Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]

Wanted for Murder (dir. Lawrence Huntington, 1946). Eric Portman stars as Victor James Colebrooke, aka Tom Maren. There’s good reason for him to want to renounce the name Colebrooke, a name that helps to explain his compulsion to kill women. A superior thriller with Hitchcock overtones and London locations. Creepiest scene: the diary. ★★★★ (YT)

*

From the Criterion Channel feature Noir and the Blacklist

Intruder in the Dust (dir. Clarence Brown, 1949). From William Faulkner’s novel, a detective story of sorts, in which the murder of a white man is pinned on a Black man, Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez). A handful of courageous people — the lawyer John Gavin Stevens (David Brian), his nephew Chick Mallison (Claude Jarman Jr.), the son of the Mallison family’s maid, Alexander (Elzie Emanuel), and an eccentric spinster named Miss Habersham (Elizabeth Patterson) — join forces to stave off a lynching and solve the crime. As in To Kill a Mockingbird, the point seems to be that white people can do the right thing, but Intruder in the Dust is great filmmaking nonetheless. Filmed on location in Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi, with brilliant cinematography by Robert Surtees. ★★★★

The Lawless (dir. Joseph Losey, 1950). “This is the story of a town and of some of its people, who, in the grip of blind anger forgot their American heritage of tolerance and decency, and became lawless.” In a California agricultural town, a fight between breaks out at a dance and just like that — the fight is cast as a riot, and a young Latino migrant worker, Paul Rodriguez (Lalo Rois), is arrested, branded a “fruit tramp,” and paraded before TV cameras in a theater of cruelty. When a newspaper editor (Macdonald Carey) stands up for Rodriguez, greater trouble follows, and good grief, is this movie made for these times. The relationship that develops between the editors (Carey, Gail Russell) of the town’s two newspapers, The Union and La Luz, suggests a healthily multicultural America that, seventy-five years later, seems still out of reach. ★★★★

*

Passing (dir. Rebecca Hall, 2021). From Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel. Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga star as Irene and Clare, affluent Black women, old school friends, now suddenly reunited. Clare, married to an unabashed racist, has chosen to live her life passing as white, which makes her renewed friendship with Irene and subsequent frequenting of what might be called Black spaces a dangerous matter. All the while, Clare must continue to perform as white, and the toll her double life takes — on her and on others — is the story the movie tells. Brilliant performances from the two principals, luminous cinematography by Eduard Grau. ★★★★ (N)

*

Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) (dir. Questlove, 2025). It’s an immensely joyous and immensely sad story: joyous when it’s about the music of Sylvester Stewart and the Family Stone, sad when it charts the downfall of a musician losing himself to drugs and becoming pathetic in an effort to maintain his appeal to the public. As André 3000 observes, “The same thing that made you great becomes the thing that kills you.” An abundance of archival performance clips and interviews with band members and other musicians — with everyone but Sly himself, who wasn’t capable of an interview — make this documentary necessary viewing for anyone who cares about American music and culture. The great revelation of this documentary for me: Sly Stone was a musical prodigy and played keyboards for and produced countless musicians and groups before forming the Family Stone. ★★★★ (N)

*

Riffraff (dir. Ted Tetzlaff, 1947). It begins with a celebrated scene, silent and unnerving, but the movie doesn’t live up to its start. In Panama, private detective Dan Hammer (Pat O’Brien) is hired to find a missing map, in a routine story with overtones of Casablanca (exotica) and The Maltese Falcon (love and betrayal). Walter Slezak, in a Sydney Greenstreet white suit, is a passable bit of riffraff; Anne Jeffreys as a Brigid O’Shaughnessy stand-in is another; O’Brien alas is the weak link, not convincing as a private eye or love interest. But George E. Diskant’s inventive camera makes the movie worth watching. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Joe Smith, American (dir. Richard Thorpe, 1942). An everyman (Robert Young) is taken off a defense-plant assembly line to work on a secret project, and before he knows it, he’s kidnapped by spies who want to know what he knows. Blindfolded and beaten, he remains remarkably attentive to his surroundings, and after a lucky escape he’s able to lead friends and police to the house where he was held captive. Marsha Hunt is Joe’s wife Mary (an everywoman); Darryl Hickman is their son Johnny (an everykid who adds an interesting subplot about American history and keeping secrets). We can now count ourselves among the small number of people who realize that Joe’s story was the model for the 1959 movie The Big Operator. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Shadowed (dir. John Sturges, 1946). I sometimes wonder what it was like to watch television in the 1950s or early 1960s and see actors whom you vaguely remembered from the movies. Let’s say you were watching a Christmas episode of Lassie and recognized the mysterious Claus-like toy repairman Mr. Nicholson: “Say, isn’t that” — why, yes, It’s Lloyd Corrigan, who stars in this B-movie as an agricultural implement salesman and amateur golfer whose discovery of a corpse on a course puts him and his daughters (Anita Louise, Terry Moore) in peril. A perfectly okay B-movie. And a helpful demonstration of why it’s a good idea to keep agricultural implements around the office. ★★ (YT)

*

Rachel and the Stranger (dir. Norman Foster, 1948). Big Davey (William Holden), a widowed farmer still in mourning, travels to a nearby stockade to get himself a — “wife” isn’t quite the right word; “partner,” certainly not. Rachel (Loretta Young) is an indentured servant, whose contract Big Davey buys, and they marry only for the sake of propriety, so that Rachel can keep house and teach Davey’s son. The icy relationship between husband and wife begins to change when Davey’s old friend Jim (Robert Mitchum) comes to visit. A disturbing, albeit ultimately sentimental, portrait of a woman regarded as a domestic commodity. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Nonnas (dir. Stephen Chbosky, 2025). Based on the true story of Jody Scaravella, or Joe (Vince Vaughn), as the movie calls him, a transit worker who opens a restaurant on Staten Island, Enoteca Maria, to honor his dead mother. What makes the restaurant different: Joe hires older Italian-American women, nonnas, or grandmas, to do the cooking. I liked the chance to see Lorraine Bracco, Susan Sarandon, Talia Shire, and Brenda Vaccaro, all women of, as they say, a certain age, front and center in funny and poignant performances. But this movie makes the average Hallmark movie feel like film noir — there’s way too much sugar in the sauce. ★★★ (N)

*

The Strip (dir. László Kardos, 1951). We didn’t realize that we had seen it before until a few minutes in. It’s a noir with music, with Mickey Rooney as a drummer accused of murder, telling his story in a movie-long flashback with many glimpses of real-world Los Angeles nightspots. The music is the reason to watch: it’s mostly by Louis Armstrong and three of his All-Stars: Jack Teagarden, Barney Bigard, and Earl Hines, with Rooney stepping in to serve as their loud, tasteless drummer. William Demarest plays a kindly nightclub owner and sometime-pianist; Sally Forrest, a cigarette girl/dancer; and James Craig, a mustachioed mob boss who looks like he stepped out of Jack Elrod’s Mark Trail. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Deadline — U.S.A. (dir. Richard Brooks, 1952). As the days to its sale run down, a great daily paper, The Day, doggedly investigates a mobster (Martin Gabel) and his likely involvement in the death of a young woman. It’s a terrific newspaper movie, with a premise that recalls The Naked City and a picture of a newsroom that looks forward to Lou Grant (Nancy Marchand, who played the owner of the TV show’s newspaper, seems to be the reincarnation of The Day’s owner, Margaret Garrison (Ethel Barrymore). As The Day’s editor, Humphrey Bogart seems stagey, and he has little chemistry with the ex-wife he’s still pursuing (Kim Hunter) or his reporters, who include Jim Backus, Ed Begley, and Paul Stewart, all of whom wear fedoras indoors. Best scene: the walkway above the printing presses. ★★★ (TCM)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)