Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics I (The Big Heat / 5 Against the House / The Lineup / Murder by Contract / The Sniper)
by Don Siegel, Edward Dmytryk, Fritz Lang, Irving Lerner, Phil Karlson
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Adolphe Menjou, Arthur Franz, Brian Keith, Guy Madison, Kim NovakDirector: Don Siegel, Edward Dmytryk, Fritz Lang, Irving Lerner, Phil Karlson
Brand: Sony
Writer: Ben Maddow
Writer: Ben Simcoe
Writer: Edna Anhalt
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Box set, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 428 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2009-11-03
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Sony Pictures
Movie Reviews of Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics I (The Big Heat / 5 Against the House / The Lineup / Murder by Contract / The Sniper)
Movie Review: Good Value For Your Entertainment Dollar
Summary: 5 Stars
Over the past decade, I have bought many film noir box sets. Yet for some reason, not one of these films was in any of them. These films, having been made by a generation of film-makers who were my parents' contemporaries and during the time when they were young adults, never crossed my radar as a young man. So as much as I like the genre of film noir, essentially each older noir film I encounter is entirely new to me. And so every box set is a cinematic adventure.
Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics Vol 1 is an attractively packaged but quite a bare-bones affair when you compare it with some of the lavish box sets that have been released this century. What you get is a CD for each film, subtitles if you want them, and a little commentary on a couple of them. There is no booklet that would have been very useful in sorting out who is who and who played what. The only real film info is the summary of each film printed on the back of the box that holds the DVD set. With one exception, I greatly enjoyed the entire set and there is enough red meat for the noir aficionado to launch this into five-star territory.
I like three of the films so well that its really a toss-up as to which is my favorite, but here are my favorites from first to worst and why they score that way:
1)The Lineup: Its hard to beat San Francisco as the backdrop for a great crime movie. This one pits some hard-bitten and determined cops against some exceptionally amoral and even evil characters involved in smuggling heroin from Asia. The movie is helped by the credibility of most of the story line and even minor characters play their parts oh so well. Then you have the sights of one of the world's finest cities, San Francisco, to add to your viewing pleasure. All the main characters are first rate, kudos also to the woman and her daughter taken along on the wild ride that brings the movie to its gripping climax and also to the drug dealer's courier in the wheelchair whose few minutes of evil presence on screen you will remember long afterward.
2)Murder By Contract: Vince Edwards shines as a hired killer in this enigmatic and spartan thriller. His qualms about offing a woman become his undoing. The haunting score sets the mood and keeps you focused on the action. The ending is a surprise and Edwards' character Claude never gets that house on the Ohio River he's been saving his blood money for. In many ways, this one has a very European flavor to it despite its being filmed in Los Angeles.
3)The Big Heat: A fairly pedestrian story of big-city corruption and venality brought to thrilling life by Fritz Lang. Lee Marvin is magnificent as an out of control gangster whose brutality sometimes even shocks his associates. When good cop Glenn Ford's wife is killed by a car bomb meant for him, he demands that the milquetoast police chief Higgins bring the perps to justice. But Higgins' non-committal and evasive response convinces him that if he doesn't smash the culture of impunity himself, no one will. And so he does.
4)The Sniper is another film with San Francisco as a setting. I like the film, but at times it gets a little preachy and the main character a little overwrought and not really credible. The sniper himself is a lonely loser who lets his pent-up rage at rejections real or imagined from women he encounters boil over into a full blown shooting rampage. When he is pointed out perched on a rooftop by a workman on Coit Tower, he shoots the workman, makes a break for it and seemingly escapes. An earlier self-inflicted injury proves to be his undoing as it is the one thing that the police know about him and can tell the public to be on the alert for. His landlady turns him in, and he is captured like a cornered animal without further bloodshed in his apartment while a circus-like atmosphere prevails on the streets outside. This actor had to be in good shape, because as he ran up and down hills and staircases around San Francisco, I found myself getting winded just thinking about what he must have experienced!
5)5 Against the House. This one started out as kind of a really dumb college buddy movie that tries real hard to be simultaneously clever and funny. As the industry reviewer says, the lame quips will quickly get on your nerves as will having to imagine a couple of silly-looking cusses being partners in crime. Kerwin Mathews and Alvy Moore are not only silly-looking, they are first-class doofuses. You can't really imagine how the two came to be friends with the serious-minded Guy Madison and his army buddy Brian Keith in the first place. I won't rehash the inane plot, suffice to say that the best part is toward the end where this bunch actually looks like they are going to pull their planned casino robbery off. The sweating fat man that plays the terrified casino employee who looks in serious danger of soiling himself does some of the best acting in the film. Then there is Kim Novak for eye candy.
While there are some noirish elements introduced about halfway through the movie, no way should this be considered in the same league with the other four.
Overall, I judge this set to be an excellent value for your entertainment dollar that last turkey notwithstanding. If you enjoy the film noir genre and do not already own these films, now is your opportunity. Highly recommended!
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Summary of Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics I (The Big Heat / 5 Against the House / The Lineup / Murder by Contract / The Sniper)
FILM NOIR COLLECTION ONE - DVD MovieSony/Columbia comes late to the business of boxing classic noirs, but their first foray is a winner. The crisp restorations fairly pop off the screen, and although two titles tower above the other three, every one rates as a must-see. Fritz Lang is represented by perhaps his last great film, and there's a gem from Don Siegel with one of the grabbiest beginnings and most breathtaking action climaxes in thriller history. Phil Karlson, a busy man at Columbia in the '50s, contributes a caper movie set chiefly in Reno, and there's also a creepy, pioneering study of a serial killer, plus a truly offbeat specimen in which minimalist art film and bargain-basement crime movie converge as though the French New Wave were about to roll.
The Big Heat (1953) is second only to Scarlet Street as the most corrosive among Fritz Lang's films: honest cop Glenn Ford, in the process of fighting an entrenched Mob and deep-seated corruption, risks becoming a vengeful monster. The source was a novel by William P. McGivern, turned into a steel-trap script by Sydney Boehm. Still, it's director Lang's implacable vision, in terms of both camera and awesome moral symmetry, that makes this American crime story kin to Die Nibelungen. And yes, this is the movie with Lee Marvin as a mobster, Gloria Grahame as his sassy moll, and a legendary interaction involving scalding-hot coffee. As James Ellroy exults in his hilariously profane commentary, Don Siegel's The Lineup (1958) "grabs your gonads in the first five minutes"--actually, a whirlwind first minute-and-three-seconds involving the theft of something from a ship just docked in San Francisco harbor and two abrupt deaths. The pressure eases for a while as The Lineup fulfills its obligation to deliver, in effect, an episode of the police-procedural TV series of the same name. The real Siegel movie resumes as a team of hit men arrive in town to do a day's work. Eli Wallach, in his second big-screen role, is brilliant as Dancer the trigger man, described by his handler Julian (the excellent Robert Keith) as "a wonderfully pure pathological study, a psychopath with no inhibitions." One goose flesh-raising scene follows another until the action peaks at Sutro's museum-cum-skating gallery, a multitiered setting Siegel exploits for maximum tension. The end, right? No, just the launch pad for the finale, the most kinetic car chase the movies have ever done (Bullitt and The French Connection notwithstanding). Shooting on locations all over the City by the Bay, veteran cameraman Hal Mohr rises to every challenge, no sweat. Phil Karlson's 5 Against the House (1955) was the first screenwriting credit for Stirling Silliphant (who also worked on The Lineup), and the aggressively quippy dialogue gets on one's nerves. The premise is a good one, though. Four overage college students--two of them Korean War veterans--elect to spend their holiday break robbing Harold's casino in Reno. The idea is simply to "be first at something"; no one will get hurt and the money will be returned. Except that one member of the team has other plans: good old lovable but volatile Brick (Brian Keith), with that old head wound and a psycho-ward history only his buddy Al (Guy Madison) knows about. As was so often the case, Keith (son of The Lineup's Robert Keith) is the best thing in the movie? unless you hold out for the pre-stellar Kim Novak in frosty black-and-white. As Al's singer girlfriend, she completes the titular five--albeit at the expense of having to smooch with Guy Madison, who kisses like an angry robot. There's no kissing for The Sniper (1952), one of the strongest of independent producer Stanley Kramer's early efforts. A foreword explains that this is the "story of a man whose enemy was womankind," and the title character, a pleasant-looking but effectively anonymous nebbish (Arthur Franz), is soon expressing that enmity through his high-powered rifle. The script by Harry Brown lays on the hostile gender dynamics with a trowel, and a psychiatrist (Richard Kiley) files an indictment of society for having failed to provide proper treatment for the killer before it was too late ("It's our fault"). Director Edward Dmytryk makes dynamic use of steep, drop-away perspectives in San Francisco to suggest a world seriously out of joint.
Murder by Contract (1958) features another sort of murderer entirely, a young man named Claude (Vince Edwards) who makes a very good living as a killer for hire. Trained not to feel anything, and assured that a stranger killing a stranger is unlikely to get caught, he goes about his business dispassionately. He could almost be in a Robert Bresson film, moving through a world of Antonioni-like bleakness; deaths occur offscreen. The production resources don't even reach B-movie levels, and that's fine: a dime more might have jeopardized this picture's eerie spell. Irving Lerner directed, and Perry Botkin's electric-guitar score sounds like something that, a year or two later, would have adorned a film by Louis Malle. Only two films are accorded running commentary, well worth the listen in each case. Native San Franciscan and noir empire builder Eddie Muller provides the inside dope on The Sniper, then brings in hard-guy novelist James Ellroy to savor The Lineup; that one's a party. Directors who've patrolled neo-noir territory--Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, and Christopher Nolan--supply intros. Scorsese's are the best, but as usual, there are spoilers galore and viewers are well advised to watch the movie, then the intro. --Richard T. Jameson
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