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It’s a manhunt South of the Border — Niven Busch’s drama has violence and murder but is really a novelistic character study that goes against the typical rules of Hollywood. Lew Ayres tries to atone for mistakenly killing a man, by coming to the aid of the victim’s widow. But he doesn’t realize that Teresa Wright’s ranch wife has learned the truth about him. The independent production is a modern oil-field western set in Mexico, and unusual both in storytelling style and emphasis, with an atypical imperfect hero and a romance far removed from Hollywood clichés. John Sturges is the director of this interesting obscurity.

The Capture

Blu-ray

The Film Detective

1950 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 91 min. / Street Date January 18, 2022 / Available from The Film Detective / 24.95

Starring: Lew Ayres, Teresa Wright, Victor Jory, Jacqueline White, Jimmy Hunt, Barry Kelley, Duncan Renaldo, William Bakewell, Milton Parsons, Felipe Turich, Edwin Rand,...

Vintage high-end Film Noir from the classic year 1947! Low Mileage too — this long cut hasn’t been seen since the early laserdisc days. I didn’t know it needed restoring until George Feltenstein talked about it a couple of years ago. It’s a domestic noir crossed with Double Indemnity with a little An American Tragedy thrown in for good measure. Normally squeaky-clean Robert Young throws his hat into the ring with the lowest of noir hero-villains: in this one he double-crosses three terrific noir leading ladies. We can now spell ‘Unspeakable Cad’ with the initial Ry. The most amazing thing about The Warner Film Archive’s new disc is that it restores a full fifteen minutes — Eddie Muller screened They Won’t on his Noir City show not long ago, with no mention that it was the short, edited version.

They Won’t Believe Me

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1947 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 95 min.

As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.And now they've quietly disappeared William Fox's name from the company: guilty by association with Rupert Murdoch, even though he never associated with him.***"Would you recognize Milton Berle without his mother? No!" So says the man himself, Milton Berle, in Over My Dead Body (1942), a fairly shoddy reminder that Berle was, for now-inexplicable reasons, a movie star in the early forties. But while some talent from radio and vaudeville slid into cinema with the ease of the proverbial buttered eel, Berle somehow got lodged halfway down cinema's throat, for reasons which may tell us something about classical Hollywood filmmaking, and something about this particular clown.Fox tested Berle on...

“It’s under the Big ‘W’!” A smart cop show goes all ‘Dragnet’ on a trio of criminal cases in the good old City of the Angels. To figure out who gunned down a top detective, rough tough FBI agent Broderick Crawford must get to the bottom of three separate dramas, each involving a beautiful woman. The producers know how to get attention for their show — the climactic shootout takes place under the Hollywood Sign.

Down 3 Dark Streets

Blu-ray

ClassicFlix

1954 / B&W / 1:75 widescreen / 86 min. / Street Date April 24, 2018 / 29.99

Starring: Broderick Crawford, Ruth Roman, Martha Hyer, Marisa Pavan, Max Showalter, Kenneth Tobey, Gene Reynolds, William Johnstone, Harlan Warde, Jay Adler, Claude Akins, Suzanne Alexander, Joe Bassett, Michael Fox, John Indrisano, Milton Parsons, Stafford Repp, William Schallert, Charles Tannen.

Cinematography: Joseph Biroc

Film Editor: Grant Whytock

Production Design: Edward (Ted) Haworth

Original Music: Paul Sawtell

Written by Bernard C. Schoenfeld, ‘The Gordons...