by Alex Deleon Filmfestivals.com

Noir means Black in French, and Film Noir is the appelation invented by French film critics to describe the kinds of low budget dark but sprightly B crime melodramas churned out by the Hollywoid studios in the forties and early fifties. They were basically made to appeal to a lower middlebrow clientele as a kind of pulp fiction on celluloid. However, the craftsmen who worked on them were experts in their field and many of these films are now seen in retrospect as top drawer quasi-art films and minor treasures of the american Cinemateque.

One of the very best of the crop, "This Gun For Hire", 1942, opened this years Noir City edition at the Ancient Egyptian theatre on Hollywood Bkvd. in the heart of the Hollywood tourist belt.

Directed by Frank Tuttle, a respected veteran helmer for Paramount, TGFH was no B movie as it featured rising star Veronica Lake opposite established leading man Robert Preston, plus hefty star character actor, Laird Cregar, but it became a gigantic hit with the introduction of Alan Ladd in his screen debut as a cold blooded gun for hire whose hardness is softened by an incredibly attractive and insanely beautiful Veronica Lake. 

It is seen on the original poster that Preston's name is far bigger than Ladd below, but Preston was quickly forgotten as Ladd became Hollywood's biggest wartime star. The chemistry between Ladd and Lake was so potent that they became a starring couple throughout the decade in such thrillers as The Glass Key, The Blue Dahlia, and Saigon. The interesting amoral twist in this picture is that Lake, who is the fiancée of detective Preston, dumps him when she goes soft on her killer captor Ladd and helps him get away. 

   
When Lake started sporting a "peekaboo" hairdo with one lock of her long blond hair covering her right eye this became all the rage and was imitated by women all over the country. This being wartime the government banned the hairstyle for fear it could get caught in the machinery of defense industry factories that employed mostly women. Apparently some such cases occurred.

For the period of her teaming with Ladd in the forties Veronica Lake was even more popular (and rightfully so) than reigning glamour queens like Betty Grable, Lana Turner, et al. Unfortunately her career went into decline too soon due to alcoholism and personal problems. Nevertheless, in Gun For Hire she remains a dazzling female monument of Film Noir and film in general.

This years Hollywood Noir festival with savvy personal introductions by author and noir expert Eddie Miller, the Czar of Noir, consists of ten double features running for ten days until April 2, ending with "The Big Heat", 1953, another classic of the genre starring Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame, the sultry femme fatale of half a dozen other noirs. On the same final program is the rarely seen "Wicked Women", also 1953, with my personal favorite, the most fatale femme of them all, Beverly Michaels, as a man eating stick of dynamite.

Other films listed:

"Ministry of Fear" and "Address Unknown", two anti Nazi thrillers of 1944, with Ray Milland in Ministry and Hungarian Paul Lukas who was a prominent actor with an accent of the time in Address Unknown.

"Lady on a Train",  1945, is a most surprising inclusion in this lineup in that it features opera trained singing star Deanna Durbin in a film that is more of a musical comedy than a noir although it is structured around a murder mystery. Worth seeing alone for Durbin's delivery of the Cole Porter hit Blue Moon. Deanna was as good at putting over a pop song as well as any operatic aria. Charming, if not very noir.

"The Dark Corner", 1946, features Lucille Ball as the wisecracking secretary of a tough private eye, Mark Stevens, before she became known for I Love Lucy on TV.  With top Paramount director Henry Hathaway at the helm this is one of the better films of the fest.

Another Ladd wartime programmer is "Calcutta" with always dependable beefy support from William Bendix. In this one both are military pilots flying missions over the Himalayas from Calcutta to Chungking. The "calcutta" location is obviously a studio set and the story quickly segues from a military setting to a noir drama in civilian clothes as Ladd and Bendix seek to track down the killer of their best pilot buddy. Ladd smokes a cigarette in nearly every scene emitting the smoke deftly through his nostrils and sports a wardrobe of white suits that is truly elegant. In a way this picture is more of a sartorial and cigarette promotion than a murder mystery.  Ladd is more wooden than usual but looks great and that is really all that mattered to his fans of the time. The acting of the female lead, Gail Russell, is preposterously amateurish. When she delivered the line "you know how I feel about you" to a credulous Ladd it sounded so ridiculous it evoked unintended laughter from the sophisticated Egyptian audience. 

Still to come this week, "Chicago Deadline", 1949, another Ladd vehicle with Donna Reed and June Havoc (whutta name!) and Otto  Preminger's "Where The Sidewalk Ends", 1950, starring Dana Andrews and top star Gene Tierney in a kind of reprise of his big hit "Laura" with the same stars in 1944.

Having dipped into the wells of film noir for nineteen years now the Film Noir Foundation which runs this annual event under the sponsorship of the American Cinemateque, are beginning to run out of truly noir material and reaching for titles that barely fit the definition hardly worth sitting through. Each evening's program has a major studio (Fox, Paramount, Universal) 'A' picture as the opener followed by a more or less throwaway low  budget second 'B' feature with titles such as "Behind Green Lights" (not to be confused with the porno classic "Behind the Green Door") or "I was a Shoplifter". 

Nevertheless, this is overall a selection of old Hollywood films that are truly worth revisiting, or seeing for the first time -- as was the case for me with "This Gun for Hire" -- mistakenly believing I had already seen it years ago I quickly realized I hadn't, and it just blew me away ... especially that amazing young lady, Veronica Lake!

http://www.noircity.com/