Mitchum, Montalban, Ryan Star in Film-Noir Collection: DVDs

By Peter Rainer

Sept. 20 (Bloomberg) -- I love film noir, so you can imagine how greedily I opened the ``Film Noir Classic Collection Volume 3.'' Not even Barbara Stanwyck in ``Double Indemnity'' was greedier.

``Double Indemnity,'' of course, is a noir classic. The DVDs in the current collection are more generic; they touch all the noir bases but none are home runs.

Still, if you crave that 4 a.m., dark-night-of-the-soul feeling, you could do a whole lot worse.

Strangely, the best film in the bunch, Anthony Mann's ``Border Incident'' (1949), is arguably not a film noir. Dana Polan, a film professor interviewed for the DVD commentary, says it's too rural and outdoorsy for that label. Yes, but it also has two classic noir ingredients -- fatalism and a vengeful tramp.

Tough and tense all the way through, it's about an undercover agent from Mexico, played by Ricardo Montalban, who disguises himself as an undocumented worker. Mann and his cinematographer John Alton were remarkable visual stylists, and although Montalban is unfortunately remembered chiefly for ``Fantasy Island,'' he was a great actor in his prime. The best scene is where an agent is mowed down by a threshing machine the size of a brontosaurus.

`Lady in the Lake'

Robert Montgomery produced, directed and starred in one of the most unusual noirs ever made, ``The Lady in the Lake'' (1947), where he plays Raymond Chandler's archetypal gumshoe, Philip Marlowe. The gimmick is that the action is viewed entirely through Marlowe's eyes: The only time we see Montgomery's face is when he looks in a mirror.

The trick gets tiresome but it has its odd allurements, including the scene where bad girl Audrey Totter advances straight into the camera, her lips moving in for a killer kiss.

Extras include scholarly commentary (the drug references in Chandler's book were dropped for the movie) and the original trailer.

No noir package would be complete without at least one Robert Mitchum movie. Here we have two -- ``The Racket'' (1951), where he stars as an old-school cop who runs into trouble with childhood friend turned bad guy Robert Ryan, and ``His Kind of Woman,'' made the same year, starring Mitchum at his most sleepy- eyed.

Although ``The Racket'' may be better -- it was made in response to Senate investigations into organized crime -- ``His Kind of Woman'' is my kind of movie. Mitchum is a gambler who is offered $50,000 to quit America for a year and go to Mexico. He sets up shop in a Baja resort where he meets Jane Russell, who's at her vavavoomiest. Vincent Price is also on hand, and Raymond Burr plays a gangster. It's all rather confusing but with this cast, who cares?

`Dangerous Ground'

Nicholas Ray's ``On Dangerous Ground'' (1952) stars Ryan again as a near-psychotic cop who gets a chance at redemption by investigating the murder of a young girl. Ida Lupino is the blind woman he falls in love with.

I can't agree with film historian Glenn Erickson, who calls this one of the great noir pictures in his DVD commentary. The movie is too sentimental, though nobody could be scarier than Ryan when he put his mind to it.

The documentary ``Film Noir: Bringing Darkness to Light'' and four ``Crime Doesn't Pay'' MGM shorts round out the package. (Warner Home Video, $50.)

(Peter Rainer is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own).

To contact the writer on this story: Peter Rainer at Fi1L2E@aol.com

Last Updated: September 20, 2006 00:09 EDT

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