Lately, I've enjoyed watching classic film noirs. Most are pretty short and after writing and reading all day, I just need a simple way to chill out. Film noirs fit the bill just fine. I'll probably watch fewer of them once baseball season cranks up. Some film noirs are outright turkeys. But then others are real gems. Such is the case for this title.
This is a 1954 movie produced and co-scripted by Collier Young and his then-wife Ida Lupino. They also did The Hitch-Hiker, one of my favorites of the genre. Ida also stars in Private Hell 36 along with her next husband Howard Duff who plays the square-jawed, clean cop. The slick-talking dirty cop is played with lots of relish by Steve Cochran, one of the great villain actors. Don Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dirty Harry) directed it, and I caught the name David Peckinpah as the dialogue director during the opening credits, and, yes, that's the later famous director Sam (Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, Pat Garret & Billy the Kid). Also, be sure to look sharp at the film's beginning and don't miss the uncredited Richard Deacon (the bald-headed dude Mel Cooley on TV's sitcom, The Dick Van Dyke Show). Deacon is the pharmacist who gets robbed by a pair of junkies. Anyway, Duff and Cochran play a pair of L.A. cops investigating a 300 grand robbery, and face a moral dilemma when they recpver the stolen money. The film is part police procedural, and "Dragnet" even gets a sly mention. But the real treat is watching Cochran and Ida play off each other as the greedy lovers who want the bigger and brighter things in life. There's even the law-and-order Dragnet-like monologue at the film's start and end. I got a kick out of watching Private Hell 32. IMDb.com rates it 6.7/10.0. No way by me, so I'll go with a solid 7.5.
It's a public domain film you can watch on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2UgoWrxS8U
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