Strip

Stanley Maxton arrives in Los Angeles with little more than his drumsticks and a hunger for the kind of life the clubs on the Sunset Strip seem to promise. He falls in with Fluff, a weathered small-time operator who knows every back corridor of the entertainment world, and finds work as a musician at a jazz club where Louis Armstrong holds court nightly. It is there that Stanley meets Jane Tafford, a young woman with her own reasons for staying close to the neon and the noise.

The romance between Stanley and Jane is complicated almost immediately by the presence of Delwyn 'Sonny' Johnson, a man with money, leverage, and a proprietary interest in Jane that he has no intention of relinquishing. As Stanley's ambitions sharpen and his attachment to Jane deepens, he is drawn into a web of jealousy and violence that the bright lights of the Strip do nothing to illuminate. Paulette Ardrey moves through the margins of this world as a warning Stanley is too young to read.

The Strip uses the familiar machinery of the noir fall – a decent man, a compromised woman, a rival with a cruel streak – but sets it against the warm, specifically American spectacle of the jazz club, where Armstrong and Vic Damone perform as though the world beyond the bandstand does not exist. The film holds its darkness at a careful distance from its musical sequences, which gives the collision between entertainment and consequence a particular, unresolved tension.