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Armored Car Robbery (June 8, 1950)

Posted on June 14, 2015 by Adam Lounsbery

Armored Car Robbery
Armored Car Robbery (1950)
Directed by Richard Fleischer
RKO Radio Pictures

Richard Fleischer’s Armored Car Robbery was originally conceived and shot with the title “Code 3,” but RKO Radio Pictures opted for extreme truth in advertising. It’s a great example of the kind of tough, no-nonsense B-noir that RKO specialized in.

Fleischer had an extraordinarily long career in Hollywood. He directed his first short in 1943, and worked throughout the 1940s making short features and short documentaries, as well as low-budget features that no one remembers, like Child of Divorce (1946) and Banjo (1947).

Fleischer worked consistently throughout the decades, and went on to make huge movies that everyone remembers, like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Fantastic Voyage (1966), and Soylent Green (1973). His directorial style is hard to pin down, as are any personal or authorial touches. Fleischer made movies in practically every genre; film noir, science fiction, war movies, horror flicks, and docudramas. He made trash classics like Mandingo (1975) and the remake The Jazz Singer (1980), which starred Neil Diamond. Toward the end of his career, Fleischer made entertainingly bad movies like Amityville 3-D (1983), Conan the Destroyer (1984), and Red Sonja (1984).

Back in the 1940s, Fleischer was one of those competent, hard-working craftsmen who toiled away in the studio system and produced movies that were entertaining, but not particularly memorable. (He was the son of legendary animator Max Fleischer, who created Popeye and Betty Boop, as well as the great Superman cartoons of the early 1940s.)

The last movie Richard Fleischer directed that I reviewed was Bodyguard (1948), which starred legendary tough guy Lawrence Tierney. Because there are always more movies to watch than I can possibly make time for, I missed Fleischer’s next few flicks, The Clay Pigeon (1949), Follow Me Quietly (1949), Make Mine Laughs (1949), and Trapped (1949).

McGuire and McGraw

I almost passed on Armored Car Robbery, but I decided to give it a watch for two reasons. First, it’s a heist movie that came close on the heels of one of the greatest and most game-changing heist movies of all time, John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Second, it stars granite-jawed tough guy Charles McGraw, whom Fleischer would direct again in one of my favorite noir thrillers of all time, The Narrow Margin (1952).

So I wanted to see how Armored Car Robbery stacked up against The Asphalt Jungle, and I wanted to see what Fleischer and McGraw were getting up to before they made The Narrow Margin together.

Considering its small budget and tight shooting schedule, Armored Car Robbery stacks up pretty well against The Asphalt Jungle. The heist is not nearly as detailed, but it’s believable, which is a surprisingly difficult thing to pull off.

Like Fleischer’s Bodyguard, Armored Car Robbery features a lot of location shooting in Los Angeles. For instance, the heist takes place outside Wrigley Field. (I know what you’re thinking, isn’t that in Chicago, where the Cubs play?) In Los Angeles, Wrigley Field was a ballpark that was in operation from 1925 to 1965 and demolished in 1969. It was built by the same chewing-gum magnate who build the other Wrigley Field.

The leader of the heist crew, played by William Talman, calls in a series of false reports outside Wrigley Field, then observes police response times. He puts together a string of heavies, including dependable baby-faced heavy Steve Brodie and dependable haggard-looking heavy Gene Evans, along with an oily Lothario played by Douglas Fowley.

If you’ve seen a heist movie before, you’ll know that the best laid plans often go awry. Talman is shtupping Fowley’s girl on the side, which can’t possibly turn out well. Incidentally, Fowley’s girl is played by the lovely and talented B-pictures mainstay Adele Jergens, who gets to show off her gams as a burlesque dancer. Armored Car Robbery gives her a nastier, more fun role than the one she played as a dancer in Ladies of the Chorus (1948), in which the 30-year-old Jergens played Marilyn Monroe’s mother(!).

McGraw and Jergens

After the commission of the heist, Armored Car Robbery is a tightly paced cat and mouse thriller in which the robbery crew narrowly avoids capture by the police as McGraw and his new partner track down leads. A lot of it is shot quickly and unpretentiously, but the cinematography by Guy Roe is always excellent, especially in the nighttime set-ups and the paranoia-inducing low-angle shots when the crew is beginning to unravel.

Armored Car Robbery is great entertainment, and a wonderful showcase for its dependable cast. If you’ve never seen Charles McGraw in a movie before, Narrow Margin is a great place to start, but Armored Car Robbery isn’t a bad place to start either. And it contains the memorable moment when McGraw comforts a friend whose husband has just died with three words, “Tough break, Marsha.” In his book Charles McGraw: Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy, Alan K. Rode called it “the bluntest expression of bereavement in film history.”

Armored Car Robbery will be shown on Turner Classic Movies Friday, July 10, 2015, at 12:15 PM (ET).

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Side Street (Dec. 14, 1949)

Posted on July 2, 2014 by Adam Lounsbery

Side Street
Side Street (1949)
Directed by Anthony Mann
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell memorably played young lovers on the run in director Nicholas Ray’s debut film, They Live by Night (1948).

They were reunited in Side Street, a twisty little crime caper directed by the great Anthony Mann.

Side Street isn’t a grand tragedy on the level of They Live by Night. O’Donnell’s role is much smaller and she and Granger play a quietly happy young married couple, not archetypal tragic lovers. But it’s definitely worth seeing. It’s a great crime movie with memorable characters and a lot of wonderful footage of New York City.

Granger

It’s also the last in a string of tough, violent, and exceedingly well-made film noirs from Mann, who previously directed Desperate (1947), T-Men (1947), Raw Deal (1948), and Border Incident (1949), among others.

After Side Street, Mann would go on to tackle a variety of genres, although in 1950 he exclusively made westerns — Winchester ’73, The Furies, and Devil’s Doorway.

I always have more movies on my “to watch” list than I can realistically make time for, and I almost passed over Side Street. But then I looked it up and saw that it was directed by Anthony Mann, and I had to watch it. I love Mann’s sensibility, and his films are always really well-paced and full of suspense. Side Street is no exception, and if it doesn’t have the stature of some of his other noirs, it’s just because they’re so good that his “lesser” works sometimes get lost in the shuffle.

Mann did some of his best-known work with cinematographer John Alton, but Joseph Ruttenberg, who shot Side Street, was also extremely talented, and he has a lot of high-profile classics on his résumé, like The Philadelphia Story (1940), Mrs. Miniver (1942), and Gaslight (1944).

Side Street looks absolutely fantastic. The interiors live and breathe with complicated interplays of light and shadows. The exteriors are mostly shot on location in New York. Not only does Ruttenberg’s exterior shooting look great, it’s a chance to see a great deal of the city as it existed in 1949, including things that are gone now, like the elevated train tracks in Manhattan.

Craig and Granger

The story and screenplay of Side Street were written by Sydney Boehm. It’s a relatively simple story about a mailman named Joe Norson (Farley Granger) who sees an opportunity to pilfer a large sum of money and takes it. His wife, Ellen Norson (Cathy O’Donnell) is pregnant with their first child, and he thinks a lump sum of cash is their ticket to the good life. Of course, the person he steals money from is a crooked lawyer with his fingers in the underworld, and Joe’s life quickly spirals out of control as he is hunted by extremely dangerous people while lying to his wife about where he got the money.

All the actors are great, and their characters seem like real people; Edmon Ryan as the shady lawyer, James Craig as his brutal enforcer, Charles McGraw and Paul Kelly as NYPD detectives, and Adele Jergens as a seductress who is part of a honey-pot blackmail scheme. I liked all the actors, but my absolute favorite was Jean Hagen (recently seen in Adam’s Rib), who plays a cynical nightclub singer and B-girl. Her scene with Farley Granger involves him buying drinks to get information out of her, and she delivers her digressive dialogue perfectly as she very convincingly portrays slowly building intoxication. Like Gloria Grahame in Crossfire (1947), she expresses a lifetime of experience, most of it bad.

Jean Hagen

Everything about Side Street holds up well, and I recommend it to anyone who’s looking for a twisty thriller. Aside from the black and white cinematography, the only thing that might rankle modern viewers is Paul Kelly’s intrusive voiceover, but that was a pretty standard feature of police dramas in the late 1940s.

I especially liked that Farley Granger’s character wasn’t an innocent victim of circumstance. He makes a very clear decision to break the law, but it’s the kind of crime of opportunity most of us have probably considered at least once in our lives.

What would happen if we walked into an empty, unlocked house and poked around? What would happen if we took a joyride in an unattended car with the motor running? What would happen if we swiped an envelope we know is full of cash? Side Street presents a worst-case-scenario answer to that question in a way that’s labyrinthine but fairly believable. Highly recommended.

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Ladies of the Chorus (Dec. 30, 1948)

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Adam Lounsbery

Ladies of the Chorus
Ladies of the Chorus (1948)
Directed by Phil Karlson
Columbia Pictures

Unless you’re a massive fan of low-budget musicals and comedies from the 1940s, the only reason to watch Ladies of the Chorus is to see Marilyn Monroe in her first big role.

Well, OK. There’s one more reason. If you’re a massive film nerd like I am, it’s also worth watching because it was directed by Phil Karlson. From 1944 through 1947, Karlson directed more than a dozen B movies for Monogram Pictures (later Allied Artists). In 1948, he moved up to making B features for Columbia Pictures. After lensing two westerns for Columbia — Adventures in Silverado and Thunderhoof — he directed Ladies of the Chorus.

Karlson’s best work lay ahead of him. He would go on to direct tough, taut film noirs like Kansas City Confidential (1952), 99 River Street (1953), and The Phenix City Story (1955), as well as one of my favorite tough-guy vigilante movies of all time, Walking Tall (1973).

But Ladies of the Chorus really has nothing in common with those movies. The only connection is Karlson’s professionalism and attention to detail. It’s a fun little movie, just an hour long, with plenty of music and songs. Musicals and corny comedies aren’t really my thing, but I appreciate any well-made film. And I absolutely love Marilyn Monroe.

Marilyn Monroe 1948

Marilyn Monroe turned 22 years old in 1948. This movie was the first time she got her name in the credits.

She plays a girl named Peggy who was born into a life of burlesque. Her mother, Mae Martin, was a burlesque queen back in Boston. When she married a wealthy young man whom she loved, the wealthy young man’s father had him shipped off to Europe and the marriage annulled. But Mae was already pregnant with Peggy.

Mae is played by Adele Jergens, who turned 31 on November 26, 1948. She’s obviously not old enough to be Marilyn Monroe’s mother, so the makeup department put a few gray streaks in her hair.

When the star of the burlesque show, Bubbles (Marjorie Hoshelle), insults Mae’s gray hair and the wig she wears on stage, Peggy attacks her. The stage manager breaks up the fight and shouts, “Fightin’ like a couple of alley cats. What are you tryin’ to do, give burlesque a bad name?”

He sends Mae in to replace Bubbles, but Mae pulls a switcheroo and sends in Peggy instead. Naturally, she kills on stage and becomes a new queen of burlesque. And of course history repeats itself when a young man from a blue-blooded family falls for her.

Peggy’s wealthy suitor is played by Rand Brooks, who’s a bit of a drip. He doesn’t have any chemistry with Monroe, but like I said, she’s the main reason to see this movie. (Although I really like Adele Jergens, too.) Monroe doesn’t quite have the breathy, “baby doll” voice she developed later in her career, but every bit of her megawatt star power is in evidence here. She does a bunch of song and dance numbers, and they’re all wonderful. Well, maybe all of them except “Every Baby Needs a Da Da Daddy,” which has to be seen to be believed.

When Ladies of the Chorus first came out, Adele Jergens got top billing, but Columbia re-released the film in November 1952 to capitalize on Marilyn Monroe’s growing fame. A lot of times when studios do this, the newly minted star whose name gets top billing actually only has a little bit of screen time, but that’s not the case here. This was a star-making turn for Marilyn Monroe, and it’s a lot of fun to watch if you’re a fan.

Ladies of the Chorus 1952

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I Love Trouble (Jan. 10, 1948)

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Adam Lounsbery

Are there any fans of the old ABC TV series 77 Sunset Strip (1958-1964) out there?

If you have fond memories of that hepper than hep private eye show, you might be interested to know that this little mystery programmer is where it all started.

S. Sylvan Simon’s I Love Trouble is based on Roy Huggins’s novel The Double Take, and stars Franchot Tone as Stuart Bailey, a pencil-necked P.I. with a high forehead and an eye for the ladies.

Bailey was later (and more famously) played by Efrem Zimbalist Jr. — first in “Anything for Money,” an episode of the ABC series Conflict (1956-1957), and then in the ongoing series 77 Sunset Strip, where he was paired with a partner, Jeff Spencer (Roger Smith).

I haven’t read any novels by Roy Huggins, but if I Love Trouble is any indication, he was a writer firmly in the mold of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. With a title like I Love Trouble, I was expecting a lighthearted mystery-comedy, so I was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be a hard-boiled mystery with crisp dialogue and a well-rendered Los Angeles backdrop.

Ralph Johnston (Tom Powers), a wealthy gentleman who used to run with “a pretty rugged crowd,” hires Stuart Bailey to find out more about his wife Jane, who has been receiving threatening letters. Johnston says Jane is sheltered, unaccustomed to trouble, and couldn’t possibly be mixed up with anything shady. He believes one of his old friends resents Jane, got plastered, and sent her a threatening letter. Bailey responds that Jane spotted him tailing her, and that’s pretty uncommon for someone who was just a “nice quiet sorority girl at UCLA.”

Although he suspects there’s more to the story than Johnston is telling him, Bailey heads for Portland, Jane’s hometown, where he finds out that a high school diploma wasn’t the only piece of paper she picked up. She also got a work permit to dance at “Keller’s Carousel,” a seedy little club on South Broadway.

Keller (Steven Geray) and his henchman Reno (John Ireland) don’t take kindly to snoopers, and they send Bailey home with a few black-and-blue souvenirs.

Back in Los Angeles, Bailey is approached by a woman named Norma Shannon (Janet Blair), who claims to be Jane’s sister from Portland. But she doesn’t recognize the theatrical head shot of Jane sitting in Bailey’s apartment. What’s going on?

I Love Trouble is a solid B movie from Columbia Pictures. It’s chock-full of beautiful actresses (Adele Jergens doesn’t even rate a mention in my plot summary, but I sure was happy to see her in a swimsuit). It’s sometimes hard to distinguish one from another, but if you’re paying attention (and have ever read Chandler’s Lady in the Lake), you’ll realize why that actually works in the film’s favor.

As played by Tone, Stuart Bailey isn’t a very memorable character. Tone is simply too gangly and effete to be fully believable as a hard-boiled P.I, but the story is good, the dialogue is hard-boiled, and the action is tough and fast-paced. I especially enjoyed Bailey’s wisecracking secretary, Hazel “Bix” Bixby (Glenda Farrell).

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