Stealers Wheel

With working titles such as Woman Confidential, Pleasure Girl, and The Blonde in 402, each should give you a decent idea about what 1959's Vice Raid is all about. A B-movie with some bite, director Edward L. Cahn brings scandal, racketeering, and corruption to the forefront of this late era film noir crime feature. Meet Sgt. Whitey Brandon (Richard Coogan), an officer that is akin to a dog on a bone. Desperate to get to the root of a massive prostitution ring run by best dressed mobster Vince Malone (Brad Dexter), he and partner Ben Dunton (Joseph Sullivan) seem to constantly get ohsoclose, yet so very far from getting a true lead.

A triumvirate of friends – bosom buddies, longtime pals... and hardcore criminals – though we all know the idiom ‘as thick as thieves’, that is not always the case, for especially in film noir, friend can quickly become foe, and femme can often become fatale. Case in point – Hell’s Half Acre (1954), directed by John H. Auer. Meet Chet Chester (Wendell Corey – Rear Window), supposedly dead at Pearl Harbor, the criminal used the event to change his name (he was originally Randy Williams) and make it rich in the racketeering underworld in Hawaii (with his two buddies). Now the owner of a swank nightclub and transformed into an amateur songwriter, his past soon comes knocking when he is confronted by sketchy eyed business partner Slim Novak (Robert Costa), who is looking for another payout... and he’s not afraid to shoot for it. The problem is, Chet’s protectively dangerous dame, Sally Lee (Nancy Gates), has a just as itchy trigger finger, offing his former buddy quite quickly.

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.