Today's Noir Birthday

[Surly]

With Humphrey Bogart and Walter Brennan in To Have and Have Not

Character actor Walter Sande had a recurring role as Detective Mathews in the Boston Blackie series. He began working mostly in Bs: Those High Grey Walls (1939), Scandal Sheet (1939), Convicted Woman (1940), Men Without Souls (1940), Meet Boston Blackie (1941), Secrets of the Lone Wolf (1941), Confessions of Boston Blackie (1941), Sealed Lips (1942), Alias Boston Blackie (1942), After Midnight with Boston Blackie (1943) and The Spider (1945). He was in The Blue Dahlia (1946), Nocturne (1946), The Red House (1947), The Woman on the Beach (1947), Killer McCoy (1947), Half Past Midnight (1948), Blonde Ice (1948), Strange Bargain (1949), 711 Ocean Drive (1950), Dark City (1950), Tomorrow Is Another Day (1951), A Place in the Sun (1951), The Basketball Fix (1951), The Racket (1951), The Steel Trap (1952), Invaders from Mars (1953), A Blueprint for Murder (1953), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), and Young Dillinger (1965). He also worked a lot on TV.


With Myrna Dell in Nocturne

[Surly]

In a Lonely Place

Actress Jeff Donnell was in The Power of the Whistler (1945), Night Editor (1946), the Boston Blackie film The Phantom Thief (1946), The Unknown (1946), Mr. District Attorney (1947), Post Office Investigator (1949), In a Lonely Place (1950), Walk Softly, Stranger (1950), The Blue Gardenia (1953), and she played secretary to Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Donnell also did a lot of television.


With Frank Lovejoy in In a Lonely Place

[Steve-O]

With Charles Bronson in Machine-Gun Kelly

B movie actress Susan Cabot had uncredited bits in Kiss of Death (1947), The Enforcer (1951), then appeared mostly in westerns before starring in several films for Roger Corman: Carnival Rock(1957), Sorority Girl (1957), War of the Satellites (1958), Machine-Gun Kelly (1958) and The Wasp Woman (1959).

According to the IMDb: In 1959, she began a relationship with King Hussein of Jordan. The couple was engaged, but broke up after King Hussein discovered that Cabot was Jewish.

And: On December 10, 1986, Cabot's son, Timothy Scott Roman, who suffered from dwarfism and psychological problems, clobbered her to death in her home in Encino, California with a weight lifting bar. He was subsequently charged with involuntary manslaughter and received a three-year suspended sentence. Hmmm...is "clobbered" a legal term?

more noir stars with cats:

[Surly]

more noir stars with cats:

Cats? What's with the cats?

[Surly]

CHARLIE CHAN IN SHANGHAI (1935) with Charles Locher (Jon Hall)

Television and film actress Irene Hervey was in Motive for Revenge (1935), The League of Frightened Men (1937), The House of Fear (1939), Missing Evidence (1939), San Francisco Docks (1940), Gang Busters (serial) (1942), Half Way to Shanghai (1942), Night Monster (1942), The Lucky Stiff (1948), Manhandled (1949), Chicago Deadline (1949), A Cry in the Night (1956), and Play Misty for Me (1971). Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Hervey appeared in on television shows including Richard Diamond, Private Detective, Peter Gunn, and Hawaiian Eye, and she had a stint on the short lived series Honey West as the titular character's Aunt Meg.

[Surly]

Obviously known for other work, actor Yul Brynner did appear in the crime film about narcotics smuggling, Port of New York (1949). According to Wikipedia, "Port of New York is a 1949 film shot in semidocumentary style. The film is notable for being Yul Brynner's first movie. He had not begun shaving his hair yet." He was never in a noir, but he did make several thrillers, including the TV movie Poppies Are Also Flowers (1966), and The Double Man (1967), The File of the Golden Goose (1969), as well as the cop comedy Fuzz (1972) and the Italian mafia film Death Rage (1976).

[Surly]

Today is the birthday of Tab Hunter, another actor not known for noir, who nevertheless made his film debut in Joseph Losey's film about immigrant fruit pickers,The Lawless (1950). Wikipedia quotes film critic Thom Andersen, who describes the film as an "example of film gris, a more cynical variety of film noir with leftist themes." Hunter also made the 1964 British crime film Troubled Waters (aka Man with Two Faces), and Curtis Hanson's Sweet Kill (aka A Kiss from Eddie aka The Arousers) (1973).

[Surly]

With Marilyn Monroe in Clash by Night

Actor Keith Andes was in the anti-commie Project X (1949), Clash by Night (1952), Split Second (1953), A Life at Stake (1954), Back from Eternity (1956), Model for Murder (1959), and Damn Citizen (1958). That film's based-on-fact plot--a chief of police charged with ridding his department of corruption--was the inspiration for Andes' 1959 TV series This Man Dawson.


Damn Citizen

[Surly]

Republic's answer to Sonja Henie and Belita, Czechoslovakian born ice skater and actress Vera Hruba Ralston never quite shed her accent--or learned how to act. She was in The Lady and the Monster (1944), Storm Over Lisbon (1944), Murder in the Music Hall (1946), The Flame (1947), Hoodlum Empire (1952), Accused of Murder (1956) The Notorious Mr. Monks (1958), and The Man Who Died Twice (1958).

[Surly]

With Dana Andrews in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

Actor Sidney Blackmer's only noir was Fritz Lang's last American film, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956). Blackmer started in The Perils of Pauline (1914) and was in many mysteries and crime films: Little Caesar (1931), Behind the Green Lights (1935), Missing Girls (1936), The President's Mystery (1936), The House of Secrets (1936), The Last Gangster (1937), Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo (1937), While New York Sleeps (1938), Convict's Code (1939), Within the Law (1939), Framed (1940), Murder Among Friends (1941), Ellery Queen and the Perfect Crime (1941), Nazi Agent (1942), and he received top billing in The Panther's Claw (1942). he was in Quiet Please: Murder (1942), Murder in Times Square (1943), The Lady and the Monster (1944), Duel in the Sun (1946), Accused of Murder (1956) and Rosemary's Baby (1968).

[Surly]

Happy birthday to Harrison Ford.

[Surly]

In The Set-Up with Edwin Max

A contract player at Warner Brothers, reliable character actor George Tobias was in many films, including They Drive by Night (1940), City for Conquest (1940), East of the River (1940), Out of the Fog (1941), Mildred Pierce (1945), Her Kind of Man (1946), Nobody Lives Forever (1946), The Set-Up (1949), Southside 1-1000 (1950), The Tattered Dress (1957) and Nightmare in the Sun (1965). Tobias moved into television, eventually playing next door neighbor Abner Kravitz on Bewitched from 1964-1971.

[Surly]

With Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear

Happy birthday to singer and actress Polly Bergen. Her films include Cry of the Hunted (Joseph H. Lewis, 1953), the rodeo drama Arena (Richard Fleischer, 1953),
and Cape Fear (1962).

[Surly]

In Sunset Blvd with William Holden

Happy birthday to actress Nancy Olson. Olson was in Sunset Blvd (1950), Union Station (1950) and Big Jim McLain (1952).

[Surly]

Pushover

Philip Carey was in I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison (1951), This Woman Is Dangerous (1952), Pushover (1954), Wicked as They Come (1956), The Shadow on the Window (1957), Screaming Mimi (1958), The Trunk (1962), FBI Code 98 (1963) and Dead Ringer (1964). He worked a lot in television, where he starred as Philip Marlowe for one season (1959–1960).

Here's a link to an episode of Carey as Philip Marlowe. It's called "Murder is a Grave", and features actress Maxine Cooper, Mike Hammer's "Velda" in Kiss Me Deadly.

[Surly]

Happy birthday to Harry Dean Stanton, 86.

[Surly]

Character actor Robert H. Harris (July 15, 1911 – November 30, 1981)

From Wikipedia: From 1950 onwards, (Harris) appeared extensively on television series, specializing in playing shady, if not outright evil, characters. From 1953–1956 he played Jake Goldberg in The Goldbergs, one of his few sympathetic roles. In 1957, Harris played the lead role in The Court of Last Resort. He also made many guest appearances in many other TV series. These include eight appearances in Alfred Hitchcock Presents between 1956–1961 and six appearances in Perry Mason between 1958–1965. He has also appeared in other television series such as 77 Sunset Strip, Ben Casey and Rawhide. He starred in the original version of the B-movie horror film How to Make a Monster and had a notable appearance in Edward Dmytryk's film Mirage, as the obsessive-compulsive consulting psychiatrist. He played a rich cuckold in Elia Kazan's "America, America."

[Surly]

From Wikipedia: Albert Popwell (15 July 1926 - 9 April 1999), was an African American actor in television and films from the late 1960s. Born in New York City, Popwell started as a professional dancer before taking up a career in acting.
He was more prolific on TV in character roles in various series, but he is perhaps best known for his appearances in films opposite Clint Eastwood, whom he supported on five occasions, notably in the first four films of the Dirty Harry series. He was a wounded bank robber at the receiving end of Eastwood's now legendary "Do you feel lucky?" monologue from Dirty Harry (1971) and was most notable as a murderous pimp in Magnum Force (1973). He appeared as Big Ed Mustapha in the The Enforcer (1976) and on the right side of the law, as Eastwood's partner in Sudden Impact (1983). He did not appear in the last film in the series, The Dead Pool, due to a scheduling conflict.

[Surly]

With Dana Andrews and Linda Darnell in Fallen Angel

Percy W. Kilbride was a character actor who made a career of playing country hicks, most memorably as Pa Kettle in the Ma and Pa Kettle series of feature films. But Kilbride was also in Guest in the House (1944), Fallen Angel (1945), Riffraff (1947), and Mr. Soft Touch (1949).

[Surly]

The File on Thelma Jordon