Vice Squad / Black Tuesday / Nightmare
BLU-RAY STREET DATE: FEBRUARY 27, 2024/KL STUDIO CLASSICS
Back with another three-fer of classic thrillers is the venerable KL Studio Classics’ series “Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema.” In this worthwhile seventeenth volume, the spotlight falls on one-time Little Caesar himself, Edward G. Robinson.
While none of the three mid-1950s curios rise to the levels of the previous decade’s Robinson-starring Double Indemnity or Scarlet Street (what does?), all three of these black-and-white titles hit the Film Noir mark. Two of the three are quite good in their own rights. All three transfers come from brand new HD masters sourced from 2K scans of the 35mm fine grains. The efforts pay off, as each film looks undistractingly swell. Each disc also benefits from a new audio commentary track.
Although Robinson’s career had taken a hit because of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s probing his communist beliefs, the bulldog actor is no less exceptional in these humble non-major-studio productions. Whether he’s playing a grounded lawman (Vice Squad; Nightmare) or a murderous criminal (Black Tuesday), Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XVII does right by this unlikely leading man. KL’s box set’s amalgamated cover art tells the story:
Red Edward G. Robinson: Hold it right there, Edward G. Robinson!
Green Edward G. Robinson: I’m innocent, see!! YOU’RE the one who’s red!!
*****
What follows are individual reviews of KL’s grouped Blu-rays of Vice Squad, Black Tuesday and Nightmare….
Vice Squad
DIRECTED BY ARNOLD LAVEN/1953
1953’s Vice Squad is an underrated, underseen discovery starring Edward G. Robinson as a hardened but effective chief of police. The story starts at night and continues through to the next day’s late afternoon. In not even a twenty-four-hour period, we are witness to burglary, knowing manipulation of call girls, and flagrant psychological trickery. And that’s just the list of infractions depicted by the film’s heroes, the men of the LAPD.
Vice Squad’s string of highly dubious police actions, all depicted as unquestionably integral to the greater pursuit of justice, are intended to demonstrate the lengths these law officers will go to get their man. The film starts with the abrupt shooting murder of one of their fellow officers, not unlike the beginning of 1948’s classic police procedural, He Walked by Night. This is witnessed by one Jack Hartrampf (Porter Hall), a nebbish funeral home owner on his way out of an extramarital tryst. Hartrampf gets picked up and taken downtown for questioning. He’s innocent (of murder), but his lawyer’s advice doesn’t make it easy. And naturally, he doesn’t want his whereabouts at the time getting back home.
Based on the novel Harness Bull by Leslie T. White, Vice Squad stands proudly as an unironic time capsule demonstrating the extreme leniency granted to law enforcement in the Eisenhower era. The fact that busting “vice” only comes up as the antithesis of how this particular squad operates is the least of the departmental infractions that occur.
With the casting of the radiant Paulette Goddard as the local brothel madame, we see how effortless Robinson’s character’s affinity for her is. In his hardened yet vulnerable performance, it occurs to us that such affinity may well extend beyond friendship. In this busy procedural, such a detail can only be implied. How well does the Vice Squad really know vice?
Film historian/screenwriter Gary Gerani speed-reads his way through his prepared audio commentary text without managing to ever sound anything less than 100% engaged. Vice Squad is, in fact, just that easy to engage with. This is helped along by KL Studio Classics’ terrific technical presentation of the film.
Black Tuesday
DIRECTED BY HUGO FREGONESE/1954
Extremely evocatively filmed in black and white yet weirdly stagnant for the longest time, the prison break/standoff film Black Tuesday (1954) proves to be a provocative tale any day of the week. At the thirty-minute mark, the pace picks up for a central prison break sequence. Film historian/screenwriter Gary Gerani returns for another optional commentary, immediately informing us that the title refers not to the stock market crash of 1929, but rather the day of the week when death row inmates are put to death.
From bars to bricks to a bank interior of stone, steel, and glass, and then a grimy warehouse lousy with forgotten restaurant supplies, Black Tuesday is rife with atmospheric texture. Music is used quite sparingly, a dignified move if perhaps not the best choice for the material. Yet, the cumulative impact is a heightened reality, an inevitable oomph.
Fragile mortality looms through all of Black Tuesday. Edward G. Robinson tops the bill as the ruthless death row inmate Canelli, whom we are introduced to as his appointment with state mandated termination quickly approaches. For all his boisterous caterwauling and hardened defiance in the face of authorities and last rites administrator Father Slocum (Milburn Stone), Canelli’s fear of the sting O death is the thing that truly gives him pause.
A brutal miscreant to the core, Canelli is the only thing that matters to Canelli. Even his gal Hatti (Jean Parker), so instrumental in his prison break (along with a group of caught-up others, including a young Peter Graves in a prominent supporting role), is, in his mind, ultimately only there for his own eventual happiness. The plan is for the two of them to run off together. It doesn’t matter how many other people die in the violent dust-up. “What goes on in that mind of yours that makes you want to hurt people?”, asks Slocum, now a hostage amid a shootout with every cop in town. The question is asked in vain.
Being an entertainment feels almost secondary to Black Tuesday– a film that, while steeped in 1950s values in terms of criminal justice, is progressive enough to push back on certain beliefs and practices. The entire notion of capital punishment is challenged verbally during some newsroom reporter banter and then challenged subtly as director Hugo Fregonese includes (among other things) a full-screen shot of a paper invitation, thereby “inviting” us, the viewers, to the event.
There’s a boldness about everything in Black Tuesday, though all of it is no doubt ignited by Robinson’s ferocious performance. It is a true Film Noir in the classic form’s late-era tradition of assuming different shapes (this movie manages to be a prison noir, jailbreak intrigue, and finally a prolonged crime standoff) under auspice of one title.
Nightmare
DIRECTED BY MAXWELL SHANE/1956
Edward G. Robinson walks among the tangled kudzu in the 1956 New Orleans-set psychological noir mystery, Nightmare. It’s based on a story by author Cornell Woolrich (who’s also responsible for the source material of Hitchcock’s Rear Window), whom, professor, film scholar, and audio commentator for this fine disc, Jason A. Ney, details as the singular author with the most influence on and adaptations within Film Noir. He counts fifteen, this one included. Ney’s commentary is a particularly strong selling point for this otherwise middling title.
A thunderous problem with nightmare is that it holds its cards too closely for far too long. For well over an hour of its ninety-minute run time, we’re stuck with a freaked-out Invasion of the Body Snatchers-era Kevin McCarthy, who, first thing, awakens from a lucid night terror wherein he kills a man in a strange hall of mirrors. McCarthy is playing Stan, a nightclub clarinetist for Billy May and His Orchestra (playing themselves), trying to figure out what on earth is going on. Although the intense incident (serving as the bravura opening grabber of this movie… a sequence the rest of it fails to live up to) was just a dream, he finds a prominent key from it in his hand. And bruises on his neck from where his victim was strangling him. But… none of that was real…! What is going on???
of course, one glimpse at the poster (as well as the KL Studio Classics’ Blu-ray case) gives a big, big clue. One might even call it… a spoiler. “HYPNOTISM… can it drive a man to murder?” But then again, just beneath that tagline is a large illustration of a petrified Edward G. Robinson, a moment which never appears in the film. So, the old artwork isn’t entirely trustworthy…. Hmmm….
Robinson, a police detective specializing in murder and also Stan’s brother-in-law, is, in fact, the very anchor of reasonable rationality in this movie. He spends the whole thing looking out for Stan but also never sugarcoating the fact that Stan did kill someone and will be held liable for that… unless they can prove his innocence.
Through a series of coincidental events and hazy premonitions, the two leading men and their respective ladies (Virginia Christine and torch singer Connie Russell, who is the uncredited singing voice of Red in Tex Avery’s classic cartoon Red Hot Riding Hood) end up waiting out a torrential thunderstorm in an abandoned ranch house in the middle of nowhere. It’s the kind of place that’s been well kept even though there are drop cloths on all the furniture and the lamps are wrapped in clear plastic. This place may or may not be vital in the unraveling of the scheme that’s made a murderer out of poor ol’ Stan.
Director Maxwell Shane didn’t make many movies, and this one came fairly late in the game. It’s not a great film, but he does load it up with the kind of pointless details that most movies simply don’t bother with. Robinson parks next to a fire hydrant and when warned about it, just says, “Tell ‘em who the driver is!” No one ever comes asking. His wife in the film is terrified of lightning. There’s no payoff to this. She also is pregnant and therefore wants to eat all the time. This seemingly important detail doesn’t matter, either. Heck, the whole New Orleans setting doesn’t factor in any major way other than it’s a nice change of pace from the usual overshot Southern California locales. They do get out onto the real New Orleans streets a few times, which is quite cool and not common for films of this ilk in this time.
As spot-on as McCarthy is in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, he’s just not a good fit in Nightmare. One might even say that the actor sleepwalks among the tangled kudzu….