Why, for Film Noir Fans, ‘The Chase’ Is Worth the Effort
Director Arthur Ripley proves adroit in his use of blocking and, especially, the deployment of mirrors. A sharp sense of displacement, both physical and psychological, filters through the movie.
While no one should go mistaking “The Chase” (1946) as an exemplar of film noir, anyone interested in the genre will likely find it worthwhile, if also notably cockeyed. Kino Lorber, which is releasing a Blu-ray of the movie, is pitching it as “something truly mind-bending and surreal” — basically a polite acknowledgment that the film is something less than the sum of its parts.
Still, it is “something” that imbues those parts with a distinctive weirdness. How true is “The Chase” to the Cornell Woolrich novel, “The Black Path of Fear,” on which it was based? Fans of classic American cinema will note that Woolrich authored “It Had To Be Murder,” the 1942 short story that inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” (1954). The pathway to film from literature is rarely straightforward. “The Chase” is its own creature.
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