PUSHOVER: Kim Novak dominates Fred MacMurray in this Finnish poster. |
The Brattle has always extended the definition of film noir to enable broader programming; The Burglar (August 8), for instance, is really an arty heist picture, though it does feature noir mainstay Dan Duryea in the lead. The most traditional noir among these nine is Pushover (1954; July 18), where Fred MacMurray plays a cop who woos a bank robber’s mistress (Kim Novak) in order to trap her boyfriend — and then falls for her so hard that he agrees to kill the mug so he and the girl can live together on the purloined cash. It sounds like a retread of MacMurray’s most famous movie, Double Indemnity, and in many ways it is, but the presence of Novak (in her first major role), with her air of melancholy and wrecked innocence, gives it a distinctive feel. MacMurray was perfect for this kind of hard-boiled material: he had such a regular-guy affability that he could take his characters into fairly murky territory without losing your affection. (Among contemporary actors, Bill Paxton comes closest to effecting that sort of identification from audiences, in noirs like One False Move and A Simple Plan.)One of the pleasures of becoming acquainted with movies like these that, unlike Double Indemnity, have slipped off the radar is that you never know who’s going to show up in them. Nobody Lives Forever (August 1) stars John Garfield as a confidence man who courts wealthy widow Geraldine Fitzgerald for her loot and then falls in love with her. The stars aren’t a match, though both are highly watchable for their individual talents, and Fitzgerald is especially poignant in the scene where she learns that the man she has grown to adore has been setting her up. The real ace in the cast, though, is Walter Brennan as Garfield’s loyal pal, a one-time con artist reduced to picking drunks’ pockets. A young Anne Bancroft — already effortlessly elegant and buzzing with that electric current that ran through her great performances in the ’60s — is the Hollywood model who touches hero Aldo Ray for the price of a drink in Nightfall (1956) and thus is targeted by the same murderous duo Ray barely escaped from out in Wyoming. Brian Keith, that peerlessly economical character actor, plays one of the pair of villains. (The skillful director is Jacques Tourneur.) Edmond O’Brien is the leading cop in Between Midnight and Dawn, which features the now-forgotten ’50s TV icon Gale Storm, at the outset of her career (the movie came out in 1950), as the daughter of a policeman killed in action who, against her better judgment, finds herself in love with O’Brien’s partner (Mark Stevens). One of the incidental pleasures of Pushover is the appearance of the vivid Dorothy Malone as Novak’s next-door neighbor, who attracts the notice of MacMurray’s partner (Phil Carey); their romance is, in noir terms, the decent love story the movie juxtaposes with the illicit, doomed one at the center of the film.
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Features
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, Entertainment, Movies, Paul Stewart, Movie Reviews, Simple Plan, John Alton, Kim Novak, Anne Bancroft, John Garfield, Bill Paxton, Less
