The Blind Alley by Jake Hinson

For fifty years this film [Pushover] hasn't gotten its due.  Perhaps because it stars Fred MacMurray as an antihero manipulated by a dangerous woman it was labeled a rip-off of Double Indemnity, but this label says more about the laziness of film critics than it does about the film itself.  Pushover is a major achievement, a spectacular film noir that deserves reassessment
--Jake Hinson, The Blind Alley


Even those of us with a certificate of completion for the online multimedia course "Into the Darkness: Investigating Film Noir" from Ball State University will learn a great deal from the facts and insights in The Blind Alley (Broken River Books, 2015); Hinson's analysis of Pushover in the context of director Richard Quine's career is particularly noteworthy.

I first came across Hinson's writing in Eddie Muller's on-line magazine, "Noir City," where he wrote a useful analysis of W.Lee Wilder's career (not included in this book, unfortunately).  The most interesting pieces in The Blind Alley are about relatively obscure actors (Art Smith, Ted de Corsia), actresses (Barbara Payton, Martha Vickers) and directors (Felix Feist, Cy Endfield) who made significant contributions to the noir universe.  And there are new and interesting views of the film noir work of more well-known actors and directors, including Tom Neal, Sterling Hayward and Orson Welles, as well as the writers --such as Cornell Woolrich, "he was the master of the set-up" -- whose stories and novels were sources for film noir.

The Blind Alley passes a crucial test for me:  does it have things to say about films I've seen and haven't seen that make me want to see them again or for the first time.  A fair number of these films are available on video but many of those that are not sometimes turn up on Turner Classic Movies.  My minor quibble with the book is that the copyediting is occasionally sloppy, which happens too often these days, even with major publishers.