Ken and Robin Consume Media: More from Noir City Chicago and an Artisanal Counterfeiter
September 18th, 2024 | Robin
Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-
looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.
The Pinnacle
Le Trou (Film, France, Jacques Becker, 1960) New cellmate Claude (Marc Michel) falls in with a quartet of prisoners with a plan to escape La Santé Prison. From Hawksian hangout to real-time tension, this absolute masterpiece draws the viewer into the prison world and the escape plan of competent, experienced Roland (real-life prison breaker Roland Barbat, playing himself with DeNiro-esque power). Becker’s eye for detail pays off in gritty realism that also triumphs as archetypal drama.—KH
Recommended
A Gun For Sale (Fiction, Graham Greene, 1936) Hairlipped hit man Raven kills a Czech cabinet minister, bringing Europe to the brink of war—but his only concern is that his employer stiffed him with hot banknotes. Far more cruel (in every dimension) than the (also-Recommended) 1942 film adaptation, this shows Greene’s contempt for all of British society more clearly than most of his work. But his mastery of plot and tension keep the “entertainment” going despite your suspicion that the girl and the detective on Raven’s trail barely exist even to themselves. [CW: Not-very-veiled antisemitism.]—KH
Inferno (Film, US, Roy Ward Baker, 1953) Dodgy prospector Duncan (William Lundergan) and millionaire’s wife Geraldine (Rhonda Fleming) leave millionaire Donald Carson (Robert Ryan) to die in the Nevada desert, but Carson doesn’t cooperate. Insanely overperforming B-picture blends gripping survival drama with daylight color noir, punctuated by actually good use of 3-D establishing the vast depths and dangerous cliffsides of the desert landscape.—KH
The Last Counterfeiter: The Story of Fake Money, Real Art, and Forging the Impossible $100 Bill (Nonfiction, Jason Kersten, 2009/2024) Family ties bring strength and downfall for Art Williams Jr., a scion of Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood who with painstaking craftsmanship devises a way to fake the supposedly uncrackable 1996 US New Note. Grippingly told true crime yarn of hubris and temptation, with the Secret Service in the role of avenging deity.—RDL
Good
Black Tuesday (Film, US, Hugo Fregonese, 1954) Gang boss “King” Canelli (Edward G. Robinson) breaks out of Death Row, bringing along fellow inmate Manning (Peter Graves) to get his hidden loot. It’s great fun to watch Robinson sneer and brutalize, and the procedural elements tick along nicely, but the film stifles somewhat in its police standoff third act.—KH
Okay
Man in the Dark (Film, US, Lew Landers, 1953) Payroll robber Steve Rawley (Edmond O’Brien) is paroled to a surgeon who removes his criminal tendencies, along with his memory of where he hid the loot. When his old gang breaks him out of the hospital, that last bit becomes a problem. Columbia “won” the race to exhibit a 3-D feature with this amiable clunker, featuring lots of scalpels and cigars and spiders and why not a rollercoaster zooming into the audience’s faces, and very little in the way of cleverness or production value.—KH
