying to get across to the American side of the falls and he tries to steal the very boat they're going out fishing in, and she starts packing things on the boat alone while her husband and company are a little bit away, "doing something else."

We can chalk this up to the company man being pushy and assigning jobs to everyone, but she's packing the boat alone and there he is! The only thing that really softens this is that he never really means harm to Peters, but she is nevertheless put in danger when around him. This leads to a fairly exiting finale on the river and at the falls. And this is the only place that I can remember where rear-screen projection is used (obviously for safety's sake), but the rest of the movie is spendidly on-location and we get tons of beautiful scenery. This is a fun movie that kind of has a 50s-Hitchcock feel to it. Or maybe that's just me. Aside from the Cotten surprise appearance I mentioned, I had no trouble with the rest of the film. And for my money, Jean Peters was the star of the movie as she seemed to have the lion's share of screentime. She represented the audience's view of things, and maybe I'm in the minority here but I think she was way hotter than Monroe. I thought Monroe was lovely but I like the girl-next-door beauty much more in actresses like Peters. Directed by pro Henry Hathaway who is probably more known for his Western films with John Wayne. Hathaway does a great job here bringing out good performances from all the cast.

Undertow (1949)



Very good film starring Scott Brady as Tony, a guy just out of the Army after two stints (several sites mistakenly say that he was in prison, including IMDB!), who is eager to to start business in a Nevada cabin resort he's bought into with a friend and his son. But first he needs to get to Chicago to see his long-time girlfriend, Sally (Dorothy Hart). He first stops in Reno to visit an old friend, Danny (played by screen and tv great John Russell), who runs his own casino. After Danny offers him a spot at the casino, Tony says no thanks, that he wants to get to his gal. It seems the reason Tony went into the Army in the first place was because Sally's uncle didn't approve of him and had him run out of town. He's determined to go back and get the guy to reconsider. At the casino, and a short time later on the plane, he bumps into the same gal, Ann (played by the beyond-cute Peggy Dow) and she seems to quickly warm up to him, but looks disappointed when he mentions his gal. When he gets to Chicago, he's quickly snapped up by the cops who think he's going to cause trouble for Sally's uncle. He's greatly confused but they remind him that years before he promised to get back at the guy for running him off. He assures the cops he was just shooting off at the mouth and they reluctantly let him go. The uncle, Big Jim (whom we never see) is apparently a big deal in Chicago and maybe involved in shady business. All we know is that he's rich and he suddenly ends up dead, and Tony is pinned for the murder. He has nowhere to go but to his brief acquaintance, Ann, who lives in Chicago and gives Tony a place to hide out while they try to figure a way out for Tony.

This is a solid Film Noir, with Noir regular Brady doing a great job as a nice guy in over his head. Dow is loveable as Sally, who any guy would be lucky to meet, girlfriend on tap or not. John Russell is his usual great self, as someone who may know more than he's letting on. Bruce Bennett does a solid job as an old detective friend of Brady's who helps him out on the sly. It's not very long at 1hr, 11 min. but it packs it in for the short running time. And crazily enough, this one was filmed by famous "theatrical gimmick" director, William Castle and he does a fine job!

Undertow is one I heard of due to William Castle directing. I'll have to watch at some point as I've seen most of Castle's films and liked them.

Fired up City That Never Sleeps (1953) last night for a re-watch. It's a mediocre noir, but it has several personal attractions. The inimitable Marie Windsor is in it (my favorite "B" noir gal); fine cinematography by John L. Russell (Moonrise; Psycho); good turn by William Talman (D.A. Hamilton Burger in the '50s Perry Mason series); and a semi-strange suggested supernatural ending.

A narrator is a very common feature of noir films. But in "City", it's totally unique because the narrator is the city! A voice representing the city of Chicago does all the narration! I've never seen that before or since.

You know I don't think I've seen that one. I have it, I just checked so I'll have to watch it one of these days. I'm curious how Gig Young works out, he's an actor that I've been luke warm on in the past, but he has had his moments. You can count me as a fan of Marie Windsor, sometimes I'll watch a film just because she's in it. The whole city as a narrator makes me feel I do need to get this watched.