I’m growing rather weary of being quoted on noir DVD audio commentary tracks. I don’t mean to be blasé about it, but it happens ever so often. 

The first time was on James Foley’s track for Confidence, where he made reference to my earlier review of his film After Dark, My Sweet, which I dubbed a film soleil. Now, a commentator on one of the four noirs here under review (I think it is Eddie Muller on Double Indemnity) says something like “Someone once said that there are no bad noirs” … and that was me again (in my book Film Soleil, from Pocket Essentials). Now, it is true that none of these people remember my name, and in fact the idea that there are no bad noirs is probably a pretty common one and someone else may have said it well before me. But still, all this attention is making my head hurt and I have to lie down.

But it is true. There are no bad noirs. Even the “bad” ones, such as a couple in the latest batch of Fox noirs, are still interesting, evocative, and can inspire comment.

Fox releases a trio of films in its series Fox Film Noir every three months or so, and the latest set brings the count up to 21. Universal has done a batch or two, but has slowed down considerably, and its new double disc set of Double Indemnity, published as part of its Legacy Series, seems more like a Billy Wilder production than an iteration of its noir catalog.

 

 

Shock, from 1946, is No. 20 in the set and is a Gaslight – Snake Pit sort of deal in which Anabel Shaw, in San Francisco to meet her husband after a long separation due to the war, witnesses a murder and falls into a state of catatonia. She is rushed to an asylum by, of all people, the very murderer she observed, played by Price, who happens to be a psychiatrist having an affair with Lynn Bari, the film’s femme fatale.

 

 

Like many a noir, especially the noirs influenced by Hitchcock, this one, directed by Alfred L. Werker from a script credited to Martin Berkeley, Albert DeMond, and Eugene Ling, shows a surprising amount of sympathy for its “villain.” Price’s Dr. Richard Cross is a man who momentarily loses control, and then tries to mop up after himself, harried by his Lady Macbeth, Bari. He is divided, doesn’t want to do many of the things he ends up doing, and Price, in one of his first villainous roles, manages to evoke great sympathy for Cross, despite a tendency to haminess, which afflicted Price throughout his career. Meanwhile, the heroine is asleep or unconscious most of the time, to be carted around from one venue to another (like Jodi Foster in most of the dreadful Five Corners), and her husband, when he arrives, spends most of his time trying to catch up with what the audience knows.

The Fox noirs have settled into a routine in which basically for supplements you get a yak track and the trailer. On Shock the track is by John Stanley, the Creature Features movie guide author, summoned because he is something of an authority on Price. Stanley is one of those unvarnished (he says “Eye-Talian”), somewhat mush-mouthed (he says “landschape” instead of “landscape”), and jokey film geeks who read too much of Famous Monsters of Filmland when he was a kid: his commentary is filled with excruciatingly bad puns (“What food these morsels be”) no doubt in mimicry of that magazine’s editor Forrest J Ackerman. The commentary is mostly about Price, whom Stanley had the advantage of meeting twice, but he is also good on almost all the actors on the screen, even those whose names don’t appear in the credits.

 

 

As others have noted, Fox seems to be stretching the definition of noir with its inclusion of Fourteen Hours (No. 21), the 1951 drama about a potential suicide that Howard Hawks famously hated. Directed by Henry Hathaway, it’s more like a social problem film, like No Way Out, the Sidney Poitier – Richard Widmark race-themed drama which was in an earlier batch of Fox noirs.

 

 

It comes across as a well meaning TV drama of the time, and could have been penned by Rod Serling. But it is also afraid to come out, so to speak, and say what it is really about. Richard Basehart’s potential suicide never says why he is depressed, but it is clear from the subtext, as Foster Hirsch points out in his detailed and interpretive commentary, that Basehart’s character is probably gay and wrestling with his identity. Besides the trailer, the disc also features the film’s press book.

 

 

Vickie is No. 19, came out in 1953, and is a remake of I Wake Up Screaming, which came out 10 years earlier and is considered to be the first Fox noir, if not one of the first films in the genre itself. Both films are based on Steve Fisher’s novel about a publicist accused of killing the client who was getting too big for her britches. Neither film captures the flavor of the novel, which has wonderfully cynical things to say about show business, but the earlier film (which is Fox Film Noir No. 18) is better cast. There it is Victor Mature as the publicist versus Laird Cregar as the cop who, Laura-like, secretly loved the victim (Carole Landis). Betty Grable, trying to escape musicals, plays the victim’s sister, who ends up aiding the publicist.

 

 

H. Bruce Humberstone directed Screaming, and imported noirish tones from his B movie work. Vicki is helmed by Harry Horner who had, if it is possible, an even less distinguished directorial career than Humberstone ( Red Planet Mars). After some 15 films, he gave it up to become a production designer, working on such films as The Hustler and The Driver.

 

 

Vicki is also weakly cast. Elliott Reid is awfully light as the publicist, and Richard Boone is game but sluggish and miscast as the cop. Foster Hirsch in his commentary, favors Jeanne Crain as sister Jill over Jean Peters as victim Vicki (they look remarkably alike), but I had the opposite impression. Jean Peter struck me as a real find, an actress whose career might bear reconsideration. Hirsch’s commentary is efficient and informative, and the disc also comes with the trailer and three galleries of art and advertising.

 

 

Double Indemnity is a long awaited DVD but it has in fact been on disc twice already, first by Universal in a bare bones release, then by Image in a transfer from a scratchy print. Still, that Image disc was hard to find when it went out of print, and in the video store down the street from me you had to put down a $200 dollar deposit in order to rent it, as if it were Salo. Curiously, though, I found a pristine used copy of the Image disc just a couple of weeks ago for seven dollars.

And what a pleasure it is to re-submerge oneself into this great film, with its crisp dialogue, brilliant acting from unlikely cast members, now in a nice package with an excellent (if soft) transfer and good supplements that honor the film.

 

 

This two-disc set has an excellent full-frame transfer (1.33:1) transfer from a new source-print with an adequate DD 2.0 audio, plus English, French, and Spanish subtitles. The supplements on Disc One include an introduction by Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies, and two commentary tracks. The first is an enthusiastic, informative track by Richard Schickel, who wrote a BFI Classic monograph on the film, and here goes over the basics. The second has Nick Redman interviewing screenwriter Lem Dobbs on the film.

 

 

Dobbs is the son of American born but British educated painter R. B. Kitaj, who in the late 1960s and early 1970s spent a lot of time in Los Angeles socializing with and painting famous directors, such as John Ford. Kitaj also happened to know Wilder who was a great art collector. Dobbs has several anecdotes to tell about meeting Wilder (once with Hockney and his dad), and nervously giving Wilder scripts to read that were later critiqued at Wilder’s independent office at the Writers and Artists building. Dobbs notes the sense of place given to Los Angeles, specific streets named and places shot, that he speculates would not fly with contemporary executives because they wouldn’t see the point of being so specific about a place that most viewers wouldn’t have been to. The most interesting thing that Dobbs says is to go against conventional thinking and charge I.A.L. Diamond with a degradation in Wilder’s output in the 1960s; he maintains that after his collaboration with Diamond began Wilder’s films more theatrical and more like sit coms.

 

 

The retrospective documentary, Shadows of Suspense (37 minutes) also on the first disc is a very good celebration of the film and it is also interesting to see the faces that go with a lot of the noir yak tracks one hears: the ubiquitous and bickersome Silver and Ursini look like twins. Finally there is the theatrical trailer.

Disc Two consists solely of the 1973 made-for-TV remake starring Richard Crenna in the MacMurray role, Lee J. Cobb as his boss, and Samantha Eggar as the femme fatale. It is exactly as good as it sounds.

As others have pointed out, not included on the set is the famous real ending, the gas-chamber sequence, which apparently did not test well at the time and may be lost, though stills exist. Paramount’s version of Sunset Boulevard had a version of the famous dropped opening, but there is not even an attempt to recreate it via stills and script here. But perhaps that is for the super deluxe HD-DVD 70th anniversary edition in 2014.

 

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