Film Noir Classic Collection: 5 Timeless Suspense Thrillers [5 Discs]

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

This box set combines five of the finest film noirs in Hollywood history. The Asphalt Jungle, Gun Crazy, Murder, My Sweet, Out of the Past, and The Set-Up are each presented in their original theatrical aspect ratio. English soundtracks are rendered in Dolby Digital Mono. Commentaries by either film noir experts or the filmmakers themselves grace every one of these releases, making each of them a worthwhile addition to any DVD library. Each of these discs is available individually, but this set offers the most cost-effective way to acquire all five. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi

DVD FEATURES:

• Region: 1
• Number of Discs: 5
• Screen: Black and White
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 (Pre-1954 Standard)
• Audio: Dolby Digital Mono
• Features:
  • cc
  • Commentary with film noir experts on all titles, including director Robert Wise and Martin Scorsese on The Set-Up and co-star James Whitmore on The Asphalt Jungle
  • Plus more DVD extras

AWARDS

• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

•     Nominated Best Black and White Cinematography - 1950 (Harold Hal Rosson)
•     Nominated Best Director - 1950 (John Huston)
•     Nominated Best Screenplay - 1950 (Ben Maddow, John Huston)
•     Nominated Best Supporting Actor - 1950 (Sam Jaffe)

• British Academy of Film and Television Arts

•     Nominated Best Film - Any Source - 1950 (John Huston)
•     Nominated Best Film - Any Source - 1949 (Robert Wise)

• Directors Guild of America

•     Nominated Best Director - 1950 (John Huston)

• Edgar Allan Poe Awards

•     Won Best Screenplay - 1950 (John Huston)
•     Won Best Screenplay - 1945 (John Paxton)

• Hollywood Foreign Press Association

•     Nominated Best Cinematography - Black and White - 1950 (Harold Hal Rosson)
•     Nominated Best Director - 1950 (John Huston)
•     Nominated Best Screenplay - 1950 (Ben Maddow, John Huston)

• Library of Congress

•     Won U.S. National Film Registry - 1998
•     Won U.S. National Film Registry - 1990

• National Board of Review

•     Won Best Director - 1950 (John Huston)
•     Nominated Best Picture - 1950

• Telluride Film Festival

•     Film Presented - 1980
•     Film Presented - 1979

• Venice International Film Festival

•     Won International Prize for Best Actor - 1950 (Sam Jaffe)

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Cast:

  
       Dick Powell - Philip Marlowe
       Audrey Totter - Julie Thompson
       Anne Shirley - Ann Grayle
       Alan Baxter - Little Boy
       Anabel Shaw - Ruby Tare
       John McIntire - Police Commissioner Hardy
       Douglas Walton - Marriott
       Barry Kelley - Lt. Ditrich
       Anthony Caruso - Louis Ciavelli
       Esther Howard - Mrs. Florian
       David Clarke - Gunboat Johnson
       David Bair - Dave Allister, Age 14
       Dorothy Tree - May Emmerich
       Brad Dexter - Bob Brannen
       Anne O'Neal - Miss Sifert
       Don Beddoe - Man From Chicago
       Robert Osterloh - Hampton Policeman
       Shimen Ruskin - Taxi Driver
       Harry Hayden - Mr. Mallenberg
       Abe Dinovitch - Ring Caller

• Director:

  John Huston, Joseph H. Lewis, Edward Dmytryk, Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise

• Producer:

  Arthur Hornblow, Jr., Frank King, Maurice King, Adrian Scott, Warren B. Duff, Robert Sparks, Richard Goldstone

• Book Author:

  W.R. Burnett

• Screenwriter:

  John Huston, Ben Maddow, MacKinlay Kantor, Millard Kaufman, Dalton Trumbo

• Book Author:

  Raymond Chandler

• Screenwriter:

  John Paxton, Geoffrey Homes

• Book Author:

  Geoffrey Homes

• Screenwriter:

  Art Cohn

• Cinematographer:

  Harold Hal Rosson, Russell Harlan, Harry J. Wild, Nick Musuraca, Milton Krasner

• Composer (Music Score):

  Miklos Rozsa, Victor Young

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Sidney B. Cutner, Leo Shuken, Constantin Bakaleinikoff

• Composer (Music Score):

  Roy Webb

• Editor:

  George Boemler, Harry Gerstad, Joseph Noriega, Samuel E. Beetley, Roland Gross

• Production Designer:

  Gordon Wiles

• Art Director:

  Randall Duell, Cedric Gibbons, Carroll Clark, Albert S. D'Agostino, Jack Okey

• Executive Producer:

  Sid Rogell

• Set Designer:

  Jack D. Moore, Edwin B. Willis, Raymond Boltz, Darrell Silvera, Michael Orenbach, James Altwies

• Costume Designer:

  Norma, Edward Stevenson

• Sound/Sound Designer:

  Douglas Shearer, Tom Lambert, James G. Stewart, Clem Portman, Francis M. Sarver, Phil Brigandi

• Makeup:

  Jack Dawn, Gordon Bau, Joe Norrin, Bill Phillips

• Special Effects:

  Vernon Walker, Russell A. Cully

• First Assistant Director:

  William Dorfman, Edward Killy

• Consultant/advisor:

  John Indrisano

REVIEWS:

• Edward Dmytryk's sharp, skillfully made noir arguably captures the wit and verbal fluency of Raymond Chandler's style more faithfully than any of the other films made from his books. One of the key early noirs, it revived the career of Powell, who was by then eager to escape his choir-boy image. Through the use of voice-over narration, the film is able to retain the writer's vision of rot beneath the cheery surfaces of the City of Angels, as the sardonic detective keeps up a running commentary on the far from angelic gallery of characters. While his disdain is evenly spread, he reserves his greatest contempt for Otto Kruger's quack "psychic advisor," a precursor to New Age con artists of more modern vintage. Hired by a Frankenstein-like ex-con to find his old girl friend, Powell's Marlowe seems to either get cold-cocked or drugged in every other scene, a state of affairs he comes to regard with bemused detachment. A sequence in which Marlowe has been fed some malign psychoactive substance now seems especially funny due to the now less-than-frightening special effects. Unlike most noirs, in which the protagonist is overwhelmed by a nightmarish sense of disorientation, Chandler's detective has the wit of the only sane man in a world gone mad. Powell is perfect as the snarky, semi-tough hero, and Claire Trevor makes a slyly elusive femme fatale. ~ Michael Costello, Rovi
• Much imitated, The Asphalt Jungle was one of the first caper films to show a crime and its consequences from the criminals' point of view. It's one of director John Huston's most gritty and suspenseful films, centering on a recently paroled criminal's scheme to make one last big hit. The cast of reliable character actors includes Sterling Hayden, James Whitmore and Sam Jaffe, and a little-known seductress named Marilyn Monroe, who had a small part. Based on a novel by W.R. Burnett, The Asphalt Jungle was innovative for 1950, as Huston told a crime-doesn't-pay story without the usual distancing and moralizing. It is more of a character study than an action film, and countless films that came later, all the way to Pulp Fiction, have paid it homage, some unknowingly. Some of the more direct remakes of the same plot include Cairo, A Cool Breeze, and The Badlanders. ~ Michael Betzold, Rovi
• Robert Wise's blistering tour de force on the fight game, a key influence on Martin Scorsese's seminal Raging Bull (1980), remains one of the best films on that world. An undefeated boxing champion while at Dartmouth, Robert Ryan gives what's likely his best performance as the over-the-hill pug who balks when ordered by his manager to throw a fight. Wise throws the harshest possible light not only on the well-known corruption of game, on the seediness of the milieu, and the grueling punishment absorbed by the fighters, but also on the febrile bloodlust of the fans, for whom the director reserves his greatest revulsion. As the film unfolds in "real" time, it touches briefly on the range of boxers on that night's card, and from the nervous young kid to the washed-up middle-weight, all are equally mesmerized by the mythology of their craft. In the main event, Ryan absorbs perhaps the worst pre-Scorsese battering on celluloid. Noir icon Audrey Totter evinces an unexpected tenderness as Ryan's concerned wife, and James Edwards is poignant as a fighter on the slide. ~ Michael Costello, Rovi
• While often compared to Bonnie and Clyde, which it preceded by nearly 20 years, Gun Crazy is in many ways a more daring and disturbing film; while the leads lack the skill and charisma of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, and the picture is sometimes betrayed by its obvious low budget, director Joseph H. Lewis gives his story a subversive sexual economy that's more provocative than that of Arthur Penn's later (and bolder) variation, and his bluntly energetic and inventive visual storytelling helped make Gun Crazy one of the most fabled low-budget crime pictures of the 1940s. The doomed romance between weak-willed sharpshooter Bart Tare (John Dall), who loves guns but lacks the courage to kill, and Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins), who is the aggressor in the relationship but can't shoot with the same grace and elan as Bart, can be read on several different levels, none of them especially healthy. While the film satisfied the edicts of 1940s film censorship, lust has rarely seemed more vivid than between Bart and Annie; their relationship is based less on love than on pure animal instinct, and Lewis makes it seem both compelling and unwholesome. Within moments of meeting each other, Bart and Annie seem bound for life and on the fast track to damnation, with no repentance possible or requested; Jim Thompson never imagined a couple as doomed and damaged as these two. And Lewis takes visual chances that one would hardly expect from a 1940s B-movie -- especially the justifiably famous robbery sequence, shot in one take from the back seat of a car -- giving the picture an inventive style that makes the material all the more effective. If Gun Crazy's ambitions sometimes outstrip its means, Lewis got enough of his ideas on the screen to make this one of the most fascinating and thought-provoking crime films of its era. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
• With its doomed anti-hero, conniving villain, sardonic script, moody black-and-white photography, and icy femme fatale, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947) is essential film noir. Opening in an idyllic small town, the movie literalizes down-and-out detective Jeff Bailey's confrontation with his past through an extended flashback depicting his moral downfall. Jeff's past exists in cities and exotic hideouts swathed in expressionistic shadows; Kathie (Jane Greer) may first appear as a beautiful vision in white, but, as she steps through a darkened doorway, momentarily blacking out her face, Jeff knows she's bad news. The past becomes the present as Jeff is inexorably drawn into a violent series of double-crossings that exemplify the noir universe's tangled amorality. The bad may be punished, but Out of the Past's downbeat ending draws the ultra-pessimistic conclusion that past mistakes are impossible to overcome, and redemption is not available even to those who want it. Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas were praised for their early starring turns as Jeff and Whit, as was Jane Greer for her lethal femme fatale. The film was remade in 1984 as Against All Odds.44684 ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi