They Drive by Night (1940)

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1. 

   locovoco

   And the award for best actress portraying an insane female in film noir goes to.....IDA LUPINO as Lana Carlsen in "They Drive By Night"...let us pause for a moment and hear Miss Lupino in her award-winning role: "The doors made me do it...yes it was the doors...AH HAH HAH HAH!"....I believe somewhere it was heard told that even Bette Davis and Joan Crawford paused for a moment from their respective whirlwind cocktail of psychoses and whispered to each other- 'That bitch is crazy'... but that's ok Collin Wilcox, your award for craziest female on a witness stand as Miss Mayella Violet Ewell in "To Kill A Mockingbird" is still intact- and that's all for today in the news of FILM NOIR- good black & white to all.... 7 years 10 months ago
2. 

   jdjudge

   Ida Lupino owns this. 13 years 5 months ago
3. 

   Siskoid

   Ann Sheridan gets all the best lines in They Drive by Night, a movie about the trucking world as it was in 1940, and if it had been more bantery like that all the way through, I would have loved the movie. As is, it's got a topic, but not a clear story it wants to tell. Two brothers (including pre-stardom Humphrey Bogart) drive a truck, are trying to pay it off, are part of a community of drivers, have ups and down, and one of them finds love, but there's also Ida Lupino playing the femme fatale spoiler, and while she's good as this tiny, angular blade of a dame, she seems to belong in another movie. So it all comes across as this happens and then this happens and then this happens... abandoning one road after another and after its flirtation with Noir, ending up in a cute - yes, I'll admit that - but tonally askew ending. I was engaged all the way through, but couldn't tell if I was watching a drama, a comedy, a romance, a thriller, or a melodrama, as if the movie had been made by six different writers and directors handing their work over to the next person like some exquisite corpse. The world would wait another 17 years for the Brits to make a more focused truck driver opus, Hell Riders. 3 years 10 months ago

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