Jules Dassin’s brooding, brutal drama is a classic film noir as well as one of the greatest prison films ever made.
Tag: 1947
‘Nightmare Alley’ – Carny Noir on Criterion Channel
Matinee idol Tyrone Power gets down and dirty as an opportunistic carny turned nightclub sensation in this pulpy 1947 film noir classic.
Baby, I don’t care – ‘Out of the Past’ on Criterion Channel
Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas star in Jacques Tourneur’s hard-boiled story of betrayal and revenge, a masterpiece with a haunting quality and one of the greatest film noirs of all time.
The original ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ on Disney+
Is there a more warmhearted celebration of Christmas cheer amid the urban reality of modern America than the original Miracle on 34th Street (1947)? It’s a Wonderful Life may be the cult film of the Christmas season, a holiday noir that slips into nightmare before pulling out its happy ending. But the idealized small town […]
Voyage of ‘The Damned’ on Kanopy
The Damned (aka Les maudits) (France, 1947) is a superb title for this noir-tinged 1947 French war thriller from René Clément. In the final days of World War II, as the Third Reich falls under the Allied advance, the Nazis send a special team on a secret mission to South America by submarine to prepare […]
Humphrey Bogart in ‘Dead Reckoning’ on Amazon Prime Video
Any resemblance between Dead Reckoning (1947) and classic hard-boiled Humphrey Bogart classics The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep is anything but coincidental (“A guy’s buddy gets killed, he oughta do something about it,” Bogie explains in an line from the Sam Spade playbook) in this murder mystery of deception and double crosses. Narrating in […]
‘Dark Passage’ – Bogie and Bacall on VOD and Blu-ray/DVD
Dark Passage (1947) – Humphrey Bogart is as an innocent man on death row for the murder of his wife who, in the opening minutes of this classic film noir, escapes from San Quentin to clear his, yet his face isn’t even seen through the first act of film. Instead we see his escape almost […]
Blu-ray: ‘Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy’ on The Criterion Collection
Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy (Criterion). Roberto Rossellini had been a journeyman director working within Mussolini’s Italian film industry when he redefined his career and all but inaugurated the neo-realist movement with this trio of films made at the end of World War II. Though he was no partisan, he started working on Rome Open City […]