Thanks for the memories!

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

***SPOILERS*** One of director Don Siegel of "Dirty Harry" fame earliest work involves a robbery in NYC of $300,000.00 that ended showing up, the stolen cash that is, in LA some 3,000 miles away. With LAPD detectives Carl Bruner, Steve Cochran, and Jack Farnham, Howard Duff, on the case they track down a 50 dollar bill from the robbery to a night club that it's top performer singer Lili Marlow, Ida Lupino, got as a tip from one of the customers there.It soon becomes obvious that the person who gave Lili the fifty was involved in the robbery and both Det. Bruner & Farnham together with Lili who can identify him stake out the Hollywood Race Track where he's known to spend his spare time and money, the stolen money, at.Track down the person they do when he makes a run for it in his car and ends up driving off the road killing himself.It's when the stolen money is found hidden in a safe box in the fugitive from justice, George Docksharden, car that Det. Bruner gets the idea of taking a large amount of it,$80,000.00, for himself and his partner, in order to keep him quite, Det. Farnham. Who's going to miss it anyway since no one has any idea of how much Docksharden spent anyway.Hiding the cash in a trailer park at lot #36 it seems that no one will find out what the two did even though honest cop and family man Jack Farnham has second thought about all this.***SPOILERS*** As things soon turn out the dead Dockshader had a partner in the $300,000.00 robbery who now want's his cut of the money. And he knows who has it Detectives Bruner & Farnham. And is also more then willing to expose their crime to their boss in the LAPD Capt. Michaels, Dean Jagger, if he doesn't get it! Unexpected final that will blow you away in how the two got caught in the act of returning the $80,000.00 that they stole to the man who they planned to double-cross who was blackmailing them. Like the saying goes "Crime doesn't Pay" it's only those who commit it that do.

"Private Hell 36" (1954), directed by Don Siegel, is tough little film noir starring a reliable cast of familiar faces for film buffs: Ida Lupino, Steve Cochran, Dean Jagger, Dorothy Malone and Howard Duff.The plot isn't anything particularly special: two cops (Cochran and Duff) decide to take thousands of dollars from the suitcase of a dead counterfeiter and hid it in a trailer park. But then Cochran starts suffering with his conscience… The opening scene is the best when Steve Cochran stumbles onto a drug store robbery late night. Burnett Guffey's agile camera surveys the action with a cool calm and helps put everything into perspective. The jazz soundtrack composed by Leith Stevens purrs along nicely, as does Don Siegel's direction, which is far from his finest hour but still holds the viewer interested in the events portrayed. The acting, on the main, is good, especially Ida Lupino as a singer cop Howard Duff falls fall. This isn't a shining example of the film noir genre but it passes the time pleasantly enough.

Though it's tempting to regard every black and white crime thriller as noir, there's a danger of reading too much into the merely monotone.As here. This isn't film noir but film monotone, devoid of the irony, and the anger, of genre classics and instead graced by, and in part compensated with, some often sassy dialog and Cochran's acting.As a movie, it's a mess: the title relates to a location of stolen money, but the money isn't stolen until well past the half way point in the running time, and so nobody's in hell, public or private, for almost an hour but are instead laboriously working their way to that point in the script when the movie can actually begin.A curio for Siegel fans, and those with fond memories of Republic, but otherwise more like purgatory than the brand of Hades it purports to chronicle.

It's nice to see the old Republic logo at the start of this. Seeing Ida Lupino is always a delight. Steve Cochrane was a handsome, effective performer who was underutilized. And Don Siegal was a great director of gritty noirs in the 1950s.Unfortunately, these parts do not add up to much of a whole. It's a standard rogue cop story that doesn't ring true. The duologue is very arch. Are we trying for Oscar Wilde here or are we making a gritty detective movie? Dorothy Malone is beautiful in that somewhat unusual way she had and she also acts well.Lupino seems either to have been allowed, or directed, to chew up the scenery. She is playing to the balcony. And saying that about one of my all-time favorite perfumers hurts.