Railroaded (1947) (including Menswear Moments)

Director Anthony Mann was something of a B-movie noir specialist in the Forties -- although no one knew these films were "noir" yet. (In the Fifties, he was definitely a Westerns specialist.) Railroaded was directed by Mann on a miniscule budget for the Poverty Row studio Producers Releasing Corporation, or PRC (which Hollywood wags said actually stood for "Pretty Rotten Crap"!). As on his other low-budget efforts, Mann, stuck with the scripts, sets, and actors that were typical of the lowliest studios, went all-out on photographic style. Cinematographer John Alton was Mann's most famous collaborator (on six films altogether, including He Walked By Night), but Guy Roe, who shot Railroaded, does a comparably fine job. This is an often beautiful-looking film, and very dark indeed.

The script is only marginally noir because the characters in the most nightmarish situations -- the "railroaded" innocent of the title, a threatened female witness -- are not the focus of the storytelling. But the villain, top-billed John Ireland, ranks as one of the nastier specimens of the no-good handsome guy in noir. He is impeccably dressed -- stylish double-breasted suits, rakish fedoras, gleaming shoes, patterned pocket squares -- and he even perfumes his bullets (nice fetishistic touch!), but he is so rotten-hearted and vicious that one wonders why the women fall for him (good lay, one theorizes, and in fact Ireland apparently had quite the reputation as a stud in real life). As contrast to Ireland, the movie supplies Hugh "Ward Cleaver" Beaumont as a decent, sensible, and really really boring cop. (However, Beaumont does get to wear some nice ties.)

Apart from the woodcut-like compositions, the highlight of the film for me was a full-scale catfight between Jane Randolph as Ireland's moll and Sheila Ryan as the innocent's crusading sister. They really go at it, unusually for two women in noir, but the best part is that Ireland is hiding watching it all, gun in hand, transfixed -- clearly getting off on the female-on-female action. It's a distinctive scene, the wildest and best in the movie.