

Simone Renant, “Quai des Orfèvres” A.K.A. “Jenny Lamour” (1947). By Paul Parcellin “Quai des Orfèvres” is a Gaulish police procedural that holds its own with any American made crime drama of that era. The title refers to the location of the central police headquarters in Paris, where some of the film’s action takes place. The story…

Roger Duchesne, “Bob le flambeur” (1956). Contains Spoilers By Paul Parcellin Two films about the Parisian underworld are as different as fire and water. One is awash in old world charm, a nostalgia-tinged tale of the gangsters and gamblers of Montmartre. The other takes place in a Paris at odds with the city’s romanticized past.…

Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, “The Maltese Falcon” (1941). By Paul Parcellin Private eyes, those lone rangers who traverse bleak urban landscapes, are romanticized in books, radio dramas and movies as upholders of right and wrong. They do the dirty work that the cops can’t or won’t touch. Often hired by those…

Left: Gloria Swanson, William Holden, “Sunset Blvd. (1950)Center: Gene Nelson, Phyllis Kirk, Sterling Hayden, “Crime Wave” (1953)Right: David Janssen, “The Fugitive” (1963). By Paul Parcellin The first time I saw a film noir I didn’t know what I was watching. Sure, I could tell that it was a crime film, a detective story, a mystery,…

Dennis O’Keefe, Marsha Hunt, Claire Trevor, “Raw Deal” (1948). They made only a handful of films together, but John Alton and Anthony Mann’s work threw a new light on film noir, police procedural dramas and documentary filmmaking Silhouettes, fog, great pools of inky blackness — that’s a king-sized portion of the visual drama in store…

Hugh Beaumont, Frances Rafferty, “Money Madness” (1948). Ward Cleaver as a psychotic killer? Say it ain’t so! Like many up and coming Hollywood actors, Hugh Beaumont appeared in noir B-pictures before he became better known as an all-American TV dad, and he played some pretty despicable characters, too. But more about that later. From the…

Ann Savage, Tom Neal, “Detour” (1945). Hitchhiking on the road to hell. So many westerns were filmed at the small, independently owned studios near the intersection of Sunset Blvd. and Gower St. in Hollywood that people began calling it Gower Gulch. From the 1930s to the ’50s it was the epicenter of low-rent film production and the gaggle of…