Noirvember 2023 - Rate the last noir you watched

Excellent little heist Noir with an exceptional soundtrack and subject matter.
Strong ending because of a very powerful last line.

There are several male actors who are immediately and lastingly associated with Classic Noir: Bogart. Mitchum. Lancaster. All legends. But for me the king of the genre is really...



Robert Ryan was in fifteen Films Noir in the initial, classic 1940-1959 period. Chronologically they are The Woman on the Beach (1947), Crossfire (1947), Berlin Express (1948), Act of Violence (1948), Caught (1949), The Set-Up (1949), The Woman on Pier 13 - I Married a Communist (1949), Born to Be Bad (1950), The Secret Fury (1950), The Racket (1951), On Dangerous Ground (1951), Clash by Night (1952), Beware, My Lovely (1952), House of Bamboo (1955), and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). All of them are worth seeing, five or six of them are bonafide, undisputed top notch Noir classics, the very definition of what the movement was all about.



Despite that huge and impressive stamp in the Noir genre, Ryan doesn't have the same marquee icon value of a Bogart or Lancaster. But he should. Anyone who delves into the genre learns about him very quickly. He played both heroes and villains, but it is the villains he is best known for. Starting with Crossfire where he played a hateful racist who murders a Jewish man he had served with in the Army. Robert Mitchum and Robert Young were the good guys and it also features one of the female stars of the genre, Gloria Grahame, but Robert Ryan is who steals the picture. Directed by Edward Dmytryk (The Caine Mutiny), it was the first B-Picture to earn a Best Picture nomination. Dmytryk, Grahame, and Ryan all also got nominations. None of them won. A straight drama, also centered on anti-Semitism, won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress instead: Gentleman's Agreement. Ryan lost Best Supporting Actor to Edmund Gwenn's Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street. Somehow it would be Robert Ryan's only Oscar nomination.



The next classic Ryan co-starred in is Act of Violence. This time even though he is a menacing figure, he is actually justified in that vengeance. Van Heflin stars as a man who returns from WWII branded a hero. He led an escape attempt of a Nazi POW Camp where his fellow soldiers were killed but he managed to live. He is now a civic-minded, well-liked citizen with a beautiful wife (Janet Leigh), but he is harboring a secret about that escape, and a brooding, limping man from his past has come to make him pay for it. That man is, of course, Robert Ryan. Probably the first great film from High Noon director Fred Zinnemann who would go on to win Oscars for From Here to Eternity and A Man For All Seasons.



A Noir where Ryan got to play the good guy, if a doomed one, is The Set-Up. Directed by the legendary Robert Wise who seemingly never met a genre he didn't like, Ryan is a boxer and the picture unfolds in real time on the night of a bout. He is older, at the tail end of his career, with a wife (Audrey Totter) and a dream of retiring to open a cigar stand and maybe manage the occasional fighter. He is facing a young up and comer who is heavily favored. What he doesn't know is his manager (George Tobias) has made a deal with a mobster to throw the fight. He hasn't told him because he figures he's going to lose anyway, so why hurt his pride. But as the fight continues it is the old man who seems to have the upper hand. What will he do once he learns about the fix? One of the pillars of the genre and widely influential on everything from Raging Bull to Pulp Fiction. Ryan should have at least been nominated, the year that Broderick Crawford won for All the King's Men and Kirk Douglas was nominated for playing a boxer in Champion.



Ryan plays another flawed good guy in On Dangerous Ground, one of several collaborations with Nicholas Ray (including another very good Noir from that same year, The Racket, with Robert Mitchum and Lizabeth Scott). He plays a big city cop who is pretty well burned out, now known for a short fuse and beating up suspects. He is banished upstate to the quieter countryside and becomes embroiled in a manhunt. A young woman has been murdered and the suspect is being tracked through the snowy woods. He is accompanied by the victim's father (Ward Bond), who intends to kill the man before he can be brought in. During the chase they happen upon a remote cabin inhabited by a beautiful blind woman (Ida Lupino). You can watch it yourself to see how it turns out from there. There's also a fantastic Bernard Hermann score.



Two years later Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino reunited for the tense Beware, My Lovely. Lupino plays a widow who impulsively hires a stranger (Ryan) as a handyman. She learns very quickly but too late that he is odd. Dangerously odd. He exhibits symptoms of schizophrenia or some other mental disorder. She is essentially trapped in the house, trying desperately to manage his psychotic mood swings while looking for an opportunity to escape or call for help before he hurts her.



Sam Fuller's House of Bamboo is one of the few color Noirs, also shot in full widescreen CinemaScope. Robert Stack stars as an Army Sergeant who goes undercover in Tokyo to infiltrate a mob of murderous American thieves led by our man Robert Ryan. He has one of the all-time great villain scenes in the genre when he bursts in on a man he thinks double crossed him, bathing in a wooden barrel, and without warning or a word empties his gun into the barrel. He then calmly berates the dead man for his transgressions.



At the very end of the 1950s Ryan agreed to do one more Noir, one that harkens back a bit to his breakthrough in Crossfire, Odds Against Tomorrow, again directed by the great Robert Wise. Ed Begley (Senior, of course, not Jr.) plays a disgruntled ex-cop who has a plan to rob a bank. He enlists a career criminal and ex-con, played by Robert Ryan, as well as a nightclub performer played by Harry Belafonte, who is reluctant to get involved but has big gambling debts he needs to wipe out. The problem is Ryan's character is an unabashed racist. All are desperate for money so they agree to work together, but it is the hatred that may undo them as much as the crime itself. Co-starring Shelley Winters and Gloria Grahame.

If you only know the older Robert Ryan from The Wild Bunch or The Dirty Dozen, have a blast diving into these Noirs. He has appeared on two of the MoFo Lists in the past, in addition to The Wild Bunch on the Westerns List and Dirty Dozen for War Films, he was in three more Westerns that charted in The Naked Spur and two very much influenced by Noir in Bad Day at Black Rock and Day of the Outlaw. He is also one of the many stars in The Longest Day.

Ryan died fairly young at the age of 63 in 1973. One of his last films is a Neo-Noir, playing the lead mobster in The Outfit with Robert Duvall and Joe Don Baker looking for revenge on the organization.

I liked this one. Barbara Stanwyck is very good here.

I liked this one.

Quicksand

This is why I don’t pick movies at random that I have never heard too often. I picked this because of Lorre. He is really good in his handful of scenes, but there is way too little of that. The story is fine but the script overall is beyond wonky. This feels very stilted way too often. This was a bummer, but hopefully I have kept a few of you from bothering.