Film DVD Culture
Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4
Act of Violence/Mystery Street/Crime Wave/Decoy/Illegal/The Big Steal/They Live By Night/Side Street/Where Danger Lives/Tension

While Esther Williams was swimming laps in kaleidoscopic aquatic-musicals, another side of Hollywood was exploring equally kaleidoscopic visions of the world: darker, more cynical, and decidedly monochromatic. The headline of a French review of Double Indemnity, Murder My Sweet, and The Lost Weekend published in 1946 provided an apt terminology: “Les Américans aussi font des Films Noirs.” Translated, “The Americans also make film noirs.”
Never actually a concrete genre, film noir is mood or style whose classical period permeated American cinema from the early 1940s through the end of the 1950s. Though certainly not limited to that time frame, earlier and contemporary examples of noir abound, and its aesthetics continually evolve through osmosis. Noir’s multi-faceted, at times schizophrenic, personality and wide-ranging influences are appropriately displayed in the recently released Film Noir Classic Collection: Vol. 4, a collection of ten films spread out over five DVDs and offering all-things noir (Decoy, 1946; Act of Violence and They Live By Night, 1948; The Big Steal, 1949; Mystery Street, Side Street, Tension, and Where Danger Lives, 1950; Crime Wave, 1954; and Illegal, 1955).
Made between 1946 and 1955, these films encapsulate noir style—a mixture of poetic sensibilities (They Live By Night), hardboiled wonderlands (Crime Wave) and lurid pulpiness (Tension). (Elements of science-fiction work their way into Decoy, with its Frankenstein-inspired reincarnation of a bank robber who has already been executed.) The many faces of noir stem from an array of cinematic predecessors, most notably the high-contrast, chiaroscuro lighting of 1920s German Expressionism, sympathetic criminals from socially-conscious American gangster films of the 1930s, and documentary-realism from 1940s Italian Neorealism. The latter’s preference for location shooting (due largely to post-WWII economic constraints) became a key distinction between glossier studio-based films and more gritty films. Examples include the LA-based Crime Wave and the NYC-based Side Street.
Noir refuses to discriminate between high- and low-brow films; often the two are inverted. A seemingly trashy B-Movie (the bottom-half of a double bill) may prove more artistic and compelling than a prestigious, big budget A-Movie (the main attraction). Where Danger Falls begins as a staid melodrama about a surgeon (Robert Mitchum) who abandons his conventional relationship with a nurse (Margaret O’Sullivan) for a mysterious patient (Faith Domergue). His new love leads him to murder, a life on the lam, and his own ruin. A penultimate confrontation between Mitchum and Domergue in a seedy hotel near the Mexican border offers seven minutes of tension, emotional breakdowns, and—that staple of noir protagonists—the realization that ones own desires bear the seeds of destruction. The entire scene, captured in a continuous shot by director John Farrow and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, is an essay in visual counterpoint. Mirrors and pulsating neon lights reveal layers of deception and delusion. The subsequent shot, a low-angle 360-degree pan of Mitchum falling down a staircase analogizes the middle-class man’s’ fall from grace, a prominent archetypes in noir.
Lewis Allen’s Illegal also follows the corruption of a middle-class figure, in this case the big-city District Attorney Victor Scott (Edward G. Robinson), whose career takes a nose-dive after he discovers a man he sentenced to the electric chair is in fact innocent. When responding to a reporter’s wish for an interview in order to “humanize him,” Robinson responds, “Well, I’ve been too busy to be human,” which is as noir an epithet as you can get come. To acknowledge the acceptance of one’s own inhumanity is typically the denouement of a story; in Illegal, it becomes the impetus for Robinson’s own corruption.
The real value of this set lies beyond the worth of any individual film (Mystery Street, while fascinating, is uneven and dated) but in the reviving of such obscure curiosities alongside long out-of-print classics such as Nicholas Ray’s debut They Live By Night. Film noir was as much the creation of artists as it was hacks, of youthful innovation (Ray) and experienced craftsmanship (Andre de Toth, director of Crime Wave), and it is befitting that this box-set celebrates the union of such a cinematic myriad.
Contributor
Cullen GallagherCULLEN GALLAGHER is a freelance critic and curator who lives in Brooklyn.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
ARTUR SCHNABEL AND JOSEPH SZIGETI PLAY MOZART AT THE FRICK COLLECTION (APRIL 4, 1948)
By Lloyd SchwartzJUNE 2023 | Poetry
Lloyd Schwartz is the Poet Laureate of Somerville, MA, the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Emeritus at UMass Boston, the longtime music and art critic for NPRs Fresh Air and WBUR, and an editor of the poetry and prose of Elizabeth Bishop. His awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, and Academy of American Poets fellowships in poetry. His poems have been chosen for the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry. His latest collection is Whos on First? New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press). He was born in Williamsburg.

Channeling Robert Ashley: Object Collection at The Brick
By Dan JosephDEC 22–JAN 23 | Music
At its core, Automatic Writing is a kind of ritual magic rendered on magnetic tape. Imbued with a sense of occult-like mysticism, it transforms sound and language into a surrealist psychological space. Developed in the studio over a five year period, Ashley wrote that Automatic Writing became a kind of opera in my imagination that conjures a set of four shadowy characters. It is this hallucinatory auditory space, this imaginary opera, that Object Collection sought to animate on the stage.
Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans
By Henry Hicks IVJUNE 2023 | Books
Brandon Taylor has a lot to say about truth. The characters in his new novel, The Late Americans, descend on Iowa City, home of the fabled University of Iowa Writers Workshop MFA programan intentional setting for Taylors exploration of voyeurism, communication, and, yes, truth, in todays America. In its opening, Taylor tosses the reader into a live workshop debate on the merits of poems that center traumaits buried question being, Whose voice is an authority? Whose experiences spur truthyours or mine?
The 60th New York Film Festival
By Laura ValenzaNOV 2022 | Film
An indie art film, a historical biopic, and an adventurous satire from this falls festival. Oh my!