Early on in Jack Webb’s
Pete Kelly’s Blues, there’s a scene that demonstrates how film noir in color can be just as visually spectacular as in black and white: drummer Joey Firestone (Martin Milner) is gunned down in an alley, bullets spraying like gold flames popping against midnight blue, a beautiful fireworks display on the ground. Known for the stiffness of his Dragnet character, Webb lets loose quite a bit here as Pete Kelly, a cornet player and band leader who’s forced to pay protection to gangster Fran McCarg (a fantastically cynical Edmund O’Brien) in a milieu of speakeasies, secret upstairs rooms, and back alleys. Janet Leigh plays Ivy Conrad, Kelly’s periodic love interest, while Peggy Lee steals the show as a gangster moll and wannabe singer who takes a beating from booze and boyfriends and winds up in a psychiatric ward talking to a baby doll, a disturbing and moving performance that earned her an Oscar nomination. Despite a few unclear character motivations, the film effectively establishes a tone of coldness, even nihilism, despite the bright colors and lovely musical interludes, including a couple numbers by the great Ella Fitzgerald playing a roadhouse proprietor, her second of four film acting roles. Webb’s film could be considered a companion piece to Nicholas Ray’s
Party Girl released three years later: both are full-color, 50’s gangster films set during Prohibition, both feature unexpected performers for the crime genre, and both successfully blend dazzling musical numbers with brutal noir violence.
