LeonLouisRicci This one will never be on anyone's Great Film Noir list, but it will be on the list of Film Noirs. Keeping it from enduring greatness is the rather wooden stare and less than dramatic line readings of the Femme Fatale. The other is the standard Studio Friendly ending.Remember Double Indemnity (1944)...Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)...Out of the Past (1947)...Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Those are quintessential Noir. If you are the Patsy or victim of Fate, you either end up dead or on your way to the Big House. Otherwise, it is just light Film-Noir. So here we have it, a watchable, if unremarkable entry in the Genre. Glenn Ford makes a great brooding, conflicted, fuzzy-headed everyman and is as likable as they come. Always generating much empathy.After all, this is pretty standard Film-Noir, but even routine Noir is better than most of the Drama that was Hollywood Product made from 1940-1960.

moonspinner55 Glenn Ford, young and brittle, plays an unemployed, hard-drinking mining engineer saved from ten days in the hoosegow by a blonde waitress with evil in her eyes; turns out she and her partner need a fall guy once they swindle the local banker. Crosses and double-crosses in a mostly predictable vein, though just about saved by excellent directorial touches and intriguing noir detail (the wrench in the backseat, the poisoned cup of coffee). Ford isn't really convincing playing drunk and reckless--and it doesn't sit well with us having him cast as the possible dupe--yet he cuts a solid presence on the screen and the picture would be nothing without him. ** from ****

blanche-2 Glenn Ford is Mike Lambert in "Framed," a 1947 noir also starring Janis Carter, Barry Sullivan, and Edgar Buchanan. Ford plays a man who takes a job driving a truck that ends up having no brakes. Once at his destination, he enters a bar/restaurant called La Paloma and comes to the attention of waitress Paula Lambert (Carter) - and vice versa. Turns out she's been waiting for someone like Ford to come along. Well, hasn't every woman? Paula and her boyfriend, Steven Price, need someone to be identified as Price in a car accident/explosion so that she and Price can take off with the $250,000 Price has embezzled from his bank. Unfortunately for them, they're pretty sophomoric, and Mike gets suspicious.I can't share the deep thrill others have expressed about this film, though I love Glenn Ford's combination of gentleness, toughness, and sexiness. He had really just hit big stardom around the time of this film. As beautiful, slender and accomplished a Broadway performer as Janis Carter was, I thought her acting was - well, awful is the only word for it. This is a Lizabeth Scott/Ann Sheridan type of role - smoky, mysterious, ambiguous as to motive. Carter had none of these shadings, offering instead wooden line delivery with nothing going on underneath. A better actress would have made this a much stronger film.The plot (to me anyway) was very predictable, in part due to the casting. As for the denouement, there was no explanation as to how it all came together, i.e., there were holes.Ford and Edgar Buchanan, who plays a miner hoping to get a loan from Barry Sullivan's bank, are very good in their roles. Sullivan is fine, but he has a non-showy part. A stronger female lead and a little more developed script at the end would have helped "Framed" immensely.

bmacv Janis Carter boasted a largely undistinguished filmography from the 1940s but she deserved (as so many of her female peers from this era did) better parts and greater exposure. As the scheming and duplicitous Paula Craig, she personifies the cool blonde bombshell (while her line readings are a wee bit stilted, her body language is instinctive and sensational). She's the spider into whose web drifts Glenn Ford, an out-of-work mining engineer with a bit of an alcohol problem who's looking for a break. Meanwhile, Carter's on the lookout for her embezzling boyfriend's lookalike, to furnish a warm body to provide a charred corpse. This is James M. Cain territory, and, though we've been through it with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred McMurray and with Lana Turner and John Garfield, this effort by Carter and Ford deserves more prominence; its writing, direction and cinematography are all well above average. One unique moment: a banner head in the local newspaper lets us know that one of the characters has been charged with murder, but just below it, in the mock-up, is the smaller headline "Meteorite lands near baby." I think they made that movie, too, about 10 years later.