Arrow’s first film noir box set, released in 2020, included bona fide cult classics like The Big Combo and Force of Evil, as well as deeper cuts from master directors like Fritz Lang. The third volume collects four titles which will be unknown to all but the most forensic of noir experts, which isn’t necessarily a problem. Film noir is a crate-digger’s genre, possessing a canon where once-obscure low-budget B-movies like Detour can sit alongside Oscar-nominated masterpieces like Double Indemnity in the hall of fame. Moreover, as Paul Schrader pointed out in his seminal essay ‘Notes on Film Noir’, the average standard of golden-age film noirs is incredibly high, arguing that “Again and again, a film noir will mark the high point on an artist’s career graph.”
Not all of the films in the new collection live up to that promise, but all of them do push the film noir template out into intriguing new areas. None more literally than John Farrow’s Calcutta, in which The Big Clock director takes noir to a whole new continent. The plot, in which Alan Ladd’s Neale falls for the widow of a friend he’s investigating the murder of, is standard genre business, and it loses tension before the end. What makes it worth watching is its sound-stage India – completely fake, but weirdly evocative – and the interplay between Ladd and William Bendix, perhaps the genre’s greatest supporting actor. (It’s one of three films they made together in 1946, with the other two being Farrow’s high-seas adventure Two Years Before the Mast and the legendary The Blue Dahlia)
Calcutta also features some wonderful cinematography, usually a strong suit of this era’s noirs. It’s why it’s such a treat when the second film in the set, Robert Montgomery’s Ride the Pink Horse, allows its visuals to carry the entire opening sequence. Montgomery’s previous film as director, the Raymond Chandler adaptation Lady in the Lake, was a bizarre experiment in first-person camerawork that’s more interesting than it is successful. Montgomery wanted to find a cinematic way of replicating Chandler’s first-person narration, but Ride the Pink Horse manages to grip more thoroughly by never letting you all the way inside its hero’s head. We watch, intrigued, as the director-star performs a mysterious ritual involving chewing gum and locker keys, captured by cinematographer Russell Metty in one snaking Wellesian tracking shot.
Ride the Pink Horse is based on a novel by Dorothy B Hughes, who also wrote the source material for Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place. That film saw Humphrey Bogart play his most chillingly unlikeable character, and Hughes gives Montgomery the same perverse gift in Ride the Pink Horse. The more we see of Montgomery as the bigoted, corrupt, violent con artist Gagin, the more magnetically awful he is: we marvel at his ingenuity when things are going right for him, we grin sadistically when he’s outsmarted. It’s a great performance, and every time it gets too much to bear it’s balanced out by an excellent supporting cast. Thomas Gomez became, deservedly, the first Spanish-American to be nominated for an Oscar for his rambunctious turn as Pancho, while Wanda Hendrix’s innocent Pila provides the key to the movie’s ending, as well as its amusingly un-noir title.
Ride the Pink Horse is the first movie in this collection which deserves to be elevated to the noir canon. It’s not the last, either, although despite having the most quintessentially noir title of any movie in the set Outside the Law really isn’t punching in the same weight class. One of that odd cycle of noirs about heroic treasury agents exemplified by Anthony Mann’s cult classic T-Men, its hero John Conrad (played by Ray Danton) is simply too nice to be a great noir hero. Director Jack Arnold is most famous for spectacle-driven science fiction films like The Incredible Shrinking Man and It Came From Outer Space; a little of his talent shows in the well-staged shootout that enlivens the movie’s final act.
The final act of the box set as a whole is Harry Keller’s The Female Animal, made in that terminal year 1958. That year saw the release of Touch of Evil, generally agreed to be the final film in the classic noir cycle, as well as Elevator to the Gallows, the first of a cycle of tributes to American noir by hip French directors that would go on to form the French New Wave. The Female Animal is definitely the product of a genre that’s come a long way since The Maltese Falcon. Happily, it’s also very good, blending the influence of “women’s picture” noirs like Mildred Pierce and The Reckless Moment with contemporary showbiz melodramas like All About Eve and The Bad and the Beautiful. The result is a wildly camp, entirely guilt-free pleasure.
The male noir hero, so often undercut and beaten-down, is here thrown into a maelstrom of ferocious, dysfunctional women. Hedy Lamarr, now more famous for her inventions than her acting, gets her last and finest role as Vanessa Windsor, a burned-out movie star who pursues George Nader’s unassuming extra after he saves her from an on-set accident. Poor Chris Farley – yes, Nader shares a character name with the late Saturday Night Live star – finds himself being pursued by Vanessa’s alcoholic daughter, played by Jane Powell, as well as earning the scorn of Vanessa’s fellow star Lily Frayne, played by Ace in the Hole‘s Jan Sterling. Sterling gets the movie’s funniest line when Frayne is asked for her achievements: apparently she became famous as “the first child star ever to be chased around a table”.
Each movie gets a fine transfer to show off that impeccable noir lighting, as well as a commentary and a visual essay for each one. In terms of the latter, Kat Ellinger makes a fine case for the set’s weakest movie Outside the Law, arguing that its lead’s foursquare blandness is actually a genre subversion. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas gets the more rewarding job of covering Ride the Pink Horse and The Female Animal, while Jon Towlson discusses Calcutta. Other extras include a radio play adaptation of Ride the Pink Horse – an intriguing alternate take on perhaps the least dialogue-driven movie of the set – and a limited edition hardback book with new writing from Towlson, Nora MacIntyre, Andrew Graves and Barry Forshaw.
Film Noir Collection Vol. 3 is out now on Arrow Video Blu-Ray
