Tuesday, October 25, 2016
Cops and Crooks
B movies of the 1940s and 1950s might seem hokey by today's standards, but some of the crime, drama, mystery, noir and suspense classics are still quite entertaining. For instance, The Big Heat and The Racket portray the challenge to police from organized crime, then rampant in American metropolitan cities. Pitfall and Dark City examine the crimes of conscience challenging individual cops and crooks. Kiss Me Deadly and City of Fear take a comically quaint look at the hard-boiled private eye and the federal agencies battling ridiculous threats from stolen atomic material in the aftermath of the Manhattan Project. Of note to connoisseurs of these classics, Lizabeth Scott stars in three of them.
