Top Ten Film Noirs ... That Aren't About Crime, Part 2
Picking up from last week's list ...
5 -- Mildred Pierce (1945)
There's a murder as the inciting incident, but this is really a rags-to-riches melodrama, and a skewering of the American belief that money can buy happiness. Plus it's based on the novel by noir master James M. Cain. Joan Crawford won an Oscar as the mother who will do anything for a daughter that truely, deeply, does not deserve it.
4 -- Laura (1944)
There's a killing in this picture, and it drives the action, but it's almost a gimmick. Like many "non-crime" noirs on this list, this is a tale of romantic obsession. It's a grand old film with solid performances across-the-board -- Dana Andrews as the stolid & obsessed detective, Clifton Webb as the acid-tongued critic, Vincent Price as a marvelously smarmy himbo, and Gene Tierney as the woman in the portrait who wants anything except to be worshipped.
3 -- Sunset Boulevard (1950)
An excoriating Hollywood melodrama that somehow still helps build up the legend of Tinseltown. The way the film's narrator is set up is one of film's great fake-outs. Bill Holden's best turn as a handsome cad (a role he played a couple times). Prying back the layers of dysfunction inside the decaying mansion at the center of this story makes it feel as much a gothic as a noir -- and I'm not in love with gothics -- but the poisonous picture it paints of Hollywood and stardom and the moral compromise that is part and parcel of success in the movie business is delicious.
2 -- In A Lonely Place (1951)
Might be my favorite Humphrey Bogart role, and there isn't a fedora or trenchcoat in sight. Came out around the same time as Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, and The Bad And The Beautiful, marking an era of distinctly unflattering movies about the entertainment business. Bogart plays a combative drunk screenwriter and an abuser, a genuine heel turn even for an actor that had played a bad guy or two in his day, and it's all the more interesting that he made this movie through his own production company -- Bogie really wanted to be this character. I keep hearing the book was better. It must be one hell of a book.
1 -- Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
This eminently quoteable picture describes Tony Curtis' Sidney Falco as a "cookie filled with arsenic," and that description could apply to the whole movie. Shot by James Wong Howe, New York City has rarely looked better, even though it's filled with scandal and suicide and corrupt cops. But it's a happy hunting ground for Burt Lancaster, a gossip columnist who controls the town with mention in his column, sincerely admitting "I love this dirty town." Tony Curtis played against his dreamboat screen persona as an unctuous, amoral press agent who thinks he's one step ahead of the twisty plot but is really just a half-smart guy who pays full price. "That cat's in the bag and the bag's in the river." See this film!