While Warner's prior box sets concentrated on fare from RKO and Warner Brothers, here we get stuff from MGM and the poverty-row studio Monogram. Quite a lot of variety, then, from the remarkably far-fetched and delirious 1946 Decoy — in which a femme fatale (played to the hilt by British actress Jean Gillie, who died only a few years after making the film) discerns the location of her ex's stash of loot by bringing said ex (King Kong's Robert Armstrong) back from the dead after he's been to the gas chamber — to the less obsessive, more stolid 1950 procedural Mystery Street, which gets most of its noir buzz via the inspired cinematography of John Alton (T-Men).
Jayne Mansfield in Illegal
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Every picture has its own commentary, and the tone of these varies as well. Most hilarious is actress Nina Foch joining film historian Patricia King Hanson on the track for 1955's Illegal, an attorney's fall-and-redemption tale on its third remake that's mostly notable for its cast — Foch, Edward G. Robinson, Hugh Marlowe, Albert Dekker and, in her first picture, Jayne Mansfield. "Look at them, they're all dead," Foch says, more than once, commenting on the tableaux of performers under Lewis Allen's singularly uninspired direction. Looking for the silver lining, Hanson notes that some noirs went for a deliberate stiffness, and Foch instructs her, in a friendly but slightly tart tone, to stop making excuses. And on it goes. Motormouth crime novelist James Ellroy joins film scholar Alain Silver on the track for Andre De Toth's inspired 1954 Crime Wave, rhapsodizing on its documentary realism and touting its overall superiority to…a film based on an Ellroy book. "[Bleep] Russell Crowe," Ellroy ejaculates when big Sterling Hayden shows up on screen. "That's the real Bud White."
For more tastes of the good stuff this box offers, check out my gallery of screen shots >>
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