Noticias

Rhonda Fleming died last Wednesday in Santa Monica, California. The 97-year-old actress, who had left a successful 15-year career as a leading lady in studio films 60 years ago, was correctly noted in her obituaries as “the Queen of Technicolor” because of her flaming red hair, as well as her significant presence as a film noir actress, particularly in Jacques Tourneur’s masterpiece “Out of the Past” (1947).

Her films included a number of now-acclaimed auteurist titles like Budd Boetticher’s “The Killer Is Loose,” Allan Dwan’s “Slightly Scarlet” and “Tennessee’s Partner,” and Fritz Lang’s “While the City Sleeps,” to go along with more mainstream titles like “The Spiral Staircase” and “The Gunfight at O.K. Corral.”

Unlike actresses like Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren, and others who made multiple films with Alfred Hitchcock, Fleming is less identified with the master. But he provided her with her breakout role in 1945’s “Spellbound.

Psycho killers long ago lost their novelty, but in 1956 Budd Boetticher and Wendell Corey gave us Leon ‘Foggy’ Poole, a screen original with limitless appeal. Imagine a time when ‘normalcy’ was so taken for granted that any weird behavior was enough to give us the chills? Foggy carries this crime potboiler with a refreshing new idea: his dangerous maniac looks more normal than normal people.

The Killer Is Loose

Blu-ray

ClassicFlix

1956 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 76 min. / Street Date June 13, 2017 / 29.98

Starring: Joseph Cotten, Rhonda Fleming, Wendell Corey, Alan Hale Jr., Michael Pate, John Larch, Dee J. Thompson, Virginia Christine.

Cinematography: Lucien Ballard

Original Music: Lionel Newman

Written by Harold Medford, story by John & Ward Hawkins

Produced by Robert L. Jacks

Directed by Budd Boetticher

A smartly directed mid-fifties noir with a sensational central performance from the overlooked Wendell Corey, The Killer is Loose shows director Budd Boetticher at ease with a modest budget,...

What are your three top noirs you'd love to see discussed this month? I mean besides the obvious choices like Gilda (a personal fav) and films we've discussed in the past few years already like Double Indemnity, Blood Simple, The Bigamist, and Woman in the Window.

Easy Access Fyi:

• Netflix has a paltry selection of Noir but they are offering Dressed to Kill, Don't Bother to Knock, Laura, and House on Telegraph Hill

• Amazon Prime is streaming The Killer is Loose, The Man in the Attic, The Hitchhiker, Shoot to Kill, Scarlett Street, Dark Passage, Strange Woman, Fear in the Night, The Stranger, Port of New York, Strange Illusion, Whistle Stop and Woman on the Run

• The new FilmStruck service has several foreign titles mostly from Japan and France...

This is definitely the time of year when film critic types (I’m sure you know who I mean) spend an inordinate amount of time leading up to awards season—and it all leads up to awards season, don’t it?—compiling lists and trying to convince anyone who will listen that it was a shitty year at the movies for anyone who liked something other than what they saw and liked. And ‘tis the season, or at least ‘thas (?) been in the recent past, for that most beloved of academic parlor games, bemoaning the death of cinema, which, if the sackcloth-and-ashes-clad among us are to be believed, is an increasingly detached and irrelevant art form in the process of being smothered under the wet, steaming blanket of American blockbuster-it is. And it’s going all malnourished from the siphoning off of all the talent back to TV, which, as everyone knows,...

The authors wish to acknowledge with gratitude the venues in which some version of this article previously appeared: Cinema Scope 24 (Fall, 2005), Trafic 62 (Summer, 2006), and the late and twice-lamented The New-York Ghost (Dec. 26, 2006).

In the Place of No Place

Every movie contains its alternates, phantom films conjured variously by excess or dearth: textures and movements that carry on their own play apart from the main line of the narrative, an obtruding performance or scene, an unexplained ellipsis or sudden character reversal, the chunk life of an object seizing the frame in an insert whose plastic beauty transcends its context.

Though the extremes of pure narrative economy (in which each detail exists purely for transmission of plot) or utter dispersal (in which no piece connects to any other) can never exist, we can tentatively use the concepts as limit-cases to differentiate films which make room for their phantoms (or, in the worst case,...

Budd Boetticher was known primarily for his Westerns—particularly the ones he made with Randolph Scott—but over the course of his 30 years as a feature-film director, Boetticher tried his hand at war pictures, gangster pictures, comedy, and noir. In 1956, the same year he began his run of classic oaters with Scott, Boetticher made The Killer Is Loose, a drum-tight crime picture as twisty and efficient as his cowboy films. In a lightning-fast opening 15 minutes, Boetticher and screenwriter Harold Medford (working from a story by John and Ward Hawkins) set up the premise. After a bank robbery ...

Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment’s manufacturing-on-demand program continues during the month of June with 29 films being released as part of MGM’s Limited Edition Collection. Unfortunately only one qualifies as real horror, but there's another that should appeal to genre fans so we're including some info on both for your perusal.

First up is 1958's Curse of the Faceless Man - A stone figure is unearthed in Pompeii followed by a series of skull crushing murders. Stars Richard Anderson, Elaine Edwards, Adele Mara; irected by Edward L. Cahn.

Next is the mash-up entitled Haunted Summer from 1988 - Romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, along with Shelly's future wife, Mary, and her beautiful stepsister, Claire, travel blissfully through Switzerland one summer. Both women share Shelley's bed, while the tortured Lord Byron flounders in a secret relationship with his physician. They experiment with opium, "free love", and the nature of good and evil.