Gloria Graham (Gloria Hallward) (1925-1981)
Noir Filmography
Crossfire (RKO, 1947)
Crossfire
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In a Lonely Place (Columbia, 1950)
One of Humphrey Bogart's finest performances dominates
this unusual 1950 film noir, which focuses less on the murder mystery at the
center of its plot than on the investigation's devastating effect on a fragile
romance. For Bogart, already a noir icon, the Andrew Slot script afforded an
opportunity to explore a more complex and contradictory role--an antiheroic
persona in line with the actor's most accomplished and absorbing triumphs
throughout his career.
For maverick director Nicholas Ray, the film posed the challenge of taking
crime dramas beyond their usual formulas and into a more mature realm, as well
as a chance to cast a jaundiced eye on the film industry itself. Its protagonist
is Dixon Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter with an acerbic wit and a violent
temper. Tasked with adapting a bestseller, he meets a hatcheck girl who's read
the book, hoping to glean its highlights before writing the script. When she's
found murdered, Steele becomes the prime suspect, and a tightening knot of
suspicion forms around the writer.
Steele's only, inconclusive witness is a pretty new neighbor, Laurel (Gloria Graham), and the couple fall in love even as the pressure mounts. At first the
new relationship is a tonic to the hard-boiled writer, who plunges into his
script with a renewed vigor and discipline. But as the police continue to shadow
him, Steele's own penchant for violence erupts against friends, strangers, and
even Laurel herself, whose feelings are increasingly eclipsed by suspicion that
her lover is a murderer, and fear that he'll harm her.
Bogart conveys Steele's world-weariness and underlying vulnerability, and
manages the delicate task of making both his romantic yearning and sudden,
murderous rages equally convincing. Ultimately, that performance and Graham's sympathetic work elevate In a Lonely Place into what has been called
"an existential love story" more than a crime drama. --Sam
Sutherland
In a Lonely Place
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Macao (RKO, 1952)
Macao
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Sudden Fear (RKO, 1952)
This is one of those noir gems about a love-hate
relationship between a husband and wife that's doomed from the very beginning.
Jack Palance plays an ambitious actor rebuffed by playwright and heiress Joan
Crawford. He later romances and marries her before falling under the dark spell
of ex-girlfriend Gloria Graham. When Palance and Graham plot to get her
fortune, the evil scheme backfires with ironically twisted results. Palance has
no idea how much his wife truly loves him, and she has no idea how sinister he
truly is. It's a fascinating if contrived film, with wonderful nuances and
sensitive performances by the three leads. --Bill Desowitz
Legend has it that Joan Crawford fought against having Jack Palance as her
leading man, protesting that he was the ugliest man in Hollywood. Her producer
finally prevailed by convincing her that her character had to be
sympathetic--and Palance was the only actor in town who was scarier than she
was. The result was Sudden Fear, a thriller that earned Oscar nominations
for both actors as well as for its gorgeous black-and-white cinematography.
Crawford plays Myra Hudson, a successful playwright and heiress who insists that
actor Lester Blaine (Palance) be fired from the Broadway production of her new
play because he doesn't look properly romantic. But when she takes a train back
home to San Francisco, they meet again, and this time she falls head over heels
in love. Before long they're married. A wedding photo in the New York City
newspapers brings Blaine's old girlfriend, Irene (the criminally under appreciated
Gloria Graham) back into his life. The two start plotting
Hudson's murder--but when Hudson stumbles onto the scheme, she starts concocting
a plot of her own. The direction is taut and heavily influenced (but
successfully so) by Alfred Hitchcock; the use of sound is particularly skillful.
And whether it's because she's playing opposite Palance or not, this is
definitely one of Crawford's most sympathetic performances. --Bret Fetzer
Description
Joan Crawford turns in one of the most emotionally charged performances
of her career as a playwright who must use her plotting skills to save her own
life, in this beautifully crafted film noir thriller. Nominated for four Academy
Awards, "Sudden Fear" is an unbeatable combination of lush melodrama
and drop-dead suspense.
Sudden Fear
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Sudden Fear
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The Big Heat (Columbia, 1953)
There's a satisfying sense of closure to the definitive
noir kick achieved in The Big Heat: its director, Fritz Lang, had forged
early links from German expressionism to the emergence of film noir, so it's
entirely logical that the expatriate director would help codify the genre with
this brutal 1953 film. Visually, his scenes exemplify the bold contrasts, deep
shadows, and heightened compositions that define the look of noir, and he
matches that success with the darkly pessimistic themes of this revenge
melodrama.
The story coheres around the suicide of a crooked cop, and the subsequent
struggle of an honest detective, Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford), to navigate between
a corrupt city government and a ruthless mobster to uncover the truth.
Initially, the violence here seems almost timid by comparison to the more
explicit carnage now commonplace in films, yet the story accelerates as its plot
arcs toward Bannion's showdown with kingpin Lagana (Alexander Scourby) and his
psychotic henchman, the sadistic Vince Stone, given an indelible nastiness by
Lee Marvin. When Bannion's wife is killed by a car bomb intended for the
detective, both the hero and the story go ballistic: suspended from the force,
he embarks on a crusade of revenge that suggests a template for Charles
Bronson's Death Wish films, each step pushing Lagana and Stone toward a
showdown. Bodies drop, dominoes tumbled by the escalating war between the
obsessed Bannion and his increasingly vicious adversaries.
Lang's disciplined visual design and the performances (especially those of
Ford, Marvin, Jeanette Nolan as the dead cop's scheming widow, and Gloria Graham
as Marvin's girlfriend) enable the film to transcend formula, as do
several memorable action scenes--when an enraged Marvin hurls scalding coffee at
the feisty Debby (Graham), we're both shattered by the violence of his attack,
and aware that he's shifted the balance of power. --Sam Sutherland
The Big Heat
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The Big Heat
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Human Desire (Columbia, 1954)
The Naked Alibi (Universal, 1954)
Odds Against Tomorrow (United Artists, 1959)
After seeing Odds Against Tomorrow, it's hard to
understand why Harry Belafonte made so few movies. He's superb as Johnny Ingram,
a nightclub singer with a bad gambling debt. To pay it off, he agrees to take
part in a bank heist with an ex-cop (the great character actor Ed Begley) and a
racist ex-con named Earl Slater, played with consummate bitterness by Robert
Ryan. But this isn't a standard crime caper--the movie carefully explores the
pressures each man is under. Ingram's debts have begun to threaten his ex-wife
and child, while Slater's pride has been eaten away by age and failure; Slater
finally has a relationship that matters to him (with Shelley Winters, in one of
her wonderful, desperate performances), but not as much as proving himself. As
the plan slowly falls into place, the tensions between the men get more extreme
until everything falls apart. Gloria Graham, one of the great B movie femme
fatales, has a small but memorable role. Director Robert Wise's long and wildly
varied career includes The Haunting, The Sound of Music, and Star
Trek: The Motion Picture, but Odds Against Tomorrow is one of his
best. This bleak, powerful movie is considered by many critics and film
historians to be the last true film noir, and it's a fitting close to the genre.
--Bret Fetter
Odds Against Tomorrow
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