Private Hell 36 (1954)

Brilliant intrigue getting you on a wayward journey through webs and jams of complications, especially concerning relationships, the outcome of which is impossible to guess - you can't even guess what's round the corner.The film opens brilliantly with a regular burglary getting into trouble with hard knocks completely ruining a well furnished drugstore, and that's only the introduction. The curious thing is, that although nothing much happens for the next 30 minutes or so, as the two policemen set out an an impossible quest in search of a haystack to begin with in order to be able to start looking for a needle in it, which enterprise involves some boring routine, which not even horse races can brighten up, the film is tremendously exciting all the way, simply because you can't possibly know what to expect. Then Ida Lupino suddenly is helpful.She is the star of the film, she always makes interesting characters of more than one shade and deep shadows into it, and here she really (unintentionally) gets her policeman involved in a serious fall.Don Siegel was a genius comparable with Ben Hecht for poignant dialogue and smashing stories. When the plot finally gets going here, things really happen unexpectedly, and mystery is added to the complications, until everything is resolved in the end with a wonderful sens morale, for a gratifying release out of the unbearable excitement.One mystery remains though after things get settled down. You'll never know what happened to Ida Lupino afterwards. She will probably just go on singing, maybe even "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", like she did when she got the plot started.

Private Hell 36 refers to what Ida Lupino at age 36 was going thru because she looked like she was 46. Here she plays hotsy-totsy vaa-vaa-voom chanteuse opposite gum chewing police detective Steve Cochran, who was 37 at the time. Cochran's police partner is Howard Duff (Ida's real life hubby at the time). After a lot of time wasted getting to the real plot, Duff & Cochran stumble across a strongbox of $200k in hot $$$ from a NYC robbery-murder. Cochran stuffs his pocket with $80k, Duff is dumbfounded but soon it's too late and he is absorbed by his participation, so much so that he goes thru private hell for the rest of the flick because of the $$$ which Cochran has hidden in a small trailer he has rented in a trailer park. It's trailer #36. Duff's Private Hell. Trailer #36. Ge it? Little twists happen, Duff tells Cochran they must come clean, Cochran says sure nuff, they go to the trailer, Duff gets the dough, Cochran pulls his gun to blast Duff, but a voice calls out, shots are fired, people scatter, mild mayhem. Duff is wounded, Cochran's dead and the surprise ending is surprising. It's watchable, too much time at the race track and the villain has nice old Packaard which crashes down the usual ravine. I love old movies with car crashes cause they looked real back before every crash now looks like 100 megaton, 1,000 gallons of gas explosion and fireball visible from outer space. The film "Impact" has a nice old Packard too.

No, not really.Two detectives, Jack Farnham and Cal Bruner are deeply investigating a robbery in which $300,000 was stolen. As their investigation progresses, they, by way of a sultry woman called Lilli Marlowe, manage to find the perp and recover the cash. But Bruner has fallen for Marlowe, and realising she has expensive tastes and that his police salary can not sustain the relationship, he ponders turning to the dark side, with Farnham equally at odds with himself over the pressures of raising a family.Is Private Hell 36 a Noir film? Well I'm no paid expert on the subject but it certainly has all the ingredients in place. Yet the film, in spite of some watchable attributes, is a largely character driven talky piece of fluff that isn't really raising the bar in film noir. Or, in fact, crime picture history. Certainly it's not a film that screams out that it was directed by Don Siegel. It's a solid premise to work from, and in Ida Lupino (Marlowe) and the great Steve Cochran (Bruner), the picture boasts two very fine performances, with each actor giving the film its emotional weight. A nod of approval also goes to the scoring of the piece by Leith Stevens, as jazzy blues like combos flit in and out to create an ear worthy alliance as our detectives battle with their very conscience. All things considered it's an enjoyable enough piece, but one that fades very quick from the memory. Solid if unspectacular, and reliable if lacking in any major amount of thrills and brain tickling plotting. 5/10

Though it's tempting to regard every black and white crime thriller as noir, there's a danger of reading too much into the merely monotone.As here. This isn't film noir but film monotone, devoid of the irony, and the anger, of genre classics and instead graced by, and in part compensated with, some often sassy dialog and Cochran's acting.As a movie, it's a mess: the title relates to a location of stolen money, but the money isn't stolen until well past the half way point in the running time, and so nobody's in hell, public or private, for almost an hour but are instead laboriously working their way to that point in the script when the movie can actually begin.A curio for Siegel fans, and those with fond memories of Republic, but otherwise more like purgatory than the brand of Hades it purports to chronicle.