This past Sunday night at Hollywood's historic Egyptian Theatre, as part of Noir City 10, the tenth annual festival of film noir (13 Nights… 27 films… NO HAPPY ENDINGS!"), I saw a double bill of obscure "swamp noir" features from the 1950s. I'm a sucker for any movie set in a swamp. It's part and parcel of being a New England Swamp Yankee relocated to arid Los Angeles. I love me some tales of passion and lust set down in bayou country or the steamy everglades. Gators, snakes, kudzu, quicksand and sweat stains galore… I just can't get enough of dat old "swamp noir." Last night's pairing was kicked off with MGM's Cry of the Hunted (1953). Directed by Joseph H. Lewis (Gun Crazy), the film was written by Jack Leonard, who had contributed to the original story for The Narrow Margin (1952) the year before and was one of several scribes on Columbia's interesting Man in the Dark (1953), in which career criminal Edmund O'Brien undergoes experimental brain surgery to remove the criminal urge. There's a similar psychological kink to Cry of the Hunted, which begins with the standard crime film trope of a desperate but essentially honorable criminal (Vittorio Gassman, playing a Cajun) going on the run from the law and pursued by weary cop Barry Sullivan.

Leonard's script is rife with cracking dialogue and probably too many one-liners but Cry of the Hunted is so out of left field in its second act complication that you hate to assign it demerits for occasionally spinning its wheels. Tracking Gassman to his Louisiana backwater, Sullivan trades barbs with local cop Harry Shannon (Citizen Kane) and with city detective William Conrad (The Killers), who has his sights fixed on taking Sullivan's job. Catching up with Gassman at his bayou shack, Sullivan allows the fugitive a final romantic clutch with his Creole wife (Mary Zavian) but is double crossed with a conk on the head. Coming to, he unwisely drinks swamp water and experiences the koo-koo craziest of fever dreams in which the banked homoeroticism that has shadowed his relationship with Gassman boils over in some near-dance choreography, rolling ground fog and potted explosions that stop this chase drama cold and turn the whole affair into a case history of thwarted passions.

Who the hell knows what Cry of the Hunted is really about but it has some interesting and even (for the time) daring ideas about societal norms of behavior and affection versus what actually goes on when the structures of society fade away, leaving us at the mercy of raw emotion and instinct. The film juxtaposes Sullivan's playfully querulous home life with a pert, cocktail jiggering Polly Bergen (the pair share a surprisingly naughty sexual repartee in one scene that concludes with Sullivan sticking a phallic celery stalk between Bergen's teeth and Bergen delivering a castrating bite) and Gassman's stormy relationship to Zavian, whose naive and even crude performance nonetheless reveals a ferality that makes her character tougher than all of the menfolk combined. The film ends with a surprisingly soft (and not very persuasive) coda but the 75 minutes leading up to it is fascinatingly bizarre and off the wall. Cry of the Hunted is not available on DVD and perhaps never will be, making last night's screening especially valuable.

Far more obscure (and equally unavailable on DVD) is the low budget Regal Films production Lure of the Swamp (1957), which was distributed (but probably not well) by 20th Century Fox. Hubert Cornfield (Night of the Following Day) directed a script by William George (of the TV series Highway Patrol), adapted from the novel by pulp novelist Gil Brewer. There are echoes of A Simple Plan (1998) in this tale of a suitcase full of ill-gotten cash moldering in the Florida everglades as a trio of criminals vie for possession of the booty by cozying up to swamp guide Marshall Thompson, the only man who can get them to the hiding place deep inside the brush. The film's cheapness limits the number of settings, which gives the production a dream-like quality as various disparate (and desperate) characters pop up without introduction in and around Thompson's shack like symbols from his subconscious, shattering the simplicity of his life and queering his relationship to local girl Joan Lora (Bloodlust!). The cast is small but when Jack Elam (Kiss Me Deadly) and Leo Gordon (Riot in Cellblock 11) are in the same room nobody's complaining. A bespectacled Willard Parker (The Earth Dies Screaming) turns up early on and icy Joan Vohs (seen in 3D in William Castle's Fort Ti) slinks in later on as an Older Other Woman for Marshall to get all hot and bothered about for all the wrong reasons. As in Cry of the Hunted, characters circle one another, sweating bullets and spitting ultimatums while quicksand is again employed as a sucking deus ex machina, bringing this mossy morality tale to a memorably outre finish. I'm not saying Lure of the Swamp is must-see cinema but, boy, you should've seen it!

Noir City 10 runs at The Egyptian until April 24th. Some upcoming theme nights include a Steve Cochran double bill of Tomorrow is Another Day (1951) and Highway 301, the pairing of the "unjustly accused" dramas lBoomerang! (1942) and Count the Hours (1953) and an Edward G. Robinson two-fer consisting of Night has a Thousand Eyes (1948) and The Red House (1947). (1950).

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