The Viewing Files - Smoking Guns and Dames

I have a serious soft spot for film noir.  Those gritty black and white movies of the 40s and 50s where men are men and women are dames and everyone smokes cigarettes.  There's also a lot of bad guys... and some bad women too.

It's so my kind of vibe, dark, stylish and seductive.

Now pass me the whiskey.

 

Marked Woman

Starring: Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart

Original release: 1937

Synopsis:  A 'dame' takes on the gangsters

 

Who knew that Bette could do the wide eyed dewey innocent look so well.

 

Not as good as some of her others but still entertaining and yay for gal pals who stand by each other.

High Sierra

Starring: Bogart again

Original release:1941

Synopsis:  A gangster does one more job

 

A bad guy with a soft heart, a good girl who can't be bad, and a dog we all want to adopt.

 

Gangster melodrama 1940s style.

All Through the Night

Starring: Bogie... yet again

Original release:1942

Synopsis:  A gambler takes on the Nazi's...

 

A cheesecake loving gambler takes on some bad guys and it's a weird but still entertaining mixture of part thriller, part comedy.

 

Only Bogart could make eating cheesecake seem like a life and death thing.

Across the Pacific

Starring: You know who... well he did make a lot of movies

Original release:1942

Synopsis:  Passengers on board on boat up to no good

 

I'm here for Mary and Humphrey being all cute and flirty with a side of World War II intrigue.

Passage to Marseille

Starring: I'm not even going to bother saying his name

Original release:1944

Synopsis:  The French Resistance

 

I kept waiting for something to happen.... and it didn't. Plays out like a documentary trying to be a movie or maybe it's a movie pretending to be a documentary.

The Dark Corner

Starring: Lucille Ball... and no I'm not joking

Original release:1946

Synopsis:  A Private Eye and his secretary flirt and take on the bad guys

 

About as film noir as you can get with a detective, his dame and a mystery to solve.

 

Not perfect but still pretty watchable with a decent cast.

Dead Reckoning

Starring: Mr B is back again

Original release: 1947

Synopsis:  Murder and mayhem

 

"Her whole body had gone soft as custard when I slugged her with it."

 

Lol, this whole movie is like some kind of cheap, trashy pulp novel of the worse kind which weirdly makes it gloriously bad, especially the voice over narration dialogue which adds a whole other level of cringe worthy badness.

 

Entertaining. But probably not in the way it was intended to be.

Framed

Starring: Glenn Ford

Original release:1947

Synopsis:  A truck driver and a very bad girl

 

70 minutes of Glenn Ford smoking and drinking while blondie manipulates everyone around her and it's all pretty exciting until it descends into 10 minutes of over the top melodrama and one of the lamest endings ever.

Dark Passage

Starring: Bogie and Bacall

Original release: 1947

Synopsis:  A man convicted of murder goes on the run

 

The whole first person viewpoint was totally weird and even more so when they kept flipping back and forth between first person and the generalised viewpoint, making this a hard one to watch.

 

If it had been filmed differently I'd probably would have loved this.

 

Sigh...

Cry Danger

Starring: Dick Powell

Original release: 1951

Synopsis:  An ex con tries to help his friend

 

The kind of movie where 2 men live in a trailer park and sleep in bunk beds while smoking and drinking their way through life, women and crime solving.

 

Better than it has any right to be.