DonSiegel Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Reading about movies, you hear stories of some films shot in five days and other films shot over three years. Some of the poverty-row directors and B-movie makers cranked out as many movies as they could during a calendar year, while filmmakers like Charlie Chaplin and Stanley Kubrick waited years between projects (making each release a new "event"). Most filmmakers, I think, given the chance would probably release one film per year, keeping their toes in without burning out. But sometimes, whether it's a trick of the calendar, or some peculiar rhythms of timing, some of the greatest directors manage to release two films per year. And even less often, both of these films turn out great. The following is my not-exactly-extensive, but enthusiastic celebration of the one-two punch or the director's double-whammy.

1. Jacques Tourneur: I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man (1943)
The world has frankly been a better place to live since Warner Home Video released the five-disc, nine-film DVD "Val Lewton Horror Collection" box set in 2005. I have often promised myself that, if ever en route to a desert island, it would be the first thing I'd grab (provided that said island came with its own entertainment system). Four directors worked on those nine great horror films (counting poor Gunther von Fritsch, a footnote in film history for being too slow, getting fired from The Curse of the Cat People, and thus launching Robert Wise's career). But Jacques Tourneur -- son of silent era filmmaker Maurice Tourneur -- is undoubtedly the most talented of the group. He started the cycle with the extraordinary Cat People in 1942, and followed it with this one-two punch in April and May of the following year. Sure, they're cheap, quickly-made B-movies, but few films have ever been made -- in any genre, for any price -- with so much textured atmosphere and such a resounding sense of dreamy dread.

At its start, Don Siegel's The Lineup comes across as an unusually well-written, smoothly directed police procedural. Opening with a sharply constructed suitcase snatching at a busy train station, the movie quickly introduces us to Lieutenant Ben Guthrie (Warner Anderson) and his partner Al (Emile Meyer, whose speaking voice sounds uncannily like that of John Spencer), a pair of middle-aged, seen-it-all cops. The two have an easy partnership, and though their dialogue is sometimes overly expository, the way they enter rooms, and relate to other cops is strikingly natural and realistic, showing the attention to detail that a big studio like Columbia could afford to give even its smallest pictures in the late 1950s.

As Ben and Al wend their way through the bag-snatching case, they discover drugs hidden in the stolen bag, and their suspicion gradually shifts from the thief (who killed a cop while fleeing the scene) to the suitcase's owner (a smarmy, too-smooth opera singer who has "guilty" written all over him, and yet somehow isn't), and finally to a large crime syndicate, victimizing innocent travelers by turning them into drug mules who unknowingly import product from Asia. Just when the movie seems to be settling into a typical police procedural mold, however, the camera shows us Eli Wallach on a plane, studying grammar. His name is Dancer, and he's an unsophisticated thug trying to learn how to fit into the upper classes; he's with an associate named Julian (the wonderful Robert Keith, a long way here from the tough-guy cop he played in Guys and Dolls just three years earlier), who is older, smartly-dressed, and George Sanders-aloof. And, suddenly, everything changes.

Beginning this past weekend and continuing through June 15, Manhattan's Film Forum (the last theater in North America with no drink holders on the seats) is hosting a six week mini-festival of films they deem 'B Noir.' Cinematical's own Martha Fischer and myself will be dropping in here and there and reviewing some of the grab-bag selections of the fest, which include psycho-drama noir, Japanese-American noir, caper-gone-wrong noir, and my personal favorite, Abraham Lincoln noir. While a few household-name films have been slipped into the mix -- including D.O.A., The Big Combo, and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing -- don't expect to see Fred MacMurray getting off the trolley car or Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum blowing smoke in each others' faces. That would ruin the hip 'B' angle Film Forum has gone to the trouble of cooking up. Which, mind you, is in no way a complaint: From a quick glance at the selections, the series promises wheelchair-bound contract killers, amnesia victims on the run from nameless crime syndicates, little girls used as human shields, and skeletons washing up on the beach.

Some expected highlights of the fest include the screening of a new print of Pushover, with Kim Novak in an early role as a cold-blooded moll, a screening of Don Siegel's The Lineup, which follows a pair of killers who enjoy writing down their victims' final words in a little book for kicks, and Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground, with Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino as a tortured cop and a blind woman who may hold the clues to a grisly murder. There's also Robert Siodmak's Phantom Lady, starring Alan Curtis as a man whose only hope of slipping the noose for the murder of his wife is to track down his alibi -- the dizzy dame he was romancing at a local dive at the time of the crime.

Admission is ten bucks for two films.