Claire Trevor

Key Largo

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Nora and Frank

If you liked Humphrey Bogart’s cynical romantic Rick in Casablanca, Key Largo gives you another go around the track with him. And if you liked the dynamite pairing of Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep or Dark Passage, they get another outing too, in the last of the films they’d make together. He plays a major back from the war and in the sweltering Florida Keys on a courtesy visit to the father of one of his men, who died in the Italian campaign. But when Major Frank McCloud gets to the hotel owned by James Temple (Lionel Barrymore), he discovers that it’s been taken over by … Read more

Raw Deal

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Joe with gun, and Ann and Pat on a staircase

Everyone gets a raw deal in Raw Deal, a taut and dark film noir from 1948, directed by Anthony Mann, lit by the great John Alton and so often overlooked when Greatest Noir lists are being compiled. Its characters all come with a tragic flaw which writers John Higgins and Leopold Atlas are eventually going to prise wide open but it’s the additional wallop of sheer bad luck that makes this unusual – that and the voiceover by one of its female characters, Pat Regan, played by Claire Trevor. Pat is in love with Joe (Dennis O’Keefe) but Joe is in prison doing a stretch as the fall guy for bigshot criminal Rick Coyle … Read more

The Velvet Touch

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Rosalind Russell and Leo Genn

In The Velvet Touch, a Broadway star accidentally kills the impresario who made her a star after arguing with him about whether she should abandon frothy comedy (and him) and pursue a noble career in serious theatre. That’s the opening scene dealt with. The rest of the film concerns itself with the actress’s fate. Will she get caught, confess the crime or get away with it? Whether it indicates her character’s superior opinion of herself or masks her own incipient double chin, Rosalind Russell plays Valerie as a head-held-high kind of gal, an actress who saw herself starring in an upcoming production of Hedda Gabler. But impresario Gordon Dunning (Leon Ames) had other … Read more