Richard Conte

The Blue Gardenia

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Norah on the phone

A young woman whose soldier boyfriend has just dumped her goes out for a drink with a known “wolf”. Drunk and vulnerable, she then heads back to his place, where, he tells her, there’s a party going down, only to discover that the party consists of just her and him. The next morning the very handsy Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr) is dead, beaten to death with a poker. Did sweet Norah (Anne Baxter) do it? Of course she didn’t – we know how these things go. But for the rest of this underwhelming thriller’s 85-minute running time we watch and wait for energetic journalist Casey Mayo and lacklustre cop Sam Haynes to arrive … Read more

Thieves’ Highway

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Mike Figlia, a haggling customer and Nick

Jules Dassin is so associated with Rififi (aka the best heist movie ever) that his other films tend to get eclipsed. Here’s 1949’s Thieves’ Highway, one of his run of great movies, which had got underway with Brute Force two years earlier. It’s the story of a guy who comes back from the war to find that his immigrant dad Yanko, a truck driver, has lost his legs in an accident and been swindled out of all of his money by an unscrupulous wholesaler. Determined to find answers, Nick buys a truck and takes to the road himself. Dassin gives us a movie that’s three things simultaneously. At one level a movie about … Read more

Whirlpool

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Husband and wife William and Ann

A diabolically brilliant plot is the making of Whirlpool, a very noirish whodunit from 1950, which gets off to a flying start with a rich psychiatrist’s wife, played by Gene Tierney at her most fragile, being caught shoplifting in a department store. Within seconds it’s been revealed that Ann Sutton (Tierney) is a kleptomaniac but rather than take her problems to her husband, the city’s go-to guy for mental problems, she’s been keeping her secret dark, which has now laid her open to manipulation by David Korvo (José Ferrer), a hypnotist, astrologer and all-round quack who is soon putting the squeeze on Mrs Sutton – she initially thinks he wants money or sex, … Read more

The Big Combo

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Brown (left) tortures Diamond (right) with a hearing aid

The Big Combo has a big reputation. A regular on the “best film noir” lists, it can’t quite match its rep and is more a solid crime thriller that’s been polished to a stygian gleam by excellent technicians, well chosen actors and some careful snaffles from other sources. The most obvious lift is from 1944’s Laura and its strange plot device of a cop falling in love with the image of a woman rather than the woman herself. That’s also what happens in The Big Combo, when upright and driven Lieutenant Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) becomes infatuated with a mobster’s gal, Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace), even though he’s never met her. Susan is … Read more