By David in TN
Friday, July 3, 2020 at 6:04:00 P.M. EDT
TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:45 a.m. ET and 10 a.m. ET is John Sturges’ The Sign of the Ram (1948).
Susan Peters plays the main character with Alexander Knox, Phyllis Thaxter, Peggy Ann Garner, Ron Randell, Allene Roberts, Ross Ford and Diana Douglas.
Film Noir Guide: “A stepmother (Peters) uses her disability to control her family—husband Knox, adult children Roberts and Ford and teenager Garner. Confined to a wheelchair after saving Roberts and Ford from drowning when they were children, Peters tries to destroy Roberts’ romantic relationship with her boyfriend (Randell) and Ford’s upcoming marriage to his fiancee (Douglas).
“The neurotic Garner idolizes her stepmother so much that she tries to kill Peters’ new secretary (Thaxter), whom she believes has been trying to seduce Knox.
“The title refers to Peters’ astrological birth sign and fits her to a tee—people born under the sign, according to Randell, are endowed with strong will power and obstinacy of purpose and will stop at nothing to accomplish this purpose.
“The Sign of the Ram is a routine soap opera with good performances by Knox and Peters, who in real life, was confined to a wheelchair after suffering a spinal injury in a hunting mishap in 1944. This was supposed to be her comeback film, but she retired from the screen afterwards and died in 1952 of bronchial pneumonia at the age of 31.”
David in TN: In my opinion Eddie Muller’s selections this year have sometimes left something to be desired.
N.S.: Agreed. When someone once interviewed Robert Mitchum, who was one of the greats in this genre, about “film noir,” Mitch corrected interrogator, saying they were “B-movies.” (Red Eddie?)
The thing is, if they were B-movies, they often had brilliant casts. Look at all the B pictures starring the likes of Barbara Stanwyck and Sterling Hayden, e.g., Crime of Passion (1956), which starred Stanwyck and Hayden, and featured a fairly trim Raymond Burr.
Another thing. According to movie historian Scott Eyman, in L.B. Mayer biography, Lion of Hollywood, films noir didn’t even make any money. They were just a break-even proposition, but were a hobby horse of RKO production chief Dore Schary, who was then made boss (unofficially in 1949; officially, in 1951) at MGM by Nicholas Schenk, the CEO of MGM’s owner, Loew’s, who hated Mayer’s guts.
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TCM's Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight ET and 10 am ET is Richard Fleischer's Bodyguard (1948), with Lawrence Tierney, Priscilla Lane, Philip Reed, Steve Brodie, Elizabeth Risdon.
This is a 62-minute late 40's RKO crime film, one of Richard Fleischer's early films. Lawrence Tierney plays a LAPD detective who beats crooks up, even then it gets him in trouble. This is a rare Good Guy role for Tierney.
Film Noir Guide: "Tierney, a hot-headed, hard-hitting cop, socks a superior officer then resigns from the force rather than accept a suspension. He takes a job as a bodyguard for a meat packing heiress (Risdon) and soon finds himself framed for the murder of the cop he assaulted. His fiancee (Lane) is a police department secretary and his inside contact for information that may clear him. Reed plays the shady nephew of the meat packing company owner, and Brodie is the ex-con who works as a meat cutter. Tierney is fine in a good-guy role for a change, but Lane is much too cutesy. This is a fast-moving film (at sixty-two minutes, it has to be)."
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