So I was standing outside the Film Forum, looking at the schedule posted there and deciding whether I wanted to see yet another B Noir or L’Armée des Ombres (Army of Shadows), when out of nowhere this cute girl asks what I’m planning to see and starts talking with me about how she saw Army and thought it was great. Blah, blah; we talked about movies. Then she told me she bought a necklace today and pulled it out of her bag to show me. It was beads interspersed with what appeared to be large Chiclets speckled with glitter, and she held it up to my neck and said it’d look good with the shirt I was wearing.
At this point, Necklacegirl’s friend, who was inside the theater buying tickets, came out and started talking to me about the movie they were going to see, Stagedoor, and that she had briefly been a child actor. I told her I worked on the floor above an audition studio on Eighth Avenue and she said she knew the place. I couldn’t think of anything else to say so I said, “What’d you do, cereal commercials?” Coincidentally, that’s exactly what she did, one in 1989 for Breakfast With Barbie, a limited edition Ralston Purina cereal that she said tasted like sickly sweet cotton candy. She had to cheerfully ladle many spoonfuls of it into her mouth, but spit it into a bucket as soon as the camera stopped rolling. She also appeared in a Six Flags commercial when she was 14 but looked 10, and Necklacegirl cheerfully interjected, to Cerealgirl’s apparent embarrassment, that the ad still runs occasionally.
So were these young ladies just being friendly like, or were they hitting on me, or what? I was wearing my nice pants, the ones that several of my female coworkers have complimented, so perhaps that was it. But maybe they were grifters; having seen all this noir lately, I’m suspicious of loose women. I would have offered to see the same movie they were, in order to gather more information, but I wasn’t interested in showtunes and hyperkinetic pint-sized fabulousness. I think I need a contingency plan if this ever happens again.
Also, I should have opted for Army because the B-Noir I saw, Trapped, was the pits. Counterfeiter Lloyd Bridges (Jeff’s dad) breaks free from federal custody and tries to track down his ex-partners, who have been profiting from his operation since he was jailed seven years ago. Along the way, he unwittingly leads the feds to close in on the racket. Barbara Payton plays the dame while John Hoyt channels Alan Arkin as the secret service agent undercover as the high-stakes gambler who gains Bridges’ confidence.
It’s a snoozer with robotic line readings and some of the worst fake fighting and reaction-takes I’ve ever seen, even accounting for the stagy conventions of most films made before the 1970s. The best line is a throwaway at the beginning by a bank teller to a flustered merchant, who has tried to deposit a $20 bill unknowingly accepted as counterfeit. The teller explains some of the fake’s imperfections, chiding, “You’ve got to look for these things in a bill of this size.” See, the movie was made in 1949, when $20 was a lot of money. Ha ha!