List Price: $14.98 Our Price: $13.48YOU SAVE $1.5!
Buy it
DVD Panic in the Streets
An amazingly effective film noir action movie, shot on location in New Orleans in 1950, that has twists of plot and explosions of violence that can still make audiences gasp. Elia Kazan, of all people, directed this story of a public health worker (Richard Widmark) and a police detective (Paul Douglas) who have only a few hours in which to capture some fleeing felons who may be infected with the plague. The bad guys are played, with enormous relish, by Jack Palance and Zero Mostel, the latter only a few years before Kazan ratted him out to the House Un-American Activities Committee. In retrospect, this modest crime picture looks like a crucial turning point in the formation of Kazan's distinctive style, a clear precursor to the blistering location work of landmark films like On the Waterfront, Baby Doll, and America, America. --David Chute
Feeling deathly ill, an illegal immigrant leaves a poker game, only to be ambushed and murdered by three of the other players (the most notable of whom are Zero Mostel and a young and scary Jack Palance, here appearing as Walter Jack Palance). When his body is found the next morning, the victim is discovered to have been sick with pneumonic plague. Doctor Richard Widmark, in charge of public health, takes over, and is initially at loggerheads with Detective Paul Douglas, who is reluctant to believe that the crisis really is as serious as Widmark says it is. Before long, however, Douglas too is consumed with the search for the man's killers, who are unwittingly plague carriers.
You can almost smell the heat, despair and filth of the New Orleans dock area as captured by the film. And the desperation in Widmark's eyes is equally palpable. How to find a murderer in under 48 hours? The task seems impossible, and director Elia Kazan teases us by having Zero Mostel cross paths with Widmark and Douglas early on, though they, of course, have no idea he's one of the men they're looking for. Though calling this a film noir is stretching the definition just a little, the atmosphere, look, and characters of the genre are present, and races against time don't get much better than this.
Other than the theatrical trailer (and an ad for the Fox Noir series), the only is a commentary track, but a fine one it is, by film historians James Ursini and Alain Silver. The emphasis here is on Elia Kazan, his methods, and the film's context in his career. The menu is basic.
Another superb addition to the Fox Noir series. The initial releases of this line are setting the bar very high indeed.
Classic Film Noir
Widmark, Douglas, Palance, Mostel & company set out, with deft direction from Elia Kazan, to create an atmosphere of great forboding in New Orleans. "Panic in the Streets" starts out at a flat-out pace and never lets up. The DVD is a treat to watch with a very nice black and white print.
Time vs. Crime
An excellent film noir Panic in the Streets features hard boiled criminals, pesky reporters, nervous politicians and a runaway disease.
The story concerns the fear pneumonic plague may be loose in the city, as a dead man is diagnosed as having had it. The victim came into the port from a ship and was subsequently murdered. The question is - where are those that killed him and what path did the dead man take and who else may have been exposed to the dread disease?
New Orleans is a great, if unusual noir location. We do not have the towering buildings of a cold impersonal urban landscape. But we do have the damp, sleazy back streets of a teaming port. In a great scene a dwarf who hawks newspapers gives a tip to the local big-shot hoodlum and when the criminal slips the dwarf a couple of bucks in reward, the newspaper peddler thanks him proufusly with "Bless you's". Everything is a little freakish and creepy.
Richard Widmark is outstanding as the US Navy officer attached to the public health department. He has the single mindedness to squeeze suspects for information, work around local politicians and demand help from cynical police. Jack Palance is a coiled spring of fury as the criminal tough guy who intimidates everyone around him, and Zero Mostel is perfect as his sweaty toadie so nervous he looks as if he may crawl right out of his skin at any moment.
No noir film library would be complete without this addition.
This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $8.98YOU SAVE $6!
Buy it
The postwar vogue for documentary-style realism, prompted by The March of Time and the critical success of Roberto Rossellini's Open City, cross bred with film noir to create a compelling strain of crime films; this is one of the most low-key and credible, based on the true story of a Chicago reporter (James Stewart) who became convinced of the innocence of a death-row inmate (Richard Conte). Director Henry Hathaway (whose Kiss of Death started the trend) stages the action on the actual Chicago locations, providing a fascinating documentary record of an underfilmed metropolis (the convict's mother is a washerwoman at the Wrigley Building), and leads his cast to appropriately restrained, naturalistic performances. Stewart is just beginning to explore his newfound,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): James Stewart - Richard Conte Director(s): Henry Hathaway DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $13.48YOU SAVE $1.5!
Buy it
The long-awaited emergence of Nightmare Alley into the light of DVD should achieve two things: make a legendary film noir available to a new generation, and restore the horrific charge to the lately watered-down term geek, a concept that once had the power to give people very bad dreams indeed.
To his lasting credit, Tyrone Power--20th Century Fox's extraordinarily handsome but not terribly interesting star of the '30s and '40s--begged for the chance to play Stan Carlisle, the predatory charmer who snakes his way through this bracingly unwholesome story. A spieler for--and lover of--carnival mind reader Zeena (Joan Blondell), he displays uncanny skill at "reading" the susceptible rubes, including a tough sheriff who turns to jelly after Stan psychs him out. Once Stan's... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Tyrone Power - Joan Blondell - Coleen Gray Director(s): Edmund Goulding DVD Release Date: Released the 07 June 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $11.98YOU SAVE $3!
Buy it
"What's the use of having a war if you don't learn from it?" The speaker is Alec Stiles (Richard Widmark), a menthol-sniffing asthmatic in a snap-brim hat who's nailed down the organized-crime franchise for a burg named Center City, and who runs it "scientifically," using methods he picked up in uniform during WWII. He can even tap into the databanks of the FBI. Which, by coincidence, is gearing up to bring his mini-crime wave to an end. Street with No Name invites us to sit back and watch both sides deploy their methodologies at each other.
The semidocumentary crimefighting/spybusting thrillers of the late '40s are fascinating for their blend of institutionalized rectitude (the FBI is totally trustworthy and awesomely competent), authentic locations ("filmed where it... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Mark Stevens - Richard Widmark Director(s): William Keighley DVD Release Date: Released the 07 June 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $13.48YOU SAVE $1.5!
Buy it
Samuel Fuller came up with one of his gutsiest "headline shots" for House of Bamboo: Mount Fuji, in CinemaScope, framed between the boots of a U.S. soldier lying murdered on a snowy Japanese embankment. Happily, the movie that follows is no letdown. This brutal gangster film was the first American production to shoot in Japan, and Fuller exploits his locations to the max, up to and including a climactic gun battle around a Tokyo rooftop facsimile of the turning Earth. Officially the screenplay is credited to Harry Kleiner, with Fuller cited for "additional dialogue"; in actuality, the 20th Century-Fox movie transplants the basic premise of the Kleiner-scripted Street with No Name (1948) from an American Midwest town to Tokyo, but otherwise the picture is unmistakably... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Robert Ryan - Robert Stack Director(s): Samuel Fuller DVD Release Date: Released the 07 June 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $13.48YOU SAVE $1.5!
Buy it
