We figured it was time to have a place to talk about Steve’s latest video subjects that do not have an UMR page.
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We figured it was time to have a place to talk about Steve’s latest video subjects that do not have an UMR page.
I have seen 18 top 1953 noirs. Favourites are The Big Heat, Pickup on South Street, Niagara, Angel Face, The Blue Gardenia, 99 River Street, I Confess, The Hitch-Hiker, Jeopardy, The Bigamist, City That Never Sleeps, The Glass Wall, and Split Second. I have also seen A Blueprint For Murder, Cry of the Hunted, Man in the Dark, Wicked Woman and I, the Jury.
Favourite posters and stills are from The Big Heat, Pickup on South Street, Niagara, Angel Face, I Confess, The Blue Gardenia, The Hitch-Hiker, Jeopardy and The Glass Wall.
Hi Flora, apologies for my late reply, a youtube glitch meant I had to try again on saturday to post the video. Your tally of 18 noirs watched out of 25 is excellent. I only managed 4. My favorite’s are Niagara and The Big Heat, I also enjoyed Pickup on South Street. I confess that I Confess isn’t one of my favorite Hitchcock films and I’ve only watched it once.
Thanks for commenting, much appreciated. Happy you liked the posters and stills. Next video on friday, hopefully.
Steve’s 1953 film noirs video is up to his usual very-high standard and entertained me personally to the tune of 98.5%. Best STILLS/LOBBY CARDS from my perspective are as follows:
1/2 for I the Jury
2/2 for Wicked Woman – wow!
3/Vicki
4/Cry of the Hunted
5/1st one for Split Second
6/City that Never Sleeps
7/Dangerous Crossing
8/A Blueprint for Murder
9/The Bigamist
10/The Hitchhiker
11/ALL for I Confess – one of Hitch’s lesser-known offerings
12/ALL for Niagara – wow!
13/The Big Heat – wow!
14/The Glass Web – I saw this as the supporting feature to ‘Trouble in Store’ the very first movie of Brit comedian Norman Wisdom who was massive in the United Kingdom.
15/ALL for Pickup on South Street. “I have nothing against Communism. I just don’t think they’re nice people.” Spoken by Thelma Ritter in the film but I bet Laddie or The Duke wouldn’t have minded saying the 2nd half of that quote!
16/Forbidden. Shelley Winters originally down for female lead and 1st time I ever saw a Bernie Schwartz movie. A rather routine film that has nevertheless always claimed a fond spot in my memories of being at movies in the 1950s. That’s because its theme song ‘You Belong to Me’ with its wonderful escapist flavor has always been one of my personal favorite pieces of music.
See the pyramids along the Nile
Watch the sun rise on a tropic isle
Just remember, darling, all the while
You belong to me
See the marketplace in old Algiers
Send me photographs and souvenirs
Just remember when a dream appears
You belong to me
Whist I didn’t go to many noirs back in the early 1950s I have since seen on TV reruns of a number of the ones that Steve’s video includes and my favourites among them are The Big Heat, The Glass Web, Man in the Attic, Angel Face, Forbidden, City that Never Sleeps, Dangerous Crossing, Pickup on South Street and Man in the Dark. Best POSTERS in Steve’s 1953 video are from my viewpoint [FL = Foreign Language version of poster}:
1/1st one for Count The Hours
2/1st one for Man in the Dark
3/Man in the Attic
4/ALL for Forbidden
5/1st one for Vicki
6/1st one for Split Second
7/2FL ones for The Glass Wall
8/ALL for City that Never Sleeps
9/MOST for The Glass Web-wow!
10/1st and FL ones for Angel Face
11/ALL for Jeopardy
12/1st & FL one for Blue Gardenia
13/1stz one for The Man Between – wow!
14/Both FL ones for I Confess
15/Dangerous Crossing: I saw this one on a double bill with the western Powder River starring Rory Calhoun my own fave B movie cowboy actor the 1950s
16/FL for The Big Heat: This movie had enormous box office pull in Belfast where I live and has developed a great reputation over the years and is therefore worthy of Steve’s ‘Top of the Bill’; so I was surprised to see that it did relatively poorly in the States with an adjusted domestic gross of just $58 million according to The Work Horse. Good to see The Great Mumbler’s big sister billed as one of the stars. She was blacklisted for a time by the McCarthy Committee as a “leftie”. She always looked like Marlon in drag to me.
I got in OK to Arrowhead but to realise the shock that the cyclist’s taunts would have been for those standing further down the queue imagine WH being told he wouldn’t get to see a supposedly-funny Myrna Loy or Al Leach comedy – and indeed maybe one hyped-up by Hirsch for people easily-pleased.
There would be as The Bible expresses it “A weeping and a wailing and a gnashing of teeth!” but to be honest and speaking for myself, unfortunately I have never found one of those movies to be ACTUALLY funny.
Or STEVE might wish to consider how he would feel if he had been queuing for an hour or so for the latest Statham martial arts bloodbath or for a turkey about a slasher only to get to the box office and be advised “HOUSE FULL” – sorry Sir but maybe you’d like to try again tomorrow evening.”
It was par for the course in those days before TV, saturation releases and multiplexes to be standing in a queue for some time and then quaking in your shoes when the uniformed attendant appeared and started to count, segregate and usher-in the final few patrons that he was able to admit that night.
Those of us who hadn’t made the cut would shuffle away like a pack of whipped dogs – or whipped Horses whichever the case might be !! I would have been OK though in any event that summer evening in August: I was then queuing-up at The Castle for my 2nd helping of Chuck in Arrowhead having already seen it the previous week at The Strand cinema!
In the 1982 film ’My Favourite Year’ Peter O’Toole starred as drunken actor Alan Swann said to be modelled on the real-life Errol Flynn. The movie opens with the voice-over protagonist Benjy Stone telling the audience something like “1954 when Alan Swann arrived in town was my favourite year.”
In my mind today my own favourite year as a movies fan during all those years in my boyhood of the late 1940s and 1950s was probably 1953 the year of Steve’s current video. Mind you I had little interest in film noirs at that time which I considered were really for adults and my big preoccupation was with westerns.
Within that context the two movies that will probably always define the early 1950s for me are the classic Shane and the virtual B movie Arrowhead starring Charlton Heston both released in 1953.
I vividly remember standing in a queue for Arrowhead one summer evening in Aug 53 when a cyclist passed and laughingly shouted at us standing in line “There are too many of you – you won’t all get in!” and then he sped away chuckling loudly. Continued in Part 2.
Aloha Bob, late again sorry about that. I was also late uploading the video, youtube video checks were taking ages on friday and I had to try again on saturday.
Thanks for the review, generous rating, anecdotes, info and lyrics, always appreciated. Glad you liked the posters, stills and lobby cards.
Yep standing in a long queue (US = line) of people outside the cinema (US = theatre) and somebody comes up and says ‘sorry we’re full’ happened to me a few times way back in my cinema going days. Eventually I started buying advance tickets to counter that disappointment.
When I was a kid and saw a long queue of people outside the cinema I would politely ask people at the front if I could get in line with them, most of the time they let me and I could hear complaints and grumbling behind me, “no no don’t let him in!”, “get at the back of the queue you little s**t!” And I’d just stick two fingers up at them.
No films scored 10 out of 10 from my sources, three films scored 9 – Niagara, Pickup on South Street and The Big Heat.
My Video Top 5
The Big Heat 8.15
Pickup on South Street 7.9
Niagara 7.5
Angel Face 7.4
99 River Street 7.4
The UMR Critics Top 5 –
The Big Heat 8.7
Pickup on South Street 8.3
Angel Face 7.6
I Confess 7.5
Niagara 7.3
IMDB Niagara trivia – Niagara was the first film in which Marilyn Monroe received top billing. During filming of the shower scene, director Henry Hathaway had to keep yelling at Monroe to keep away from the shower curtain and away from the lights as she insisted on being naked (as she was under the bed sheets at the beginning of the film). To pass the censors of the time, the scene was darkened in post-production. The famous walk by Monroe’s character across the cobblestone street holds the record for the longest walk in cinema history – 27 seconds and 116 feet of film.
Spoilers Ahoy –
Henry Hathaway stated: “It would have turned out a much better picture if James Mason had played the husband as I wanted. He has that intensity, that neurotic edge. He was all set to do it, but his daughter Portland said she was sick of seeing him die in his pictures”. Niagara is the only film in which Marilyn Monroe’s character dies.
HI STEVE: Thanks for the usual comprehensive feedback. I enjoyed the accounts of your own queue experiences. Over here in the early fifties and even much later we were not permitted to make advance bookings except for a special epic or extravaganza such as Chuck’s 10 Commandments and Ben Hur. I’ve told you before that WE were a simple and primitive people back then.
Good solid stuff too about Niagara except that Orson Welles wouldn’t have taken kindly to James Mason instead of Joe Cotton: Orson thought Joe was “the greatest American actor of all-time” and Cotton returned the favour by nicknaming all-rounder Orson “the Boy Wonder”. Remember the song line “We belong to a mutual admiration society”!
I have always felt that actresses such as MM who dine out on being “sex symbols” take every opportunity to flaunt their ‘talents’. Some actors are the same. For example Mitchum who was of course very big and who thought he was tough and important seemingly used to pick fights with people whom he thought he could beat.
Also I’m sure that even The Work Horse for all his wizardry with stats could not put a figure on the countless time on screen that Jace has taken off his shirt and/or shown the audiences his rear nakedness.
Whilst many of the 1953 noirs that you covered are interesting and entertaining I still feel that the Halcyon Days of the film noir/gangster movies were the 1930s and 1940s with classics like White Heat, Maltese Falcon and Key Largo and The Roaring Twenties and stars such as Bogart, Edward G, Cagney and Ladd at their peak.
Recently we have had the 50th anniversary of Godfather One which is not classed as a noir but is now considered one of the greatest gangster/crime films of all time if not the greatest.
In an article two weeks ago in the GB Sunday Times to celebrate that 50th anniversary the author made the point that since their arrival on the scene Coppola’s Godfather films have always been loved by men of great political/military power in real life.
For example Godfather One was apparently the favourite movie of military dictators Col Gadaffi and Saddam Hussein. In formal “democracies” Donald Trump is said to have cited Godfather One as being in his own top 3 films of all time; and Barak Obama quotes Godfather 2 as his personal favourite movie per se.
Moving closer to home Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson has apparently claimed that his favourite all-time single SCENE or SEQUENCE in any movie ever is the retribution massacre near the end of Godpop One when Pacino has his hirelings mow-down Richard Conte’s Barzini and all the other Corleone family’s rival Mafia ganglords and enemies.