The tagline of Hugo Fregonese’s Black Tuesday thunderously announces itself as “the most ruthless Robinson of all time!”, putting its rough-and-ready leading man Edward G. Robinson front and centre of the action. And that’s certainly true; today, not even the cumulative power of Tim Robinson’s screaming sketch comedy oeuvre or the determined members of the entire Swiss Family Robinson can hold a candle to the force Edward G. gives off in this ink-black film noir, presented in the UK’s first ever edition by Eureka’s Masters of Cinema, auspiciously its 300th addition to the series.
Robinson is notorious gangster Vincent Canelli, currently serving the end of his sentence on death row with a rogues gallery of other lifers, including wily bank robber Peter Manning (Peter Graves, the spitting dab of Sterling Hayden) who is refusing to illicit where his $200,000 haul is sitting ahead of his imminent execution. A daring escape is sprung for Canelli and co. by his loving dame Hatti (Jean Parker) and the dastardly cad escapes with a group of hostages, any of whom he won’t hesitate to sacrifice if he doesn’t get his hands on Manning’s hidden fortune. Chaos ensues as the body count rises in furiously hard-boiled fashion.
In between the classic entertainment found in deals and schemes and backstabbing betrayals, it never loses sight of its brutal worldview that gives it significant stopping power a good seventy years after its release.
The remarkable thing about Black Tuesday is how much it still stings. Film noir was the ten-a-penny genre of Fregonese’s area, and with Robinson in the lead, one can be forgiven for assuming this is just another in the log pile. Robinson played so many criminals that the ‘G’ central to his name might as well have stood for ‘gangster’, yet few would hold the same savagery as Vincent Canelli. Robinson’s squat figure and grumpy face cut the perfect figure of the ‘little man’, and Canelli certainly has a chip on his shoulder; his incarceration on death row sees him reject morality absolutely and allows him to kill indiscriminately in the name of survival first, and greed second. Black Tuesday has a genuinely unpredictable body count, with characters set up to be major players unceremoniously abandoned or gunned down at unexpected intervals, and by its bleak conclusion, who died and for what is a depressingly nebulous question. The idea of survival at any cost becomes less a heroic endeavour and more of an animalistic compulsion as dog bites dog in the harrowing denouement, putting a big full stop on the nihilism inherent in its genre.
Fregonese, of course, has fun mounting a well-oiled noir world despite the clearly tragic arc he takes The Big Sleep scribe Sydney Boehm’s ill-fated characters on. It’s entirely possible to get lost in the deep silhouettes of damned men inside the prison walls, and these pop with stylistic verve even better thanks to the new restoration. Its opening act is a soupy, swampy pressure cooker with a claustrophobia that extends into each proceeding scene, even when the prison is abandoned for the veneer of freedom in a warehouse lair. In between the classic entertainment found in deals and schemes and backstabbing betrayals, it never loses sight of its brutal worldview that gives it significant stopping power a good seventy years after its release.
Il Cinema Ritrovato festival director and former underground programmer Ehsan Khoshbakht contributes a brilliant retrospective on Fregonese’s world and draws Black Tuesday into context within a career spanning multiple continents and genres, and puts a bow on another impressive set from Eureka. The new disc is a great treatment for a sturdy noir that stands out against the crowd even today, thanks in good part to the unrelentingly meanness Boehm’s script indiscriminately deals out and a gold-standard bulldog performance from Edward G. Robinson on classic form.
Black Tuesday is out now on Eureka Masters of Cinema Blu-Ray
Simon’s Archive – Black Tuesday (1954)
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