Volume 38, Number 14 · August 15, 1991
The Return of Film Noir!
By Geoffrey O'Brien
MOVIES DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
The Seventh Victim
directed by Mark Robson
Turner, $19.95
The Dark Mirror
directed by Robert Siodmak
Republic, $14.95
Desperate
directed by Anthony Mann
Turner, $19.95
The Street With No Name
directed by William Keighley
CBS-Fox, $19.95
Road House
directed by Jean Negulesco
CBS-Fox, $19.95
Follow Me Quietly
directed by Richard Fleischer
Turner, $19.95
Caught
directed by Max Ophuls
Republic, $14.95
Gun Crazy
directed by Joseph H. Lewis
CBS-Fox, $19.95
Panic in the Streets
directed by Elia Kazan
CBS-Fox, $39.95
The Underworld Story
directed by Cyril Endfield
CBS-Fox, $19.95
Try and Get Me
directed by Cyril Endfield
Republic, $19.95
The Narrow Margin
directed by Richard Fleischer
Turner, $19.95
On Dangerous Ground
directed by Nicholas Ray
Tuner, $19.95
Pickup on South Street
directed by Samuel Fuller
CBS-Fox, $19.95
Human Desire
directed by Fritz Lang
Goodtimes, $12.95
Kiss Me Deadly
directed by Robert Aldrich
MGM, $19.95
For spectators who grew up during the postwar period and its aftermath, there existed an internalized movie whose characters circled warily around each other in a world of night clubs and truck stops, a backlit theater of memory where women's faces disappeared in cigarette smoke and the world was erased by the blare of rumba bands. All men were named Steve and hadn't shaved in three days, had been wounded in battle or betrayed in the bedroom, stopped off for coffee but couldn't get that tune out of their heads, had been out of work since they got back from the war, took no satisfaction in anything but a grim, worn-out lucidity of purpose. The women were isolated, cynical, haunting, ruthless, frightened, doomed. Their intentions were crucial but definitively illegible. The rest of the world—cops, soda jerks, small-time hoods and con artists, rubes on the town flashing their wads, hatcheck girls dreaming of movie careers, cunning drunkards, eccentric night clerks—didn't care anyway. The el rumbled by, indifferent to the lovers dying in its shadow.
Review, 5139 words
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