Director: Henry Levin
Cast: William Gargan, Janis Carter, Jeff Donnell, Coulter Irwin
Have I Seen it Before: Nope.
Did I Like It: I’m struck by the moment in that episode of The Simpsons when Bart and his friends exit a theater after sneaking in to see the R-rated Naked Lunch (1991). Their one-line review of that film pretty much covers a goodly portion of this review:
“I can think of at least two things wrong with that title.”
Based on a radio series where newsmen trade stories, one supposes that the film was at least mildly meant to be the first in a series of films with a similar construction. That series never came, so we’re left with a logic that would have left The Princess Bride (1987) titled Grandpa Reads A Story and The Green Mile (1999) as An Old Man Gets Some Toast.
That might not even be all that much of a weakness of the film, as there is some quiet thrill in not having the entirety of a movie explained to me in the title card. The unavoidable problem here is a question of how we might just define film noir. It’s difficult to conclusively pin it down, butt one can certainly point to things that aren’t Noir. A happy ending feels less noir than it might be otherwise. Noir might feel like it lives in the trapping web of a femme fatale—this film has that in spades—but when the film bends over backwards to release its protagonist from the grips of that trap, there is something fundamentally less bleak about the story, and certainly renders any of the tension that the third act develops.
Honestly, the man (Gargan) is stabbed in the heart by an icepick and manages to go on to find a tidy middle-class income outside of the police force, and keeps his marriage and family. Crime may not pay, but there’s always a way out of it, apparently.