Il veleno del peccato

Catch that big crashing wave as spider woman Jill (Carter) reaches her own kind of climax. There's nothing like viewing a mangled dead body to get some spider women off, and Jill's some kind of cold-hearted 40's temptress. Too bad cop Cochrane (Gargan) doesn't run for the hills or maybe even his loving wife after viewing this little perverse episode. Instead, he covers up the murder he and Jill just eye-balled. After all, neither wives nor city fathers reward philandering husbands. So how is Cochrane going to clear his conscience once an innocent man is about to get fried for a murder the two illicit lovers know he didn't commit.

My guess is Night Editor was hoping to repeat the success of the noirish Whistler series, also adapted from radio. It didn't happen, but not because of a failure in this 60-minutes. Sure, it wraps up in conventional fashion, even if imaginatively done. After all, there was a stultifying Production Code in effect. Still, the other 55-minutes amounts to a nail-biting trip down black shadow lane. Actor Gargan may not show much emotion as the conflicted cop. But then he's got to keep his real feelings inside. Otherwise he might give it all away, which includes not just his job but wife and family, as well. So, how did he get mixed up with the blonde man-eater in the first place. Apparently it was from working on a prior case that involved Jill and her ritzy clueless husband. It appears she sets a mean trap for about every guy crossing her predatory path, including bank presidents.

No doubt about it, Jill's on the very edge of 40's perversity. Carter really looks the part of blonde ice-queen, even if nuance is not her strong point. I was hoping for some big-eye close-ups that made her similar role in Framed (1947) so memorable, but director Levin's camera stays mainly at a neutral distance. On the whole, it's the script and dark material that carry events.

Anyway, this early noir is a neglected must-see. I'm not going to say gem, since it doesn't quite rise to that level. Still, for sheer 1940's daring, Harold Smith's crafty little screenplay remains an eye-opener.

Night Editor was the proposed "pilot" for a series of B-movie programmers introduced by a bunch of graveyard-shift reporters working the police beat. The series came to naught, but this maiden effort bears watching. William Gargan is a basically decent married detective on the force who has been getting a little action on the side with rich dame Janis Carter, a haut-40s glamourpuss in the Claire Trevor/Helen Walker/Audrey Totter mold whose few performances leave us wondering why her career wasn't a lot bigger. Parked in a lover's lane one night, they witness a man bludgeoning his girlfriend to death with a tire iron. In the movie's most notorious scene, Carter reaches a pitch of erotic frenzy from this random act of sadistic voyeurism. Gargan then has to investigate the crime while keeping mum about the fact that he saw it happen. Of course it turns out that the murderer was not a stranger, but a well-to-do banker friend of Carter's.... Night Editor is a splendid example of why, in the early postwar years, audiences took to these dimly lit, zero-budget, quick-and-dirty crime dramas: They were unapologetically sleazy, they had no time for the sentimental gloss that Hollywood had confected, and they were shocking fun.

Columbia Pictures, the home of the Three Stooges shorts,"Batman" serials,"Crime Doctor", "Boston Blackie" and many other programmers, was also the place where many B movies were hatched including this very low budget crime yarn based on the radio program "Night Editor" by Hal Burdick and the short story "Inside Story" by Scott Littleton.

This film version, very tightly directed by Henry Levin, and starring the then aging and rumpled William Gargan, is a definite Noir artifact of the late 1940's.

There's little pity in this compact story of sex and brutality. Unusual for a film of this time period, the femme fatale is depicted as a woman who feeds on cruelty and takes gleeful joy in looking at the battered corpse of one of her previous friends. Murder and perversion seem to function as the only things she truly loves. They are what she demands others give her so she may feed the bottomless emptiness within.

Originally fashioned as a pilot episode for a new continuing series like its radio show progenitor, the film was a failure upon release, but succeeds as a stand alone example of the close ties between sex and sadism in the continuing Noir cycle.

William Gargan and Janis Carter star in "Night Editor," a 1946 B noir.

On a newspaper night shift, the people in the newsroom are told the story of Tony Cochrane, a police officer. This was the first in a planned series of night editor stories, which never happened.

Tony was a married man cheating on his wife (Jeff Donnell) with a married socialite, Jill Merrill (Janis Carter). One night, they're parking down by the beach, and they see a man beat a woman and run away. They both see his face clearly. Tony could have apprehended the man, and perhaps even stopped the murder (though it seemed to have happened very quickly) but he was afraid of being found out and losing his wife, son, and his job.

When the murder is reported, Tony has to investigate, not letting on that he was a witness. By now he's broken things off with Jill. He's surprised to see her name on a list of the dead woman's friends. He confronts her, because he suspects she recognized the man, but she won't tell him the man's identity. Things go from bad to worse.

This was pretty good and effective, with a nice ending. Gargan by then wasn't anyone's idea of a leading man, but was a good playing a cop. Gargan had a laryngectomy in 1960, after which he devoted his time to the American Cancer Society and used a voice box.

Janis Carter is a glamorous femme fatale here and plays a woman devoid of any conscience or compassion. In fact, when she learns the dead woman's face had been bashed in, she wants to see it. The idea is, she's married to an older rich man and likes slumming.

I wasn't expecting much from this two-noir disc from Netflix, but I would up liking both of them.

I just found my newest femme fatal favorite. Janis Carter, who plays an incredibly sexy but psychopathic society woman having a deranged affair with a police detective in the 1946 C-level noir Night Editor. Never saw her before. When she and the detective witness a woman being clubbed to death while they're sitting in a lover's lane, the Carter character suddenly starts yelling, "I want to see the body." Man, when this lady asks for a "date" with her cop lover, you know she's not fooling around. This actress was far more convincing as a dangerous seductress than most of the other actresses playing those roles in the 40s and 50s, with the exceptions of Barbara Stanwick and Gloria Grahame. What a waste that she didn't appear in more and better noirs.