When searching for an image to post alongside a Facebook note on TCM's 24-hour Ida Lupino marathon all day tomorrow, I came across this rather resplendent Italian poster for one of my favorite Hollywood b+w films—Fritz Lang's ultra-bitter, cynical as all hell...+ hilarious and brilliant While the City Sleeps. I have many reasons for loving this black-hearted epic—not the least of which is that it's roughly based on the story of "Lipstick Killer" William Heirens, via Lucy Freeman's classic true crime account Before I Kill More... (one of my favorite crime books, bar none)...+ that the teddy boy killer is played by one of my perennial cinematic loves/one of the most beautiful men in history in his youth: John Barrymore Jr. JB had already started losing his boyish loveliness by this time (to find him at his most sublime you have to go further back to Joseph Losey's 1951 The Big Night). But back to this particular epic, it also includes Ida at her loveliest + bitchiest as a proud/admitted opportunistic slut + gossip-monger, with the ever-brilliant George Sanders as her equally opportunistic fishwife cohort, + young Vincent Price in cute-dolt mode (Price was so much more in non-horror mode than he ever was as the ridiculous caricature that he turned into... age-old story). Never mind that Dana Andrews + Sally Forrest are both as hideous/tedious + painful to watch as ever—there's more than enough to make them forgettable here! One of Lang's best Hollywood bitter diatribes, and, with The Blue Gardenia, probably Lang's best for my money (yes, I do love the Hollywood films more than the German ones)...
Also on TCM's line-up + every bit as bitchy + even much more grim, is Robert Aldritch's The Big Knife—another absolute masterwork that I don't have time to even begin to do justice to at the moment, suffice it to that Ida stars as the wife of a young—+ honestly pretty fucking lovely—Jack Palance as a Hollywood star/part-time boxer, with Shelley Winters along for the ride (no pun intended—as her starlet (yes, she was almost thin at the time) gets drunk + run over by a bus!!!), + at the film's ultra-bleak end Ida gives forth with one of the most blood-curdling screams in the history of film. All this + a bile, piss + vinegar-drenched screenplay by Clifford Odets that puts the film version of Sweet Smell of Success to shame (Ernest Lehmann's novella is another story). Just seek it out!
And the goddess Ida's role as one of Hollywood's earliest female directors isn't slighted either, with her Bigamist also included. While this one might be a little too gritty/faux-verite/drab for my taste in some respects, there are other things I love about it, most notably the combination of Ida + Joan Fontaine...
The marathon runs all day tomorrow, August 27, on TCM, but all of these films are findable in some form of another, + testament to a great + beautiful woman... Now if only they had the cojones to include The Trouble with Angels!!! Dig! xo, B.
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