After binge-watching comedies and cartoons for months, we at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog are ready for a deep dive into film noir - and nobody made more uncompromising, gripping and vividly atmospheric noir thrillers than Robert Siodmak (1900-1973).
Robert Siodmak arrived in Hollywood in 1939 and made 23 movies there. Many of them were hard-hitting crime dramas as The Killers, notable for exemplifying the themes and mise en scène of film noir.
That said, it is simplistic to describe him as a director who only excelled at film noir, as brilliant and prolific as Siodmak was at the genre. He worked in all genres, both in America and Europe.
From Robert Siodmak's first U.S. produced opus that dipped an unsuspecting toe into the icy waters of film noir, Phantom Lady, it was clear that the Dresden-born director could adapt the UFA German expressionist visual style to mysteries and crime thrillers with exceptional panache.
Since we can't go out to the movies for big screen fun, here are some trailers from Robert Siodmak masterpieces that positively oooooooooooze the pungent essence of film noir.
The Spiral Staircase is among the most terrifying and paranoid psychological thrillers and more than a tad reminiscent of Robert Wiene's way-out 1920 chiller The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari. Can't discuss the plot without spoiling this tense and diabolical film!
Robert Siodmak began making films in Germany in 1929, but, after making Brennendes Geheimnis (The Burning Secret) in 1933, found himself on minister of propaganda Josef Goebbels' hit list and attacked for not being a Nazi shit-bag. He immediately high-tailed it to France, where Siodmak would both avoid being a victim of The Night Of The Long Knives and work successfully as an émigré director for the rest of the decade. In Paris, Siodmak was more of a Howard Hawks style "all genres" director than a specialist in thrillers. He even made Dannielle Darrieux musicals!
Over their long careers, Robert Siodmak and his brother Curt, novelist, science fiction author and screenwriter, hit bulls-eyes in many of 20th century pop culture's sweet spots. We wager that one of the main reasons the Siodmak brothers were not fawned over and lauded as great directors and screenwriters was their uncanny skill at genre pictures.
The Siodmaks consistently hit many favorite B-movie genres of the gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog - Universal Pictures' signature Gothic horror, science fiction, murder mysteries, crime dramas, film noir - out of the park.
Our introduction to Robert Siodmak was the excellent Universal horror movie Son of Dracula, a late-night television Creature Features perennial back in the 1970's and 1980's.
After many viewings, it still lands squarely in our genre picture wheelhouse as does The Wolfman, just one of many classic movies with a screenplay by Curt Siodmak.
Filmmaker Joe Dante elaborates on the inventiveness and stylishness of this very Gothic opus. Have a hunch Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder watched Son of Dracula while planning Young Frankenstein. Robert Siodmak's uber-creepy contribution to the Universal horror genre emphatically illustrates that it is not a good day when a fortune teller informs you that you're destined to marry a corpse!
Some of Robert Siodmak's American films turn tried-and-true genres upside down. In Christmas Holiday, what looks like a small town Americana tale starring Hollywood musical stars Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly turns out to be a thriller, imbued with the leads' most un-prototypical performances. While Gene Kelly periodically played character roles in such films as Inherit The Wind, he portrays a psycho (actually, quite well) here who at no point dances or sings "I Got Rhythm."
The Killers, featuring a script by John Huston, is the feature film debut of Burt Lancaster, who makes the most of his part. This adaptation of a short story by Ernest Hemingway ranks among the masterpieces of film noir.
Another masterpiece of film noir is Criss Cross, a white-hot, delirious, yet also subtle, sensitive and beautifully realized nugget of cinematic genius. Along with Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy, no movie before or since expresses the sex-crossed lovers theme quite like this.
Don't have to see the doomed couple drool all over each other to get the picture - they're hornier than Maurice Chevalier in The Smiling Lieutenant. Throughout, the incendiary performances by Burt Lancaster and femme fatale Yvonne De Carlo are on the money. Want to die anytime soon? No. Want to have as good sex as Lancaster and De Carlo do (offscreen) in this movie? YES!
Founder of the Noir City film festival, author and Czar of Noir Eddie Muller elaborates on this unbeatable classic movie on TCM's Noir Alley.
While many of the great Robert Siodmak films, from Fly By Night to The Suspect to Christmas Holiday to The Strange Case of Uncle Harry to The Dark Mirror to Cry of the City to The File on Thelma Jordon, can be seen in their entirety on YouTube, they lose approximately 95.7% of their dramatic, cinematic and emotional impact on the small screen. That's as diminished as the signature diminished scale riff frequently played by jazz trumpeter Lee "The Sidewinder" Morgan!
Although going out to the movies, unfortunately, remains a non-option for the foreseeable future, don't watch these fantastic and atmospheric classic films on your Iphone any more than you would watch a 70mm print of Lawrence Of Arabia, here in his 1971 "Dirty Larry" incarnation, on a tiny screen.
After his career making memorable American films ended, Siodmak returned to Europe and continued directing films, including noir thrillers, through the end of the 1960's. Particularly notable: The Devil Came At Night (1957), a crime drama about a serial killer on the loose in Nazi Germany.
Robert Siodmak's swan songs as a filmmaker would be westerns, historical dramas and sword-and-sandal epics. In that respect, his career parallel another principal architect of film noir, the great Anthony Mann.
For more info, there's Deborah Lazaroff Alpi's book Robert Siodmak: A Biography, with Critical Analyses of His Film Noirs and a Filmography of All His Works. Buying a copy, as it has been out-of-print for quite awhile, will cost mucho dough, but, if you are lucky enough to live near a interlibrary loan program, check it out! The research, writing and analysis is thorough and impeccable.
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