On Tuesday, Warner Home Video released an excellent eight movie DVD set, “Film Noir Classic Collection, Volume Five,” made up of some lesser known titles in the crime genre that flourished in the 1940s and 1950s.
French critics coined the term “film noir” for those tough-minded, post-World War II mysteries and gangster pictures that were filled with hard-boiled heroes and women of (somewhat) ill repute.
Many of the pictures were A-level productions with major stars — such as Billy Wilder’s great “Double Indemnity” with Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson — but the new Warner set is devoted to 
B-pictures with stars on their way up (Susan Hayward, John Cassavetes), stars on their way down (Dick Powell, Virgina Mayo) and other actors who would never become very popular (Bill Williams, Kathryn Grant).
What the eight movies in the collection have in abundance are energy, speed and atmosphere. Unlike the big major studio releases of the period, B-pictures were racier, shorter and in many cases much livelier than “prestige” pictures.
The biggest surprise in the DVD set for me was “Deadline at Dawn,” a 1946 vehicle for Susan Hayward, Bill Williams and the great stage and screen actor Paul Lukas.
During the opening credits I was shocked to see that the film was directed by the theater critic and Group Theater co-founder Harold Clurman and written by his frequent stage collaborator Clifford Odets.
I didn’t know Clurman had ever made a film (according to IMDB, it was his only movie job) and the Odets script is almost as juicy as the one he wrote for “Sweet Smell of Success” a decade later.
The picture starts just after midnight on a sweltering hot August evening in New York City where a callow sailor (Williams) on leave has just six hours to figure out the real perp in a murder he knows he will be accused of committing.
The victim in question picked up the sailor, got him drunk, and was apparently planning to have her way with him back in her apartment (until he passed out). Williams wakes up to a dead body and all evidence pointing in his direction.
It is only with the help of a hard-boiled (but soft inside) dime-a-dance girl (played by Hayward) and a kind-hearted cab driver (Lukas) that the sailor has any hope of solving the crime and making the 6 a.m. bus back to his base in Norfolk.
The film was based on a story by Cornell Woolrich (who also wrote the story that inspired “Rear Window”) and it’s a tightly constructed little mystery with some really juicy Odets dialogue (a woman greets her ex-husband by saying “Aren’t you dead yet?” and another character tells a woman that she would be “a lot prettier with your head cut off”).
Hayward is wonderful — you can see why she became a major star within a few years of this film’s release. The dance hall girl’s slow thaw as she becomes involved in helping the sailor out of his jam is beautifully played by the actress.
Another highlight of the DVD set is Phil Karlson’s lurid 1955 based-on-fact melodrama “The Phenix City Story.”
Filmed in the real (and oddly spelled) Alabama town of the title, the movie is based on journalistic accounts of the unbelievable corruption in Phenix City, stemming from the enormous amounts of money that were generated from gambling and prostitution.
Richard Kiley plays a straight arrow guy who has spent the past several years in Europe in the military with his wife and children; he is appalled by what has been going on in his native city and he pressures his honest lawyer dad (the marvelous John McIntire) to run for state attorney general in an attempt to clean up the mess.
The film starts with a 12-minute prologue in which we meet the real journalists who covered the story. The device is rather clunky by contemporary standards but adds to the authenticity of a movie which remains a gripping account of a town dominated by gangsters.
