André De Toth made only made two noirs, but in Crime Wave he gives us a lesson on how easy it is to make a great noir movie in just a few simple steps:

1) Wear an eye-patch. (Actually this is pretty good advice for would-be film directors of any kind.)

2) Cast Sterling Hayden as an ambiguous cop and don’t let him smoke during the shoot so he’s a bit testy.

3) Cast crazy Timothy Carey and throw his ass down a set of wooden stairs

4) If you can get Charles Bronson, Ted de Corsia, and Dub Taylor, that’s gravy.

5) Take to the streets of L.A. use all real locations all the time.

6) Use a cardboard…

Maverick filmmaker André de Toth directed this taut film noir, full of pulp-crime emotion. Three escaped cons (Ted de Corsia, Charles Bronson and Nedrick Young) stop at a gas station, reduce the attendant (Dub Taylor), kill a motorcycling cop and take the money in just the first five minutes or so of footage.

We are right away put in the gang, so to speak: the title credits are printed over a subjective-camera's point of view from inside the crooks' car. Later we meet a reformed ex robber (Gene Nelson) and his devoted wife (Phyllis Kirk); his apartment is our next stop. Yet, maybe we are not on the criminal side anymore. Perhaps, we never were.

The ambivalence explored by this…

Policial súper compacto, noir y precioso filmado en trece días con muy poca plata y mucha intención. Sólo vi House of Wax de André De Toth, ni sus westerns ni sus otros policiales, pero Crime Wave ya es razón suficiente para ir más adentro. Aparte, hay linda trivia dando vueltas sobre como De Toth se le plantó a Warner en contra de Humphrey Bogart y Ava Gardner para esta peli. Me caen bien esas cosas.
La trama es de esas que rompen el corazón y generan mucha tensión: ex criminal con condena cumplida y tratando de sobrevivir muy a pesar de la policía, su pasado y el prejuicio en general. 'Once a crook, always a crook'. Un blanco y negro…

Man alive does this movie look good. Noirs that use light as well as they do shadow are rarer than you’d think, but it’s the brightness of DeToth’s film that is its most striking feature. In the daylight — as with the climax of the film — LA is on display in all of its grungy glory, with the sun glinting off of the myriad cars and shop windows, and the sky a big, open fronteir. At night, the black is deep and dark, but it’s interrupted by splotches of brilliant light: diners, shop windows, apartments.

And, often, these oases of light come with their own soundtracks, whether it’s Doris Day in a gas station, or a big band pouring…

Summer of Scam 2: Criminally Insane

After watching a fair few of his films over the last couple of years, it seems to me as though Andre de Toth had a much better grasp of crime and war films than he did of the westerns that he was perhaps best known for.

I've enjoyed a couple of the westerns I've seen from him, but the three or four I've seen from him in other genres have been terrific, and Crime Wave is very much a part of that group. Short and very sharp, this thriller features an eye-catching turn from a very young Charles Bronson as a dopey but dangerous villain, and Sterling Hayden as a cop convinced that ex-con…

How interesting is the fact to notice that in the only two Noir films that master André De Toth directed on his entire career, this one and the excellent Pitfall, both movies came to share a common familiar story handling inside the genre, with the family-core at the center of everything. Is almost as if it were the way that De Toth faced the world that these genres portray, the characters that inhabit it, and the victims that bare their marks under it. While that in Pitfall was a perfect premise to create an inquisitively great melodrama that subverted usual character models of the genre – the private detective, the femme-fatale -, while here in Crime Wave that scenario changes…

A trio of escaped convicts on a crime spree kill a cop, and drag a reformed former criminal into helping them evade the law and carry out their next robbery.

Steve Lacey (Gene Nelson) is the poor unfortunate who is trying to go straight and make a new life for himself with his new wife, but who, when faced with a demand for assistance has nowhere to turn, knowing that informing the cops will lead to him being a marked man.

Meanwhile, he immediately comes under suspicion from the cops, fronted by Detective Lieutenant Sims (Sterling Hayden) whose harsh attitude makes him as threatening as the crooks, as far as we, and poor old Steve are concerned.

The criminals here…

"Just when I thought they was out, they pulled me back in."

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that iconic line was cribbed from this movie, where Gene Nelson's Steve Lacey plays a paroled man trying to go straight and succeeding. Until a job he had nothing to do with put some former partners in crime right back into his orbit.

You feel for poor Steve, who has a job and a beautiful wife, but can evade neither his old running buddies or the long arm of Sterling Hayden's Detective Sims. Sims is assured that Lacey will relapse into a life of crime and through some wrong-place-wrong-time happenings he seems to be correct.

This is a sharp, focused noir…