Film Noir 2022
Screening Dates
  • August 6, 2022 6:30
  • August 8, 2022 8:45
  • August 21, 2022 4:00
Events
New Restoration

“A fine thriller in which the familiar situation of the man wrongly accused of his girl’s murder is given a number of brilliant twists … Its mood becomes increasingly murky as the hero plumbs the depths of nightmare.”

Tom Milne, Time Out

H. Bruce Humberstone’s top-shelf early noir is a sordid, shadowy whodunnit boasting a trio of Hollywood heavyweights—Victor Mature, Betty Grable, and Carole Landis—and one doozy of a final-reel twist. Mature plays Frankie, a big-shot sports promoter who, on a lark, decides to turn a bombshell hash-slinger (Landis) into a star. When she turns up dead after ditching him for Hollywood, Frankie becomes the subject of incessant screw-turning by a crazed cop obsessed with nailing him for murder. Helping matters not at all is Frankie’s growing affections for Jill (Grable), sister of the dead. Told in noir-customary flashback from the hot seat of a police interrogation, this seedy box-office success reassured Fox that doom-and-gloom was good business. The source novel is by pulp author Steve Fisher, screenwriter of noir staples Lady in the Lake and Dead Reckoning.

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