By David in TN
Friday, June 29, 2018 at 1:34:00 P.M. EDT
TCM's Film Noir of the Week for Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight ET is Armored Car Robbery (1950), starring Charles McGraw and William Talman.
Richard Fleischer directs—as usual, he gets a lot of plot in a 67-minute film.
McGraw is the detective. Talman plays a vicious killer, who plans the heist with low-level crooks Steve Brodie, Gene Evans, and Douglas Fowley. Adele Jergens is the stripper femme fatale two-timing the sap played by Fowley with Talman.
A lot of location filming showing Los Angeles circa 1950.
It repeats on TCM Sunday morning, July 1, at 10 a.m. ET.
N.S.: Armored Car Robbery; that’s a really imaginative title. So many of these crime thriller B pictures had names like that: Crime Wave, Mystery Street, etc.
Red Eddie Muller has had to conscript more and more crime, message (e.g., Crossfire), and even Bette Davis (The Letter and Joan Crawford (Mildred Pierce) pictures as films noir, in order to give himself remunerative work, and to promote Communism.
3 comments:
"We don't have a crime problem, we have a people problem!" - - Chief Parker.
"Film Noir," referring to something very specific- a grim fatalistic style of movie like DETOUR or DOA- has become a sucker-bait marketing label applied to ordinary crime-suspense-type films. If LASSIE COME HOME featured a night scene, they'd label it "Film Noir." Alas, film buffs aren't very bright, parrot each other's opinions and attitudes, and, most depressingly, tend to tilt to the Left (that's a story for another time).
TCM's Film Noir of the Week for Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight ET (and 10 am ET Sunday Morning) is Party Girl (1958), starring Robert Taylor, Cyd Charisse, and Lee J. Cobb. Nicholas Ray directed.
Taylor plays a mob lawyer, circa the 1930's. Charisse is a showgirl Taylor falls for, who wants him him to quit working for crooks. Cobb plays the mob boss, not exactly casting against type.
In the usual fashion, Taylor can't easily break away and is kept in for another job. It all leads to a "sensational climax," according to the 2003 reference book, Film Noir Guide, by Michael F. Keaney.
When "Red Eddie" Muller gives his intro and followup, look for him to take a shot at Robert Taylor for being an anti-communist. Taylor was by all accounts a decent man by Hollywood actor standards.
BTW, Red Eddie in his intro a couple of weeks ago remarked that The Man Who Cheated Himself is the only time Lee J. Cobb ever underplayed a role.
Here (https://www.weeklystandard.com/paul-a-cantor/film-noir-politics) a criticism of "Film Noir Politics" from the June 30, 1997 issue of The Weekly Standard by Paul Cantor, a specialist on "Pop Culture." I'm not familiar with him. His point is Fritz Lang was the progenitor of film noir and many of the directors were from Central and Eastern Europe: Dieterle, Ophuls, Preminger, Siodmak, Ulmer, Wilder, and Lang himself.
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