Kino Lorber’s ongoing drip-drip release of Universal’s seemingly endless archive of Golden Age film noirs continued with its most recent box set, The Dark Side of Cinema XXVI ($24.99 Blu-ray), the latest entry in this library of classic crime cinema. But as its three titles reveal, one person’s noir is another’s romance, and is another’s gilded literary adaptation, films that tend to be most interesting when they deviate from the shadowy tropes.
A footnote in film history for its status as the first feature from director Anthony Mann, 1942’s Dr. Broadway is a breezy, confident debut, a thoroughly enjoyable trifle even if lacks the existential heft of the filmmaker’s psychologically charged Westerns of the 1950s. Macdonald Carey is the title character, a suave New York City physician, AKA Tim Kane, who has treated just about everybody on the Great White Way, and is acknowledged as one of the few trustworthy men in a metropolis of cynics, grifters and reprobates. But the goodwill he’s engendered among all facets of city dweller will be tested over the film’s 68 minutes, which begin outside the ninth floor of an apartment building, where he “rescues” Connie Madigan (Jean Phillips), a young woman threatening suicide.
Connie, it turns out, is an aspiring actress whose antics on the ledge are a mere publicity stunt—and a criminal misappropriation of local law enforcement funds. But as Tim shields this “friendless little waif”—his sympathetic words to the judge presiding over her arrest—from potential imprisonment, he finds himself in the crosshairs of Broadway’s criminal underbelly. A terminally ill gangster and patient of the doctor’s, recently freed from Sing Sing, asks him to track down his estranged daughter, with a significant payday in it for Tim. But the gangster’s rival, an unctuous tailor named Jack Venner (J. Carrol Naish), has been following the drama, and endeavors to obtain the money by any means necessary.
Mann and screenwriters Borden Chase and Art Arthur cram a lot of plot in 68 minutes, but the heart of the film is the witty, Nick and Nora Charles-like repartee between Carey and Phillips. Dr. Broadway is essentially a rom-com cosplaying as a crime thriller, from the heroes’ meet-cute on the ledge of the building to their teamwork in foiling their nemeses’ intentions. Betraying his history as an assistant director for Preston Sturges, Dr. Broadway is anything but essential Mann, but it’s brisk, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it showcases his adeptness in a genre he would abandon after 1946.
Long Island Sound is hardly a conventional setting for a noir, and indeed, 1949’s The Great Gatsby, the second adaptation of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, is a square peg forced into a gaping noir hole — an unusual stylistic jumble that, despite the creative limitations forced upon its producers by the Production Code, holds up surprisingly well.
Glossy and handsome, this Gatsby differs from the novel’s era-capturing bite by instituting a tsk-tsking tone from the outset—including a cringe-y preamble about the destructive vices of the Jazz Age and a hectoring Bible verse plastered onto the title character’s grave. Once we flash back to his life, however, we’re in better hands. Alan Ladd seems born to play Gatsby, effectively communicating a surface suavity that masks a canyon of insecurities. Paring the book down to a workmanlike 91 minutes, director Elliott Nugent envisions Gatsby as a character who haunts the periphery of his gaudy East Egg mansion to the point where few guests can even identify him — he’s a phantom only occasionally made flesh, as much a mirage as his ersatz blueblood pedigree.
Yes, you could say, but is it a noir? As the story’s tragic tumble of narrative dominoes proceeds, some of the genre’s hallmarks — a dame who sets a death trap, a wronged man pushed to the brink, a corpse in a pool — play out effectively enough to qualify for inclusion in this box set, if barely. Mostly, this Gatsby is a period romantic drama. Perhaps most importantly, despite the moralistic softening of the censors, Fitzgerald’s rapier commentary on the Roaring Twenties’ social stratification still emerges through the glitter and pomp, staring us down like the all-seeing eyes of the book’s famous oculist billboard.
Which leads us into 1946’s Smooth as Silk, the most definitively noirish of the three titles, but also the most routine in its execution. Kent Taylor plays skilled defense attorney Mark Fenton, who successfully works to acquit the alcoholic son of a high-powered Broadway producer of a manslaughter charge. In exchange, said producer, Stephen Elliott (John Litel), agreed to cast Mark’s actress girlfriend Paula Marlowe (Virginia Grey) as the lead in his next play. When Stephen reneges on the quid pro quo, Paula begins to work her charms on the producer’s aforementioned son Don (Danny Morton), and eventually Stephen himself, in an effort to weasel her way into his production.
As contrasted with her good-hearted, practical sister Susan (Jane Adams), whose ambitions extend only to secretarial work, Paula is a career climber and sociopath who fits every definition of a femme fatale, an archetype the screenwriters, Florence Ryerson and Colin Clements, have some meta fun with. Describing the lead in his father’s much-desired production, Don insists Paula couldn’t embody her; after all, he says, “she’s a selfish mercenary who does nothing but lie and cheat for all three acts.”
As for Smooth as Silk, a movie as generic as its title, it wraps up the action after about two acts, in all of 65 minutes, likely presented in its day as one half of a double feature. Its presentation in the box set only goes to show that pure, undistilled noir can lose its flavor, if not its potency, after too much of the same thing; sometimes, a tangy genre cocktail finishes all the smoother.