#sidney lanfield

Ricardo Cortez-Joan Blondell "Así es Broadway" (Broadway bad) 1933, de Sidney Lanfield.

Constance Bennett photographed for Moulin Rouge (dir. Sidney Lanfield, 1934)

Fun facts: Spencer Tracy in a supporting role and the soon-to-be Mr Joan Blondell, George Barnes, filmed it.

Murder, my dear Watson, refined, cold-blooded murder.

Director Sidney Lanfield talking to Simone Simon and Dick Baldwin during production of LOVE AND HISSES (1937).

Station West is an odd duck of a Western. Oh, there’s the usual stagecoach and saloon stuff, some gunplay, and a big fistfight. But it also has the kind of snappy dialogue you associate with film noir, and nobody is exactly what they seem. It’s also threaded through with songs performed by an uncredited Burl Ives, who plays a hotel owner who’s also a kind of Greek chorus, commenting on the action with his ballads. One of the refrains of his songs, “A man can’t grow old where there’s women and gold,” is sung often enough that we get the point. The women are played by Jane Greer and Agnes Moorehead, and they give no quarter. Greer is Charlene, known as Charlie, and she owns most of the business in the town, but not the gold mine, which belongs to Mrs. Caslon, played by Moorehead. And then a stranger named Haven (Dick Powell) comes to town. He’s really an undercover agent from military intelligence investigating the deaths of two soldiers who were guarding a shipment of gold from Mrs. Caslon’s mine that got hijacked. Powell’s character is a boots-and-sixguns variation on his Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944), quick with a quip, catnip to the women, able to take a licking and keep on sleuthing. Somehow this mash-up of film noir and horse opera works. There’s nice camera work, too, from Harry J. Wild, who knows how to use shadows effectively.    

Window card for "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (1939)

Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth in You'll Never Get Rich (1941) dir. Sidney Lanfield