Michael F. Keaney - Film Noir Guide: 745 Films of the Classic Era, 1940-1959

Special thanks to my wife, Doreen Keaney, for reading the entire manuscript and finding a number of errors that would have been embarrassing if not caught, and for helping me double-check my lists; and to Charlie Mitchell of Darker Image Videos, who was so helpful in answering my many questions.

From 1956, when I was nine years old, through 1963, when my family moved away from my beloved Bronx to Queens (at the time a more suburban area of New York City), I made weekly pilgrimages to three neighborhood movie theatersthe Spooner, the Boulevard and the Starall located on the same street within walking distance of my home.

The Spooner and the Boulevard were quality theaters that showed double features (a first-run A film plus a new or re-released B film), an occasional cartoon, and coming attractions. I dont recall the price of admission for matinees in the 1950s, but I do remember that by the early 1960s the price was a whopping fifty cents for kids over twelve and thirty-five cents for the younger children.

I can recall my mother taking me to see The Ten Commandments at the Boulevard. We sat in the non-smoking section of the balcony, an unusual treat for me because during matinees kids unaccompanied by an adult had to sit in the childrens section, which was patrolled by an ornery matron who carried a flashlight and barked orders to disruptive children, warning them to be quiet or be evicted. Some of the other films I saw at the Boulevard and the Spooner were Tom Thumb with Russ Tamblyn, The Buccaneer with Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner, The Delicate Delinquent with Jerry Lewis, Al Capone with Rod Steiger, The Alamo with John Wayne and teen idol Frankie Avalon, Rodan with Japanese actors nobody ever heard of, and Godzilla with some more unknown Japanese and Raymond Burr, who would soon become famous playing Perry Mason on television. I could easily list a hundred films like these without taxing my memory.

While I appreciated the classy atmosphere of these two theaters, with their cushiony seats, plush carpets and super-wide screens, I really preferred their smaller, somewhat dingy competitor, the Star, which showed, count em, three movies on Saturdaysat half the price. A triple feature for a quarter! Plus cartoons, newsreels and coming attractions. Sure, the screen was smaller, the seats were harder and the carpets were dirtier, but do hundreds of boisterous twelve-year-olds really care about such luxuries? And moms and dads were quicker to part with twenty-five cents than half a dollar, especially since their little darlings were sure to be out of their hair for a good five or six hours.

The Star never showed first-run A films. All three movies were usually re-released Bs, with an occasional newer B film that management always saved for the evening shows. While I never saw a Hollywood blockbuster at the Star, the films were different every week. I saw plenty of old Abbott and Costello comedies; Three Stooges shorts; Johnny Mack Brown Westerns; decade-old Frankenstein, Dracula and Wolf Man movies; science fiction flicks (many in 3-D); and scores of old, low-budget crime films that I didnt understand. Oh, sure, once in a while theyd show one I could follow. What wasnt there to understand about Split Second? An escaped killer (Stephen McNally) holds some hostages in a ghost town where the Army has scheduled an A-bomb test. Every kid in the theater understood that. Werent the Russians going to drop one of those bombs on us any day now? Then there was Baby Face Nelson with Mickey Rooney. That certainly wasnt difficult to follow: a short, angry guy blasting away with a tommy gun.

The previous weeks coming attractions, however, always seemed to sucker me backgangsters shooting it out with rivals, hold-up men fleeing with bags of money stolen from an armored car, a killer shooting a cop in the back (and vice versa), or a guy kissing (or slapping) his scantily clad girlfriend. But more often than not I was disappointed and, frankly, bored. There seemed to be an awful lot of talking going on in these dark and dreary, black-and-white films. And all that talk bored me. I remember being puzzled as to why Sterling Hayden was spending so much time planning the race track heist in The Killing instead of skipping right to the good part, the robbery itself, and why they had to show that TV doctor Ben Casey (Vince Edwards) snuggling up with Elisha Cooks wife (Marie Windsor). A lot of familiar TV faces kept popping up in these types of moves. There was that Perry Mason guy (Raymond Burr) and that cowboy from The Restless Gun (John Payne). And the heavyset cop in Highway Patrol (Broderick Crawford).

Evidently, the rest of the kids felt as I did because it was during these talky cops and robbers movies that we usually decided to act up (throwing popcorn and water balloons at each other, or creating flatulent sound effects by blowing through our cupped hands). We quieted down only when somebody on the screen was about to get shot or beaten up. The Stars manager was crafty, though, because these types of films always seemed to be run last, after the monster movies and Abbott and Costello romps, and many of the kids just gave up in the middle and went home.

It wasnt until years later, in the 1970s, when I began seeing reruns of these old crime movies on TV, that I finally realized that all that dialogue and character development actually were quite interesting. The films no longer bored me. I soon discovered that there was even a name for these types of movies. They called them films noirs, French for black films.

The term film noir had been applied by French critics to a number of American films that, over a six-week period, made their way to France at the end of World War II. These films (The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Laura, The Woman in the Window, Double Indemnity, This Gun for Hire, Lady in the Lake, Gilda,The Killers and Murder, My Sweet) had some common elements that fascinated the entertainment-starved French filmgoers. One of these elements was crime, especially murder. Not the gangster-type murders that were commonplace in such 1930s films as