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DVD Whirlpool
Laura will always be director Otto Preminger's most beloved movie, but he gets closer to the essence of film noir in this fascinatingly slippery item about a psychiatrist's wife whose weakness for kleptomania makes her prey to an oily hypnotist, con artist, and manipulator par excellence. The fashion-plate wife (dresses, robes, and peignoirs by Oleg Cassini) is played by Laura herself, Gene Tierney. The mellifluous conniver is Jose Ferrer, coming off like the illegitimate son of Waldo Lydecker ("I'm so glad you're here--you make Tina's party seem an almost human event"). Among other things, Ferrer would probably like to get Tierney into bed, and a good many people--including Richard Conte as the caring husband--come to believe he has. But that's not the extent of his ambitions, and before long Tierney has been framed for a murder of convenience to clear up another bit of messiness in the cad's career. Whirlpool's mise-en-scène has a sinuous fluidity and subtle play of light and shadow (it was among the last films shot by that master of black-and-white, Arthur C. Miller), and the complexly structured screenplay--by Ben Hecht and Andrew Solt--takes us by surprise in reel after reel. There's nothing redeeming about Ferrer's character (except how much pleasure his villainy affords), but Preminger doesn't really side with any of the characters or permit our facile identification with anyone. Different parts of the movie are dominated by each of the key figures, including police detective Charles Bickford, and we keep learning there's more to each of them than we initially assumed. Whirlpool's a good title for it. Dive in. --Richard T. Jameson
Can A Man Make A Woman Do Things She Doesn't Want To?
Gene Tierney plays the kleptomaniac wife of respected psychiatrist Richard Conte. When she is caught shoplifting a pin, she is rescued from embarrassment by con artist and hypnotist Jose Ferrer, who wins her confidence, and then sets her up for a murder wrap. His alibi is airtight, and the evidence all points to her guilt.
Tierney, as ever, excels at being beautiful and unstable, though here she is sympathetic, as opposed to the monsters she plays in Leave Her to Heaven and The Razor's Edge. Ferrer is in top form as the suave, completely despicable villain. Bad guys just don't get dialogue like this anymore, and more's the pity.
A very nice, almost flawless print. The B&W tones are superb, and the image is incredibly sharp. The grain, apart from a couple of shots, is almost nonexistent. This is one great-looking transfer.
Richard Schickel's commentary is solid enough, but not as strong as some of the other commentary tracks in this series - there are a number of silences, and he does point out the obvious a bit too often. Still, not a bad piece of work. The only other extras are some trailers, including the one for Whirlpool. The menu is basic.
Another great film, and another great transfer. What a series!
"I dislike inspiring so much terror in such a lovely woman."
As the film begins we see an attractive woman (Tierney) leaving a department store (stores have valet parking? I gotta get out more...), soon to be accosted by the store detective, as she's caught stealing an expensive trinket. As she's hauled back in, protesting all the way, a man named David Korvo (Ferrer) recognizes the woman, and comes to her aide. Turns out she's Ann Sutton, wife to a prominent and affluent psychoanalyst named Dr. William Sutton (Conte). The management, seeing the possibility of negative publicity for the store, releases Ann (must be nice...if this happened to me I'd probably be enjoying the comforts of a 6 by 9 concrete room with burly man named Bubba), but thus begins her relationship with Korvo, an oily, opportunistic, highly intelligent and perceptive con artist who passes himself off as a doctor of sort, his specialty being astrology and hypnosis. Given this recent event, you'd think it a prime opportunity for blackmail, but Korvo expresses interest in helping Ann with her issues, which include a persistent case of insomnia. Ann secretly takes Korvo up on his offer mainly due to the fact her husband doesn't know about her condition, as she's afraid of the adverse effects her problems may have on her husband's career (and their marriage) if word ever got out, but Korvo's machinations prove a slippery slope marked with lies, deceit, and even murder.
The picture on this DVD, presented in the original aspect ration (1.33:1), looks exceptionally clean and sharp, and the audio comes through excellent, available in both Dolby Digital stereo and Dolby Digital mono. Special features include a commentary track with film critic Richard Schickel, a theatrical trailer, and trailers for other Fox noir DVD releases like Call Northside 777 (1948), The Dark Corner (1946), House of Bamboo (1955), Laura (1944), Nightmare Alley (), Panic in the Streets (1947), and The Street with No Name (1948).
Cookieman108
Worth seeing for two reasons....
1) Gene Tierney, who is a big, dripping jelly sandwich of sexiness.
2) Jose Ferrer, who is so casually suave and interesting and funny and assured, he not only belongs in a different movie but in a different reality. His charlatan, Korvo, should've wound up in a film by William Friedkin or James Toback. He looks a little like the actor Tim Blake Nelson and his physical appearance is so antithetical to the character he plays -- a mink-smooth, mesmerizing con artist -- that at first I was disappointed and I wondered if he could pull it off. "Is *that* the bad guy?" I thought, when he first appeared onscreen. Almost immediately -- during the department store debate -- he proved he was and then immediately transcended an otherwise forgettable picture.
The movie itself is semi-noir hogwash -- psychoanalysis from the perspective of 1949 but what we're really talking here is a Preminger sermon on the sanctity of marriage and the trouble girls can get into when they misbehave. Only when it speaks so frankly it actually trumps the sordid subtext (with exchanges such as, "He helped me sleep!" "How? By making love to you?") does it extend past its pulpy plot.
"Somewhere in the Night" is an exemplary title for a film noir, and the shellshocked pilgrimage of an amnesiac WWII veteran through an L.A. shadow-zone of hotels, bars, steam baths, sanitariums, and creepy private dwellings casts an uncanny spell. The plot is so byzantine, and the interlayering of the banal with the bizarre so pervasive, we may occasionally feel we've wandered into a Raul Ruiz mindgame in the guise of a '40s mystery-melodrama. The situation is primal: a man searching for his own identity, dreading what that identity will prove to be, yet so monastically dedicated to his mission that he won't reveal his dilemma to anyone even when it might ease his quest.
The script is shot through with contradictions and improbabilities, though these loom more glaring in retrospect... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): John Hodiak - Nancy Guild Director(s): Joseph L. Mankiewicz DVD Release Date: Released the 06 September 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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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
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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
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The House on 92nd Street has solid claims to a place in film history, and not just as an engrossing true-life counter-espionage movie. Its working title was "Now It Can Be Told," and its story--about the F.B.I. smashing a Nazi spy ring in New York--involved the stealing of atomic secrets. That surely upped the topical ante for 1945 audiences (who, we may assume, had a lot less ambivalent feelings about the F.B.I. than latterday viewers).
Of more lasting significance, the movie pioneered a salutary postwar trend in American filmmaking: forsaking the Hollywood soundstages and back lot to tap the freshness and palpable authenticity of real-world locations. Shot mostly in New York City, House was a collaboration between 20th Century–Fox and Louis de Rochement, the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): William Eythe - Lloyd Nolan - Signe Hasso Director(s): Henry Hathaway DVD Release Date: Released the 06 September 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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"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
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