The Fiend Who Walked the West (1958) was a lower budget remake. You’re worse than him, tellin’ me he’s comin’ back! Ya lyin’ old hag! (maniacal laugh)” (weird laugh) You think a squealer can get away from me? Huh? (crazy laugh) You know what I do to squealers? I let ‘em have it in the belly so they can roll around for a long time thinkin’ it over. “I’m askin’ ya, where’s that squealin’ son of yours. As Udo, who did the dirty work for mobster kingpins, Widmark cemented his place in cinema history by pushing the wheelchair-bound Mildred Dunnock down the steps to send a message to her snitch son to stay out of town. No one was more psychotic than Richard Widmark, who debuted with a bang in Kiss of Death (1947). His psychosis is a gentler variation on that malady of gangster Tommy Udo.Ī seminal attribute of the dastardly villains of this era was mental instability, which we now label PTSD. It takes a blind girl (Ida Lupino) to reform him. In On Dangerous Ground (1951) Ryan is a police detective much addicted to beating up hoods with little forethought. Ryan could play good or bad, but opposite Mitchum here and four years later in The Racket (1951), he’s the vicious criminal. (Robert Mitchum) to get the goods on Ryan. It’s the film of “the three Roberts,” and the chief detective (Robert Young) is helped by another G.I. Several soldiers on leave, one of whom is an anti-semite (Robert Ryan), targets for murder a Jew (Sam Levene).
On the heels of The Big Sleep came Crossfire (1947), a social drama in the guise of a mystery. The dazed look in Canino’s eyes as the life drains out of him and he steps backward before falling into the dirt is a particularly gruesome death scene. Recall the scene when Canino (Bob Steele) unloads his pistol on the car in which he thinks Bogart’s Marlowe is hiding in the driver’s seat only to have the private dick rise up and empty three slugs into his guts. A case can be made that another Bogart movie, The Big Sleep (1946) was the first to tie the brutality of the war years into criminality in modern urban life. Of course we now reckon classic noir as having been birthed by The Maltese Falcon (1941). It seems common wisdom now that the experience of World War II-the combat and devastation, the economic travails, and the murder of millions of Jews and others deemed enemies of the fascist states-had a significant effect on films, especially crime movies, including film noir.
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