MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

Out of the shadows come Hollywood's greatest Film Noir masterpieces in one box set. These ten films are considered classics of the genre and feature silver screen legends, like Orson Wells, Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, and Glenn Ford. They also include very recognizable character actors who have become synonymous with the genre, such as Edmond O'Brien, Lawrence Tierney, and Cornel Wilde. So, get ready for some of the darkest and most exciting crime thrillers ever made in Hollywood! Includes these ten films: The Stranger, The Green Glove, He Walked By Night, Call It Murder, The Hitch Hiker, DOA, Detour, The Big Combo, Scarlet Street, and The Hoodlum.

DVD FEATURES:

• Number of Discs: 5
• Audio: Dolby Digital 5.1

AWARDS

• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

•     Nominated Best Original Story - 1946 (Victor Trivas)

• Library of Congress

•     Won U.S. National Film Registry - 1998
•     Won U.S. National Film Registry - 1991

• London Film Festival

•     Film Presented - 2006

• Telluride Film Festival

•     Film Presented - 1983
•     Film Presented - 1980

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Cast:

  
       Cornel Wilde - Leonard Diamond
       Allene Roberts
       Brian Donlevy - McClure
       Beverly Campbell - Miss Foster
       Byron Keith - Dr. Jeff Lawrence
       Billy House - Mr. Potter
       Ann Zika
       Arthur Loft - Dellarowe
       Granville Bates - Henry McGrath
       Charles Kemper - Patcheye
       Cay Forrester - Sue
       Anita Bolster - Mrs. Michaels
       Helen Flint - Ethel Saxon
       Fred Essler - Marchetti
       Edgar Dearing - Policeman
       Baynes Barron - Young Detective
       Chuck Hamilton - Chauffeur
       George Navarro - Salesman
       Brian O'Hara - Malloy
       Rita Gould - Nurse
       Michael Mark - Hotel Clerk
       Al Ferrara - Gas Station Attendant

• Director:

  Orson Welles, Rudolph Maté, Chester Erskine, Ida Lupino, Edgar G. Ulmer, Joseph H. Lewis, Fritz Lang, Max Nosseck, Alfred L. Werker

• Producer:

  Sam P. Eagle, Georges Maurer, Chester Erskine, Ida Lupino, Collier Young, Leo C. Popkin, Leon Fromkess, Sidney Harmon, Fritz Lang, Walter Wanger, Jack Schwartz, Maurice Kasloff, Bryan Foy, Robert Kane

• Screenwriter:

  John Huston, Victor Trivas, Anthony Veiller, Orson Welles, Decla Dunning, Charles Bennett, Chester Erskine

• Play Author:

  Claire Sifton, Paul Sifton

• Screenwriter:

  Ida Lupino, Collier Young, Robert L. Joseph

• Screen Story:

  Clarence Greene

• Screenwriter:

  Clarence Greene

• Screen Story:

  Russell Rouse

• Screenwriter:

  Russell Rouse, Martin G. Goldsmith

• Book Author:

  M.M. Goldsmith

• Screenwriter:

  Philip Yordan

• Book Author:

  André Mouezy-Eon

• Screenwriter:

  Dudley Nichols

• Play Author:

  Georges de la Fouchardiere

• Screenwriter:

  Sam Neuman, Nat Tanchuck, Harry J. Essex, John C. Higgins, Crane Wilbur, Beck Murray

• Cinematographer:

  Russell Metty, Claude Renoir, Nick Musuraca, Ernest Laszlo, Ben Kline, John Alton, Milton Krasner, Maj. Clark Ramsey

• Composer (Music Score):

  Bronislau Kaper, Joseph Kosma

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Constantin Bakaleinikoff

• Composer (Music Score):

  Leith Stevens, Dimitri Tiomkin

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Dimitri Tiomkin

• Composer (Music Score):

  Leo Erdody, David Raksin, Hans Salter, Darrell Calker

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Irving Friedman

• Composer (Music Score):

  Leonid Raab

• Editor:

  Ernest Nims, Lola Barache, Douglas Stewart, Arthur H. Nadel, George McGuire, Robert S. Eisen, Arthur D. Hilton, Jack Killifer, Alfred de Gaetano

• Production Designer:

  Rudi Feld

• Art Director:

  Perry Ferguson, Alexandre Trauner, Albert S. D'Agostino, Walter E. Keller, Duncan Cramer, Edward C. Jewell, William Calihan, Jr., Alexander Golitzen, John B. Goodman, Fred Preble, Edward Ilou

• Associate Producer:

  Joseph H. Nadel, Martin E. Mooney

• Executive Producer:

  Harry M. Popkin

• Set Designer:

  Al Orenbach, Glenn Thompson, Russell A. Gausman, Carl Lawrence, Armor E. Marlowe, Clarence I. Steensen

• Costume Designer:

  Michael Woulfe, Maria P. Donovan, Mona Barry, Don Loper, Travis Banton

• Sound/Sound Designer:

  Arthur Johns, Corson Jowett, Mac Dalgleish, Ben Winkler, Glenn E. Anderson, Bernard B. Brown

• Makeup:

  Irving Berns, Bud Westmore, Jack Pierce, Ern Westmore, Joe Stinton

• Special Effects:

  Harold E. Wellman, John P. Fulton, Jack R. Rabin, George J. Teague

• First Assistant Director:

  Melville Shyer, Howard W. Koch

• Short Story Author:

  Daniel Mainwaring

• Script Supervisor:

  Arnold Laven

REVIEWS:

• A taut, thrilling B-movie, The Hitch-Hiker features fasten-your-seatbelts, edge-of-your-seat tension from start to finish. Ida Lupino really makes her mark here as a director with a film that is as tough and merciless as anything any of her male counterparts were creating at the time. Edmund O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy are good as regular joes who are on the longest and worst fishing trip of their lives. But it's William Talman as their sadistic kidnapper who is brilliant. This is one of those performances that all future criminal scumball characters can be measured by. Talman's cold-blooded killer personifies America's deepest fears about random crime that can strike anyone anywhere. ~ Adam Bregman, Rovi
• Based on a true story, He Walked By Night (1948) transcends its B-movie origins through a combination of crime-fighting realism and starkly stylish film noir visuals. Directed by Alfred L. Werker and an uncredited Anthony Mann for Poverty Row studio Eagle-Lion, the documentary-style voiceover narration and emphasis on Los Angeles police procedure, especially by Jack Webb's evidence expert, tautly builds suspense from the real-life (and then-newfangled) tools of police investigation, rather than from excessive heroics or emotionality. Cinematographer John Alton's deep focus shots, chiaroscuro nocturnal lighting, and oblique camera angles match the inner menace of Richard Basehart's intelligent and unbalanced cop killer, and they help orchestrate a climactic chase through the Los Angeles storm drain system that rivals the sewer sequence in The Third Man (1949). Part of a wave of 1940s semi-documentary crime movies that included progenitor The House on 92nd Street (1945), Kiss of Death (1947), and Elia Kazan's Boomerang! (1947), He Walked By Night inspired Webb to create his "just the facts, ma'am" Dragnet series on radio and TV. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi
• Edgar G. Ulmer was one of the very few filmmakers who was able to carve out a distinctive and memorable style while working in the lowest depths of Hollywood's Poverty Row, and he rarely wrung more from less than in Detour. Detour was shot in a mere six days, and one look at the shoddy, minimalist sets or the clumsy, in-the-camera optical effects makes clear that this movie wasn't meant to be anything more than another dingy time-filler from PRC Pictures. But screenwriter Martin G. Goldsmith filled this tawdry crime story with a cheap but expressive poetry (the cynical bite of Tom Neal's narration and Ann Savage's venomous dialogue tapped a well of bitterness rare even in film noir of the period), and Ulmer made the most of it, filling the film with an air of dread and weary hopelessness. Ulmer's bold compositional framings and effective use of visual shorthand gives a real and effective visual style, something few of the hacks at PRC could be bothered with (cameraman Ben Kline certainly helped), and if there's little subtlety in the performances of fatalistic Tom Neal and shrewish Ann Savage, they suit the tone of the screenplay and add to the film's blunt impact. Detour isn't quite the masterwork film cultists sometimes make it out to be, but it's still a darkly fascinating little film that proves the right director could make something powerful and expressive even out of the most shoddy materials available. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
• German-American master Fritz Lang produced and directed this gritty film noir for Universal Pictures, notable as the first Hollywood feature in which the real criminal goes unpunished. When a mild-mannered cashier (Edward G. Robinson) becomes enamored with an amoral woman (Joan Bennett), she ensnares him in an embezzlement scheme which leads to a murder. Her lover is fingered and executed for the murder, while Robinson's character gets off free. Lang's daring, almost assaultive imagery divided critics and audiences who might have expected less Gothic melodrama. Robinson and Bennett are chilling villains in an era when it was rare not to tack on a happy, or at least moralistic, ending. The script was adapted by Dudley Nichols from a French play filmed by Jean Renoir as La Chienne. ~ Michael Betzold, Rovi
• One of the most definitive films noirs, the suspenseful D.O.A. also features one of the greatest conceits in film history: a man trying to solve his own murder. Not many movies can boast the line, "You've been murdered." The existential anxieties lurking in other film noirs are at the forefront of D.O.A.: the "walking dead man" metaphor is no longer merely a metaphor. The underrated Edmond O'Brien was at his finest as the accountant fighting a fatal, slow-acting poison. The film was the first directorial effort from famed cinematographer Rudolph Mate (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr), and would be his most enduring film. Though the production values were in keeping with B-movies of the time, the stylish black-and-white cinematography of Ernest Laszlo was creative even by expressionistic standards. D.O.A. has been remade twice, first as the average Color Me Dead and then as 1988's vapid D.O.A. (1988). ~ Brendon Hanley, Rovi
• The abstract beauty of Joseph H. Lewis' harsh, classic noir may be the best work of legendary cinematographer John Alton in the genre he did so much to shape. Although tightly scripted, the banal tale of a cop's obsessive quest to nail a powerful mobster would seem to hold few surprises, but here the plot elements are overwhelmed by a subtext of erotic obsession and implied depravity. Cornel Wilde's investigation is clearly driven by his worship of nice-girl-gone-bad Jean Wallace, who is held in sexual thrall by Richard Conte's mobster. In the film's most controversial scene, the gangster silences her words of contempt by working his way down her body with kisses to an ecstatic response. The film's uglier violence is often offscreen, but a notoriously inventive Tarantino-like torture sequence involving a hearing aid is enough to sustain its lurid tone. Alton is the film's major factor, and his brilliant low-key lighting effects and imaginative camera placement effectively mask the limitations of Wilde, Wallace, and the sometimes inane dialogue. In a film that is often literally very dark, the cameraman's geometrical shafts of light seem to fall across this unsavory crew with an accusatory glare. ~ Michael Costello, Rovi
• The Green Glove is a Hitchcock-ian thriller that would have benefited from the master's touch -- as well as from the more generous budgets that Hitchcock would have commanded. It's not that director Rudolph Mate's work is in any way bad; as a matter of fact, there are some moments that are quite good. But Glove needs someone with a vision that is simultaneously larger and more focused than that which Mate brings to this particular project. It also needs someone with the ability to tease out the potentially fascinating story in Charles Bennett's screenplay that is hindered by characters that lack depth and motivations which seem to exist merely to get from one plot point to another. Still, when Mate and Bennett do fuse, as in the marvelous goat path chase, the results are electrifying. Glove is also hindered by a rather ho-hum lead turn from Glenn Ford and a female lead (Geraldine Brooks) who tries hard but never really can find much to do with her part beyond the obvious. Much better are George Macready and, though he has little do, Cedric Hardwicke. Better than anything, however, are the captivating location shooting in Paris and Monte Carlo, vividly captured by cinematographer Claude Renoir. ~ Craig Butler, Rovi