an important article on the subject) scripted TAXI DRIVER would anyone involved in the making of a film noir actually have known what the term meant. These assembly line movies incline more to simple crime, detective or espionage meller than the over- wrought visual or plot complications of true noir. Brief, punchy B pics which favor straight-up, two- fisted heroes and standard black hat baddies, they only occasionally run to noirish character types like the boxer nearly corrupted by a vengeance crusade in RINGSIDE or the scheming femme fa- tale of SCOTLAND YARD INSPECTOR. An inter- esting, recurrent theme in this set is the overspill into B cinema of the Golden Age of radio drama— which extends to including vintage dramas as ex- tras, and an interview with the daughter of radio pioneer Phillips H. Lord, the man behind the MR. DISTRICT ATTORNEY and COUNTERSPY shows. Print quality is variable, but since all the titles included are rare—the first offering, DAVID HARDING COUNTERSPY, is labeled “first time shown any- where since 1961”—that’s scarcely surprising.
FORGOTTEN NOIR COLLECTOR’S SET SERIES THREE
VCI Entertainment, $29.99, DVD
DAVID HARDING, COUNTERSPY 1950, 70m 38s
DANGER ZONE aka PIER OF PERIL 1951, 55m 35s
THE BIG CHASE 1954, 59m 48s
MR. DISTRICT ATTORNEY 1947, 82m 15s
RINGSIDE 1949, 67m 4s
HI-JACKED 1950, 66m 14s
LADY IN THE FOG
aka SCOTLAND YARD INSPECTOR 1953, 78m 17s
PIER 23
aka FLESH AND LEATHER 1951, 57m 50s
THE CASE OF THE BABY-SITTER 1947, 39m 49s
DAVID HARDING, COUNTERSPY is adapted from a radio series which ran from 1942 until 1957—though it’s also a low-budget entry in the your-secret-services-at-work procedural genre of THE HOUSE ON 92ND STREET, T-MEN, BORDER PATROL, WALK EAST ON BEACON and others. The feature harks back to the conflict covered in the show’s early days, with an extensive 1943 flash- back involving enemy activity in a naval-engineer- ing works during WWII, but is brought up to the moment by a frame story which was topical in 1950. Radio commentator Charles Kingston (HOUSE BY THE RIVER’s Alex Gerry), as bombas- tic as Walter Winchell but otherwise much less impressive, reports the loss of US atomic secrets which will delight a certain “mustached dictator” and accuses an unnamed American counter-in- telligence agency of culpable stupidity. Kingston is snatched in the dead of night and conveyed to the office of David Harding (Howard St. John), who reveals that the atomic leak is part of a cam- paign of deliberate misinformation to which the commentator has unwittingly contributed. Given the real-world situation, there’s a certain wish-ful- fillment element in this—and St. John’s bland pro- fessional determination doesn’t sit with the fact that Harding is given to throwing snits in which he kidnaps American citizens and reveals vital security information to the media.
Harding spins a yarn to Kingston about his wartime recruitment of short-fused Navy man Jerry Baldwin (THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING’s Willard Parker) to work against the spy ring which killed his best friend, and has a hold over the dead man’s young widow (Audrey Long). A paradox of the pro- paganda is that the story has to show a US de- fense industry riddled with deeply-entrenched spies so dangerous that civil liberties have to be sus- pended to stop their activities, or else there’d be no need for the paternal Harding and his no-non- sense organization (he tells a minion who makes a mild joke to “save the humor till after the War”). However, the fact that the extensive, gangster-like ring (the Nazis don’t even get a mention) was set up in the first place implies that the country’s se- curity is disturbingly lax—unless we’re supposed to believe that the only US secrets that get to the enemy, in 1943 or 1950, are deliberate fakes. A flicker of complication is the hero’s love for a woman who passes naval secrets in popcorn, but everyone does their duty and the baddies are ma- chine-gunned out of hand in a perfunctory climax. The only cast member to show charisma is a young, uncredited, mustache-free John Dehner as an agent with skills in vocal mimickry, but future
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