Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 2

Warner Home Video's follow-up to last year's boxed set of noir classics is every bit as meritorious as the first, featuring another assortment of skillfully made thrillers exhibiting all the wonderful qualities of those gritty, dark crime dramas which proliferated in the years following World War II. My favorite is Richard Fleischer's The Narrow Margin (1952), a claustrophobic suspense yarn mostly set on a train that carries a hardboiled cop (Charles McGraw) guarding a gangster's widow (Marie Windsor) slated to testify at the trial of a mob big-shot and targeted for death by those who don't want her to reach the stand. Taut, fast-paced, well acted, and beautifully photographed, this film is one of the very best noirs (it's been ripped off many times and was officially remade in 1990 with Gene Hackman and Anne Archer). Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire (1947), the second-best film in the box, aroused some controversy with its then-daring exploration of anti-Semitism, which rears its ugly head during a frenzied search by police for an insane ex-soldier in the aftermath of WWII (Robert Young, Robert Mitchum, and Robert Ryan head one of the finest casts in noir history). Forties tough-guy Lawrence Tierney is seen to advantage in what are arguably his two best starring films: Max Nosseck's stylish but cheap Dillinger (1945), in which he plays the notorious real-life gangster shot down by G-men outside a movie theater, and Robert Wise's savagely unsentimental Born to Kill (1947), featuring the rugged Irishman as a killer who marries good girl Audrey Long but fancies her sister, bad girl Claire Trevor. To some, Fritz Lang's Clash by Night (1952) is memorable primarily for an early performance by Marilyn Monroe, but it's also a sharply cynical exercise in deceit and betrayal with a solid turn by noir icon Barbara Stanwyck and more than a few of Lang's German Expressionism cinematic tracks. Boasting sharp transfers, DVD extras on this five-disc set (each title is also available individually, priced at $19.98) include audio commentaries by noteworthy contemporary filmmakers (including John Boorman, Steven Soderbergh, William Friedkin, and Peter Bogdanovich), and a handful of featurettes. Highly recommended. (E. Hulse)