Lawrence Tierney Day
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Lawrence Tierney Day
The Film Forum cranks up the B Noir confetti this week and the first chance I've had to catch up with it was on Lawrence Tierney day. Lawrence Tierney would have made a good Dan Duryea if given a chance. Instead, a brittle, aging Hollywood put him up front in the movies and hoped for another A-list tough guy, though the floodlights made his eyes go all pinpointy and dead. In Born to Kill (Wise, '47) everyone keeps talking about how "terribly attractive" he is on account of his viciousness. Really, he barely looks like he wants to be in the movie at all, or with top-billed Claire Trevor. He's just waiting around to become the jowly, respected burgher he would become years later in Resevoir Dogs. He's not much better in The Bodyguard (Fleischer, '48) as the good guy, but it's a lot of fun to watch him watch baseball with Pricilla Lane. The best movie in the bunch was Shakedown (Pevney, '50), where he merely plays Lawrence Tierney, somewhere in the background, a representation of totem-pole-headed brutishness the character up front can't hope to aspire to.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:58 PM,
