The biggest thing that happens for me moviewise every year is the annual Noir City Chicago put on by the Film Noir Foundation at the Music Box Theater. It's a can't-miss festival of classics and oddities, and this year's line up (starting this Friday) looks amazing. Stand outs include the Charles McGraw flicks ARMORED CAR ROBBERY and THE NARROW MARGIN, the Ida Lupino rarity DEEP VALLEY, the Martin Goldsmith penned SHAKEDOWN with Howard Duff, and Bogart's last film, the boxing flick THE HARDER THEY FALL. Here's the complete schedule of movies and showtimes.
Here is a film ripe for rediscovery. I’m not sure how ROADBLOCK has escaped the attention of so many critics and historians, but it is a brilliant encapsulation of almost everything that we love in crime pictures from the fifties. It is hardcore noir.
ROADBLOCK tells the story of an insurance investigator named Joe Peters (Charles McGraw) who meets a beautiful young society climber named Diane (Joan Dixon) when she cons her way into a cheap plane ticket by pretending to be his wife. At first, he’s offended. He’s a straight-shooter, a hard-nosed insurance cop who takes an immediate disliking for this little “chiseler.” For reasons he can’t quite understand, though, he goes along with her. When a thunderstorm forces their plane to stop for the night in Kansas, “Mr. and Mrs. Peters” are forced to share a room. They flip a coin for the bed. He wins, but she gets the blanket. By the time they make it to Los Angles, he’s asking when he can see her again. Joe, against his better judgment, is already in love, but Diane blows him off. She likes him as much as he likes her, but she thinks he’s a sucker. She’s ready for good times, expensive meals, and nice fur coats. They part company, and soon Joe’s back at work. His first case, funny enough, is the theft of some pricey furs. His prime suspect is a high-class hood namedKendall Webb (Lowell Gilmore). Joe goes up to Webb’s penthouse to question him and finds Diane slinking around in new mink.
Soon Christmas rolls around, and when Webb heads home to enjoy the holidays with his family, Diane is left spending Christmas with her furs. She goes to find Joe. He’s spending Christmas with a bottle. They fall in each other’s arms, and Diane decides she’d rather have love than money. Joe’s not so sure she’ll keep feeling that way, so he approaches Webb with a plan to rob a mail train carrying over a million dollars. Webb’s a good sport about losing Diane. He agrees to finance the caper, and honest Joe starts down the path to destruction.
The movie is directed by Harold Daniels, a director of little distinction, and ROADBLOCK is a compelling counterargument to the auteur theory of filmmaking. It features a smart script (by George Bricker, Steve Fisher, Richard Landau, and the blacklisted Daniel Mainwaring writing as Geoffrey Holmes), a wonderful cast, and one of the genre’s iconic cinematographers (the great Nicholas Musuraca). It is an assembly of great talent, but it would be difficult to isolate one person to credit for the film’s artistic success.
Perhaps the lack of a notable director at the helm helps explain ROADBLOCK's obscurity among general film buffs, but noir fans should search this film out. For one thing, it features Charles McGraw’s best performance. Most fans know that McGraw can do steely toughness better than just about anyone, but they’ll be surprised how flawed and human he makes Joe Peters. ROADBLOCK is your chance to see McGraw—toughest of the tough guys—being a Mitchum-sized chump.
You can’t really blame him for being such a fool, though. In ROADBLOCK, Joan Dixon does what any great femme fatale should do, she makes a believable case for throwing your life away. Femmes come in all shapes and sizes of course, but Joan Dixon is a unique member of the pantheon of deadly women. She’s not an evil cipher in the mold of an Ava Gardner or a Barbara Stanwyck. She’s a bad girl who doesn’t quite know herself until she meets Joe Peters. Once they fall in love, she tries to go straight because he’s unlocked some latent good she’s kept stored away. The tragedy here is that she’s already unlocked the latent evil in Joe. This is a marriage made in a particularly ironic pit in hell.
Dixon is a virtual unknown today, even in the tiny world of film noir. Her career was brief, starting with a bland little programmer called BUNCO SQUAD about conmen posing as a religious cult. Most of her career was spent in low budget westerns and bit parts on television, followed by a career as a lounge singer. By the end of the fifties, she was mostly notable in Hollywood for her semi-regular appearances in the tabloids as the star in a series of messy divorces. She died in Los Angles in 1992, just another forgotten old lady in Tinseltown who was an actress for five minutes in the fifties.
Like Ann Savage, Joan Dixon had a short, unremarkable movie career. However, they each make one great film before disappearing into history. DETOUR has been acknowledged as a noir masterpiece, and Savage has been given the credit due to her. I hope someday we can say the same thing about ROADBLOCK and Joan Dixon.
In our time we all play different parts, and just about every noir player has played the hero and the villain, the good girl and the femme fatale, the lead and the support. Yet over a career there are certain personalities that take hold. This is another addition to the roundup of faces that appear over and over in noir, like thugs pulled into a police lineup:
Charles McGraw-The Man of Granite
They don’t come any tougher than this guy. With a voice like a cement-mixer and the squarest jaw in movies, he did more time in noir than just about anyone else, playing every kind of role a man could play (hero, sidekick, sap, villain, victim, henchman). His best known film is Fleischer’s excellent The Narrow Margin with a sassy Marie Windsor, but he also starred in the director’s lean, mean Armored Car Robbery as a no-nonsense cop trying to track down nutjob William Talman. Since McGraw might very well be noir's most ubiquitous performer, this list could go on, but his best film is little seen outside the hardest of the hardcore noir geeks. In the brilliant, underrated Roadblock, opposite demigoddess Joan Dixon, McGraw turned in his best performance as a good man gone bad.
Essential McGraw: Roadblock, The Narrow Margin
For Further Viewing: Armored Car Robbery, The Threat
Supporting Roles (blink and you'll miss him in some of these):The Killers, Brute Force, T-Men, Border Incident, Side Street
I ranked McGraw's famous fight with David Clarke in The Narrow Margin at number two on my list of noir's best brawls.
