Film noirs

Alfred Hitchcock (displaying a gun): "This is for the man who has everything, enabling you to take it from him."

I've just seen a couple of film noirs on DVD. (I think of them as the "desire and trouble" genre.) Last night we saw WHERE DANGER LIVES, in which doctor Robert Mitchum falls for suicidal rich girl Faith Domergue who tells her she can't marry him because of her father, so he goes to her house and confronts father Claude Rains... who turns out to be her older husband!  Of course, it leads to a fight, in which Rains conks Mitchum on the head with a poker, giving him a concussion that impairs his judgement and slowly paralyzes him, and Mitchum knocks Rains' lights out, and when he returns with water Rains is dead! (Uh-oh Spaghetti-Os!) So Domergue convinces Mitchum to lam it... It isn't as good as the Mitchum noirs OUT OF THE PAST and ANGEL FACE, but it has a sense of paranoia.  Rains is good enough to make me wish his role were less small.

This evening I saw TENSION, in which mousy pharmacist Richard Basehart loses his no-good wife to a rich tough guy who beats him up, so he decides to murder the tough guy through a big scheme that involves him creating a fake identity and moving into an apartment where he meets Cyd Charisse...  Things turn ugly, but not in the way we expected.

Speaking of noirs, I've been watching the 1950s TV anthology ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS on DVD.  It's a clever show with some very original stories, and Hitch's deadpan introductions are always good for a laugh.

Last night I dreamed of a remake of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, but longer and even more explicit!