IT’S easy to recognize the Bad Girl. She’s usually a bottle blonde, stuffed into a tight sweater that outlines her oddly conical breasts. Her mouth is wide, painted and clamped on a cigarette. Her eyes burn a little too brightly, and her legs, planted in a pair of high-rise pumps, go on forever.
In the 40's and 50's the juiciest roles for actresses in Hollywood were often in B-pictures that explored the dark side of life: starring roles as cool, calculating gals who could stick a knife in a man's back and make him like it.
This week Sony is releasing “Bad Girls of Film Noir,” a two-volume collection that contains eight little-known titles from the Columbia Pictures archive. As it turns out, not all of the girls in this set are bad, and not all the films noir. But given the barriers to bringing older films to market at a time when DVD sales are diminishing, it would be churlish to complain. What we have here are excellent transfers of hard-to-see films that provide fine showcases for some of the most provocative actresses of the postwar years.
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