cigarjoe
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Posts posted by cigarjoe
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The Bloody Brood (1959) Beatnik and Bongo Noir, Beatniksploytation Canadian Style no less..... Had it on mostly as background noise Peter Falk stars.
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Thanks that works
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Where did they go? are they still being worked on?
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I can see one bright spot on the emoticons every time we see a picture of Donald Trump we have that big SAD emoticon now to use.
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Wazup with the giant emoticons?
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What's up with the giant sized emoticons?
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Are you talking about the film Raw Deal? (too early for me being on the west coast).
Yes.
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Great film today, and nice intro and outro by Eddie.
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Here is a review with screencaps http://Something Wild (1961) New York Kitchen Sink Noir
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Cidade Baixa (Lower City) (2005) Beautiful Brazilian Noir
A Brazilian Neo Noir masterpiece, directed by Sérgio Machado, written by Karim Aïnouz, Sérgio Machado, Adriana Rattes, and Gil Vicente Tavares.The excellent cinematography was by Toca Seabra and music was by Carlinhos Brown and Beto Villares.The film Stars Alice Braga as Karinna, Wagner Moura as Naldinho. Lázaro Ramos as Deco, Dois Mundos as Dois Mundos, Harildo Deda as Careca, Maria Menezes as Luzinete, João Miguel as Edvan, Débora Santiago as Sirlene, José Dumont as Sergipano, and the beautiful locations around Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.A 10/10, and a good example of what can be done without spending tons of dough, a Neo Noir about simple people in convoluted situations. Bravo! Full review with more screencaps on Film Noir/Gangster and, with even more screencaps at Noirsville
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Cidade Baixa (Lower City) (2005) Beautiful Brazilian Noir
A Brazilian Neo Noir masterpiece, directed by Sérgio Machado, written by Karim Aïnouz, Sérgio Machado, Adriana Rattes, and Gil Vicente Tavares.The excellent cinematography was by Toca Seabra and music was by Carlinhos Brown and Beto Villares.
The film Stars Alice Braga as Karinna, Wagner Moura as Naldinho. Lázaro Ramos as Deco, Dois Mundos as Dois Mundos, Harildo Deda as Careca, Maria Menezes as Luzinete, João Miguel as Edvan, Débora Santiago as Sirlene, José Dumont as Sergipano, and the beautiful locations around Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.
The beginning of film is like a riff on all the truck driving and road noirs, They Drive by Night (1940), Thieves' Highway (1949), Highway Dragnet (1954), and particularly Road Movie (1973) and then adds bits and pieces of other noirs, and every film you ever saw about two guys fighting over one girl, making the whole something new.
The films femme fatale is Karinna a ****/stripper who needs a ride to Salvador. Two "brothers" Naldinho and Deco, childhood friends, own a cargo boat. They overhear Karinna asking a bodega owner about any trucks going to Salvador. Naldinho offers her a ride if she'll put out for the two of them. Karinna dickers the price and agrees to go. Naldinho and Deco draw straws to to see who goes first with Karinna, Naldinho wins. The next day the brothers are in both love with Karinna which sends the tale and the crew sailing off to Noirsvilleas as jealousy begins to gnaw at their relationship.
Karinna (Alice Braga) 
Deco (Lázaro Ramos) 
Naldinho (Wagner Moura) After tieing up for the night they all go to a bar where a cockfight is taking place, they lose 100 on the bet they made with their chicken but the winner continues to torment them. A fight starts Deco grabs a bottle breaks and kills the guy. Deco picks up Naldinho and the brothers run out of the place back to their boat and cast off. In Salvador, a Doctor patches up Naldinho, but the brothers need rent and eating money.
Deco looks for a job, getting some work as a sparring partner at a boxing gym. Karinna takes off to work for Xanadoo, a strip joint/**** house. Karinna get's the brothers a job using their boat to ferry hookers out to the various ships anchored out in the harbor. They also got a con scam working where Karinna fakes ODing and in the panic the captain of the ship offers them money to clean it all up.
As things heat up between Karinna and both Naldinho and Deco, each brother jockeys for the upper hand, Deco concentrates on boxing, Naldinho goes to local mobster Dois Mundos (Dois Mundos) and begins to rob pharmacies for the Brazilian equivalents of Cialis, Viagra, etc. When Karinna finds out that she is pregnant, as you would expect, things build to an explosion.
Noirsville
A 10/10, and a good example of what can be done without spending tons of dough, a Neo Noir about simple people in convoluted situations. Bravo! Full review with more screencaps at Noirsville
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His psychic force commits sensual, shocking acts---that's the tagline for this movie. Sounds ok to me. Where is it available?
A DVD or at the moment on that popular video site that must not be named. :-)
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Psychic Killer (1975) Supernatural Noir
Supernatural, SiFi, and Fantasy based Noir. along with Western and Period Piece Noirs have been around since the beginning.It's going to be subjective, each individual viewer will have to be their own judge, some of these films will be on the cusp between genres and depending on your individual tastes you will either tune to them as Noirs or not.For anybody who has watched a lot of noirs and Naked City and other TV anthology programs, the cinematic memory provided by all the Classic Noir stars front loaded in this piece will propel it easily into a small Twilight Zone corner of Noirsville.Paul Burke and Jim Hutton are great, Aldo Ray looking a bit chunkier than he did in Nightfall plays Burke's second banana. Whit Bissell looks like he's having a blast playing a lecherous doc. Julie Adams and Jim Hutton shine. Nehemiah Persoff does his competent usual bit, and Neville Brand in his small part as a butcher arguing with a customer Mrs Gibson (Della Reese) is chuckle inducing.The film is entertaining enough for me, it's the equivalent of an old "B" movie, no more no less. Again some of these non straight up traditional Crime films, both in cinema and TV, that combine noir stylistics with elements of supernatural, horror, and exploitation, are part of the fog shrouded, teetering bridge, between Classic Noir and the Neo Noir resurgence in the late 70s and again in the 90s. 7/10. Full review with some screencaps here in Film/Noir Gangster and even more at Noirsville blog.
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Psychic Killer (1975) Supernatural Noir
Supernatural, SiFi, and Fantasy based Noir. along with Western and Period Piece Noirs have been around since the beginning.It's going to be subjective, each individual viewer will have to be their own judge, some of these films will be on the cusp between genres and depending on your individual tastes you will either tune to them as Noirs or not.
During the Classic Film Noir Era films like Val Lewton's Cat People (1942), The Seventh Victim (1943) and others have Noir stylistics. Others, Decoy (1946), Repeat Performance (1947), Alias Nick Beal (1949), , The Amazing Mr. X (1948), Fear in the Night(1947), The Night Has a Thousand Eyes(1948), Dementia (1955), Nightmare (1956), Indestructible Man (1956), I Bury the Living(1958) all covered roughly the same Supernatural, SiFi, and Fantasy territories, there are probably a few more to be discovered. Another that comes to mind is Angel On My Shoulder (1946) and you can possibly even include It's a Wonderful Life (1946) for it's Noir-ish sequence. Add to the mix in the 60s Experimental, and various Exploitation Films.
Even television in the mid fifties and early sixties with anthology programs like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Suspense, The Twilight Zone, One Step Beyond and The Outer Limits also blurred the lines between Crime, Noir, Suspense, Horror, SiFi, and Thrillers.
During the Transitional Noir period (1960-1968), films like The Hypnotic Eye (1960), Carnival of Souls (1962) Repulsion (1965) and Seconds (1966) continued the trend. Neo Noirs from 1969 to the present with these elements occasionally crop up also, TV film The Night Stalker (1972), this film Psychic Killer, Angel Heart (1987), Siesta (1987), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me(1992), A Gun, A Car, A Blonde (1997), Lost Highway (1997), and Dark Country (2009), again, there are probably others out there that will fit either your or my parameters that are forgotten and off the current radar and yet to be identified.
Psychic Killer has some heavy noir credentials in cast and crew, which endows the film with cinematic memory. It's directed and co written by Raymond Danton aka Ray Danton, who starred in I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955), The Night Runner (1957), beatnik Noir The Beat Generation(1959) and Budd Boetticher's The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960). He turned to directing in 1972, predominantly in TV ending with The New Mike Hammer TV Series 1984-1989. Like most of the Hollywood Studio B Production stars at the end of B Productions, who seemed to disappear off the movie screens of the 60s, Danton migrated over to television to finish out his career.
The film was written Greydon Clark, Mikel Angel, and Danton. The cinematography was by Herb Pearl. and music was by William Kraft.
The film stars Paul Burke an early TV star probably best known to Noiristas for playing Det. Adam Flint in the noirish Naked City anthology TV series (1960-1963), Jim Hutton best known for A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), Where the Boys Are (1960), Period of Adjustment(1962), and Major Dundee (1965), Julie Adams Creature from the Black Lagoon(1954), Slaughter on 10th Avenue (1957), The Killer Inside Me (1976)
Lt. Jeff Morgan (Burke) 
Arnold Masters (Jim Hutton) 
Lt. Morgan (Burke) Lt. Dave Anderson (Aldo Ray) and Dr. Laura Scott (Julie Adams ) 
Lemonowski (Neville Brand) Noir vets Neville Brand Port of New York (1949), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1949) D.O.A.(1949) Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950), Kansas City Confidential (1952), Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), Cry Terror! (1958), The Mad Bomber (1973), and Eaten Alive (1976), Aldo Ray from Nightfall (1956), Whit Bissell (Somewhere in the Night (1946), Brute Force (1947), Raw Deal (1948), He Walked By Night (1948), Side Street (1950), The Killer That Stalked New York (1950), The Sellout (1952), Shack Out on 101 (1955), and Nehemiah Persoff The Naked City (1948), On the Waterfront (1954), The Harder They Fall (1956), The Wrong Man (1956), Al Capone (1959), provide the cinematic memory. Rounding out the rest of the cast are Rod Cameron, Mary Charlotte Wilcox, veteran Blaxploitation actor Stack Pierce (Cool Breeze (1972), A Rage in Harlem (1991)) Della Reese (Harlem Nights (1989),) and John Dennis (Battle Taxi (1955), Marty (1955), The Night of the Hunter (1955), The Naked Street(1955), My Gun Is Quick (1957), Mister Buddwing (1966)).
Los Angeles a state mental hospital. Arnold James Masters (Jim Hutton) is in the looney bin for killing his mother's doctor. The Doc had refused to operate on a tumor she had because they had no money.
After he's arrested his mother dies and they didn't find the body for four days. Now he goes on a periodic violent binges, resulting in getting dumped in a padded cell.
He meets an inmate Emilio (Stack Pierce) in the exercise yard who is staring through the chain-link fence doing time for killing his own daughter, because she was a ****. Emilio is a voodoo practitioner.
Emilio: (to Arnold) The day before I die I will kill the pimp that made my daughter a ****, and I will carve my initials in his body, the day after I die I will help you get justice.
A few days later Emilio runs across the exercise yard climbs the fence and falls to his death. Frank (John Dennis) the guard brings Emilio's possessions to Arnold telling him that Emilio left them to him. It's a book, a box with beads, an amulet, and a picture of Emilio's dead daughter all wrapped in a scarf. A letter also arrived addressed to Emilio, with a news clipping about a pimp who was ritually carved up in his downtown apartment last night. It means nothing to Frank, but to Arnold it was predicted by Emilio.
That night while Arnold is holding the amulet he gets a severe headache sees a vision of Emilio goes into a trance, and basically dies. Declared dead Arnold is sent to the morgue for an autopsy. The moment the coroner makes an incision Arnold wakes up. The next day Arnold is summoned into the Warden's office and told that last night a man confessed to killing the doctor. So Arnold is free to go. Arriving back at his mother's house Arnold cleans out some cobwebs, sets up housekeeping, and goes on an out of body killing spree of all those that did his mother and him wrong.
Whit Bissell is a hoot as the seriously suave Dr. Paul Taylor (the court appointed psychiatrist in Arnold's case), making the moves on a patient up in a secluded hunting cabin. He's rounding third and just about to slide into home when he begins to hear voices. He grabs a hunting rifle, runs out into the woods and ends up breaking his neck. His mother's incompetent ex-visiting nurse mysteriously scalds herself to death in a shower at a patient's home.
Trying to make sense out of the weird and suspicious accidental deaths are Police Lt. Jeff Morgan (Paul Burke) and Lt. Dave Anderson (Aldo Ray). The next victim is close to home, it's the arresting officer in Arnold's case. He dies in a speeding accident. When the police connect the dots to Arnold, psychiatrist Dr. Laura Scott (Julie Adams) from the institution is brought in. After she sees Arnold appear to her in his out of body state after she's shacked up with Morgan, she demands that Morgan bring in an old colleague of her's, an expert in parapsychology Dr. Gubner (Nehemiah Persoff).For anybody who has watched a lot of noirs and Naked City and other TV anthology programs, the cinematic memory provided by all the Classic Noir stars front loaded in this piece will propel it easily into a small Twilight Zone corner of Noirsville.
Noirsville
L.A. River 
Arnold in his out of body trance 
Paul Burke and Jim Hutton are great, Aldo Ray looking a bit chunkier than he did in Nightfall plays Burke's second banana. Whit Bissell looks like he's having a blast playing a lecherous doc. Julie Adams and Jim Hutton shine. Nehemiah Persoff does his competent usual bit, and Neville Brand in his small part as a butcher arguing with a customer Mrs Gibson (Della Reese) is chuckle inducing.
The film is entertaining enough for me, it's the equivalent of an old "B" movie, no more no less. Again some of these non straight up traditional Crime films, both in cinema and TV, that combine noir stylistics with elements of supernatural, horror, and exploitation, are part of the fog shrouded, teetering bridge, between Classic Noir and the Neo Noir resurgence in the late 70s and again in the 90s. 7/10. Full review with more screencaps at Noirsville
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Shock Corridor (1963) Nutter Noir
Sam Fuller's shot in 10 days in studio Neo Neo Noir.Fuller (Pickup on South Street (1953), House of Bamboo (1955), The Crimson Kimono (1959), Underworld U.S.A. (1961), The Naked Kiss (1964)) also wrote the script back in the forties under the title Straitjacket for Fritz Lang. But Lang wanted to cast Joan Bennett in the lead. Cinematography was by Stanley Cortez (The Underworld Story (1950), The Night of the Hunter (1955), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Three Faces of Eve (1957), Vice Raid (1959), and uncredited for Chinatown (1974)). Additional color footage sequences by Sam Fuller from The House Of Bamboo and the unfinished film Tigrero, the Music was by Paul Dunlap.Shock Corridor is good in some sequences with some powerful acting but in others not so much and not because of anything controllable, it was a victim of the restraints of the times. 7/10Review with more screencaps here: http://noirsville.blogspot.com/2017/10/shock-corridor-1963-nutter-noir.html
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Shock Corridor (1963) Nutter Noir
Sam Fuller's shot in 10 days in studio Neo Neo Noir.
Fuller (Pickup on South Street (1953), House of Bamboo (1955), The Crimson Kimono (1959), Underworld U.S.A. (1961), The Naked Kiss (1964)) also wrote the script back in the forties under the title Straitjacket for Fritz Lang. But Lang wanted to cast Joan Bennett in the lead. Cinematography was by Stanley Cortez (The Underworld Story (1950), The Night of the Hunter (1955), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Three Faces of Eve (1957), Vice Raid (1959), and uncredited for Chinatown (1974)). Additional color footage sequences by Sam Fuller from The House Of Bamboo and the unfinished film Tigrero, the Music was by Paul Dunlap.
The film Stars Peter Breck (I Want to Live! (1958)) as Johnny Barrett, Constance Towers (Over-Exposed (1956), The Naked Kiss (1964), as Cathy, Noir vet Gene Evans (Berlin Express(1948), Criss Cross (1949), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Armored Car Robbery (1950), Storm Warning (1951), Ace in the Hole (1951), The Long Wait (1954), Crashout (1955) ) as Boden, Western Vet James Best (One Way Street (1950), ) as Stuart, Hari Rhodes (The Satan Bug(1965) as Trent, actor and writer Larry Tucker (Blast Of Silence (1961) as Pagliacci, Paul Dubov as Dr. J.L. Menkin, Chuck Roberson (Hi-Jacked (1950)) as Wilkes, Bill Zuckert (Kiss of Death(1947), ) as 'Swanee' Swanson, and Philip Ahn (Impact (1949), Macao (1952), Hell's Half Acre(1954)) as Dr. Fong.
Johnny Barrett (Breck)
Stuart (Best)
Wanna be hot shot reporter Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) gets a bug up his **** to break a story about a murder that took place in the kitchen at a mental hospital. With the blessing of his editor, he gets coached for a period of time by Dr. Fong (Philip Ahn) a psychiatrist so that he can conceivably pass re great as insane. His girlfriend exotic dancer Cathy is going to file a complaint posing as his sister. Cathy is going to claim that Johnny is molesting her. Cathy thinks the whole idea is disgusting. Getting committed is a breeze.
Pagliacci (Tucker) midnight opera
Johnny is in like Flynn, but the nut jobs, and wing nuts are beginning to wear him down. Pagliacci, (Larry Tucker) his next over ward mate sings gibberish opera at all hours of the night.
The three witnesses to the murder are Johnny's targets, Stuart was captured in the Korean War and was brainwashed. Stuart now thinks he's Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart, Borden (Gene Evans) is a brilliant nuclear scientist who's gone mad. Trent is a blackman who thinks he's the head of the Klu Klux Klan. Trent starts race riots among his ward mates.
Added to Johnny's dealings with the loonies are the sadistic guards and various forms of institutional therapy that he's subjected to after his confrontational altercations. All the sequences in the asylum are great with some outstanding acting sequences on display especially from James Best. The area where the film goes laughingly off track are in the Constance Towers' Cathy stripper sequences. I don't know if it was written in the original script but as it comes out on the screen Towers plays a singing stripper with a brain who sticks out from the other strippers like, as Chandler put it in Farewell My Lovely, "a tarantula on a piece of angel food.
Cathy: Do you think I like singing in that sewer with a hot light on my navel? I'm doing it because it pays more than shorthand or clerking or typing.
Yea sure. In real like she wouldn't last a set. She comes off utterly ridiculous doing a very lame strip routine. Her head at one point is completely covered with a feathered boa. You can picture what a real real hardcore reaction of the audience to her would be, i.e. jeers, boos, and shouts of, "****!" "shut up and strip," "take it off," "show us your ****," and "get the **** off the stage." It's almost as bad as Anita Ekberg's set in Screaming Mimi.
****?
You gotta wonder if Towers had some input into that disastrous decision, did she not want to play a common stripper?, or was it the sway of the MPPC that dictated it so, but in contrast, other films got away with a lot more doing a way better job with more believable burlesque related sequences, i.e., Girl On The Run (1953), The Man With Golden Arm (1955), Hell Bound(1957), Two Men in Manhattan (1959), the way ahead of it's time and also BTW, the real deal a strip show circa 1960 in The Savage Eye (1960, Satan In High Heels (1962), and Angels Flight(1964). It's not until Rita Moreno's stripper routine in 1969's Marlowe do we get an actually believable classy strip in a mainstream film. The best Black & White strip recreation is Valerie Perrine's as Hot Honey Harlow in Lenny -Bio Noir .
It also doesn't help having Cathy show up in miniature in repeat performances to reinforce the cheesiness of her act during some hallucination sequences.
In another scenario Barrett walks accidentally into the male graffiti covered walls of the **** ward, the ****'s go out of control and attack, taking Barrett down like a pack of wolves taking down a deer, apparently trying to "bite" Barrett to death, it's a hoot.
**** Another chuckle inducing sequence is when Barrett wanders into the **** Ward. You kind of wish that rather than 1963 Fuller would have made both this and 1964's The Naked Kiss, after the complete demise of the Motion Picture Production Code, say post 1967. He could have made a more realistic adult features.
After one of Trent's hospital race riots, Barrett is straitjacketed and cared off for shock treatments. He begins imagining that Cathy really is his sister.
Barrett still manages to learn the identity of the killer and during a fight with a guard violently extracts a confession from him in front of witnesses and gets to write his story. But consequences send this directly to Noirsville.
Noirsville
Shock Corridor is good in some sequences with some powerful acting but in others not so much and not because of anything controllable, it was a victim of the restraints of the times. 7/10
Review with more screencaps here: http://noirsville.blogspot.com/2017/10/shock-corridor-1963-nutter-noir.html
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Food for thought, a 50 foot woman would have a 4 1/2 foot v-jayjay.
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Concerning the Other Sources for Classic Films from any era.
For those with a high speed internet connection and a cable TV modem with WiFi, there's an extensive amount of Films &TV programs available on Internet Archives, Youtube, Dailymotion, etc., etc., stuff thats, you'd think, dropped off the face of the earth.
Some in excellent HD presentations, that you don't have to watch on a computer screen.
You can watch on your TV (if you have modern flat screen TV most of these all have multiple ways of connecting, i.e., coaxial cable, HDMI, Composite Video (RCA jack plug connections). If you buy a Chromecast ($30 roughly), and get the free app online, anything you bring up on a tab on your computer screen you can cast it to the TV. You can still work, search, etc., on other things while casting.
I've watched Highway Dragnet (1954), Carney (1980), Jailbait (1952), The Violent Years (1954), The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961) some old TV episodes of Darren McGavin's The Outsider, the rare out of print experimental film The Savage Eye (1960). Even some Public Libraries have film archives for streaming. Anything you can think out you can look for on line. You'd be surprised what you can find.
It opens up a whole new realm of possibilities.
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Mmmmmm...Martine Beswick. [sigh]
She's great as Adelita in the film A Bullet for the General
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I am now a dedicated Charles McGraw fan. Took me while. He always seemed older than his years due to that gravelly voice. A reviewer once said that any movie is enhanced if Charles McGraw appears in it. I believe that.
Definitely check out In Cold Blood (A Neo Noir masterpiece) it's one of his most powerful performances.
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Carny (1980) Directed by Robert Kaylor with Gary Busey, Jodie Foster, Robbie Robertson, Meg Foster, Kenneth McMillan, Elisha Cook Jr., A nice surprize, a film about carny life that stayed interesting. Currently on Youtube 7/10
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Related did anybody post anywhere on the message boards that Skip Homeier died June 25, 2017 (age 86) he was in some memorable Westerns and Noir films. R.I.P
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Watch for Jean Hagen, about two thirds of the way in, as a sad sack singer in a run-down nightclub. Damn, she's good ! I love Jean Hagen, and wish she had more screen time in this.
Yea Jean Hagen has a way of playing seedy very convincingly. I watcher her recently in The Asphalt Jungle.
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I just watched a strange little film called "Mickey One" by Arthur Penn from 1965 with Warren Beatty, which is two years before their classic "Bonnie and Clyde" collaboration.
The genre of the film is listed as "crime drama" but it owes more to Fellini than it does to say Siodmak.
Beatty is a top comic with an over-the-top lifestyle that is apparently thanks to the Mob. Suffice it to say, he runs afoul of the mob, has to flee for his life and ends up adopting the name of a guy he saw mugged (by stealing his Social Security card, no less). He is on the run for his life and ends up as a busboy in a seedy Detroit restaurant.
This should be a tale of paranoia and fear, but it's filmed in an almost surreal style, owing much to Fellini, who had already made La Strada, La Dolce Vita , and 8 1/2 by then. There's a Japanese mime, who seems to turn up wherever Mickey is, played by Kamatari Fujiwara, which adds a circus-like atmosphere to this "crime drama." The supporting cast is filled with oddballs and even some former film stars, including an almost unrecognizable Franchot Tone and Hurd Hatfield, far from the days of "Portrait of Dorian Gray."
But it is the black-and white cinematography and the swooping camera work that give this pseudo-noir it's Felliniesque touches. There are garishly dressed and made-up women populating the entire film, close-ups of backstage strippers and transvestites wrangling their costumes, and a feeling of hysteria as the camera pans up-close on the audience members laughing at Mickey's performances.
Mickey One was fun to watch for a while but it couldn't make up it's mind what it was about, so I had a hard time staying engaged.
Agree, I saw it a few yeas ago and liked it up to a point, then it just sort of unraveled.
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Recently watched Noir
in Film Noir--Gangster
Posted
Dementia aka (Daughter Of Horror) (1955) Beat Noir Nightmare
Directed and written by John Parker (uncredited).
Produced by John Parker, Ben Roseman, and Bruno Ve Sota. The cinematography by was by William C. Thompson. Music by George Antheil an avant-garde composer, and Shorty Rogers and his jazz band the Giants in the nightclub sequence.
The film stars Adrienne Barrett, Bruno VeSota as Bruno Ve Sota (The Long Wait (1954), Female Jungle (1956), Night Tide (1961)), Richard Barron (Union Station (1950), The Hoodlum (1951)), Lucille Rowland, Ben Roseman (Night Tide (1961)), Angelo Rossitto (Freaks (1932), Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962)) and filmed in Venice, California in 1953.
The original production had no dialog. It used music and sound effects. The avant-garde score featured soprano Marni Nixon (who provided voice dubs for actresses in many Hollywood productions).
Night. Venice, California. A neighborhood in Noirsville section of town. A flea bag residence hotel. A flop. A young woman on a bed. She awakes, looks in the mirror. She grabs a stiletto knife. Heads downstairs and out into the shadows.
She meets a dwarf selling newspapers. Headline "Mysterious Stabbing," She continues on. Alleyways. She gets accosted by a wino. A police cruiser stops. The wino is beaten down by a policeman.
She walks on. A pimp propositions her. She accepts. She becomes the escort of a rotund rich man, getting into the fat cat's chauffeured limo.
The fat cat wines her and dines her. He takes her to bars and to a girlie show nightclub. He constantly leers between the rumba dancer and his "date." When he takes the woman up to his high rise she expects him to make a move. Fat cat however is more interested in eating than in sex. A butler brings him a roast chicken dinner which he eats grotesquely with his face. Dripping grease he approaches the woman with a money roll in one hand. She is standing by an open window. When he grabs for her she stabs him with her stiletto and pushes him out the window, as he falls he rips a pendant from her neck.
Turning a corner the pimp from earlier grabs her and drags her into a cellar jazz club. The club sequence is somewhat reminiscent of the frenzied basement jazz jam sequence in The Phantom Lady (1944). The jazz band and it's appreciative crowd is equated with a wild, bohemian, let it all hang out, doped up, irresponsible hedonism. The woman is transformed into a torch singer, but soon policemen appear. At a barred window the the dead fat cat points at her with is bloody stump. The crowd manically laughs as they closing in around her .
Noirsville
The roots of these types of films can be traced back to Un Chien Andalou (1929).
The film is an entertaining prelude of the supernatural, thriller, experimental, noir-ish explosion to come i.e., Vertigo (1958), The Savage Eye (1960) Carnival Of Souls (1962) The Glass Cage(1964), and Seconds (1966), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–1962), The Twilight Zone (1959–1964), and One Step Beyond (1959–1961).
Screencaps are from a Youtube streamer. 7/10 Full Review with more screencaps here: Noirsville