Under the Mink: Film Noir at Columbia Pictures at HOME

Head into the shadows and discover the murky world of Film noir with a curated season of film at HOME this September. Featuring ruthless gangsters, corrupt cops and dangerous dames, Under the Mink is an invitation to explore the darker side of post-WWII Hollywood through four films from the heyday of Columbia Pictures.

Characterised by a world-weary, hard-boiled cynicism, stark chiaroscuro lighting and canted camera angles, Film noir was born out of the experiences of disillusioned American GIs returning from the war and the European emigre filmmakers who had escaped it. The films draw from sources as varied as the European existentialists, pulp detective novels from the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and the writing of Ernst Hemingway. At their best, they channel a tough poetry that expresses the urban alienation of the time, featuring characters lost and longing, both blessed and burdened by an intimate knowledge of violence.

Under the Mink is curated by award-winning film writer and programmer Christina Newland — lead critic at the i paper — who has built a reputation on thoughtfully exploring classic genre cinema. The season is an expansion of her newsletter Sisters Under the Mink which critically examined the roles of women in crime cinema, looking at how women have historically fit into a traditionally masculine space, while finding room to acknowledge everything from the seductive pleasures of on-screen glamour, to the subversive flipside of the doomed femme fatale.

For the season at HOME, Newland has selected four classic titles, including work from top directors and big name screen-talent, each of which features a doomed romance at their centre. In Fritz Lang’s 1953 The Big Heat (Fri 19 Sept), Glenn Ford is a police sergeant hellbent on taking down an brutal crime syndicate, while Gloria Grahame is the gangster’s moll memorably caught up in the grim power struggles of the men around her. On Thursday 25 September, Irving Lerner’s low budget 1958 thriller Murder By Contract follows a ruthless contract killer who finds his latest target — a woman — is harder to dispatch.

Perhaps the centrepiece of Under the Mink is Nicholas Ray’s gorgeous, melancholy 1950 film, In a Lonely Place

Perhaps the centrepiece of Under the Mink is Nicholas Ray’s gorgeous, melancholy 1950 film, In a Lonely Place. Humphrey Bogart has seldom been better than as Dixon Steele, a viscous, bitter screenwriter in this inside-Hollywood tale of murder and mistaken(?) identity. Gloria Grahame features again here, this time as Laurel Gray, an actress who starts a relationship with Steele and provides an alibi when the police suspect him of murder. The police aren’t convinced though, and as Gray learns more about her new lover, she begins to have her own suspicions.

Concluding the season, there’s a lesser-seen Bogart classic in the form of Dead Reckoning. This 1947 film from director John Cromwell is a perfect example of a strain of noir that explores the bonds of men returning from war and the familiarity with violence that they brought home. Bogart plays an ex-army captain who sets out to find out who murdered his war buddy Johnny, a path that leads him to Johnny’s former sweetheart (Lizabeth Scott), now working as a singer in a mob-run nightclub. This trip into the past is quintessential noir territory, buoyed by Scott as one of the great femme fatales opposite the film’s veteran leading man.