Film Noir

All posts tagged Film Noir

Va-Va-Villainess: Constance Dowling

Published September 24, 2025 by biggayhorrorfan

Its the rare actress whose onscreen evilness makes even the eternally villainous Peter Lorre seem sympathetic. As Mavis Marlowe in 1946’s The Black Angel, Constance Dowling actually hits that mark again and again, creating a queen of mean for the celluloid ages.

A blackmailing torch song singer, Marlowe claims multiple victims in this black and white noir with stylish direction from Roy William Neill (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, The Black Room). Nicely, Neill’s aesthetic here also includes encouraging Dowling to work with a flinty eyed haughtiness and a steely superiority. Whether verbally thrashing down a housekeeper or gleefully persecuting her ex-husband, Dowling’s Marlowe definitely gives the notorious women played by such genre fixtures as Barbara Stanwyck and Rhonda Fleming a run for their money.

Indeed, as mentioned above, even Lorre as Marko, a mysterious nightclub owner who is central to the plot here, comes off with a sympathetic aura due to this blatant femme fatale’s poisonous machinations.

Interestingly that same year, before she eventually left Hollywood for work in Italian films, Dowling essayed another sinister baddie in Boston Blackie and the Law. 

A return to the US found her embracing marriage and motherhood and leaving behind her performing career. Unfortunately, after years of seeming happiness, a heart attack at the age of 49 assured that she would make no onscreen comebacks. 

Still, the skillful viciousness with which she supplied Marlowe assures her a place in the history of dark cinema for all of time. 

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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Va-Va-Villainess: Ann Savage

Published April 13, 2025 by biggayhorrorfan

Its hard to believe that in the 6 years that I’ve been writing this particular column that I have never profiled the divinely acerbic Ann Savage. For in Edgar Ullmer’s classic, very low budget Detour (1945), Savage (very convincingly) plays Vera, truly one of the evilest femme fatales ever brought to celluloid life.

Significantly, unlike many of the other deadly dames of film noir, Savage gives Vera no seductive grace. Instead, she imbues the character with a poisonous snarl and a devastatingly calculated manner. These qualities do not de-escalate for even a moment throughout the picture’s incredibly taut running time. 

Indeed, as she traps the seemingly hapless Al (Tom Neal), a down on his luck piano player, in her never ending schemes, Savage uses an almost relentless sharpness. Nicely, the acidic energy provided by this less than typical choice assured Savage and the character a place in cinema history.

The fact that Detour, long ago, became a readily viewable public domain title surely helped a bit with this notoriety. Currently, it is available on a variety of free streaming services. There is even a colorized version to peruse, if so desired. Criterion, meanwhile, has also produced a restored, extras heavy version in recent years, as well.

Unfortunately, despite her brilliance, Savage remained a staple of the B-Movie set-up throughout her career, notching appearances in a number of sequel outings to such publicly entrenched, cheaply shot series as Blondie and Jungle Jim. Registering on a much more glamourous scale, she also was cast in such horror adjacent comedy-thrillers as Scared Stiff and Midnight Manhunt.

Thankfully, her work in Detour eventually made her a favorite of cinematic scholars and movie buffs, worldwide. She, gratefully, spent the last decades of her life attending festivals and screenings, embracing a much deserved, late-in-life success that had previously alluded her.

Further Viewing: Savage plays with a more traditionally catlike vibe as the honorary dame-up-to-no-good in 1951’s Pier 23. This noir quickie, which is stream-able on YouTube, may provide passing interest to Golden Age television lovers, as well. Hugh Beaumont, best known as the understandingly normal patriarch on Leave it to Beaver, stars as the typical money motivated PI here.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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The Poisonous Whitley King

Published February 25, 2025 by biggayhorrorfan

With an ultramarine noir setting as her backdrop, the deranged Whitley King (Kim Coles) made a sadistically triumphant return to Days of our Lives this February. 

Of course, the cast and crew of Body and Soul, Days‘ soap within a soap, had already been feeling King’s presence for a while. For months, poisoned cupcakes and other dangers have pockmarked their paths due to her handiwork. Poor Bonnie (Judi Evans) even landed at the bottom of an empty elevator shaft due to the former Florence Nightingale’s crazed manipulations.

But that bumpy freefall was just the starter course. Angered at what she considered the desecration of her favorite program, Whitley ultimately laced a potpourri of fake scripts with a deadly chemical, intending to off everyone involved with the show, once and for all. Talk about a special delivery!

This plot devise found everyone from charming, frequently shirtless playboy Alex (Robert Scott Wilson) to wacky diva-in-waiting Hattie (Diedre Hall) near death’s door. Thankfully, the quick-thinking Dr. Sarah Horton (Lindsey Godfrey) realized what was happening and that the hospital had an antidote to reverse the effects of King’s morbid libation. 

Meanwhile, Abe (James Reynolds,) the enterprise’s executive producer, finally cottoned to the fact that it just might be his former kidnapper (see As The Stab Burns: Kim Coles) that could be behind the nefarious happenings at his workplace. Of course, once she realized that not only had her crimes been exposed, but completely thwarted, King, like many a prime villainess before her, fell into a catatonic stupor – with only another sweeps month bonanza seemingly a tonic strong enough to revive her.

Whitley can sleep peacefully for now, though, knowing that her prime objective was reached. Much to many a real-life fan’s relief, Tuesday’s (2/11/25) episode detailed the aftermath of Abe and his co-executive producer Kate (Lauren Koslow) deciding to pull the plug on their rendition of Body and Soul. Fully aware they failed to keep everyone safe, the fictional drama’s fictional drama’s headquarters will now be moving to Los Angeles, leaving many viewers, who felt this tale had long overstayed it’s welcome, very happy that their favorite program is about to move onto other, more traditionally dramatic pastures.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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Va-Va-Villainess: Jayne Meadows

Published June 24, 2024 by biggayhorrorfan

Often revered for her comic antics, the surprisingly creative Jayne Meadows was also a decorated feminist. She often played creative thinkers like Margaret Sanger and Elizabeth Barrett Browning on PBS’ Meeting of the Minds, which was created by her husband Steve Allen, exposing society to important female historical figures. MS Magazine even paid special tribute to her upon her death (at the age 95) in 2015.

The other surprising side to the eternally glamourous Meadows has to be the aptitude she had for playing characters who embraced the underside of society. Emphasizing her youth and looks, many of her first film roles in the ’40s found her playing spoiled society types. There, she threatened the happiness of such stalwart cases as Katherine Hepburn (in Vincente Minnelli’s moody and gothic Undercurrent) and Anne Baxter (in the more lighthearted The Luck of the Irish). The whimsical Enchantment (1948) was a nice detour in that more seductive course. This feature allowed her to play a stern, uncompromising type against David Niven, the project’s charming lead.

A veteran of 6 Broadway shows before her screen debut in 1946, one of her most highly praised early roles, though, was in the inventive noir Lady in the Lake (from that same year). Here, her dexterity with language was revealed, as she often cut away at her dialogue with a clipped antagonism. Her character here was also more of a deadly construct. While her other roles hinted at the possibility of evil deeds, this project found her committing them with vigor and resolve.

Nicely, her latter-day work contained certain diabolical elements, as well. While her kindhearted madame on an episode of Matt Houston (1983’s The Beverly Woods Social Club) was merely rouged a bit around the jawline, her self-involved cosmetics queen on Murder, She Wrote (1986’s Murder by Appointment Only) allowed her to employ her way with a quip and an arched eyebrow. Catty and demanding, she simply steals the show out from under such experienced performers as Robert Culp and even series star Angela Lansbury, herself.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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Hopelessly Devoted to: Jeanne Crain

Published February 1, 2023 by biggayhorrorfan

Jeanne Crain spent her primary Hollywood years portraying cinematic sweethearts. She was everyone’s faithful sister (Leave Her to Heaven) or the ingénue who bloomed when romance arrived, fully collared, at her door (The Model and the Marriage Broker). Nicely aging into roles in a series of mild noir films like Vicki and Dangerous Crossing, wherein she played elegant, frightened women facing deadly circumstances with trembling aplomb, she wound up her career, as many movie queens before her, in genre films.

She had to do little but look pretty in the midrange disaster epic Skyjacked. Her primary function there, in her final screen role, being to serve up devoted energy as a proud doctor’s spouse. Immediately before that less showy part, though, she proudly enacted a heavily utilized terror stereotype – the woman on the verge of emotional collapse. As the headliner of the cast of The Night God Screamed, playing a preacher’s wife stalked by a Manson-like cult, she fully committed to the disheveled, wide-eyed histrionics necessary for the undertaking.

Sure gold as the melodramatic heroine, a duo of guest shots on Burke’s Law in 1964 nicely confirmed her eclectic talents to the world. There she played against type as egocentric ladies of leisure and highly emotional murderesses. Despite these feats, she retired from the screen thirty years before her death. (She passed away in 2003 at the age of 76.) Thankfully, as night bleeds regularly into dusk, celluloid insomniacs can still discover her work on various media platforms, experiencing her never-ending magic as if anew.

Fun Fact:  Crain had the less-than enviable task of replacing Marilyn Monroe opposite Jane Russell in Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, the cinematic quasi-sequel to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Even Russell was rumored to have felt that her very quiet, dignified costar was miscast. Still, Crain, whose vocals were mainly handled by the oft utilized Anita Ellis, proves that she was in on the fun via her enjoyable take on I Want To Be Loved By You on the film’s soundtrack LP.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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Va-Va-Villainess: Claire Trevor

Published July 6, 2022 by biggayhorrorfan

My mom has never wished me a Happy Pride Month or asked if I am dating anyone. Her husband believes Black people would avoid getting shot if they just did what law enforcement figures asked them to do & they both vote via the Pro-Life agenda. Not surprisingly, our phone conversations are laced by all that goes unsaid, the overpowering dearth that comes from avoiding topics that would surely destroy the hesitant calm that it has taken us years to achieve. But my mom loves shopping for me for Christmas and my birthday. It’s a superficial connection for sure, but you take what you can in a world that is ever-spinning in a chill glow of uncertainty. We even have a sweet tradition established now – I pick an old school film diva and ask for books & films on them. She will, happily, read up on each of my choices and then spend quality time deciding what items I would like best from the lists I provide her. It’s exactly what any proud momma would do for her very gay, cinema obsessed son & it provides a light in the midst of all that is murkily unexpressed. I can’t produce a left wing glow from my maternal entity, but I can squeeze out a bit of appreciation for Claire Trevor.

Of course, Trevor, my latest choice, is well known for her heartbreaking Academy Award winning work as a drunken, aging gangster’s moll in the classic noir Key Largo. I also love her effortlessly comic antics in a movie called Borderline with Fred MacMurray. There, as a policewoman trying to infiltrate a criminal’s lair by posing as a dance hall girl, she is a bundle of perfectly timed awkwardness. 

But her gritty, no-nonsense demeanor also lent itself well to acts of ruthlessness. 1938’s The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse found her playing a more lighthearted figure of crime – the leader of a gang of thieves whose affection for Edward G. Robinson’s academically awkward title character leads to her downfall.  But the 1951 sports-noir Hard, Fast and Beautiful! definitely utilized her knack for portraying women with sophisticated, underhanded charms. As Millie Farley, the mother of a female tennis prodigy, Trevor radiates with a seductive sense of calculation. She obviously knows how to subtly bring out all of Farley’s ambitious qualities. In fact, she positively brims with truth as she enacts Farley’s seduction of prestigious figures and calculated justifications for compromising her talented offspring’s future for a bit of cash and extra press attention. 

Not surprisingly, Trevor is directed here by Ida Lupino, the actress-writer, who definitely played her own share of bad ladies in gothic melodramas and crime flicks, as well. According to Derek Sculthorpe, Trevor’s biographer, the two strong willed creatives occasionally had artistic differences on set, but they respected each other – and happily worked together again on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. With those successful collaborations behind them, it’s unfortunate that the two never made another film together. Millie is one of Trevor’s most popular creations and it would have been nice to see her play more characters with this level of determined wickedness. 

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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Va-Va-Villainess: Agnes Moorehead

Published April 4, 2021 by biggayhorrorfan

Noted for her acerbic antagonism as Endora on Bewitched, arguably her most famous role, the significant, always striking Agnes Moorehead resonated with a much more slithery, maliciously evil context in the noted 1947 film noir Dark Passage. Indeed, Madge Rapf, the character portrayed by Moorehead, undermines and manipulates the lives of Humphrey Bogart’s maligned Vincent and Lauren Bacall’s overly supportive Irene with such devious finesse that, even at the film’s semi-happy fade-out, their lives have been irreparably altered by her sadistic manipulations.

In fact, with the strategic aid of Bernard Newman’s glorious costumes, Moorehead’s Rapf may be one of celluloid’s most notoriously nasty characters. And while some casual fans may be surprised at the ferocious energy that she ultimately exhibits here, she is definitely this film’s most uninhibited pleasure.

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Horror Hall of Fame:

With credits like The Bat, Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, Night Gallery and Dear Dead Delilah, this one of a kind performer has irrevocably earned her stripes as a dignified goddess of terror, as well.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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Va-Va-Villainess: Leslie Brooks

Published November 21, 2020 by biggayhorrorfan

“It’s called tonight…or never!” –  Miss Medwick (Leslie Brooks), Romance on the High Seas.

Crisp and cool, the glorious Leslie Brooks always shot from the hip, especially in 1948, the year that marked her most notorious cinematic undertaking. As the gleefully immoral Claire Cummings Hanneman in Blonde Ice, she calmly manipulates her way through a trio of beaus…including one who winds up dead and another who she frames for his murder. Coming on like a lethal version of Barbara Stanwyck’s fabulously Pre-Code Baby Face, Brooks is unforgettably malevolent here, creating an iconic B-Movie noir monster.

That same year in Romance on the High Seas, a much frothier, big budget Warner Brothers musical, she is less destructive. Still, as Miss Medwick, she makes an obvious play for her married boss, using a seductive tone and an arched eyebrow (or two) to try to sway him into her arms. Capitulating to his devotion to his wife, she eventually becomes a model employee. Thus, in her final scenes, Brooks radiates with a strong efficiency and warmth.

Despite those qualities, seemingly due to a disastrous divorce and vicious custody battle for her daughter that same year, Brooks soon disappeared from the screen. But her work as a worthy femme fatale will never be forgotten.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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Unsung Heroines of Horror: Googie Withers

Published November 13, 2020 by biggayhorrorfan

The height of English elegance, the distinguished Googie Withers made appearances in everything from Alfred Hitchcock adventures (The Lady Vanishes) to multiple, stagey dramas with Michael Powell (the director of the controversial Peeping Tom).

If they search their memories, classic horror lovers would find they remember her fondly, as well. As Joan Cortland in the acclaimed 1945 anthology Dead of Night, Withers proved herself to be a cunning adversary for a maniacal spirit that dwells within a mirror in one of the film’s most haunting tales. As Cortland’s husband Peter (Ralph Michael) suffers greatly due to the visions he sees within the spectral looking glass’ reflection, Joan wisely uses her investigative skills to determine its history, learning simultaneously how to defeat it. Working with subtle economy and grace, Withers proves herself to be truly modern, gracefully victorious heroine of horror here.

Nicely, Withers showed the extent of her range by playing the connivingly determined Helen Nosseross in the moody 1950 film noir Night and the City, as well. Teaming up with Richard Widmark’s wild eyed con man, Wither’s spits out Helen’s dialogue with spite and vitriolic vinegar, her disdain for her corpulent businessman husband (Francis L. Sullivan) visible in every frame of film that she imbues with her commanding presence.

Indeed, with dozens of theater projects and distinguished cinematic adventures to her credit, Withers, who died in 2011 at the age of 94, is definitely worthy of significant rediscovery by today’s always hungry celluloid masses.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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Va-Va-Villainess: Geraldine Fitzgerald

Published March 20, 2020 by biggayhorrorfan

Geraldine Fitzgerald Harry

Best known as Bette Davis’ sympathetic companion in the classic tearjerker Dark Victory, the supremely talented Geraldine Fitzgerald was also renowned to certain cinema goers for her humor filled appearances in such ‘80s comedies as Arthur and Easy Money. Nicely, for our purposes, she also brought a tart acidity to a duo of nasty ladies in successive films in 1940s’ gothic-noir cinema.

Not surprisingly, her Crystal Shackleford in Three Strangers (1946) was a deceptively strong counterpoint to the desperately manipulative Jerome Arbutny (the always masterful Sydney Greenstreet) and the drunkenly con minded Johnny West (the singular Peter Lorre). Able to turn her character’s sweet demeanor into a scalding sense of vengeance in a quick turn, Fitzgerald’s work here sears itself into the viewer’s brain. She proves herself to be as memorable a figure as both Greenstreet and Lorre, two of cinema’s most recognizable characters, with her flirtatiously venomous ways, taking focus as the ringleader of a financial caper that proves to be the downfall of all involved.Geraldine Three Strangers

A year before her committed performance in Three Strangers, she probed even more controversial depths as George Sander’s controlling sister in The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry. As Lettie Quincey, a desperate spinster with a pathological devotion to her brother, Fitzgerald fearlessly dives into the incestuous overtures of her role, never backing down from the intensity of her character’s emotions. Calmly and convincingly destroying the late blooming romance of Sanders’ Harry, Fitzgerald’s deadly sense of the saccharine works an evil magic, pulling cinema lovers into her toxic web with joyous abandon.

Geraldine Strange Affair poster

Horror Hall of Fame:

While both these works, directed by such supreme stylists as Robert Siodmak and Jean Negulesco, feature haunting visuals and elements that contain both the supernatural and the fantastical, Fitzgerald fully submerged herself into the horror genre with appearances in 1982’s Blood Link and 1986’s Poltergeist II: The Other Side. Geraldine Poltergeist

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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