André de Toth’s PITFALL (1948; May 25 at 7 pm, with Felix Feist’s Tomorrow Is Another Day) skirts the basic template of noir and comes close to being the first incarnation of the Fatal Attraction paradigm. Bored insurance exec Dick Powell puts his suburban family, home, and life in jeopardy after meeting lonely model Lizabeth Scott on a job, falling for her (after a classic fuck fade), and incurring the jealous thunderstorm of mountainous private dick Raymond Burr. De Toth was a drone, and the film lacks the vision that makes noirs sing, but it’s teeming with electric dialogue and potent real-life details (as when Powell and wife Jane Wyatt matter-of-factly change their boy’s sweat-saturated pajamas after a nightmare). Irving Reis’s shadowy, dreamlike CRACK-UP (1946; May 25 at 3 pm, with Boris Ingster’s Stranger on the Third Floor) isn’t thin — Pat O’Brien is an art expert who may or may not have amnesia, the sussing out of which reveals a harebrained conspiracy plot centered on a city museum — but the knotted narrative and the duplicitous characters obscure the film’s essential noirness, making it more sub-Hitchcockian than authentically desperate.
There’s nothing over-clever about Phil Karlson’s movies — they’re so pulp-aggressive they make Samuel Fuller’s noirs look sophisticated. Karlson’s 99 RIVER STREET (1953; May 26 at 7 pm, with his The Brothers Rico) is truly a forgotten gem on his résumé, a brutal and hostile jeremiad set entirely at night about a bitter, failed boxer (John Payne) whose unhappy wife gets mixed up with a diamond heist; that initiates a fall of dominoes that gets so despairingly twisted, you can’t imagine how the luckless hero will ever punch his way out. Twitching with rage, Payne finally obliterates the memory of his nice-guy lawyer from Miracle on 34th Street, and as his new love interest, Evelyn Keyes, playing a strangely impulsive actress, flits in and out of the darkness like a neurotic moth. But Karlson fills in the margins so beautifully: imperturbable buddy Frank Faylen, smiling scumbag Brad Dexter, faithless slut Peggie Castle, Yiddishe diamond fence Jay Adler, bullet-headed hitman Jack Lambert, and so on, all biting at one another like lab rats left to starve in their maze.
Joseph E. Lewis retroactively became a noir god when his 1950 masterpiece Gun Crazy was rediscovered, but MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS (1945; May 24 at 7 pm) is a faux Brit mystery freak that hardly qualifies for the genre. Nina Foch plays (stiffly) a lonesome working girl in London who gets a job as a rich family’s secretary — only to wake up miles away in a seaside mansion and being treated by everyone there as if she were a married woman suffering from schizophrenia. Rather Lewtonesque in its particulars (and trailing plot lifts from Rebecca and Gaslight, but pushed to brown-acid extremes), Julia Ross is memorable mostly for its “what the . . . ” narrative curve, and for George Macready, possibly the least trustworthy actor of the period, as the shady family’s psychotic scion, methodically shredding the clothes of his new “wife” with a knife and coming close to gutting his own mother (Dame May Whitty).
