By 1956 Crime Wave's simple story was being played out every week in TV episodes of Dragnet and Highway Patrol, but André De Toth and his expert actors turn it into a gem of a show. Sterling Hayden chews on toothpicks but looks like he'd rather stomping every crook he sees; we're genuinely surprised in the first scene when he offers a fair shake to one of his stoolies. Gene Nelson is a good hardboiled hero, neither an idealistic chump nor an embittered cynic. Like the best of noir protagonists, Steve Lacey must go it alone, trusting neither the cops nor the murderous 'friends' he met in prison.

De Toth's direction is remarkable. When they decide to ignore a late-night phone call, we only see her hand restraining his from underneath as he reaches for the receiver, suggesting that she must be under him on the bed. In the next cutback, they're smoking. I don't know of an earlier Hollywood noir with such a bold suggestion of sexual activity. De Toth uses excellent part-subjective camera work to put us within the action, as when Bronson's brutish Ben Hastings assaults the veterinarian in his surgery. Low angles on Sterling Hayden make him seem enormous as he bulls his way under the glaring fluorescent lights of the police station. One scene begins with Hayden bursting into a dark room, gun drawn, a moment staged so sharply that it's almost frightening.

The crooks are slick and mean, with Ted De Corsia (The Killing, The Naked City) leaning on Steve just enough to get him to play ball with his crooked scheme. Nedrick Young is a luckless cohort (more on Young below) and a young Timothy Carey is Johnny Haslett, a leering goon enlisted to babysit the terrorized Ellen. We expect him to rape her as soon as they're alone, and he instead invites her to play Gin Rummy! (Note: Check out Timothy Carey's IMDB page to see the most psychotic head shot in cinema history.)

Crime Wave evokes a great atmosphere of endless night in Los Angeles. Bert Glennon's expert photography puts us into a time machine to the streets of Glendale in 1953. Upscale movie patrons might have wanted more fanciful escapism, but the authentic settings in films like Crime Wave and Without Warning! now give us a fascinating eye on the way the past really looked. We can see the famous Red Cars on Glendale Blvd.; they'd be discontinued only a few years later.

The violent bank robbery leads to a convincing car pursuit from Glendale to Chinatown, culminating in a satisfying surprise ending. Crime Wave is the perfect 50s noir: realistic, fast-moving and unpretentious.

Crime Wave is presented in a terrific enhanced B&W transfer made from excellent elements. The movie starts oddly with the Warners logo coming up as an odd blur. The film then begins by repeating a few seconds of action already seen under the title sequence; it really looks as if the film were scored with this error in place and the filmmakers had no recourse but to leave it this way. Even though the titles are formatted for 1:66, the flat 1:37 transfer is correct; a license plate with a 1952 date suggests that Crime Wave was shelved for a few months after completion, a detail confirmed by Eddie Muller in his commentary. The featurette The City is Dark uses on-camera input from Richard Schickel, Oliver Stone, Alain Silver, Christopher Coppola, Elizabeth Ward and an archival appearance by director André De Toth.

The commentary connects James Ellroy with Eddie Muller, a sure formula for seamy insights on this exceptional picture. Muller starts off like a hopped up disc jockey and goes upward from there, profanity bleeps and all. Ellroy growls and pants like a dog at every mention of a 50s noir actress. Just your average academic conference. They both think that Crime Wave is the tops for gritty L.A. noir.

Decoy is the Wild Card in this noir ten-pack, a relatively impoverished Monogram production from 1946. It's biggest star is Sheldon Leonard, who usually plays second string bad guys in bigger pictures. It has an interesting and committed femme fatale in Jean Gillie, an English actress who garnered a lot of good press but made only one more picture before dying at age 33.

I was first intrigued by Decoy from its entry in Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style and an original 1946 trade notice that appeared in a 1985 Daily Variety compilation of Science Fiction film reviews. Crooks use medical hocus pocus to revive a gangster executed in the gas chamber, so he can lead them to a fortune in stolen loot. It sounds a lot like a scam in a story by Ben Hecht about early newspaper days in Chicago, a tale retold in Norman Jewison's 1969 Gaily, Gaily.

Search as one would, after 1978 Decoy rarely or never appeared on television or in museum screenings. In 2000 the American Cinematheque showed it with the writer of its original story, Stanley Rubin, in attendance. The movie brought the house down with its odd mix of melodrama, hardboiled gimmicks and unrestrained sadism. I thought then that, as far as violence goes, Decoy was to 1946 what Pulp Fiction is to 1994.

The scene that had the Cinematheque audience climbing the walls is when Shelby commits a grisly murder with impeccable Martha Stewart manners. She runs over one of her confederates with her car, and then backs up and runs him over twice more for good measure. Then she gingerly retrieves the treasure map and the jack he used to change her flat tire. It must be seen to be believed. ¹

The featurette A Map to Nowhere uses on-camera input from Stanley Rubin, Dick Cavett, Molly Haskell, and this reviewer -- make that, 'Film Critic.' For the feature-length commentary I had the privilege of hosting the author of the original story, Stanley Rubin, a fascinating man with a stellar career. We get sidetracked for a couple of minutes talking about Stanley's wartime experiences but otherwise use the commentary to investigate the genesis of this odd movie and the mystery of the promising Miss Jean Gillie. ²