Scripted by Sydney Boehm, a specialist in westerns and crime movies whose best film is perhaps Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, and directed by genre specialist Richard Fleischer, Violent Saturday is a noir thriller in Technicolor that brings together in 90 minutes a key location of the 1940s and 50s with one of those decades' favourite plots.
The setting is a corrupt, middle-American township (key examples being King's Row, Peyton Place and Some Came Running). The opposite of the cosy hometown of Andy Hardy movies and nostalgic Tin Pan Alley songs, it's seething with hypocrisy and inhabited by snobs, alcoholics, thieves, voyeurs, blackmailers, adulterers and womanising playboys. The plot is the heist movie, the story of a carefully prepared robbery, which has been around since The Great Train Robbery (1903) but became an established species of the crime genre in the postwar years in The Asphalt Jungle, Criss Cross and The Killing.
Continue reading...
No comments:
Post a Comment