From Those Were the Days:

1946 - The Adventures of Sam Spade was heard on ABC Radio for the first time. Howard Duff starred as the San Francisco detective in the summer replacement series, which later moved to CBS and NBC for a five-year run. Sam Spade first appeared in the 1930 Dashiel Hammett novel The Maltese Falcon and in the 1931 original film version of The Maltese Falcon (a.k.a. Dangerous Female), starring Ricardo Cortez. Humprey Bogart played Sam in the 1941 version.
6:41:28 PM    comment []  trackback []  

Night time is noir time

After the ‘rents wrapped it up for the evening, I pressed on—moviewise—with a couple of selections from the Shadows, Lies and Private Eyes: The Film Noir Collection, Volume 1 box set just released by Warner Home Video. (If you’re a noir fan, you need to run—don’t walk—to the nearest computer and snap this puppy up; it’s a genuine keeper.)

Most film buffs generally tout The Big Sleep (1946) as the definitive Philip Marlowe flick, but I’m personally much more partial to Murder, My Sweet (1944), which stars Dick Powell as Raymond Chandler’s legendary sleuth. (This is not to slight Sleep, which I like very much—I just think Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal is more Sam Spade than Marlowe.) The DVD for Sweet is…well, sweet; a nice transfer of the film plus the original theatrical trailer (which is a bit beat-up) and commentary provided by noir scholar Alain Silver, author of a fistful of books on the subject (most notably Film Noir: An Encyclopedia Reference to the American Style, considered by many fans to be the “Bible” of noir).

In the film, Marlowe is hired by hulking ex-con Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki) to locate his old girlfriend Velma Valento, but as the plot progresses, the detective finds himself enmeshed in a second case (involving a stolen jade necklace) that gradually appears to be connected to the first. The always delightful Claire Trevor plays the femme fatale in this one, and is joined by a great supporting cast in Anne Shirley, Otto Kruger, Miles Mander, Douglas Watson, Donald Douglas, Ralf Harolde and Esther Howard. Murder, My Sweet was directed by Edward Dmytryk, who has a great many films on his resume like Crossfire (1947) and Broken Lance (1954)—but I believe Sweet is his very best. The movie has reams of endlessly memorable hard-boiled dialogue (“If I always knew what I meant, I’d be a genius”), intriguing visual touches (Marlowe lights a match on the ass of a Cupid statue) and a knockout, expressionistic nightmare sequence in which Marlowe finds himself “coked-up” by a doctor attempting to wrest information from him. I’ve lost count on how many times I’ve watched this movie, but it’s a sublime pleasure each and every time.

I finished out the night with The Set-Up (1949), a classic boxing film starring Robert Ryan (who was no stranger to the sweet science, having boxed at Dartmouth), one of my favorite movie actors. Ryan is Bill “Stoker” Thompson, a washed-up pug barely eking out an existence in his choice of profession; his girl Julie (Audrey Totter) is anxious for him to throw in the towel before his brains get beat to mush. Stoker’s manager (George Tobias) and trainer (Percy Helton) have arranged with a local hood (Alan Baxter) to throw Thompson’s bout that evening, and they decide not to inform Stoker, figuring the lug will lose the fight anyway (so he doesn’t need to be cut in on the action).

The Set-Up was directed by Robert Wise, who helmed such classic noirs as Born to Kill (1947, also with Claire Trevor) and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) before succumbing to dreck like The Sound of Mucus, er, Music (1965) later in his career. (It happened to Anthony Mann and Richard Fleischer, too.) Wise participates in the DVD’s audio commentary along with Martin Scorsese, who acknowledges that Set-Up was a major influence on his own Raging Bull in 1980. I positively adore this low-budget, short-but-sweet film; Wise’s recreation of the entire boxing milleu—cheap hotel rooms, dingy, overcrowded dressing rooms, etc.—is so authentic it hurts, and the movies wouldn’t see a more accurate portrayal of second-rate boxers until John Huston’s Fat City in 1972. Wallace Ford, Hal Baylor, Darryl Hickman, James Edwards and David Clarke round out a top-notch supporting cast (if you look quick enough, you’ll see Bernard Gorcey as a cigar stand owner, Herbert “Dennis the Menace” Anderson as a spectator and OTR stalwarts Paul Dubov and Jess Kirkpatrick as gamblers, too)—along with Body and Soul (1947) and The Harder They Fall (1956), The Set-Up remains one of filmdom’s best boxing movies.
6:39:06 PM    comment []  trackback []