Classic Film Noir

If you are a mystery or detective fan you've probably learned about film noir, a genre of 40's and 50's black and white dramas with a more negative point of view than that usually taken by earlier films.  Film noir was usually made as B pictures by RKO, Warner Bros, or Monogram or some of the other small moviemakers, but even goody two-shoes MGM got into the act occasionally.

This DVD is published by St Clair Entertainment Group and is a collection of very highly rated films noirs that have fallen into the public domain. If a copyright lapses, public domain publishing firms are quick to produce DVDs and this is one of those. 

The DVD has 9 movies split up over three DVDs. They are all well known and uniformly good to view.  The quality of the DVD is pretty good without a lot of deterioration.

Disk 1 has

Too Late for Tears – starring Lizabeth Scott and Arthur Kennedy, with Dan Duryea and a few other familiar faces.  Lizabeth proves herself one of the best femmes fatales when she decides to keep a briefcase full of money that gets thrown into her car by a gang of robbers.

The Man Who Cheated Himself - stars Lee J Cobb as a homicide detective that has to investigate himself at a killing actually performed in his presence by his married girlfriend as his kid brother, also a detective, wanting to solve his first big case, eagerly helps. Shows how bad he can be.

The Stranger – Orson Welles directed and stars in this story of a Nazi war criminal masquerading as a small town professor just after WWII.

Disk 2 has

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers - Barbara Stanwyck plays the title character and shows she can be a queen b----- from hell.  She is one of the best femmes fatales in the movies. Also starring Van Heflin and Lizabeth Scott.  Kirk Douglas makes his film debut also.

The Hitch-Hiker noted actress Ida Lupino directed this and was one of the only female directors for many years.  Stars William Talman, Edmund O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy as three guys who share a ride across the desert. One of them is a psychotic that terrorizes the other two.

Quicksand - Mickey Rooney sheds his kid actor stripes and does a pretty good adult performance as a guy who falls into the snare set by a scheming woman. Jeanne Cagney and Peter Lorre costar.

Disk 3 has

Detour - a short film but one of the best. Tom Neal and Ann Savage share a ride out to California and when he tries to drop her off, she decides to keep him and he has no say about it.

The Scar – Paul Henreid and Joan Bennett show how hard it is for a guy to change his identity with very ironic results, in keeping with the film noir code that everyone gets punished.

D.O.A.  – Edmund O’Brien is a guy who gets poisoned and then spends the rest of the movie trying to find and catch the person who did it.

If you don’t have most of these mysteries already you’re missing something and this set lets you get them all at once to fill out your library quite nicely.

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV