As Night and the City progresses, jealously runs into greed, ambition meets deception, and one double-dealing move encounters a newly revealed double cross. Before he knows it, Harry is in over his head on any number of different fronts.
Crime dramas and noirs predominantly made up the early part of Anthony Mann’s career, and epics and action/adventure films concluded it. But the Westerns he directed solidify his standing as one of the great, underrated figures of American cinema. Many films are evidence of his talent. Man of the West is just one, a very good one.
There are multiple reasons why Out of the Past is such an exemplary work in the world of noir, and part has to do with just how faithfully and inventively it adheres to the form.
Out of the Past Written by Daniel Mainwaring Directed by Jacques Tourneur U.S.A., 1947 Sometimes, there is no eluding one’s past, regardless of how hard one tries. The reasons are numerous. Perhaps the emotional and psychological weight of an event in one’s life are too great to shake off. In other instances the shackles exist …
Out of the Past Directed by Jacques Tourneur Written by Daniel Mainwaring Starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas USA, 97 min – 1947. “I never saw her in the daytime. We seemed to live by night. What was left of the day went away like a pack of cigarettes you smoked. I didn’t …
I looked for him, but he was gone. I checked the boozy dives and the greasy spoons and the street corners where the not-nice girls hang out. Nothing. He was gone. Tall guy, fedora, trench coat. You must’ve seen him. Usually smoking. He was always hanging around, poking his nose where it didn’t belong and …
The title of Lee Server’s acclaimed 2002 biography, Robert Mitchum: Baby I Don’t Care (MacMillan), offers a perfect encapsulization of the eponymous actor: a hard-partying Hollywood Bad Boy who didn’t give a damn what moralizing finger-waggers thought of him, or what his peers in the movie business thought, or the press, or even the public. He …
Coming out of World War II, the major Hollywood studios had hoped to get back to business as usual. The distraction of the war was gone, rationing repealed, and the boys – 15 million of them — were coming home. But the expected upsurge in business didn’t come. In fact, almost immediately box office began …