Most of us who love film noir and have seen all the classics are tantalized by the hard little gems that turn up now and then—lost or forgotten noirs that are sometimes as atmospheric as the better-known ones. In his essay “Notes on Film Noir,” from 1972, the director Paul Schrader argues that, measured by “median level of artistry,” the noir cycle of the nineteen-forties and fifties represented Hollywood at its most creative: “Picked at random, a film noir is likely to be a better made film than a randomly selected silent comedy, musical, Western, and so on.” When a noir obscurity shows up on TCM, or is restored under the auspices of the indispensable Film Noir Foundation and screened at one of its Noir City festivals around the country, chances are it will be well worth seeing. It’s likely to be a B movie—so many noirs were—but that won’t mean it’s any less appealing. Noirs were ideally suited to low budgets and low lighting, tight editing and short running times, stolen shots on city streets.
Led down some meandering Internet path not long ago—I’ve since forgotten what I was searching for—I came upon a nifty little suburban noir from 1951, “Cause for Alarm!,” which is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Directed by Tay Garnett (“The Postman Always Rings Twice”), it stars the excellent Loretta Young as a housewife, Ellen Jones, tormented by her sadistic invalid husband (Barry Sullivan). Though it was written and directed by men, “Cause for Alarm!” feels like a work of accidental feminism—a cry for help sent telepathically from the fifties. (Maybe the uncredited writing contribution from Dorothy Kingsley helped.) The film takes as its subject a husband’s sinister campaign to undermine his wife’s perception of reality, but the setting is more conventional and ostensibly benign than that of, say, “Gaslight”—not a crepuscular Victorian mansion but a neat, tidy house in a sun-bleached California suburb. In that bright, smug milieu, Ellen is trapped and watched—by the nosy neighbor, the officious postman, even the cute but insistent little boy who keeps dropping by with his toy TV and six-shooters. Like the men in other noirs who’ve been accused of crimes they didn’t commit, Ellen’s reasonable actions attract suspicion, but, in her case, a maddening condescension, too. A notary who comes to the house to see her husband tells her, “He warned me that I’d get some resistance from you” but that “I wasn’t to take you seriously.” It’s a tense, suspenseful movie, with a wry twist at the end, but it’s also, in its way, a sharp-eyed study of the feminine mystique.
