kim novak Tagged Articles at Cinematical

"Introducing Kim Novak." What else do you need to know? After a short stint as "Miss Deepfreeze," a spokeswoman-character for a refrigerator company, the 21-year old aspiring actress and future Vertigo ice goddess was snatched up by Harry Cohn and immediately plunked down in a starring role in 1954's Pushover. The film, which was screened last week as part of Film Forum's ongoing B-Noir festival, is best described as a re-imagining of the popular Double Indemnity story. In the original, Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck conspired to defraud an insurance company. Their ace in the hole was that MacMurray was an insurance man himself, and thought he could game the system. In Pushover, MacMurray and Novak conspire to double-cross a thief who's just knocked over a bank. Their ace in the hole is that MacMurray is a bank robbery detective, and thinks he can game the system. Novak plays the bank robber's girlfriend, tucked away in a posh apartment and waiting patiently for her man to breeze back into town. MacMurray and his partner Rick (Phil Carey) watch her every move from a stakeout nest in a motel across the street. Rick is initially skeptical that the bank robber would take the chance of coming back into town with all that money, just to pick up his girlfriend. Then he raises his binoculars and looks across the way at Novak for the first time: "Yep, he'll show up."

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.