228) Cornered (1945), 229) Desperate (1947), 231) The Phenix City Story (1955), 232) Armored Car Robbery (1950), 233) Crime in the Streets (1956), 234) Backfire (1950) and 236) Dial 1119 (1950)

228) Cornered (1945) Dir: Edward Dmytryk Date Released: December 1945 Date Seen: July 12, 2010 Rating: 3.25/5

229) Desperate (1947) Dir: Anthony Mann Date Released: May 1947 Date Seen: July 13, 2010 Rating: 3.75/5

231) The Phenix City Story (1955) Dir: Phil Karlson Date Released: August 1955 Date Seen: July 15, 2010 Rating: 3/5

232) Armored Car Robbery (1950) Dir: Richard Fleischer Date Released: June 1950 Date Seen: July 14, 2010 Rating: 3.75/5

233) Crime in the Streets (1956) Dir: Don Siegel Date Released: June 1956 Date Seen: July 15, 2010 Rating: 2/5

234) Backfire (1950) Dir: Vincent Sherman Date Released: February 1950 Date Seen: July 16, 2010 Rating: 3.25/5

236) Dial 1119 (1950) Dir: Gerald Mayer Date Released: October 1950 Date Seen: July 18, 2010 Rating: 3.75/5

In retrospect, this noir box set was actually really very good. See my dvd review for Slant Magazine.

172) The Naked Spur (1953)

172) The Naked Spur (1953) Dir: Anthony Mann Date Released: February 1953 Date Seen: June 7th, 2009 Rating: 3.75/5

There's an unusual spontaneity to Anthony Mann's normally meticulously composed images of bodies in The Naked Spur. You can see it in the way that you can't always get a clear shot of Jimmy Stewart when he's tussling with Robert Ryan or how the camera hesitates a little more than it should during group shots of Stewart's posse and his bounty right before he transitions to a close-up. You can also see it in the way that, just after Robert Ryan says what deceptively sounds like the film's tagline--"Plain arithmetic. Money splits better two ways instead of three"--the camera accidentally crash zooms into Janet Leigh before showing Millard Mitchell and Stewart clumped together on her right. 

That last bit of unrehearsed visual experimentation reflects the curiously jerky nature of the film's melodrama. Stewart plays Edward Kemp, a sweaty, beleaguered  bounty hunter on the trail of badman Ben Vandergroat (Ryan). Kemp and Vandergroat don't have a personal score to settle--Kemp is simply turning in Vandergroat because of the $5,000 price tag hanging over his head--but they do squabble over Lina (Leigh), Vandergroat's girl. While the feud between Kemp and his two new partners, Roy Anderson (Ralph Meeker) and Jesse Tate (Millard Mitchell), takes the foreground of the film's drama, the tug-of-war for Lina's hand quietly commands the film's focus, making what looks like a botched zoom seem fraught with veiled insinuations.

Lina bounces from Vandergroat to Kemp and back so roughly that it's no wonder that Mann's wandering camera had trouble picking her out from the rest of the boys.  She's the one rare exception to Mann's sustained dedication to fleshing out all of his characters, which is especially admirable in Roy's case considering how he could have just as easily been tossed aside like a necessary means to an inevitable end (hint: Vandergroat doesn't stay tied up forever). There's never a moment when she enjoys the limelight like the other guys, not even when she's justifying her love to a snarling but out-of-breath Kemp at film's end.* She's a rough edge that screenwriters Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom weren't quite able to smooth out but considering how many great one-liners and individually memorable scenes they supply the film with, it's no wonder why it's one of the cornerstones of Mann's career. 

*Stewart's brutal performance in this one surprised me. Just goes to show ya how versatile the guy was. Why, Mr. Smith, what a big gun you have!

157) Side Street (1950)

157) Side Street (1950) Dir: Anthony Mann Date Released: March 1950 Date Seen: June 1st, 2009 Rating: 4/5

Thanks to its acute attention to detail, Anthony Mann’s Side Street provides the kind of satisfaction that few noirs are able to. This isn’t just an appraisal of Mann’s stunning visual sensibility, which makes each shot of Manhattan, both interiors and exteriors, a carefully composed and striking image unto itself, but rather on the film’s gimmicky but effective ethos. Being a film not only set in but also about New York City, screenwriter Sidney Boehm makes informs us in the film’s voiceover introduction that everyone has a separate but equal voice. What’s most remarkable about Side Street is that it achieves that small feat thanks to Mann’s masterful direction, an all-round terrific cast and of course the nuance of Boehm’s script.

Whether it’s the Greek waiters with their very Greek tendency to exaggerate or the OTB reject that bums a newspaper off of Joe Norson (Farley Granger), our harried hero, no person is left without a sufficient dollop of character-defining detail. These little establishing bits of dialogue aren’t so overbearing as to distract from the film’s central plot but are rather real enough to make Joe’s search for the bundle of $30,000 he’s stolen and subsequently lost that much more absorbing. Even at the end, when a seemingly inconsequential thug gets gunned down and dies in an uncomfortably close close-up, the scene feels like it could be more than just the end of a one-note, faceless jamook. That kind of specificity makes Side Street feel, dare I say it, authentic, taking on an ambitious, quasi-modernist task of making every POV equal and running with that idea as far as it can.