Brad Dexter has evil eyes. There are a lot of guys who have that whole hollow-on-the-inside steely-eyed-gaze thing going on in classic noir, but no one does it better than Brad Dexter. To catch up with him in some of his classic roles is to stare down the barrel at a man who simply does…
In the classic era, Warner Brothers was the most hardboiled of the major studios. It was the home of the gangster flick and the detective movie. In short, it was the kind of place that gave steady work to a guy like Barton MacLane. MacLane just had a face you wanted to punch. On the…
Jeff Donnell just seemed nice. Maybe that’s why she was the resident Nice Girl of film noir. She was always cast as the chipper best friend, or the perky wife, or the goofy roommate. No matter the role, she was almost always called upon to project a certain affability and intrinsic kindness. Maybe it came…
For a guy who was only about five foot two, Percy Helton was the biggest creep in film noir. He has one of those indispensible faces that is as essential to the genre as cigarette smoke and low key lighting. He’s in a million noirs, almost always playing the same guy: the creep. Sometimes he’s…
We've recently featured a post on the noir career of Raymond Burr. Although he’s best remembered today as the stalwart defense attorney Perry Mason, Burr spent much of the 40s and 50s playing demented psychos and cold-eyed masterminds in film noir. It’s interesting to note, then, that William Talman—who played Perry Mason’s loyal opposition, district…
I loved Perry Mason as a kid, and something that I always felt without ever quite being able to put my finger on it at the time was that Raymond Burr was kind of creepy. He was the hero of the show, sure, but was there ever a TV star who was less warm and…
Film actors subject themselves to a level of scrutiny that most of us would find unbearable. True, they do this out of ego and ambition, but that doesn’t change the cold hard fact that they make their living being objectified. Most of us would be creeped out by one stranger staring at us, much less…
Let us establish here and now the Ted de Corsia Rule: Any movie with Ted de Corsia is worth watching. That’s not to say that Ted can redeem a complete stinker but he’ll always be worth the price of admission. You can stick that in the bank and start drawing interest on it. Ted’s a…
The one scene that every film noir fan remembers Dorothy Malone for is her brief appearance in Howard Hawks’s 1946 adaptation of The Big Sleep. Private eye Philip Marlowe is investigating a phony bookshop that operates as the front for a pornography ring. He ducks into the legitimate book store across the street to see…
After watching a good Dan Duryea performance, I’m always reminded of Dashiell Hammett’s description of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon: “He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.” Duryea’s charisma was an amusing superficiality masking an inner demon. This guy would slap around his own mother if it’d make him a buck. Like Kirk…
