A recent viewing and post on Kiss the Blood Off My Hands reminded me that the only major Burt Lancaster noir title still unavailable in a decent edition was 1948’s I Walk Alone. Happily though, Kino Lorber in the US have just posted on Facebook that the title is due out on DVD and Blu-ray in the summer:
• Coming this Summer!
• First Time on DVD and Blu-ray!
• Brand New HD Master – From a 4K Scan of the 35mm Safety Dupe Negative by Paramount Pictures Archive!
• First Film Co-starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas (The Gunfight at O.K. Corral, The Devil’s Advocate, Seven Days in May, Tough Guys)
I Walk Alone (1947) Starring Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Lizabeth Scott, Wendell Corey, Kristine Miller, Marc Lawrence and Mike Mazurki – Shot by Leo Tover (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Dead Reckoning) – Music by Victor Young (Johnny Guitar, Around the World in Eighty Days) – Edited by Arthur P. Schmidt (Sunset Boulevard, The Blue Dahlia) – Produced by Hal B. Wallis (Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon) – Screenplay by Charles Schnee (The Bad and the Beautiful, They Live by Night) – Adaptation by Robert Smith (Sudden Fear, Quicksand) and John Bright (Public Enemy, She Done Him Wrong) – Directed by Byron Haskin (The War of the Worlds, Too Late for Tears)
Riding the High Country 
More great Noir news – hurrah!
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Absolutely! And I’m especially pleased that I’ll be able to retire the rather grotty copy of the movie I had to make do with up to now.
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Never even had one of those, been relying on memories from long, long ago!
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Well then, that makes it even better. Frankly, I wasn’t expecting this news at all and it makes we wonder if there might be some hope of seeing stuff like some of the more elusive Alan Ladd titles – Calcutta and Saigon – in the future.
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This film and Lancaster’s ROPE OF SAND are two pictures I saw a long time ago, but have no memory of. Whereas I recently saw BRUTE FORCE for the first time since watching it on TV as a kid and remembered almost every scene. So a disc of I WALK ALONE will be welcome.
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It’s strange the way some movies tend to stick more firmly in the mind, and not necessarily because they were the better ones. I think most of us have films we saw long ago but can recall in much greater detail than others, but there’s not a lot of logic to it – or there doesn’t seem to be anyway.
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Yup, great news! Certainly overdue. I saw this film decades ago on TV so it will be great to be able to revisit it, and in a fine transfer.
Of course it wasn’t actually the first Burt-Kirk film – that was “OUT OF THE PAST”.
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Every time a film like this, one which I’d almost given up hope of ever seeing released in a top quality edition, becomes available I get encouraged that something else, something which seemed equally unlikely before has just moved up in the line.
BTW, I think you’re mixing up stars with Out of the Past.
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Especially when it was the movie that MADE Mitchum………and to some extent Douglas by the way.
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Doh!!!! And I only watched (again) “OUT OF THE PAST” last week!! Not another senior moment……
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Easy enough to do with the various noir pair-ups.
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Great news! It a terrific little noir. What about Desert Fury? Another fine Lancaster-Scott movie. I’m also waiting for Universal’s All My Sons. 🙂
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Eric, Desert Fury has been available on DVD from Australia for a good many years now – I wrote about it myself some time ago here in fact. I don’t recall if it has appeared anywhere else since then but that old DVD looked pretty good.
And something tells me All My Sons is also available, somewhere in Europe anyway, but I don’t own a copy myself.
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I guess we Americans are getting screwed. We have no official DVD releases of Desert Fury and All My Sons. Rope of Sand eventually made an appearance, though. I guess I need to buy a Region-free player. 😦
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As has been noted here before, Universal are an odd case. Quite a lot of their films appear to have been licensed out in various territories but there’s no real consistency, and there are plenty more which has never seen the light of day anywhere yet.
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‘Lost’ Universal Noirs on my Most Wanted list include ONE WAY STREET (1950) and SPY HUNT (also 1950) both featuring the beautiful and tragic Marta Toren. I’ve only ever been able to track down extremely poor off-air copies of these. JOHNNY STOOL PIGEON (1949) is another. The recent release of obscurities like HIGHWAY DRAGNET and the impending release of I WALK ALONE give a little hope that more pictures like these are on the radar of some innovative company.
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One Way Street would appear to have a lot going for it to make a release attractive – the presence of the aforementioned Ms Toren along with James Mason and Hugo Fregonese’s direction are all big pluses i my opinion.
As for Johnny Stool Pigeon, there’s the William Castle aspect, which may see somebody push for a release on that basis.
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Interesting that Nick should mention “SPY HUNT” (1950). High on my ‘wanted’ list too. Its original title, I believe, was “PANTHER’S MOON” which was also the title of the 1948 novel by Victor Canning, an author I have read a lot over many years. Forgotten today, but he was very popular in the 40s-60s.
The other films mentioned are also on my hit list. We can but hope…..
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Never heard of that, Jerry. Mind you, I do know of Victor Canning and have a few of his books on my shelves.
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You can pick up ONE WAY STREET on YouTube right now. The quality looks to be damn damn good.
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Interesting! I shall have a look.
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My autistic/developmentally delayed son loves his movies. Occasionally he will put Don Bluth’s All Dog’s Go to Heaven on a loop. The animation is glorious, but the story is rather dark and strange for children. On one of those “loopy” days, I realized that the story was basically I Walk Alone. Guy gets out of prison expecting his cut in the business, but the outside partner has other plans. And then there’s a girl. Some of the dialogue sounds right out of noir. It is bizarre.
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That is curious! Now, I haven’t seen that movie myself but your description here does sound lie it’s shadowing the storyline. People argue a good deal about definitions and classifications of noir, advocating varying degree of tightness and looseness. And what strikes me out of all that is how flexible the scenarios of noir setups can be, almost in a similar way to the malleability of the western, and how diverse motifs can drift within the “genre” itself and even have an influence on supposedly unrelated forms too. That’s the beauty of cinema for you!
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Back in the 1980’s the local arthouse cinema would have a month every year on classic films. One of the films they showed on a double bill was I WALK ALONE. While the print was shall we say, less than pristine, the film floored me. Wow. It was one of the first films that set me off on the noir road. The other half of the double bill was the great DETOUR.
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This is probably going to be regarded as sacrilegious, but I’ve never been able to rate, or perhaps I should say enjoy, Detour as much as most people seem to. For one reason or another it just doesn’t draw me as other movies do.
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DETOUR is for sure one of those films one loves, or does not. The fact I saw it on the big screen probably moves it up the rankings for me.
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That makes sense. It’s hard to overestimate the importance of the circumstances in which we view movies. I can’t think of too many where a big screen presentation hasn’t given a boost.
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Colin
This one is coming up on one of my cable channels this coming March. Needless to say the old dvr will be humming.
Gord
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Enjoy! The chances of anything remotely interesting popping up on TV where I am these days is slim to say the least.
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In the last two weeks and the upcoming couple, this channel has shown, or are going to show, CRISS CROSS, STORM FEAR, HOODLUM EMPIRE, TRAPPED, CRY OF THE CITY, THE KILLER IS LOOSE, SLAUGHTER ON 10th AVE, HE RAN ALL THE WAY, WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS, DARK MIRROR, BIGHOUSE USA, SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR, WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, UNION STATION, and the odd duster like DAY OF THE BAD MAN. Some of these never show up on television.
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That is an impressive list. You’re fortunate indeed to have a channel like that available.
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