Movie Details
| Title: | Private Hell 36 | |
| Director: | Don Siegel | |
| Year: | 1954 | |
| Genre: | Noir | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 03.03.23 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (9)
- The Beguiled
- Charley Varrick
- Coogan's Bluff
- Dirty Harry
- Escape from Alcatraz
- The Lineup
- Madigan
- Riot in Cell Block 11
- Two Mules for Sister Sara
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 03.03.23 | Internet | Well, I got Covid. It's kind of a long story I don't feel like getting into, but the net result is I'm slacking off work for a few days and stuck in my room all day with no distractions. I don't want to say I'm happy about this? But It does allow me to do a thing I wasn't sure how I was going to do: A Don Siegel marathon! Back to that QT book, he mentions a bunch of Siegel movies and talks about a couple of them in depth. I've already revisited Dirty Harry but there were a bunch more that I'd never seen so I thought it would be cool to put them together and take a trip through time, also seeing how his trademark brusque macho efficient style developed. So let's do it. The day starts with this 50s cop noir starring Ida Lupino, her husband Howard Duff, and Steve Cochran playing Duff's partner and Lupino's love interest (according to imdb trivia, they were also having an affair at the time, which I'm sure wasn't complicated at all). It's a pretty run-of-the-mill cop story for the first half with Lupino being a nightclub singer who can identify a robber passing hot money so Duff and Cochran force her into a stake-out. But then halfway through, the plot shifts a bit and enters prime noir territory. The movie is short already but feeling like the first half is all set-up means there's no time at all to develop the more interior struggle going on. The noose tightens almost instantly, there's a weird ethical tag at the end, and we're out. I'm finding it hard to dance around what's going on during the second half. Plus, it's like the synopsis of the movie on imdb so it's really only that I started watching this movie completely blind that it wound up being a twist for me so... from here on out: ARGUABLE SPOILERS AHEAD. So the twist is that the cops catch the burglar and take money from his stash, but one cop has a conscience about it that eats away at him. I'm not sure if this is the first time it's happened in film but it's definitely become a little niche genre of its own since then. As such, all this stuff felt rather simplistic compared to how evolved the premise has become over the years... so in that regard I still had to put myself in a 50s-audience mindset I guess to try and enjoy the story, but it still made it more interesting than the first half which is essentially a not-as-good version of Pickup on South Street. The title is also very good I think. I was starting to think the number at the end was random like Aeropostale clothing in the 90s but eventually it comes around. Good title. |
