Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 143: Sat May 23

The File on Thelma Jordon (Siodmak, 1950):
BFI Southbank, NFT, 6.20pm (35mm screening)



This film, which is part of the Robert Siodmak season, also screens on 25th May. Full details here.

Time Out review:
A fine film noir which works an ingenious, intricate variation on the situation in Double Indemnity, but which takes its tone, unlike Wilder's film, not from Barbara Stanwyck's glittering siren who courts her own comeuppance ('Judgement day, Jordon!'), but from the nondescript assistant DA she drives to the brink of destruction. The part is played (remarkably well) by Wendell Corey, whose haunted, hangdog persona as a perennial loser is echoed so perfectly by the deliberately slow, inexorable tempo of Siodmak's direction (not to mention George Barnes' superbly bleak lighting) that the film emerges with a quality akin to Lang's dark, romantic despair.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the original trailer.

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