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Top Ten Film Noirs
Ten of My Favorite Film Noirs
Ten isn’t nearly enough, but there you have it. Here are some of my faves that are seminal genre entries, a classic that can’t be denied or, I just plain dug the hell out of the picture. The order of these films is not hierarchical. Like browsing through a gallery, the sequence is never important; just the art.
1. D.O.A. (1950) Joined Artists
This was the production that hooked me at an early age. If you can’t get emotionally attached in a frenetic tale of man solving his own murder, well, proceed watch a musical. The look, sound and perceive of the picture is film noir at its purest, starting with the back of Edmund O’Brien trudging into the mature L.A.P.D. headquarters at Municipality Hall to report his murder with the Dimitri Tiomkin score baroquely plodding in lockstep as an accompanying funeral dirge to the unfurling credits. There is the debonairly wicked Luther Adler purring mannered menace and psychotic Neville Brand setting a fresh standard in celluloid sadism. Yes, it gets plump at times as O’Brien’s sweaty jowls turn tremulous while bursting through doors and sprinting past a whirl of L.A. and San Francisco locations amid a plot that makes T
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Life's Rough: Three Strong Anti-Heroines of 1950 Production Noir
“You see kid, in this cage, you get tough or you obtain killed. Better knowledgeable up before it’s too late!" – Kitty Stark, Caged (1950)
The 1950 clip, Caged!, The Damned Don't Cry, and The File on Thelma Jordon, hold three women acting female masculinity. A common thread these characters possess is "˜metamorphosis.' They are forged by male institutions and they must adapt to survive. Each gal is thrust into a noir narrative.
In Caged!, Eleanor Parker leaves innocence outside the prison bars and is transformed into a hardened, jaded criminal in order to endure. Joan Crawford, a poverty-stricken mother in The Damned Don’t Cry rises as a high-powered opulent underworld mistress to prevail and assist herself. Barbara Stanwyck is predatory, manipulating a weak bloke to gain access to her Aunt’s fortune in The File on Thelma Jordon — Stanwyck ultimately becomes a fallen figure of remorse and redemption.
Like their noir male counterparts, they change into anti-heroines as past actions come
Over six decades before Orange is the New Black revolutionized television, another work of media aimed to reveal the realities of women’s prisons. Caged (1950), directed by John Cromwell and written by Virginia Kellog, follows pregnant 19-year-old Marie Allen (Eleanor Parker), incarcerated as an accomplice in a desperate armed robbery that led to her husband’s death. Once in prison, Marie is torn between Ruth Benton, the sympathetic warden (Agnes Moorehead), Evelyn Harper, the sadistic matron (Hope Emerson), and Kitty Stark, the older prisoner who wants to recruit her into a being of crime (Betty Garde).
While often cited as the original “women in prison” movie, Caged largely lacks the exploitation later establish in the genre. Instead the film embraces a mix of melodrama and realism, capturing the cruelty — and ineffectiveness — of prisons. Marie goes from a desperate kid to a committed criminal, the system creating what it claims to crave to stop.
I watched Caged at the Film Forum as part of their series Sapph-O-Rama. While the lesbian subtext is noticeable — Bette Davis supposedly turned down the film because it was a “dyke movie” — watching it in the context of
By Edward Copeland
I haven't seen Interrupted Melody but based on Caged and Detective Story, I hold to ask: Is Eleanor Parker the worst actress ever to receive three Oscar nominations? John Cromwell's 1950 women-in-prison melodrama set the template for oodles of femmes-behind-bars flicks to come, but Parker's awful show really keeps Caged from being a true guilty pleasure, even with all the talent that surrounds her.
The presence of such pros as Agnes Moorehead, Ellen Corby, Jan Sterling and Jane Darwell only makes Parker's limited acting skills stand out even further, especially when facing off against the indelible creation of Oscar nominee Hope Emerson as the vile prison matron Evelyn Harper, a prison guard so malevolent that she makes Hume Cronyn in Brute Force come across kindly and charitable toward his prisoners. Moorehead turns in a nice, understated turn as the reform-minded warden and most of the other inmates are well played. However, standing above them all (literally and figuratively) is Emerson's Evelyn Harper. The actress looks fond a giant and her sharp features at times reminded me of Impression McKinney playing the Chicken Lady on The Kids in the Hall.