An ostensibly simple tale, told with dark and ferocious intensity. Senses of Cinema
Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) don’t take no guff. Get in his face, cross him, and things happen, bad things. Trouble is he’s a cop, a tough cop who’s lost his balance. He’s got no room for ambiguity. It’s either right or wrong. Then he crosses the line: Dixon accidentally kills a suspect, then covers it up. As luck would have it, Dixon’s lax lieutenant (Karl Malden) assigns him the case and so he points an incriminating finger at a local thug. “Innocent people can get into terrible jams,” Dixon says, getting to the dark heart of a world where crooks and cops sup at the same table.
Written by Ben Hecht, based on the novel Night Cry by William L. Stuart. Photographed by Joseph LaShelle. With Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Gary Merrill, Karl Malden. (95 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Criterion Pictures)
(In conjunction with) Dark Past: Film Noir by German Emigrés
As Hitler’s influence grew in 1930s Germany, artists and intellectuals fled the country; whether because they were Jewish or held contrary political views, they saw their lives or livelihoods threatened by the emerging fascist reign. The German film industry was not immune to this flight and the decade witnessed the exodus of a host of important filmmakers—directors, cinematographers, screenwriters, and others. Hollywood became a haven for these hasty émigrés—by the early forties tinsel town had a thriving contingent of German-speaking filmmakers, including Otto Preminger, Max Ophuls, Douglas Sirk, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, Edgar G. Ulmer, and many others. Grateful for any assignment, these veteran directors took on low-budget B-movies, turning them into highly effective, emotionally resonant, darkly dramatized mysteries and crime stories, later to be known as noirs. It’s said that the greatest contribution of this group of directors was the shadow-laden mise-en-scène with its brooding urban cityscapes distilled from German Expressionism. But as you shall see from these eight noirs by eight directors, much more than rain-spattered streets and crepuscular lighting links them. Many of these bristling features, from Max Ophuls’s Caught to Curtis Bernhardt’s High Wall, from William Dieterle’s Dark City to Otto Preminger’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, share a belief that authority is necessarily corrupt, that institutions are to be mistrusted, that what is worst in us will come to light, and, finally, that no one can shake their dark past.
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