Montreal Magnum

Almost as if designed to be a scripted crime version of a PSA for the greatness of armoured trucks, Guns Girls and Gangsters (1959), directed by Edward L. Cahn, is a late era film noir that still has some bite. Voice-over narrated by the above quoted Chuck Wheeler (Gerald Mohr), he’s the hardened criminal with the plan. With a dead-eye shot that can blow out a moving tire from fifty yards and a mug to match said blown out rubber, he plans on knocking off an armoured truck carrying two million dollars.

A man, whose five o’clock shadow (after several drinks) is seemingly approaching midnight, kills another at last call in a drunken fit; evading chasing parties, he slips through an unlocked window and gazes upon a beautiful sleeping woman – a singular moment that will forever change and intertwine their lives... this is the mysteriously alluring introduction to the film noir Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948), directed by Norman Foster. The man is Bill Saunders (Burt Lancaster) – an American concentration camp survivor who is grifting in and around London; the woman is Jane Wharton (Joan Fontaine) – a highly educated yet lonely nurse who lost her sweetheart during the war, together they are quite the unlikely pair.

Before there was John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), there was The Thing from Another World (1951). If you know John Carpenter, it is not overly surprising that he would remake this film, for when I interviewed him back in 2017, he could not stop speaking of his love for film maker Howard Hawks (citing him as a major influence on his career, he was enamoured with his genre jumping films – be it western, drama or horror)... and Hawks’ fingerprints are all over the 1951 version. It is also worth noting that Carpenter, just five years before making The Thing, had Hawks’ original make a screen appearance in his legendary Halloween. Still debated as to whether it was Hawks who directed the film or the co-credited Christian Nyby, not even the cast has been able to agree. Some called Nyby the director but Hawks the boss, while other recollections remembered Hawks doing most of the work. Without ever having a true answer, it seems most likely that Nyby directed under the tutelage of Hawks, with the elder statesman taking charge from time to time (hence why the film has such a feeling of the veteran film maker’s work). There is no denying that he co-wrote and co-produced the film.

Arguably one of the more bizarre buddy cop action/comedy films ever made, 1988's Dead Heat, written by Terry Black (brother of buddy cop screenwriter extraordinaire Shane Black – think Lethal Weapon and The Nice Guys... who cameos as a Patrolman in this one), and directed by Mark Goldblatt, fuses the tried and true formula within a Los Angeles set zombie storyline. Meet Doug Bigelow (Joe Piscopo) – cousin to Deuce, and Roger Mortis (Treat Williams) – and I think he’s the brother of Rigor, two officers who drive around town in a red 1960 Chevrolet Impala convertible – very inconspicuous. The former’s goofball jokey, the latter’s the more refined sort, together, they’re chaos.

Taking a more melodramatic angle of the horror genre, towards the end of Universal’s golden age of scary movies comes 1946's She-Wolf of London, directed by Jean Yarbrough – a change of pace from the Lon Chaney Jr. led Universal features (he had already played the Wolf Man four times to this point, and would soon do so one last time in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein). A period piece set in London, horrific murders continue to take place in a local park near the wealthy estate of the Allenby’s. Long rumoured to be cursed, the last vestige of the line is Phyllis Allenby (June Lockhart), a young, nervous woman who, instead of cheerfully planning her wedding to barrister Barry Lanfield (Don Porter), frets about the growing number of deaths in the vicinity – wondering if these acts might have been unknowingly done by her very own hand.