Second Look: Some films in noir collection lose allure in light of day

The films in the five-disc set “Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics II” were released as the movement was nearing its end, and in some the wear has begun to show. Apart from chronology, there’s little to tie them together, but there’s a common sense of a genre fraying at the seams, which in some cases translates as an opportunity to bust it wide open.

Jacques Tourneur’s “Nightfall,” from 1957, uses multiple time frames to complicate the story of a graphic artist framed for murder and robbery by a pair of hot-tempered thugs. With his workingman’s rasp and bony brow, Aldo Ray hardly seems the type to paint soup cans for a living, but the disparity fits the movie’s split personality. The story moves backward and forward, alternating between Ray’s artist’s present-tense flight from the police (in the company of a flinty fashion model played by Anne Bancroft) and the circumstances of his framing, doled out in uneven chunks that rarely begin or end where you expect. Although he’s not an amnesiac per se, Ray’s character’s patchwork memory obscures a detail crucial to proving his innocence, one the movie seeks out by riffling through the past as if searching through a cluttered desk.

Division plays a part in Richard Quine’s “Pushover” (1954) as well. While looking out for a fugitive bank robber, Fred MacMurray’s hard-bitten detective takes up with Kim Novak’s moll, while his partner swings the binoculars to the neighboring apartment and falls for the good girl played by Dorothy Malone. Here the flatness is more a matter of tone than texture. Better known for comedies like “Strangers When We Meet” (1960), Quine stages MacMurray’s descent with an almost priggish rigor. The inevitable comparison with “Double Indemnity” only throws the sputtering chemistry between Novak and MacMurray into starker relief. Quine’s ostensibly lighter films often had a dark core (see: 1965’s “How to Murder Your Wife”), but “Pushover’s” seduction never gets its hooks in.

“City of Fear” (1959) lays its hands on you right from the start, as an escaped convict ( Vince Edwards) lets his partner bleed to death in a stolen ambulance. Reuniting Edwards and director Irving Lerner from the previous year’s “Murder by Contract” (a highlight of the Film Noir Collection’s first volume), the film daringly keeps company with Edwards’ unrepentant killer, whose prized canister of stolen drugs turns out to contain a radioactive isotope that could destroy Los Angeles. The momentum stalls, however, as unfortunate cutaways to the lawmen on his trail sap the intensity that could have made it a worthy successor to Robert Aldrich’s brutish 1955 classic “Kiss Me Deadly.”

Beginning and ending aboard a moving train, Fritz Lang’s “Human Desire” (1954) never flags. Although substantially toned down from its source, Émile Zola’s novel “La bête humaine” (or, a more likely source, Jean Renoir’s 1938 adaptation), Lang’s take is almost unremittingly downbeat, with Glenn Ford as a straight-arrow engineer led to the brink of ruin by Gloria Grahame’s desperate femme, who is looking for a way out of her marriage to a thuggish husband ( Broderick Crawford). Even the domestic scenes are bathed in ominous shadows, although the masculine space of the engine room allows for the wordless camaraderie expressed in the movie’s lyrical opening. If the repeated shots of train tracks suggest a sense of predetermination, at least those up front can see what’s coming.

On one of the Film Noir Collection’s few extras, Martin Scorsese, whose Film Foundation lends its imprimatur to the set, muses on the puzzling “flatness” of 1957’s “The Brothers Rico,” whose evenly-lit compositions barely qualify as noir. Richard Conte (later “ The Godfather’s” Barzini) plays a retired mafioso whose brothers have retained their places in “the organization.” When word arrives that they’ve been marked for death, he’s pulled back in, but the world he reenters is devoid of the ambivalent romance of vintage gangster movies. Without shadows to hide their faces, the villains seem less foreboding than merely ugly, more sordid than seductive.

In the light of day, the underworld loses its allure.

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