Saturday, December 02, 2017

TCM's Film Noir of the Week for Sunday, December 3, at 10 a.m. ET, is Pushover (1954), Starring Fred MacMurray, One of the Most Underrated Actors of All Time, and Kim Novak

 

 

By David in TN
Friday, December 1, 2017 at 7:53:00 P.M. EST

 

TCM's Film Noir of the Week for Sunday, December 3, at 10 a.m. ET, is Pushover (1954). It stars Fred MacMurray and Kim Novak in the standard Noir trope of a sap who falls for a woman and gets himself deeper and deeper into bad trouble. This time the sap is a cop gone wrong.

 

Fred and Kim times two
 

Novak plays the girlfriend of a bank robber whom MacMurray is trying to catch as part of an undercover operation. Novak tempts MacMurray into a plan to kill her boyfriend and run off with the bank heist loot. Things go bad from there.
 

 

Fred MacMurray plays a character similar to his most famous role, in Double Indemnity, in which he was an insurance salesman. In Pushover he is a detective.

 

Philip Carey and Dorothy Malone
 

N.S.: Fred MacMurray is one of the greatest actors to never get nominated for an Oscar. He should have been up for Best Actor for his performance as insurance man Walter Neff, in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944); for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as cowardly, manipulative novelist, Lieutenant Tom Keefer, in Willie Dieterle’s The Caine Mutiny (1954), instead of Rod Steiger, from On the Waterfront; and probably yet again for Best Supporting Actor for his turn as amoral, philandering executive Jeff D. Sheldrake, in Wilder’s The Apartment (1960), instead of Jack Kruschen, from the same picture.
 

 

Kim Novak was also an underrated actress. She gave one of the greatest performances of all time by a lead actress in Alfred Hitchcock’s doppelgänger masterpiece, Vertigo 1958, which unfortunately bombed. Due to the picture’s box office failure, Vertigo was only nominated for Oscars for Best Sound and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration.


 





Novak in her doppelgänger role in Vertigo: as Madeleine, L, and as Judy
 

Today Novak is 84, and works as an artist.
 

 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

jerry pdx
Yet another white woman makes the mistake of getting involved with a negro male. The remains of army veteran Julia Jacobson and her box terrier Boogie, were found in a shallow grave in rural Riverside County, Ontario California. Her negro husband, Dalen Ware, told police where he buried her for a plea bargain. I'm almost afraid to know what that plea bargain is. 20 yrs. with time off for good behavior? Maybe ends up being 12 yrs? Plenty young enough to murder more white women. Photos of her show a very attractive young woman, yet this Dalen Ware is a hideous mofo. She can pick and choose and this is what she wants. I don't know what the psychological explanation would be but it would have to be a mental aberration of some kind. This mope wasn't satisfied with just murdering her, he killed her dog also. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/12/02/remains-missing-army-veteran-dog-found-in-shallow-grave.html

David In TN said...

The TCM Film Noir of the Week for Sunday, December 10, at 10 am ET is The Breaking Point (1950). This is based on Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not and is more faithful to Hemingway's story than Howard Hawks 1944 film.

John Garfield stars as a charter boat owner forced by looming poverty to smuggle illegal aliens (Chinese) from Mexico into the U.S. In Noir fashion, Garfield is double-crossed by the smugglers and gets in trouble with the Mexican government.

Patricia Neal plays the femme fatale and Phyllis Thaxter his faithful wife.

Garfield then gets involved with a crooked lawyer played by Wallace Ford fronting for would be stick-up men. It concludes in a shoot-out on board Garfield's boat.

Our host Eddie Muller considers this the best film ever made on a Hemingway story.