Dan Duryea

Too Late for Tears

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Jane, a gun and her husband

Misleading title, Too Late for Tears, suggesting there was a time for tears at all. By the time this 1949 film noir is done, the story of a woman rotten to the core, it’s clear that the time for tears – from her, or for her – might well be never. It’s Lizabeth Scott’s chance to chew the scenery, the furniture and her co-stars, playing a woman with a crushing sense of social inferiority who is transformed instantly when a big bag of cash suddenly lands on the back seat of the convertible she and her husband are powering towards a dreaded dinner party in the Hollywood hills. The car it came from … Read more

Scarlet Street

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Kitty and Chris

There’s a “strike while the iron is hot” aspect to 1945’s Scarlet Street, a quick follow-up to 1944’s The Woman in the Window which reunited the three key cast members – Joan Bennett, Edward G Robinson and Dan Duryea – with director Fritz Lang and the ace cinematographer Milton Krasner. That was noir and so is this, a remake of Jean Renoir’s 1931 film La Chienne (literally, The Bitch). Renoir didn’t like Lang’s remake and nor, later on, would he like Human Desire, Lang’s remake of his La Bête Humaine. Edward G Robinson was also in the Renoir camp. He didn’t like working on Scarlet Steet much, considering it too similar to The Woman … Read more

The Woman in the Window

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Alice and the professor meet

Not to be confused with the 2021 movie of the same name, 1944’s The Woman in the Window is the second of three film noirs Fritz Lang made with Joan Bennett and the first of two he’d make with Edward G Robinson. It’s a queer beast – noir with a plot trick picked up from The Wizard of Oz, a trick used so brilliantly it rescues what looks like a film that’s gone weirdly off the rails. Robinson plays the tweedy psychology professor called Richard, Dick to his friends – Sigmund Freud bubbles around beneath the surface of this plot and that name is no accident – who, while admiring a portrait of a … Read more

Walk a Tightrope

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Dan Duryea

Walk a Tightrope, a British B movie from 1964 packs more of a punch than you might expect, thanks to a properly ingenious story and a great performance by Dan Duryea, who adds the all-important element for British B movies of the era, a starring role for a second-string American actor at the tail end of his career. Duryea was 57 when this was made and looks older. Often cast as a villain, this “heel with sex appeal” (as the New York Times called him in his obituary) would be dead of cancer within four years and looks gaunt here, so maybe it was already taking its toll on his health. His appearance … Read more