Noir Watch: Decoy (1946)

Watched:  01/15/2026

Format:  DVD

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jack Bernhard

What an odd film.

Devoid of narrative economy, the movie starts with a guy staggering his way to the highway, and then hitches a ride from the countryside to San Francisco.  He then takes the lift up to someone's apartment, and shoots them.  It's a dame!  

A cop - an instantly recognizable Sheldon Leonard - who played Nick the bartender in It's a Wonderful Life, here playing a cop named Joe Portugal* - shows up too late.  And the woman shot tells her tale.  But only after she gets to hold the unopened MacGuffin box.

The woman is our femme fatale, Margot, played by Jean Gillie in her penultimate performance before succumbing to pneumonia in 1949 in her early 30's.   Margot's been working a grift on a mobster who knocked over an armored truck, but for his trouble is on death row - and no one knows where the money is.  She's cheating on him with another gangster, Jim, with whom she concocts a plan to get the dough.  

They'll let the guy get executed by cyanide gas, but then steal the body and revive him with Methylene Blue,** a very real medication that can, in real life, combat cyanide, but, alas, in real life, does not restore life function to a corpse.  But in this movie, it sure does.

To do this, Margot seduces the doctor who does the autopsies on executed crooks.  I guess she's really good at *something*, because in a short time she convinces the doctor (Herbert Rudley) to join in on the operation.  If they can get that money, then she'll be happy!, she says.

Anyway, things take... a while... to get to the point.     

The one thing this movie has... well, it also has a knock-out nurse (Marjorie Woodworth) working for the doctor who seems like she's in a completely parallel story that isn't being filmed... So the OTHER thing this movie has is British-born lead actress Jean Gillie, who is really pretty terrific, gorgeous, and as solid a femme fatale as you're likely to find.  The character as written is why this movie exists - not that all the characters aren't a *little* bit bonkers, but Margot is a stunning psycho, using her charms to manipulate three men at a time, sometimes two in the same room.   

The weirdest thing is that the movie is called "Decoy", and at the beginning of the movie they start at the end, seeing Margot shot, the doctor clearly dying and you see an unopened money box.  And , because the movie is called "Decoy", one might spend 80+ minutes sitting there going "well, clearly that money box is a decoy".  

Like, I have zero idea why this starts at the end and tells itself in flashback.  It does nothing to help the story as we can see what will become of everyone before the story starts.  And it's not a good enough movie to make you say "gee, what was that?  Maybe there's twists and turns!"  It just plods toward that ending we saw at the beginning.

Anyway, it's certainly not awful, and from a "this is bonkers" perspective - bringing people back from the dead, Margot's scheming, etc.. - it's interesting.  But the pacing can feel deadly in the first thirty minutes or so, and it telegraphs the ending in the title.  So.

*truly, it can be said he is Portugal, The Man 

**Methylene Blue is the name of my new shoegaze band

Wise Watch: The Curse of the Cat People (1944)

Watched:  01/14/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Gunther von Fritsch / Robert Wise

We're continuing on with movies directed by Robert Wise - our gameplan for 2026.   

In his first outing directing, Wise did some pick-ups for The Magnificent Ambersons while Orson Welles was out of the country.  For his second directorial effort, Wise was *again* tapped in after the first director wasn't around.  Gunther von Fritsch was let go from The Curse of the Cat People (1944) for going over time and over budget at the notoriously tight-fisted RKO.  

I don't know what work belongs to Wise and which to von Fritsch here, so we'll just talk in generalities.

Re: the actual movie - as Jamie said after the movie wrapped "that was a wholly unnecessary sequel", which is absolutely true.  I'd argue The Leopard Man is more of a spiritual sequel to Cat People than this movie - but it *does* feature our heroes from the first movie, and Irena (Simone Simon) in ghostly form.

Avengers Doomsday and the All New Return of Hatin' on Superheroes

 

What a time it's been for Marvel of late.  

I think people forget about the crazy early years of Marvel when they were essentially an indie studio who leveraged studios for distribution.  Marvel was acquired by Disney in 2009, AFTER the release of the first two films.  Superhero films taking off was not a foregone conclusion, it was a thing that made sense as FX could now kind of do anything, and the generation of 1980's comics readers made their way into positions of influence where they could roll back the anti-comics hysteria of the 1950's and 1960's and show what comics had been up to since Katy Keene was a big seller.

So credit where it's due, no one forced superheroes on the public, the public was ready for them.

And, look, we all know something got off-base with Marvel after Endgame.  But many things have changed both at Marvel and in the world.

Recently I was rewatching part of The Marvels on cable - and I can see why it didn't take.  *I* liked the movie, but it required homework.  One had to watch and recall Ms. Marvel, know a side character from WandaVision, and be all in on Captain Marvel (which I was or am).  And as a stand-alone movie it never felt entirely like they'd worked out the actual stakes of the movie, the personality of the villain.  Instead, they focused on the character interaction and that story, which was a worthy story, certainly.  But there was so much going on between Skrulls, singing water planets, Hala melting down, Ms. Marvel's family, Nick Fury in space, etc...

Extrapolate that across the line, and it's maybe just too much and not enough at the same time.  

Wise Watch: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

Watched:  01/12/2025

Format:  Criterion Disc

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Orson Welles/ others/ Robert Wise - some scenes

This year we're going to try to watch every film we can find directed by American film-director Robert Wise.  We will watch the movies he helmed in order of release.

Wise is the director of innumerable, truly great movies, but it's odd how rarely he gets discussed by film fans.  From film noir like The House on Telegraph Hill to the classic that is The Sound of Music and the ever-controversial Star Trek: The Motion Picture to one of the scariest movies I've ever seen, The Haunting - our fellow has range.   

Starting our journey with The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), famously an Orson Welles directed movie, will seem odd.  However, it seems Wise first got to direct during re-shoots for the ending of the movie, something allowed him as Welles was in Brazil on behalf of the Good Neighbor program instituted during WWII by FDR shooting a different movie for RKO. 

Neo-Noir Texas Watch: Lone Star (1996)

Watched:  01/09/2025

Format:  Criterion 4K

Viewing:  Unknown - likely 4th or 5th

Director:  John Sayles

I remember going to see this opening day in Austin at the Arbor 4 at, like, a 4:00 pm show, thinking "no one will be there.  It's John Sayles.  And, I'm going by myself, I can find a seat.".  

Y'all, it was so packed when I showed up, I wound up in the front row staring straight up at the screen for the duration.

And I loved it.  

At the time I was double-majoring in film and history at the University of Texas.  As part of my load, I took as much local and regional history as my degree plan would allow.  And, yes, the courses I took illuminated the material certain officials are currently screaming to the heavens about colleges teaching.*

Noir Crime Watch: Dillinger (1945)

Watched:  01/08/2025

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  First

Director:  Max Nosseck

A biopic of famed gangster John Dillinger, Dillinger (1945) is really a crime drama that feels pulled from a "true crime" pulp magazine - the sort where facts will not stand in the way of a good story.  I can't tell you what's real here or not as I know two things about Dillinger - that he once broke out of jail with a fake gun, and something I can not print in a family publication like the Signal Watch.*

Anyway, this is the movie that broke Lawrence Tierney, for good or ill.  And he's solid in the movie - maybe singularly good here playing a (checks notes) absolute cold-blooded monster.  I won't get too much into Tierney as a person, but apparently he was a real asshole - like in a way you or I can't comprehend putting up with.  

Catch-Up Watch: One Battle After Another (2025)

Watched:  01/05/2026

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  First

Director:  Paul Thomas Anderson

Well, better late than never.  This was one I absolutely wanted to see in the theater, but didn't due to circumstances.

Let's not bury the lede:  I dug the hell out of this movie.  

I suspect One Battle After Another (2025) will do well through awards season - everyone in the movie is great, it's beautifully shot, the audio and score are A-level (I hadn't heard a Jonny Greenwood score in a minute).  It's on an evergreen topic in modern drag.  That said, I haven't read any reviews and I don't know what people *think* about the movie as of yet, just seen it get many stars from folks' letterboxd accounts.  

I kept thinking about how movies are made - what choices were made.  How someone else would have turned this into something preachy, or treacly, or something that was just a standard actioner.  There's a handful of directors who maybe could have done this, but PTA walks a tightrope here, and so many others would have tilted too far one way or the other.

The Signal Watch Presents: Favorite Movies of 2025

Well, here's our wee, personal best-of list for 2025.  

• We broke down the movies we watched by-the-numbers
• We talked about what we really didn't like

These are not necessarily new movies, but they are new-to-me movies.  Of the 246 unique movies I watched this year, I also watched like 175 new-to-me movies, so these are selections from that list.

We're going to break these up into categories.

Horror 

Chabert Watch: Lost in Paradise (2026)

Watched: 01/04/2026

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First

Director:  Dustin Rikert

Job: head of a premier fashion design studio

Location of story:  Fiji

new skill:  jungle and beach survival

Man:  Ian Harding

Job of Man: Chef!

Goes to/ Returns to: Goes to Fiji

Event:  Plane crash

Food:  fish

Again, I'd love to know what stats the Hallmark Channel has about viewership when they have Lacey Chabert in a movie.  Because someone ran the numbers and was able to show that sending a Hallmark crew and stars to Fiji was going to be profitable.

It's not the first time Chabert has wrangled a destination movie.  I've seen her in movies filmed in Malta, Ireland (once as Ireland, once doubling as Scotland), vague Europe, South Africa, Italy and I think Greece.  And for the US, I know she went to Hawaii for a movie.  I feel like she's been in Manhattan at some point.

Somehow Fiji feels particularly nuts, but off to Fiji this movie went.  

The Signal Watch Presents: Worst Movies of 2025

All right.  Let's light this candle.

• We've already broken down some numbers regarding all the movies we watched in 2025.  
• And we'll be looking at the Best of the Year for 2025.

However - this post is the end-of-the-year wrap up in which I indulge in being more than a little unkind.  

There's a school of thought that "hey, you made a movie!  Good for you!  That's hard!" that's very much an appreciation for the work someone put into something, no matter how it turned out.  But we're not here to cheer on sixth graders to whom we share a family bond playing their first band concert.