The Smashing Secret Service Adventures of Brass Bancroft in the Air!

Tarzan

The Falcon

Dick Tracy

James Bond

Indiana Jones

Batman

Richard B. Riddick

Jason Bourne

Agent Phil Coulson

and, of course...

Brass Bancroft

No, seriously.

Bela Lugosi noi-wait...Bela Lugosi noir?

OK, follow this now.

Dr. Ernest Sovac, Ernst to his friends apparently, is an experimental brain surgeon who's in search of success and credibility in the United States. On Friday the 13th, Sovac's close friend, English Professor George Kingsley, suffers a grievous head injury when a car driven by big city gangster Red Cannon—on the run from his own crew—slams into Kingsley on the streets of the collage town Sovac and the professor call home. Kingsley's head and brain are virtually destroyed. Cannon's spine is broken, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.

One guy's your buddy, the other is a criminal and you've successfully experimented with brain transplants in animals.

Hmmm...

Black Mamba Noir: Murders in the Zoo

What would you do if you thought someone kissed your wife? Obviously, you'd sew the guy's mouth shut and send him off into the jungles of French Indochina with his arms tied behind his back to be mauled to death by lions while you ride back to base camp on your elephant.

Obviously.

What would you do if you suspected the man you met on the steamer back to America had designs on your wife as well? Well, you do have that black mamba head laying about...

"How about you just let us go?" Hostage Noir

One of the first films I watched when I got into "old movies" as a a newly-minted high school graduate in 1992 was KEY LARGO. Loved all the tension and byplay between the characters as played by a Warner Bros. all-star team. Not as big a fan of the rather pat action finale, but that's a story for another blog.

As good a KEY LARGO is, its Warner A picture pedigree leaves it scrubbed of the grime and grit associated with Noir City. So, tonight, we're going to look at two crimey hostage chamber pieces from RKO Radio Pictures that, while not truly noir, have some of the characteristics of the movement and are well worth your time.

Jungle noir!

THE DISEMBODIED is referred to as a horror movie everywhere I've seen it mentioned, which is not many places. True, this 1957 Allied Artists B involves voodoo, a kind of zombie and some pretty graphic violence, but this story of a trapped, frustrated girl from the noir side of the tracks could just as easily have taken place in a concrete jungle as the one in which it's set.

The Maltese Falcons you haven't seen, Part 1

When film noir comes up, most people familiar with the term at all will go straight to John Huston's adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's 1930 private detective novel, The Maltese Falcon to establish that familiarity. While Huston's take, released in 1941, is, by far, the best known and, as you'll see, the best made, it was Warner Bros. third bite at Hammett's sour apple.