Film Noir Classics Collection, Vol. 5 [4 Discs]

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

Cornered (1945): From England to continental Europe to Buenos Aires, ex-RCAF pilot Dick Powell stalks the Nazi collaborator who murdered his bride. But one fact constantly surfaces during his quest: no one can describe the mysterious man. Joining Powell in the film shadows are the director and other key talent behind Murder, My Sweet of the year before. Desperate (1947): Desperate is the first of seven atmospheric noirs directed by Anthony Mann. Steve Brodie is a postwar Everyman who accepts what he thinks is an honest trucking job, only to find he's the driver in a botched heist that puts Brodie and his bride (Audrey Long) on the run from the cops and the cons who planned the job (including chief thug Raymond Burr). The Phenix City Story (1955): Corruption, brutality and vice plagued Phenix City, Alabama, for 100 years, so who would dare to change it? Based on real-life events and filmed on location in what was called Sin City USA, director Phil Karlson's semi-documentary tells the jolting tale of those who risked their lives to bring the burg's syndicate of thugs and murderers to justice. Dial 1119 (1950): An asylum inmate escapes to the city, where he takes hostages at a local dive, guns down a bar employee and warns authorities his captives will be next if the doctor whose testimony first put him away doesn't arrive within the hour. A bit of casting irony goes with the movie's then-novel use of TV news coverage: actors Marshall Thompson, William Conrad, Keefe Brasselle and Leon Ames would have significant career ventures in television. Includes Dial 1119 Theatrical Trailer Armored Car Robbery (1950): Richard Fleischer directs this brute-force milestone about a deadly heist and the battle of wits and firepower between a fugitive gangster (William Talman) and his stripper moll (Adele Jergens) and a bulldog cop (Charles McGraw), out to avenge his partner's death, who uses hidden microphones, lab work and his own well-honed instincts to close the net. Crime in the Streets (1956): Following a turf rumble with a rival group, street gang leader John Cassavetes tells his gang to do what they've never done before: kill a snitch. Reginald Rose wrote and Don Siegel directs a jazz-riffing screen version of a tale first seen on TV and co-starring James Whitmore and Sal Mineo. Includes Both Movies' Theatrical Trailers Deadline At Dawn (1946): A gangster's sister lies dead. All clues point to sailor Bill Williams as the murderer. Slated to depart for duty at dawn, the swabbie, aided by good-hearted dime-a-dancer Susan Hayward and affable cabbie Paul Lukas, has mere hours to prove his innocence. The tangy Clifford Odets script is based on a novel by William Irish (pseudonym of Cornell Woolrich). Backfire (1950): Vincent Sherman directs this gripping yarn about recovering war veteran Gordon MacRae's quest to prove pal Edmond O'Brien innocent of murder. Aiding him is his resourceful nurse Virginia Mayo. And a secretive doctor, a lively undertaker, a desperate gambler, a dying witness and a haunting Viennese melody all lead them to a shocking climax. Includes Deadline at Dawn Radio Show

DVD FEATURES:

• Region: 1
• Number of Discs: 4
• Audio: Dolby Digital Mono
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 (Pre-1954 Standard)
• Screen: Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV
• Subtitle: Eng/Fre/Spa
• Features:
  • Theatrical trailers on 2 titles

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Cast:

  
       Charles McGraw - Lt. Jim Codell
       Adele Jergens - Yvonne
       Bill Williams - Alex Winkley
       Dane Clark - Ben Arno
       Denise Alexander - Maria Gioia
       Biff McGuire - Fred Gage
       Don Haggerty - Cuyler
       Jack LaRue - Diego
       Gene Evans - Ace Foster
       Dan Terranova - Blockbuster
       Joe Sawyer - Babe Dooley
       Allen Nourse - Jeb Bassett
       James Edwards - Zeke Ward
       James Ogg - Lenny
       Otto Hulett - Hugh Bentley
       Duke Mitchell - Herky
       Dick Curtis - Redtop
       Al Bridge - Detective Smiley

• Director:

  Edward Dmytryk, Anthony Mann, Phil Karlson, Gerald Mayer, Richard Fleischer, Don Siegel, Harold Clurman, Vincent Sherman

• Producer:

  Adrian Scott, Michael Kraike, Sam Bischoff, David Diamond, Richard Goldstone, Herman Schlom, Vincent M. Fennelly, Anthony Veiller

• Screenwriter:

  John Paxton, Harry J. Essex, Martin Rackin, Daniel Mainwaring, Crane Wilbur

• Screen Story:

  Don McGuire

• Screenwriter:

  John Monks, Jr.

• Screen Story:

  Hugh King

• Screenwriter:

  Gerald Drayson Adams

• Screen Story:

  Robert Angus

• Screenwriter:

  Earl Felton, Reginald Rose

• Play Author:

  Reginald Rose

• Screenwriter:

  Clifford Odets, Cornell Woolrich, Ivan Goff, Lawrence B. Marcus, Ben Roberts

• Cinematographer:

  Harry J. Wild, George E. Diskant, Harry Neumann, Paul Vogel, Guy Roe, Sam Leavitt, Nick Musuraca, Carl Guthrie

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Constantin Bakaleinikoff

• Composer (Music Score):

  Roy Webb, Paul Sawtell

• Songwriter:

  Harold Spina

• Composer (Music Score):

  Harry Sukman

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Harry Sukman

• Composer (Music Score):

  Andre Previn

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Andre Previn

• Composer (Music Score):

  Franz Waxman, Hanns Eisler, Daniele Amfitheatrof, Ray Heindorf

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Ray Heindorf

• Editor:

  Joseph Noriega, Marston Fay, George White, Newell P. Kimlin, Desmond Marquette, Richard Meyer, Roland Gross, Thomas Reilly

• Art Director:

  Carroll Clark, Albert S. D'Agostino, Walter E. Keller, Stanley Fleischer, William Ferrari, Cedric Gibbons, Ralph Berger, Serge Krizman, Jack Okey, Anton Grot

• Executive Producer:

  Sid Rogell

• Set Designer:

  Darrell Silvera, Alfred E. Spencer, Edwin B. Willis, James Altwies, William Wallace

• Costume Designer:

  Renie, Chuck Keehne, Ann Peck, Milo Anderson, Leah Rhoads

• Sound/Sound Designer:

  Terry Kellum, Richard VanHessen, A. Earl Wolcott, Robert B. Lee, Clem Portman, Frank Sarver, James G. Stewart

• Makeup:

  Mel Berns, William J. Tuttle, Mel Burns, Ed Voight, Perc Westmore

• Special Effects:

  Russell A. Cully, Arnold A. Gillespie, Vernon Walker

• First Assistant Director:

  Ruby Rosenberg, Maurice Vaccarino, William Dorfman

• Short Story Author:

  Dorothy Atlas, Robert Leeds, Cornell Woolrich

REVIEWS:

• Deadline at Dawn wants to be a crackling good mystery, but it unfortunately keeps coming down with a case of artsiness. The basic set-up, from a Cornell Woolrich story, has some great elements, and as the film goes about laying out its story, one can see that with Howard Hawks at the helm and with a screenwriter well-versed in the wisecrack and snappy rejoinder, Deadline could have been a nifty little noir-ish escapade. Unfortunately, with Harold Clurman in the director's seat and with Clifford Odets supplying the dialogue, what one gets is a soppy, muddy and pretentious treatment that doesn't sit well with the basic material. Odets being Odets, there is certainly a flavor to the dialogue, and at times it's beautiful and poetic. More often, however, it's annoyingly artificial, and eventually one wants the characters to stop trying to impress with their vocabulary and their ideas and simply talk in a normal manner that gets the story moving. The cast is good, which helps a great deal, with all the players deserving kudos. But first among equals is Susan Hayward, always to be counted on to deliver a powerful performance and shining even when the dialogue she's given should induce winces. ~ Craig Butler, Rovi
• Don Siegel's Crime in the Streets was adapted for the screen by Reginald Rose, who'd originally written it for a presentation of The Elgin Hour on television in 1955. John Cassavetes, Mark Rydell, and Will Kuluva played the same roles in the small-screen version -- which was directed by Sidney Lumet and featured Glenda Farrell as Mrs. Dane, a young Van Dyke Parks as Richie, Ivan Cury as "Baby," and Robert Preston as Ben Wagner. The feature-film script feels padded out a bit, though Siegel does his best to keep the camera moving and the images -- most of them violent -- flowing out at a good clip, so that visually it's never dull. In the end, he, cinematographer Sam Leavitt, editor Richard Meyer, and composer Franz Waxman (working a surprisingly raw, modernistic mode, not far removed from what Leonard Bernstein did in On the Waterfront) make almost more of this than Rose's script will carry. The performances by Cassavetes and company are still fascinating to watch, even if the script and the sensibilities behind it have dated somewhat in the ensuing half century, and Siegel's overall handling of the material makes it one of the better and more enduring dramas about urban delinquency, as he underplays the script's preachiness in favor of some more enduring images and conflicts contained within its structure. The trick for modern viewers may be to find an intact version of the movie -- the 2006 theatrical showing at New York's Film Forum, in its Don Siegel retrospective, utilized a worn if serviceable TV print. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi
• One of the most violent and realistic crime films of the 1950s, The Phenix City Story pulses with the bracing energy of actual life captured on the screen in its establishing shots and key scenes, and punctuates that background with explosively filmed action scenes. Director Phil Karlson showed just how good he was at merging well-told screen drama with vivid verisimilitude, and leaving no seams to show where they joined. Filmed on location in Alabama with a documentary-like look, the movie captured the ambiance and tenor of its Deep South setting better than almost any other fact-based movie of its era. Richard Kiley and John McIntire are excellent in their respective roles, as John and Albert Patterson, and get superb assistance from an array of fine actors, the best among them Edward Andrews as the slimy crime boss, James Edwards as a victim of the brutality around him, and John Larch as a brutal strongarm man.
  
  (Note: As fine a film as The Phenix City Story is, it doesn't tell you all that happened with the real-life figure at its center -- the real John Patterson [who did, indeed, somewhat resemble Richard Kiley physically], the hero of this story, who was in many ways a reform-minded attorney general. However, he was also a dedicated segregationist, a fact never even hinted at in the movie; indeed, as attorney general, he was best known not so much for battling organized crime as for blocking black citizen boycotts in Tuskegee and Montgomery, and successfully banning the NAACP from organizing in the state of Alabama. In 1958, he became the youngest man ever to win the governorship, succeeding the progressive Big Jim Folsom by running a virulently racist campaign against Folsom protege George Wallace, who, in those days, was a much more liberal figure on racial issues, very much in the mold of his mentor; Wallace vowed after that race that he would "never be 'outniggered' [sic] again," and turned sharply to the right, coining the defiant phrase "Segregation Forever" in a later campaign. Patterson did pass some reforms as governor, in connection with controlling such criminal enterprises as loan-sharking, and boosted the state's woefully low spending on schools and highways; but he was best known during his four years for opposing all efforts at integration, tolerating and even encouraging violence against the Freedom Riders coming into the state to help register black citizens to vote, and for his clashes with U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy on those and related issues. Patterson was succeeded, ironically enough, by George Wallace in 1962, running on a racially inflammatory platform of his own, and lost his 1966 bid to regain the governorship to Wallace's wife, running as her husband's stand-in so that he could get around the state's term-limit law. Patterson later served as an appeals court judge.)
  
  Also, ironically enough, the events in Phenix City are mentioned in an even more well-known movie about organized crime in the South, Arthur Ripley's Thunder Road (1958), Trevor Bardette's Vernon Doolin citing the trouble they had in Phenix City to Robert Mitchum's Lucas Doolin as a good reason for staying away from an offer from a Memphis crime boss to come into his cartel. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi
• Still a few years away from major studio "A" pictures, director Anthony Mann was already showing how he could make something very substantial out of very little with Desperate. This compact noir-ish thriller pulls together a lot of threads -- neatly and convincingly drawn characters, especially Steve Brodie's good-guy trucker, caught in a nightmare not at all of his making, and Raymond Burr's psycho gang leader; a believably dark situation for the hero; and a credible, bare-bones setting and array of supporting characters. Desperate even manages moments of relatively light, unforced humor (especially in the opening minutes) and romance, which is no small assist in making the central characters believable; as a counter-balance to the interactions of Brodie's Steve Randell and his wife Anne (Audrey Long) are the scenes between the fugitive Randall and detective Ferrari (Jason Robards, Sr.), the latter so quick to pronounce judgment and throw the hapless trucker to the wolves, that he's quietly harrowing in his easy dismissal of lives and reputations. And the script, by Harry J. Essex and Martin Rackin, even manages to resolve that point convincingly and reassuringly. In all, this is one neat and diverting low-rent, high-quality thriller, in many ways the direct antecedent to Mann's better-known, bigger-budgeted MGM-made thriller Side Street (1950). ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi
• The title of Dial 1119 refers to the 1950s equivalent of our current "911" phone number. Clearly, 1119 is intended as a tense, gripping hostage drama. But the best intentions don't always pan out, and what 1119 turns out to be is a sometimes tense, sometimes dull hostage drama. It's worth watching, especially for fans of noir-ish films of the period, but it's not the exciting thriller that it wants to be. A large part of the blame for this lies with Marshall Thompson, who plays the psychopathic killer. Thompson, who got his start as a fresh-scrubbed boy-next-door type and generally played good, decent people, is daringly cast against type here. He's not bad, but he's not the kind of overwhelming presence that the part demands. What's needed is someone whose mere silence screams menace. When Thompson is silent, it's just an absence. Granted, he could sue more help from the script, which is a bit too terse in places and which has some believability issues here and there. 1119 does have solid direction from Gerald Mayer and an excellent supporting cast, with stand-out work from Andrea King and William Conrad. ~ Craig Butler, Rovi
• Touching on both the film noir style of the 1940s and the "just the facts, ma'am" approach popular in the early television era, and incorporating both shadowy alleys and bright, almost flat sunlit street scenes, Richard Fleischer's plebeian, no-nonsense Armored Car Robbery remains the quintessential low-budget heist melodrama. Starring tight-lipped Charles McGraw as the tough, unyielding police detective, the potboiler also benefited from a downright vicious performance by an unredeemable William Talman as the brains behind the ill-fated caper, as well as the presence of luscious B-movie icon Adele Jergens as one of those hardboiled dames seemingly born to destroy gullible dime-store gangsters like Benny McBride (Douglas Fowley). "What is a dame like her doing with a two-bit mug like Benny?" McGraw's junior colleague Don McGuire asks at one point. Filmed at Los Angeles' Wrigley Field and amid the spooky oil derrick landscape of Long Beach, CA, Armored Car Robbery is almost shocking in its in-your-face violence with a climax that is downright gruesome. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi