The Night of the Hunter is not recorded as having charmed critics when released in 1955, but its reappearance in cinemas means it can be seen for what it was: a dark, frightening and intense film which questions the nature of faith and what happens when evil comes to town.
Build My Gallows High, Farewell, My Lovely: Cold Comes the Night. The cod-profound, slightly tortured syntax of its title is in the lineage of downbeat pulp fiction Tze Chun’s film aspires to.
Where there’s a stoker there must be a furnace, and this being Russian director Alexei Balabanov’s latest story from St Petersburg’s gangster 1990s, as well as heating some snow-bound Soviet industrial hulks, its flames also conveniently consume whatever corpses the local criminal gang brings in.
Although Anthony Mann is best known for the five James Stewart Westerns (and one apiece starring Henry Fonda and Gary Cooper) he directed during the 1950s, it was the dour film noirs he made during the previous decade that made his name. Like Mann’s T-Men, Raw Deal, He Walked by Night, and Border Incident, Railroaded! (1947) was written by John C Higgins, whose pacey, violent stories owe much to the pulps.
There are very few examples in film history of a son directing his mother, and there’s a distractingly Oedipal vibe at the core of Barnarby Southcombe’s I, Anna that might offer some clue as to why. Charlotte Rampling turns in a brittle, enigmatic performance in her son’s big-screen debut, playing the eponymous divorcee whose attempt to become sexually bold goes violently awry.
Joseph H. Lewis’s The Big Combo (1955) isn’t as celebrated as Gun Crazy (1950), his other great film noir, but it’s as perverse and violent as anything in the canon. A vehicle for the husband-and-wife team of Cornel Wilde and Jean Wallace, it’s about a dogged plainclothesman, Leonard Diamond, who has spent three years following Susan Lowell, a masochistic socialite enmeshed with suavely sadistic Mob boss Mr. Brown (Richard Conte) whose organisation, the Combination, leaves no traces.
Rian Johnson’s spunky debut Brick (2005) fused the past with the present, the old with the young, as high-school kids inhabited the archetypal characters and played out scenarios from 1940s noir. It worked beautifully. His third film Looper - whilst sharing Brick’s love of posturing dialogue and shadowy villainy - looks forward and then forward again and finds that the future is far from bright. If Brick was conceptually ambitious yet small-scale, Looper gives us filmic chutzpah with the budget (and stars) to match.
In Vertigo Kim Novak plays two women who are really just one. First Madeleine, a supernatural siren, a woman apparently possessed by her tragedienne great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes. However, it’s a performance within a performance and she’s merely a facsimile, a devastating creation played by an agent in a murderous plot. The imposter manipulates Scottie (James Stewart) into loving her only so that he may witness her apparent death. Then there’s Judy, the real woman behind the performance who is persuaded back into the part when Scottie can’t let go of Madeleine’s ghost.
Calling Zift hard-boiled undersells it. This Bulgarian film is so tough, it’s as though director Javor Gardev blow-torched the conventions of film noir so the picture he paints from the ashes is pure black. It’s in black and white, and had to be. Despite the darkness and violence, Zift is a compelling, breathless ride which flies by.
Connecticut-born Jules Dassin graduated from lightweight suspense and comedy fodder for MGM to pungent, location-based crime dramas, hitting his stride with Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948), both included in this package. However, his upward trajectory was derailed after he was identified as a communist at the HUAC hearings. Producer Darryl Zanuck gave Dassin the script for Night and the City and dispatched him to London to shoot it, days before the Committee was due to grill the director.