Alan Ladd will probably always be remembered for his award-winning performance in Shane, one of the greatest westerns ever made. But in my heart he’ll always be one of the great film-noir actors. His five films with Veronica Lake are legendary enough, but he made lots of other noirs throughout his career and I’ve got a soft spot for every one of them. This new set form Kino Lorber highlights two lesser-known Ladd films plus a nifty little “female thriller” without him.
Buy Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XX Blu-rayWith a name like Captain Carey, USA (1950), you’d think this film would be more of a war drama than a noir. It starts out that way with an opening flashback finding our titular Captain (Ladd), an OSS officer hiding out in the cellar of an Italian castle fighting Nazis. His mission is blown by some unknown traitor which lands him in the hospital, his partner dead, and his girlfriend Giulia de Greffi (Wanda Hendrix) presumably killed as well.
After the war, he returns to that Italian village to figure out who the traitor was. He’s shocked to discover that Greffi is still alive and now married to Barone Rocco de Greffi (Francis Lederer). Most of the villagers do not welcome him back as a hero or even a guy who did his duty in helping them fight fascism. After he was shot, the Nazis lined up a couple dozen men from the village, accusing them of aiding the enemy and executed them. While the survivors don’t exactly blame Carey for this, his presence is now considered a bad omen.
On the audio commentary, Gary Gerani notes that one could consider that coldness from the villagers symbolically representing most of Europe’s feelings towards U.S. involvement after the war. I don’t know if that was intentional or not, but I do know that the rest of the film becomes a rather crackerjack film noir. Carey investigates the betrayal like a big-city detective, lining potential suspects from nearly every major character in the film, and getting dizzy from all the twists and turns.
Appointment With Danger finds Ladd playing Al Goddard, a U.S. Postal Inspector investigating a murder of one of his own. He’s the kind of calculating, cold-hearted inspector that thinks everyone has an angle. Everyone is out for themselves. Even Sister Augustine (Phyllis Calvert), the nun who was a witness to the first murder (there will be more). He’ll eventually go undercover with a gang of thieves (which include a pre-Dragnet Jack Web and Harry Morgan) to both suss out who the killer is, and try and stop the robbery of a postal money shipment.
It is an interesting mix of styles. When the film is with the crooks, it is all enclosed spaces and dark shadows, but whenever he’s with the nun, it opens up into open spaces filled with light. She’s a beacon to the story and to Goddard’s closed-off heart. Even when the bad guys try to bump her off, she maintains a cheery attitude and refuses to stop doing the Lord’s work. By the film’s end, he might just believe that not everyone has an angle. But first, he’s got to stop those crooks and catch a killer. Getting that done will create plenty of thrills and chills. It’s a pretty great little movie.
Make Haste To Live is the one film without Alan Ladd and is also the set’s worst. It is a rural noir where a woman’s killer husband gets paroled and tracks her down. It is the type of film where you wish it was a little nastier, a little more mean so you could sink your teeth into it. Instead, it is fine, not bad, not not too memorable either.
The woman, Crystal Benson (Dorothy McGuire), lives with her teenaged daughter Randy (Mary Murphy) in rural New Mexico. She’s a successful businesswoman with a nice new boyfriend (John Howard) – an archeologist excavating a Native American dwelling with an all too convenient “bottomless” pit. Twenty years ago, she ran away from her husband (Stephen McNally) whom she found out after the honeymoon is a violent gangster.
A newspaper article led him to her and now he’s out for blood. The problem is there is never any real menace to it. Once or twice he expresses some threatening anger, but mostly, he plays it cool. He butters up Randy (whom he pretends is his niece) and forces Crystal to pay him a large sum of money. But he lacks any serious bite. Weirdly, Crystal just goes along with it all. She never tells the sheriff (who is all too willing to loan her a gun, no questions asked) or anybody really, what is going on. It seems like a convicted murderer, breaking parole, ought to be someone the police could easily get rid of, but then we wouldn’t have a movie now, would we? McGuire is good and there are some nice views of New Mexico, but it just never feels all that thrilling.
Kino Lorber once again does a nice job of presenting these three films. They’ve each got nice-looking new masters from 4K scans. Each film comes with a lively audio commentary and the usual slew of trailers. I’ve watched and reviewed several of these Dark Side of Cinema sets now and this is one of the better ones.
