Two decades and going strong, it's the Guild Cinema's annual July Film Noir Festival. Here is our first batch of samples:
ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW (1959) (A-minus) - Racial tensions undergird this realist heist film from Robert Wise, starring Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan and our favorite, Gloria Grahame. The glue holding it all together, though, is veteran character actor Ed Begley as the ex-cop who brings Belafonte's Johnny and Ryan's Earle together for a bank score.
Johnny is divorced, settling for visitation with his 6-year-old daughter. A scene with the two of them attending a carnival is vividly rendered, as Johnny is distracted by the impending bill coming due for his $7,500 in gambling debts and by the logistical planning for the heist that he hopes will erase those debts. The miserable Earle lives in a cramped apartment with Lorry (Shelley Winters), who improbably puts up with his sour demeanor on every subject (most notably his ingrained prejudices sparked by the idea of working with a black partner). Begley figures his scheme can't miss, and cobbles together his team of misfits by promising them each $50,000 and keeping Earle's slurs in check.
This is the film that Wise, an old RKO hand, made at the end of the '50s before he directed his calling card, "West Side Story." His black-and-white streets are bustling and a little grimy. He brings realism to upstate New York in towns along the Hudson River. The dialogue from a triumvirate of writers is facile and biting. They establish Earle's racism early on, but they don't let it consume the story.
The supporting cast here is strong. Richard Bright (Michael Corleone's enforcer Al Neri in the "Godfather" trilogy) leers at Johnny lasciviously as the mob boss' henchman. Winters is saucy as Earle's wisecracking girlfriend who just can't quit him. And Grahame lights up the screen as their frisky neighbor lady. The heist doesn't kick in until the final 20 minutes, culminating in a shootout and foot chase that leads to a spectacular climax and a clever ending that exposes the folly of judging and hating another based solely on the color of their skin.
SPOTTED: Wayne Rogers, who would populate the original cast of TV's "MASH," plays a soldier at a bar. ... Mel Stewart (Henry Jefferson on "All in the Family" and the boss on "Scarecrow and Mrs. King") is a chatty elevator operator. ... And don't miss a cameo by the stunning dancer Carmen De Lavallade as Johnny's estranged gal. (When he gives her a less-than-passionate kiss, she chirps, "That's good. But it was better when you wanted it.")
PEEPING TOM (1960) (C+) - This one goes nowhere fast. It's a creepy British offering that crawls out of the dregs of the noir era, focusing on a serial killer who gets off on filming women before he kills them. The glitch here is that Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), who was abused as a child and still lives in his parents' mansion that he partially lets out to boarders, is compelled to kill whichever women he trains his camera on.
He feels the need to reel in his mania when he meets mousy Helen (Anna Massey), who lives below him with her blind mother (a chilling Maxine Audley) and falls for the conventionally handsome Mark. She and her mom are curious about Mark's upstairs film-viewing activities. Meantime, a rather ineffective group of detectives belatedly follows the trail but gets nowhere close to nabbing Mark.
The journeyman production team -- from director (Michael Powell, "Black Narcissus") to writer to cast -- march through this limp horror procedural, which tends to grow tedious before it runs its 101-minute course. It has echoes of "Psycho," which came out the same year, but Boehm is just too stilted, and the would-be romance much too chaste, for any of this to gel into something resembling a thriller.
SPOTTED: This is a British one, and so the C-listers don't really jog the memory. Nigel Davenport (as a detective here) would be a busy character actor who had a role in "Chariots of Fire."
THE GLASS KEY (1942) (B-minus) - The oldest picture of the bunch mixes gangsters and politicians in a story based on a Dashiell Hammett novel. No one here has much of a grasp on Hammett's wise-guy dialogue, most notably Alan Ladd, a weak link here as Ed Beaumont, a crooked pol's fiercely loyal right-hand man who digs into a murder that is being pinned on his boss.
Brian Donlevy is strong as that that slimy pol, Paul Madvig, who is trying to ride the coattails of a gubernatorial candidate, whose daughter Janet (Veronica Lake) juggles Paul and Ed. The governor hopeful's ne'er-do-well son ends up dead, and a mobster (Joseph Calleia) seeks to pin it on Madvig, who has been cracking down on the mobster's turf.
The plot is convoluted beyond words. There are so many characters that they keep having to call each other by their name to aid the viewer in tracking the players, and excessive exposition is needed to keep things straight, up until the twisty-turny final act. Donlevy gets Hammett's cadences, and William Bendix (TV's "Life of Riley") hams it up swell as the mobster's goon. But the whole 85 minutes can be dizzying and frustrating. The visuals are bland -- the director is journeyman Stuart Heisler -- except for an overhead shot of Ladd plunging through a roof and landing in the middle of a quartet's dinner table below.
Lake has the anemic screen presence of a hemophiliac prince. She has a hushed gun-moll voice, and her acting chops consist mostly of coy side glances. Pretty-boy Ladd is a lightweight, too. The two stars -- who were quite the box-office Ken and Barbie in the '40s -- get in the way of a messy story.
SPOTTED: As a waiter serving beers, the rotund Vernon Dent, familiar to viewers as as the stuffy foil in countless Three Stooges shorts.
BONUS TRACK
Harry Belafonte slinging the blues in "Odds," with "My Baby's Not Around" (featuring the catty Richard Bright):
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