A new collection of classics, from Niagara to Purple Noon, reminds us that the darkest acts can occur in broad daylight
that was unseated just the next day as thermometer mercury continued climbing. Dozens of cities have logged unprecedented warmness in a year that scientists are identifying as the most inarguably, oppressively sweltering the modern human race has ever faced. Soon, the concept of going on holiday as it’s understood at present – of taking the summer months to travel somewhere hotter and sunnier than your day-to-day home town so that you can, presumably, relax – will seem counterintuitive.
The standard-bearing icon of noir – the hard-boiled private eye gazing upon the wickedness all around him with a detached cynicism befitting disillusioned post-second world war attitudes – is nowhere to be found around these parts. The series features mysteries aplenty, but they are investigated by unlikelier protagonists in keeping with the unlikely settings.
No spoilers, but Dangerous Crossing’s eventual denouement hinges on one in a handful of set-ups involving furtive lovers and unwitting cuckolds – none so surprising and sensitively wrought as the central tension in 1947’s Desert Fury. No-goodnik gangster Eddie shacks up with the obstinate daughter of a Nevadan casino magnate , with his eye on the family fortune.
Tangled attractions stretching from coast to coast posit something like the opposite of a love story; these affairs fueled by self-interest instead model the worst the human soul can muster. Where Orson Welles’s memorable appearance in The Third Man unveiled the evil at the heart of geopolitics, his direction on The Lady from Shanghai two years earlier confronted the same turpitude on a more intimate person-to-person scale.
No one does existential angst like the French, a people so fixated upon ennui that they can’t even go on a getaway without reckoning with defects of the soul. Purple Noon and La Piscine form an Alain Delon double feature, not just flaunting one of the most preternaturally handsome people to have ever stepped in front of a camera, but a twinned sensibility of heat-fatigued indifference broken only by cruelty.
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