Today's Noir Birthday

[Surly]

Undercover Girl

Actor Gerald Mohr worked for Orson Welles' Mercury Theater and on Broadway, and he used his deep baritone in an extensive career on radio, from the thirties through the early fifties--Wikipedia credits him with over 4,000 radio plays. Mohr voiced detective Phillip Marlowe from 1948–1951 in 119 half-hour radio plays. He also starred in "The Adventures of Bill Lance" and frequently starred in "The Whistler". Mohr was also in countless television shows in the fifties and sixties.

In film Mohr was Captain Delgado in Gilda (1946), and played Michael Lanyard in three movies of "The Lone Wolf" series in 1946-47. He appeared mostly in Bs: Dr. Broadway (1942), One Dangerous Night (with Warren William as "The Lone Wolf") (1943), Murder in Times Square (1943), The Truth About Murder (1946), Passkey to Danger (1946), The Invisible Informer (1946), and The Blonde Bandit (1950). He was in Undercover Girl (1950), narrated Southside 1-1000 (1950) and Hunt the Man Down (1950). He moved up budget and down the cast list for Sirocco (1951), Detective Story (1951), but had a bigger part in The Sniper (1952). Mohr got top-billing in The Ring (1952), Invasion USA (1952) and Date with Death (1959), but followed Mamie Van Doren in Guns, Girls, and Gangsters (1959).




Guns, Girls, and Gangsters

[Surly]

Hunky actor John Bromfield was in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) and Rope of Sand (1949), but his starring roles were in Bs: Ring of Fear (1954), The Big Bluff (1955), Manfish (1956), Crime Against Joe (1956), and Hot Cars (1956). He was also in Revenge of the Creature (1955) and Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956).


Working for peanuts in Sorry, Wrong Number

[Steve-O]

Undercover Girl

Actor Gerald Mohr worked for Orson Welles' Mercury Theater and on Broadway, and he used his deep baritone in an extensive career on radio, from the thirties through the early fifties--Wikipedia credits him with over 4,000 radio plays. Mohr voiced detective Phillip Marlowe from 1948–1951 in 119 half-hour radio plays. He also starred in "The Adventures of Bill Lance" and frequently starred in "The Whistler". Mohr was also in countless television shows in the fifties and sixties.

In film Mohr was Captain Delgado in Gilda (1946), and played Michael Lanyard in three movies of "The Lone Wolf" series in 1946-47. He appeared mostly in Bs: Dr. Broadway (1942), One Dangerous Night (with Warren William as "The Lone Wolf") (1943), Murder in Times Square (1943), The Truth About Murder (1946), Passkey to Danger (1946), The Invisible Informer (1946), and The Blonde Bandit (1950). He was in Undercover Girl (1950), narrated Southside 1-1000 (1950) and Hunt the Man Down (1950). He moved up budget and down the cast list for Sirocco (1951), Detective Story (1951), but had a bigger part in The Sniper (1952). Mohr got top-billing in The Ring (1952), Invasion USA (1952) and Date with Death (1959), but followed Mamie Van Doren in Guns, Girls, and Gangsters (1959).




Guns, Girls, and Gangsters

Moher is one of those guys that's in everything. The bigger the part, the smaller the movie! I like that he started out as a poor-man's Bogart and ended up being the voice of Green Lantern on the old Aquaman animated show in the 60s.

[Surly]

Moher is one of those guys that's in everything. The bigger the part, the smaller the movie! I like that he started out as a poor-man's Bogart and ended up being the voice of Green Lantern on the old Aquaman animated show in the 60s.

The poor and rich man's Bogarts in Sirocco.


Mohr voiced Reed Richards on the animated Fantastic Four, and was one of a succession of Archies on the half-hour radio series "The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe" (1950–1951).
Sydney Greenstreet starred as Nero Wolfe.

[Surly]

With Jeff Corey in Follow Me Quietly

William Lundigan was in Dishonored Lady (1947), and starred in Mystery in Mexico (Robert Wise, 1948), Follow Me Quietly (Richard Fleischer, 1949), The House on Telegraph Hill (Wise, 1951), appeared in 3-D with Robert Ryan and Rhonda Fleming in Inferno (1953). While at Warner Bros., Lundigan's 'voice with a smile in it' was used as one of the narrators in several of the classic 1940s Looney Tunes cartoons. Lundigan hosted the TV series Climax! (1954-1958) and starred on the series Men Into Space (1959-1960).

[Surly]

Saboteur with Robert Cummings

Priscilla Lane was in The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, 1939), Blues in the Night (1941), Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), and Bodyguard (1948).


Bodyguard with Lawrence Tierney

[Surly]

In the middle of Naked Alibi

Gene Barry's one true noir is Naked Alibi (1954). On television he was Bat Masterson (1958–1961), and starred in Burke's Law (1963–1966), The Name of the Game (1968–1971) and The Adventurer (1972–1973). His films include The Atomic City (1952),
The War of the Worlds (1953), Alaska Seas (1954), Sam Fuller's China Gate and Forty Guns (1957), and Thunder Road (1958).


Shooting it out in Naked Alibi

[Surly]

I'm including Dorothy McGuire for her role in Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase (1945). She also starred in The Enchanted Cottage (1945), Till the End of Time (1946), Invitation (1952), Make Haste to Live (1954), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957).

[waltermcwilliams]

Naked Albi is also "one true noir" I would love to see get a DVD release!!!

[Surly]

Picture Snatcher (1933)

Ralph Bellamy was in The Secret Six (1931), Let Us Live (John Brahm, 1939), the early psychoanalysis crime film, Blind Alley (1939)--it was remade as The Dark Past. Ralph Bellamy was a brilliant third wheel in His Girl Friday (1940), and he was in Brother Orchid (1940) and Queen of the Mob (1940). Bellamy starred as detective Ellery Queen in a B film series: Ellery Queen, Master Detective (1940), Ellery Queen's Penthouse Mystery (1941), Ellery Queen and the Perfect Crime (1941) and Ellery Queen and the Murder Ring (1941.). He was in Footsteps in the Dark (1941), The Wolf Man (1941), The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), The Great Impersonation (1942), Guest in the House (1944), and Lady on a Train (1945).



From Wikipedia: In 1949, Bellamy starred in the drama Man Against Crime (aka Follow That Man) on the DuMont Television Network; the program lasted until 1956, when the lead role was taken by Frank Lovejoy.

''Television in those days was interesting. It was a whole new field to begin with. We shot our show on kinescope, and of course, T.V. not having developed, there was no chain across the country. They mailed the kinescope to all the other towns that used it," reminisced Bellamy about the birth of television."We did Man Against Crime from Grand Central Station in New York. None of the studios had been prepared for television at the beginning. And they had been experimenting with T.V. upstairs at Grand Central Station. In addition to our series, they did The Ford Theater and I Remember Mama from Grand Central. There were just two studios, and they managed to bring off all three shows.
"Man Against Crime was the first private eye show, and we were copied several times. And I know one thing. .. I had a short vacation and my wife and I went to England. I wanted to buy a trench coat. And I said to the salesman, 'I wanted everything on that you can put on the coat... front, back, chest, shoulders....everything." And he said (Bellamy went into an English accent, imitating the salesman), 'You mean one Iyke Danny Kaye's?' And I said, 'Yes, I do.' I wore that trench coat as "Mike Barnett". And I think I was the first private eye in a trench coat. From that point on, most private eyes wore trench coats." Much in the same way that "James Bond" would later introduce himself as "Bond, James Bond", "Mike Barnett" used to always say, "Mike Barnett, with two T's", whenever he introduced himself on Man Against Crime.
From http://www.classichollywoodbios.com/ralphbellamy.htm


Man Against Crime

[Surly]

Faith Domergue's shot at noir fame came in Where Danger Lives (1950) with Robert Mitchum. She had an uncredited cameo in Hardly a Criminal (1949). Filming began on Vendetta (1950) in 1946, but the production was plagued with problems. At least five directors worked on it, some leaving when they were either fired or quit because of producer Howard Hughes' constant interference, others being hired only to shoot retakes or small bits of new footage. She was in Cult of the Cobra, This Island Earth, The Atomic Man, It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), Spin a Dark Web (1956), and Violent Stranger (aka Man in the Shadow) (1957).

[Surly]

I Bury the Living

Richard Boone became famous as Palladin on the TV series Have Gun – Will Travel (1957-1963). Boone was in Vicki (1953), Dragnet (1954), The Big Knife (1955), The Garment Jungle (1957), Ocean's 11 (1960) and The Big Sleep (1978). He was in several good westerns, and at least one great one, The Tall T (1957), and the horror film I Bury the Living (1958) .

[Surly]

With Dean Stockwell in Compulsion

E. G. Marshall was in The House on 92nd Street (1945) (uncredited), 13 Rue Madeleine (1947) (uncredited), Call Northside 777 (1948) (uncredited), Pushover (1954), 12 Angry Men (1957), Compulsion (1959) and The Chase (1966). Marshall was best known for his television role as the lawyer Lawrence Preston on The Defenders in the 1960s, and was the original host of the nightly radio drama, The CBS Radio Mystery Theater.

[Surly]

The Thief

Martin Gabel was an American actor, film director and film producer. From Wikipedia, Gabel's credits include...The Lost Moment (1947) (director), Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947) (associate producer), Dr. Strauss in Fourteen Hours (1951), Charlie Marshall, crime boss, in M (1951), Tomas Rienz in Deadline - U.S.A. (1952), Mr. Bleek in The Thief (1952), Bert Smith in Tip on a Dead Jockey (1957), George Vincent in The Crimebusters (1961), Chief of police in The Power and the Glory (1961), Sidney Strutt in Marnie (1964), Morton Craft in Goodbye Charlie (1964), Al Munger in Lady in Cement (1968), Warden LeGoff in There Was a Crooked Man... (1970), Meade De Ruyter in the Harry O TV movie, Smile, Jenny, You're Dead (1974), Baruch 'Bob' Waldman, Crime Boss in Contract on Cherry Street (1977), and Christopher Langley in The First Deadly Sin (1980). In the 1950s Gabel was an occasional panelist on What's My Line?


Marnie

[Surly]

As the police detective in Impact

Charles Coburn specialized in comedy, and he mixed crime and comedy in Shady Lady (1945) and How to Murder a Rich Uncle (1957). But he was also in Lured (1947), The Paradine Case (1947), B.F.'s Daughter (1948), Impact (1949), the Mickey Spillaine adaptation The Long Wait (1954), and the British mystery Town on Trial (1957).


With Helen Walker in Impact

[Surly]

His Kind of Woman

Jane Russell was paired with Robert Mitchum in His Kind of Woman (1951) and Macao (1952). She was in The Las Vegas Story (1952) and the adaptation of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novel, Darker Than Amber (1970). Here she is in singing "You Kill Me" in Macao:

[Surly]

The bio on Wikipedia of voice and character actor Paul Frees makes for fascinating reading. In addition to all his voiceover narration and animation work, Frees "reportedly dubbed for Humphrey Bogart in his final film The Harder They Fall. Bogart was suffering at the time from what would be diagnosed as esphageal cancer and thus could barely be heard in some takes, hence the need for Frees to dub in his voice." There are other interesting stories. Naturally, Frees did a lot of radio work, including the shows Suspense, Escape, and Crime Classics, and had a starring role as The Green Lama. Frees appeared in many films, including Force of Evil (1948), Red Light (1949), Hunt the Man Down (1950), The Company She Keeps (1951), The Thing from Another World (1951), His Kind of Woman (1951), The People Against O'Hara (1951), The Las Vegas Story (1952), Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), and Suddenly(1954).

[Surly]

Kind Hearts and Coronets

British actor Dennis Price is probably best known for Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). Some of his other films are Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (1944), The Echo Murders (1945), Dear Murderer (1947), Snowbound(1948), Good-Time Girl (1948), Murder at 3am (1953), Noose for a Lady (1953), Time Is My Enemy (1954), Fortune is a Woman (1957), The Naked Truth (1957), Victim (1961), Murder Most Foul (1964), Ten Little Indians (1965) and Theatre of Blood (1973).


With Eric Portman in Dear Murderer

[Surly]

With Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly

Model and actress Leigh Snowden was "Cheesecake" in Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and was also in The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), Outside the Law (1956), and Hot Rod Rumble (1957).

[Surly]

Bury Me Dead with Hugh Beaumont

Happy birthday to June Lockhart. Most folks remember her as the mother in two TV series, Lassie (a role that she played from 1959–64) and Lost in Space (1965–68), and some, god help them, for Troll (1986). Fewer know that over a decade earlier she had played the title role in She-Wolf of London (1946), and perhaps only noir hounds recall that Lockhart portrayed Mary Genaro in Anthony Mann's T-Men (1947), and starred in Bury Me Dead (1947). In the 1950s Lockhart moved into television and didn't look back. She was in the TV movie Who Is the Black Dahlia? (1975). She is the daughter of Canadian-born actor Gene Lockhart.


She-Wolf of London