A New Batch of Noirs
Good choices, but no extras as MGM relaunches its shadowy film series.
Glenn Kenny's "The Discophile"
(posted 7/10/2007)
It seems as if every DVD label worth its salt — and a couple that aren't — has its own Film Noir series, so it's no surprise that the somewhat reactivated MGM is beginning one. For those of you who don't follow the biz, the entity once known as MGM/UA was acquired by Sony a few years back, and after some business machinations the finer nuances of which escape this correspondent, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment got the rights to much of the MGM back catalog. Hence, the latest releases in MGM's Film Noir series are actually 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment discs. The four titles are for the most part choice: The Stranger, a 1946 Nazi-hunter thriller directed by and co-starring Orson Welles; The Woman in the Window, a 1944 Fritz Lang thriller and mostly excellent femme fatale tale, starring Edward G. Robinson (who also costars in The Stranger) and Joan Bennett; Kansas City Confidential, a tough-as-nails 1952 B-crime picture from underrepresented-on-disc auteur Phil Karlson. The wild card in the bunch is 1955's A Bullet for Joey, pairing Robinson with George Raft; what could have been a real twilight-of-the-gods match-up is instead a peculiar Cold War–meets–organized crime potboiler that doesn't have a patch on Fuller's 1953 Pickup on South Street.
Welles has referred to The Stranger as his least favorite of his own pictures, but as it happens, it's both a good, pulpy thriller and a demonstration that Welles could in fact function "within the system," as it were. A production of Sam Spiegel (using the name S.P. Eagle), it depicts dogged investigator Robinson (in a part Welles originally wanted Agnes Morehead for — how interesting would that have been?) following one Nazi war criminal to a quiet New England town where an even bigger criminal — played by Welles — has ensconced himself. The former Franz Kindler teaches at a boy's academy and is about to marry wholesome Loretta Young, and Robinson has to smoke him out. The picture has a few classic Welles touches, such as the long walk in the woods Kindler takes with his former colleague before strangling him — it's a remarkable, uninterrupted take. The worm-turning lines "Marx wasn't a German. Marx was a Jew," are searing, and the clock-tower finale satisfyingly over-the-top.
Lang's The Woman in the Window can be best appreciated as a dress rehearsal for his subsequent Scarlet Street, the remake of Renoir's La Chienne that once again teamed Robinson and Bennett. In Woman, Robinson plays a much more solid, confident character than his sad-sack Sunday painter in Street, but that doesn't stop him from getting caught in a web of intrigue and murder once he meets up with Bennett. Despite its having one of the biggest copouts of an ending in Lang's career, it's still a treat. Kansas City Confidential is notable for its unusual plotting — in which a framed ex-con, rather than a cop, goes up against the gang that set him up — as well as overall hard-boiledness, with a trio of tough guys to make Quentin Tarantino swoon: Neville Brand, Lee Van Cleef, and Jack Elam.
The films all boast good-to-excellent transfers, but I can give only two stars to this series at the moment because parent company Fox and Warner Home Video have both spoiled me with their extras-filled Noir packages. The extras on these discs are nil — no commentary, no featurettes, no trailers even. I'm terrifically glad to have the pictures, but it would have been nice to have more.
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