Posted by ChiBob
on 9/17/2009, 1:21 pm
75.60.17.123
For those of us that have almost all of the American noirs from the classic period (approx 1940-1960), minus the elusive handful, e.g., Shed No Tears, the world of TV noir is the next area to explore. It’s virtually an artistic (dare I say moral) imperative. Gord Gates has been collecting this stuff for years, yet there is so much more out there. One can live with the beaten and battered 16mm TV prints. Where TV noir gets difficult to grasp is in the realization that many of them came from old anthologies, where a noir was interspersed periodically with a comedy or some drama with moral uplift. Consequently, short of going through each title of every anthology show, and trying to guess its “noirness” by title only, about the only other way to pinpoint them is to do some actual research in a specialized film/TV library. I’ve also found this site as a starting point – http://ctva.biz/. Just look under the letter “S” and find SUSPICION and you begin to realize how much we are missing. I’m still hoping that some day all of the San Francisco Beat (aka The Line-Up) episodes can be found.
Now that Paramount has just issued season one of One Step Beyond (which had a handful of noir episodes, like “The Hand” with Robert Loggia) and saved it from the public domain graveyard, I have to believe that many of these old shows are languishing on the shelves of some studio, forgotten and considered useless, except to a dedicated core of fans.
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