Category: William Bendix
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Crime tourists, Part I: Yanks behaving badly in foreign lands
Orson Welles, ‘The Third Man’ (1949). By Paul Parcellin Film noir loves morally sketchy locales — the kind of places where law and order is on life support and police can be manipulated like a vending machine. Like America’s Wild West, post-war Europe and Asia’s rubble strewn roadways were a magnet for drifters, bootleggers, grifters…
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Out of the Shadows (and onto the Cathode Ray Tube)
Raymond Burr in ‘Pitfall’ (1948). Film noir heavies and second bananas of the 1940s got respectable in the late ‘50s and ‘60s when they morphed into TV doctors, lawyers and sitcom moms and pops. But could they ever wash the stage blood off their hands? You mean Mom and Pop were once arch criminals? Jeepers!…