"Cry Danger" Blu-Ray, Gumshoe America, Chandleresque detectives

Dick Powell made a startling career transformation from apple-cheeked crooner to one of the better screen Marlowes (1944's Murder, My Sweet). He followed with a score of interesting films noir: Cornered (1945), Johnny O’Clock (1947), and Pitfall (1948). His last contemporary tough guy assignment, 'Cry Danger' (1951), is a winner, a low-key thriller soaked in Los Angeles realism and spiced with hardboiled patter. It’s also the auspicious directorial debut for Robert Parrish, a former film editor for John Ford and Max Ophüls. Most of 'Cry Danger' takes place in the one mile between Los Angeles’ Union Station and the legendary, long-lost Bunker Hill.

'Cry Danger' conveys the lax, drifting flavor of living in Southern California when one is between jobs, or “working on a sure thing.” Rocky Mulloy’s mission of vengeance seems almost a casual pursuit—he packs a .45 yet is too cool to openly display his vengeance. Rocky could go after Castro and cronies with gun blasting, but he’s retained a sense of decency within his strange moral limbo. When Rocky resorts to rough stuff, we see him as still human and vulnerable. He does, however, seem to possess extraordinary powers of resistance when it comes to women. 'Cry Danger' is ambiguous enough for us to suspect it’s headed to a grim conclusion, with Rocky becoming yet another of the era’s “loser heroes.”

Dick Powell is solid as the earnest, streetwise Rocky, a man trying to reassemble his broken life. Rhonda Fleming tones down the glamour just enough to come across as a pretty woman who must hold down a boring job in the real world. If Nancy Morgan were a dental receptionist, the movies might have taken note of her beauty (as happened to Jane Russell).

Olive Films’ Blu-ray is from the FNF’s restored negative, and it looks pretty clean throughout. Contrast and detail are excellent, and because Olive does not use digital tools to obliterate imperfections, the sharp picture retains its original granularity. Joseph Biroc’s B&W cinematography makes one wish that monochromatic films were still in style. Cry Danger is a happy, and long-awaited, arrival for noir fans. It takes its place with Olive’s lengthy list of prime-quality noir winners, among them Appointment with Danger (1951), Body and Soul (1947), Private Hell 36 (1954), Plunder Road (1957), The Big Combo (1955), Force of Evil (1948), and The File on Thelma Jordon (1950). We’re hoping that Olive will soon give us a promised disc of another Film Noir Foundation / UCLA Film & Television Archives restoration, Cy Endfield’s disturbing Try and Get Me! (1951) -by Glenn Erikson for "Noir City" vol. 9 #1 - Summer 2014

During the late thirties and early forties, California’s version of corporate consolidation appeared to be only a distant possibility. The region’s industrial giants still cast themselves as scrappy local entrepreneurs; their reliance on public dollars seemed an example of the way that federal spending could break the stranglehold of Wall Street to foster local opportunity and regional community.

'The Lady in the Lake' stands almost literally at the hinge of these two visions of California. The men who guard Chandler’s dam and the placid rural community that surrounds it look like a nearly exact rendition of the benefits the era’s antimonopolists hoped the New Deal would foster: ‘‘decentralized administration, regional development, and the encouragement of small, integrated communities.’’ Tellingly, though, this is a brief image in Chandler’s fiction, soon to be replaced by vociferous denunciations of postwar mass society.

One way to understand Chandler’s fiction and the trajectory of his career is to see the dam at the conclusion of 'The Lady in the Lake,' and the decentralist New Deal to which it alludes, as the absent center of Chandler’s literary imagination. The fellowship that Chandler imagines briefly at the dam is a rare glimpse of a fleeting desideratum. In his early novels such fellowship of decent men is all but overwhelmed by the monopolistic elite of California’s old landholding oligarchy. In his later fiction it is swamped by postwar consumerism. He absorbed there the Brandeisian distaste for centralized power. But, although Chandler had published four novels in the years between 1939 and 1944, over the next five years he would produce little apart from essays and critical screeds directed against Hollywood and contemporary mass culture. By 1949 when he finally released his fifth novel, American society had been substantially altered by postwar expansion. "Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism" (2000) by Sean McCann

Roy Huggins' decidedly downscale Los Angeles private eye Stuart Bailey appeared in one pretty good novel, 'The Double Take' (1946): one of those Chandleresque rip-offs/homages so prevalent in the forties [Chandler praised Roy Huggins' effort], not as good as Leight Bracket's No Good from a Corpse or Howard Browne's Paul Pine series. It boasted a suitably convoluted plot - Bailey's hired by a wealthy advertising executive to look into his wife's past, which eventually uncovers a couple of switched identities, some stolen loot, an angry mobster and a murder or two. There are some sharp wisecracks and a few well-etched similes that suggest Huggins was paying attention in Mr. Chandler's classroom.

"For ten dollars a month I and about fifty other gentlemen from various walks of life—all legitimate, Hazel insisted—got a mailing address, a telephone, with a competent voice to answer it, and the use of the office whenever we needed it. There was a small room in one corner for private conferences and for five dollars a month extra Hazel had let me bring in my broad-gauge files, two Mexican posters, and my own desk, set down by the east window overlooking Broadway and the distant, dusty hills of San Bernardino. I heard the door open and Hazel was standing in it, looking crisp and attractive in her new caracul coat. She was trying to give me a long, cool stare, but the softness in her eyes defeated her." -Stuart Bailey

It was brought to the big screen in the now-forgotten but often effective 1948 film noir 'I Love Trouble,' starring Franchot Tone as Bailey, Janet Blair and a well-rounded cast of crime flick vets, including Raymond Burr in a bit part. Source: www.thrillingdetective.com

-"I heard a gentle, sighing sound and light suddenly broke into bright fragments behind my eyes. Then there was only darkness stretching away endlessly. My stomach still lay tight inside me like a cold rock. The nausea was gone, and the pain. But time had rolled to a stop." (Franchot Tone as Stuart Bailey)

-"You're probably a heel like most men. But you managed to give the impression the other night that there was something rather decent about you." (Janet Blair as Norma Shannon)