Universal has delivered a stunning new black-and-white transfer for the Blu-ray debut of Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity” (1944), a rare Best Picture Oscar nominee that later earned the designation of film noir.
Barbara Stanwyck received one of the film’s six other Oscar nods as a femme fatale who bewitches a smitten salesman (Fred MacMurray, who deserved a nomination but didn’t get one) into killing an unwanted husband after tricking him into buying accident insurance with a special payoff bonus.
Universal utilized “original pre-print materials” to produce the best-looking iteration I’ve ever seen of this sizzling thriller, which has always looked a bit murky on video in the past. Wilder and Raymond Chandler (who has a brief wordless cameo as a bespectacled man sitting on a chair in the corridor who MacMurray passes by his office) were also nominated for their screenplay, adapted from a James M. Cain novel inspired by a famous 1927 case in Queens Village.
The film — part of Universal’s extensive holdings of pre-1950 Paramount films — moves the action to a wonderfully noirish Los Angeles. Amid some of the most memorable sequences in any American crime film of the era, there’s an extremely fine supporting performance by Edward G. Robinson as a claims adjuster who appears to have a serious man-crush on MacMurray’s character.
Despite a modest budget, this is a film positively packed with lurid details and extensive location shooting (with Venice, Calif. standing in for both sides of the border), both of which really pop in this superlative restoration. Benefiting especially from Blu-ray is the lengthy motel-hell sequence with Janet Leigh (as Heston’s new wife) that almost certainly influenced Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”
Despite Heston’s patent brownface miscasting as a Mexican official who stumbles across a respected Texas police chief Welles’ efforts to frame a countryman for a murder commited by a drug gang that Welles is cahoots with, this is the kind of film that improves with each viewing. That remarkable opening sequence with Russell Metty’s famous tracking shot, I’d argue, makes it Welles’ second-best film after “Citizen Kane.”
Welles’ performance as the massively corrupt cop is one of his best. and he gets brilliant support from Joseph Calleia as his loyal but unsuspecting lieutenant and the Russian-Armeninan Akim Tamiroff (who also starred in Welles’ never-completed “Don Quijote”) as an improbable but highly entertaining Mexican drug lord. There are also cameos by Mercedes McCambridge (as a biker lesbian), Joseph Cotten, Zsa Zsa Gabor and an unforgettable, black-wigged Marlene Dietrich as Welles’ former lover who delivers his florid epitaph.
As in the 2008 DVD, “Touch of Evil” is presented in three different cuts: the original theatrical version with material added after Welles’ departure; a longer and more lurid foreign-release cut; and a 1998 reconstruction based on an extensive memo by Welles, which is reproduced in full. All three are worth watching.
This was a passion project and career restarter for Wanger (his credits included “Queen Christina” and “Foreign Correspondent”), a prestigious director who found himself banished to upwardly mobile poverty row studio Allied Artists/Monogram after a short stretch at a minimum-security prison for shooting agent Jennings Lang in the groin in front of actress Joan Bennett (Lang’s mistress/Wanger’s wife).
Wanger’s new interest in prison reform prompted him to commission an (excellent) script from Richard Collins based rather closely on a real-life protest against inhumane conditions that boiled over into a riot at a Michigan prison in 1953. Thanks to Siegel’s brilliant staging and Russell Harlan’s extensive location shooting at California’s Folsom Prison, this is still one of the most exciting and compelling jailhouse movies ever, moving past the cliches of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
The starless cast includes a murderer’s row of character actors: Neville Brand, Emile Meyer, Frank Faylen, Leo Gordon (a real-life parolee who had a long career as a screen and TV writer) and Robert Osterloh are all wonderful, with such familiar TV faces as Paul Frees, Dabs Greer, Whit Bissell, Harold J. Kennedy and William Schallert in smaller roles.
Bob Furmanek, a film historian who specializes in film formats, has presented fairly convincing evidence that “Riot in Cell Block 11,” though shot in full-frame 35mm, was composed for 1:1.66 and presented cropped that way, at least for its premiere engagements. Criterion, which says the film was presented in various ratio, is offering it only at 1:37 — possibly the choice on the part of the film’s current owner Paramount Pictures, which acquired it as part of its Republic Pictures library (most post-1945 AA/Monogram titles are controlled by Warner Bros.)
Dick Powell, a key figure in the genre since “Murder, My Sweet,” is in good hardboiled form a pardoned convict determined to collect $100,000 from the gangster (William Conrad) who framed him for a robbery he wasn’t involved with.
Rhonda Fleming gets second billing as a shady lady, but the film is actually stolen by the veteran character actor playing a stranger — a wisecracking decorated and disabled war veteran with a prodigious capacity for alcohol — who provided Powell with a phony alibi that got him out of jail. He’s the great Richard Erdman, who at 90 is still working as a semi-regular on NBC’s “Community.”
Add Regis Toomey in his most appealing detective role since “The Big Sleep,” great location shooting by Joseph Biroc (“It’s a Wonderful Life”) and very tight direction by ex-editor Robert Parrish in his 80-minute debut, and “Cry Danger” is one pretty sweet package, even without any supplements.
Don Ameche is cast wildly — though effectively — against type as a soft-spoken architect who’s secretly plotting to hypnotize his heiress wife Claudette Colbert into killing herself so he can use her millions to marry his mistress, grasping model Hazel Brooks (Mrs. Cedric Gibbons, whose best-known acting role is in “Body and Soul”).
This was the third teaming of Colbert and Ameche after a pair of romantic comedies: Mitchell Leisen’s delightful “Midnight” (1939) and Sam Wood’s forgettable “Guest Wife” (1945) — a clip from the latter (released last year by Olive) was shown at Colbert’s 1984 Lincoln Center tribute, where Ameche was one of very few former co-stars from Hollywood to turn up.
“Sleep My Love” isn’t as good as you’d hope from the names behind the camera — humorist Leo Rosten and fellow New Yorker writer St. Clair McKelway, as well as co-producers Mary Pickford and Charles “Buddy” Rogers. But Sirk and cinematographer Joseph Valentine (“Shadow of a Doubt”) conjure up some memorable noir images — George Coulouris as a phony psychiatrist plotting with Ameche and a hynotized Colbert teetering against a second-story railing of her Sutton Place home, ready to fall into the East River.
And any film where hero Robert Cummings (anticipating his role in Hitchcock’s “Dial M For Murder”) is best friends with Keye Luke — and a very young Raymond Burr turns up for a single scene as a police detective — is definitely worth checking out. Nice transfer.