By David in TN
Friday, January 11, 2019 at 1:06:00 A.M. EST
TCM's Film Noir of the Week for Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight ET (and 10 am ET Sunday Morning) is Lured (1947), starring Lucille Ball, George Sanders, Charles Coburn, Cedric Hardwicke, and Boris Karloff.
Douglas Sirk directed. Sirk is best known for his series of Fifties soap operas, which critics now claim are attacks on American society.
Film Noir Guide: "Ball is an American taxi dancer in London who agrees to act as a decoy for Scotland Yard after her friend falls victim to a serial killer. She meets a number of oddballs through her police-sponsored personal column ads, and her zany misadventures will have you half expecting Desi to pop up at any moment to scold her. Coburn is the police inspector trying to find out what happened to all the missing girls, and Karloff, in a too-small role, is a crackpot, has-been designer. Sanders plays a rich playboy attracted to the beautiful redhead, and Hardwicke is his stiff, humorless secretary. Who's the killer? Who cares? Sit back and enjoy the acting."
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TCM's Film Noir of the Week for Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight ET (and 10 am ET Sunday Morning) is Murder My Sweet (1944), starring Dick Powell, Clair Trevor, Anne Shirley, Otto Krueger, Mike Mazurki, Douglas Walton, Ralph Harolde, Don Douglas, and Miles Mander.
Film Noir Guide: "Powell stars as Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled sleuth, Philip Marlowe, on a case involving a missing dame and a jade necklace worth a hundred grand. He's hired by a huge, slow-witted ex-con (Mazurki) to find a former girlfriend but soon finds himself suspected of murdering another client, a foppish ladies man (Walton). Whiloe trying to find the real killer, Powell becomes involved with a dangerous blackmailer (Krueger), a suspicious cop (Douglas), a narcotics dispensing doctor (Harolde) and an elderly tycoon (Mander), his pretty daughter (Shirley) and his femme fatale wife (Trevor).
Murder My Sweet is one of the paradigm examples of Film Noir. Powell's interpretation of Marlowe is said to have been author Chandler's favorite. The original title of Farewell My Lovely was changed because people might think it was another Dick Powell song and dance vehicle. Powell was trying to change to a "tougher" image with this role.
Earlier on Saturday, at 3:30 pm ET, TCM shows The Seven-Ups (1973). I saw it in a theater at the time.
The Seven-Ups (http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/941259%7CO/The-Seven-Ups.html) was billed as something of a sequel to 1971 Oscar winner The French Connection, whose producer, Phil D'Antoni, does his only directorial turn. Roy Schieder returns as Buddy Manucci, "essentially the same character he played in the previous film with a slightly more crooked morality."
The Seven-Ups are a special detective squad going after criminals for offenses rating seven years and up.
There is a ten-minute spectacular car chase and location shooting of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.
Tony Lo Bianco plays Schieder's mob informant who uses the cops to set up mobsters to be kidnapped for ransom, a ploy supposedly used by the depression era Purple Gang.
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