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So I literally just finished watching TCM's recent screening of this flick, and I just wanted to write what a GREAT GODDAMN MOVIE this is!

For those who haven't seen it (it's currently unavailable on R1 dvd), here's the skinny: a burgeoning news reporter walks onto the scene of a crime, fingering a local cabbie in the brutal murder of bartender. At the trial, his testimony sentences the young man, who professes his innocence, to death. When he goes back to his apartment, the reporter notices a man (Peter Lorre) coming out of his neighbor's apartment. The rest I won't give away, because I'm a prick. YOU NEED TO SEE THIS MOVIE.

Anyone else here seen it and loved it just as much as I did? It's not a subtle film, and the ending is weak and way too clean, but the director Boris Ingster (who only made two forgotten films after this one) maintains an incredible hold on the proceedings, creating a menacing atmosphere filled with low angles and chiaroscuro. The narrative structure is really complex for its day, with constant flashbacks and flashforwards, and the whole thing is peppered by a slew of wonderful, recognizable character actors.

And then there's Peter Lorre... what more can I say? He's onscreen for less than ten minutes, but he had more charisma in his pinky than 99% of the actors working today. This film features a magnificent little turn by him. I can't forget Elisha Cook Jr. either, who plays the cabbie. This guy never seems to get his due, despite his wonderful career. His role in this is a standout, especially considering how negligible it could have been.

The dream sequence in this film, where the main character examines his guilt and puts himself on trial for murder, is brilliant. Far from understated, it features all the tropes of film noir that I love. It's been said that this may be the first film noir; how much truth is there to that notion?

Hopefully Warner will have the good sense to make this more widely available; I'm slowly becoming convinced that this is one of the great American films yet to appear on dvd. I'm done rambling; this film was just too exhilarating.

I didn't think it was an overall great film when I saw it last year, but that dream sequence is really magnificent.

It's usually a bit presumptuous to withhold credit from a director, but in this case, it was (as you said) one of only three films he ever directed. The cinematographer was none other than Nicholas Musuraca, one of the great DPs of the classic noir period. According to IMDB, he had already worked on more than 100 films when he did this one! So just working off those facts, it's reasonable to attribute whatever striking visuals there are in this film to Musuraca's influence (unless there's been some specific research or archival work showing otherwise).

You're probably right, I didn't think to look at the DP. But this was RKO... a very loosey goosey studio, with not that much interference from up above. I'm sure Ingster had his sway over the production, even if only a little. I kinda got excited over the prospect of a director-that-never-was, so to speak.

He did have a fruitful producing career though.

I hate myself for missing this.

instead I caught Hotel Berlin & Mad Love and was underwhelmed by both.

I am and have been a HUGE fan of this film-- the dream sequence is one of Nick Musaraca's cinematographic masterpieces. I know there's quite a bit of talk lurking under the surface of this forum (much of it prompted by myself and signore Hare) about this film.

As for a first genuine Noir I'd always gone with-- and still feel comfortable with-- Wallace Worseley's The Penalty. It's about as ripsnorting, meanspirited, utterly bleak and shadowy a crime-drama as has ever been fashioned. And it probably contains Chaney's greatest performance-- certainly the one that made his career and set him in the direction of playing cripples and mountebanks for the rest of his life. His whole career was a continual reworking of his peformance in The Penalty.

But the Ingster film certainly has a lot to commend it and it is baffling that it's not available on dvd. It's filled with wonderful conceits and the studio-bound artifice of NYC works quite well. And you see Lorre slimmed-down, drugged out, and showing the enormous sweaty sadness that plagued him throughout his life-- he essentially is portraying the addled, life-crippled part of himself that drove him to destruction.

MichaelBayFanClub wrote:I hate myself for missing this.

instead I caught Mad Love and was underwhelmed.

That's a first in my lifetime. I can't imagine being anything but awestruck and tickled to blackness by Mad Love.

Shreck, I've only heard of The Penalty and I see Kino released a pretty extensive dvd of it. Worth getting? Chaney is one of my faves, hard to believe I overlooked this.

Noir is probably the most debated of all standard movie genres. I mean, could something like White Heat or Night of the Hunter , two of my top 10, really be considered classical noir? Stylish and cynical, absolutely, but they don't seem to really fit the mold. Now if we want to define noir by the outlook and attitude of a film, well that's a whole different ballpark...

I know there are some on the forum who don't particularly like them, but Ursini and Silver's work and research are pretty interesting and passionate, and their assumptions about certain things feel correct to me.

And just to throw another wrench into the cog: what about von Sternberg's Underworld? I haven't seen it, but from what I understand, it sounds like a fantastic noir piece, or at least similar to certain noirs in terms of its plot. Dear god I hope criterion gets around to this and the other von Sternberg silents soon. I saw Docks of New York on an old vhs and I was transfixed. New York rarely looked so damn beautiful.

Back to the topic at hand...

Does anyone know anything about this film's composer Roy Webb? I know he scored Notorious, but he seems fairly unknown. I thought the score to this film was pretty amazing for what was essentially seen at the time as a studio potboiler, unobstrusive but distinct and menacing all at once. Wonderful.

HypnoHelioStaticStasis wrote:Does anyone know anything about this film's composer Roy Webb? I know he scored Notorious, but he seems fairly unknown.

Not at all. Webb was musical director at RKO, meaning he occupied a position analogous to Newman at Fox or Steiner (whom Webb replaced) at Warner Bros. If you watch many RKO films from the 1940s, Webb's name pops up on many of the best -- most of the Lewton horror cycle, for instance. I actually like Webb's work better than other, more celebrated film composers (like Tiomkin). I suppose that Webb's relative obscurity is due to the fact that he didn't have a lot of proponents who pushed his music after his death and during the revival of interest in film music in the 1970s and 80s, though Bernard Herrman's famous dismissal of him as "some guy named Webb" didn't help. (That was probably due to bad feelings over Ambersons though -- for which Webb shouldn't be blamed any more than Robert Wise.)

I really should have looked at his imdb profile before I misjudged the guy. He had a pretty incredible career. What's funny is I remember looking him up a few years ago after I was taken aback by the score to Journey Into Fear. I guess my brain dumped that piece of info out. His score for Seventh Victim is also really interesting, and now that I think of it, very reminiscent of Stranger's. And as much as I love the man and his work, Herrmann was a textbook narcissist and very jealous of the success of other composers. He never had a kind word for any of his peers, music or otherwise.

And I'm no fan of Tiomkin either. Not to say anything of the film, but his work on Giant is beyond hokey.

a question for Lorre aficionados: did he fix his teeth before he made Maltese Falcon? I only ask because i watched a little bit of it after this film and I noticed what an uncharacteristically slick smile he had in the movie. His teeth are still what his caricature dictates in Stranger. Just curious if that was some kind of concession he made to Warners. If so, that's a shame; his smile is truly my favorite thing about his performances in films like Mad Love and The Secret Agent. It makes me amazed that a studio believed a man like him could be such a huge box-office draw. Not exactly Robert Taylor, y'know?

re good copies of The Penalty, in this link Kino has it for 19.95, which is 10 bucks off what they usually charge.. I think they're doing a sale or something for their anniversary. They also have it in that American Silent Horror which is a great deal if you don't have some or most of the films in the box, all of which are masterpieces (except Bret Woods Kingdom of Shadow's doc, which is just a modern doc). But anyone who's never seen the american Leni's, and/or The Penalty, should grab it. And of course the Barrymore Jeckyll/Hyde is a must own for silent / horror fans.

Penalty is actually a nice package loaded with extras and tons of information about the making of the film and Chaney's amazing harnessed contortions to appear legless.. the pain of which probably drove him to the fierceness on display. It's an absolute must-own for any fan of cinematic masterpieces (and it is an absolute masterpiece, definitely Worseley's greatest surviving work-- light years ahead of Ace of Hearts or Hunchback), Chaney, crime dramas, silents, etc.

Docks of NY is of course wonderful, as is Underworld which is often erroneously labeled as the first gangster pic (that would go to Raoul Walsh's debut film, which is a masterpiece, Regeneration from 1915). But simply being a crime drama does not of course a Noir make. I always cite the Penalty because of it's utter viciousness, shadowy atmosphere, and rampant meanspritedness. When it came out Variety commented that is was a very well made film, but gasped "Here is a film thats about as cheerful as a hanging.."[/url]

davidhare wrote:Roy Webb is a fascinating subject about which I know very little but he's an excellent lens through which to examine RKO.

I think it's probably foolish to compare him to "Star" composers like Hermann, Waxman, Tiomkin (a major in my view) and the sublime Miklos Rosza among others. But maybe he occupies ground closer to "generic" studio composers certainly like Newman or Roger Edens, especially so as they were both prolific writers of the totally undervalued "leadin" and "segue" music that's acts like glue to tie shots and scenes together. (Edens was also a composer and performer and ultimately producer of considerable note and one of the major figures in 20th century film music who remains underappreciated to this day.)

Has anyone here noticed how some of Webb's "motifs" keep turning up in movie after movie, usualy from around the same period, as though RKO were promoting them as popular radio hits? The first one to come to mind is the ballroom Long track to CU of Alicia in Notorious which is accompanied by a sleek 6/8 time dance tune. This gets repeated in simialrly diegetic contexts in at least two more RKOs from 46 or 47 - but Im damned if I can remember for sure - anyone out there? One is possibly Cornered with Dick Powell returning to the hotel lobby around mid film. And another major Webb "motif" is the memorable 4/4 tune played on the phonogram for the first Acapulco Cabana scene with Mitchum and Greer in oput of the Past which gets another outing in (I think) Big Steal and at least two other RKO pictures. If anyone can confirm these that would be great!

David, your memory of these "motifs" is far more specific than mine. But it certainly wouldn't be surprising if they were recycled more than once. In this regard, your comparison of Webb and Newman is especially apt, because Newman frequently recycled motifs from film to film: in particular, there's a motif that Newman uses for action sequences (like Demetrius' rescue in The Robe that pops up in other Fox films from the late 1940s and early 1950s). These guys were required to churn out so much music so quickly that I guess they just dipped into a bag at times to speed along the process. What makes Rozsa and Herrman and Korngold stand out is that they only worked on one or two films a year and so didn't tap out and/or got to spend more time preparing.

Regarding Tiomkin: He's one of those composers who elicit strong feelings from me both ways. I love some scores, like the one for Fall of the Roman Empire, and yet others are far too busy and bombastic (his score for The Unforgiven never lets up for a minute and almost seems to descend into self-parody).

Apart from the "star" issue (and it's hard to say how many average filmgoers actually knew the names of these composers), I do think that it's important to remember that the ones we celebrate most nowadays either survived long enough to participate in their own reappraisal (Herrman and Rozsa notably) or they had dedicated children who did it for them (Steiner, Korngold, Waxman, and Newman). Webb doesn't seem to have had the benefit of a dedicated child, and although he lived longer than most, a fire destroyed nearly all of his papers just at the point of his retirement in the early 1960s. Don't get me wrong, though. I wouldn't rank Webb alongside Waxman, Herrman, or Rozsa, but he strikes me as being as consistent as Newman, Tiomkin, and perhaps even Steiner.

Just caught another "early" or "proto-" noir this morning on TCM: John Brahm's 1939 Let Us Live for Columbia. It's very much in the mold of Lang's You Only Live Once (and his much later Beyond a Reasonable Doubt) -- Let Us Live even has Fonda in an early role. For people who like Brahm's work, like Hangover Square, etc., it's well worth checking out.

Just a heads up for UK members. This film is being shown in BBC 4's Noir season on Sunday 22nd August at 9pm.

On the Radio Times website, Stranger is scheduled for 11.30 pm (the 9pm slot is for Build My Gallows High/Out of the Past).

It's absolutely insane that this excellent film hasn't made it out individually or in any of the glut of film noir box sets.

I'm actually due for a go-round... haven't pulled my old VHS out for at least a year.

I can't forget Elisha Cook Jr. either

For a great Cook-Noir double-bill, pair this with PHANTOM LADY … another film I don’t think gets near enough attention.
There is a fair amount of info on Roy Webb in the booklet accompanying the Marco Polo CD of his scores for Val Lewton films (I have no idea if this is still in print – it might have been reissued on the Naxos label). Webb was basically RKO’s answer to Hans Salter in that he was assigned to damn near everything the studio put out, from lush A’s like NOTORIOUS to B’s like DICK TRACY MEETS GRUESOME. Naturally enough he cannibalized his own work frequently (especially on B films) just to meet deadlines. He might not be in the stratosphere with Herrmann and Rozsa, but he wrote some great stuff in the post-Roamntic Alfred Newman mode.

And as much as I love the man and his work, Herrmann was a textbook narcissist and very jealous of the success of other composers. He never had a kind word for any of his peers, music or otherwise.

Not entirely true. He was good friends with both Rozsa and Laurie Johnson.
But he was a raging egotist as well.

Actually Webb did have a champion in the person of the late Christopher Palmer (writer, record producer, musician and film score transcriptionist) who wrote a chapter on him which begins "Roy who?! Roy Webb? Never heard of him!" in his book THE COMPOSER IN HOLLYWOOD (Marion Boyers Publishers, Inc. London/New York, 1990) which I highly recommend. Palmer also produced a compilation album of Webb's RKO scores from surviving wax or metal transcripition discs released in the '90s on (I think)Cloud Nine Records. Long out of print (I sold my copy for 75$ after copying it) it comprised both single cuts and short suites from many of the films mentioned above (though not, alas STRANGERS) and would be of great interest to anyone interested in Webb's work.

Unfortunately the sound quality was none too good (which was why I sold it when I saw what it was going for), about on a par with that CD "restoration" of the Boris Morros produced 78s of Rozsa's SPELLBOUND/THE JUNGLE BOOK originally recorded in the forties. I didn't copy the booklet cause the text was duplicated for the most part in the book chapter. I know I have a CD copy with the cover illustration and track listing but I can't put my hands on it now, only the dupe in slimline jewel case. I know there was a suite from NOTORIOUS, tracks from SINBAD THE SAILOR, MIGHTY JOE YOUNG, JOURNEY INTO FEAR and OUT OF THE PAST as well as some of the Lewton material found on the Marco Polo disc Harry mentioned above.

BTW the book chapter addresses (somewhat) the issues David Hare brings up with regard to the reuse of certain themes and motifs.

Yes David, I believe Gershenson was the pivotal ingredient to the '50s Universal sound. Mancini was the rising star but Irving Gertz and others (whose names refuse to skirt the synapses at this hour!) were important to the creation of that sound especially those fabulous sci-fi collaborations. There was an article (I think in Scarlet Street) which detailed how two or three composer/arrangers would be employed to create those scores. Mancini would get the jazzy/romantic scenes (and contempo source tracks), someone else would get the action stuff and a third would do scary "sci-fi" stinger riffs and drudge bridgework. I couldn't begin to find it if I tried (even though I have the entire run) but someone here might know have the issue # at hand. Paging Harry Long!

What a coincidence-- I've just been stringing a load of the Universal Int. Sci Fi's-- It Came From Outer Space, The LEech Woman, Cobra Woman, Mole People (amazing and underappreciated), The Land Unknown, Revenge of the Creature, Monoloth Monsters, Tarantula.. all watched over the past four days believe it or not, and with an ear to Gershenon's contribution, which -- in terms of atmosphere and the Universal INternational atomic age House STyle-- is impossible to overstate.

Paging Harry Long!

Ding!

I know there was a suite from ... MIGHTY JOE YOUNG

And how could I forget!? There's a really terrific re-recording of JOE on David Schecter's Monstrous Movie Music label.
And, though I'm not recalling it clearly, I'm sure there's info on Roy in that CD booklet (David tends to produce mini-books).
The SCARLET STREET articles you're recalling, props, may have been interviews with Herman Stein & Irving Gertz who were to chief focuses of Svchecter's first 2 CDs. They were in the Universal music dept. along with Mancini, Salter, Skinner & I don't know who all besides. And yes the scores were parcelled out piecemeal ... that is after existing cues were raided from the library. Supposedly this was to make turning out the scores more efficient, but it's been also theorized that it was so the on-screen credit would read "Music Supervision by Joseph Gershenson" rather than giving credit to any single composer - except on the A titles. I seem to recall either Stein or Gertz claiming that on one film that he'd scored entirely, some of the cues were removed & replaced with library cues so Gershenson could retain his solo credit.
I'm trying to recall if Gershenson just ran the department (he later moved int producing) or if he conducted the scores as well. There is a distinct, brassy sound to the U-I horror/sci-fi scores of the period. Some complain about James Bernard's dissonant, brassy scores for Hammer, but I think the sound originates with U-I.
And having gone waaaaaaaaaaaaay off -topic ......

There's a DVD release on September 8th by Editions Montparnasse in France. I'm not sure if their subtitles are removable, but cheap at 10 euro.

They're removable on all those RKO Montparnasse editions. They're a great bargain, most of them. However, some of the transfers are pretty poor quality, like that of 'The Bodysnatcher'.

Being released by the Warner Archive

Supposedly this has been remastered. I'll believe it when I see it.

The spanish manga edition didn't look to shabby. I always had an old copy from a TCM broadcast from years ago, and the film hardly needs restoration-- it's in pretty much immaculate shape.

No need to mention the film is magnificent... even over his work with J Tourneur and Lewton, I'd say this film is Nick Musaraca's masterpiece in terms of DP work. That dream sequence-- sublime!