A Law Unto Themselves

The front door to an apartment swings open... an unseen figure walks through the living area and approaches a beautiful blonde woman wearing a robe as she walks around the bathroom... he then deliberately empties the barrel of his revolver into her – this is the jarring cold opening to the film noir Illegal (1955), and one thing is for sure, it knows how to grab your attention. Funnily enough, this was the third adaptation of the 1929 play “The Mouthpiece” by Frank J. Collins, following Mouthpiece (1932) and The Man Who Talked Too Much (1940) – and they say movies are remade too much today. Flash to Victor Scott (Edward G. Robinson), a district attorney who is wise to all the angles and is graced with a silver tongue. With an unyielding desire to win (he got it from growing up and fighting his way out of the slums), he argues every case like it is his last.

A film noir with some eccentricities, The Big Steal (1949), directed by then third time film maker Don Siegel (who would go on to make such greats as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dirty Harry, and Escape from Alcatraz), plays like a long chase within a longer chase, while the meeting between gent and femme is something akin to a will they/won’t they screwball comedy. The usually laconic Lt. Duke Halliday (Robert Mitchum) is in quite the conundrum, as he has been robbed of a U.S. Army payroll totaling a whopping three hundred grand by swindler Jim Fiske (Patric Knowles). On the lam in Mexico (a rather rare noir location, also think Ride the Pink Horse and Touch of Evil), Halliday is on his trail... but the problem is, so is his superior – Captain Vincent Blake (William Bendix), who, of course, thinks it was actually the Lieutenant who ran off with the money.

Looking for the easy way out... it’s often a motif of the film noir. Taking the idea to its seemingly inevitable conclusion, director Anthony Mann (Desperate) definitely drives the concept down what seems to be every Side Street (1949) in The Big Apple in this tale of go on, take the money and run. Joe Norson (Farley Granger) is anticipating the birth of his first child with wife Ellen Norson (Cathy O’Donnell). The acting pair grace the screen together for the second and final time following They Live by Night from the previous year... funnily enough, it almost plays as a ‘what could have been’ second chance for that couple.

If jailed for false pretenses, when you finally get out of prison, what would you do? The premise of the engaging film noir thriller Cry Danger (1951), made by former child star and first time director Robert Parrish (it is also said Dick Powell was quite involved in the film’s directing), one thing’s for sure, it’s about as hard boiled as you can get. Dick Powell (Murder, My Sweet) plays understandably rough around the edges Rocky Mulloy – a man who was falsely fingered in an armed robbery case that led to a murder.

Beating the famed comedy duo of Abbott and Costello to the horror comedy circuit both one and two years prior to their 1941 classic Hold That Ghost, Bob Hope released The Cat and the Canary in 1939, following it up in quick succession (just eight months later) with The Ghost Breakers in 1940 – it was originally a play written by Paul Dickey and Charles W. Goddard (there are also two silent films from 1914 and 1922 based on it that are thought to be lost – the former being directed by Cecil B. DeMille). Directed by George Marshall, the mystery infused horror comedy follows a socialite, Mary Carter (Paulette Goddard), who has learned on a stormy New York night that she has inherited a supposedly haunted castle on a secluded Cuban isle ominously named Black.