Of the five movies in Warner Home Video's excellent box set "Film Noir Classic Collection Volume 2," only four truly qualify as film noir, and the odd film out is not the one you might expect. There are plenty of similarities among the five: All were shot in high-contrast black-and-white. All were released within seven years of one another. All are stories of physical and/or emotional violence. Two of them feature the same star (Lawrence Tierney), and two others feature another star (Robert Ryan). Still, one of these films doesn't belong (and it's not the one that doesn't star Tierney or Ryan).

BORN TO KILL

At one point in Born to Kill (1947), someone tells Claire Trevor, "You're the coldest iceberg of a woman I ever saw, and the rottenest inside. I've seen plenty, too." Sure enough, Trevor's Helen Trent is one of the scarier women in film noir, an effect made all the stronger by the fact that she dresses exquisitely and seems on the surface to be very well-mannered. She isn't. The above dialogue is prompted by her chilling verbal description, in graphic detail, of the painful death that awaits another woman if she continues her investigation into Lawrence Tierney's affairs. ("a bullet tearing through your skin, crashing into a bone...") By this point, Tierney has murdered a woman in Reno and come to San Francisco, where he lusts after Trevor despite the fact that she is engaged. Trevor in turn is strongly attracted to the violent and jealous Tierney even after he marries her sister for her money. Their animal-like sexuality, mixed with some brutal violence and the feeling that Tierney's psychotic nature has rubbed off onto Trevor as if a contagious disease, help to make Born to Kill a twisted noir gem.

Tierney had made a small handful of movies since the attention-getting Dillinger (1945) and this was a chance at the big time, but he blew his chances for an A-list career by letting his temper and the bottle get the better of him. In his 1940s B films, however, he is a terrific presence, powerful and mean. While he's an actor of limited range, you can't take your eyes off him (though when Claire Trevor shares the frame, you want to). Born to Kill is an early film from director Robert Wise, and he imbues it with strong shadowy atmosphere no doubt honed from having worked with producer Val Lewton. A murder in a kitchen, and more impressively the revelation of its aftermath, form a stunning sequence of horror where more is implied than shown. You could watch it with the sound turned off and it would be just as scary - a sign of great moviemaking.

The disc's one extra is a commentary track by film noir historian Eddie Muller. He does a good job and sounds like he really enjoys the film and talking about it. It's amazing how many commentators on other DVDs do not share this quality. A few recollections by Robert Wise are also mixed in, but unfortunately the director's 90-year-old voice is mostly unintelligible.

CROSSFIRE

The murder mystery Crossfire (1947) caused a sensation in its time due to its frank treatment of anti-Semitism (though in the original Richard Brooks novel, the victim was homosexual, not Jewish). Released several months before the more famous Gentleman's Agreement (1947), Crossfire is the better movie partly because it doesn't ram its message down the audience's throat in as preachy a way - though it does have its moments. Basically, the effect is more emotional and shocking here than in Gentleman's Agreement, and it exists under the surface of a satisfying mystery plot with a flashback structure, as Robert Young investigates a murder in Washington, D.C. which seems to have been committed by a GI. Co-starring are Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan, who is superb in a career-making performance. The presence of these actors, the expressive lighting design by J. Roy Hunt, and the violence that springs from deep within the human soul all combine to give Crossfire a strong noir feel. The picture was a big hit and received five Oscar® nominations, including nods to Robert Ryan and the luminous Gloria Grahame, though it won none. The big winner that year? Gentleman's Agreement.

The print used here has some scratches, dirt and two or three severe splices - hardly pristine but still entirely watchable. In the extras department are a short featurette about the making of the movie and a commentary track with excerpts of director Edward Dmytryk discussing the film and his involvement in the HUAC hearings and the Hollywood blacklist. Otherwise, Alain Silver and James Ursini provide insightful, yet rather methodical and dry, commentary. They are certainly knowledgeable but it would be nice to hear some passion for the movie.

THE NARROW MARGIN

Perhaps the best of this bunch, The Narrow Margin (1951) is the tale of a cop (Charles McGraw) taking a gangster's moll (Marie Windsor) by train to L.A. to testify in a trial. Gunmen on board, however, are trying to get to her first. Shot in 12 days by director Richard Fleischer, this is a taut, lean movie with not a wasted frame. A fistfight on the train is not terribly long but is as good and believable as any ever put on screen, even rivaling the one in From Russia With Love (1963) (which it no doubt influenced). Notice the lack of music in the scene (and the entire movie), a quality which intensifies it greatly. As Fleischer has said on TCM, "I used the sounds of the train as a musical score." Fleischer considers The Narrow Margin his finest film, and he's probably right. The scenes between McGraw and Windsor have vibrancy and intensity (their characters don't exactly like each other), and a brilliant plot twist late in the game shows the world of The Narrow Margin to be an unstable one where things are not as they appear, certainly a noir attribute.

Disc commentary is provided by William Friedkin (director of The French Connection) but it's too much of the "what's happening now is..." variety, where he simply states what we are already seeing. Furthermore, even though he does provide some good nuggets of information, Friedkin's delivery is slow and patronizing, as if he's lecturing to an audience who not only knows nothing whatsoever about movies but doesn't even speak English very well. Richard Fleischer is much more interesting and conversational, but his comments are few and far between.

CLASH BY NIGHT

"Confidence! I want a man to give me confidence! Someone to fight off the blizzards and the floods! Someone to beat off the world when it tries to swallow you up!" That's Barbara Stanwyck talking in Clash By Night (1952), and the dialogue throughout is just as vivid and theatrical - and not exactly realistic. Based on a Clifford Odets play and directed by Fritz Lang, the movie thankfully doesn't really feel like a play, except for the dialogue. Essentially a tense love triangle set in a California seaside fishing community, this is the film which one might think is not a film noir. After all, there are no cops or hoodlums here. There's barely even a gun to be found. (Eagle-eyed viewers will spot a rifle hanging on a wall, but that's it.) Appearances can be deceiving, however. If film noir is a mood and style, then Clash By Night qualifies. Stanwyck, having returned to this community from a life in other cities which drained the optimism out of her, plainly and fatalistically warns fishing boat captain Paul Douglas that she's all wrong for him: "I'm the kind of woman who's never satisfied." But he goes for her anyway, just like the hapless, doomed sucker in so many more traditional noirs. Robert Ryan as Douglas's friend is just as alienated and angry at life as Stanwyck, and it's not long before a triangle forms. The anger and emotional violence that ensues seems to come from the noir universe, and Lang's visual style certainly emphasizes literal and figurative darkness.

No one was better than Fritz Lang at capturing the inner seething of a character and telling a story as if from inside that person. This is true even in a movie like this one, which allows us to observe all three of its main characters and their interactions in all possible combinations. Lang still captures each character's subjective experience: we feel strongly Stanwyck's cynicism, Ryan's deep anger, Douglas's inner pain, and all three characters' loneliness underneath it all. Clash By Night also co-stars a luminous Marilyn Monroe in the first film for which she received above-title billing, and boasts an extraordinary, wordless opening sequence which shows in documentary-like fashion how the fishing and canning operation works.

As one might expect, Peter Bogdonavich's commentary contains some interesting observations and recollections of Lang himself, but he is just deadly to listen to. He repeats himself and sighs so often that it sounds like he recorded the commentary at 3am after a long night out and can't wait to get to bed.

DILLINGER

That leaves Dillinger (1945) as the movie that doesn't really belong here. Rather than achieving the depths of despair and fatalism that mark true noirs, Dillinger is simply a straight-ahead gangster movie, more in the vein of a 1930s Cagney picture. It may be filled with brutal violence and gunplay, and set in an urban environment with a notorious bad guy at the center of the action, but those qualities in a non-noir merely go to show how many different and interesting guises noir can take. That's one reason why, despite Warner Home Video's misrepresentation of Dillinger, the movie's inclusion is actually so welcome. Another is that it's such a tough and entertaining little movie. Dillinger moves like lightning for its 71 minutes. Philip Yordan's screenplay may not be very historically accurate, but it is a model of economy. It's also surprisingly sadistic, with Lawrence Tierney's Dillinger killing people left and right with guns, a broken beer mug and even an axe. The violence is all off-screen, making it all the more powerful.

At least a quarter of the picture is stock footage, but it's very well integrated. There's even a heist sequence stolen from Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1937). Watch the scenes from the two movies back to back and you'll be amazed at how many of Lang's shots were used here. This was possible because the producers of Dillinger, Frank and Maurice King, had secured the rights to a large amount of stock footage. Former bootleggers and vending machine owners, the King brothers had by now become independent film producers. They made Dillinger for the poverty row Monogram Pictures at a time when the major studios were not making movies about real-life gangsters because the FBI feared the glorification of criminals. (Monogram was not subject to this agreement.) Dillinger doesn't glorify John Dillinger, however. It is totally detached from taking sides, asking the audience to observe Dillinger's exploits but not to sympathize with him or accept explanations for his behavior. Equally, it doesn't condemn him. With Tierney's electric presence, Dillinger riveted audiences and became a surprise hit. It even received an Oscar® nomination for Yordan, who at the time was an obscure writer. His great fame would come in the 1950s.

Dillinger looks and sounds excellent. John Milius's commentary is lackluster, to say the least. He may have written and directed a more faithful Dillinger movie in 1973, but he knows little about the making of this version and offers little insight into the filmmaking technique on display. Snippets of screenwriter Philip Yordan are more welcome.

In the end, it doesn't really matter what labels are applied to these (or any) movies. The bottom line is simply how involving, magical, entertaining or provocative they are. In this case, all five range from very good to excellent and are presented in fine viewing condition. Some of the commentaries could be better, but that's a minor complaint. With plenty of great films noirs in its library still unreleased on DVD, hopefully Warner Bros. will keep this winning streak going with Volume 3.

For more information about Film Noir Collection Vol. 2, visit Warner Video. To order Film Noir Collection Vol. 2, go to TCM Shopping.

by Jeremy Arnold