Street Of Shadows (1953)

'Street Of Shadows' is a British noir-ish movie from 1953, one of many churned out by UK crews but with American leads. Originally produced by Nassour Studios, it was subsequently bought by Lippert Productions, who co-produced a ton of these cheap programmers in the UK, and who released it Stateside as 'Shadow Man'. According to VCI, who included this movie in its 'Forgotten Noir' series, the US version runs 7 minutes shorter than the original UK version, but they included the UK version on the DVD, complete with the 'Street Of Shadows' title card in the movie, while using the 'Shadow Man' title on the DVD jacket, possibly for the same reason as there being a 'Shadow Man' poster to the left, I couldn't find any sort of poster for 'Street Of Shadows'.

The movie was directed by Richard Vernon, who also wrote the screenplay based on a novel called 'The Creaking Chair' by Laurence Meynell. This was Vernon's only writing and directing effort, but he did (co-)produce 1940's 'Gaslight' and 1948's 'Kiss The Blood Off My Hands'. Cinematography was done by Phil Grindrod and music was done by Eric Spear, they both worked on a lot of these low-budget crime flicks. In this case, they did a pretty good job.

The aforementioned American lead here is Cesar Romero, who plays Luigi, the owner of a 'pin-table saloon', which is a mix between a penny arcade and a dance club, helped by his loyal aid 'Limpy' (Victor Maddern), who does indeed have a limp. One night, Luigi and Limpy bump into Luigi's ex Angele Abbé (Simone Silva) who is being harassed by a sailor. Luigi interferes and KO's the sailor. The police visit his saloon later that night, warning him to keep his hands to himself, he's got a bit of a toughguy reputation and they'll close his saloon sooner rather than later should he get into a fight again. That same night unhappily married socialite Barbara Gale (Kay Kendall) visits his saloon with a bunch of her friends, and Luigi and Kay connect. They have no time to enjoy the still burgeoning sparks however, as soon afterwards Luigi comes home to find Angele sprawled on a rug in his living room, stabbed to death, after he sees Barbara running away and finding one of her gloves on his doorstep. Not knowing what to make of it or what to do, he tries to get rid of the body by dumping it elsewhere, but he accidentally leaves his front door open, attracting the attention of a patrolling streetcop, who discovers the bloody knife and rug. Luigi gets Limpy to get his car and together they take off with Angele's body, only to be picked up by the police in quick fashion, led by inspector Johnstone (Edward Underdown). During a brief interrogation, Luigi manages to escape and he goes underground in search of the real murderer, as he cannot believe Barbara had anything to do with it, and he's wanted for a murder he did not commit.

The main storyline of Angele's murder and Luigi's hunt for the murderer is pretty straight-forward and dare I say it, pretty average (the identity of the murderer can hardly be called a surprise, I'm sure most readers will be able to guess who it is without even seeing the movie). So it helps that there a few side stories woven into the larger story. There's Luigi's affair with Barbara, the unhappily married wife of Gerald Gale (John Penrose), who is gambling away their money. And Limpy has his own storyline as well, his limp prevents him from finding a girlfriend, something he desperately wants, so he sees any female smile thrown his way as a sign of potential love. What doesn't help is that none of the storylines introduce too many likely candidates for the murderer, despite using over half of its running time to establish the characters and relationships. Gerald and his shady, and arrogant, friends aren't the friendliest bunch of people and while Gerald suspects there is something between his wife and Luigi, suggesting a hint of possible involvement on their part, it's too weak to really be considered, leaving only a couple of suspects.

But quite frankly, the plot or the 'mystery' is not where this movie shines. The stand-out feature of this movie is the soundtrack, which features a lot of harmonica, played by Tommy Reilly, and it gives the movie a very different feel, which works in favor of the movie. The harmonica played theme of the movie was actually good enough to warrant being released on record and even as sheet music. I doubt a lot of other B-noirs can say the same. While it's not as quirky, let alone iconic, as the zither music of 'The Third Man', it does give this movie a fairly peculiar and unique feel. There is also a rather massive jukebox which plays an important role in this movie, providing the blaring soundtrack for some nightmarish scenes. Soundwise this movie is exceptionally well-done given its low budget and obscurity.

The main actors also help elevate this movie to a higher level. Not that there are Oscar-worthy performances here, but Cesar Romero, Kay Kendall and especially Victor Maddern are quite solid here. Romero had already done another British 'noir' called 'Scotland Yard Inspector'/'Lady In The Fog' the year before, as many US actors who weren't in the top-echelon or had a declining career travelled to the UK to star in what were otherwise completely British movies. Romero, who had a long and varied career, would become most well-known for his portrayal as The Joker in the 60s Batman series. Maddern is the standout actor here, he gives Limpy a well-rounded and multi-faceted character, loyal and friendly towards Luigi and the locals, crude towards strangers, especially when they dare call him Limpy, and naive in his attitude towards women. If this movie had been shot in the US 10 years earlier, no doubt Elisha Cook Jr. would've played Limpy, Limpy is the sort of sucker that Cook could play to perfection while asleep.

Kay Kendall also played in a couple of these types of movies opposite US leads, like 'Wings Of Danger'/'Danger On Course' opposite Zachary Scott and 'Mantrap'/'Man In Hiding' opposite Paul Henreid. She was a beautiful and dignified actress and she's perfect for her role, and she could really act. Almost the same can be said for Simone Silva, who had the right look to play the promiscuous and sleazy Angele, except her acting abilities didn't quite match Kendall's, to put it mildly. Both women died at an early age unfortunately, Kendall in 1959 at the age of 32 from leukaemia, and Silva in 1957 at the age of 29 from a stroke. Silva would gain a lot of publicity and notoriety in 1954 when she took off her top while doing a photo shoot with Robert Mitchum at the Cannes film festival, but it didn't do much for her career.

The scenes in the pinball saloon are quite nice. The place has a threatening and claustrophobic feel to it, even when it's fully lighted and filled with people, due to the cornucopia of machines like a maniacal laughing sailor machine, a guitar playing and fortune telling robotic monkey and the jukebox, but once the place is closed and the lights are off, it becomes a very dark, shadow filled and noir place. The narrow streets which are almost like tunnels with its pitch-black shadows also help give this movie a distinct noir feel, even if the plot doesn't.

All in all, at 80+ minutes 'Street Of Shadows'/'Shadow Man' is an above-average movie which is not pure noir, but pushes enough of the noir buttons to provide a fun evening of movie watching. It really should not be a 'forgotten noir', despite being labelled like that. It's worth checking out.

Terror Street (1953)

In the early 50's, US producer Robert L. Lippert struck a deal with UK-based Hammer Films to produce movies in the UK, using US lead actors and a UK cast & crew. These movies would be released in the UK and the US under different titles, in this case, the movie was released as 'Terror Street' Stateside (also the title under which I watched it) and as the more appropriate title '36 Hours' in the UK. I prefer the UK title in this case, as 'Terror Street' makes little sense in regards to the story, and the movie takes place over a period of 36 hours.

'Terror Street'/'36 Hours' was directed by Montgomery Tully ('The Counterfeit Plan') after a story and screenplay by Steve Fisher ('Dead Reckoning', 'I Wake Up Screaming', 'Lady In The Lake'). Cinematography was done by Walter Harvey and the musical score was done by Ivor Slaney, who both worked for Hammer Studios at the time.

Dan Duryea plays US air force pilot Bill Rogers, who was stationed in the UK during World War II. After the war, Rogers settled down with his Norwegian wife Katherine (Swedish actress Elsy Albiin) in London, but he's been stationed in the US on a training assignment for the past year. At the start of the movie he's hitched a flight back to the UK without permission to see his wife, and needs to catch a flight back to the US within 36 hours so he doesn't get reported as AWOL and face a court martial. In his absence however, his wife has been lured into a diamond-smuggling racket by customs intelligence officer Orville Hart (John Chandos), but she wants out. Hart kills Katherine the evening of Rogers' return and frames him for it. Rogers flees the murder scene and ends up in the apartment of mission sister Jenny Miller (Gudrun Ure) who believes his story about being innocent and together they try to unravel the murder, before he has to return to the States. Over the course of (less than) 36 hours, he learns a lot more about what his wife had been up to while he was away, and everything it entailed including the smugglers, blackmail, a secret admirer of his wife, and especially Orville Hart's involvement in it all.

The movie is very light on the noir elements overall. There are a few nighttime scenes that are filmed with some noir lighting, wet cobblestone streets, stark shadows, piercing lights. Also the final scene in the basement of an antique dealer has a noir feel to it, especially during a fight with a swinging light providing some nice visuals. The main noir element here is Bill Rogers, who is basically a desperate and innocent man, being framed for his wife's murder, while in a foreign country. He does find a companion in Jenny but ultimately is on his own, trying to clear his name as well as find the murderer of his wife. Dan Duryea had appeared in a number of noirs before, including 'Scarlet Street' and 'Too Late For Tears', portraying mostly shady, sleazy characters so this was quite a change for him, but his performance is too flat for the character. He is decent as the lone man on the run, but at times he seems too calm, too emotionless, as if he's got all the time in the world and everything's peachy. It didn't work for me.

The best parts of the movie, to me, were John Chandos as the slimey Orville Hart and especially Gudrun Ure as Jenny. She was using the stage name Ann Gudrun at that time to help her new film career, this was her first motion picture after she'd been a theater actress. Ure does a great job and despite her small frame, makes Jenny come across as a very strong woman who can stand her ground but is also compassionate and empathic. I really liked her performance here. She would gain fame much later in life in the UK and some parts of Europe as she starred as Super Gran, a popular British kids TV show of the same name in the mid 80s. There is also a small but good part for Eric Pohlmann as a smuggler/antiques dealer, who played in a few more Hammer noirs such as 'The Glass Cage' but also did the voice of Ernst Blofeld in 2 James Bond movies (but he was never the face of Blofeld).

This is more of a straight-forward innocent-man-on-the-run thriller than anything else. And it is half-decent at that, the movie doesn't hold interest enough throughout and at no point does it really give a sense of urgency to Rogers' predicament. Hammer noir's tend to be relatively light on the noir side, and this is not one of the better movies that Hammer Studios produced I'm afraid to say. It's okay enough to waste under an hour and a half with on a rainy evening, but don't expect greatness.

Dangerous Crossing (1953)

The locked room mystery is a staple when it comes to detective/mystery movies. It involves a confined space in which an event takes place (usually a crime of some sort) which seems impossible within the constraints of the confined space and/or where vital ingredients of the event (usually the body, the perpetrator or the weapon, or a combination thereof) have seemingly disappeared from the confined space. A well-known and early movie to depict this type of mystery is the classic Hitchcock movie 'The Lady Vanishes' from 1938, which is placed on a moving train. In the case of 'Dangerous Crossing' a person disappears on a cruiseship, and is nowhere to be found, and apart from one person nobody seems to know about the missing person. The story was based on a radio play, 'Cabin B-13', which was written by John Dickson Carr, who was very adept at this type of mystery and he wrote several radio plays in this genre. The radio play was written for the popular Suspense radio play series, which also hosted the radio play after which the movie 'Sorry, Wrong Number'  was made. Leo Townsend adapted 'Cabin B-13' into a screenplay, Joseph M. Newman directed the movie and Joseph LaShelle did the cinematography.

At the start of the movie, newlyweds Ruth Bowman Stanton (Jeanne Crain) and John Bowman (Carl Betz) board a cruiseship for a honeymoon. Due to the large amount of people trying to board the ship, they don't board it at quite the same time with several people entering the cruiseship after Ruth and before Bowman. After they find their cabin, B-16, Bowman goes off to give some money to the purser to store in a safe, and tells Ruth to go to the main deck and watch the cruiseship leave the harbor and meet him at the bar in 15 minutes afterwards. But he never shows up at the bar. When Ruth returns to their cabin to see if John is there, she finds the room locked. After she has an attendant open the room for her, she finds the room empty, without their luggage. It turns out it was never booked for this trip, and Ruth is booked into room B-18 instead, under her maiden name, and by herself. And her luggage, but not John's, is already in B-18. Ruth is flabbergasted and slightly worried, trying to convince everybody she did not come by herself, that they were really in B-16 before, and asking people where her husband is. She becomes increasingly hysterical and frantic and eventually the ship's doctor, Dr. Paul Manning (Michael Rennie), is called in. Despite nobody knowing anything about her husband, or seeing her board the ship with him, he is helpful and while he doesn't fully believe Ruth, he tries to check her story as much as he can. The captain entrusts her with him, provided he keeps a close eye on her, because he doesn't want her throwing a scene and making the trip unpleasant for the other passengers. He doesn't believe her story, also because she has no wedding ring nor can remember vital details of the wedding (due to it happening so fast and in a random wedding chapel church by the side of a road in Maryland, in fact they'd only met a month before), but Manning doesn't let her out of his sights. Ruth finds herself in an even bigger mystery when John calls her in her room that evening and says he cannot make himself known to the crew but wants to see her. As Ruth struggles to find out why John has to keep in hiding Manning stays on her tail, and eventually the twist is revealed what is going on with John and how involved Ruth is in John's plans. In the meantime, it's hard for Ruth, and the viewer, to know who she can and cannot trust, and she is slowly driven into madness.

At various points during the movie, characters are introduced which are potentially involved in one way or another with the mystery of the disappearing husband. Several scenes can be interpreted multiple ways, suggesting that there's some sort of conspiracy going on, involving a German-speaking old man with a cane. In some of these instances, perfectly reasonable explanations are given later, but ofcourse, can these explanations be trusted? Ruth does not know who to trust or not, especially after John's call in which he warns her to not trust anybody, and she becomes increasingly worried and alarmed. She isn't even sure about Dr. Manning, whether he's an ally or not. But he also seems to be the only person who's trying to help her.

Jeanne Crain, who plays Ruth Bowman Stanton, is a beautiful actress who gives her character a pretty soft edge. Ruth seems slightly hapless and naive and a bit too hysterical at times, but it's also understandable that she's doubting everything and everybody, especially after John tells her so during his first call. At various points in the movie, there's a voice-over where she's talking to herself inside her head, mostly to tell herself to not trust anybody and play along with the people around her so she does not raise any suspicion. This device to keep the viewer informed of her state of mind and reasonings for certain actions seems a little redundant and unnecessary as it is usually pretty clear why she does something. On the other hand, it is a good way to keep the viewer involved with her, also because the majority of the scenes have Ruth in 'em. In that respect, credit has to be given to Crain for keeping the viewer interested in her and the story.

Dr. Paul Manning is played by Michael Rennie. He's most famous for playing Klaatu in the sci-fi classic 'The Day The Earth Stood Still'. He does a nice job here, albeit a somewhat bland one. He does have a somewhat striking face (I didn't know him beforehand and the first comparison that came to mind was a cross between Jack Palance and Leonard Nimoy). He plays his character with a very distinguished and calm demeanor, becoming of a seasoned doctor who's seen it all. Dr. Manning seems to see Ruth as more than a patient after a while, even telling her at some point that maybe he wishes there was no Mr. Bowman. But the way he acts, you'd never know it, he's just too reserved, not even his eyes really show his affection for Ruth.

There's also Kay Prentiss (Marjorie Hoshelle), a wealthy single woman who's been married several times and has a good line during her first encounter with Ruth: 'Husbands can get lost so easily, I know'. They meet as Ruth is standing on the deck, waving at the people on the harbor when the ship is sailing off. They bump into each other several times afterwards, including one encounter which gives Ruth reason to believe Kay knows more than she's telling. It is kind of weird how Kay continues to be friendly towards Ruth and treats her as a friend when during most encounters Ruth brushes off Kay or even openly ignores her.

Oddly enough one of the best part of the movie to me is the monotonous & droning foghorn sounding every few seconds during the night scenes, which creates a very ominous & tension-filled atmosphere, it has an almost foreboding quality. It's a simple but effective and dramatic effect. Add to that the thick, soup-like fog making ghostlike shadows out of anybody who dares enter it (before they disappear completely into the dense soup), and you've got some great and atmospheric noir scenes. During some of the more thrilling scenes the music takes over from the foghorn but continues with the monotonous droning theme, again with very effective results.

Another interesting visual, besides the fog, is the moment Ruth gets handed a telegram that was sent to the doctor, from the head of her dad's company. It explains her dad died 4 months ago and Ruth has been seeing a doctor since. The last sentence says that neither the housekeeper nor the doctor know anything about John Bowman and are certain Ruth is not married. What's so interesting about the shot is that the light shines on the telegram she's holding in such a way that this last line is in the light while the rest of the telegram is in the shadows. It gives this line, which confirms the belief of everybody else on the ship that Ruth's lost it, an even more damning quality.

'Dangerous Crossing' was shot on a pretty tight budget in 19 days and re-used some of the sets used for 'Titanic', which had already been re-used for 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes'. That's how you churn out movies, conveyor-belt style. Thankfully, and because of re-using sets from A-movies, this movie doesn't feel like cheap at all. It's not too long at 76 minutes, but it doesn't look or feel cheap, and it does what it's supposed to do, and it does so pretty well. It was also one of the last cheap B-movies that Fox made, with the rise of television the need for 2nd features on a double-bill diminished.

The cinematography was done by Joseph LaShelle, a very good cameraman who had won an Oscar for his work on 'Laura' in 1944 and who also did the cinematography on some other film noirs by Fox, namely 'Fallen Angel' in 1945, 'Road House' in 1948 and 'Where The Sidewalk Ends' in 1950. As mentioned before, his use of fog in the outside night scenes is very noir, even if the movie as a whole isn't. I don't know whose choice it was, but in several scenes the camera moves up and down, slowly and almost unnoticable. It's a neat little trick to make the viewer feel as tho he/she is also on the ship, as it moves across the waves.

This movie is not exactly film noir, it's more of a straight-forward mystery movie and only has some of the visual characteristics of a film noir. But it is entertaining nonetheless and despite some characterizations which seem quite outdated now, the movie is well-made and clever.