Product Description

Hollywood's legendary tough guys and femme fatales collide again in The Film Noir Classic Collection Volume Two. The Collection includes five smoldering classics all new to DVD and all digitally remastered: Born to Kill Clash By Night Crossfire Dillinger and The Narrow Margin. The movies star film noir icons Robert Mitchum Barbara Stanwyck Robert Ryan Lawrence Tierney and Claire Trevor among others and feature commentaries from film historians and directors including Robert Wise on Born To Kill Peter Bogdanovich with archival contributions from Fritz Lang on Clash By Night; John Milius on Dillinger and William Friedkin and Richard Fleischer on The Narrow Margin.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: TELEVISION/CLASSIC UPC: 012569713314

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6640 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2005-07-05
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Box set, Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Color, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 5
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 414 minutes

Amazon.com
Film noir is such a rich cinematic zone that second-tier specimens compel nearly as much fascination as the classics. At a glance, Volume 2 of Warner Bros.' (ever-expanding, we hope) Film Noir Collection is a distinct step down from Volume 1--inevitable when you've launched your series with five landmark titles, including three outright noir masterpieces (The Asphalt Jungle, Gun Crazy, Out of the Past). But linger beyond that first glance, because the second set is a flavorful mix of sleazoid iconography (two vehicles for B-movie bad boy Lawrence Tierney), an offbeat outing for a major director (Fritz Lang in his Howard Hughes RKO period), Poverty Row production circumstances that encourage aggressively peculiar, verging-on-radical filmmaking (the strange mélange that is Monogram's Dillinger), and two pressure-cooker suspense pictures that are landmark films in their own right (Crossfire and The Narrow Margin).

Jean-Luc Godard dedicated Breathless to Monogram Pictures, and Dillinger (1945) was probably the main reason why. With an Oscar-nominated script credited to Philip Yordan (abetted by his friend William Castle, director of Monogram's excellent When Strangers Marry), Max Nosseck's 60some-minute account of the Depression-era outlaw's brashly improvisatory career is a hypnotic mix of bargain-basement filmmaking (lotsa stock footage and minimalist sets), astute ripoff (the rain-and-gas-bomb robbery sequence from Lang's You Only Live Once), and Brechtian bravura. The major Hollywood studios had taken a vow of chastity when it came to glorifying gangsterism; Monogram ignored the embargo and barreled ahead to unaccustomed popular and critical success. The storyline actually scants the ultraviolence (no Bohemia Lodge shootout) and all-star supporting cast (no Pretty Boy Floyd, no Baby Face Nelson) of Dillinger's real life--likely a matter of cost-cutting rather than abstemiousness. Newcomer Lawrence Tierney nails the guy's coldblooded freakiness and animal magnetism, and the supporting cast includes such éminences noirs as Marc Lawrence, Eduardo Ciannelli, and Elisha Cook Jr. Producers Maurice and Frank King would make Gun Crazy four years later.

Born to Kill (1947) is the second helping of Tierney, playing a psychotic drifter who's irresistible to women ("His eyes run up and down ya like a searchlight!" breathes housemaid Ellen Colby, just about the only female he doesn't bother targeting). A number of people end up dead by his hand, but the kicker is that he crosses paths with a woman--socialite-divorcee Claire Trevor--just as heartless as he, and even more treacherous. The script makes less sense with each passing reel, but there are ripe character turns by Walter Slezak, as a philosophical private eye who operates out of a diner; Elisha Cook Jr., as Tierney's more level-headed partner; and Esther Howard, as a hard-bitten old bat who flirts with Cook in a nightmarish nocturnal wasteland outside San Francisco.

Three Roberts--Young, Mitchum, and Ryan--costar in Crossfire (1947), one of only a handful of noirs to be sanctified with Academy Award nominations: best picture, director Edward Dmytryk, screenwriter John Paxton, and supporting players Ryan and Gloria Grahame. The film unreels during a single sweaty, post-WWII night when one among a squad of GIs on leave in Washington, D.C., murders a nice Jewish man (Sam Levene) because he doesn't like "his kind." The audience knows who's guilty before the cops do, and Ryan's portrayal of the bigot will make the hair on your neck rise. Police detective Robert Young plays with his pipe too much and makes one speech too many, but the atmosphere is memorably taut and surreal.

Robert Ryan may be even scarier in Fritz Lang's Clash by Night (1952), a rare noir without any criminal aspect: all its bitterness and savagery is emotional, psychological, and--preeminently--sexual. Barbara Stanwyck, slightly past her stellar peak but in her prime as an actress, plays a married woman in a New England fishing town who knows what a bad idea it is but falls anyway for a vicious, misogynistic movie projectionist. Sample Clifford Odets dialogue, Stanwyck to Ryan: "What do you want to do to me? Put your teeth in me? Hurt me?" Clinching ensues. (All this and Marilyn Monroe, too.)

We've saved the best for last. Narrow Margin (1952) is the kind of trim, beautifully paced movie people have in mind when asking, "Why don't they make 'em like that anymore?" Two cops have to guard a gangster's widow against assassination as she rides the Golden West Limited sleeper train from Chicago to give evidence in L.A. Soon there's only one cop (gravel-voiced Charles McGraw, usually a villain), and he's finding the sharp-tongued widow (Marie Windsor) as obnoxious as she is endangered. Nothing goes quite as you'd expect in this exemplary train thriller, which rattles and rocks toward its destination without a music track or a wasted moment. --Richard T. Jameson

Customer Reviews

Not the ultimate but still good


Compared to the outstanding Volume 1 in the collection, Volume 2 is not as exciting. However, it's still worth having.

Each movie in this box set has something unusual to contribute, so even though some of the titles aren't textbook noir, they have enough noir elements to give them a toehold on the genre. I hope future volumes (I have #3 already) will include more intriguing titles. My preference would be for Angelface, Desperate, Conflict, Dead Reckoning, and The Big Heat. That said, I don't regret adding Volume 2 to my collection.

Born To Kill has all the classic elements an admirer of the genre craves and more. From the title one thinks the story will chronicle the destruction (and inevitable self-destruction) wrought by Laurence Tierney's one-track, menacing psychopath, and it does. But the original working title, Deadlier Than the Male, reveals the real story: Claire Trevor's composed detachment and icy self-possession as she takes over Tierney and assumes control of their situation. She manipulates people and events as though conducting moves in a game. She is utterly amoral, unlike Tierney's maniac who is organically bad; she has a choice whether to be bad or not, and simply doesn't care. The nice twist here is that in the toughguy chauvinism of noir, the woman proves more cunning and dangerous than any man.

Clash By Night has the telltale moodiness and self-destruction of noir, but without the moral ambiguity and lawless element. There is plenty of violence but not in the physical sense. Here it mainly takes place in the emotional upheaval of the characters, thus setting apart this title in a niche of its own.

Crossfire is an important piece for its groundbreaking treatment of bigotry, specifically anti-Semitism. Released slightly sooner than Gentleman's Agreement, an argument can be made that this movie paved the way for the social commentary that would mark much of postwar cinema.

Dillinger is a great example of how skimpy budgets helped create the look of what would come to be known as film noir. Not a lot of pennies went into this one, but neither was a single penny misspent. Every scene is spare and tight and the entire story moves along with the singlemindedness of a getaway car.

The Narrow Margin is all sharp angles and sharp dialogue, and even has a sharp detective in a tight spot. All in all, a sharp little movie, but what really sets it apart is the complete lack of a music score. The director replaces strings and brass with locomotives to punctuate what might otherwise be a typical suspense-on-a-train yarn. The rushing rhythm of the tracks enhances the rapid pace of the story and unrelenting pursuit of the antagonists, while whistles and screeches mirror the shrill unpleasantness of a reluctant witness escorted by an even more reluctant protector. Claustrophobes beware--the train interiors give this one a real sense of restriction and entrapment.

There are not a lot of extra features in this set but each title does include a commentary track. I especially liked the ones on Born To Kill and Crossfire.

Disappointing follow up to vol. 1
I had high hopes for this set after being quite impressed with vol. 1. All the movies were top notch & they all looked excellent (probably restored). Then came the Gangsters box set, which, while not all 5 star movies, made up for that fact by also including introductory news reels, cartoons & featurettes for each film. After watching all of these films, I must say it seems like WB has rushed this one onto the market. No extras like the Gangsters box set and the prints used for this set weren't restored. "Crossfire" in particular looks really bad, with all kinds of spots & cuts. The movies were also a mixed bag. Despite its title, "Dillinger" was particularly dull, a rather formulaic bank robbery movie. "Crossfire" had potential, but it's social commentary becomes a little preachy in the end, though it may be of interest to film historians. "Clash By night" was the biggest surprise in its dark view of married life. Hopefully WB will put at least a little bit more effort into vol. 3.

An Interesting Mix
This set illustrates the diversity of Noir films. Crossfire and Narrow Margin develop plot complexities handled in very dynamic ways that propel the film. Born To Kill, Dillinger, and Clash center on strong but flawed personalities and the viewer watches them self destruct over the course of the film. The filming of Clash strongly suggests the stage play from which it came. Individual performances are fascinating. Barbara Stanwyck in Clash is delightfully hard edged and cynical. Marie Windsor in Margin is gorgeous and a very good actress. Robert Young in Crossfire is unexpectedly forceful. Robert Ryan is always threatening and relentless. Robert Mitchum plays the somewhat weary, seen it all before character of many of his early films. Lawrence Tierney is perhaps the stiffist actor to ever be filemd. Two of his films is one too many.