Cereal At Midnight

Even though it was released in 1950, Outside the Wall  feels like it has a foot in the crime pictures of the 1930s. The film opens on the Cherry Hill prison in Philadelphia where we meet Larry Nelson (Richard Basehart), a man who is about to be paroled after doing a 15-year sentence for murder. We find out more about his crime later in the movie, but the film is more interested in showing us how he's been jailed for so long that he has trouble adapting to a world he no longer recognizes. He ends up working in a sanatorium that's far from the city, but it's not so far away that trouble doesn't arrive in the form of a gangster from his past with a tempting offer that could lead him back to the wrong side of the law. Complicating matters further are two women--a proverbial devil (a materialistic blonde played by Marilyn Maxwell) and angel (virtuous, kindhearted brunette Dorothy Hart)--who pull him in two very different directions.  While this does feel heavily influenced b...

This cracking little noir film is directed by schlockmeister William Castle, but there are no gimmicks here. Instead, we have a pure and simple noir plot involving a returning military man who happens to be the perfect patsy for a frame-up job. Character actors will enjoy seeing Scott Brady ( Johnny Guitar,  later the sheriff in Gremlins ), Dorothy Hart (1948's The Naked City ), Peggy Dow (soon to appear in Joseph Pevney's exceptional noir Shakedown ), John Russell ( Pale Rider , The Outlaw Josey Wales ), and even a fresh-faced Rock Hudson in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it role. The action takes place in Chicago, though rear projection and studio sets occasionally fill in for expensive location shooting. At a brisk 71 minutes, this one flies by and unfolds in something close to real time.  Universal International cranked out scores of these cheap noir and noir-adjacent B-films during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. Some are more memorable than others, but all of them e...

A friend of mine, Chicago film critic Patrick Bromley , is known for saying "it's black and white, so it must be good." It's mostly a joke, but there's something to it. This phrase means two things to me: first, my generation grew up in the shadow of monochrome. For our formative years, most of the "important" movies were all in black and white. Second, as we began to explore the cinema of the distant past, we discovered that there was a basic competency, efficiency, and overall magical quality to The Golden Age of Hollywood and the films made during the studio system era. The lighting, the acting, the camera angles, the music, even the distinct dialogue, delivered through transatlantic accents all work together to create something that is uniquely cinematic and altogether artificial. The sixties and seventies would do much to deliberately destroy that gauzy, otherworldly reality, but we continue to discover these antiquities with a mix of awe and fascin...

 Has there ever been a city more perfectly suited for film noir than San Francisco?  Impenetrable fog rolls in from the bay, secluding the towering steel bridge that looms ominously in shadow. Steep hills represent either insurmountable obstacles or uncontrollable descents, and Alcatraz is a literal unreachable island surrounded by murky water. San Francisco is a living manifestation of noir's themes and atmosphere, so it's no coincidence that so many famous films are set in The Golden City ( Out of the Past, The Maltese Falcon, The Lady from Shanghai, Dark Passage ).  And then there's The Midnight Story , a 1957 film noir starring Tony Curtis as Joe Martini, a traffic cop who learns that a local priest, Father Tomasino, has been attacked and brutally killed. Tomasino was like a father to Martini, and our hero asks his superiors for permission to help in the investigation because he's so personally invested in solving the crime. When his request is not granted, he turns...

It's a tale as old as time: boy meets girl, boy marries girl, girl doesn't tell boy that she's on prison parole and used to be engaged to a mobster. Boy is in for serious trouble when that mobster comes for revenge after he finds out his ex has settled down with someone else. We've all been there or known someone who has, right?  1952's Because of You  stars silver screen starlet Loretta Young as the bottle-blonde moll of a tough gangster (Alex Nicol, The Screaming Skull ). Mere moments after we meet them, they're busted by the fuzz, split up, and sent to prison. Young is a model prisoner and is eager to serve her time and rebuild her life; she's eventually paroled and takes a job at a hospital where she meets a combat veteran, played by Jeff Chandler, who is suffering from injuries sustained in battle. The two fall in love quickly, but Young--now dark-haired--doesn't tell her new beau anything about her prison sentence and the fact that she was an acces...