By David in TN
Friday, April 3, 2020 at 5:00:00 P.M. EDT
TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is William Cameron Menzies’ Address Unknown (1944). Paul Lukas plays a German-American businessman who goes back to Germany as Hitler takes power. He betrays others, leading to his own destruction.
Address Unknown isn’t on the usual Noir listing, and I haven’t seen it. Also with Morris Carnovsky, K.T. Stevens, Carl Esmond and Peter Van Eyck. Photographed by Rudolph Mate.
TCM's Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight ET and 10 am ET is Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) with Dana Andrews, Joan Fontaine, Sidney Blackmer, Philip Bourneuf, and Arthur Franz.
ReplyDeleteFilm Noir Guide: "A successful novelist (Andrews) and an anti-capital punishment editor (Blackmer) concoct a hare-brained, downright illegal scheme to prove that an innocent man can be convicted of murder and sent to the chair, especially when a top-notch lawyer (Bourneuf) with political aspirations is the prosecutor. After a stripper is murdered, the conspirators plant circumstantial evidence implicating Andrews in the crime. For Andrews protection, they carefully document each piece of phony evidence with photographs and notes and lock everything in Blackmer's office safe. After Andrews is convicted and sentenced to death, fate intervenes, causing the plan to backfire. Andrews fiance (Fontaine) must now prove his innocence. Despite the presence of noir icons Andrews and Fontaine, Lang's last American film is disappointing. Even he is said to have hated it. The good acting and the enjoyable ending compensate for the hard-to-swallow plot."
Always good to watch Dana Andrews in a Noir but the plot has too many twists. Andrews' biographer said the actor embodied "steely impassivity."