Thinking about online film discussions (+ a recommendation for He Walked by Night)

I have been thinking about hosting a few online discussions around cinema —I hesitate at this point to call them “film-appreciation classes”, though that is what the eventual goal is — and I wondered in particular if there might be takers for conversations around American/British films of the 1930s and 1940s. Across genres: from noir and psychological horror (e.g. Val Lewton) to screwball comedy (Preston Sturges) and films that are hard to classify (the works of Powell-Pressburger). The idea being 1) to examine ways of “reading” a film by looking closely at specific works, 2) to acquire a deeper sense of film history - something that I know many young movie enthusiasts struggle with today, given all the demands on their time — and how the past has influenced the present. 

Anyway, I will provide updates about such a project here (and hopefully some of this blog's readers will be interested). But for now, a quick B-noir recommendation. A couple of such films are playing on Mubi India, among them the 1948 He Walked by Night. 

This is a lean and gripping low-budget movie, structurally unusual for its time, and it has some historical importance too: it was while playing a supporting role in this film that the actor Jack Webb came up with the idea for the police-procedural series Dragnet — a show with a long and very influential run on both TV and radio. (Dragnet might not mean very much to Indian viewers — even those of us who know old Hollywood quite well — but it helped prepare the ground for much later police shows that we do know, such as Hill Street Blues.)

Much like another 1948 film The Naked City (which also led to a TV series much later, and which I wrote about here), He Walked by Night is made in a semi-documentary style. Though it has a narrative and a dramatic arc, it also focuses on the painstaking nuts and bolts of police-work: forensics, the creation of a suspect profile based on the testimonies of several witnesses, and of course sheer luck. 
 
One more point of note: a year before a much more famous (and respectable) film noir, The Third Man, this film features a climax where the antagonist runs through a complex network of storm drains, with the police in pursuit. These sequences may not be as poetically constructed and shot as the corresponding scenes in The Third Man (and there are no canted angles!), but they are gritty and suspenseful in their own right. A very fine film if you have a taste for this sub-genre. 

P.S. like Paatal Lok, He Walked by Night also has a “villain” who seems to care for dogs. This is turning into a motif…