Claire Trevor

  • Born to Kill (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) As Eddie Muller pointed out in his TCM Noir Alley introduction to Born to Kill, there’s a fantastic gender-flip at the heart of the film—Lawrence Tierney playing a cold-blooded killer corrupting two good (?) women on his way to more power, and mercilessly eliminating the obstacles in his way. Even by the standards of film noir, Born to Kill plays rough — the body count accumulates, no one gets what they wanted and there’s a clear air of moral decrepitude over the entire thing. (Contemporary accounts of the film reveal negative aghast reviews, successful efforts to ban the film from further distribution, and the film being used in the defence of a young man accused of murder —further evidence that nothing is new under the sun.)  While Tierney gets the lead role and Claire Trevor does her best to follow him into crime, my favourite character is probably the Private Investigator played by Walter Slezak as a jovial but amoral force of chaos with an impact on nearly everyone. Director Robert Wise ended up with a chameleonic career following his debut here — but I don’t think any of his later films were as gleefully dark as this one. For jaded twenty-first century viewers, Born to Kill amounts to a nice period piece that narratively goes from Reno to San Francisco, but thematically delves deeper and deeper into darkness with the stylish flair of classic noir.

  • Murder, My Sweet (1944)

    Murder, My Sweet (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2019) Aw yeah, pump that undiluted film noir stuff right into my veins, because I can’t get enough of that genre and Murder, My Sweet is as pure as it gets. Adapted from Raymond Chandler’s more innocuous-sounding Farewell, My Lovely, this is a film that goes right for the archetypes of film noir, what with the private investigator, femme fatale, precious McGuffin, criminal figures, gunplay and complicated plotting. The addition of a nice girl thankfully lands the movie in happy-ending territory without necessarily sabotaging what comes before. I had a bit of trouble accepting Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe, but was gradually won over by his sardonic humour, reasonable stature and flashes of vulnerability—the shadow of Bogart looms large of the character, but Powell’s take on it is excellent. Alongside him, Anne Shirley is as lovely as she needs to be as the only rock of morality in an otherwise gray-on-gray tale. Claire Trevor is ideal as a femme fatale, while Mike Mazurki is a presence as a dim-witted enforcer. Perhaps the best thing about the film on a moment-by-moment basis is the delicious tough-guy dialogue, played unironically given the film’s place in early noir history. Murder, My Sweet is, unsurprisingly, one of the most influential films in the noir canon—it had the good fortune of appearing on screens in 1944, alongside a class as distinguished as Double Indemnity, Laura, The Woman in the Windows and (arguably) Gaslight, a time when noir was gaining traction as a specific thing (even if defining it took another two years on another continent). There have been many, many imitators and some of them may even have surpassed Murder, My Sweet. But the original is still more than worth a watch.

  • Key Largo (1948)

    Key Largo (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2018) There are actors that elevate the material they’re given no matter the genre or how many years later you see the result, and so while Key Largo is in itself a perfectly serviceable thriller, having Humphrey Bogart in the lead role certainly doesn’t hurt. At times a small-scale thriller in which various people are trapped in a Florida hotel during a hurricane (showing its theatrical origins), the film eventually opens up to a boat-set finale. In another classic pairing with Bogart, Lauren Bacall plays the dame in distress, with strong supporting performances from Edward G. Robinson and Claire Trevor. Director John Huston keeps things tight and suspenseful as characters are forced to interacting in a small setting—you can see the influence that the film had over some of Tarantino’s work, for instance. Key Largo is not particularly remarkable, but it does have this pleasant late-forties Hollywood studio sheen, meaning that you can watch it and be assured of a good time.