Preamble: What is a "noir"?

Like all human categorizations "cinema noir" has fuzzy boundaries, especially the ones between "gangster picture" and "cinema noir" and sometimes between "police procedural" and "cinema noir." All three genres involve crimes and police forces of various kinds. Noirs also often involve a knocked-about not-particularly-heroic man without a badge or uniform trying to figure out what happened and get revenge or a cut.

The label "cinema noir" was coined by the French critic Nino Frank in 1946 and popularized by French auteurists in the mid-1950s. Nathaniel Rich encapsulates the noir mood in trying to specify what he calls a "foggy term" as "American films made during World War II and in the years following, punctuated by violence and pervaded with a profound sense of dread and moral uncertainty. The heroes tend to be cynical, tough, and overwhelmed by sinister forces beyond their control. Stylistically, film noir is distinguished by its stark chiaroscuro cinematography, influenced in large part by German expressionism. Films are shot in black and white, lit for night, favor oblique camera angles and obsessive use of shadows, and, most importantly take place in a city. Film noir tries to make sense of the complexities and anxieties of the postwar urban experience by exploring the rotten underside of the American city, the place where the American dream goes to die" (San Francisco Noir, 2005, p. 8).

For me, one absolutely criterial feature for classifying a movie a "noir" is that it was filmed in black-and-white. Color images may be dark but do not have true black to contrast to white or the thousand shades of gray. Two other prototypical features are urban settings, and being primarily set in the City of Night. For me, another criterial feature is that the hero cannot be a lawman going about his business, even undercover, of bringing the villains to justice. The lawmen (I can't think of a "law-woman" in the crime melodramas of the 1940s and 50s) populate police procedural movies that may look dark, particularly if the lawman goes undercover (as in Anthony Mann's "T-Men"), but unless the lawman "goes bad" (changes his allegiances from policing to gangs rather than pretending to do so to witness or entrap) a movie is not for me a "noir."

This Disc

I have gone into such definitional detail as a background for the discussion of each of the three movies packaged together from "the best available material" on this two-sided DVD. "The best" is not always good. There are vertical scratches in a number of scenes of "Too Late for Tears" and "Kansas City Confidential," and a few pieces missing from the print of "Tears." The best print quality is that of the best-known of the movies, "He Walked by Night." With three movies on the disc, there are no bonus features.

I don't see any particular influence of "Walked" on "Tears" or "Confidential" or of "Tears" on "Confidential," but have to discuss them in some order, so will take chronology as the ordering principal.

He Walked by Night (1948)
is one of the quasi-documentary movies (The House on 92nd Street, The Street With No Name) from the police (or FBI or Treasury) files about mobilizing state of the art technology and dedicated agents to put dangerous criminals out of business (usually out of life, too). In this instance it is the LAPD frustrated by but doggedly seeking to find a psychopathic loner with no criminal record played by Richard Basehart. Its main claim to fame is as the father of "Dragnet," complete with a young Jack Webb (working in ballistics, he had no chance to ask for just the facts...).

I find the narration in these movies (often, as here, intoned by Reed Hadley) annoying, in their certainty, omniscience, and triumphalism practically the antithesis of the voiceovers of real noirs in which those who are multiply betrayed and battered relate how they were played as a sucker. There is not the slightest moral uncertainty in "He Walked By Night." Basehart's Roy is a dangerous psychopath, none of the police have any vices, and the citizens (except for one crazy lady who believes her milk is being poisoned....) are eager to help and do not have the slightest discrepancies in memories of what the criminal looked like. It's black and white in more ways than one.

It has a conventional, earnest, straight-ahead hero policeman Sgt. Marty Brennan played square-jawedly by Scott Brady and a sympathetic uncorrupt superior, Capt. Breen played avuncularly by Roy Roberts. These are not noir protagonists or noir policemen! And Roy is not conflicted about crime. He's very good at it. He may be jumpy, but with good reason: he knows very well that large numbers of policemen are mobilized to catch him and is right that he can trust no one except his very alert dog.

What is noirish is the look of two attempts by the police to catch the murdering thief. The second and longer moves to Los Angeles storm sewers after some stylish Venetian blind alternations of light and shadow. The sewer sequence has less human drama than the one in the Vienna sewer in "The Third Man" (which was already filming in Vienna in the autumn of 1948, wrapping less than three weeks after the Los Angeles premiere of "Walked" on 24 November 1948 [,George]), but for expressionist images of desperate flight is the best I can remember seeing.

There is no romance and no character development to speak of. No one in the LAPD thinks to try to find out about Roy's experiences in the army (which might tell them and the audience about his motivations, traumas, and technical experience). The movie is almost all police work (with punch card sorters, composite sketches from slides, etc.) and portrayal of the shifting modes of the criminal.

"Walked" was credited to the otherwise undistinguished Alfred Werker (he directed the 1939 "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" with moody cinematography by Leon Shamroy, so I am being a bit unfair). "Walked" is included in another disc of three Anthony Mann movies. Mann supposedly took over directing it without being credited. "Walked" definitely showcases the genius of Mann's recurrent noir master cinematographer John Alton. No doubt there is a story to tell about Mann's involvement, but I have not been able to find out what it is.

Too Late for Tears (1949)

I think that enjoyment of "Too Late for Tears" is maximal with no foreknowledge of the plot beyond the initial set-up. At the outset, Alan Palmer (Arthur Kennedy) is driving a convertible on a deserted highway, as his wife Jane (deep-voiced Lizabeth Scott, one of the baddest of noir bad girls) is kvetching about the condescension she receives from the hostess of a dinner party they are driving to (Alan's boss' wife). She pulls the keys out of the ignition of the moving vehicle. This causes the headlights to blink off and on. After Alan turns the car around, another car goes by and throws a leather bag into the car. Jane opens it and sees that it is full of money. Alan wants to take it to the police, but Jane's greed is in over-drive. She takes the wheel and the car is also soon in overdrive. Ironically, it is after losing the car that was pursuing them and switching drivers, that a policeman stops and tickets them (for making a turn without signaling). Jane persuades Alan to wait a week to think about what to do with the money, and he takes it to the LA train station and checks it. The claim check slips through a hole in his coat pocket into the lining and becomes the center-piece of the plot.

Scott's Jane is as cold-blooded as she is greedy and neither her husband nor a blackmailer played by Dan Duryea can stop her.

There is nothing special (none of the odd angles or menacing shadows of the artier noirs) in "Too Late for Tears" as shot by William Mellor (who won an Oscar for "A Place in the Sun" two years later).

It seems that as much as half of the movie is daytime, but with none of the characters who survive the first third of the movie having clean hands, the moral universe of greed and revenge is indisputably the noir world.

"Too Late for Tears" is not a great movie nor is it a particularly impressive noir visually, but it contains prototypical performances by the diamond-hard Scott and the squishy-centered (under the swagger) Duryea and a very hard-boiled noir plot (supplied by Roy Huggins).

Kansas City Confidential (1952)
is a very hard-boiled cops and robbers flick with a noirish look and the noir atmosphere of duplicity, complicated betrayals, and moral confusion that defined the genre (along with being filmed in black and white). Like the considerably lighter-hearted 1951 movie "His Kind Of Woman," the last half of the movie takes place at a Mexican beach resort. And it only partly takes place at night. The characters focused on are definitely urban American ones. Rather than a femme fatale (or two or more), there is a pure-of-heart heroine (and law student; Coleen Gray) who takes the side of the dogged, tough, kicked-around antihero Joe Rolfe (John Payne) who was framed as a prime suspect of an armed robbery in Kansas City.

He is both a decorated World War II veteran and an ex-con who has been going straight. His (mis)treatment by the police is severe enough that I'm surprised it got by the censors (but, since it was a B movie, they probably did not pay as much attention to it as to A pictures). The rest of the movie is his quest to find out who framed him and to reap the rewards of the crime he did not commit. The print is scratched, but the dialogue is clear.

Payne is outstanding, dealing shall we say firmly with the unsavory bandits played (baroquely overplayed) by Lee Van Cleef, Jack Elam, and Neville Brand. In recruiting them, Preston Foster also dealt with them firmly and had the advantage of knowing more about them.

The movie drags a bit in the middle, and a major twist was clear to me long before it was spelled out, but I'd give the movie high marks for plot ingenuity. As Bill Jones noted, the movie goes soft literally in the last minute. Perhaps the censors did make some demands after all...

The action was well photographed by George E. Diskant, who had also photographed Desperate for Anthony Mann, They Live by Night and On Dangerous Ground for Nicholas Ray (and the noir "The Narrow Margin" directed by Richard Fleischer). Diskant's cinematography was not as virtuosi as Alton's was, but was better than good.

Full Reviews

There is more contextual (and plot) information on "Too Late for Tears" in my review at http://www.epinions.com/content_193007095428.
There are discerning full-length reviews of "He Walked by Night" by George Chabot at http://www.epinions.com/content_180048858756
and of "Kansas City Confidential" by William Jones at http://www.epinions.com/content_41983250052.

I have also written about what I think are the ten best American noirs at
http://www.epinions.com/content_4454916228.
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Recommended:
Yes

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