Mary Astor once summed up what she called the five stages in the life of an actor: Who's Mary Astor? Get me Mary Astor. Get me a Mary Astor Type. Get me a young Mary Astor. Who's Mary Astor? Astor was part of the first generation of actors who more or less grew up in…
In some ways, Joan Crawford might seem an odd choice for a hard luck lady of noir. Unlike many of the actors I’ve profiled in this series—people like Peggie Castle or Barbara Payton—who somehow missed popular success altogether and died penniless and forgotten, Crawford was a major success. In fact, as the silent era gave…
Being beautiful was Linda Darnell’s curse. She was an emotionally intuitive actress, but almost from the beginning of her career, she was typecast because of her looks. Add in alcohol problems and a series of tortured relationships, and you have the recipe for a full-tilt Hollywood tragedy. She was born Monette Eloyse Darnell in Dallas,…
Consider now the strange case of Cleo Moore. Blonde, buxom, and beautiful, Cleo seemed like another Marilyn Monroe clone in the 1950s. She got her start in film in 1948 when she was only twenty, and she was soon cast in a series of bit roles that called for a pretty girl who could fill…
If you spend enough time in the shadow gallery that is film noir certain faces start to haunt you. I’m not talking here about the icons like Mitchum or Grahame or Bennett or Andrews—their legends were set a long time ago, so we approach them with the expectation of greatness. And I’m not talking about…
Bad Blonde (1953) is the kind of movie that exists on two levels. On one level it is an entertaining film noir about an up-and-coming boxer who is lured into a scheme to commit murder by the duplicitous wife of a boxing promoter. I’ve seen this plot referred to as Body And Soul meets The…
The classic femme fatale had many attributes. She was always sexy. She was usually greedy. And she was never ever to be trifled with. All of that is bound up in our basic idea of the femme fatale, the beautiful dame with death at her back. What is perhaps less readily apparent is the reality…
It’s important to remember that film noir is a recovered movie genre, by which I mean that most of the films we call noir were once lost. Many of these movies, in fact, are still in danger of vanishing unless we rescue them from the disintegrating effects of time. It would be a shame to…
