Kit Parker Films announced this past week that a
second volume of film noir treasures will be heading home on July 16 as a
three-disc/nine-film Blu-ray collection.
Titled Noir Archive Volume 2: 1954-1956, we begin
— chronologically speaking — with director Hugo Haas’ 1954 film release of Bait,
starring Haas (Pickup, Hold Back Tomorrow) as
Marko, a hard-beaten prospector who has been in search of a lost mine for
nearly two decades. He teams up with a
younger man by the name of Ray (John Agar) and as luck would have it they find
the mine!
In one of the most convoluted partnership breakups
ever concocted, Marko marries a woman of loose morals by name of Peggy (played
by Cleo Moore — Hold Back Tomorrow, The Other Woman,
etc.) and plans to use her as bait to seduce Ray into having an affair with
her. In a jealous rage he could then
confront his partner, who would end up dead … except nothing goes as planned!
Director and showman extraordinaire, William Castle,
served up the film noir/crime
thriller, New Orleans Uncensored, in
March of 1955. It was one in a long
series of director-for-hire films that Castle delivered to Harry Cohn and
Columbia Pictures between 1943 and 1956 … and then he starting producing and
directing his own films, and, as they say, the rest is history.
An ex-Navy vet by the name of Dan Corbett (Arthur
Franz) ends up working for some shady characters in New Orleans, including
killer “Zero” Saxon (Michael Ansara), but ends up working with the police to
bring the mob to justice.
The following month, April of 1955, director Fred
Sears saw his film adaptation of Caryl Chessman’s best-selling novel, Cell
2455, Death Row, hit theatres nationwide. Chessman (played by William Campbell — Escape
from Fort Bravo, Love Me Tender The Naked and the Dead,
etc.) was convicted and sentenced to death for a series robberies and sexual
assaults in the Los Angeles area in 1948 and ends up on death row in San Quentin
… the story relates how he got there.
More of a social commentary and crime drama than a film noir, but welcomed in this terrific
collection nonetheless … the great irony is that five years later Chessman is
executed for “non-lethal” crimes, and yet today California’s prisons are packed
with the condemned — who have committed unspeakable and unredeemable acts of
torture and murder — who will never meet Chessman’s fate.
Director Phil Karlson’s June of 1955 film adaptation
of novelist Jack Finney’s 1954 pulp fiction, 5 Against
the House, is next up in the collection.
Starring Guy Madison, Brian Keith, Kerwin Mathews
and Kim Novak, we follow the plans to rob the Harold’s Club in Reno when a
group of college kids stumble upon a casino cage hold-up gone wrong … and begin
to speculate on what it would take to actually pull such a thing off.
During the summer months of 1955, writer/director
Andrew L. Stone delivered The Night Holds Terror,
featuring Jack Kelly, Vince Edwards, John Cassavetes and Hildy Parks. Gene (Jack Kelly) is on his way home from
Edward’s Air Force Base and happens to pick up a hitchhiker by name of Vic
(Vince Edwards), who immediately kidnaps his benefactor and picks up two of his
buddies, Robert (Cassavetes) and Luther (David Cross) … they are all three
escaped convicts.
The initial plan is to waste Gene, but they end up
making him take them back to his place where his wife, Doris (Hildy Parks) and
kids await. A hostage drama, with all
the sexual trappings unfolds … of note, in October of the same year director
William Wyler’s The Desperate Hours,
starring Humphrey Bogart, Fredric March and Martha Scott opened theatrically,
it is eerily similar in tone and theme.
Right after Labor Day in 1955, the British import
from director Arthur Lubin, Footsteps in the Fog, hit
these shores. This Victorian-era piece,
starring murderer Stewart Granger and blackmailer Jean Simmons, finds the pair
spending the entire film trying to one-up the other in their game of cat and
mouse. A terrific twist at the end does
them both in!
It’s October, the traditional Halloween promotional
season, and you’d think that a film with “Dark Web” in the title would be a horror
entry complete with spiders and the like, but director Vernon Sewell’s Spin a
Dark Web was another British film noirish crime thriller imported for
domestic consumption.
Faith Domergue stars as Bella, the over-sexed sister
of SoHo mob boss Rico Francesi (Martin Benson), who spots an ex-G.I. by the
name of Jim (Lee Patterson) and convinces her brother to give him a “job” …
Jim, enamored with the seductive Bella is a little too slow to realize that he
is way in over his head!!
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 1955, a
normally “dead time” for the movies, director Nathan Juran’s The
Crooked Web hit theatres. Not near as good as Highway
Dragnet (1954), but fun just the same, a
duplicitous scheme unfolds involving stolen Nazi gold.
Army buddies Stan (Frank Lovejoy) and Frank (Richard
Denning), with Frank’s carhop “sister,” Joanie (Mari Blanchard — as Queen
Allura in Abbott and Costello Go to Mars), along
for the trip back to Germany, head overseas to recover it, but nothing is as it
seems. Is Stan being set up for a
double-cross? And Joanie seems just a
little too friendly (happy) to be with her brother … what’s that all
about?
Kit Parker Films Blu-ray release of Noir
Archive Volume 2: 1954-1956 wraps up with the
Christmas-of-1956 film release of director Fred Sears’ Rumble on
the Docks, starring future teen idol James
Darren (Gidget, Gidget Goes Hawaiian) in
his screen debut. Darren is sort of a West Side
Story wannabe gang member who gets involved with
the big time rackets and has to find a way out of the jam he’s gotten himself
into.
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