Your favourite films noire.

[scoundrel]

We have threads for Westerns, War Films, British Films, Hitman Films, Worst Films Ever, Horror Movies, Best Films Ever. We need another film thread, obviously.:D

My proposition is: Which film or films noire do you particularly like, and what is it about it/them which especially pleases you . A post naming the film is all very well, but with no extra information the members who haven't already seen the movie won't get any value from your contribution, and might not click the 'Thanks' button!

Here are two from me to start the ball rolling.

Casablanca (1942)
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Surely one of the best films ever made. Humphrey Bogart was never better than as the bleakly witty and icily cynical Rick Blaine. Rick is a man who has opted out of love: love of women (though he certainly still enjoys their companionship); love of his fellow man (the black piano player Sam excepted); love of his own country - he is now a self-proclaimed citizen of the world; love of freedom, except for himself. Why? Because love has only ever disappointed, defeated and betrayed him.

In a film full of complexity, we can see almost immediately that Rick still retains some moral centre and is not as callous as he pretends to be. There is a fascinating little byplay when a pitiable, though very attractive Bulgarian girl approaches Rick with a mortifying question she is forced to ask: If she goes to bed with chief of police Captain Renault (Claude Rains), can she trust the man to pay her prostitute's fee: visas to the Free World out of the open prison called Casablanca, for herself and for her hopeless fool of a husband? After all, once he has had what he wants from her, why should he?

Rick takes the question at face value: the answer is ''yes, Captain Renault can be trusted to keep his word'', because Captain Renault has the virtue of honest corruption. But without seeming to, Rick has noted the agony the girl is in, how much this matters to her when so many girls in Casablanca would think nothing of it. In a surreptitious gesture of compassion, Rick allows her husband to win on the roulette tables so that Captain Renault can be painlessly bought off with money.

Three people know what Rick has done. The croupier, who accepts the fact with calm resignation; the girl (she will always remember Rick in her prayers); and Captain Renault, who will need to revise his plans for the night. Renault is not angry: he seems to accept Rick's actions as a mild, implied reproof, and to realise that his original plan for the girl would have done her great harm, which absolutely was not his intention. He is a cad, but a gentlemanly one and free of cruel intent.

This is a tiny throwaway detail but typical of this densely woven, superbly acted character piece. It helps to establish Bogart's screen character, Claude Rains' screen character, and the deeply ambivalent cat and mouse ''friendship'' of the two.

Its almost a musical: it has far more good tunes than that rubbish stage-musical, Blood Brothers, and doesn't trade on this at all.

Its an action drama: note the shootout at Ricks, the subsequent killing of the Nazi villain Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt in fine form).

It is, of course, a romantic love story: Ingrid Bergman is perfect as Ilse, both sexy and full of class. Losing a woman like her would make any man feel bitter.

What a film!

Incidentally I have only scratched the surface of what there is to say about Casablanca: if anyone else wants to say more about this film, please do.

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

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Billy Wilder's masterpiece starring William Holden, a penniless Hollywood screenplay writer on the skids and a truly great Gloria Swanson as a clapped out former screen goddess called Norma Desmond who takes Holden into her little sychophantic court as a junior courtier and toyboy.

This film is a classic Hollywood satire about Hollywood, exploring the dark side of the film business and the pitiless way in which it discards those who are no longer useful. There is a great late cameo performance from Erich von Strolheim as Norma's long term lover, director and (truth be told and if only Norma had eyes to see it) the one person in the world who is really there for her. Nancy Olson is also excellent as the junior studio screenplay editor who could and should have been the love of Holden's life. Delusions, blindness and loss of love are key themes of this dark and compelling thriller.

The last scene, when Swanson descends the Grand Staircase of her palatial mansion towards the police is iconic: even the hard-boiled LAPD detectives are moved to pity her.

Simply wonderful.

OK folks! What does the collective VEF critical mind have to add to these two?

[eelcat]

Double Indemnity for sure.
I'll give my vote to "Sorry, Wrong Number", again with Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster.

[tabler]

A film which I love that sends up the whole genre of 'film noir' is 'Dead Men Dont Wear Plaid' with Steve Martin. Sorry no details at the moment will post more when not pissed:D

[Mal Hombre]

The original Cape Fear (1962,i think) with Gregory Peck as the epitome of goodness and the great Robert Mitchum as the essence of pure evil. As the pyschopathic Max Cady,Mitchum chills without even raising his voice and is horribly believable.

[Farowt]

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:cool::cool::D:cool::cool:

[eelcat]

We can't forget The Big Sleep...........and Robert Mitchums' The Big Steal. I enjoyed both of those, although I haven't seen them in more than 20 years.

[smutwerx]

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I have two favorites. First is Out of the Past with Robert Mitchum, and second is Ride the Pink Horse with Robert Montgomery.

Out of the Past is great for a lot of reasons. The direction by Jacques Tourneur is good, the acting is good, and Mitchum is a stud in general. Part of the film is set in Mexico, which is a noir plot device I always like. The depth of blackness here is notable. The blacks are full and rich, especially as the film goes on, and the shadowplay gets really wild during a fight sequence in the middle. One of the better noir fights, by the way. Anyway the deep blacks and shadows really help hint that circumstances closing in around the hero.

Ride the Pink Horse is set in a U.S./Mexico border town, and it's interesting for the effort paid toward actually trying to make this setting feel authentic. In that way it succeeds where Out of the Past doesn't. Here you get some believable Mexican flavor, and at least one Mexican with a good speaking role. The title refers to a carousel in town that has a pink horse. Basically, Robert Montgomery arrives in this town under mysterious circumstances, and with unknown intentions. People are looking for him, but he's also looking for a local kingpin. Montgomery also directed this, by the way.

[snorkie]

My favorite novel as well as my favorite film:



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One often has to explain to a first time viewer that all of those clinches they're seeing began with this film.

Actually, Nicole Black is my favorite filmed noir! :)

[doyle]

And the original D.O.A. (1949). Haven't seen the re-make and don't want to.
The original is one of those modest 40s movies (probably shot in a month), that look better with time. It has tremendous speed, good acting (even though they're reading their lines off cue cards in some scenes), and interesting views of L.A. and San Francisco in 1949, before they became traffic clogged tourist traps.

[scoundrel]

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I have never seen this one from start to finish: caught the first half during a season of Dymytryk films shown by Channel Four, and the second half years later - can't remember where.

Interesting that cloq mentioned Bad Day At Black Rock: not often thought of as a film noire but it has key elements of the genre, particularly the moral ambiguities, guilt and paranoia of the various townsfolk who are all implicated in the crime which Spencer Tracy gradually exposes, even if only by their years of cowardly silence. Robert Ryan was a key player in BDABR and we see him again in Crossfire.

Though set in urban America and in a different social context, Crossfire has a similar plot and similar themes to BDABR. Robert Young as the DA's Investigator, in the same way as Spencer Tracy, peels away layer upon layer of lies and half-truthes with deadly patience until the various guilty parties have been exposed both for the crime and for the rottenness of their souls. Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum and George Cooper all turn in good performances. This film also deals with thuggish racism in American society and like BDABR it invites the viewer not to be so complacent about society, his own friends, or himself.

The deviant sexuality common to so many films noire is present in Crossfire in a low-key, muted way. Where soldiers or ex-soldiers gather, naughty girls are seldom far away and so we have the hapless witness, a girl who is no better than she should be but had the sheer bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She is played with some pathos by Gloria Grahame.

The storytelling, much of it through flashbacks is stylish and involving. the acting is first rate. Dymytryk's direction maintains the pace seamlessly in what could have been a clunky and static talking-too-much kind of drama and keeps up the tension.

This is what film-makers had to do when they had no special effects and CGI to hide behind: tell a damn good story.

Thanks so much to everyone who has chipped in so far.:):) Keep up the good work guys and girls! :D

[brausch]

No doubt about it, The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity would be at the top of any list but as they've been mentioned I'll pick The Woman In The Window and The Big Combo

[tabler]

What I would class as a modern 'film noire' it bears all the hallmarks of the genre,'In the Heat of the Night' 1967:- Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger & Warren Oates.

The atmosphere and tension in this film is almost palpable, the initial loathing to the growing (grudgingly) respect of Virgil Tibbs (Poitier) and Gillespie (Steiger), the seedines of the town and the impression of the heat plus a very daring (for its time) plot make this one of my favourite films ever.

A deserved winner of 5 oscars.

[kananga]

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On the subject of 'modern' film noir I would heartily recommend 'Femme Fatale (according to a friend it's a good remake of an old film), starring Antonio Banderas (whom I normally personally loathe) and a stunning Rebecca Romijn-Stamos

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0280665/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femme_Fatale_(2002_film)

http://femmefatalemovie.warnerbros.com/index2.html

[Estreeter]

I love most political drama's, films with espionage or most film that involve a good factual story line. Not really big on action or horror.
A good comedy is never far from my mind either

[scoundrel]

I love most political drama's, films with espionage or most film that involve a good factual story line. Not really big on action or horror.
A good comedy is never far from my mind either

Espionage film noire: Notorious. The Third Man (possibly).
Film noire with a good factual story line: Citizen X. But film noire is a naturally subversive genre.
Film noire comedy: Dr Strangelove perhaps. MASH possibly. The film noire frequently has exquisitely funny moments: the poisoning of the abusive husband by his wife and his mistress in Les Diaboliques is deliciously, wickedly funny, because he slaps them for refusing to pour him a drink, so they pour him a drink...
Film noire political drama: I'm struggling on that one. Help from other members welcome.

[Estreeter]

Film noire comedy: MASH possibly.
Brilliant,
Watched the entire TV series many times but never saw the film until about 2 years ago (strange) there are not many films i've watched twice in one day, but MASH was one of them
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[imtrying]

I love "Kiss Me Deadly"(1955) with Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer. Another fave is a Sam Fuller film called "Shock Corridor"(1963). Peter Breck plays a reporter who goes undercover in a mental institution to find a murderer and goes crazy himself. Great stuff.

[scoundrel]

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A stylish and bleak view of Vienna under Allied occupation just after WW2. Joseph Cotton stars as Holly Martins, a writer looking for a job, who finds that his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) has turned up dead, run over by a lorry in very suspicious circumstances. Cotton is soon embroiled in some very funny goings on, finding that he himself is decidedly interesting to the British military police (Trevor Howard) and that he is ineffectually trying to protect the late Lime's mistress (Alida Valli as Anna is excellent) from being handed over to the Russians as a citizen of Czechoslovakia: British official callousness in applying the letter of the Yalta Treaty is only too authentic, and adds to the film noir ambience in which the watcher is invited to take a very jaundiced view of the supposed good guys.

Corruption, treachery, back stabbing and espionage are underlying currents throughout the film, flaring up at key moments. The film has all the visual signatures of film noir: subtle use of light and shadow; sharp evocation of atmosphere; a world view which is witty, cynical and hardboiled.

Orson Welles is perfect as the cold and ruthless Harry Lime, ultimately loyal to no-one and nothing. The confrontation with his disillusioned ex-friend Cotton on the Ferris wheel is a great set piece of cinema. Lime's famous cuckoo clock speech, in which he cynically mocks peace and democracy (a perfect epigram of the fascist world view) was not in the script. Welles invented it off the cuff to fill 30 seconds between the end of the Ferris wheel scene and the start of the final action: the word ''genius'' is over-used but a man who could produce that on the spur of the moment was no ordinary man.

Technically The Third Man is a British, not a Hollywood production: Welles was already being victimised by the Hollywood establishment and to some extent by politicians in Washington and I understand British Lion Productions (Sir Alexander Korda) were pressurised not to employ him, but (politely) told the messengers where to go and how to travel. They were no fools: The Third Man without Welles would have none of its edge and wouldn't really be a film noir, nor would it be half the thriller it actually is.

Great example of the genre and one of the minority produced outside of Hollywood.

[doyle]

I always thought Third Man was a little over rated. Yes, it's a good movie, and has all the things a good movie needs.
But many consider one of the best movies ever made, and I just don't think it's up there at the tip of the pyramid.

[scoundrel]

I always thought Third Man was a little over rated. Yes, it's a good movie, and has all the things a good movie needs.
But many consider one of the best movies ever made, and I just don't think it's up there at the tip of the pyramid.

As far as one of the best hundred movies ever made is concerned, The Third Man is up against some serious competition: IMO both Casablanca and Sunset Boulevard are better, as are several of Hitchcock's best films, not to mention Powell and Pressburger, John Ford and so forth. It would definitely be in my top one hundred movies, but probably not in my top ten.

But The Third Man is an excellent film noir notwithstanding and well worth anyone's viewing time.

Incidentally, I called film noir a ''genre'' when reviewing The Third Man, but on reflection, film noir isn't a genre/type of film (as one would say ''western'', ''gangster movie'', ''war movie'', ''horror movie'' etc): it is more like a cinematic way of seeing, characterised by the director's vision, the camera technique, the script and acting, the atmosphere of the film's own world. Film noir cuts across various genres.

[Fleabag]

For me, this film defines a true film noir, corruption on a political and personal level; a mystery that can be solved by the presented evidence, to the viewer; not by some hidden conceit.As in real life, the perpertrator and victim(s) are close/intimate.This film is beautifully, directed,acted, scripted and scored.Go watch it now!

[scoundrel]

For me, this film defines a true film noir, corruption on a political and personal level; a mystery that can be solved by the presented evidence, to the viewer; not by some hidden conceit.As in real life, the perpertrator and victim(s) are close/intimate.This film is beautifully, directed,acted, scripted and scored.Go watch it now!

Chinatown is a good choice. The mood of the film is very dark, for all that it was shot in colour, and Faye Dunaway is excellent as the heroine with a secret (what a terrible secret). I also remember that Jack Nicholson has...nose issues. Ouch!:D

Well done Fleabag for managing to post today. Forum software is making a lot of trouble just now.

[cerv3za]

For me, this film defines a true film noir, corruption on a political and personal level; a mystery that can be solved by the presented evidence, to the viewer; not by some hidden conceit.As in real life, the perpertrator and victim(s) are close/intimate.This film is beautifully, directed,acted, scripted and scored.Go watch it now!

My favorite film of all time. The mystery is revealed little by little as it is to the main character, who is in virtually every shot of the movie...and as craft, it has everything: great plot, great acting, brilliant direction, all of which you said of course.

I loved The Third Man also...

You know what's a great subversive, noirish-but-not-quite-noir film...the original Manchurian Candidate. It's amazing that one ever got made.

[scoundrel]

You know what's a great subversive, noirish-but-not-quite-noir film...the original Manchurian Candidate. It's amazing that one ever got made.
Rather like Chinatown this one, in the way the betrayers and the villains turn out to be the ones above all that you should be able to trust. But the film also taps into the cold war paranoia of its time and (like Michael Caine in The Ipcress File), the use of brainwashing techniques by the villains means that the hero, in this case Frank Sinatra in possibly his best outing as an actor, is struggling to find what to trust in even cold reality and even inside himself. What remains that he can believe in as ''truth''?

Only saw this one once and that was years ago. I don't remember whether it had all the stylistic tools and whether it looked and felt like a film noir (Chinatown does this) but as cerv3za says, The Manchurian Candidate is strongly influenced by preceding films noire, even if we don't regard it as a film noir in its own right.

[Mal Hombre]

:DHow about the original Kiss of Death ? with Victor Mature and the late great Richard Widmark.Alternately snarling and giggling,he introduced the psychopath to film.

[scoundrel]

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Directed by Richard Fleischer.

Detective Sergeant Brown (Charles McGraw) is assigned to escort a mobster's widow (Mrs Neall), played by Marie Windsor, from Chicago to Los Angeles, where she is due to give evidence. Unfortunately, her journey is not a well kept secret and the train they are travelling on becomes a covert battleground where anyone on board might be friend or deadly foe. To make matters worse, Sergeant Brown's ward is not a well behaved charge, alternately flirting with him, doubting his competence, offering to run off with him into the wide blue yonder, but always distracting him when he needs to be absolutely focused. Bizarrely, she is much less afraid than he is. She is treacherous, dangerous and TROUBLE. In this film, no-one is exactly as they seem and no-one conforms to the expected character type.

Fleischer uses the claustrophobic setting of the train cleverly, and exploits the rhythms of rail travel: for example there are artful interludes when the train stops at stations and the characters, good and bad, communicate with their superiors by telex. The sense of being trapped in this mobile ampi-theatre is strong. The final confrontation features a really smart use of the reflection in the window of a second train running parallel to the Chicago/LA express, a neat cinematic trick.

The film used relatively unknown actors, all of whom perform really well, fairly cheap settings and no expensive special effects. It proved that a really good director and cast with a first rate screenplay doesn't need fancy tricks or a massive budget to create a high class film. This great and complex thriller was made as a B movie: it outshines 9 out of 10 modern blockbuster feature films being released this year.

[damp-patch]

Double Indemnity.

[Mal Hombre]

It occurs to me that Reservoir Dogs is a classic film noir plot,with it's heist gone wrong,crooks falling out and the ultimate down beat ending.It could easily have been made in the 40s or 50s(with a lot less swearing and a little less violence).You could imagine Richard Widmark as Mr Blond, Dana Andrews as Mr Orange and Victor Mature as Mr White.(i call it a Premake)

[damp-patch]

Touch of Evil.

[scoundrel]

My proposition is: Which film or films noire do you particularly like, and what is it about it/them which especially pleases you . A post naming the film is all very well, but with no extra information the members who haven't already seen the movie won't get any value from your contribution, and might not click the 'Thanks' button!

Here's a brief reminder of the ground rules I set at the start of the thread. All contributions are gratefully received:) but I think its much more interesting for the other members if you say something about the nature of the film instead of merely naming it. No need to go overboard as I tend to do: just a few pithy comments is quite good enough.:D

Brighton Rock
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Film of a book by Graham Green. In the photo we see Richard Attenborough as Pinkie Brown and Carol Marsh as Rose, an innocent abroad who doesn't know that she really really needs to stay away from men like Pinkie Brown...

I say ''men'' but Pinkie is really a teenager, but old in crime and wickedness and already the leader of a violent gang of protection racketeers, enforcers and multi-talented organised criminals much older than himself, but in thrall to him because he is energetic, imaginative, devilishly clever, charismatic and bad all the way through, like Brighton Rock. Brighton Rock is a long thin tube of sugar confectionery, flavoured with peppermint, and with the word 'Brighton' in the middle of it all the way through from one end to the other. Pinkie Brown is the Brighton Rock of the title.

IMHO this is Richard Attenborough's finest hour as an actor in front of the camera. He creates a wonderful, terrifying villainous persona, not a million miles away from the monster put together by Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs nearly forty years later. Pinkie doesn't shout, swear, threaten or bluster: he is quiet, usually impeccably polite and friendly, even in the company of someone he is about to kill and even when both men know it. He does very scary things without so much as a hesitation or a second thought. In 1947, I doubt if many British filmgoers were familiar with the word 'psychopath', but once the end credits were running on Brighton Rock, they knew what one was. Oh yes indeedy.

Pinkie's ''romantic'' connection with the innocent and vulnerable Rose is one of the creepiest things about this dark and creepy film. She is attracted to a man for the first time in her life (and it has to be Pinkie Brown:rolleyes:). She more than half suspects that he is a very bad boy, which of course enhances his appeal. He is at all times a perfect gentleman in his behaviour towards her, as far as she knows.

We, the viewers, can see the horrible attraction Rose hold for Pinkie Brown. It isn't simply that she is good looking (she is, of course) but that she is, in her own way, the picture of innocence. That itself is fascinating to Pinkie, who knows theoretically that such a thing exists but has never seen it for real before. Also, he is a horrendous mixture of cruelty, malice and deadly patience. If she ever fell wholly into his power, he would break her physically and emotionally into a million pieces, but there's no hurry. Most of the pleasure in fishing is baiting the hook, and waiting...

The scratch in the vinyl record on which Pinkie has expressed his true feelings for Rose is a really clever cinematic trick. Even at the end, she still hasn't grasped what has been going on: we omniscient viewers pity her but are cruelly superior, almost like Gods in Ancient Greece, and very like Pinkie Brown in the action of the film. I like this ending a lot.

IMHO Brighton Rock is the best out of the very few film noir offerings to emerge from the UK: We Brits weren't very suited to this subversive way of seeing. the Americans were past masters and the French were also excellent but we Brits? Perhaps we thought it wasn't cricket...

[tabler]

Touch of Evil.

Oh the wit, you cant beat pithy banter:D

[scoundrel]

Oh the wit, you cant beat pithy banter:D

Harsh, tabler, but you see where I'm coming from. Touch of Evil is a brilliant film, Orson Welles' last real masterpiece (did he do anything but film noir? Even The Magnificent Ambersons could be argued to be film noir) and the opening tracking shot is breathtaking in its' seamless, magnificent audacity. What a master-film-maker Orson Welles was.

damp patch, I have only scratched the surface. You picked a good 'un but there's plenty left for you to say: go for it mate!

[snorkie]

Did anyone mention 'Murder, My Sweet'?

http://img157.imagevenue.com/loc710/th_26241_SweetPoster_122_710lo.jpg (http://img157.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=26241_SweetPoster_122_710lo.jpg)

A true classic of the genre, which I never tire of watching. Chandler said that Dick Powell matched his vision of Marlowe ("Phillip for short"). Powell got the role by promising the studio that he'd do more musicals. He never did another.

[scoundrel]

I just accidentally caught the last 30 minutes of TTM on one of the Sky channels and want to expand a little on what I have already said. I don't feel that I have given nearly enough credit to Trevor Howard for his excellent performance as British military policeman Major Calloway. After Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) goes back on their agreement and refuses to sell out his old friend Harry Lime, Calloway shows an almost inhuman lack of anger or animosity, and offers Martins a lift to the airport as though there really isn't much to worry about.

But on the way to the airport, Calloway plays his last card and oh boy is it a nasty one. In a really potent scene I had forgotten about, Calloway shows Martins what is really going on by escorting him around a children's hospital where kids who were treated with the fake penicillin peddled by Lime are now being cared for by Sisters of Mercy. We never see the kids but we see Cotton's face go numb with horror and revulsion as he survey's Lime's handiwork. A Holy Sister removes a teddy bear, signifying that the child has just died, and Calloway (Howard) remarks, as dispassionately as though he were talking about the weather:

She caught meningitis, so they treated her with Lime's penicillin. [Pause] Terrible pity, isn't it?

This is really chilling. Both because Calloway can be so remote and unfeeling in his outward demeanour, and because we are briefly seeing behind Calloway's ice cold mask. Calloway hates Harry Lime and for him the whole purpose is to destroy Harry Lime, and in this childrens' ward we are seeing the mainspring of Calloway's hatred. It's sooooo British: Calloway would never scream, shout, swear or weep. Instead, he will tread on Harry Lime like a cockroach, then have a cup of tea, then check the next item in his in-tray. In one sense, this is compassion which means something because it is expressed in deeds, not words. In another sense it is part of this looking glass world, where ordinary reactions and feelings have disappeared.

Trevor Howard is great in this film.

[scoundrel]

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Already mentioned by Greenskull, but I feel like giving it a plug as well. I reviewed Strangers on a Train on another thread which is no longer with us (:rolleyes:) so apologies is anything I say seems repetitious.

IMHO this is one of Hitchcock's best films, yet has been been eclipsed by later films, some of which (The Birds, Marnie, The Family Plot, the truly rubbish Frenzy) are lesser work. The premise is that two men who randomly meet on a train [Robert Walker as Bruno Anthony and Farley Grainger as Guy Haines] both have problems which might be solved if inconvenient people in their lives were to experience bad luck with their health. Bruno has an unpleasant controlling and authoritarian father, from whom he stands to inherit big bucks. Guy is a social climber who would like to marry a Senator's daughter (Ruth Roman as Anne Morton), but has a vulgar, promiscuous wife who won't divorce him (Kasey Rogers as Miriam). Guy thinks his conversation on the desireability of exchanging murders is merely a clever and diverting thought-experiment on Bruno's part.

Guy is wrong.

The murder of Miriam by Bruno is a really sick and brilliant flight of cinema, made possible by the magnificent charisma Robert Walker brings to the part. Bruno is a charmer and a seducer who stalks Miriam through a provincial funfare, actually flirting with her and teasing her. Unsympathetic though she is, you see how cruelly she is being deceived, and the whole sequence also underlines the films unspoken theme of sexuality as perverse, dark and sinister. Bruno actually follows Miriam in a boat through a ''tunnel of love'' to get her alone and strangle her: Freud and Jung would have enjoyed the twisted humour of that.

The rest of the film boils down to a clash of wills between Walker's and Grainger's characters, as Bruno tries to force Guy to perform his reciprocal murder and then to incriminate and destroy Guy for Miriam's death as a punishment for failing to honour the bargain. Throughout, and in a theme which was very advanced and subversive for a 1951 Hollywood film, there is a clear homo-erotic tension between the two, never articulated but hard to avoid. Bruno's campaign to ruin Guy expresses sexual jealousy of Guy's unacceptably wholesome relationship with Anne Morton. It isn't merely homosexual versus heterosexual, its also deviance in a much broader and creepier sense against purity of love, and strength of purpose (Bruno) against weakness, cowardice and vacillation (Guy). As one often finds in film noire, the villain is stronger than the hero and the hero must either shape up or go to the wall.

Guy shapes up, but dangerously late in the game. His fiercely contested tennis final ironically demonstrates that the deadly battle with Bruno is turning him into a real man at last: he wins in 5 sets a match he would ordinarily have lost, even more ironic in that losing in 3 sets would have been better tactics in his real war with Bruno. But Guy finally has found some fight in his character and the tennis victory prefigures his resolve in the next battle against Bruno. Guy is pissed off and has had enough: Bruno is no longer going to walk over him.

The final action around the merry-go-round is a classic Hitchcock tour de force, reprising the surreal combination of violence and fairground carnival pleasure-seeking which helped to give such edge to the earlier murder of Miriam.

The ending appears to be a happy one, good triumphing over evil and so forth, but the implacable malevolence, charm and resolve of Bruno, using his dying breath in one last attempt to incriminate Guy leaves a stong impression. Sure the good guys won, but they've got nothing to be complacent about. A nice Hitchcock flourish.

Strangers on a Train: top film. Recommended.

[dohupa]

This thread lacks some of the best classics imho. For starters, don't see anywhere The Postman always rings twice (1946) with awesome Lana Turner as Cora

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038854/

or Laura (1944) with Gene Tierney. How could you guys miss these beauties? :rolleyes: :D

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037008/

One of the best film-noir movies I've watched ages ago on the telly was Detour (1945) - a cult masterpiece lasting a moderate 67 mins only!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037638/

As far as recent noir is concerned, I really liked Red Rock West (1993) - have this thing for Lara Flynn Boyle you see. :D Seriously though, it's a great movie - recommended. ;)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105226/

[snorkie]

http://img157.imagevenue.com/loc710/th_26241_SweetPoster_122_710lo.jpg (http://img157.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=26241_SweetPoster_122_710lo.jpg)


Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki) was supposed to be a hulking giant, but Dick Powell was actually taller, which they manage to hide in all but one scene (in the garage). Also, I understand that Anne Shirley, who played the good girl, so wanted to play the femme fatal that she retired from films shortly after the movie was completed.

Director Edward Dmytryk had the screen writers lift dialog directly from the novel: "She had a face like a bucket of mud." "My bank account was trying to climb under a duck." "She was the kind of gal who would accept a drink, even if she had to knock you over to get it."

Finally, check out the sequence where they have Marlowe drugged in an asylum, very effective.
If you enjoy Film Noir, you really should see this one.

BTW, while not strictly film Film Noir, the Tom Selleck TV adaptations of 'Jesse Stone' novels have many of the elements. I don't care for writer Robert Parker, but based on the effectiveness of "Night Passage" I went and read the book. I still don't care for Robert Parker. ;)

[haldane4]

Phantom Lady (1944)
The Chase (1946)
Fear In The Night (1947)
I Wouldn't Be In Your Shoes (1948)
Night Has A Thousand Eyes (1948)

I picked out the above five because they all have something in common - they're based on stories by Cornell Woolrich. For me Woolrich was the greatest exponent of noir in prose, critic Francis Nevins called him 'the Poe of the 20th century and the poet of its shadows' - if the girlfriend of a Woolrich protagonist went missing not only could he not persuade the Police she was missing, he probably couldn't persuade them that she ever existed. Woolrich peddled the unreasoning momentum of fear and panic further than any other author, screwed the life out of panic situations. His books were later picked up by the French New Wave when Truffaut filmed The Bride Wore Black.

There are many times in my life when the fear has crept up high in me and I recognised it as that essential Woolrich moment. The film adaptations aren't the best (though Hitchcock did fine with Rear Window and Three O'Clock), but they are black path back to the author.

[ironmonkey]

http://www.siffblog.com/Night&City_228.jpg
Night and the City
Jules Dassin, 1950

Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) is a London hustler with ambitious plans that never work out. One day, when he encounters the most famous Greco-Roman wrestler in the world, Gregorius, at a London wrestling arena run by his son Kristo, he dreams up a scheme that he thinks will finally be his ticket to financial independence. As Fabian attempts to con everyone around him to get his scheme to work, he of course only ends up conning himself. This is an interesting tale of blind ambition, self-deception, broken dreams, and how a man who always thinks he's ahead of the game ends up tripping himself very badly.

http://asset3.flavorpill.com/attachment_image_files/0004/0782/doulos_large.jpg
Le doulos
Jean Pierre Melville, 1962

Burglar Maurice Faugel has just finished his sentence. He murders Gilbert Vanovre, a receiver, and steals the loot of a break-in. He is also preparing a house-breaking, and his friend Silien brings him the needed equipment. But Silien is a police informer ... A movie whose "all characters are two-faced, all characters are false", according to director Jean-Pierre Melville

[scoundrel]

Ace In The Hole: http://img235.imagevenue.com/loc388/th_70562_Ace_In_The_Hole_122_388lo.jpg

Kirk Douglas in Ace In The Hole: http://img241.imagevenue.com/loc403/th_70564_Kirk_Douglas_in_Ace_In_The_Hole_122_403lo .jpg

A classic Billy Wilder satire, dark black in tone, bitingly cynical, sharply witty and a harsh morality tale.

Kirk Douglas in fine form is the venal, self-serving and unpleasant anti-hero Chuck Tatum, a man bogged down in the mess he has made of his own career through excessive drinking (even by journalists' standards) and sleeping with his former boss's wife. He secures a fifth rate job in a small town newspaper in New Mexico and, when a local man becomes trapped in old mine-workings, he sees the story as a chance to step back up the career ladder. There is national interest in the poor man's predicament, a media circus is gathering, Chuck Tatum is suddenly the man with the local contacts and the inside track on the story.

Only trouble is, the man musn't be rescued too soon...

Tatum teams up with the victim's trashy and mean spirited no-good wife (Jan Sterling is very good in this meaty role of a thoroughly bad woman) and with the corruptible mining engineer entrusted with supervising the rescue. Mrs Minosa runs the local diner, her business in ailing, and the sudden influx of journoes is manna from heaven, plus when her husband is finally rescued they will sell the story.

Even the naive teenage photographer catches the self-serving bug and dreams of the syndication rights to his photographs.

Alas, the story is not as under control as Tatum thinks. Instead of delaying the rescue for dramatic effect, all the trumped up high tech foolery traps the poor devil in the mineshaft for eternity.

He who will not when he may,
When he will, he shall have nay.

Far too late, Tatum discovers that his failed bid to get back into the big time has been bought at far too high a price. His rabbit is stuck in the hat, Mrs Minosa has no story to sell and no husband either, the media circus blows away as quickly as it blew in and, though the hope and ambition has turned to dust and ashes, the blood of an innocent man will stay fresh forever.

This is one fierce satire on 20th Century news media, and is uncomfortably relevent today.

[retro72]

I would have to put in a vote for Bladerunner as a modern 'film noir'...

[Joszka]

http://thumbnails13.imagebam.com/4209/c80d1342081722.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/c80d1342081722)http://thumbnails16.imagebam.com/4209/10c54042081727.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/10c54042081727)http://thumbnails14.imagebam.com/4209/4c701942081732.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/4c701942081732)

- "Laura", Otto Preminger, 1944.
- "The asphalt jungle", John Huston, 1950.
- "The big combo", Joseph H. Lewis. 1955.

I still watched "Laura" a few days ago,.

[scoundrel]

http://img166.imagevenue.com/loc208/th_78857_The_Big_Sleep_122_208lo.jpg

As nominated by eelcat, and featuring one of the all time great romantic pairings on screen and also actually in life, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall:

http://img127.imagevenue.com/loc554/th_78860_Bogart_and_Bacall_122_554lo.jpg

This is a great film adaptation from a great book. The plot is extremely complex but unfolds steadily and with great tension as, like Ariadne's thread, we viewers follow in the wake of Phillip Marlowe (Bogart) in his quest to explain the disappearance of Rusty Regan. It turns out that under the genteel and monied surface of General Sternwood's mansion, there are some extremely sordid goings on, mostly revolving around the wild behaviour of the youngest daughter, Carmen (Martha Vickers), who is involved with some deeply shady people, including a blackmailer and pornographer (:rolleyes:) called Geiger, who inconveniently muddies the water by turning up dead just when he might have been useful as a suspect...

Bogart's performance is the foundation stone of this impressive film, he is in nearly every scene and is our eyes and ears. He is also our spokesman, full of all those replies we always wish we could have thought of and never do:

Eddie Mars[sinister gangster]:Convenient, the door being open when you didn't have a key eh?
Marlowe:Yeah, wasn't it? By the way, how'd you happen to have one?
Mars:Is that any of your business?
Marlowe:I could make it my business.
Mars:I could make your business mine.
Marlowe:Oh, you wouldn't like it. The pay's too small.

The smartness and cutting edge of the dialogue does justice to Chandler's razor sharp narrative style in the original book. The brooding camera work is also first class, especially the scene in the rain as Bogart deals with Carmen Sternwood's compromising situation as a bystander at the scene of Geiger's murder. There are numerous strong supporting performances, notably Charles Waldron as General Sternwood and John Ridgeley as Eddie Mars.

It is only in the final reel that the core mystery of Rusty Regan's disappearance is solved, in a very surprising and rather shocking moment of violent intent as the true culprit is unmasked, and Vivian Sternwood's (Bacall's) deeply ambivalent behaviour and attitude explained. Not only is this one of the top films noire, it is also one of the top films, period.

[crazybikerme]

I think Bogie went one better....................;)

http://img103.imagevenue.com/loc143/th_87680_TMF_122_143lo.JPG (http://img103.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=87680_TMF_122_143lo.JPG)http://img175.imagevenue.com/loc570/th_87680_MalteseFalcon_122_570lo.jpg (http://img175.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=87680_MalteseFalcon_122_570lo.jpg)ht tp://img207.imagevenue.com/loc427/th_87682_maltese-falcon-bogart-lorre_122_427lo.jpg (http://img207.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=87682_maltese-falcon-bogart-lorre_122_427lo.jpg)http://img138.imagevenue.com/loc256/th_87683_falcon15_122_256lo.jpg (http://img138.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=87683_falcon15_122_256lo.jpg)

:p :p :p

[scoundrel]

http://img225.imagevenue.com/loc446/th_38243_Citizen_X_122_446lo.jpg (http://img225.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=38243_Citizen_X_122_446lo.jpg)
This low-key and atmospheric detective story strikes me most strongly as a latter day film noir. It is stongly based on the true story of the serial killer Andrei Chikotilo, a prolific and unbelievably cruel murderer of children. The film gives a very revealing insight into the various ways the hunt for Chikotilo was handicapped by the hypocrisy, corruption and incompetence of the responsible authorities in the pre-Gorbachov Soviet Union.

Joss Ackland gives a nice performance as the totally despicable Chairman of the Rostov Communist Party local politburo, who obstructs the investigation at every turn. Donald Sutherland is excellent as the local chief of police ( and Party Secretary), Colonel Mikhail Fetisov. Stephen Rea carries the film as the central figure, Lieutenant Viktor Burakov, on a lonely and desperate quest to stop the deadly killing spree of a murderer so elusive that almost no-one else even believes that he exists.

The relationship between Burakov and his CO, Fetisov is a theme of central interest to the film. It reminds me, both in the power dynamic and in the poised, cynical dark humour, of the relationship between Captain Renault and Rick Blaine in Casablanca. But Lt Burakov is a little bit unworldly and Colonel Fetisov's suave charm is not so readily displayed, though he can be charming, witty and amusing when it suits his purpose.

Fetisov is initially not a likeable man at all, but becomes more sympathetic partly because we see more and more that he is, in his own way, also a man of honour. He has played the dirty Communist political game as well as anyone, but now that he has the job of Chief of Police which he was angling for, it turns out that, alone among the local Communists, he takes his duty to the people of Rostov very seriously. Once Burakov, a backroom forensic specialist, convinces him that there is something really really bad going on, he shoulders the burden like a man. The Politburo absolutely will not do their duty (serial killers are a sickness of the decadent West you see) so Fetisov works on their selfish fears, inviting them to consider what they will say to the KGB man from Moscow when Moscow finds out that they were warned and did nothing: this happens again and again, where duty and honour means nothing to these venal and corrupt bullies, Fetisov gets his way by talking their sordid language and using their dirty weapons against them. Fetisov is often just as nasty as they are, but he is never quite as soiled as a human being.

The way his professional relationship with Burakov evolves over time is fascinating. The two men become friends as the film goes on. Fetisov drives Burakov mercilessly but never blames him for the ongoing failure of the investigation because he, of all people, knows only too well the difficulties Burakov is up against. Gradually, the two create a working partnership because they both want to catch the mysterious Citizen X and they both contend constantly with the dead hand of the Communist establishment, having to treat as enemies the very people who should be helping and supporting them.

Near the end, the cold wind of post-Communism starts to blow, threatening to destroy the investigation. But Colonel Fetisov, the great politician, contrives to allign himself with the winning side and one of the rewards is that, at long long last, the newly promoted Colonel Burakov can be granted his wish and can appeal to the FBI in America for specialist advice on ways and means to track down a serial killer. The telephone conversation with the Feebs is a revelation on many levels: the Russians are transferred straight to the Director himself. The FBI do indeed provide some valuable tips, but are also delighted to have been approached. It turns out that Communist attempts to conceal the Chikatilo case from public knowledge were wasted on the FBI, who have followed the case intently (they include it in lectures on procedure at their Quantico training school) and are effusive in their admiration for Colonel Burakov [ they know about his promotion even before Burakov knows].

Burakov, who is always plagued by self-doubt and a haunting, keen sense of his own failure, cannot understand the FBI's eagerness to praise him, so the Director explains that it is about Burakov's exemplary attitude rather than his results, which are not a fair measure given how little support he has had and how inadequate his resources were. The Director comments wryly: ''Its been over ten years and you've never let up once. I'd sure hate to have you looking for me...'' When the Russians, even Fetisov unusually humble and child-like with honest curiosity, politely ask how the Americans know so much, the Director's voice takes on a tone of humour as he tells them never mind how he knows, just accept that he knows.

I like this film a lot. It is a real character-piece and very insightful in its exploration of the differents ways in which people can try to maintain their compromised integrity in a morally tainted and ambiguous world.

[MrKinkade]

Here's one that comes to mind
http://www.aijaa.com/img/t/00694/4510744.t.jpg (http://www.aijaa.com/v.php?i=4510744.jpg) Le Samourai dir by Melville and protagonist actor Alain Delon.

Also a more recent film noire Fight Club a very dark theme :D

[scoundrel]

I think Bogie went one better....................;)

http://img103.imagevenue.com/loc143/th_87680_TMF_122_143lo.JPG (http://img103.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=87680_TMF_122_143lo.JPG)http://img175.imagevenue.com/loc570/th_87680_MalteseFalcon_122_570lo.jpg (http://img175.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=87680_MalteseFalcon_122_570lo.jpg)ht tp://img207.imagevenue.com/loc427/th_87682_maltese-falcon-bogart-lorre_122_427lo.jpg (http://img207.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=87682_maltese-falcon-bogart-lorre_122_427lo.jpg)http://img138.imagevenue.com/loc256/th_87683_falcon15_122_256lo.jpg (http://img138.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=87683_falcon15_122_256lo.jpg)

:p :p :p

Yep. I watched this last night on DVD and its pretty good.

The story is full of twists and turns and yet linear and basically easy to follow, mainly because the action and character development are enthralling from start to finish so there is no wavering of concentration. Compare and contrast with the dismal flop The Da Vinci Code, not so much film noir as film merde.

Bogart delivers a gripping and complex performance, doing justice to the dark side of Sam Spade: his latent cruelty, enjoyment of violence, and his compulsive urge to live dangerously. He is no fool but admits himself that he often behaves like one, because its fun. He knows he should really be with his unflaggingly loyal secretary, Effie Perine (Lee Patrick) but prefers bad girls, such as the widow-spider Iva Archer, with whom he was carrying on adulterously before Miles Archer, his friend and colleague, turned up dead. On the same principle he is drawn to the pathalogical liar and deceiver, Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), knowing full well she is a back stabber who may well be behind Miles' murder and would not hesitate to sell him down the river as well.

Its really textbook film noir, in which the good guys are also bad guys, and the bad guys (even ''badder'') are strangely appealing. Peter Lorre is brilliant as the totally cynical and shamelessly amoral Joel Cairo, as constant and unchanging as a koleidoscope, capable of dangerous violence but neither loyal nor revengeful, and, of course, as blatantly gay as the Hays Commission would allow. Although potentially murderous, he is witty, amusing and handles himself quite well: Sam Spade is not scornful and indeed doesn't dislike him. His disdain is chiefly reserved for the incompetent gunman and toyboy Wilmer, nicely played by Elisha Cook:

Wilmer: ''Keep on riding me and they're goin' to be pickin' lead out of your liver.
Spade: ''The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.''

But most of all Sidney Greenstreet, in his first film at 61, is superb as the sinister Fat Man. Kasper Gutman in his obsessive and utterly unscrupulous quest to find the Falcon, is a charming, witty and lethal psychopath. He doesn't kill people left, right and centre, because he is hyper-intelligent and knows better. But as he tells poor old Wilmer:

''I couldn't be fonder of you if you were my own son. But, well, if you lose a son, its possible to get another...and there's only one Maltese Falcon.''

The gradual homo-erotic love-hate thing going on between Gutman and Joel Cairo sort of consumates into the start of a relationship as Joel hysterically berates Gutman for the failure of their plans, Gutman looks as if he is about to have a seizure from sheer frustration, then, with sang froid which is both grimly amusing and really formidable, reverts to his normal persona, comforts and rallies the weeping Cairo, and invites him to Turkey, where the hot lead is going...The Fat Man has tremendous class, and Sam Spade, who fears no-one, isn't sorry to see him go.

The final scene, when Sam unmasks Brigid and then coldly throws her to the wolves of justice, is a perfect end to a perfect journey of treachery, deceit and low cunning from all hands.

The Maltese Falcon: cracking good stuff.

[haldane4]

The end of The Maltese Falcon has an act of courage and resolve by Spade which goes so far beyond gun-play and tough-guy antics that it's simply breath-taking. That part is so brilliantly scripted and acted by Bogart and the beautiful but bad, and possibly mad, Ms Astor that I think it's the most emotionally intelligent scene ever captured on screen, and certainly the most effective debunking of the Hayes Code.

Flawless and timeless.

Lorre and Greenstreet teamed up later in an adaptation of Eric Ambler's The Mask of Dimitrios - while not in the same class as the Falcon, it's worth seeing.

[snorkie]

The end of The Maltese Falcon has an act of courage and resolve by Spade which goes so far beyond gun-play and tough-guy antics that it's simply breath-taking.


A lot of the credit has to go to Dashiell Hammett, as the dialog was lifted fairly faithfully albeit condensed from the novel. The scene is actually a reworking of an earlier Hammett pulp call "The Girl with the Silver Eyes" (not the book by Roberts with the same title). In that story, the truly hard boiled, never named Continental Op makes the same choice as Sam Spade. The difference is Jeanne Delano's reaction is quite a bit different than that of Brigid O'Shaughnessy.

[tmee2000]

http://thumbnails13.imagebam.com/4209/c80d1342081722.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/c80d1342081722)[/URL]

- "Laura", Otto Preminger, 1944.
- "The asphalt jungle", John Huston, 1950.
- "The big combo", Joseph H. Lewis. 1955.

I still watched "Laura" a few days ago,.
I think Laura. Really strong cast. With the delicious Gene Tierney in it, it could be Laura vs The Smog Monster and it would still be pretty bloody good.

The Third Man is a great movie. I love it.

So is The Maltese Falcon.

[doyle]

But didn't you think Dana Andrews was mis-cast? I always found old Dana painfully stiff; I'm amazed he was so successful as an actor.
Bogart would have been wonderful.

[snorkie]

But didn't you think Dana Andrews was mis-cast? I always found old Dana painfully stiff; I'm amazed he was so successful as an actor.
Bogart would have been wonderful.

I suspect that another Otto Preminger regular, Robert Mitchem would have done well in the role of detective McPherson. Andrews was reasonably good in the first half of the film where he was supposed to be laconic, hard boiled, and in many ways going through routine. The problem is after Laura turns up, Andrews needed to shift to a gear he didn't have.

If you want to see Andrews at his best, I'd recommend "The Best Years of Our Lives." Watch his eyes as each disappointment is compounded by the next. Really fine work, IMO

[scoundrel]

Yes: The Best Years Of Our Lives is a really fine and powerful film, full of dark and potent irony and bitterness. It was hugely topical in 1946 and dealt very honestly with the social problems of wounded, mentally traumatised veterans, often without skills to earn a living in civilian life. Of course Captain Fred Derry (Andrews) could have invoked his entitlement under the Servicemens Readjustment Act 1944 to pursue a college degree, re-training or otherwise improve himself. At the end, with the sturdy and strong-willed Peggy (Teresa Wright) at his side instead of the trashy good-time girl Marie (Virginia Mayo) Andrews in on a course to be OK, and might yet invoke the GI Bill, though I don't remember that this excellent and enlightened legislation is ever mentioned, and that's significant of the helplessness felt by Fred and by his friend Homer, who has no hands. The help is there but the guidance and support they need is missing.

Andrews is really good in that part. He is sympathetic, but his flaws and weaknesses are also laid bare: he isn't blameless for his predicament and isn't totally honourable at all, especially courting Peggy, the teenage daughter of a friend when he is married already. But the film invites us to forgive him and hope he will end up OK: he pays heavily for his errors and has served his country faithfully and bravely. He, Homer and Al all deserve better than they are getting, which is the central message of the film.

[scare'crow]

I'd go for a couple of newer releases, L.A. Confidential & Gone Baby Gone, although neither are as good as the original novels.

[Attila The Hun]

Great to see so many Noir fans! :-)

1. Casablanca
2. The Maltese Falcon
3. The Big Sleep
4. Angels With Dirty Faces
5. M

[snorkie]

Yes: The Best Years Of Our Lives is a really fine and powerful film, full of dark and potent irony and bitterness.

Well, said. It should be mentioned that Fredric March had lead billing in the film as the alcoholic banker trying to find balance between the world of finance and the needs of the common soldier which he was during the war. At the same time, he is trying to connect with a family that hardly knows him. The scene where he drunkenly reveals to his wife that he'd probably cheated on her is humorous and would have been tragic if level-headed Myrna Loy hadn't decided to smile and blow it off.

BTW, legendary songwriter Hoagy Carmicheal (Stardust) as Butch, nearly steals every scene he's in.

[foxx]

Farewell, My Lovely by Dick Richards.

Although "The Big Sleep" was the better film, but I always liked Robert Mitchum's Marlowe portrayal better.

[snorkie]

Farewell, My Lovely by Dick Richards.

Although "The Big Sleep" was the better film, but I always liked Robert Mitchum's Marlowe portrayal better.

Trivia: The Dick Powell version, "Murder, My Sweet" was renamed because Powell had been a star in musicals. When they tested the film, with the title "Farewell, My Lovely," audiences expected singing and dancing. They were sorely disappointed.

Mitchum's two turns as Marlowe weren't bad, and probably a little closer to the novels details (for example they didn't shy away from Carmen Sternwood being a pathological killer). All four movies are enjoyable; I just happen to think the Bogart and Powell films were better.

[foxx]

You' re right. There have been many remarkable Chandler adaptions.

Robert Montgomery's "Lady in the Lake" had a very interesting use of camera and mainly showed Phillip Marlowes perspective.
Robert Altman's "The Long goodbye" was very good satirical deconstruction.

I even like Armand Westons "Expose me lovely" ;-).

[scoundrel]

http://img257.imagevenue.com/loc119/th_60969_North_By_North_West_122_119lo.jpg
Classic Hitchcock thriller, and full of treachery, double-dealing, dark and twisted sexuality and cynical moral relativism. Cary Grant is outstanding as Roger Thornhill, a senior advertising executive who finds that his facile gift for pulling the wool over peoples' eyes (sorry tabs:D) has a whole new relevence and applicability to the problem of mere survival. He is mistaken for George Kaplan, a fictitious enemy invented by the American secret service (''CIA, FBI: we're all in the same alphabet soup...'') to distract attention from their real agent undercover. Unfortunately Kaplan is perceived by the bad guys, led by James Mason in a polished and deadly performance, as a serious nuisance...

James Mason's courteous, urbane and merciless villain is a perfect performance of its kind. He never even raises his voice, is only ever angry once (with Martin Landau over Eva Marie Saint, for a variety of complex reasons which basically centre on punishing the bearer of bad news) and is as emotional as an IBM database. His relationship with Eve Kendal reflects a physical lust combined with a really creepy mutual fascination: she is no girl scout and he likes the worst aspects of her character the best. They make a charming couple, don't they?

http://img262.imagevenue.com/loc542/th_61452_James_Mason_North_By_North_West_122_542lo .jpg (http://img262.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=61452_James_Mason_North_By_North_Wes t_122_542lo.jpg)

The ''good guys'', in classic film noir tradition, aren't particularly ''good''. Led by The Professor (Leo Carroll), they are not very troubled by the danger they have visited on Roger Thornhill: the word expendible comes to mind, especially since he is not even their property, but a windfall of fate. However, Roger chooses to remain inconveniently alive and obliges them to rescue him once his energetic and fierce intervention starts to jeopardise their plans.

These plans centre on their inside man, woman actually, a once naive innocent turned double-edged and scalpel sharp weapon played superbly by the sexy and classy Eva Marie Saint. Eve Kendal is intelligent, charming and a real deadly-dangerous ice Goddess, a perfect film noir heroine, who seems able to seduce a man then smile as she sends him to certain death. In fact, she isn't nearly as heartless as she seems but her determination to do Phillip Vandamme (James Mason) down makes her as willing to sacrifice Cary Grant, even if she loves him, as she is willing to die herself if it comes to that. Some of this is genuine patriotism. Some of it reflects her sincere dissatisfaction with the fact that James Mason blithely expects her to share his affections with another, and this ''other'' is Martin Landau.:rolleyes: There are limits, dahling...

The preying mantis flirtation games she plays with Cary Grant on the train are classic noir: la belle dame sans merci in glorious full plumage. The film leaves a faint ambiguity just how far she is prepared to go, possibly for censorship reasons, but the rest of the action only makes sense on the basis that she has first loved him, then cast him to the wolves. The 180 degree reversal of 1950s sexual roles adds to the sense of her unexpected power over him and the danger of her persona. To love such a woman is to court deadly peril, but Roger, though wounded and angry, still comes back for more. That night on the train must have been quite something.

Here is a still which reflects the dynamics of their true love:
http://img132.imagevenue.com/loc532/th_61625_Eva_Marie_Saint_in_North_By_North_West_12 2_532lo.jpg

The film is darkly funny, cruel and callously cynical, but still a strangely convincing love story. The support acting is uniformly excellent, especially Martin Landau as a grown up little boy who still enjoys pulling the legs off spiders. Incidentally Cary Grant's grey suit must be the best suit ever worn in cinema: like the luggage in Joe And The Volcano, it sticks with him all the way to hell and back again.

North By North West borrows its title from Hamlet and like Hamlet is full of plays within plays, betrayals, masks and shifting identities.

Good film.

[snorkie]

http://img257.imagevenue.com/loc119/th_60969_North_By_North_West_122_119lo.jpg
Classic Hitchcock thriller, and full of treachery, double-dealing, dark and twisted sexuality and cynical moral relativism.

One of my favorite Hitchcock's, North By Northwest features one of the director's favorite themes: the ineffectual hero. No matter how determined, resourceful or clever the protagonist is, very little seems to work out in his favor until the very end. You can see this theme in several Hitchcock films such as "The 39 Steps," "The Wrong Man", "I Confess," "The Man Who Knew Too Much," "Rear Window," and Robert Cummings best work by far "Saboteur."

A somewhat related subject: Does Eva Marie Saint's behavior on the train remind anyone of the way Janet Leigh under similar circumstances, so easily adopted Frank Sinatra in "The Manchurian Candidate?" At least one writer has suggested that Leigh might have been an agent, possibly even a second mole. They used this possibility nicely in the Denzel Washington version.

[tmee2000]

http://img257.imagevenue.com/loc119/th_60969_North_By_North_West_122_119lo.jpg.
The Simpsons do a very funny take on this scene as well, to explain Marge's fear of flying.

[scoundrel]

One of my favorite Hitchcock's, North By Northwest features one of the director's favorite themes: the ineffectual hero. No matter how determined, resourceful or clever the protagonist is, very little seems to work out in his favor until the very end. You can see this theme in several Hitchcock films such as "The 39 Steps," "The Wrong Man", "I Confess," "The Man Who Knew Too Much," "Rear Window," and Robert Cummings best work by far "Saboteur."

I would include most other Hitchcock films in this catagory, particularly Strangers On A Train, which is a strong personal favourite of mine, and the wonderfully gothic and sinister Vertigo, which also features Kim Novak as a belle dame san merci not dissimilar to Eva Marie Saint, only Jimmy Stewart, that paragon of all American decency, is a really disturbing blend of Cary Grant's hero and James Mason's villain in this one, so Kim Novak doesn't have to choose...

[snorkie]

Kim Novak as a belle dame san merci not dissimilar to Eva Marie Saint, ...

Evan Marie Saint, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren: Popular thinking is that Hitchcock kept trying to find a substitute for Grace Kelly. Makes you wonder about Psycho, and Vertigo, doesn't it?

[Attila The Hun]

So many Hitchcock fans. I guess I am alone in thinking that he is overrated and somewhat artless? The only Hitchcock film I would seriously say is brilliant is 'Rope' which he didn't like that much. One of my main problems with Hitchcock is that he usually casts attractive but untalented blondes who he would like to fuck rather than great actresses.

[scoundrel]

So many Hitchcock fans. I guess I am alone in thinking that he is overrated and somewhat artless? The only Hitchcock film I would seriously say is brilliant is 'Rope' which he didn't like that much. One of my main problems with Hitchcock is that he usually casts attractive but untalented blondes who he would like to fuck rather than great actresses.

Blasphemy, Attila!:D

If you were only talking about Tippi Hendren I would be inclined to agree: she was rubbish in Marnie but actually IMHO she put in a decent turn in The Birds. Eva Marie Saint is simply excellent in North By North West and watch her in On The Waterfront opposite Marlon Brando: she was no 'untalented blonde'. Kim Novak was more limited but hardly talentless: (Vertigo is a very good film noir BTW) and I would respectfully submit that Janet Leigh knew what she was doing on camera as well, not to mention Grace Kelly...

Ingrid Bergman wasn't blonde, of course.:rolleyes:

Nah, sorry Attila, but I think you're barking up the wrong tree, mate.:D But you're obviously fully entitled to your opinion.:)

[Seeker]

Double Indemnity, in one word: Great !
Highly recommended.

Many people mention "The Big Sleep". But did you understand it the first time you saw it ? It's a film with so many twists and turns that you feel you're on a roller coaster ride, and when you go out of the theater you feel dizzy and confused. I recommend that you read the book if you had problems understanding the film.

http://img184.imagevenue.com/loc886/th_73860_doubleindemnity_122_886lo.jpg

[Mal Hombre]

Here's a rare beast -British noir,"The Good Die Young " (1954 ) made in the uk but featuring Richard Baseheart and John Ireland.The British contingent was made up of Stanley Baker and adoptive British Laurence Harvey.The plot is classic noir, four disparate men commit a robbery,they fall out and end up killing each other.

[snorkie]

So many Hitchcock fans. I guess I am alone in thinking that he is overrated and somewhat artless? The only Hitchcock film I would seriously say is brilliant is 'Rope' which he didn't like that much. One of my main problems with Hitchcock is that he usually casts attractive but untalented blondes who he would like to fuck rather than great actresses.

You're certainly not alone; however, your group is a pretty small one. Hitchcock was a master filmmaker and every year at least one new film is something of an homage to him. One problem current viewers have with Hitchcock is the feeling that they have seen it all before. With so many imitators that it is bound to happen.

Regarding the women, Hitchcock heroines were always smart and self-reliant, never window dressing. Often they were very sexy as well. Take a look at Bergman in Notorious - the scene where Grant covers her midriff with a scarf has a lot of sensuality in just a few seconds.

[scoundrel]

http://img31.imagevenue.com/loc1158/th_83480_Batman_122_1158lo.jpg
I've just been watching this one.

You can hardly call Tim Burton's Batman a film noir but it is a thoroughly enjoyable pastiche on the film noir style. The camera work, the elaborately gothic film sets and lighting, the trench coats worn by the plain clothes police, including the seedy Lieutenant Ekhardt, the brooding intensity of the film score: it all borrows heavily from film noir and yet mocks its cultural heritage with energy and enthusiasm. Jack Nicholson steals the show with his irrepressibly cheerful and malevolent Joker: the closest he comes to being downhearted is when the gas attack at the Gotham City parade is thwarted, he shoots his faithful henchman Bob dead just to express his frustration, then calmly tells the rest of his men: ''Boys, I'm going to need to be alone for a while...''

It's nonsense, but damn good fun.

[dohupa]

So many Hitchcock fans. I guess I am alone in thinking that he is overrated and somewhat artless? The only Hitchcock film I would seriously say is brilliant is 'Rope' which he didn't like that much. One of my main problems with Hitchcock is that he usually casts attractive but untalented blondes who he would like to fuck rather than great actresses.
Indeed - too many of us around here. :rolleyes: Having said that, you really need to do your homework mate.

It's not just Psycho you watch every other week on some sat channel you know. Try some 39 Steps, Young and Innocent, Suspicion, Strangers on a train, The man who knew too much - how's that for starters? :D

[haldane4]

http://i633.photobucket.com/albums/uu60/blacknorth/3shonewaystreet.jpg

One Way Street (1950)
Dir: Hugo Fregonese
Starring: James Mason, Marta Toren, Dan Duryea

Forty year old James Mason had a problem. Tempted from Britain to Hollywood on the strength of his performance in Odd Man Out, Mason had unwillingly signed a six-picture deal with a major studio. Arriving in the US, he reneged on his contract and found himself black-listed for a couple of years. During this time he made three films which were thrown to him as consolation - Caught and The Reckless Moment, both directed by Max Ophuls, and both now regarded as noir classics. The other film he made was One Way Street, which has almost disappeared without trace.

One Way Street is an interesting curiousity. Mason plays Doc Matson, a sawbones attached to Dan Duryea's heist gang. When he's not eyeing Duryea's moll, Marta Toren, he's digging slugs out of the gang. After a while, he's had enough. He pulls his own heist on Duryea and escapes with a quarter million and Toren, all in the space of a few breathless minutes. Fleeing across the Mexican border by plane, they have engine trouble and are brought down near a remote village where Mason and Toren are pressed into helping the doctorless local population. Meanwhile Duryea puts out the word, he wants them brought back...

The Mexican interlude is the least effective part of the film. It provides an interesting backdrop to the developing romance between Mason and Toren, but they are both such cool customers that all that desert heat takes 40 minutes to get them going. And it's here where the film bogs down and the morality becomes conventional. There are interesting flashes back to Duryea who has become obsessed with finding the fugitives and has taken to bumping off members of his gang to relieve his frustrations.

Mason decides to return Duryea's money, but not to return Toren, and makes tentative moves. Duryea agrees. The two recross the border for the inevitable showdown. We know Duryea isn't going to play it straight. We don't see how Mason can escape his presence alive and in possession of Toren. Such is the set-up for a genuinely shocking ending, reminscent of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

The film is full of nices touches - Duryea's character is called Wheeler, he signs his letters with a little sketch of a wheel, interesting, given the title. The bright bleached out photography of the Mexican desert ensures all the doubts and vitriol of the city bookends are exposed. And there's an extraordinary gas station scene where Toren offers herself to Mason on the car. Toren looks her best here, a tragic actress, misused by Hollywood and dead at 31 - this film offers her possibly her best role as an ex-moll baiting Mason's character through decency to a fate neither of them can anticipate. Mason's performance is nothing special - he despised these earlier films which he referred to as 'facile assembly work'. Only after his death were most of his noir films re-examined and found to be excellent. One Way Street needs that re-examination.

It's almost impossible to find this film. There's a print on emule at the moment, beware - it's in Spanish and the ending is cut, probably because it's a little too much for modern audiences. I don't see much chance of it turning up on television in the UK. I got my copy from ioffer.

Sorry for the long post, and sorry, Scoundrel, for stealing your patented noir format, but I wanted give this film a decent write-up. It's had precious few over the past 60 years. :)

[snorkie]

[One Way Street]
Starring: James Mason, Marta Toren, Dan Duryea



Dan Duryea was one of the 50s finest psychotic villains (Best evil laugh since Richard Widmark's Tommy Udo in "Kiss of Death"). Check Duryea out in "Winchester 73."

[scoundrel]

One Way Street (1950)
Dir: Hugo Fregonese
Starring: James Mason, Marta Toren, Dan Duryea

Sorry for the long post, and sorry, Scoundrel, for stealing your patented noir format, but I wanted give this film a decent write-up. It's had precious few over the past 60 years. :)

Don't be sorry haldane! You can borrow my film noir format anytime, especially for a post as intriguing as this one. I had never even heard of One Way Street and I'm grateful for the info. I will be keeping an eye open for this one.:D

[John C. Holmes]

For me there's Chinatown and then there's everything else.

[MrKinkade]

well guys I think you've overlooked a british classic not visually in the classic noir style but I watched this on italian tv last night censored and badly dubbed 'GET CARTER' probably the best or one of the best films to come out of british cinema ?
It has all the ingreadients of a film noir gansters,corruption,heroes who are more flawed and morally questionable than the norm. It depicts a depressing post sixties urban landscape funnily enough I was in newcastle around the time that film was shot 1971 on a school trip cant remember much but I dont think I was impressed Iam from west yorkshire btw plenty of ex industrial shit holes there. Also advent guard sound track basically one helluva film.


http://www.aijaa.com/img/b/00752/4638590.jpg (http://www.aijaa.com/v.php?i=4638590.jpg)

[Joszka]

2 of my favs, with Rita Hayworth :

http://thumbnails4.imagebam.com/4496/fe0b3344951698.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/fe0b3344951698) http://thumbnails3.imagebam.com/4496/f74cac44951700.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/f74cac44951700) http://thumbnails9.imagebam.com/4496/2e48c244951702.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/2e48c244951702)

"Gilda", Charles Vidor, 1946.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038559/

"The Lady from Shangaï", Orson Welles, 1947.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040525/

[Attila The Hun]

Blasphemy, Attila!:D

If you were only talking about Tippi Hendren I would be inclined to agree: she was rubbish in Marnie but actually IMHO she put in a decent turn in The Birds. Eva Marie Saint is simply excellent in North By North West and watch her in On The Waterfront opposite Marlon Brando: she was no 'untalented blonde'. Kim Novak was more limited but hardly talentless: (Vertigo is a very good film noir BTW) and I would respectfully submit that Janet Leigh knew what she was doing on camera as well, not to mention Grace Kelly...

I totally agree with you about Tippi Hedren (cute as a button though), although, I actually preferred her in 'Marnie' over her turn in 'The Birds'.

I forgot about Eva Marie Saint but I disagree with you about Kim Novak, I have always found her to be an underactor. 'Vertigo' is one of the Hitchcock films I do not mind but I wouldn't really say it is one of the best noirs.I think Grace Kelly is worse than Kim Novak but better than Tippi Hedren. Nearly all of her performances are a bit ''same-ish'' and underwhelming.

Ingrid Bergman wasn't blonde, of course.:rolleyes:

Well most say it is light brown but I would consider it more ash-blonde, actually. I do not find Ingrid Bergman to be that bad, atleats not on the mediocre level with that other beautiful Scandinavian Tippi.

Nah, sorry Attila, but I think you're barking up the wrong tree, mate.:D But you're obviously fully entitled to your opinion.:)

Thanks. I just think he is vastly overrated; of course, this is coming from a mainly European and mainly non-Hollywood film aficionado.

[Attila The Hun]

Here's a rare beast -British noir,"The Good Die Young " (1954 ) made in the uk but featuring Richard Baseheart and John Ireland.The British contingent was made up of Stanley Baker and adoptive British Laurence Harvey.The plot is classic noir, four disparate men commit a robbery,they fall out and end up killing each other.

You should check out 'Hell Is A City', a good noir starring Stanley Baker and made by, I believe, Hammer Films.

[Attila The Hun]

You're certainly not alone; however, your group is a pretty small one. Hitchcock was a master filmmaker and every year at least one new film is something of an homage to him. One problem current viewers have with Hitchcock is the feeling that they have seen it all before. With so many imitators that it is bound to happen.

That isn't my problem, I just find him a lacklustre filmmaker with a few good technical expertise but no real art or drive. I find his filmmaking good but not great. People talk about him as if he is on the level with Bergman, Kobayashi, Ozu, Fellini, Godard, Huston, Lang and even Kubrick but in truth he is not.

I will give you that a lot of films are inspired by Hitchcock but some of the greatest films of all time were not. I think that in reality, John Ford is more influential as he influenced most of the great Japanese filmmakers and a great deal of US and European filmmakers too.

Regarding the women, Hitchcock heroines were always smart and self-reliant, never window dressing. Often they were very sexy as well. Take a look at Bergman in Notorious - the scene where Grant covers her midriff with a scarf has a lot of sensuality in just a few seconds.

My issue is not with the writing of the women, hell I prefer female heroines in films and love Hawksian ladies, but the fact that Hotchcock didn't cast them for their acting talents is very revealing.

Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, Ingrid Bergman and Eva Marie Saint are the only women who I think could act. When I watch a Hitchcock film, I grow very tired of the amateur dramatics of the leading ladies in his films.

Yes he is a good director of entertainment, but he isn't an auteur, certainly not a great artist.

[Attila The Hun]

Indeed - too many of us around here. :rolleyes: Having said that, you really need to do your homework mate.

There is no need to be condescending as I have watched nearly all of Hitchcock's films, some I liked and others I absolutely loathed.

I can easily say that anyone who thinks that Hitchcock is a great artists needs to do their homework.

It's not just Psycho you watch every other week on some sat channel you know. Try some 39 Steps, Young and Innocent, Suspicion, Strangers on a train, The man who knew too much - how's that for starters? :DI have seen them all (including the two versions of 'The Man Who Knew Too Much', which I liked). 'Psycho' is a horrible little slasher - though atleats more subjective and less explicit than most - film with a highly predictable plot (based on one of Robert Bloch's weakest stories), 'Young and Innocent' and 'Suspicion' are nicely made thrillers though. 'The 39 Steps' is one of the worst adaptations ever and a complete bastardisation of Buchan's novel and 'Strangers On A Train' is, as Raymond Chandler also believed, preposterous nonsense which all criminologists I know laugh about.

You should have mentioned 'Rope', 'Vertigo' and 'Rear Window' in my opinion as they are all stronger films.

[Attila The Hun]

For me there's Chinatown and then there's everything else.

'Chinatown' is perhaps, along with Altman's brilliant (thought sometimes blasphemous) 'The Long Goodbye' and Dick Richard's 'Farewell, My Lovely', the best noir film made in the 1970s although I do think you should check out the older, original noir. I suggest you start with 'The Maltese Falcon'.

well guys I think you've overlooked a british classic not visually in the classic noir style but I watched this on italian tv last night censored and badly dubbed 'GET CARTER' probably the best or one of the best films to come out of british cinema

It is one of the best gangster films from the UK along with the brilliant 'The Long Good Friday'.

Being from Northumberland myself, the film is also very topical for me and brings back good memories of Newcastle before they started to ''revamp'' the place in the late 90s and early this century. Many of the great locations used in 'Get Carter' have now be knocked down; a famous example is the carpark used in the film.

2 of my favs, with Rita Hayworth :

http://thumbnails4.imagebam.com/4496/fe0b3344951698.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/fe0b3344951698) http://thumbnails3.imagebam.com/4496/f74cac44951700.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/f74cac44951700) http://thumbnails9.imagebam.com/4496/2e48c244951702.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/2e48c244951702)

"Gilda", Charles Vidor, 1946.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038559/

"The Lady from Shangaï", Orson Welles, 1947.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040525/

Brilliant choices! :)

[scoundrel]

My issue is not with the writing of the women, hell I prefer female heroines in films and love Hawksian ladies, but the fact that Hotchcock didn't cast them for their acting talents is very revealing.

Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, Ingrid Bergman and Eva Marie Saint are the only women who I think could act. When I watch a Hitchcock film, I grow very tired of the amateur dramatics of the leading ladies in his films.

No room for Grace Kelly, Attila? Not even a honourable mention for Kim Novak, or for some pretty good actresses appearing in earlier work, such as Joan Fontaine in Rebecca or Margaret Lockwood in The Lady Vanishes? Or for Doris Day, who puts in rather a good turn in the second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (even though I think this one was a bit of a stinker actually).

More seriously, I hope no-one is going to denegrate Attila for daring to have an iconoclastic opinion about Hitchcock, even though I guess the majority view is that he actually was a master filmaker. IMHO Hitchcock is comparable with Ford, Fellini, Fritz Lang, John Huston etc: his best work is just as good as theirs, though lets not deny he was flawed (as an artist and as a man) and that he also turned out some real turd logs as well. Ironically the ones you praise Attila are mostly the ones I dislike, though both Rear Window and Vertigo are classics. Conversely, the only one of your raspberries I agree with is The 39 Steps: one day someone will make a half-decent version which uses more of John Buchan's book than just the name and the names of a few characters. But it's a discussion, not a quarrel.:)

[tobaldo]

36 Quai d'Orfevres
look it!

[scoundrel]

36 Quai d'Orfevres
look it!

J'ai voi le publicite pour 36 Quai des Orfevres, mon bon ami toboldo, et il es certainement un film noir formidable, mais malheureusement nous ne connais pas cette flic dans Le Grande Bretagne.

I'm guessing English is not your language toboldo, and also guessing your choice of 36 Quai des Orfevres might mean that you speak French. I apologise for the bad quality of my French, but at least I had a go. Feel free to venture a few more words in English about 36 Quai des Orfevres whenever you feel brave enough to try.:cool:

[Joszka]

J'ai voi le pubicite pour 36 Quai des Orfevres, mon bon ami toboldo, et il es certainement un film noir formidable, mais malheureusement nous ne connais pas cette flic dans Le Grande Bretagne.
Thx for ur effort in French language, scoundrel :)
Feel free to venture a few more words in English about 36 Quai des Orfevres whenever you feel brave enough to try.:cool:

http://thumbnails12.imagebam.com/4508/ad201a45078753.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/ad201a45078753)

I can try to help a bit our friend toboldo -and sry for my poor own English.
"36 Quai des orfèvres" (Police headquarter's adress in Paris) is a good recent (2004) movie about life in that place. It essentially worth coz of the 2 best French actors at the moment (Gerard Depardieu & Daniel Auteuil). The story is their fiight to be "the boss" of the police,more or less based on true facts. It's the 1st movie of Olivier Marchal who was for long time cop himself before being scenarist then film director.
"Cop" = "flic" in French slang ;)

It's not the French "Film Noir" I prefer -and I prefer them more "vintage"- I'll try later to post a list of some good ones.

[snorkie]

I find his filmmaking good but not great. People talk about him as if he is on the level with Bergman, Kobayashi, Ozu, Fellini, Godard, Huston, Lang and even Kubrick but in truth he is not.


Hitchcock is placed on the same level with these fine directors because is belongs there. We're just going to have to agree to disagree on this one.

[scoundrel]

http://img197.imagevenue.com/loc682/th_25597_UnionStationPoster_122_682lo.jpg
This film has not been shown on UK TV for decades as far as I know and thats such a shame. Its sort of a companion piece to Sunset Boulevard, made in the same year and featuring William Holden and Nancy Olsen as the male and female lead: no room for Gloria Swanson of course, the pictures got too small...

Union Station is Dirty Harry about 20 years before Dirty Harry. The world of 1950 is very different to the louche and decadent society of 1971 but it has its really dark side. Nancy Olsen's character is PA to a wealthy industrialist and is travelling by train to Chicago when she observes that two fellow passengers are behaving suspiciously: they are swapping briefcases and one of them is armed...

At first the head of the Union Station transport police (William Holden) isn't very interested, but he discovers that the two men are suspects in a kidnap case involving the blind daughter of Joyce Willecombe's (Olsen's) employer and that his station is going to be the venue for paying the ransom money. Since Joyce is the only one who knows what they look like, she becomes highly significant.

The film was notable for its tension as various attempts to capture the kidnap gang and liberate their prisoner meet with somewhat limited success. The transport police and the City Police (Barry Fitzgerald as charming, avuncular and utterly pitiless Irish-American detective Inspector Donnelly) hunt and follow everyone connected with the two men identified by Joyce Willecombe but it is clear that Donnelly at least is determined to catch, convict and execute the kidnappers but really isn 't concerned whether he get the victim back dead, alive or not at all. Holden's Lieutenant Bill Calhoun is seemingly far from anxious about the victim as well: Joyce knows her employer's daughter very well and is keenly anxious. As the film progresses, a really complex and interesting romantic relationship develops between Olsen's character and Lt Calhoun, woven from the the following strands:

Joyce is attracted to Lt Calhoun, and vice versa.

Joyce is furious with Calhoun for his seeming indifference to the fate of Lorna, the blind kidnap victim. Calhoun understands this and is not deterred, nor offended.

Joyce would like to sway Lt Calhoun into being more concerned with his duty to get Lorna back alive. If smiling and holding hands will influence Lt Calhoun, Joyce will try to smile and hold hands. But Joyce isn't very good at concealing her frustration with Lt Calhoun's attitude and is too honest to be a good manipulator: Lt Calhoun enjoys her frowns a lot more than her smiles and rather respects her both for trying the tactic and for being no good at it.

Unlike Inspector Donnelly, Lt Calhoun actually is quite focused on getting the victim back alive: he just won't promise to do something which is totally in the lap of the Gods.

After the first trap leads to the death of two members of the kidnap gang but seems to close the door on leads to the rest, Joyce entertains Calhoun to dinner at her father's house: its part of helping him with trying to find new leads, not a social event. She is upset by the failure of Plan A and treats Calhoun with minimal courtesy, offering him tea (she means this as a slight, because declasse plain clothes detectives should drink coffee): but Holden turns the tables by politely accepting and clearly enjoying the tea:

Olsen: Do you prefer cream or lemon with your tea?
Holden: [smiles at her]. Lemon, thank you. [smiles again] I like sour things.

Actually my favourite moment in the film. Its beautifully done. This is the moment when Holden shows his own hand: he likes Olsen and is telling her so. Olsen retreats in some disorder, her intended blow having landed on fresh air and her own jealously guarded secret, that she likes Holden as a man, flushed out for both of them to see.

The action follows a conventional path but with tension nicely tight and the actual outcome not predictable. There is a grim twist when the lead kidnapper imprisons his blind victim by leaving her in an electricity substation in the tunnels underneath Union Station: she is surrounded by high voltage cables and dares not try to escape. The second trap is sprung, the kidnapper returns to his victim in order to murder her, for reasons of pure malice, but Calhoun follows him and rescues the girl, meeting with a severe wound in the process.

Joyce follows in Calhouns's wake until the shooting is over, and we see her applying a field dressing torn from Calhoun's shirt, and looking at him very differently now that he has staked his life to save the kidnap victim...

The film is enjoyable as a drama, quite avant garde for 1950 in its acknowledgement that honest and dedicated policemen might still not necessarily be sane, nice or safe to know, and the chemistry between the male and female lead is very good. Strong performances from both Holden and Olsen.

Good film.

[brianwp]

But it's a discussion, not a quarrel.:)

Yes, you're right, it's a discussion. Far be it from me to make trouble, (heh heh).:rolleyes: But I will say this, very diplomatically, I might add. Attila, you stated " 'Psycho' is a horrible little slasher". Ok, that's fine. But I have to ask...how old are you? And when did you first see it? You see, nowadays, as we've become numbed to horror and violence by scads of explicitly violent movies, it was a lot different back in 1960. People who saw Psycho in the theatres back in 1960 would scream and faint! The impact of that film on society in general was intense! Might be tame by today's standards, but when it came out, it was cutting edge. Hitchcock was years ahead of most directors in this genre. This needs to be taken into account when you critique a film.

[scoundrel]

Yes, you're right, it's a discussion. Far be it from me to make trouble, (heh heh).:rolleyes: But I will say this, very diplomatically, I might add. Attila, you stated " 'Psycho' is a horrible little slasher". Ok, that's fine. But I have to ask...how old are you? And when did you first see it? You see, nowadays, as we've become numbed to horror and violence by scads of explicitly violent movies, it was a lot different back in 1960. People who saw Psycho in the theatres back in 1960 would scream and faint! The impact of that film on society in general was intense! Might be tame by today's standards, but when it came out, it was cutting edge. Hitchcock was years ahead of most directors in this genre. This needs to be taken into account when you critique a film.

That's a very good point brian. In fact Psycho isn't visually all that gory (though the shower scene might have been quite gruesome in colour). The real art of Hitchcock is to convey suspense, tension and horror through what you feel and imagine rather than see. For example, the shock of the shower scene is intensified by the violins playing in synch with the blows of the murderer's knife: Hitchcock was the first film-maker to do that.

[snorkie]

You see, nowadays, as we've become numbed to horror and violence by scads of explicitly violent movies, it was a lot different back in 1960. People who saw Psycho in the theatres back in 1960 would scream and faint! The impact of that film on society in general was intense! Might be tame by today's standards, but when it came out, it was cutting edge. Hitchcock was years ahead of most directors in this genre. This needs to be taken into account when you critique a film.

When 'Psycho' and later 'The Birds' came out, talk around the school yard was "Do you know anyone who's seen it? What happens?" That's a pretty rare effect these days, and the reason studios were able to get away with the old "No one seated after the first 30 minutes of this move" routine. As there was no video, it was years before I was able to see either film (I was so curious about 'The Birds' that I even read the Daphne du Maurier story).

OK, my last words on the subject, really, no kidding this time: An easy way to gauge the quality of 'Psycho' is to judge it next to the lame nearly scene-for-scene re-make. Watch the way Hitchcock tips off the villain by the way he has Anthony Perkins sashay up the stairs. Brilliant!

[scoundrel]

http://img219.imagevenue.com/loc508/th_06187_Blue_Velvet_122_508lo.jpg
Made many years after the classic film noir period, Blue Velvet still fits the bill. It is a stylish, dark and sophisticated study of the dual nature of civilisation, where the surface veneer of ordinary bourgeios life can dissolve into violent chaos with little or no warning. On one side we have the conventional American dream, white wooden house, white picket fences; a sort of Pleasantville world. On the other side of the coin, there is a seething chaos of malice, lust and cruelty. This dichotomy is a recurring theme in director David Lynch's work, especially seen in the notable series Twin Peaks, made several years after Blue Velvet.

Blue Velvet is a journey seen through the eyes of Jeffery Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), a steady unravelling of a grim and terrible mystery which begins with the freak discovery of a severed human ear. The police are informed but their response is debateable. Jeffrey follows up his own lead and is gradually drawn, in classic noir detective style, deeper and deeper into a web of dreadful corruption. The female suspect, played by Isabella Rossalini, turns out to be both femme fatale and victim; her ''lover''/oppressor, Frank Booth (an electrifying study in visceral lust, hatred and raw violence by Dennis Hopper) is a villain of demonic stature, present even when absent rather like Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects.

The hideous magnetism which draws him to Dorothy Vallen (Rossellini) is a sinister and creepy force which sucks Jeffrey into its power in a nightmarish sequence starting with Rossellini catching MacLachlan hiding in her flat (he was searching it, but she thinks he is sexually motivated, which in her upside-down world counts as normal and balanced behaviour) and leading to Jeffrey's capture by Frank and a night of wild insane horror which Jeffrey is extremely lucky to survive. Dean Stockwell stands out in a cameo role as the gay drug dealer who is holding Rossellini's infant son prisoner to ensure she does exactly as Frank tells her, sexually and otherwise: he is suave and elegant where Frank Booth is abrasive and aggressive, but he is full of deadly menace and even Frank is wary of him. The moment when he lip-synchs to Roy Orbison's 'In Dreams' encapsulates the surreal and nightmarish quality of the whole passage. It doesn't get much more ''noir'' than this.

Although in colour, the cinematography is atmospheric and very evocative with clever use of light and shadow, for example when Kyle MacLachlan is hiding from death behind the louvred door of a wardrobe and the light forms horizontal bars across his face, making him seem like a caged animal hiding from the public in a zoo. The use of soulful ballads in the film score is a witty and bleak counterpoint to the violent action, a trick used later as a bit of a trademark in Tarentino's films.

Blue Velvet takes the dark romanticism of classic noir and turns it into a vision of hell, a bit like Lucretia Borgia adding arsenic to wine.

Bouvez!

[snorkie]

http://img219.imagevenue.com/loc508/th_06187_Blue_Velvet_122_508lo.jpg



I've always thought of Blue Velvet as being more of a surrealistic film, as typified by the obviously fake songbird at the end of the film. Great film in any case.

[scoundrel]

I've always thought of Blue Velvet as being more of a surrealistic film, as typified by the obviously fake songbird at the end of the film. Great film in any case.

Blue Velvet is extremely surreal: all the way through one has a sense of reality being distorted. This is not in the least inconsistent with Blue Velvet being a film noir. Film noir and surrealism are both offspring of artistic modernism, where storytelling is no longer a matter of linear narrative, but of conveying emotion and empathy, or concealing the facts from the viewer, playing with surface perceptions, to reveal them at the most dramatically satisfying moment. For example is it in The Long Goodbye where Dick Powell's Phillip Marlowe is drugged and we see a key passage in the action presented in a surreal and distorted manner on film to indicate that the drugs are mind-altering in character? [see footnote] I think it is, but it's late and I might be mis-remembering. Given enough time I'm sure I'll find some other examples. But I think the point is made: a film noir can certainly be surreal; a surrealist film can also be a fully formed film noir.

Footnote: This is actually Farewell, My Lovely. Another example of reality heightened into surrealism in film noir is the Fun House/Hall of Mirrors sequence at the end of The Lady From Shanghai.

[skor]

My favorite novel as well as my favorite film:


http://img221.imagevenue.com/loc119/th_67531_M_Falcon_122_119lo.jpg

One often has to explain to a first time viewer that all of those clinches they're seeing began with this film.



If you've read the novel, you know the Bogart version of the film deviates quite a bit from the book. The novel makes it quite clear that the characters of Joel Cairo, Wilmer, and Kasper Gutman are flaming homosexuals. In addition, the character of Sam Spade is about 40 years old, while the character of Brigid O’Shaughnessy is a gorgeous, redheaded, 24 year old.

The changes were made so that the film could comply with the "Hays Code". The Hays Code was a censorship standard that controlled the content of commercial films, shown in the USA, from the mid 1930's until 1968. Any film that was not certified by the Hays Office, could not be shown in commercial movie houses in the USA during that time period. In 1968, the Hays Code was abolished, and a movie ratings scheme went into effect. BTW, the US film rating board, the MPAA, has no official X rating. The most restrictive rating is "NC-17" -- no one under 17 admitted.

Since the Hays Code forbade any mention of "deviate" sexual behavior, the homosexual nature of the three characters mentioned above was omitted from the Bogart version of the film. The age difference between Spade and O’Shaughnessy was seen as potentially incendiary, so that was changed as well -- Miss O’Shaughnessy was played by an older actress. This last change ruins the film in my opinion. It is easy to believe that a beautiful, young, 24 year old girl could convince middle-aged men to commit murder for her. It's not so easy to believe that the matronly Mary Astor, who was 35 years old when the movie was made, but looked like she was 45, could have such powers of persuasion over men. Astor is OK in a MILF sort of way, but she's no femme fatal. The only things that makes this movie worth watching are the fantastic performances by Bogart, Greenstreet and Lorre.

BTW, the Bogart version was not the first screen adaptation of Hammett's novel. The first film version of Maltese Falcon was made in 1931, and starred Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade. The 1931 version was made before the Hays Code went into effect, so the film is true to the novel it was based on. The homosexual nature of the villains, as well as Miss O’Shaughnessy's promiscuity are openly displayed. There is even a scene of Miss O’Shaughnessy(played by actress Bebe Daniels) naked in a bathtub. The acting in the 1931 film is not as good as the 1942 version, but it's still a good movie and worth seeing if you can hunt down a copy.

Actress Bebe Daniels, the first actress to portray the character of Miss O’Shaughnessy on screen.

http://thumbnails11.imagebam.com/4697/448b3f46969194.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/448b3f46969194)
Free Image Hosting by ImageBam.com (http://www.imagebam.com)

[snorkie]

The age difference between Spade and O’Shaughnessy was seen as potentially incendiary, so that was changed as well -- Miss O’Shaughnessy was played by an older actress. This last change ruins the film in my opinion. It is easy to believe that a beautiful, young, 24 year old girl could convince middle-aged men to commit murder for her.

. . . disagree on essentially all of your points.

I have read my favorite novel several times, and in my view the points you make are interesting but not important to the arc of the story. Actually in the Huston version of the film, they strongly hint at Cairo sexuality both when he first meets Spade, and later in Spade's apartment when he and Bridgid argue over their respective failures to use sex to aquire the falcon. True, Huston couldn't be explict, but being a skilled filmmaker he got the job done.

In the end whether the criminals were homosexual or not simply isn't important. Just as in Chandler's "The Big Sleep" the fact that Lungren was gay didn't effect the fact that he was guilty of one, possibly two murders. The bottom line is that Gutman and associates were criminals. I suppose that homosexuality may have made eventual prison life a little easier, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

Being filmed before the Hayes code didn't keep the earlier versions of The Maltese Falcon from being, in my view, pretty poor movies.

Finally, history is littered with women of a certain age who were accomplished at the art of seduction - ask Kurt Russell, Ashton Kutcher or Alex Rodriquez.

These are just my opinions. Please keep in mind that it's the disagreements which make this forum enjoyable.

Cheers

[scoundrel]

Rather like Snorkie, I think the 1941 Bogart version of The Maltese Falcon is fine as it is. I won't comment on whether it is true to the novel as I haven't read the novel for decades: but it is an excellent film in its own right. The Hays Office obviously restricted what could be made explicit, but the implicit homosexuality of Joel Cairo, Wilmer and Kaspar Gutman is not only present, it is used in the film to enhance the sense of brooding conspiracy. Like a big diamond with a name, the Falcon is stained in blood and haunted by ghosts: it attracts bad spirits like Cairo, Gutman, Wilmer and devilish Bridget O'Shaughnessy everywhere it goes. When Sam Spade at the end says the Falcon is ''the stuff that dreams are made of'', he isn't talking about sweet dreams. I think this sense of latent menace around the ''Black Bird'' would be diluted if the sexuality of the villains was out in the open. Ironically, in this specific case, the Hays Office helped rather than harming the film, because it forced director John Huston to use art and imagination, and to involve the viewer's mind in the creation of Cairo, Gutman and Wilmer's hidden characters, and that's what makes them such creepy and sinister figures in the film.

But skor, I enjoyed reading and thinking about your alternative view, even though I don't concur with it. Mary Astor acts her part splendidly, but a more obviously and blatant sexual siren (like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct) could have added a dimension to the final confrontation between O'Shaughnessy and Spade, perhaps: but only if she also brings every single thing which Mary Astor brings to the party, particularly the chameleon shifting of her persona, the emotional blackmail, the expert working of the sympathy angle, the unrelenting sincerity...Sam wouldn't waver or feel any pain if sex was all there was to the appeal of Bridget. Lets face it, Mary Astor is a damn good actress. Also, she might not float my boat quite as readily as Sharon would have, but would I feel nothing as I handed her over to face justice? I doubt it. However, its food for thought and I like thinking about such things, so thanks for your input skor.:)

Thanks also for the reflections on the 1931 film, which I haven't seen, and for the very charming still photo of Ms Bebe Daniels, who was obviously a very beautiful young woman back in the day. One day I hope to see her in the Mary Astor part and form my own opinion.:cool:

[skor]

Ironically, in this specific case, the Hays Office helped rather than harming the film, because it forced director John Huston to use art and imagination, and to involve the viewer's mind in the creation of Cairo, Gutman and Wilmer's hidden characters, and that's what makes them such creepy and sinister figures in the film.


This is a valid argument. Actually, many people have suggested that the restrictive Hays Code forced Hollywood writers and directors to be more creative. I'll concede, and agree that the treatment of the villains sexuality in the 1942 version made for a better movie.

However, I stand by what I've said about Mary Astor. Astor was wrong for the part, she's more soccer-mom than killer-sexy.

[Joszka]

I wanted to make a list of French movies, but there's too many I like, from various periods and various directors or styles.
The first name I had in mind was Henri-Georges Clouzot,

http://thumbnails6.imagebam.com/4543/5e0ccf45424544.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/5e0ccf45424544)

director with a real personality (able to physically fight with his actors or actresses, or to demand they have a real blood test if it was needed in a scene). And a real style too, very dark & pessimistic, sometimes close of fantastic or gothic in very contrasted black and white colors.
His best period is between 1940 & 1955.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0167241/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri-Georges_Clouzot
5 of his movies are very famous in France (and certainly further) and are or could be in a Top50 of the best French movies ever.
I love them :

"L'assassin habite au 21" (aka "The Murderer Lives at Number 21"). 1942.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034478/
Maybe his most optimistic, sort of Agatha Christie's comedy-thriller in a cabaret atmosphere.

"Le corbeau" (aka "the Raven"). 1943.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035753/
It's a "thriller concerning a spate of poison pen letters in a small French town. Critics have seen this as a comment on life under the occupation, where denunciations were common."(Wiki)
His movies between 1940/45 were made for the Continental Company, which was a nazi company. He had -with some actors and techs- problems when France was liberated from Germans and was even barred for a while. But he had probs with Continental and nazis too, who wanted movies for "entertainment" only and with a "limited intellectual content" (it wasn't his case).

"Quai des Orfèvres" (yep, again this police station in Paris). 1947.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039739/
Criminal investigation in a musical theatre environment, with some "scandalous" social background depictements (class struggle, lesbianism).The most poetic and efficient at same time of his movies. My fav.

"Le salaire de la peur". (aka "the Wages of Fear"). 1953.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046268/
Maybe his most famous. Noir "action" movie, the story of drivers carrying nitroglycerine.

"Les diaboliques" (aka "The Devils"). 1955.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046911/
A terrible good one too, macabre & close of the "horror" genre.

http://thumbnails6.imagebam.com/4543/60289a45424545.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/60289a45424545) http://thumbnails6.imagebam.com/4543/3e9df245424546.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/3e9df245424546) http://thumbnails6.imagebam.com/4543/248aa745424547.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/248aa745424547)http://thumbnails6.imagebam.com/4543/34b60445424549.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/34b60445424549) http://thumbnails6.imagebam.com/4543/cf501b45424548.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/cf501b45424548)

[scoundrel]

I wanted to make a list of French movies, but there's too many I like, from various periods and various directors or styles.
The first name I had in mind was Henri-Georges Clouzot,

"Le salaire de la peur". (aka "the Wages of Fear"). 1953.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046268/
Maybe his most famous. Noir "action" movie, the story of drivers carrying nitroglycerine.

"Les diaboliques" (aka "The Devils"). 1955.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046911/
A terrible good one too, macabre & close of the "horror" genre.

http://thumbnails6.imagebam.com/4543/34b60445424549.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/34b60445424549) http://thumbnails6.imagebam.com/4543/cf501b45424548.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/cf501b45424548)

The earlier Clouzot films are works I have never yet seen, they sound well worth a viewing, especially Quai des Orfevres. I have seen Les Diaboliques: the scene where the poisoned drink is administered is a classic moment of dark humour. Chickening out at the last minute, Vera Clouzot declines to pour a drink for her abusive husband, Paul Meurisse. She has relented from her desire to murder him. But then he slaps her one more time and threatens her with worse if she disobeys him again. So, she pours him a drink...:cool:

The Wages of Fear is another Clouzot film which has very occasionally been shown on British TV. It reminds me in some ways of John Houston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre, particularly the themes of drifters down on their luck thrown together, and of friendship tested by greed and danger. The tension of driving containers of nitro-glycerine on dirt roads on trucks with primative suspensions is really intensely conveyed. Its a great thriller.

As well as being a source for film noir in Europe, France was the place where film critics such as Nino Frank first started to reflect on Hollywood thrillers as an art form, and of course it was in this process that the phrase film noir was born.

[vzok]

For anyone who has access to BBC4, this weekend is film noir weekend, with a documentary and six or so movies being show - Farewell My Lovely, Build My Gallows High included

[scoundrel]

I'm in the middle of BBC4's film noir weekend: just seen a very clever and interesting little essay on film noir narrated by Matthew Sweet, who is a BBC radio presenter and film critic for high brow newspaper The Independent.

He said a lot I agree with and a few things I don't:

He sees film noir as a specific genre: I see it as a vision and style which cuts across genres.

He thinks there would have been no film noir without the influence of the European refugee film-makers who fled to Hollywood in the thirties and forties: they were hugely influential, but I think there would still have been film noir because it reflected the spirit of the age.

A very worthwhile and intelligent hour of TV however. Well done BBC4: commercial TV simply doesn't do stuff like this.

[scoundrel]

Farewell My Lovely
The Lady From Shanghai
The Big Combo

Superb films, all of them. The murder of Brian Donlevy's deaf mobster in The Big Combo is sooooooo chilling: the lead mobster, Richard Conte, tells him:

Joe, I'm sorry for you. So I'll fix it so you won't hear the bullets.

Then he takes off Joe's hearing aid and we see the Tommy guns chattering in terrible, abstract silence. Never was such violence so coldly and clinically presented. Top stuff.

[Joszka]

Farewell My Lovely
The Lady From Shanghai
The Big Combo
Superb films, all of them.
"The Big Combo" is one of the 3 first movies I named here, and Joseph H. Lewis is really a great director.
Another of his mythic "Films Noirs" is "Gun Crazy" (1949), stunning piece of art.

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[scoundrel]

"The Big Combo" is one of the 3 first movies I named here, and Joseph H. Lewis is really a great director.
Another of his mythic "Films Noirs" is "Gun Crazy" (1949), stunning piece of art.

[CENTER]http://thumbnails10.imagebam.com/4636/51d4be46356530.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/51d4be46356530)

The Big Combo has been mentioned by brausch, tmee2000 as well as yourself, Joszka, and rightly so because it is a well written story, a fine classically hard-boiled script, excellent acting all round and Joseph Lewis's direction shines in both the dramatic pace of the action and in the characteristic signature-noir look of the film on the screen. This is one of the unmistakeable classics of film noir.

Jean Wallace stands out as the gangster's moll, Susan Lowell: she despises her villain boyfriend and despises herself for being with him, but in scenes which certainly were quite bold for 1955, it is crystal clear that she isn't with him only or even mainly for the expensive lifestyle. She hates her situation but she doesn't hate everything about it: in fact her self-loathing comes from the fact that she has strong masochistic enjoyment at least of the physical relationship with Conte's villain. She is not so fatale as most film noire bad girls, in fact she is rather sympathetic and arguably one of the villain's most severely injured victims, but she is very sexy and red-blooded. Her liking for classical music is a nice touch: Richard Conte's villainous Mr Brown is a little bit of an intellectual himself, certainly a cold and cruel analytical thinker who enjoys studying human weakness. He wouldn't have kept this woman for four years if she was only a dumb blond. The Great Combo is rather a subtle and well observed portrait of deviant human sexuality.

Richard Conte himself is a superb villain. He lacks the suave charm of James Mason in North By North West and is somewhat more hands-on in his leadership style, especially where violence is required, but he has the same aura of detached superiority, authority and menace. In the end, his nemisis, Lieutenant Diamond (Cornel Wilde) could kill him but prefers humiliation as his method of revenge, initiating the legal process which will strip all power and authority from Mr Brown and leave him crawling in the dirt.

Cornel Wilde is also very good as the obsessive and rather selfish hero. He thinks he is dedicated to his duty: his boss knows that Lt Diamond's motives are personal, but doesn't object to using Diamond and his twisted obsessions as a tool to bring Mr Brown down. Diamond's shabby behaviour towards the exotic dancer Rita (Helen Stanton, one of the few sane and well-adjusted characters in the story) brings about her death, misidentified as Diamond by Brown's assassins in the dark. Wilde's best scene is in the aftermath of this tragedy, when his own self-awareness and self-hatred emerges as he articulates his guilt, not for Rita's death (genuinely not his fault), but for the lousy selfish and unfeeling way he used her when she was alive and really liked him.

The ending scene is a nice touch. Diamond and Susan Lowell leave in one anothers' company and may very well end up together, but it isn't a conventional ''and they lived happily ever after'' kind of thing: there are doubts. Susan Lowell really won't mind the fact that Diamond only earns $96.50 a week, but is he a bad enough boy to provide for her in the way she really insists on from the man in her life? For that matter, he is highly intelligent but she is a bit of an intellectual type as well...Rita, had she lived, and for all her disreputable profession, would have been a much safer choice, but Diamond isn't the safer choice kind of guy. There is a whole new story just starting.

It was really worth staying up late to watch The Big Combo.

[scoundrel]

You wait for ever and ever, then seven come along all at once!

BBC4's noir weekend continues tonight with Build My Gallows High and Stranger On The Third Floor . Tomorrow Film4 will show The Good Die Young at 3pm GMT. Meanwhile I have just finished watching Laura for the first time while monitoring the cricket every commercial break (who says men can't multi-task?) and I can say I enjoyed this film a lot. I shall say more about it later.

Folks, I'd say its noir heaven if that weren't such a contradiction in terms.

[scoundrel]

http://img223.imagevenue.com/loc228/th_97908_Laura_film_poster_122_228lo.jpg (http://img223.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=th_97908_Laura_film_poster_122_228lo .jpg)http://img162.imagevenue.com/loc921/th_97909_Gene_Tierney_in_Laura_122_921lo.jpg (http://img162.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=th_97909_Gene_Tierney_in_Laura_122_9 21lo.jpg)http://img249.imagevenue.com/loc207/th_97911_Clifton_Webb_in_Laura_122_207lo.jpg (http://img249.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=th_97911_Clifton_Webb_in_Laura_122_2 07lo.jpg)
This film has previously been mentioned by dohupa and Joszka but I saw it for the first time only a few days ago: I have been seriously missing out. It is a-typical of 1940-50s Hollywood film noir and yet unmistakeably a member of the noir family, with its exploration of jealousy and betrayal and in its classic use of light and shadow, particularly noticeable in the scene where Laura (Gene Tierney) enters her own apartment and finds Detective Lieutenant McPherson (Dana Andrews) asleep in her living room. He is a sinister and unwelcome intruder to her, but for a brief instant, she is literally a supernatural apparition to him and, even though he is a veteran cop with severe wounds to show for it, wounds which help explain to a wartime audience why he isn't in the military, his reaction to her arrival is one of intense shock, though quickly overcome. The lighting of the scene adds nicely to the psychological drama.

Laura is untypical in a variety of ways. The female lead is beautiful and desired to the point of obsession by all three lead male characters, but any wickedness and malice entering the field of human desire comes from them. Laura herself is rather sweet and ingenuous, for all her talent and experience as an advertising executive. Though good at her job, she is naturally trusting and is repeatedly deceived by the men in her life: she has a bad case of ''smoke gets in your eyes''.

The mileau of the film is superficially affluent, posh and well connected: Detective McPherson grits his teeth and rises above provocation to remain professional in spite of being systematically patronised and socially belittled by all his snobbish suspects, because even after Laura muddies the water by turning up alive when she is meant to be dead, it is only too clear that some poor dame [how Clifton Webb's Waldo Lydecker enjoys telling everyone who will listen that McPherson is the kind of declasse mysogynist who calls ladies ''dames''] stopped both barrels of a shotgun in her face at extremely close range. He is a film noir detective in a drawing room melodrama, gradually forcing the terribly terribly posh drawing room characters to realise that there's nothing genteel about the crime.

In fact, though glossy on the surface, this is the film noir world in disguise, populated by the usual losers, who are potentially dangerous because they are becoming desperate. In the end, only Laura herself is out of place, because she is vivacious, super-bright and yet there is no meanness or deceit in her: this, as much as her astonishing beauty, is why both Lieutenant McPherson and Waldo Lydecker, the latter a bleakly cynical loner and possibly gay, fall before her feet as soon as they meet her properly. Clifton Webb as this lonely batchelor who fell in love too late is really excellent, giving the film much of its' narration, a racy gossipy and icily witty but unreliable guide into the heart of the story. It is the voice of his character telling the back-story which pulls this film into tight, suspenseful shape and makes sense of all the flashbacks and non-linear presentation of events. He also imparts the film's darkly romantic feel, so typical of noir, so that the true love attained between McPherson and Laura doesn't sugar the pill too much. This was Clifton Webb's first film role after many years in Broadway plays: he was Oscar nominated for Best Supporting Actor and deserved this compliment from Hollywood.

Vincent Price has a good outing in a relatively un-camp acting role as the charming but dishonest, parasitic and deceitful fiance, Shelby Carpenter, who irritates McPherson by trying to interfere with the crime scene, but gradually alienates McPherson bitterly by being such a worthless heel and yet having dared to woo and almost win such a fine woman as Laura. How ironic this is: the very emotions which distract the policeman are identical to the emotions which motivate the killer.

This is not a perfect film but it is, despite its flaws, a real masterpiece and a great credit to the players, the scriptwriters and to the subtle and well organised directing of Otto Preminger. The film's musical score is an evocative theme to loss and the broken male heart: it was written by David Raksin who went on to work with Otto Preminger several times in other films.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn3rOEW99_0 See this film if you get the chance. Its really good.

[Giacson]

Angel Heart
http://img9.imagevenue.com/loc452/th_03222_Angel_Heart_122_452lo.jpg (http://img9.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=03222_Angel_Heart_122_452lo.jpg)

1987 film written and directed by Alan Parker featuring Robet Deniro, Mickey Rourke, Lisa Bonet

With unmistakeable elements of Noir through the film, its one of my favorites. Set in 1955, Rourke is a tattered New York City private detective hired by Deniro to locate a crooner named Johnny Favorite. I hate spoilers so I wont add any further details for those who havent seen it, though many did, just to see Lisa Bonet.

I found Angel Hearts originality to be its biggest attraction, much in the way The Usual Suspects delights one with its rare surprise ending.

[spitalhouse]

Brighton Rock
IMHO Brighton Rock is the best out of the very few film noir offerings to emerge from the UK: We Brits weren't very suited to this subversive way of seeing. the Americans were past masters and the French were also excellent but we Brits? Perhaps we thought it wasn't cricket...

Brighton Rock is undoubtedly the most unremittingly dark and cynical of all British Films and the character of Pinkie one of British cinema's most irredeemably wicked. The point you make is an intriguing one because the British themselves are regarded by many as a somewhat dark and cynical race of people. With such a reputation it would therefore have been fair to assume that the genre would've been tailor-made for the Brits to excel in.

Regards.

[scoundrel]

...the British themselves are regarded by many as a somewhat dark and cynical race of people. With such a reputation it would therefore have been fair to assume that the genre would've been tailor-made for the Brits to excel in.

I wonder if it isn't a ''that was then, this is now'' kind of thing. During the great era of film noir, we Brits were still a bit deluded in our faith in our establishment: Suez in 1956 started the engine of social change, as recorded in the influential stage play Look Back In Anger by John Osbourne, and then we had the Profumo scandal in 1963 which for many people shattered illusions about the probity of British government. But we were as a country slow off the mark and our few films noire were originated by maverick and dissident anti-establishment voices for the most part.

The only British examples I can think of are:

The Third Man: often thought of as a Hollywood noir because the central conflict is between Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles.
Brighton Rock: originally a novel by the ultra-cynical Graham Greene and very faithful to his original vision.
The Long Memory (1952): A little known crime thriller starring John Mills, made on a budget of two carrots but made worth watching by a fine performance from Mills as an innocent man who is out on licence after 20 years for a murder he didn't do. His world is a poisonous place where no-one cares if he lives or dies, and he doesn't care about anyone. Then, in a dark and superbly observed ironic twist, a German displaced person, a pretty girl but outcast because she is German living in bombed out post-war London, is snatched into an alleyway right in front of Mills by a sailor who intends to rape her.

The play of expressions on Mills' face is hugely eloquent. There isn't a single good reason why he should rescue this girl. Who ever came to his rescue when he was in dire need? Yet...the act of abducting her right in front of him was just so insulting! Also, he's got 20 years of inspeakable rage to work off. So he beats the would-be rapist almost to death in a fight scene which is pretty raw and convincing for a low budget post war British B movie and finds himself saddled with a damsel in distress who speaks little English but is more mutely adoring and faithful than a dog, when really all he wants is to enjoy being miserable in peace...

Tiger Bay-possibly. Another Mills film in which he is a blinkered and unlikeable bully of a detective: the captain of the Latin American ship takes understandable satisfaction in refusing to hand over a crewman they both know to be a murderer, simply because Mills has been so arrogant and overbearing and has bullied a little girl witness (Hayley Mills) right in front of the captain on the bridge of the ship. But also the noir element comes from the subversive theme that the murderer had strong reasons, the victim had it coming, and Mills is really in the wrong to be so personally bent on bringing to ''justice'' a man who had some right on his side.

Ice Cold In Alex: yet another Mills film and not really a proper noir, but with some noirish characteristics.
Gaslight.
Obsession.

After these I'm running dry of suggestions. I just don't think we Brits were all that prolific in this field. Play up, play up and play the game...

[spitalhouse]

I take your point made in response to my last post, scoundrel, however, I have my own theory as to why there are so few good examples of British films noir.

British cinema has a pretty good track record in depicting the lives of ordinary people in a gritty, uncompromising and unsentimental fashion. It has excelled when attempting to tackle contemporary social issues such as poverty, deprivation and the like (of which 'It Always Rains On Sunday' is a superlative example). But this style of film making (often referred to as the 'kitchen sink drama') has had a tendency in my opinion to strive for realism above artistic interpretation. Film noir on the other hand isn't concerned with realism - authenticity, perhaps, but not realism (social or otherwise). In film noir style is every bit as important as substance; thought is translated into deed and allegory is it's universal language.

I would therefore suggest that it is British cinema's preoccupation with social realism and its inability or reluctance to make the translation from a straight-forward polemical narrative to an allegorical one that has inhibited its exploration into the realms of film noir.

P.S. The actress who played the part of the displaced German in 'The Long Memory' was the Norwegian actress Eva Bergh. A remarkable performance in my opinion.

Regards.

[scoundrel]

I would therefore suggest that it is British cinema's preoccupation with social realism and its inability or reluctance to make the translation from a straight-forward polemical narrative to an allegorical one that has inhibited its exploration into the realms of film noir.

P.S. The actress who played the part of the displaced German in 'The Long Memory' was the Norwegian actress Eva Bergh. A remarkable performance in my opinion.

Regards.
Kitchen sink drama (perhaps a watered down British socialist variant of Russian communist ''socialist realism'') was not very compatible with the more artful and complex form of film noir, that's very true. Kitchen sink drama was a better fit with where we were as a society, especially in the mid to late fifties and early sixties, when millions of fairly downtrodden working folk, including my parents and grandparents, started to feel grimly that they had bloody well earned the right to a little more and a little bit better than what they were getting. It focuses on the ordinary life of the majority, not on the heightened reality of the life of the misfits, malcontents, social odd men/women out who are the stuff of film noir. I think we arrive at similar conclusions from differing standpoints: Britain just wasn't a film-noir sort of place back when film noir was in fashion.

I share your opinion that Eva Burgh gave a very fine performance in The Long Memory: her scenes with Mills are real high points in this film: its not a great film but I like it partly because its much better than it has any right to be, thanks to some real quality acting from Mills, Eva Burgh and also from Elizabeth Sellars (I know very little about Ms Sellars but she knew a bit about acting) as the cause of Mills' original downfall.

[spitalhouse]

It focuses on the ordinary life of the majority, not on the heightened reality of the life of the misfits, malcontents, social odd men/women out who are the stuff of film noir.

You make an excellent point, scoundrel: the British exemplar of a misfit amounted to little more than the spiv who sold stockings from a suitcase or the working class lad who strove to 'better' himself by winning a scholarship to Oxford or the toff who frequented East End pubs and listened to jazz. The emergence of characters such as Pinkie Brown who represented a force that fundamentally undermined the very fabric of a 'civilised' society were the undoubted exception.

Despite its sincere intentions, British cinema's attempts to hold a mirror up to society only occasionally succeeded in revealing what lay beneath its surface. Perhaps the most subversive and consequently the most socially revealing of all British film makers of the period was Michael Powell, whose film style was as far removed from social realism as it was possible to get.

Regards.

[scoundrel]

I have just been watching Laura again on Film4: it is full of good things and deserves a second viewing. One of the ways in which it experiments with the standard film noire ingredients is the unusual use of a good and fine woman as a femme fatale: Waldo Lydecker comments ''I knew Laura would never betray anyone'' and the whole action of the film bears this out. Laura is virtuous (the maid hides the two used glasses from the police in case they and the press make her out to be a loose woman, precisely because she was not); Laura is principled, loyal and full of generosity, warmth and kindness, as well as a really wholesome love of life.

Yet for all that she is an excellent femme fatale because there is steel in her character, as cold and sharp as a razor blade. This shows first when Lieutenant MacPherson insists on clarification of her equivocating and contradictory position towards her fiance and fellow suspect Shelby Carpenter: is she still in love with him or not? Her reply is calm, truthful and absolutely deadly, the more so as it is spoken in Gene Tierney's cultured and wistful voice:

''Why no. I don't know now how I ever could have been''.

Her scene with Judith Anderson as Ann Treadwell is a splendid example of girl-talk, film noir style. The two discuss Vincent Price's character, Shelby Carpenter, in cool dispassionate terms which would crumple the ego of any man who had the bad luck to overhear any such conversation about himself, and each calmly appraises the other rather as two serpents might.

Late in the film, Laura breaks her friendship with Waldo Lydecker (the excellent Clifton Webb) in a display of cast iron self-control which is far more effective than any histrionics or unveiled anger ever could be. No blunt instuments or shotguns for Laura: for all the generosity, compassion and even-tempered tolerance of her character, Laura is utterly merciless if she has weighed someone in the scales and they have been found wanting. She can destroy a man with a few softly spoken words. A great performance by Gene Tierney, showing how a woman can kill a man merely by withdrawing her heart from his. Lieutenant MacPherson had better be careful never ever to disappoint Laura's expectations of him.

[Clouddancer]

This film made a very positive impression on me when I first saw it in the cinema. For those who have never seen it, your'e in for a treat, seek it out.

Rififi (French: Du rififi chez les hommes) is a 1955 French crime film adaptation of Auguste le Breton's novel of the same name. Directed by American filmmaker Jules Dassin, the film stars Jean Servais as the aging gangster Tony le Stéphanois, Carl Möhner as Jo le Suédois, Robert Manuel as Mario Farrati and Jules Dassin as César le Milanais. The plot revolves around a burglary at a jewelry shop in the Rue de Rivoli. Tony, Jo, Mario and César band together to commit the almost impossible theft. The climax of the film is an intricate half hour heist scene depicting the crime in detail, shot in near silence, without dialogue or music. The fictional burglary has been mimicked by criminals in actual crimes around the world.[3][4]

After he was blacklisted from Hollywood, Dassin found work in France where he was asked to direct Rififi. Despite his distaste for parts of the original novel, Dassin agreed to direct the film. He shot Rififi while working with a low budget, without a star cast and with the production staff working for low wages.[2]

Upon the initial release of the film, it received positive reactions from audiences and critics in France, the United States and the United Kingdom. The film earned Dassin the award for Best Director at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival.[5] Rififi was nominated by the National Board of Review for Best Foreign Film. Rififi was re-released theatrically in 2000 and is still highly acclaimed by modern film critics as one of the greatest works in French film noir.[6]

[scoundrel]

http://img212.imagevenue.com/loc355/th_90924_Kiss_Tomorrow_Goodbye_122_355lo.jpg (http://img212.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=90924_Kiss_Tomorrow_Goodbye_122_355l o.jpg) http://img266.imagevenue.com/loc530/th_94815_Barbara_Payton_and_James_Cagney_in_Kiss_T omorrow_Goodbye_122_530lo.jpg http://img139.imagevenue.com/loc638/th_94816_Helena_Carter_in_Kiss_Tomorrow_Goodbye_12 2_638lo.jpg
With a title like Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye you know you're not going to get a feel-good movie, and by golly no you don't. This film is a fiercely bleak and cynical examination of crime and corruption. The court scenes at the start and at the end are a neat framing of the context of the action, but they also enable the film-makers to pretend that their film upholds establishment values, a little bit like the ''social problem'' blurb at the start of that early James Cagney classic, Public Enemy. The official line is that crime doesn't pay: the real message is much more complex and ambiguous. Through the course of the action the film vividly portrays the corruptibility of public and personal morals: the accused in the dock include a prison guard, two police officers, a lawyer and a grieving sister. All of them have been dragged down by their association with the dynamic and relentlessly evil Ralph Cotter (James Cagney is terrific as this one-man power house of crime).

At the start we see Ralph escaping from a prison farm with inside and outside help, callously murdering his fellow escapee, whose sister financed and plotted the breakout, because he was shot, wounded and liable to spill the beans when recaptured. The sister, Holiday Carleton, is played extremely well by Barbara Payton: alas, a bit like Lana Turner, Ms Payton walked on the dark side in her personal life and a really promising film career fell by the wayside. She eventually died of liver failure after years of alcoholism, mental illness and prostitution: its a crying shame not only for her but for film-lovers, as we see in this film how good she was before it started to go sour.

As the film develops, Cagney's character shows a huge talent for violent robbery but also a self-destructive urge to test his luck, never playing safe, never consolidating his gains, always wanting more and more and more. The robberies are dangerous enough but Ralph has been inside for rather a long time, and Holiday Carleton's looks are very good: if Ralph had any caution at all he would stay hull down below the horizon from any location where she is to be found, but instead he seduces her in a really sick and disturbing combination of blackmail, violence and charm. She is desperately lonely, heartbroken that her plan to liberate her wrongly convicted brother led only to his death (little does she know exactly how) and already she has passed the point of no return, having shot a guard with a rifle during the escape. For all her instinctive realisation that Ralph is holding open the door to damnation, she is ripe to walk though the doorway because in a sense she has crossed the porch anyway. Ralph is vicious but he is addictive, and soon Holiday is irretrievably hooked, a good girl gone enthusiasticaly bad. The relationship with Holiday is the closest Ralph comes to being human: she is mad enough to love him and he accepts criticism and contradiction from her which he would tolerate from no one else alive, sometimes even listening and taking her advice. She helps him to get the better of the corrupt detectives who rob him of his proceeds of crime and to obtain the incriminating evidence which will turn the tables on them and force them to collude with Ralph in more ambitious robberies. She really is his partner, albeit a very junior one who does exactly as she is told.

But Ralph isn't the loyal type and as his star rises he begins to aspire to the finer things, especially posh totty in the form of Helena Carter as heiress Margaret Dobson. Beautiful and rich, she is also gullible and very susceptible to the Cagney charisma: the prospect is both fun and lucrative and Ralph sees this as much too good to pass up. But in seeking to trade Holiday in for a younger and classier model he is playing catch with a nitroglycerine ball: he has done nothing but make enemies since he got out of jail and the deadliest enemy is the one closest to home...

[Joszka]

http://thumbnails20.imagebam.com/4863/0a7f6848626549.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/0a7f6848626549)

Another of my favourites French directors is Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973).
Four of his latest movies are between the best "films noirs" ever. His very minimalist & hyper-realistic style, influenced itself by U.S director as John Huston, is still influencing lot of contemporary filmmakers (Q. Tarentino, Kateshi Kitano or John Woo in their 1st movies for ex. or Michael Mann).
He was also one of initiators of the French "New Wave" in the 60's.

This "noir" tetralogy is :
"Le deuxième souffle", (= Second Breath) 1966.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060305/

"Le Samouraï", (aka The Godson), 1967.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062229/

"Le Cercle rouge", (aka The Red Circle), 1970.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065531/

"Un flic", (aka Dirty Money), 1972.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067900/

All these films are an accurate & pessimistic description of an environment where a sort of nostalgic code of honor faces the abandonment of the world.
Well known French actors Alain Delon or Lino Ventura are here in their best performances.

http://thumbnails3.imagebam.com/4864/0fd1f348630276.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/0fd1f348630276) http://thumbnails14.imagebam.com/4864/e2629248630277.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/e2629248630277) http://thumbnails9.imagebam.com/4864/69a84e48630279.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/69a84e48630279) http://thumbnails21.imagebam.com/4864/ad823a48630281.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/ad823a48630281)

[scoundrel]

Speak of the devil...I mentioned this film and Lo! it was screened on Film4, first time I've seen it for decades. Well, fancy that on a bun!

It's much as I remembered, with a tight and complex performance by John Mills. His split personality as a kind and warm human being driven almost over the edge by sheer hate and fury over the injustices maliciously inflicted on him is brought out by the relationship with Eva Burgh as the German girl. The analysis of revenge is fascinating: Mills' character has dreamed of it but he visits each of his oppressors in turn, terrifies and humiliates each one, but forgoes the obvious revenge in favour of the much more satisfying triumph of being so much better than they are.

His scene of confrontation with the oh so respectable Elizabeth Sellars, the middle class housewife who was once no better than she should be and who helped frame him for murder, is beautifully done: her humiliation is total, even worse because she actually did once love him. Her silent agony as she listens to Mills' words of merciless condemnation is great acting from her.

''It's funny. I've dreamed of killing you for years. At times, in there, it was the only thing I lived for. But now that I have you exactly where I want you...it's not worth it. You're not worth it. You don't altogether like that, do you?...I'm finished with you, but I doubt if the police are. If you have time (and you will have time; in prison the days are long and the nights are long too), when you're inside, remembering, remember that I'm free. I'm free of the place where you are, and I'm free of you.''

The script of this film is full of this quintessentially English take on the hard-boiled film noir style, and it works. Even when Mills has finished his tour of the villains who did him down, and is really (so he thinks) free of them at last, his reaffirmation of his new-found love for Eva Burgh is refreshingly void of false sentiment:

Burgh: At last! This is the first time I have ever seen you smile. The bad thing which has been eating you inside, it is over?
Mills: Yes.
Burgh: It is well over?
Mills: Yes.
Burgh: Thanks be to God! Suddenly you are the man I always knew you were! [embraces Mills]
Mills: [returns Burgh's embrace] Its your fault.

The cinematography is better than I remembered: the lighting effects of the night scene where Mills waits with deadly patience in the street opposite the front door of the first perjuror, then walks off into the dawn after the man throws himself into the arms of the police and confesses in exchange for their protection, are every bit as good as any Hollywood noir. The use of the reed marshes in the Thames estuary (the Isle of Sheppey or close to there by the look of it), where Mills lives rough on an abandoned and beached riverboat, is atmospheric and lends extra darkness to the story.

In the end, very British, we are given a happy ending of sorts. But it is no sell out: Mills' lost years will never be made good. But he has cleared his name, stopping a bullet to do so, and can now live again on the modest scale set out by Eva Burgh:

''Justice? That's too big a word for little people, like Philip and me. All we ask for is the right to live: to live without being hurt, and to live without hurting.''

I like this film.

http://img12.imagevenue.com/loc136/th_17149_The_Long_Memory_still_122_136lo.jpg (http://img12.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=17149_The_Long_Memory_still_122_136l o.jpg)
Poor Philip Davidson (Mills): he has a lot to put up with...

[scoundrel]

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Frank McCloud (Humphrey Bogart), a man who has drifted aimlessly since his heroic and decorated service in WW2, has come to Key West in Florida on an errand which took a while to do, because it is so painful. His closest friend and comrade died in action somewhere in Italy and Frank has come to meet his father (Lionel Barrymore excellent as wheel chair bound hotelier, James Temple) and pass on his son's dying words.

But at Mr Temple's hotel, things are not right. There is a party of city slickers from Milwaukee (or so they say) who are led by a mysterious Mr Brown (Edward G Robinson) and there is something very sinister about them. To make matters worse, there is a deadly hurricane working up, which will force this toxic mixture of characters together in a crucible, then turn up the heat...

This film is adapted from a stage play and occasionally this shows, both in its weaknesses and in its towering strengths. Some of the special effects, the storm shots etc are run of the mill, but the acting is anything but. Mr Brown is actually Johnny Rocco, a Capone-like mobster. Robinson delivers a really fine performance as this profoundly evil man, who seeks to dominate every group he is in, is choking with false pride, and the lust to feed his ego on the fear of others, yet at key moments proves to be himself a coward and weak. The confrontation with Rocco and his repellent henchmen, in which they sexually harrass Lauren Bacall, widow of his dead comrade, taunt and torment the brave but helpless Mr Temple, murder a sheriff's deputy then murder two local American Indians by proxy, making them patsies for the Deputy's killing, winds the disillusioned Frank McCloud's initial apathy tighter and tighter until he is forced to be true to the character he was born with, forced to be a hero irrespective of whether or not there is any point to it.

Claire Trevor as Rocco's moll, a once beautiful and gifted nightclub singer who Rocco reduced to an alcoholic floozy whose looks have gone, gives a spellbinding performance, even better than in Stage Coach. Her desperation for a drink, which Rocco refuses to allow her (to feed his cruelty, he doesnt give a damn whether she lives or dies) climbs until Rocco plays an exceptionally cruel trick, making her sing. She is years out of practice, way past her prime as a singer, has no musical accompaniment, yet if Rocco and his ignorant gang only knew it, her pitiful rendering of the song Woman Like Me is wretched yet full of tremendous soul and pathos. It is an articulation of the years of pain Johnny Rocco has inflicted on her, which perfectly accounts for her subsequent conduct in the film. Frank's defiant overuling of Rocco's refusal to allow her the drink she has earned with the song is a pivotal moment in this psychological drama: he has started to realise that he can no longer hide behind his own disillusionment and pain; she, with a drink inside her, is no longer defenceless. Her face, as she contemplates Rocco edging towards panic in the face of the gathering hurricane winds, is a picture of cool, calculating venom, the rattlesnake carefully measuring the distance before striking. This is a great scene.

My thanks to whoever loaded this on youtude: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uEyW77JTyI

Replacement link: original link has been removed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vh8veUgPt8

It only shows the part where Claire Trevor actually sings, while what happens afterwards is also intensely interesting. But Edward G Robinson's callous scorn after the song is there; he was a great villain.

Claire Trevor won the Oscar for best supporting actress for this performance and was great value.

The weaknesses of Key Largo are chiefly in its rather uninspired cinematography, disappointing for a film noir: the film was made on the cheap, and it shows. Its strengths are in the ensemble of first rate players who all deliver. The theme is not so simple as it might seem. Even though good triumphs over bad, the conflict is eternal: there is a never ending supply of scum like Rocco, but the supply of people like Frank, Nora Temple (Lauren Bacall), old man Temple and even Gaye Dawn (Claire Trevor) who have enough courage and integrity to fight them off, the very will of such people to fight them off, is not to taken for granted.

[haldane4]

The Long Memory's been playing occasionally on Film Four for a while now - somehow I keep missing it. I'd like to renew my acquaintance with the film as it's been a while now.

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry turned up on the same channel today, an interesting film, the ending of which was cut by the censors and had to be reshot by a reassembled crew. The last line of the film is actually an apology to the audience for the truly terrible new ending.

[brianwp]

I was watching the old classic, "Night Must Fall", with Robert Montgomery tonight, which is great, but so was the one with Albert Finney. Probably a little scarier, what do you think?

[scoundrel]

I was watching the old classic, "Night Must Fall", with Robert Montgomery tonight, which is great, but so was the one with Albert Finney. Probably a little scarier, what do you think?

Confession time: I have seen neither. Googled them and intriguingly the 1964 remake has a British cast (with Finney, Susan Hampshire and Sheila Hancock, its a strong cast as well) and setting wheras the 1937 original looks American. I wouldn't mind seeing both of these, but since I haven't, is there anything you'd like to add, brian?

[brianwp]

Confession time: I have seen neither. Googled them and intriguingly the 1964 remake has a British cast (with Finney, Susan Hampshire and Sheila Hancock, its a strong cast as well) and setting wheras the 1937 original looks American. I wouldn't mind seeing both of these, but since I haven't, is there anything you'd like to add, brian?

Well, actually, except for Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell, most of the cast is British, also. I must say that the two Americans do a heck of a job with the accents, especially Montgomery, with a bit of Scottish in there, I think. All I can tell you, is that when I first saw these movies years ago, they truly gave me the creeps. The times when Russell would talk to Montgomery in his weaker moments and get him to admit he was always acting, was a chilling insight into the criminally insane mind. (As well as the other version). I can't explain something like this, scounds, you'll just really have to see it for yourself. This to me was a truly frightening movie, even as old as it is. Look it up, I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

[grunde]

Jean-Pierre Melville - Le Cercle Rouge

[Oswald]

I like old black and white British films - especially comedies such as:

Kind Hearts And Coronets
The Happiest Days Of Your Life
Passport To Pimlico
The Lavender Hill Mob
Two Way Stretch
I'm Alright Jack!
The Green Man

Also these comedy films in colour:

The Ladykillers
The Titfield Thunderbolt

Any British film that features Alistair Sim and/or Margret Rutherford is well worth watching. :thumbsup:

[scoundrel]

http://img254.imagevenue.com/loc509/th_22630_The_Duellists_122_509lo.jpg

I had forgotten about this one until it was mentioned on ''Films You Like Which Others Loathe'' by wrench24a: my thanks to wrench for the reminder.

I liked The Duellists the one and only time I ever saw it, in 1983. It featured an early and rather good outing from Harvey Keitel as the psychopathic Gabriel Feraud, who cannot let go of his initially trivial quarrel with Armand d'Hubert (the late Keith Carradine) and is obsessively determined to kill him, forcing d'Hubert into duel after duel, abusing the duelling convention to seek, not satisfaction of honour, but murder in disguise. d'Hubert is unusual among Napoleonic officers for never starting a duel, and he initially fights these duels most unwillingly, but there is a fascinating bad chemistry between him and Feraud: right from the beginning, d'Hubert despises Feraud, Feraud is smart enough to know this without needing to be told, and this is the real driver of Feraud's hatred. As the action progresses, Feraud is scoring points because d'Hubert starts to hate back, just as intensely, and no longer pretends, even to himself, that he is morally superior. d'Hubert never initiates any duel but stops trying to avoid Feraud, and becomes determined to be the victor, not merely the survivor.

The ending had a good flavour. It turns out that d'Hubert actually is the better man, but the form of his revenge is exquisitely cruel and impeccably fair and just.

This was Ridley Scott's first feature film but his skills are apparent already. Attention to period is very good, but the visual look of the production is really striking. The colours are lush and vivid, Scott mentioned later that he was inspired by the naturalistic paintings of the Napoleonic/Regency period, and at key moments this consciously beautiful rendering of rural settings emphasises the preciousness of life, something d'Hubert values and Feraud does not. There is also intense use of light and shade, often seen in the moments of highest tension, such as when Feraud reappears like a bad spirit, or when the great heartbreaks of d'Hubert's life occur, such as the final hopeless meeting with his long-term mistress. Already, Scott was experimenting with film as a visual medium: what a shame he was born at least 25 years too late to contribute this natural flair to the classic era of film noir.

The Duellists is a debateable piece: is it really film noir or simply a period drama with some noirish pretensions? I see it as noir for the visual triggers and for the moral ambivalence of the story, in which at several points the hero becomes deeply tainted in the wickedness of the villain, having to get dirty in order to survive. d'Hubert is not a typical noir character but the feud with Feraud forces him to live in a marginalised noir world, ostensibly one of the privileged French aristocracy, but in reality a fugitive, and later a strange confederate in a mutual conspiracy of hate. Feraud's diologue is terse, hard-boiled and uncompromising, but d'Hubert remains genteel and courteous throughout, only showing the merciless hard edge of his own hatred in his elegant and pitiless final speech to the defeated Feraud.

The duelling convention, long gone now, suits Ridley Scott's very stylised and surrealist approach and it also stands in for the more usual criminal conspiracy as the factor which makes the key players into losers and marked men. I have only seen this one once but it was extremely memorable, I would watch it again except I never see it scheduled. Not sufficiently mainstream? I would watch this in preference to 99% of current Hollywood output and thats not fairytales neither.

[brianwp]

Either. I think it would be "and that's not fairytales, either". Thank you.

[scoundrel]

Either. I think it would be "and that's not fairytales, either". Thank you.In Yorkshire we say ''...and that's not fairytales neither.'' In this, as often happens during informal communication, for example posting on a porn forum, we Yorkshiremen favour force of expression over grammatical correctness. In this case I am committing the linguistic sin of a double negative, because I am using ''neither'' as an adverb to negatively qualify the noun ''fairytales'', having already used the word ''not'' as my negative conjunction. Another example, famously from Star Trek, is ''To boldly go where no man has gone before'', which is a split infinitive, but neither of the grammatically correct alternatives works nearly as well as a use of language. The precision of language works against the force of expression.

A long time ago and only briefly, I was a teacher of English.:D I always advocate knowing what the rules are, so that you will always know exactly how and exactly why you are bending them.

[brianwp]

Just messin with ya, scounds...

[Aubrey]

There is a late night season of Film Noir on BBC2 over Christmas.

[Rocky de Sade]

Most all of my favorites were mentioned, but I didn't see two. Anyone who finds Lionel Stander's voice music to their ears needs to see Blast Of Silence (though you're a couple of days late for a timely Christmas viewing). And Blake Edwards' (who's movies I don't usually care for) Experiment In Terror with the lovely Lee Remick and a not so lovely asthmatic assailant. Super suspenseful and quite unnerving.

[haldane4]

On The Night of the Fire.

Excellent Brit noir from 1939. I can't do any better by this film than to quote a reviewer at IMDb:

"This film is brilliantly directed by the largely forgotten Irish director, Brian Desmond Hurst, and brilliantly performed by its entire cast. But it is largely a 'downer', with its plot of the unremitting grinding of the wheels of Fate. It was filmed in 1939 and released in the spring of 1940. With entry into war, the British public no longer wanted tragedies but 'feel-good films', and they must have tried to forget this film, which was too much like reality to be comfortable. This film is really more like the post-War 'noir' films of America, where doom awaits. It must have been the last of the gritty 1930s British film dramas before the ultimate grit of the Blitz hit in 1940.

The film is fascinating in many respects. It shows in intimate detail the life of a working-class urban community in Britain, in those last pre-War moments before most such communities were wiped out forever by German bombs. There are many wonderful location shots of the docks and streets of such areas, later reduced to rubble. For much of the film, I struggled to figure out which part of old London near the docks this could be, and thought I recognised a street near the wharves of old Lambeth (near the reconstructed Globe Theatre) which was only finally demolished about 20 years ago. But towards the end of the film, we are shown a shot of the unmistakable railway bridge hurting northwards across the river into Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and I realized this film must have been meant to take place at Newcastle. But no one in the film has 'Geordie' accents (the unmistakable accent of Newcastle folk). They all speak like Londoners except for Sara Allgood, who does her best to suppress her Irish lilt (she was a famous actress from the old Abbey Theatre in Dublin whom Hurst had directed in his earlier films 'Irish Hearts' of 1934 and 'Riders to the Sea' of 1935.) The young Glynis Johns, aged 17 and already in her fifth film, appears as a fey maid in this film. But the central performances are those of Ralph Richardson and Diana Wynyard, as a couple faced with a terrible dilemma. Wynyard is often of the verge of screaming hysteria in this desperate tale, but her stiff upper lip triumphs. Richardson was perfect for these parts as an introspective and worried husband, and was what you might call 'a steady presence on screen'. His great ability was to stand with the camera on his face and suddenly, as we watch, achieve 'realization' of something, with a nervous narrowing and slight twitching of his eyes. Henry Oscar is marvellously creepy as a miser who sits counting his money alone in his shop at hight, while listening to records of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. (The director makes good use of this, and a special shot featuring the gramophone, which is very effective, was later much copied by other directors.) This is an almost unbearably intense tragedy, thoroughly convincing, but it won't cheer you up, so be strong."

[snorkie]

http://img137.imagevenue.com/loc1116/th_60162_thin_man_122_1116lo.jpg (http://img137.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=th_60162_thin_man_122_1116lo.jpg)

Based on a hard-boiled novel by one of the masters of the genre, "The Thin Man" balances all of the requirements of the canon with a sharp sense of humor. In fact, the humor works so well that the rest of the series is laugh first, mystery second. The "Thin Man" is pretty faithful to the novel, albeit with some of the more overt sexual overtones removed. Possibly the best thing about the film is the dialog, which allows one to easily hear William Powell switch from man of leisure to tough detective and back again.

Along with The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man is the best of the Hammett adaptations. Of course, there is a lot to be said for the excellent Yojimbo/Fist Full of Dollars, and The Glass Key is a close miss due to a softened ending. By the way, if you are interested in seeing how good a character actor William Bendix was, see The Glass Key.

[elton dong]

I'm looking for a copy of Johnny Apollo 1940, does anyone know where I could download it? any film Noir forums?
all the best.

[snape]

The term 'film noir' was derived from the German Cinema's "Expressionist" influence, when stark black and white images were predominant in creating mood and atmisphere.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was probably the most recognisable film from that era to most of us now.
That type of stylism whereby cinematography and shapes influenced the mood and attitude of the story was taken up in the US during the 1940s and 1950s.
Mainly black and white, mainly "gangster" (involving guns and chases), mainly portraying women as manipultors and gold diggers. Mainly cynical and mainly without hope.
The era before "happy endings".

Whether this transference was as a result of the second world war, it's hard to figure, but the negative and anti-hope message of film noir in the US walked a tight borederline of political inspection.

The infamous Senator McCarthy who leapt to fame by "discovering" communists, socialists and fellow travellers within Hollywood and subsequently hounded selected people in his "witch hunts" - centered on the writers, actors and directors of the film noir.
It is a very sad tale of US cinema when people like Gary Cooper denounced his role in "High Noon" (cowboy film noir) because he didn't realise it was socialism.
Equally when Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart were cited as communist conspirators.

http://nighthawknews.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/bacall_and_bogart.jpg?w=300&h=218

Film noir preceeded the Italian renaissance where we saw De Sica and later Antonioni try and film "real" people struggling against an oppression in stark and memorable imagery.
Bicycle Thieves(De Sica)

http://image3.examiner.com/images/blog/wysiwyg/image/bicyclethief-9849.jpg

In France: Riffifi - directed by Jules Dassin who had to escape the US because of McCarthyism.

http://sarcastig.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/rififi2.jpg

Film noir spread across Europe as it was slowly killed by lingering suspsicion of subversion and anarchy in the USA.

Now US films have an inbuilt DNA-factored requirement of happy endings, aspirational looking actors and no camera anywhere near working class housing.

Independant US cinema is keeping film noir alive (in black and white) but the future for film noir may lie in South America.

My own favourite film noir - sorry - :)

http://abluteau.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/brighton-june-14.jpg

Brighton Rock -

- from a Graham Greene novel. I know, a pale imitation of the supreme US films.But, to me another failed kick start to move Brit films away from Noel Coward and 'Anyone for Tennis?' middle class cr@p.
But supremely sucessful in it's respect and acknowledgement of the US films.

And:

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/original/highnoon.gif

HIGH NOON.

The most stylised, bleak and realistic of film noir. Using the physcology of the weakness of the ordinary man and the failure of unity to stand against oppression. It's "Happy Ending" of sorts made this film the biggest earner of all films that could be classed as film noir. Deservedly.

[Xexemedes]

A film which I love that sends up the whole genre of 'film noir' is 'Dead Men Dont Wear Plaid' with Steve Martin. Sorry no details at the moment will post more when not pissed:D

Great call Tab!!! That is the first film I though of as well. Steve Martin weaves his story line around and through clips from many a classic film noir. All of your favorites are in there with their dialog intact, yet the new situations they are edited into shines a light of unprecedented comedy. The film quality, direction, score, story line may all have been right out of the 1940's

Steve's narration is superb and the gags are intelligent and goofy at the same time-a rare feat indeed. This coffee scene gets me every time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T60p8OYf6E&feature=related

Plus it has Rachel Ward and in the end he asks the very question that was burning in my brain for most of the movie (can't find the clip, you'll just have to watch it for yourself:D).



http://img158.imagevenue.com/loc826/th_15857_rachel_ward1_122_826lo.jpg (http://img158.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=15857_rachel_ward1_122_826lo.jpg)htt p://img259.imagevenue.com/loc348/th_15861_rachel_ward2_122_348lo.jpg (http://img259.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=15861_rachel_ward2_122_348lo.jpg)htt p://img144.imagevenue.com/loc545/th_15863_plaid_122_545lo.jpg (http://img144.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=15863_plaid_122_545lo.jpg)http://img233.imagevenue.com/loc488/th_15866_plaid11_122_488lo.jpg (http://img233.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=15866_plaid11_122_488lo.jpg)
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb18FCjHSDY&feature=related

If you are a film noir fan and you have not seen this, then, well, see it. It is both a parody and a tribute.

[aphex1973]

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid is a classic. I'm a huge fan of Steve Martin. He's brilliant and completely lame at the same time. This is a talent which many British comedians have mastered, but it's rare among American performers. Good call, Xexemedes and tabler!

I read through this thread and I didn't see 'Key Largo' mentioned. If it was, my apologies. I love this movie. Not necessarily considered one of the classics, but it is beautifully atmospheric and minimalist. The performances by Bogart, Bacall, Lionel Barrymore and Edward G. Robinson are top notch.

[scoundrel]

I read through this thread and I didn't see 'Key Largo' mentioned. If it was, my apologies. I love this movie. Not necessarily considered one of the classics, but it is beautifully atmospheric and minimalist. The performances by Bogart, Bacall, Lionel Barrymore and Edward G. Robinson are top notch.
http://www.vintage-erotica-forum.com/showpost.php?p=841458&postcount=120
Here's what I had to say about Key Largo aphex. I agree: it's an excellent thriller, building tension from the conflict of characters and of alternative takes on duty, social responsiblity and the individual.

[henryf]

Classic film noire, featuring Edmond O'Brien - infinitely superior to the remake with Dennis Quaid

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042369/synopsis

[Jack1956]

The Duellists is a superb film

[Jack1956]

My Top Ten (no order) :

1. Double Indemnity (1944) - The only film that had a decent performance from Fred MacMurray

2. Farewell, My Lovely aka Murder My Sweet (1945) - In my view the very best Philip Marlowe is Dick Powell, not Humphrey Bogart and Mike Mazurki as Moose Molloy! All very expressionistic

3. Laura (1945) Gene Tierney was always beautiful to look at (and apparently an absolute bitch) and Dana Andrews underrated as an actor

4. Build My Gallows High aka Out Of The Past (1947) The US and UK markets often had different titles. Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas are superb and Jane Greer very sexy. A fine downbeat ending too.

5. The Blue Dahlia (1946) Alan Ladd is good standing on his box - Veronica Lake is again gorgeous, shame she ended up a little strange later in life. William Bendix gives a great show as well as the shell-shocked army buddy.

6. Gilda (1946) Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford are very good but the film's piece de resistance is George McCready, as Gilda's cuckolded husband

7. Force Of Evil (1948) John Garfield was a great film actor, the true heir to the magnetism of Cagney

8. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) Garfield again and seduced by Lana Turner (but who could resist her in that white get-up?)

9. The Narrow Margin (1952) Another brilliant and underrated film actor took the lead in this B-film noir - Charles McGraw. Superbly plotted. Better that nearly every other film made in the same year.

10. The Woman In The Window (1944) Edward G.Robinson caught in a nightmare not of his own making and Joan Bennett - say no more

I think film noir had to be made from 1940-1955 and reflect contemporary themes. The influence of European film-makers I think more aesthetic than formative, but that's my view. People have mentioned The Third Man. I do not think it a film noir but does obviously deal with dark themes. In my view however, it is a film that just gets better all the time each time I see it. It is one of the greatest films ever made and the equal of any named in this topic.

But I'll leave you with a real British period film noir if that is not me arguing against myself - The Queen Of Spades (1949) by Thorold Dickinson and just released again.

Food for thought. By the way, Scoundrel, you have missed his true vocation. Your posts are terrific and always highly readable and informative. Thanks.

[scoundrel]

By the way, Scoundrel, you have missed his true vocation. Your posts are terrific and always highly readable and informative. Thanks.I can resist anything except praise: thank you so much for the kind words Jack1956. I have always been keenly interested in the narrative arts, such as novels, poems, plays and film. They are an accessible medium offering insights into this mysterious thing we call ''life.''

[scoundrel]

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From the opening credits, with it's stylishly dark panaroma of dirty, rain slicked streets set to a deliciously sleazy jazz trumpet theme tune, this is classic noir: hard bitten, pitiless and tense. It begins with a murder commited between petty crooks and losers over a card game: the silent stalking of the ailing victim, one of the killers his own cousin, the way the murderers run and crouch like apes as they corner him, is ugly, grim and gripping.

So far, it's small time losers committing murder for pocket change. The action transfers to a police procedural drama but the minutae of the autopsy stops being dull routine when the police surgeon spots deadly trouble. This murder victim, who we saw to be sick before he was snuffed, has pneumonic plague. His killers dumped him in the dock, so they handled him and will have it too, and who knows who else has been in contact with him? Richard Widmark, the doctor from the United States Public Health Service, (a Navy department responsible for quarantine on ships) gives a decent performance against type as a good guy, relatively insignificant and unambitious, forced to show leadership and fiercely assert a normally passive personality to make the Mayor and Chief of Police grasp that fifty million tons of liquid manure is suspended over their heads and will drown them if the contacts of the dead man are not traced. Widmark vividly conveys Lt Commander Reed's anxiety and frustration as an man charged with a huge burden of responsibility and almost no power to carry it out, forced to rely on cunning, ingenuity and persuasion to charm and coerce foot dragging civilians in the face of the desperate emergency.

The drama splits into two sides. One one side, Widmark and Chief of Detectives Captain Tom Warren (Paul Douglas in a laconic and convincingly cynical performance) are seen on a forlorn search for the contacts of a man for whom they haven't even got a name, only the photo of his corpse. On the other side, we see the killers, led by Jack Palance, feeling the heat as their grubby little crime attracts more police attention than they dreamed possible. Palance is superb as Blackie, the lead villain and actual shooter, a man who can switch from sunny, amiable charm to vicious and savage ferocity, then back to warm friendliness at the flick of an invisable switch. Zero Mostel is also very good as his main sidekick, fat and talkative Raymond Fitch, who wouldn't hurt a fly of his own accord but lives in terror of his gang boss and would massacre babies if Blackie told him to do it.

The film is an early and very strong work of Elia Kazan. It portrays the flawed and venal, far from omniscient yet energetic and determined efforts of Widmark and the police to prevent disaster. It is a forerunner of the classic On The Waterfront in it's visually atmospheric and insightful rendering of life in the American gutter. The set pieces, as the police gradually find the killers and trap them, culminating in an extended manhunt through the warehouses and piers of the city's dockland, are superbly shot. The urban jungle of film noir, where the red clawed beasts run, hide and fight, is really well captured and already we see that Kazan's vision is taking shape.

[scoundrel]

http://img192.imagevenue.com/loc632/th_22779_Whirlpoolfilmposter_122_632lo.jpg (http://img192.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=th_22779_Whirlpoolfilmposter_122_632 lo.jpg)http://img231.imagevenue.com/loc35/th_22782_WhirlpoolGeneTierney_122_35lo.jpg (http://img231.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=22782_WhirlpoolGeneTierney_122_35lo. jpg)http://img166.imagevenue.com/loc1108/th_22784_WhirlpoolGeneTierneyandJoseFerrar_122_110 8lo.jpg (http://img166.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=22784_WhirlpoolGeneTierneyandJoseFer rar_122_1108lo.jpg)http://img167.imagevenue.com/loc787/th_22785_Whirlpool_GeneTierneyandRichardConte_122_ 787lo.jpg (http://img167.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=22785_Whirlpool_GeneTierneyandRichar dConte_122_787lo.jpg)
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This one is a psychological thriller rather than a crime caper, dealing with cloaked malice and concealed motives, concealed both by the villain (Jose Ferrar) and by his secondary victim and intended patsy, Gene Tierney. The trademark film noir visual signals, the alternating light and shade, are nicely used to indicate this deadly concealment.

The weakness of Whirlpool lies in its' somewhat tenuous plot, over-dependent on pop-psychology and tricks of hypnosis, especially the self-hypnosis (see the last photo, rather nice visual image to redeem a silly plot device) which enables a villain who has just suffered major surgery to rise from his bed and commit the crime, using the fact that he just undergone surgery as his alibi. In 1949, America was in its first love affair with psycho-analysis. The bad guy and the good guy are both adepts in this new wizardry, but Richard Conte's Dr William Sutton is a properly trained and registered psychiatrist with a thriving practise, while Ferrar's David Korvo is a bogus astrologist but a genuinely gifted hypnotist, with no compunction about using his ability to defraud, deceive and betray vulnerable women. At least the script (written under a pseudonym by blacklisted Ben Hecht) is moderately researched and acknowledges the limitations of hypnosis. Korvo exploits pre-existing weaknesses amd neuroses in Gene Tierney's Ann Sutton, particularly the kleptomania he is claiming to treat her for, in order to hypnotise her into covering his tracks after murdering Theresa Randolph (Barbara O'Neil), who is about to expose his theft of $60,000, and to steer Tierney's Mrs Sutton into a desperately compromising situation, caught in the room with a fresh corpse who was throttled with Mrs Sutton's own scarf.

The acting is very good. Tierney is convincing as a woman starting to crack under the strain of concealing from her husband that she is not the angel he thinks, that she steals and lies and is bad: the point being that she is actually sick rather than bad. Conte, who was superb in the classic The Big Combo, brings the same icy self-possession to Dr William Sutton, Ann's affectionate but remote and unapproachable and rather bossy husband. The evolution in their relationship is one of the best parts of the film: when he is led to believe (through lies and false clues planted by the evil David Korvo) that Ann was having an affair with Korvo, he alternates between seething bitter jealousy and the firm determination still to get his unfaithful wife off the hook and deal with other matters in their turn. What keeps him fooled is that, despite his pleading, Ann will not talk to him about what really went on. His reaction when he learns from others Ann's true confession to a lifelong kleptomania and deep rooted lack of self esteem is one of relief (she did not do the murder, nor did she step out on him) tempered by proper remorse and shame, because she could not tell him, of all people, her own husband, of what she has been suffering inside. Released from jealousy and using his exceptional intelligence, he sets the trap which unmasks the real villain.

Jose Ferrar was more of a stage than a film actor, but his is a character part and he does it more than justice. His voice is pregnant with the power and presence of a hypnotist, suave and cultured, but cold and pitiless. He creates a nicely reptilian personality, superficially charming but lacking in any genuine humanity. The conversation with Conte, where he pretends to be recovering from anaesthesia and babbling indiscretely information designed to compromise Tierney's Ann Sutton is really well done by both: Ferrar as the snake, feeding poison into Conte's ears, and Conte as a man who is not fooled, urgently wanting to kill David Korvo, but retaining self control by a deadly strength of will which Korvo fails to break. Unlike his wife, Dr Sutton is not a suggestible character. The most ''noir'' facet of this story lies in the duel of wits between these two, fighting a symbolic battle for ultimate possession rights over the girl.

Gene Tierney's character lacks the internal strength and the wily self possession of her great role of Laura Hunt in Laura. Ann Sutton is a weaker and more flawed heroine, but still armed with the Tierney looks and winning charm, and hamstrung by the same retinue of obsessive male courtiers, seemingly worshipping her but actually weighing her down. Five years after Laura, and in an older and more matronly part, she still radiates the outward beauty which suggests, without any logical foundation, the existence of a beautiful soul. This is the facade which fooled her husband, which the wicked Korvo sees straight through, yet in the end it turns out that her wounded soul does actually have beauty and it is her much put-upon husband who can forgive all the idiotic self-destructive rubbish she has dumped on him, and see this beauty after all.

Its not in the same class as Laura and the excellent Leave Her To Heaven (think Laura, but she has gone over to the Dark Side): it is still a good entertainment, because a fairly weak basic plot is redeemed by good direction from Otto Preminger and by very strong acting from the key players.

[Nobody1]

The ego-perspective is just awesome!:thumbsup:
I love the first minutes, when Bogey's head is wrapt with bandages.
The german titel is " Die schwarze Natter ", wich means " The black Snake ".:confused:
A stupid and silly translation like always in germany.

http://filmsdefrance.com/img/Dark_Passage_2.jpg

The movie is exceptional and to the smallest supporting role well filled.
I like this bad little guy!:D

http://cache.thephoenix.com/secure/uploadedImages/The_Phoenix/Movies/Features/CODE_MalteseFalcon2.jpg

By the way, i admire Bogey especially for his honest attitude to his colleagues during the mccarthyism.:thumbsup:

Sometimes actors have just in real life character Mr. Tom Cruise & Friends.:rolleyes:

[1952224]

the bad little guy is elisha cook jr. an excellent character actor in many films

[Joszka]

http://thumbnails19.imagebam.com/6952/82e11b69513284.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/82e11b69513284)

The Killers. Robert Siodmak, 1946.
Burt Lancaster at his debuts.. And Ava Gardner.

"The film actually investigates the fundamental post-WWII question: in a world where every man bears scars from the fight,
how and why does he keep fighting? Siodmak's answer seems to be the very one given by Albert Camus
in his famous essay "The Myth of Sisyphus." At the moment a man accepts the burden of his existence,
bends to shoulder the stone of his being, he is greater than his destiny".


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[scoundrel]

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Yet another Gene Tierney film and the film reveals really excellent acting presence from one of the coolest, most elegant and beautiful of film noir femme fatales. Imagine Laura Hunt was actually guilty of the shooting in Laura and you start to get how wonderfully dark and sinister a psychological thriller Leave Her To Heaven is. Ms Tierney’s effortless charm and disarming sweetness of manner, voice and expression are deadly weapons in a secret war she is fighting against the world. Even her own family are enemies, except for her dead father who she idolised and brutally monopolised. Right at the start of the film, Ellen Berent tells her future husband, Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) that he reminds her of her father and, poor sap, he has no idea how significant this is.

Leave Her To Heaven is a superbly realised drama of love gone bad, of jealousy heightened to insane and deadly extremes. There are four main acts: initial courtship; early marraige culminating in the supremely creepy lake scene; later marraige, in which Cornel Wilde gradually wakes up and smells the coffee, and a final court room section, where Vincent Price oozes poison as the revengeful DA. The first section, in which Gene Tierney courts Cornel Wilde (it’s most emphatically that way round) is tremendous. The somewhat pastel shades of the first generation techni-colour process are used to great effect by director John Stahl in order to imply the deadly hidden currents and tensions concealed below the photogenic idyll of this New Mexican ranch in its striking desert/mountain landscape. The scene where Gene Tierney scatters her father’s ashes on his favourite mountain is really intense. There is also a chilling cameo appearance by Vincent Price in cracking good form as Ellen’s jilted fiancé, Boston District Attorney, Russell Quinton. But the chill comes mostly from Gene Tierney. Her totally merciless rejection of this man, who loved her with all his heart; her cool and unfeeling betrayal of him is really disturbing and a warning flag of how dangerous her character is.

Jeanne Crain as Ellen’s unloved foster-sister Ruth is excellent throughout the film but in this first section, she plays melancholy Beethoven piano sonatas as a silent chorus of pathos, watching Cornel Wilde, whom she already loves from afar, being drawn into Ellen’s overwhelming spell. She has few lines, and most of these are mundane, or would be except for the magnificent way she delivers them. But Jeanne Crain’s silent acting is perfect. Ellen has, even at this stage, a strange separation from her blood family, both Ruth and her mother, Mrs Berent (Mary Phillips). They can be seen watching helplessly as Ellen replaces her father fixation with a fixation on Richard Harland, and tacitly pitying a man they cannot even warn.

The rest of the film is a slow and relentless revelation of Ellen’s deadly nature. Her love for Richard is absolute and initially seems to redeem her other, cold and cruel side. She embraces Richard’s handicapped younger brother Danny (a very good turn from 14 year old Darryl Hickman), is radiant with happiness and benevolence towards the world. But this benevolence is always conditional: God help the world if at any stage it offers to get in the way of her monopoly on Richard’s heart, mind and soul. When her blood family shows up, not only are they in the way, but paranoid Ellen detects, with dark and cruel insight, that foster sister Ruth is in love with husband Richard, a discovery which produces bitter fruit in the final act. Poor sap Richard has not the least idea. Still worse, Richard insists that Danny, his kid brother, needs care and that this family unit includes Danny. When various less extreme manoeuvres do not get Danny out of her way, the tension ratchets to breaking point and there follows a stream of terrible and only too inevitable denouements.

Although the plots are very different Leave Her To Heaven reminds me of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The leitmotif of love poisoned by obsession, the faintly necrophilia undertones stemming from obsession with a dead person, the intense music and the reliance on emotion rather than physical action as the mainspring of the drama: the two films have all these themes in common. Above all, the most crucial dramatic passages of Leave Her To Heaven are filmed in exquisite natural settings, in brilliant sunshine, and yet this is one of the darkest and most Gothic films I have ever seen, haunted not by supernatural monsters but by the evil genius of an insane human mind. Gene Tierney was truly angelic without being at all weak or defenceless in Laura: here, she seems just as perfectly angelic but is actually possessed by evil demons, not from Hell, but from the hell of her own soul. Ms Tierney was nominated for this acting performance but lost out to Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce. Hard to say whether Crawford was better (Mildred Pierce was also a hell of a good film) but 1945 was a vintage year alright when Gene Tierney couldn’t get an Oscar for this turnout.

Leave Her To Heaven: bloody good film.

[snorkie]

The movie is exceptional and to the smallest supporting role well filled.
I like this bad little guy!:D

http://cache.thephoenix.com/secure/uploadedImages/The_Phoenix/Movies/Features/CODE_MalteseFalcon2.jpg


This scene is from the incomparable "Maltese Falcon."

[scoundrel]

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I watched this one for the first time on Film4 a few days ago and was ultimately saddened and disappointed by the moralistic Hays Code ending tacked on to subvert all the excellent work which went before. It was still hugely watchable though.

Edward G Robinson was first class in a complex role of a good guy inadvertently compromised and forced to think and act like a bad guy. His layers of feeling underneath a cold and resolute courage when making and carrying out a criminal plan to retrieve a disaster brought on by completely innocent initial circumstances: these things are the product of great acting skill. Joan Bennett was also impressive as a naughty girl who still engages our sympathy, even when she is attempting a real murder to rid herself of the blackmailer.

Fritz Lang’s cinematography brings home the feeling of steady contraction as circumstances close in on the anti-hero and the anti-heroine, once again through the expressionistic visual tools of film noir, the raking alternation of light and shadow. A little bit like characters in a Franz Kafka novel, the protagonists are helplessly trapped in a snare imposed on them through nothing which they did. The suggestion that they did this to themselves by being adulterously attracted to one another is there, but consequences are wildly out of proportion to this as a cause of action. What has really happened is that civilisation is a thin sheet of glass over an abyss, and the glass has cracked under the weight of their footsteps.

I deplore the rotten ending though. It spoils the party.

[haldane4]

Joan Bennett also appeared in Max Ophuls seminal noir The Reckless Moment which regularly makes 100 best film lists everywhere. It occasionally pops up on BBC2 and is well worth seeing - the camerawork is astonishing.

[dohupa]

Had no idea that the noir thread has gone this far; one of the best genres ever in cinematography, sadly this is hardly being touched upon these days of computer graphics and stunts. Can't blame them really; they have to satisfy the web addicted youth, don't they?

Still - one would expect a film lover such as Martin Scorsese bring back to life some classics or even better hire the best Hollywood writers for a modern noir with greed, immoral values & deception. Alas, you can't go beyond the minimum requirements set by the guys with the deep pockets in the studios.

Haven't watched the Rolling Stones movie he did BTW - I watch a lot less movies than I used to. Sign I'm getting old? :o

[pjd]

the killers.burt lancaster .what a film

[scoundrel]

the killers.burt lancaster .what a film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killers_%281946_film%29

See also Joszka's post on The Killers. (http://www.vintage-erotica-forum.com/showpost.php?p=1008923&postcount=149)

Very strong cast: Ava Gardner, Charles McGraw (who was the unenviable bodyguard in The Narrow Margin), Edmond O'Brien (check out this guy's filmography!), as well as Burt Lancaster. The Killers has absolutely no excuse not to be excellent.:cool:

[hound dog]

Lots of great films mentioned. I have to agree with snorkie in post #34 about "Murder, My Sweet", a great film.

[pjd]

just got dvd box set from hmv called film noir collection from universal.nine dvd films.the killers,double indemnity,the big steel,crossfire,out of the past,the blue dahlia,the glass key,this gun for hire,murder my sweet.all for just 15 pounds.not bad

[scoundrel]

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This is one of the all time great pictures: they screened it on Channel 4 today and it has lost none of its power in 60 years since they filmed it. It was nominated for 11 Oscars, including Billy Wilder as best director; William Holden as best actor; Gloria Swanson as best actress, and Nancy Olson as best actress in a supporting role. Erich von Stroheim wasn’t nominated as best supporting actor, which slightly surprises me, as he was also excellent. The scene where, in his characteristically dead-pan butler’s voice, Max reveals to Joe Gillis (Holden) that he was once Norma Desmond’s first husband is beautifully timed to shock and disturb. He also is obsessive and rather mad: Stroheim brings out the calm monomania of Max’s character superbly.

Sunset Boulevard starts out as the story of an unemployed screen writer whose luck has run out. Then it becomes a dark and tragic love triangle, where Joe Gillis builds his own gallows by seeking to take a rich older woman for a bit of a ride, only to realise that she wants to completely take over his whole life and he isn’t strong enough to stop her.

In the sequence where he rebels and seeks out his former crowd to party on New Year’s Eve, the perfectly cut dinner jacket, bow tie and black trousers already set him apart, not as a prosperous winner in life, but as the real loser in the room, except he is the only one at the party who realises that he is no longer really there. It is here that he starts to connect with beautiful proof-reader Betty Schaeffer (Nancy Olson). Their little flirtation game is deadly dangerous for both of them: she has promised herself to Joe’s best friend and is playing games with her own happiness; he knows full well he can never support or even be any good for her, and that to love her is asking for heartbreak. So, naturally, they court one another and fall in love.

Betty is the woman Joe desperately needs and can never have: such a woman seems to Joe to be the reward for the successful in life. Even though Betty is absolutely not a gold digger or a trophy wife/girlfriend, even though she is herself a working girl, trying to make a little bit of a career of her own, she still is one of the special people. Joe has nothing to offer her and in the end he brutally breaks their relationship, parading the squalid reality that he is Norma Desmond’s toy boy, because he has lost faith in his own worth. Poor fools. She is a fool because she would gladly take him away from Norma’s clutches, even knowing all the sordid facts: she still thinks he is one of the special people. He is a fool because he has despaired: rather than allow Betty to throw away her forthcoming marriage to his friend, take him away from Norma’s house and dare to risk trying to have a real life, Joe chooses the symbolic suicide of returning to hopeless disappointed mediocrity in Ohio. It is for Betty’s sake that he will not unite his perennial loser’s life with her younger and much more hopeful one.

Watching the film this time, I noticed more clearly how Billy Wilder used the visual signals. The photography is wonderful: you could freeze frame any scene at random and you would have a pin-sharp studio still-photo. There is a reason for this: we see in black and white how Joe Gillis’s life slowly morphs. The clothes get sharper, more tailored and classier, but the shadows close in on him and Norma Desmond’s crumbling art deco mansion becomes his prison, then finally his trap. Later in the film, Joe takes to wearing crisply laundered white shirts which accentuate the dark shadows of the haunted mansion around him. Light gleams through keyholes, sometimes occluded when a human head spies into his goldfish bowl: and yet, there are no locks, because they have all been removed in case Norma locks herself in and tries to commit suicide, and so there is no privacy and no security in Joe’s prison. It is expressed symbolically in the visual language of film; it is sinister and horribly claustrophobic. Joe, you should have gone with Betty, you should have taken the hand she extended to you, it was your last, best chance...

I love this film and yet I haven’t seen it for decades: I have this strange need to watch these films on real telly. DVDs are most definitely second best. I don’t understand why the ether is so full of dross and there’s so little room there, even in the era of satellite TV, for films like this.

[scoundrel]

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Courtesy of tabler, who lent me the DVD, I have watched Gaslight. This is a Hollywood film but with a strongly British background setting. The main players, Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer and Joseph Cotten are all Hollywood stalwarts. Angela Lansbury is rather good in her first role, that of somewhat tarty and unpleasant house maid, Nancy Oliver, whose attitude of thinly veiled contempt for her highfalutin mistress (Bergman as Paula Alquist Anton) adds to the isolation of the invisible mental prison which evil husband Gregory Anton (Boyer) is building around her at 9 Thornton Square.

Gaslight is a period costume drama, which seems entirely different to those contemporary settings, the hard bitten dialogue and mean streets which are the staple of film noir. Yet, as directed by George Cukor, this is unmistakeably a film noir. The film’s interiors, especially that of the murder house, the house of fearful childhood memories to which Paula Alquist has been lured back by her new husband, is a gothic world of flickering shadows and dim lighting where strange and sinister forces lurk. The dimming of the lights is the signal that the hidden evil demons are emerging.

Boyer’s performance is really creepy. His surface patina of charm can be assumed or removed exactly like a mask. Beneath lies the real man: a merciless bully who enjoys twisting reality into a vicious illusion and isn’t only doing it for the end in view, but rather for the pleasure which it gives him. He makes me urgently want to stamp on his face with clogs: that’s damn good acting in a 2 dimensional Victorian music-hall villain’s part. For 1944, the insights into psychological torture and brainwashing are astute and chilling.

Bergman as Paula, the hapless wife and victim, is in danger of being too weak and passive to engage our sympathy. It is only where she fights back that I start to care about her predicament rather than merely despise Boyer’s character. Beneath the vulnerable sweetness and naively trusting personality, not totally unlike Ilse in Casablanca, there is a slightly different Paula, one who is capable of revenge. The turning of the tables in the attic scene is excellent fun. This is the Paula I liked.

Joseph Cotten is miscast as the police inspector: why would an American be working in CID at Scotland Yard? However his part takes off once he talks his way into the haunted house and his part and interest in Paula’s story is revealed. He has stealthily unravelled the mystery of the house and uncovered the plot against Paula’s sanity, motivated by his childhood memory of Paula’s murdered aunt. Unlike either Gregory or Paula Anton, Inspector Cameron is entirely in control of himself and has the ingenuity and the deadly patience of a cat.

Gaslight is a really clever thriller which has all the elements of a penny dreadful cheap melodrama but is actually subtle, clever and very nasty.

[snorkie]

Had no idea that the noir thread has gone this far; one of the best genres ever in cinematography, sadly this is hardly being touched upon these days of computer graphics and stunts. Can't blame them really; they have to satisfy the web addicted youth, don't they?


Film noire and screwball comedy as genres were largely a product of their times. As wonderful as these films were it just hard to recreate that magic in a different age. The best we can hope for is to appreciate films that have some of the elements adapted for today, such as "A History of Violence" or "There's Something About Mary."

[Joszka]

http://i40.*******.com/651zf5.jpg

Angel Face. 1952. Otto Preminger.
8 years after "Laura", another stunning masterpiece..

Dave Kehr. The New-York Times :
(1952) The Postman Always Rings Twice meets The Case of the Deadly Gearshift as chauffeur Robert Mitchum fends off murderous heiress Jean Simmons (“loaded with venom underneath a lacquered surface, one of the most poisonous femmes fatales in Noir.” – Hirsch) until late-arriving mouthpiece Leon Ames steals the show. Jean-Luc Godard listed it as one of the top 10 sound films of all time. Nick Pinkerton. The Village Voice :
“His noirs are knotty with thwarted sex, characterized by patient characterizations, ellipses of solitude, and the precision-haloed nocturnal photography of Joseph La Shelle. The culmination of this period is 1952’s Angel Face, a dyspeptic terror that open-ends onto the abyss.”http://thumbnails3.imagebam.com/7574/efc6f175733172.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/efc6f175733172) http://thumbnails4.imagebam.com/7574/76b56275732611.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/76b56275732611) http://thumbnails26.imagebam.com/7574/47dfe275732612.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/47dfe275732612) http://thumbnails24.imagebam.com/7574/18afc375732615.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/18afc375732615) http://thumbnails4.imagebam.com/7574/86716c75732619.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/86716c75732619)

[scoundrel]

Film noire and as well as screwball comedy as genres were largely a product of their times. As wonderful as these films were it just hard to recreate that magic in a different age. The best we can hope for is to appreciate films that have some of the elements adapted for today, such as "A History of Violence" or "There's Something About Mary."
I don't think you can exactly re-create a 1940s or 50s noir set in modern surroundings because we inhabit a different cultural space. But there are modern noirs. I would suggest a few good ones are:

The Long Good Friday: Bob Hoskins has sometimes been described as a Cockney Cagney and you can see it here, in his feisty and enthusiastically violent portrayal of an East End gang leader who finds himself up against a team from a bigger league and gives them a vicious and costly run for their money.

Someone to Watch Over Me: Tom Berenger, Mimi Rogers and Lorraine Braccho all give well judged and sensitive performances in this drama of a society lady who has become witness to a drugs assassination and of the blue collar detective whose own family is imperilled because he has been ordered to protect her. The film is very observant of social resentments and sharply delineates the squalid things hidden below the facile 1980s surface glitter of Mimi Rogers' fashionable society world. Its gritty, hard-bitten and very dark, both in themes and in its visual style.

Leon (The Professional): I love this one. Natalie Portman gives a fantastic performance as the small child old beyond her years who evades psychotic Gary Oldman and his mad dog killers. Jean Reno is also marvellous as eponymous "heo" Leon, the self-styled "cleaner" of people who discovers, to his own surprise, that he has one tiny shred of humanity left and takes pity on Natalie Portman's helpless waif, plucking her out from under the very noses of her would-be murderers. Leon is a man of few words who speaks through actions...really scary actions which he doesn't need to think about very hard or for very long. When he decides that Natalie Portman's enemies are his enemies, she has won a vital ally and they have just plumb run out of luck.

Angel: Neil Jordan's directorial debut. It is notable for a fine early performance by Stephen Rea as the small time musician in the midst of a Northern Ireland run by terrorist-gangsters who witnesses Protestant paramilitaries murdering the manager of his band and a deaf-mute teenage girl Rea's character has only just slept with and heartlessly discarded. The shock turns him into a really dangerous man, deadly because he no longer gives a damn what becomes of himself as long as he can have a bit of a chat with every single member of the killer band before anyone catches up with him.

The scene where he guns down one of the killers on a lonely beach then holds the dying man's hand because the man begs not to be left to die alone is moving and chilling: Rea's character is absurdly compassionate to the man he has just murdered and this marks him as the most ordinary and mundane of assassins. He isn't even driven by hate, but rather by a calm and implacable resolve to even the score. Neither are his motives political. He is a Catholic and the Protestant paramilitaries murdered his band manager for sectarian as well as financial reasons (the man defied their extortion demands): but at one stage Rea casually shoots dead an IRA man who threatens the band's female singer, because he is equally sick of all terrorist gangsters and couldn't care less about labels. To his eyes, IRA and UDA are tweedle dee and tweedle dum. The film's theme is that once violence becomes normal and banal, normal and seemingly defenceless people catch the infection, the criminals are no longer protected by their violent mystique, and the whole fabric of civilisation starts to unravel.

Just four examples at random of modern film noir. Its out there.:cool:

[jokerman]

Edward G Robinson as Rico in Little Caeser & of course Key Largo.
Another classic which has already been mentioned is the Maltese Falcon. Which, saw the brilliant debut of Sydney Greenstreet as the "fatman"

[jokerman]

JC & Mae Clark in Public Enemy.
http://img190.imagevenue.com/loc1083/th_99507_grapefruit_james_cagney_mae_clark21a1_123 _1083lo.jpg (http://img190.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=99507_grapefruit_james_cagney_mae_cl ark21a1_123_1083lo.jpg)

[jokerman]

Orson Welles as Harry Lime, in The Third Man.
One of the greatest British Films ever.

http://img228.imagevenue.com/loc541/th_34213_welles_123_541lo.jpg (http://img228.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=34213_welles_123_541lo.jpg)

[scoundrel]

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I haven’t seen this one since it was on BBC2 back in the days before the Director General decreed “If it’s black and white, it must be sh...” I wish someone would screen it again.

This movie came slightly before the peak period of film noir: it is one of the pioneers. The plot is staple gangster-thriller but with a really interesting underpinning of social comment and observation. The film is notable as the debut of the Dead End Kids, child actors with really authentic mean street charisma who went on to add value to a series of similar pictures, particularly the excellent Angels With Dirty Faces alongside James Cagney in 1938.

The basic outline is that unemployed architect Dave Connell (Joel McCrea) has to choose which way his life is going. He is having a hopeless love affair with beautiful kept woman Kay Burton (Wendy Barrie) but neither of them has money and the film is brutally realistic about how far love gets you if there’s no money. Meanwhile Dave’s old childhood friend Drina Gordon (Sylvia Sydney) has never stopped loving him but now has desperate problems of her own, trying to keep her head above water in Hells Kitchen and trying to keep her hoodlum younger brother out of trouble in a neighbourhood where gangs and crime are the warp and weft of daily life. Given Dave’s straitened circumstances, this woman with her brave and stalwart nature and modest hopes and dreams would make a far more suitable partner in life than high-maintenance Kay, but when did men ever think with their brains in choosing women?

In a seemingly unrelated subplot, a local “hero” called Baby Face Martin, disguised by a plastic surgeon to look remarkably like Humphrey Bogart, has come home to find true love at last: his own childhood sweetheart Francie has been waiting for him all these years...Not. Francie is played by the excellent Claire Trevor, who deserves to be much more widely remembered. In Martin’s head the world has stood still since the day he left Hell’s Kitchen to seek his fortune as a gangster. However the world has not stood still and Martin did not make any provision for Francie’s survival needs, let alone her emotional needs while he was away. He comes back to discover that an awful lot of other men have been playing with his train-set and now it is broken and cannot be mended. Poor Francie turned to prostitution to stay alive and it has killed her: she is a dead woman walking. Under the Hays Code, words like “syphilis” could not be said, but the scene of Martin’s final pitiful reunion with Francie is unambiguous about her being sick and no longer fit to kiss him. [Francie evades Martin's attempt to kiss her]
Martin: What's the matter? Ain't I good enough for you?
Francie: Oh no. It ain't that...I note the way William Wyler used the dark shadows of the alley briefly to hide Francie’s “shame” so that Martin could open his heart to her, thinking she is still the angel he once idolised, and then she herself forces him into the light to look hard at the sordid, diseased and cruel truth. These are expressionistic film noir techniques in play. This is the scene that stays in my memory, decades after I last saw this film. Here it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvttiIssLf0

It is a desperately sad and dark scene.

Dead End is grim and harsh stuff, examining the grinding and soul-destructive force of poverty. To escape from this ugly and crushing trap, men and women must have hope. Without hope, they will turn to crime, prostitution, drink and a permanent life in the gutter. But in depression America hope is a rare commodity. Martin in his despair decides to commit one more bold crime and sets his life on a collision course with Dave Connell's as both men find that fate is inescapable.

[scoundrel]

http://img223.imagevenue.com/loc728/th_79984_pickup_on_south_streetposter_122_728lo.jp g (http://img223.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=79984_pickup_on_south_streetposter_1 22_728lo.jpg)http://img216.imagevenue.com/loc206/th_79985_pickuponsouthstreet_richardwidmark_122_20 6lo.jpg (http://img216.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=79985_pickuponsouthstreet_richardwid mark_122_206lo.jpg)http://img11.imagevenue.com/loc20/th_79988_pickuponsouthstreet_thelmaritterandrichar dwidmark_122_20lo.jpg (http://img11.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=79988_pickuponsouthstreet_thelmaritt erandrichardwidmark_122_20lo.jpg)http://img124.imagevenue.com/loc553/th_79990_pickup_south_street_jeanpetersandrichardk iley_122_553lo.jpg (http://img124.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=79990_pickup_south_street_jeanpeters andrichardkiley_122_553lo.jpg)


This film noir, directed by Sam Fuller, belongs to the 1950s lowlife noir type and has a nice line in moral relativism, engaging our main sympathy for the petty crooks and grifters rather than the official heroes of law and order. Apparently J Edgar Hoover hated it .

It’s an unpretentious crime/spy thriller but quite well done on a shoestring budget. The use of the set in the scenes filmed in the Richard Widmark character’s weird home (he basically lives semi-rough in the control room of a derelict crane at the docks) is ingenious and highly relevant. A leaky wooden crate in the sea on the end of a winch doubles as his stash for loot and the cool box for his beers. There is an excellent scene where the villain, Communist spy-for-pay Joey, played nicely by Richard Kiley, tries to kill the femme fatale, Jean Peters, then slips through the cordon of cops using the “service elevator”, which we Brits would call a dumb waiter, and then bludgeons a cop to death in the alleyway behind her apartment building. There is a real feeling of tension and claustrophobia as he sits in the nasty little box, knees tucked under his chin, half way down the lift-shaft.

The character-acting is good, and in some cases it is really good. Thelma Ritter, who went on to play the insurance company nurse in the Hitchcock thriller Rear Window, stands out as the old and tired “stoolie” who is actually rather sympathetic and quite liked by Widmark’s pickpocket, Skip McCoy, even though she has a distressing habit of charging 50 dollars to tell people who he is and where he lives. When she learns that he has become embroiled with communist spies and won’t help the police catch them, she gently reprimands him and it becomes apparent that he has known her since he was a little boy:
Moe: “I always knew you’d be a crook, but I just never figured you for a louse. Stop using your hands and start using your brains...”
Skip: “You waving the flag at me too?”
Moe’s dialogue is really well written and witty in what I would describe as razor sharp stereotypically Jewish humour: she runs enjoyable conversational rings round the police captain with the arrogant and hostile attitude, negotiates her various fees with tough good humour, even cheekily selling the FBI man a rather smart striped tie for an extra dollar. Her death scene is actually a splendid acting display. She has cheerfully sold Skip’s name and address to cops and assorted fellow crooks but she won’t sell to Richard Kiley because he is a killer, a communist and because she is clever enough to realise he will kill her anyway to shut her up once she has told him.
“Mister, I’m so old and tired, you’ll be doin’ me a favour if you'd blow my head off.”
Thus does a stool pigeon die with impressive courage and dignity without deviating in the slightest from her disreputable lowlife character.

Widmark was always reliable in this sort of film and here he shows much dexterity in shifting between deft pickpocket, more violent and sinister hood, and a genuinely sympathetic anti-hero. The developing relationship with pretty and shifty courier Candy (Jean Peters was also very good) is very well portrayed: she too is no angel and uses all the standard underhand techniques of a pretty and unscrupulous woman to try to steal back the package Skip so artfully plucked from her handbag. Once or twice the script hints that before she fell in with and briefly loved Richard Kiley’s Joey, she may well have been involved in some form of high-end prostitution. The police know her, even though she has no official record. Skip sizes her up with pin point accuracy. But in spite of their mutual mistrust and resentment, they are strongly drawn to one another.

Skip’s major handicap is that he is militantly mistrustful. He likes Moe because she is open and honest about selling him out, even joking “Is there anyone in this town who doesn’t know where I live?”; he refuses to cooperate with the cops simply because they have framed him in the past and he automatically discounts talk of communist spies as lies to set him up again; he is very slow to warm to Candy because she is indeed trying to deceive him.

But underneath the anger and case-hardened rejection of normal human contact, Skip is still capable of caring about others and he starts to turn when he learns that Joey has murdered Moe. He can figure out it was over looking for his name and address. Moe’s darkest fear was a paupers grave in Potters Field, so Skip bribes and lies to claim her cadaver so he can give her an honourable funeral: she was almost his only friend in the world. The sea change is completed when he finds out that Candy is critically ill in hospital, savagely beaten and shot. He manages to visit her and she manages to tell him that Joey did it. There is both venom and great tenderness in the way he caresses her bruised face. Joey has just made the worst mistake of his life.

In the end this lowlife criminal/semi-criminal pair walks triumphantly out of the frustrated and embittered police captain’s office, clutching the official pardon for past misdeeds which was Skip’s and Candy’s reward for bringing the communists into the clutches of the FBI. The captain balefully predicts that Skip will be in his cells in thirty days. Candy smiles a brassy and defiant anti-police smile and calmly faces him down: “Do you want to bet?” No. They have won and he has lost. They are firmly unrepentant but they’ll never be back.

Pickup on South Street certainly isn’t Citizen Kane. It is however a very effective crime thriller and mischievously enjoyable in the way it turns the bad guys into the real heroes of the story and marginalises the official good guys with considerable disdain. Recommended.:)

[scoundrel]

http://img158.imagevenue.com/loc1149/th_69966_thegooddieyoungposter_122_1149lo.jpg (http://img158.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=69966_thegooddieyoungposter_122_1149 lo.jpg)http://img46.imagevenue.com/loc58/th_69967_TheGoodDieYoung_GeorgeBaker_122_58lo.jpg (http://img46.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=69967_TheGoodDieYoung_GeorgeBaker_12 2_58lo.jpg)http://img166.imagevenue.com/loc71/th_70005_thegooddieyoung_laurenceharveyandmargaret leighton_122_71lo.JPG (http://img166.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=70005_thegooddieyoung_laurenceharvey andmargaretleighton_122_71lo.JPG)http://img209.imagevenue.com/loc235/th_70011_TheGoodDieYoung_RichardBasehartandJoanCol lins_122_235lo.jpg (http://img209.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=70011_TheGoodDieYoung_RichardBasehar tandJoanCollins_122_235lo.jpg)
http://img197.imagevenue.com/loc651/th_70013_thegood_die_young_gloriagrahame_johnirela nd_122_651lo.jpg (http://img197.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=70013_thegood_die_young_gloriagraham e_johnireland_122_651lo.jpg)

I wasn’t absolutely convinced this was truly a film noir until the excellent final action sequences around the armed robbery: a litany of wanton nihilistic violence, double-crossing and callousness quite rare for British films of this period. It is a night sequence and all shown as a nightmarish shadow-play of stark, bleak streetlights and torches alternating with pitch black shadows where the perpetrators of the crudely botched robbery are hiding from justice like rats.

The build-up to this savage conclusion is slow and very traditional, with plenty of rather trite narration. However the acting is strong. Slowly we are witnessing the fatal coming-together of a gang which doesn’t even realise that it is a gang, and it is a subversive process. Three out these four men are very ordinary, with no criminal past. They have been betrayed and let down by life and by society: they have compelling reasons to feel desperate and bitter. They make the worst possible choice of solution to their differing problems, but they are sympathetic figures whose various roads to disaster inspire the audience with pity. The fourth is a natural criminal, even though he is much more educated, socially connected and affluent than the others. He is the instigator and also the wild card, the engine of destructive energy whose personality is genuinely and convincingly psychopathic.

The dialogue isn't hard-boiled in the traditional noir fashion, as seen for example in Pickup on South Street. Rather it mirrors the variously class backgrounds of the British and American characters, all of whom are perfectly cast for their roles in this pitiless morality play. The most terse and hard-bitten exchanges are in the boxing sequences, where George Baker’s washed-up heavyweight boxer Mike Morgan plays out the final scene in his failed boxing career, winning his final fight for no higher reward than pride (he would have got his £100 purse win or lose) and pays a shocking price for his last victory. The most cultured and “posh” dialogue is around the public school educated wastrel and selfish playboy Ralph Ravenscroft, played with polished and icy detachment by Laurence Harvey (Ralph comes out “Rafe” when his circle are on camera) and yet this is where the most scalpel sharp and viciously cruel words are spoken, both by Rafe and to Rafe by the people who know him really well and loathe him.

The ending is very noir. There are no winners in this drama. Yet in the end I feel a strange and pleasurable satisfaction that the film pulled no punches at all. It was a very good use of 94 minutes.

[renno61]

The lady in the lake
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwkm-IcBMy0
http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/e/2/0/5/thumbs/LADY1_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3756176) http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/d/a/9/6/thumbs/1_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3756183) http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/7/8/e/3/thumbs/LADY2_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3756193)
well worth the watch,original,stylish and well acted .

[Night Haunter]

Charles Laughton's (Arguably the world's finest actor) first and only turn behind the camera. Robert Mitchum gives a chilling portrayal of the psychotic preacher with 'love & hate' tattooed on his fingers hunting the innocent babes:thumbsup:

http://thumbnails24.imagebam.com/7920/faa4e779192298.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/faa4e779192298) http://thumbnails25.imagebam.com/7920/fd715d79192331.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/fd715d79192331) http://thumbnails16.imagebam.com/7920/40c36d79192332.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/40c36d79192332)

[renno61]

Kiss Me Deadly 1955
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzxGKBPLc44
a brilliant film noire by Robert Aldrich from the opening scene to amazing finale .
Ralph Meeker is fantastic as Mike Hammer
http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/0/7/a/f/thumbs/KissMeDeadly2_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3762058) http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/0/4/5/8/thumbs/kiss-me-deadly1_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3762063) http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/2/c/7/7/thumbs/kiss-me-deadly_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3762070) http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/4/f/5/9/thumbs/Meeker.Hammer._0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3762078)

[renno61]

five more classic i would reccomend
the mask of dimitrios ,1944
http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/f/b/6/0/thumbs/mod1poster_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3770261) http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/2/8/b/b/thumbs/Sydney Greenstreet Peter Lorre_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3770263)
out of the past ,1947

http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/a/8/a/d/thumbs/ootp poster_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3770272)
the stranger ,1946

http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/8/5/3/9/thumbs/200px-The_Stranger_(film)_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3770284) http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/d/5/5/c/thumbs/Annex - Robinson Edward G. (Stranger The_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3770286) http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/3/9/a/3/thumbs/Welles_TheStranger_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3770287)
the big clock 1948
http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/7/0/7/5/thumbs/bigcloc2_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3770297) http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/1/0/5/d/thumbs/bigclocklc2zh1_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3770298)

[scoundrel]

the stranger ,1946

http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/8/5/3/9/thumbs/200px-The_Stranger_(film)_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3770284) http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/d/5/5/c/thumbs/Annex - Robinson Edward G. (Stranger The_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3770286) http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/3/9/a/3/thumbs/Welles_TheStranger_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3770287)

I have seen this film a few times, most recently last month on Film4. The master I saw could do with restoration but The Stranger is now in the public domain and there's no financial incentive for a studio such as Fox to carry out the technical work involved. Then again, the way the studios felt about Orson Welles, we're lucky that they didn't sweep the toilet floors with his master copy.

That's a shame: it undermines a lot of the excellent work Welles did directing the visual effects of key scenes, especially those between Welles himself as "Charles Rankin" and Loretta Young as his deceived bride, who gradually discovers both the ugly truth about her new husband and some uncomfortable truthes about her own capacity to condone evil and also her own latent capacity for hate and violence. Although the evil in the film as come from Nazi Germany, it's really a film critique of the idealised Norman Rockwell, white picket fence New England idyll, which in some ways parallels Peyton Place, filmed 11 years later. It's a film about secrets and hidden malice.

[Bubba Hotep]

Excellent thread about my favourite genre! Many thanks to all participants! :thumbsup:
I love all those beautiful filmposters and stills.

I noticed that many of the films that have been reviewed in this thread by scoundrel are from either Warner or Fox. You probably also own the brilliant (R1) Warner noir boxes and Fox noir series. Do you ever listen to the commentaries? I'm a huge noir-commentary-fan, especially Eddie Muller's commentaries are terrific!

[scoundrel]

I noticed that many of the films that have been reviewed in this thread by scoundrel are from either Warner or Fox. You probably also own the brilliant (R1) Warner noir boxes and Fox noir series. Do you ever listen to the commentaries? I'm a huge noir-commentary-fan, especially Eddie Muller's commentaries are terrific!
I do own several of these films in DVD but I am catastrophically cheap and I don't own most of the films I have reviewed here: I tend to post a review if I have seen the film on TV. However the commentaries on the DVDs I do possess are very good value. The Fox DVD of Laura includes a commentary by Professor Jeanine Basinger of Wesleyan University, Middletown Connecticut which is a great analysis of how this film works as cinema, drawing attention to the subterfuges used to divert our attention from the real villain until the the villain is unmasked at the most dramatically satisfying moment, and yet also preparing us mentally so that the surprise itself is satisfying. At the right moment, all the jigsaw pieces click together and the film has supplied us with every clue necessary to solve the puzzle, so when the puzzle is solved, we do not feel cheated. Professor Basinger is an academic with a considerable reputation in film and theatre studies and her 50 minute commentary on an 88 minute film is excellent value, not one of those 50 minutes is either superfluous or dull.

[haldane4]

You should use torrent sites, scoundrel. I know a lot of folk are against copyright theft etc, but the majority of noir films (or any genre for that matter) have never been released on VHS or DVD and are rarely if ever shown on television. The copyright renewal process of older films seems highly suspect and the films are just rotting in studio vaults. They'd rather that happened than let you see them. As far as I'm concerned the many bit-torrentors on private trackers are the librarians of the interweb.

[caboosier]

It was Orson Welles day on TCM today.
I DVRed The Stranger. The last time I had seen it was on TVO 5 years ago.
Unfortunately, the screen was black & silent for the first 10 minutes of The Tartars (w/ Victor Mature).
They also showed Journey Into Fear which I first saw a year ago. I thought it was pretty amazing. :thumbsup:

Question to forum: Do I need to fork out the big Criterion bucks for
Mr. Arkadin?

[Bubba Hotep]

Personally I only use the torrent sites to find classic serials/cliffhangers. These are usually public domain, and therefore in terrible quality, but that's better than nothing. Some of the serials have been restored, and they are for sale of course, mostly at a very low price.

That Laura dvd is a perfect example of a terrific release! I prefer Rudy Behlmer's commentary by the way. And what about the other terrific extra's: docu's on both Tierney and Vincent Price?
The complete Fox noir series is brilliant, although some films probably would not be qualified by everybody as noir. Also their Studio Classics series is awesome!

But I really encourage everybody to take a look at what especially Warner and Fox (but also Universal, Paramount, Kino, etc) have done over the past years with their noir films. They all released excellent dvd's that are only a fraction of the price when bought in a box set (and most of these sets are priced very cheaply at most online retailers after a year or so). Not just noir, but also plenty of classic gangsters, Bogart sets, Cagney, The Thin Man, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis sets, etc. etc.
The films look brilliant, and they've added valuable audio commentaries by experts, and featurettes in most cases. I can really REALLY recommend to buy these films and support future releases.

For example, Warner's terrific noir sets:

Warner noir 1:

http://img9.imagevenue.com/loc71/th_20506_1_122_71lo.jpg (http://img9.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=20506_1_122_71lo.jpg)

Warner noir 2:

http://img269.imagevenue.com/loc250/th_20508_2_122_250lo.jpg (http://img269.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=20508_2_122_250lo.jpg)

Warner noir 3:

http://img267.imagevenue.com/loc428/th_20510_3_122_428lo.jpg (http://img267.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=20510_3_122_428lo.jpg)

Warner noir 4:

http://img101.imagevenue.com/loc52/th_20512_4_122_52lo.jpg (http://img101.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=20512_4_122_52lo.jpg)

Warner noir 5 ( to be released in a few months):

http://img187.imagevenue.com/loc390/th_20516_5_122_390lo.jpg (http://img187.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=20516_5_122_390lo.jpg)

[Joszka]

http://thumbnails6.imagebam.com/7957/befe7379561917.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/befe7379561917) http://thumbnails22.imagebam.com/7957/56c75979561919.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/56c75979561919) http://thumbnails23.imagebam.com/7957/ff34aa79561925.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/ff34aa79561925) http://thumbnails23.imagebam.com/7957/a0d49079561927.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/a0d49079561927) http://thumbnails25.imagebam.com/7957/63078f79561922.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/63078f79561922)

From all these studios I have a special weakness for RKO, not the most prestigious of course but with some great tittles : "Suspicion - Angel face - The Narrow margin - Journey into fear, etc..
And all movies produced for RKO by Val Lewton (not exactly "noir" movies but they maybe should have their own thread in a noir-gothic- fantastic genre ) : Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, Isle of the Dead, etc..

http://thumbnails13.imagebam.com/7957/da799279561926.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/da799279561926)

And I still remember how I was impressed when I was kid by the "gongman" of the English Rank studios (R.I.P).

http://thumbnails26.imagebam.com/7957/29026e79561928.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/29026e79561928)

There's a DVD with their most famous movies : "The Rank 70th Anniversary Collection - 8 DVD Box Set (Brief Encounter / The 39 Steps / The Wicked Lady / Genevieve / The Red Shoes / A Matter Of Life And Death / Hamlet / Henry V).

[jokerman]

Another great British film of the film noire era is Odd man out. I think it's a Carol Reed film.
Set in Belfast, & starring James Mason as a member of the Ra on the run from the R.U.C after a failed bank robbery.

[scoundrel]

http://img208.imagevenue.com/loc128/th_59297_Jeopardyfilmposter_122_128lo.jpg (http://img208.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=59297_Jeopardyfilmposter_122_128lo.j pg)http://img231.imagevenue.com/loc503/th_59300_BarbaraStanwyck_122_503lo.jpg (http://img231.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=59300_BarbaraStanwyck_122_503lo.jpg) http://img142.imagevenue.com/loc152/th_59454_jeopardy_BarbaraandRalphagain_122_152lo.j pg (http://img142.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=59454_jeopardy_BarbaraandRalphagain_ 122_152lo.jpg)http://img261.imagevenue.com/loc184/th_59303_Jeopardy_BarbaraandRalphMeeker_122_184lo. jpg (http://img261.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=59303_Jeopardy_BarbaraandRalphMeeker _122_184lo.jpg)
http://img18.imagevenue.com/loc59/th_59303_Jeopardy_BarbaryandBarrySullivaninadiffic ulty_122_59lo.jpg (http://img18.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=59303_Jeopardy_BarbaryandBarrySulliv aninadifficulty_122_59lo.jpg)


I have had a mental block on this one. I watched it nearly 20 years ago on BBC2 and it was absolutely gripping, a massive adrenaline charged white knuckle ride of a psychological thriller. Only trouble was, blockhead Scoundrel couldn’t remember what the film was called or who was in it...

Barbara Stanwyck, the great femme fatale of Double Indemnity, is heroine, narrator and femme fatale all in one in this film. It is a bravura performance from 46 year old Barbara who still had exactly what it took to persuade lethally dangerous, vicious and rather crazy villain Ralph Meeker to take time out from being a fugitive from justice in order to rescue her clottish husband Barry Sullivan from certain death, a death brought on by his own stupidity. Of course Ralph wouldn't be a boy scout out of the goodness of his heart, plus the Mexican police manhunt is breathing down his neck. But Ralph is Barbara's last and only chance to save her husband's life: all other options are closed. So how can she talk him into it....

Clue: When the film was released, the tag line was "I'll do anything...to save my husband!"

Actually it’s much more complex and subtle than the tag-line implies, made so by a fascinating double-act between Stanwyck’s tough minded, brave and utterly resolute heroine and Ralph Meeker’s superbly three-dimensional villain, a murderous desperado in full flight from an orchestrated man hunt who steadily emerges as strangely human, impressive and sympathetic. He captures Barbara for the sake of her car, retains her a prisoner for window-dressing (they’re not looking for a couple), slaps her around when she tries to get cute and it is crystal clear in the early stages of her captivity that this man is a mad dog killer, no fairy tales.

But here’s a funny thing: Ralph is a really really bad boy but he is full of guts, a hugely competent improviser and problem solver, a total contrast to Barb’s complacent and slow-witted, but good natured and loyal husband. The car is Barbara’s lifeline, she will need to use it as a tractor to physically remove the fallen pier which has her husband pinned down, waiting for the tide to come in and drown him. But even with the rope she managed to find before Ralph captured her, it’s very doubtful whether she is either strong enough or clever enough with her hands to make the plan work. The car blows out a tyre and Barbara broke the jack trying to prise the fallen pier off her husband. If Barbara was still alone and not Ralph’s prisoner, the game would be over, her husband would be doomed. But Ralph needs that car and the lack of a jack is only a problem to be solved, using a rock outcrop as a ramp to lift the punctured wheel so he can swop it over: a superbly presented incident which epitomises John Sturges’ skill in directing this movie.

The incident of the puncture also starts other wheels turning. Ralph is a bit of a rough diamond, not Barbara’s usual type, but the man who could swop that wheel over without a jack is a man who might well be able to get the fallen pier off her husband. Also, Ralph may be a little bit crazy, but he is hugely energetic, totally undaunted by the odds against him, and there is more than a hint of “Me Tarzan, You Jane” in the way he loves to show off his physical prowess to his attractive older-woman prisoner. Interestingly, he isn’t making sexual overtures to his captive, even though it is clear he knows she is female and good looking. He is seriously bad, but that’s not what’s wrong with him: he is unconsciously advertising that he is interested, but though he would shoot Barbara, he wouldn’t force himself on her. In a really smartly observed and thought-provoking twist of the tale, it is Barbara who decides to make all the running. Is she only doing it because she wants to save her husband’s life? Is it only because she has figured Ralph out and calculated that he likes her enough to honour their wicked bargain? Or is Barbara, for all her sincere love of her husband, her stalwart loyalty and cold steel courage, just a teensy weensy little bit wicked herself?

Barbara's husband and her captor both fondly imagine that they are in charge of her. Both of them completely under-estimate her, not appreciating her resourcefulness, her cunning and her strength of will. A feminist reading of this film, focusing on Barbara’s complex relationships with these two men, in both of which she provides the brains and common sense, would be very interesting indeed.

Jeopardy is a fantastic film, a high octane rocket ride from the moment Barry Sullivan (Barb’s daft husband) gets himself trapped. It is rare that such a fast moving action thriller is so well staffed by totally convincing and well written characters, fleshed out by actors of such class. Sullivan and Lee Aker as their frightened 9 year old son are also excellent in their supporting roles. It was made as a cheap B movie and lasts 67 minutes: 67 minutes of power-house entertainment infinitely superior to 9 out of 10 current Hollywood cash extravaganza block-buster action movies today.

Why the bloody hell won’t any TV channel show it again?

[atomicrooster]

"Two Men In Town"/"Deux hommes dans la ville"/"Endstation Schafott"

starring Alain Delon and Jean Gabin in his last movie

it`s a sort of "Every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in!" movie

really noire...


http://thumbnails31.imagebam.com/8056/a10ff780550551.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/a10ff780550551/)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069967/


"Deux Hommes dans la Ville "is A WINNER.First thing to bear in mind is that ,at its time of release,French critics were chilly ,they sneered when they saw Michel Bouquet 's cop character.They had probably forgotten "Les misérables" ,Javert and Jean Valjean.Giovanni's cop is not implausible and Bouquet's sly face is ideal.

By and large,the cast is dazzling:we find an actor from the heyday of the French cinema ,Gabin,(Delon's fate recalls some parts of young Gabin "le jour se lève" and "Quai des Brumes"),then from the second generation (Delon) and even the third one is represented with Gerard Depardieu and Bernard Giraudeau -whose part is certainly the weakest of the script:the post-68 student ,we have seen this character too many times- Supporting cast also includes Victor Lanoux and Malka Ribowska ,as a convincing lawyer who is Giovanni's spokesman(woman!)when she expresses her horror of this "razor" (guillotine)which reduces France to the level of the under developed countries.

Gino (Delon) paid for what he'd done.He deserved a chance to pick up the pieces.His awakening,on THE fatal morning,is absolutely terrifying.

[scoundrel]

http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/a/3/1/a/thumbs/Where The Sidewalk Ends poster_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3855602) http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/e/1/7/6/thumbs/Where The Sidewalk Ends-The casino scene which is a gutter in disguise_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3855605) http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/c/2/e/1/thumbs/Where The Sidewalk Ends-Dana Andrews didnt know his own strength. Ooops._0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3855616) http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/3/b/7/c/thumbs/Where The Sidewalk Ends-Dana Andrews realises the worst_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3855617)http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/e/a/4/3/thumbs/Where The Sidewalk Ends-Karl Malden accuses_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3855623) http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/f/0/f/b/thumbs/Where The Sidewalk Ends-Gene Tierney likes Dana Andrew but he doesnt like himself_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3855627)http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/5/a/3/b/thumbs/Where The Sidewalk Ends-Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3855622) http://pimpandhost.com/media2/image/1/_/_/_/1/b/8/5/b/thumbs/Where The Sidewalk Ends-Gene Tierney will forgive her knight in rusty armour_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/3855626)

Where the Sidewalk Ends is an enthralling film noir. Literally, where the sidewalk ends is in the gutter, and this is a police action drama about a bad cop with a foot in each place. The storyline is tight and convincing: scriptwriter Ben Hecht was for many years a crime reporter for the Chicago Daily News and his procedural knowledge is integral to the film’s plot. It’s a police thriller in which the cop is also the villain; it’s a hard-boiled gangster movie in the classic Hollywood tradition; it’s a darkly romantic love story set in the classic bleak ambience of noir, where if happy ever after can be attained at all, the price will be very high indeed.

The characters are all well drawn, even the somewhat passive and angelic Morgan Taylor-Paine, who is an odd-woman-out, too genteel for her own good in the low-life world her heel of a husband dragged her down into, as is cleverly shown in the girl talk at work. Morgan’s fatal weakness is that she is drawn to charming but shady men: men like the deceased Ken Paine; men like Detective Sergeant Mark Dixon. Dana Andrews as Dixon brings depth and tortured humanity to a really fine acting performance. Dixon is a splendid noir anti-hero, villainous because he is desperate, but hag ridden by his own conscience. He killed Morgan’s late husband, who was resisting arrest, then fatally decided to conceal his crime. Then, impressed by Morgan’s basic truthfulness, dignity and of course her superlative good looks, Dixon invites her out to dinner, no doubt hoping to make time with her and then carry on aimlessly drifting through his sad-sack life and stranded police career. What could possibly be the harm, she’s barely connected with the real case at all...First he set the trap, then he trod in it.

Lieutenant Thomas (Karl Malden), Dixon’s boss, is grimly determined to find and apprehend her late husband’s killer, little suspecting it is one of his own men. Paine beat Morgan in public and Morgan’s protective father knew about it. The forensic evidence strongly indicates Paine died from a beating that went too far rather than a deliberate act. Thomas likes Jiggs Taylor for this one and proceeds, in complete good faith, to build a distressingly persuasive and convincing case against an innocent man. Poor Morgan is watching her whole world dissolve before her eyes and only Dixon know the truth. His guilty knowledge, which he cannot divulge without confessing to involuntary manslaughter, also incriminates mobster Tommy Scalise in a related murder which Lieutenant Thomas cannot solve without knowing what Dixon knows. Scalise is the man who suborned Dixon’s cop father, turning him into into a corrupt cop, a thief and a man Dixon remembers with hate and shame. It’s a complex and toxic brew.

Dixon has fallen deeply in love with Morgan Taylor-Paine in very short order (she looks and talks like Gene Tierney, you see) and now the guilt he was already carrying is being raised to a whole new level. He was rather unstable and full of rage, self loathing and frustration even before his life imploded. He is now personally to blame for incriminating Morgan Taylor-Paine’s father and covering the tracks of murderer Tommy Scalise, the man he hates above all others. He is forced to watch as poor Morgan struggles despairingly with no evidence to clear her innocent father’s name. What is the way out of this appalling mess he has made for himself and for this woman who has, all too late, reawakened his better nature?

The solution is blackly nihilistic even by the usual standards of noir. Dixon has weighed himself in the scales and found himself wanting. He sincerely hates himself for what he has done to Morgan and for what he has turned into. There is no way back. However, he can use their mutual hate to tempt mobster Scalise to kill him and go to the chair for slaying a cop; a letter of confession to be opened after he dies will make the facts plain and save Morgan’s father from being railroaded to prison; Dixon himself will receive his just deserts; as he grimly states in the letter, this solution will square accounts all round. For a man who can no longer bear living with his own moral turpitude, this is an elegant and satisfying solution.

The only trouble is, Dixon is assuming the events will fall neatly into place and this is silly because they never have before. The actual ending is slightly less extreme, but grimly pleasing. Dixon’s punishment is not to die but to live, to pay for the crime he committed and to put right some of the harm he did. However, he has earned the forgiveness of Gene Tierney’s wronged Morgan Taylor-Paine. She knows he intended to die for her sake and no man could love her more than that. So it’s not all bad news.

[scoundrel]

http://img183.imagevenue.com/loc226/th_57452_TheBigNightfilmposter_122_226lo.jpg (http://img183.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=57452_TheBigNightfilmposter_122_226l o.jpg)http://img41.imagevenue.com/loc228/th_57454_TheBigNight_JohnDrewBarrymoreandPrestonFo ster_122_228lo.jpg (http://img41.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=57454_TheBigNight_JohnDrewBarrymorea ndPrestonFoster_122_228lo.jpg)http://img161.imagevenue.com/loc532/th_57455_TheBigNight_JohnDrewBarrymoreoutonthetown _122_532lo.jpg (http://img161.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=57455_TheBigNight_JohnDrewBarrymoreo utonthetown_122_532lo.jpg)

This isn’t a great film but I include it here as worth watching for the central performance by John Drew Barrymore in the part of George La Main, and because it includes some grimly impressive set pieces, most notably at the start and at the end. The film begins with George La Main’s 17th birthday, which is interrupted by a man in evening clothes (Howard St John), accompanied by two hired thugs. The thugs merely hold the ring and intimidate the people present. The man in evening clothes orders Andy La Main (Preston Foster) to take off his shirt and vest. As the horrified and uncomprehending George watches, Andy La Main meekly obeys. The mysterious man then inflicts a savage and humiliating beating with his cane to a victim who does nothing to fight back. It is violent, cruelly humiliating and inexplicable to the young boy watching.

The boy is sickened and shocked that his father, who he thought was a man, submitted so miserably to this treatment. But he himself, though only 17, is forced under glass by this horrible experience and visibly turns into something rather like a man, albeit a deluded and foolish one. Rather than accept this insult, he finds his father’s gun and goes out on a night of surreal and nightmarish discovery, in the course of which he discovers alcohol, falls in love with a girl, finds out who his father’s enemy is and tracks the man down. Worst of all, he discovers that his father’s enemy has a valid reason for his conduct and that, at least arguably, his father had it coming.

The final scene, where his father takes the blame, the police knowingly collude with his father in transferring the blame, and his father explains what really went down, from his own point of view, is very poignant. This, rather than the birthday party from hell, is Preston Foster’s big moment and he is equal to it, investing the part of a failed man with convincing courage and dignity. As I say, it’s a very minor film and rather drab, but it has some good things in it.

[scoundrel]

http://img210.imagevenue.com/loc209/th_46928_ToKillAMockingbirdposter_122_209lo.jpg (http://img210.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=th_46928_ToKillAMockingbirdposter_12 2_209lo.jpg)http://img181.imagevenue.com/loc361/th_46930_ToKillAMockingbird_GregoryPeckandMaryBadh am_122_361lo.jpg (http://img181.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=th_46930_ToKillAMockingbird_GregoryP eckandMaryBadham_122_361lo.jpg)http://img247.imagevenue.com/loc164/th_46931_tokillamockingbird_ifonlyprejudicewasnowo rsethanamaddogwhichcanbeshot_122_164lo.jpg (http://img247.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=th_46931_tokillamockingbird_ifonlypr ejudicewasnoworsethanamaddogwhichcanbeshot_122_164 lo.jpg)http://img269.imagevenue.com/loc40/th_46932_ToKillAMockingbird_inthecourtroom_122_40l o.jpg (http://img269.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=46932_ToKillAMockingbird_inthecourtr oom_122_40lo.jpg)

From the delicate and haunting notes of the superb theme (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVMqjNX0Ftg&feature=related) composed by Elmer Bernstein to the crisp and pin-sharp expressionistic camera work to the assured and shrewdly observed acting of the lead players, here is a real masterpiece. I see To Kill a Mockingbird as a member of the noir family because it explores classic noir themes and uses the tools of film noir to do it. It is a film about secrets, injustice, outsiders and the angst of a divided and neurotic America. The milieu of the book is a dysfunctional society where the outsiders are the voices of reason and justice. It is not that the majority of the people of the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama are bad people: rather, they think resolutely as they have been trained to think all their lives. Nothing is heavier to lift and move than a fixed idea and they have neither the motivation nor the imagination it takes to reconsider a lifetime of indoctrination. Sooner than do this, they will blind themselves to a fatal miscarraige of justice.

The courtroom sequence wears the cruel inevitability of a great Greek tragedy. It is a rape case. The testimony of the black defendant, Tom Robinson (Brock Peters) is chilling. We can see a helpless animal caught in the snare of Mayella Ewell’s malice, lust and cowardice, mutely and hopelessly pleading for mercy from the jury. His remembered realisation that something was badly wrong when he grasped that the Ewell house was silent because Mayella had sent her brothers and sisters away in order to be alone with him is genuinely the stuff of horror. Even the white jurors and onlookers in the public gallery are briefly impressed by the weakness of the prosecution case and the utterly convincing testimony of the defendant and for a brief moment there is hope. Then the prosecutor, Mr Gilmer (William Windom) effortlessly sidesteps the really great jurisprudence of defence attorney Atticus Finch by establishing that Tom Robinson used to do odd jobs for Mayella Ewell without payment because he felt sorry for her. Quite mildly, he interjects:
You felt sorry...for a white woman?
In a moment, Tom Robinson is condemned to death for not knowing his place. Mayella Ewell, the trashiest, most vulgar and unsubtle of femme fatales, has trapped and destroyed her victim. No-one really doubts Tom’s innocence of the rape charge, but that is no longer the issue.

However, though Atticus lost the battle for Tom’s life, he drew blood. The flimsy lies of Mayella and Robert E Lee Ewell, her brutal father, are public knowledge. No one doubts that white Mayella Ewell tried to seduce a black man. No one doubts that vicious coward Bob Ewell savagely beat his own daughter. No one is under any illusion that Tom Robinson was anything more than their scape-goat. Therefore, though Tom lost his life, they failed in their attempt to paint out their shame in his blood. Bob Ewell especially is burning with hate for Atticus Finch because Atticus exposed this shame to the world.

There are two strands to the story. There is the adult world of the Tom Robinson trial. Then there is the childhood world of magical realism where Scout and her brother Jem observe adult doings through the lens of child eyes. They also live a parallel life, closely involved with the narrative of their adult family and yet also immersed in childhood adventures of which the adults are only distantly aware. One of these is the ongoing saga of their reclusive neighbour Arthur (“Boo”) Radley, who alternates between villain and victim as their imaginations see fit. They know he exists and very occasionally have mysterious clues as to his personality, for example from strange, child-icon gifts he leaves for them in a hole in a tree, but they do not see him and can learn nothing substantial about him.

These two worlds come together dramatically on the night of the school pageant when Bob Ewell attempts to revenge himself on his enemy, Atticus Finch, by murdering Jean Louise (Scout), the apple of her father’s eye, as she and her brother walk home from the school. Maycomb is so peaceful and safe that Atticus never imagines that his children cannot safely walk home in the dark. But Bob Ewell, like everyone else, has forgotten about Boo Radley. Boo has severe agoraphobia and hasn’t stepped out of his house for 20 years. His life is so monotonous that the children playing outside his fence and walking to school are the absolute centre of his world, even though he has never met them. When he sees someone violently attacking them with a knife, suddenly he can step outside and calmly and silently fillet Bob Ewell with Ewell’s own knife.

The final scenes, when Scout meets Arthur Radley (Robert Duvall in his first role) and learns the real story of her interaction with him, are intensely moving. Gradually she realises that he has been her guardian angel all her life and she never knew it. The moment when she stands outside the Radley porch in the spot she has for years never dared to stand, and sees her own house and street as Arthur Radley has been seeing them for decades, is an utterly sublime moment of cinema. The heart and mind of one outsider empathises at last with the heart and mind of another outsider and quietly resonates with sincere affection and gratitude.

One time Atticus said you never really knew a man until you stood in his shoes and walked around in them; just standing on the Radley porch was enough. The summer that had begun so long ago had ended, and another summer had taken its place, and a fall, and Boo Radley had come out...Neighbours bring food with death, and flowers with sickness, and little things in between. Boo was our neighbour. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a knife, and our lives.

What a great film this is.

[snorkie]

. . .The courtroom sequence wears the cruel inevitability of a great Greek tragedy. It is a rape case. The testimony of the black defendant, Tom Robinson (Brock Peters) is chilling. We can see a helpless animal caught in the snare of Mayella Ewell’s malice, lust and cowardice, mutely and hopelessly pleading for mercy from the jury. . .


This is one of my favorite and most watched films, as well as a wonderful source novel. However, IMO rather than a Noire, Mockingbird is a coming of age film which incorporates larger issues of intolerance of those who are merely different -race and mental deficiency. To elevate Mayella Ewell to the status of femme fatale misses the point that in an era of "reckless eyeballing" a stupid girl could be the cause of such a tragedy. The film also celebrates the value of a common decent man, Atticas Finch.

cheers

[Bubba Hotep]

However, IMO rather than a Noire, Mockingbird is a coming of age film which incorporates larger issues of intolerance of those who are merely different -race and mental deficiency.
I also never saw this brilliant movie as a noir to be honest. One of Peck's best roles!

At the moment I am (once more!) totally into the 30s and 40s detective films, like Mr. Moto and Charlie Chan. Last weekend I saw a couple of Chan's, and one of them had about all of the noir elements: The Shanghai Cobra, whose director Phil Karlson went on to direct classic noir like Kansas City Confidential.

[scoundrel]

This is one of my favorite and most watched films, as well as a wonderful source novel. However, IMO rather than a Noire, Mockingbird is a coming of age film which incorporates larger issues of intolerance of those who are merely different -race and mental deficiency. To elevate Mayella Ewell to the status of femme fatale misses the point that in an era of "reckless eyeballing" a stupid girl could be the cause of such a tragedy. The film also celebrates the value of a common decent man, Atticas Finch.

cheers

The courtroom sequence is classic noir in its use of b/w photography, the focus always on the humble chair which serves as a witness box. Mayella (Collin Wilcox) is hardly Jane Greer, but in her own lowlife way she is every bit as deadly, a stream of evil poison: Ms Wilcox gives a fine performance:

I got something to say. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckVV3eA4azw&feature=related)

What a bitch! This is as bad as the girl in The Crucible who persistently pretends to be possessed by the devil whenever it looks as if the defence in the witch trial might be gaining ground. The testimony of Bob Ewell and of Tom Robinson in the same chair is equally compelling, and you should note the camerawork here, which drags the eye onto the face of each character.

I know that To Kill A Mockingbird isn't widely recognised as a noir, possibly because the overall tone of the movie is warm and optimistic, but we shouldn't let this mislead us. Boo Radley, who strokes the unconscious Jem's hair in an instinctive protective gesture, in a scene which can still bring a tear to my eye, has just slain a fellow human being. That's quite alright: Bob Ewell had it coming. But if this calm acceptance of a killing by all the "good" characters isn't noir, what is? Mockingbird seems redemptive and sentimental, partly due to it's staunchly liberal central thesis and to the heartrending theme music of Elmer Bernstein, but actually it is as hard as nails.

All in the eye of the beholder of course. I was tempted a while ago to post The Bad and the Beautiful (http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/showpost.php?p=1083181&postcount=98) here, which is widely seen as a film noir, but I feel myself that it soft pedalled on it's core storyline theme of Hollywood cruelty and ruthlessness just a tad too much and became a (very good) melodrama instead of a true noir. Again, others are free to disagree.:cool:

[snorkie]

What a bitch! This is as bad as the girl in The Crucible who persistently pretends to be possessed by the devil whenever it looks as if the defense in the witch trial might be gaining ground. The testimony of Bob Ewell and of Tom Robinson in the same chair is equally compelling . . .

Let's add a little context here. The story would have likely taken place somewhere between 1930 and 1940, certainly prior to WWII (Harper Lee's father defended two black men in a similar case in 1919; they were convicted and hung). Can you imagine the consequences for a not terribly bright teenage white girl, living at best a hardscrabble life, admitting in court that she was aroused by and embraced a black man . . . against his will . . . in Mississippi, where was possible to find oneself lynched for even looking at a white woman (reckless eyeballing)? Come on, now. The villain here is without doubt Bob Ewell, who clearly knew the truth, and likely beat the snot out of Mayella after she made her move on the ill fated Tom Robinson.

Let's see, what am I forgetting . . . oh, yeah: IMO! :)

[scoundrel]

Let's add a little context here. The story would have likely taken place somewhere between 1930 and 1940, certainly prior to WWII (Harper Lee's father defended two black men in a similar case in 1919; they were convicted and hung). Can you imagine the consequences for a not terribly bright teenage white girl, living at best a hardscrabble life, admitting in court that she was aroused by and embraced a black man . . . against his will . . . in Mississippi, where was possible to find oneself lynched for even looking at a white woman (reckless eyeballing)? Come on, now. The villain here is without doubt Bob Ewell, who clearly knew the truth, and likely beat the snot out of Mayella after she made her move on the ill fated Tom Robinson.

Let's see, what am I forgetting . . . oh, yeah: IMO! :)

Very true. The leading witness for the prosecution in the witch trial in The Crucible is similar. Abigail Williams is herself testifying because she was suspected of being a witch and can save her own neck by pointing the finger elsewhere. To that extent she acts under duress. But she pointed her finger at John and Elizabeth Proctor rather than AN Other for reasons of malice: she had an affair with John but John wouldn't leave Elizabeth. Then she goes to lengths above and beyond the call of "duty" to make absolutely sure they are hung.

Mayella is in a similar position, forced to make the accusation by her lethal brute of a father, who might well kill her if she doesn't. But she points the finger at Tom, not at AN Other (unknown). She isn't only doing it because she is afraid. That last speech in the chair isn't Mayella scared of Bob Ewell. it's Mayella hating Tom Robinson and bursting with frustration because the jury doesn't quite believe her. She hates Tom Robinson because he turned her down and because she wants to project her "guilt" onto him and say it was all his fault. She is doing everything she can to get him hanged, because she wants him hanged. She is only the secondary villain here but villain she is.

[scoundrel]

http://img132.imagevenue.com/loc436/th_14382_OutofthePastposter_122_436lo.jpg (http://img132.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=14382_OutofthePastposter_122_436lo.j pg)http://img106.imagevenue.com/loc565/th_14383_OutofthePast_MitchumandGreer_122_565lo.jp g (http://img106.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=14383_OutofthePast_MitchumandGreer_1 22_565lo.jpg)http://img260.imagevenue.com/loc229/th_14385_OutofthePast_Mitchumreactstothefirstkilli ng_122_229lo.jpg (http://img260.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=14385_OutofthePast_Mitchumreactstoth efirstkilling_122_229lo.jpg)http://img233.imagevenue.com/loc163/th_14388_OutofthePast_MitchumandKirkDouglas_122_16 3lo.jpg (http://img233.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=14388_OutofthePast_MitchumandKirkDou glas_122_163lo.jpg)
http://img253.imagevenue.com/loc419/th_14389_OutofthePast_DouglasandGreer_122_419lo.jp g (http://img253.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=14389_OutofthePast_DouglasandGreer_1 22_419lo.jpg)

I’ve watched this three times this year alone and I still don’t quite get everything about what happens in the San Francisco sequence, but I get the gist of it. This film has more double crosses in it than the entire province of Lorraine in France.

A bit like Leave Her to Heaven, Out of the Past mostly takes place in gloriously photogenic surroundings and in an ambience of extremely dark romanticism. It is a world which could be beautiful and fulfilling to the human spirit, but for all the snakes in paradise. I say “a world” but it is actually two worlds, past and present; country and city, which are destined to collide with terrible consequences. The collision point is Robert Mitchum’s Jeff Bailey, who fled to a tiny country town in the Sierra Nevada as obscure as he could find and hid from his past, only to discover that there was nowhere he could go where a past as deadly as his wouldn’t seek him out. Mitchum delivers a superb performance, cool, steely and hard as nails, but with a tremendous range of controlled emotions as the disasters unfold and his hopes and dreams fall over a cliff.

Jeff is hiding from a complex mix of dangers:
He used to be a private eye and he double crossed a wealthy and really dangerous man, gambler and all round shady character Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas).
Whit has a sidekick called Joe Stephanos (Paul Valentine) who is worth avoiding as well.
But the real nightmare, the prize Jeff stole from Whit is glorious Kathy Moffat, played by Jane Greer, one of the best femme fatales ever to cast a shadow on a cinema screen. Unfortunately, she is even more wicked and dangerous than Whit Sterling, as Jeff has had to learn the hard way. Gorgeously sexy though she is, Jeff is hiding from her even more emphatically than from Whit. Whit and Joe are dangerous, but Kathy is the one thing in the world of which Jeff is genuinely afraid.

Jeff’s new world, for all the parochial and small minded attitudes evident in Ann Miller’s parents, is one of innocence, where really dramatic bad deeds just don’t happen. But they have happened in Jeff’s past life and once Joe re-surfaces Jeff knows they are on the cards again. But the real disaster is not the re-appearance of Joe, or even of Whit, but the re-appearance of Kathy, once again back with her former keeper. Every bad thing started with her.

Jane Greer is simply outstanding in this film. The expert way in which Kathy uses the feminine weapons she was born with to manipulate and double cross all the various men, Jeff, Whit and Joe, is really chilling. Jeff alone sees through her, and that only after the marvellous scene in the mountain cabin where she watches him fight Fisher, his blackmailing former detective partner, her eyes gleaming with cruel pleasure at the spectacle of raw violence, then kills Fisher with no more compunction than if he were a cockroach. Mitchum’s shock and distress when she shoots Fisher is all the more striking because his character so seldom exhibits strong emotions and emphasises how cold and pitiless her action was. Later we see the same thing from hood Joe Stephanos, no stranger to torture or death, who is shaken, if only briefly, by the killing of crooked lawyer Leonard Eels and even moved to feel a certain pity:
Joe: [with unusual gravity] He shook like a leaf. I never saw a man so afraid to die. [pause] I didn’t like it much.
Kathy: But you did kill him?
Joe: [in his usual voice] Certainly.

Kathy, however, is never at a loss for words, never even briefly lacks a sense of what angle to play, which strings to pull on, to manipulate the man who she needs to control. Neither is she ever daunted, or ever swayed by pity. Even Whit, himself a polished razor blade of a character, all charm, and bonhomie and underneath a malevolent, cruel and implacable villain, is in the end not a match for Kathy.

Jeff, for all his street-wise cunning, can’t escape from the frame Kathy and Joe meticulously prepare for him in San Francisco. He does however capture incriminating papers which he can use drop Whit deep in trouble with the Feds. Back in the mountains, he begins to appreciate a new edge to his problem when his deaf and dumb teenage filling station employee (“The Kid”, played by Dickie Moore) slays Joe Stephanos, who was trying to kill Jeff from ambush. The knives are out, and his conflict with Whit and Whit’s associates is a grave danger to Ann Miller, The Kid and others too. They are in danger because they know him and the danger will never end unless he brings the feud with Whit to a head.

Plan A is to do a deal with Whit in exchange for the papers. The real quarrel is that Jeff slept with and ran off with Whit’s prize concubine, Kathy, but Jeff settles that by divulging exactly how and where Kathy has been deceiving him even after she returned. However he still even now under-estimates how dangerous Kathy is. Once she does away with Whit, Plan A is finished and Kathy is now making the plans. These turn out to be the darkest imaginable.

She could merely frame him and run off with lots of Whit’s money, but that’s not enough. Whit she herself killed. Joe Stephanos, who she may or may not have slept with, and who she certainly had wrapped around her finger, is no longer alive. It turns out, in a really creepy last twist of the tale, that she doesn’t want to flee all by herself, she wants Jeff to come along. There are all sorts of reasons why, none of them good, but the creepiest one of all is that she loves him. She tells him she’s no good for anyone else now and neither is he, and the darkest part about this is that she is right. Come with me along a path of blood and corpses, and I’ll make all your days and nights delightful...

My my my...it’s as bad as being invited to spend eternity as the bridegroom of Dracula’s really cute younger sister. And the worst part about it is that Jeff is so obsessed with this deadly woman that he is tempted. She has expertly framed him for the various murders like double glazing: he has no-where to run or hide, no-one to bargain with, except her. The bargain is quite openly a sexual one, and let’s not mince our words; there is a whole world full of women who aren’t remotely as sexy as Jane Greer was. But Jeff has been running away for years already. He could have run away when Joe Stephanos turned up in the filling station. He wanted to stay where he was and marry Ann Miller: Kathy has ruined all hope of that. Now she wants him to run away with her; but she is everything he was running away from. No.

The ending of the movie is as logical and as inevitable as high tragedy should be. Not only does Jeff sacrifice his own ruined life to rid the world of Kathy, he even contrives to leave behind the impression that he betrayed Ann Miller. His last act of love is to make her despise his memory, so that she will turn to the childhood sweetheart she ought to have chosen in the first place and settle down happily, unburdened by grief for a man who didn’t deserve her.

Now: I dare anyone to claim this one isn’t film noir.

[Joszka]

http://img132.imagevenue.com/loc436/th_14382_OutofthePastposter_122_436lo.jpg (http://img132.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=14382_OutofthePastposter_122_436lo.j pg)
Now: I dare anyone to claim this one isn’t film noir.

It's even THE fondamental film noir. Jacques Tourneur for RKO, produced by Warren Duff :
one of the best associations ever between a director and a studio / productor.
For RKO too, a bit earlier (1944) and certainly not so good, from the same couple Tourneur / Duff, I recommend "Experiment Perilous".
At least for Hedy Lamarr.. and the special Tourneur touch :
"A frenzied gun battle in an aquarium, replete with shattered glass, gushing water and floundering fish may be the most memorable (and most often imitated) scene in the film" (Wiki).

http://ist1-4.filesor.com/pimpandhost.com/3/2/9/6/32966/h/n/W/S/hnWS/experiment%20cover.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/4143638-original.html) http://ist1-4.filesor.com/pimpandhost.com/3/2/9/6/32966/h/n/W/X/hnWX/2427304734_767edd5239.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/4143643-original.html)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYWpq3dMS5w

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiment_Perilous
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036807/


(http://pimpandhost.com/image/4143638-original.html)

[scoundrel]

http://img265.imagevenue.com/loc194/th_95860_la_confidentialposter_122_194lo.jpg (http://img265.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=95860_la_confidentialposter_122_194l o.jpg)http://img257.imagevenue.com/loc440/th_95861_LAConfidentialwatchingthedetectives_122_4 40lo.jpg (http://img257.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=95861_LAConfidentialwatchingthedetec tives_122_440lo.jpg)http://img134.imagevenue.com/loc585/th_95862_LA_ConfidentialKimBassinger_122_585lo.jpg (http://img134.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=95862_LA_ConfidentialKimBassinger_12 2_585lo.jpg)


This film was made 50 years after the heyday of classic noir but stylistically and in its’ wealth of period details it is a neo-noir which pays respectful homage to the police-action noir of the 50s, notably those which deal with police corruption and organised crime, such as The Big Combo, Touch of Evil and Where the Sidewalk Ends.

What marks this film out to me as special is the sheer craftsmanship which went into it, from the writing of the tight and smartly structured script to the rock solid acting from all players. The details are never superfluous: for all the gaudy excesses of some of the violent action sequences, this is crime drama for the thinking audience, with an intricate mystery to be patiently unravelled. Rather like Otto Preminger in Laura, director Curtis Hanson is careful not only to plant the visual clues but also to ensure preparation and continuity in the small details. The hole in the floor at the Victory Motel which plays an important part in the final shootout is not there by accident but because Bud White (Russell Crowe) ripped the hole open when he attacked Sid Hudgens (Danny De Vito) in a crucial scene earlier on the same fateful evening. When Officer White succumbs to the allure of Kim Bassinger’s high class call girl Lynn Bracken, she leads him not to her glossy modernistic professional bedroom but to the homely and naively decorated bedroom which she actually sleeps in and which is personal to her. Bud knows this when he see the pillow embroidered with Bixby, Arizona, her home town. He does not need to be told that she has paid him a huge compliment by taking him into her most personal and private place: on the other hand it also explains why he is so bewildered and hurt, actually crying like a child, as well as murderously angry, when he finds out that she betrayed him in the arms of his personal enemy, Lieutenant Ed Exley (Guy Pierce).

There isn’t a single bad acting performance in this film. De Vito is cheerfully pitiless as the scandal mongering celebrity journalist; Guy Pierce is fascinating as the cruel and ruthless narcissistic careerist whose hunger for power conflicts with both misdirected sincerity and a fierce thirst for retribution over the betrayal and murder of his policeman father by someone inside the force. Kevin Spacey is excellent as Sergeant Jack Vincennes, the cynical narcotics detective who is far too much in love with easy money and Hollywood glamour, but who cannot divorce himself from his professional habit of smelling and wanting to hunt crime and criminals, and who also finds himself fatally weakened by compassion for a homosexual actor who is set up and killed. James Cromwell's Captain Dudley Smith is delightfully nasty, elegant and as merciless as a bird of prey.

Most of all however, this is Russell’s Crowe’s film. In all his scenes, he exudes Cagney-like screen presence. This is a dynamo of violence held just barely on a leash, yet his sense of justice is strong and his target selection is far from random. As his drunken and venal squad car partner enjoyably quips in the opening scene: “You’re just like Santa Claus, Bud, you’ve made a list too. It’s just that everyone on your list has been naughty.” But even while enjoying the joke, you are irresistibly drawn to Crowe’s implacable and calm face as he observes his intended victim beating and haranguing his abused wife. Bud White is measuring his target. Then he strikes with slick and venomous accuracy, summoning the brute outside by trashing his Christmas decorations and effortlessly gut-punching the fight out of him, making sure the experience is memorably painful and humiliating. Officer White is savage and very dangerous, but he is no mere thug. He is there to protect the beaten wife from her husband. The scene explains how he becomes a part of Lynn Bracken’s (Kim Bassinger's) story and why it is he is interested in the injuries to the face of Susan Lefferts, Lynn’s fellow call girl. Later, he divulges that his father beat his mother to death and part of his intense, energetically violent and driven personality, especially his hatred of men who abuse women, is explained. Incidentally, I think this is one of Kim Bassinger's best films as well. Her veneer of poise and cynical sophistication dissolves with no visible artifice into the small town girl who wants to go home with some tiny shreds of pride left, and who can love even a thoroughly unstable man like Bud White because he knows all the worst things there are to know about her and doesn't care, just so long as her heart is loyal. For Bud, and for Lynn too, loyalty is not about the sexual goings on of a prostitute, but about the unique relationship which she shares only with him. Loyalty to that relationship is everything that matters to both of them, as Lynn ultimately discovers when she nearly forfeits it.

I admire the film as a visual work of cinema, especially in the way it invokes the mystique of the early 50s noir period. We know we're in the early 50s organically through all the wealth of background period details, such as the references to Lana Turner: The Bad and the Beautiful is showing at the cinema, Guy Pierce inadvertently insults the star herself in one of the various dark-comic moments; Russell Crowe memorably extracts information from Lana's mobster boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato. I notice that the film makers appreciate that the world of 1953 is like the world of 1997, full of icons from previous years, and the eclectic mix of the glossily modernistic with the shabby, well used artefacts of the 1940s, such as Bud White's unpretentious car, helps to give a really authentic feel.

As well as in the way it uses night scenes and darkness, and contrasts the modernistic apartments and villas in which the villains luxuriate with the grittily downbeat surroundings in which their cop antagonists live and work, LA Confidential is completely noir in the way it explores the moral relativism of the three policemen at the centre of the tale and how each of them is required to confront the blame for their own part in the rotten story they uncover. All three have a personal journey to make, and for all three the journey away from the trap of their own character flaws is dark, dangerous, costly and painful. One of them has to die; one of them very nearly dies; the third must break his own rules and put loyalty and duty to his true colleagues ahead of his own advantage, staking everything he ever once valued to do right by them. Here I see a more than passing resemblance to the resolution of Where the Sidewalk Ends where the bad-cop anti hero, played so well by Dana Andrews, throws away his career and accepts his just imprisonment in order to do down the worst bad guys and take back his own honour. LA Confidential is a film about the dilemma faced by men who would like to be honest but who must also live in a world teaming with corruption; which compromises are acceptable and which compromises amount to the fatal surrender of integrity?

I cannot recommend this film highly enough: it is really a modern classic.

[echobravo]

The Big Sleep. Sure it has some plot holes you could drive a truck through, but Bogart and Bacall really make it a joy to watch. Not to mention the snappy dialog.
Marlowe (Bogart): I could make it my business.
Eddie Mars: I could make your business mine.
Marlowe: No, you wouldn't like it, the pay's too small.
Classic private eye noir.

[snorkie]

The Big Sleep. Sure it has some plot holes you could drive a truck through, but Bogart and Bacall really make it a joy to watch.

Some points about one of my favorite movies: If you can get the DVD with both the 1945 print and the version released in 1946 you'll see that they had some concerns about Bacall, whose origional performance was seen as flat. They went back a year later and re-shot some scenes to bring out the Bogart-Bacall chemistry from "To Have and To Have Not". Regarding the dialog, William Faulkner was a screenwriter.

The 1945 print has detective Bernie Olds explaining some of the plot points. This exposition was eventually cut. Some of the plot points simply have no answers. For example, when the screen writers asked the author who killed killed chauffeur Owen Taylor, Chandler reportedly replied, "I don't know." BTW, the novel doesn't clear up many of the plot questions. Chandler, like Dashell Hammett didn't think is was important to tie up all of the loose threads. That said, the book is still a terrific read.

Finally, the Robert Mitchum version (1978) more clearly explains what Eddie Mars knew that allowed him to so effectively blackmail the Sternwoods (HINT: In the novel the Bacall character was married to Sean Regan, the man who disappeared). Unfortunately, this version suffers from moving the locale from L.A. to England.

Cheers :)

[snorkie]

This movie is full of gorgeous women. Besides Lauren Bacall, you have Martha Vickers looking fecund when she first appears on the Sternwood staircase. I'd take more taxi's if the drivers looked like Joy Barlowe. In my opinion, Dorothy Malone never looked better, and she pulls off the old taking off the eye glasses and letting the hair down cliche to perfection. Finally, if more librarians looked like Carole Douglas, I might actually be well read. ;)

[Attila The Hun]

No room for Grace Kelly, Attila? Not even a honourable mention for Kim Novak, or for some pretty good actresses appearing in earlier work, such as Joan Fontaine in Rebecca or Margaret Lockwood in The Lady Vanishes? Or for Doris Day, who puts in rather a good turn in the second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (even though I think this one was a bit of a stinker actually).

Ah, I forgot about this discussion until today!

Well, I think Grace Kelly and Kim Novak are highly attractive but I was not keen on their acting. I like Joan Fontaine and Doris Day though!

The best actress in his films was Vera Miles. She was so underused by Hollywood.

Ironically the ones you praise Attila are mostly the ones I dislike, though both Rear Window and Vertigo are classics. Conversely, the only one of your raspberries I agree with is The 39 Steps: one day someone will make a half-decent version which uses more of John Buchan's book than just the name and the names of a few characters. But it's a discussion, not a quarrel.:)

Yeah, I agree. John Buchan's novel, though of its time, is great and a classic of its genre. When the discussion of all the lackluster adaptation comes up most people brush it off as a mindless adventure novel, but it was highly influential in the suspense fiction genre.

I liked the 70s version, which was close but sadly still didn't have some of the major plot points. I like people hanging on clocks, but the 39 steps has nothing to do with Big Ben and it is not a villainous organization...though my lips are sealed on this point incase others wish to read the novel. ;)

[Attila The Hun]

Yes, you're right, it's a discussion. Far be it from me to make trouble, (heh heh).:rolleyes: But I will say this, very diplomatically, I might add. Attila, you stated " 'Psycho' is a horrible little slasher". Ok, that's fine.

The impact of that film on society in general was intense! Might be tame by today's standards, but when it came out, it was cutting edgem.

My criticism is not tameness, actually, but more its violence and brutality. I have never been a fan of what the horror genre became and so I am biased against 'Psycho'. It is just more concerned with brutality than real suspense. The plot twists are obvious and feels as if it is because Hitchcock doesn't care about the thrills, just the horror of the violent acts (which are shot well). The ironic thing is that I am a fan of Robert Bloch, Vera Miles, and alot of the other actors in the film.

[Kombo*]

2 of my favs, with Rita Hayworth :

http://thumbnails4.imagebam.com/4496/fe0b3344951698.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/fe0b3344951698)
"Gilda", Charles Vidor, 1946.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038559/

http://thumbnails32.imagebam.com/9629/85866896289285.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/85866896289285)

found this image :)

[Attila The Hun]

Double Indemnity.

http://ist1-4.filesor.com/pimpandhost.com/1/_/_/_/1/k/M/u/l/kMul/di_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/show/id/4952953)

One of my favourites too, and I watched it again the other day.

Also, 'The Glass Key', which I rewatched last night, is great. Infact many will see a scene that Kurosawa stole ...ahem... borrowed for 'Yojimbo'.

[snorkie]

Also, 'The Glass Key', which I rewatched last night, is great. Infact many will see a scene that Kurosawa stole ...ahem... borrowed for 'Yojimbo'.

The 'Glass Key' is a good Noir. The versatile William Bendix is a fine goon. By the way, Kurosawa borrowed liberally from mystery writer Dashiell Hammett. "Yojimbo' is essentially drawn from the novel 'Red Harvest'. Of course, Kurosawa's film was copied nearly scene by scene in Sergio Leone's 'Fist Full of Dollars'.

Cheers!

[Attila The Hun]

Yes, 'Yojimbo' is certainly a liberal adaptation of 'Red Harvest', I wrote a comparison of scenes and character, though I am not sure where it has gone.

Many people who have not read the whole book argue that it is not an adaptation of 'Red Harvest', however, the classic story in the novel starts midway through and keeps getting more recognisable as 'Yojimbo' as it goes along. The novel even has a ''montage'' scene much like in the film, and I will not even get started with the famous wherehouse scene.

[scoundrel]

http://img245.imagevenue.com/loc580/th_60367_ThePostmanAlwaysRingsTwiceposter_122_580l o.jpg (http://img245.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=60367_ThePostmanAlwaysRingsTwicepost er_122_580lo.jpg)http://img260.imagevenue.com/loc554/th_60371_johngarfieldinthepostmanalwaysringstwice_ 122_554lo.jpeg (http://img260.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=th_60371_johngarfieldinthepostmanalw aysringstwice_122_554lo.jpeg)http://img201.imagevenue.com/loc1/th_60372_LanaTurnerThePostmanAlwaysRingsTwice_122_ 1lo.jpg (http://img201.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=th_60372_LanaTurnerThePostmanAlwaysR ingsTwice_122_1lo.jpg)http://img227.imagevenue.com/loc162/th_60372_JohnGarfieldPostmanAlwaysRingsTwiceThe_12 2_162lo.jpg (http://img227.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=60372_JohnGarfieldPostmanAlwaysRings TwiceThe_122_162lo.jpg)




This film has been re-made three times. Why? I think it is essentially because Hollywood is stupid. It isn’t as though great film is ephemeral, like great live theatre. All the players in this film have been dead for a long time now but their performances endure as long as someone out there is willing to preserve one single copy of this masterpiece.

John Garfield is at the top of his form as the drifter, Frank Chambers, who innocently enquires about a casual job flipping burghers in a diner off an obscure back road in California and, all unknowing, chooses his dark and tragic destiny. I have liked Garfield in all the films of his which I have seen: he was excellent in The Sea Wolf as the seaman who befriended and protected Ida Lupino when she had the rotten luck to be “rescued” from the sea by psychopath captain Edward G Robinson; he was also first class in the social drama Gentleman’s Agreement; he even gave some edge and class to the group chemistry of the B17 crew in that piece of crap, Air Force. But in this role he was outstanding, bringing out the emotional as well as the sexual hunger which draws Frank into the power of Lana Turner’s character.

Lana Turner was also magnificent as the bitterly dissatisfied wife who blows hot and cold at the same time. Her trademark ambivalence, femininity, empathy and hard-boiled ruthlessness were never better used than in the role of the reluctant but desperate villainess, Cora Smith. Cora is greedy for the simple rewards of life, having been born and raised with nothing to rely on but her sexuality. Garfield’s character, though not at all ill-natured, is trashy, cynical and bleak in his expectations of life as well and part of their mutual attraction is that they have no illusions at all about either each other or themselves. There is more than a hint of masochism in Cora’s personality; the fact that Frank can be rough and is no angel is very definitely a plus. Frank is tough-minded and has no patience with lies or excuses; their path is wicked and wrong and he refuses to pretend that mere desperation, although it is a strong reason, counts as any justification at all.

Naturally, after committing murder for each others’ sake, these two lovers quarrel, betray each other, generally flake at the edges under the stress and tension of their guilt and the danger they are in from the authorities, from blackmailers, from each other. Yet always, even though they cannot behave normally in such abnormal circumstances, their mutual love is real and shines through. What is missing is elementary trust: they are both natural born back stabbers and both know this about each other and about themselves.

The scene where Lana Turner decides to resolve the trust issue permanently is a real highlight of the film for me. She must have Garfield, but cannot have him unless she can trust him all the way: he is her partner in life and also her partner in crime. It would be quite sensible and logical for him to murder her. Only his love stands between her and death. Rather than wait, she tests the issue by swimming far out to sea with him at her side until she is too exhausted to swim back. All he has to do swim back alone and abandon her. He will never have a better, safer opportunity to rid himself of her. But he will not entertain this idea for a second. Shrewish, infuriating, ill-tempered and rather unstable though she is, she is his woman: end of discussion. It does not seriously occur to him to not carry her safely back to shore, even though he knows full well that she might not do it to him, but she sure as hell would consider it as a viable option. He doesn’t need her to be good, he doesn’t even need her to be trustworthy; he only needs her to know what a heel he truly is and still love him. After this swim in the sea, these lovers are bound together forever: even wicked people can experience true love.

At the end, on his way to take The Deep Breath, Garfield asks the priest for a prayer. To be forgiven? Uh uh, he is calmly unrepentant. He wants to be with Cora in the next life, always: upstairs or downstairs, it’s all the same to him as long as she is there. Who says noir cannot be romantic?

[scoundrel]

http://img258.imagevenue.com/loc76/th_83829_Gildafilmposter_122_76lo.jpg (http://img258.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=83829_Gildafilmposter_122_76lo.jpg)h ttp://img289.imagevenue.com/loc113/th_83830_GildaRitaHayworthblamingMame._122_113lo.j pg (http://img289.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=83830_GildaRitaHayworthblamingMame._ 122_113lo.jpg)http://img157.imagevenue.com/loc177/th_83831_GildaRitaHayworthandGlenFord_122_177lo.jp g (http://img157.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=83831_GildaRitaHayworthandGlenFord_1 22_177lo.jpg)http://img289.imagevenue.com/loc428/th_83833_GildaGlenFordandGeorgeMacCready_122_428lo .jpg (http://img289.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=83833_GildaGlenFordandGeorgeMacCread y_122_428lo.jpg)


This is a remarkable blend of action, melodrama and psychological thriller and thanks to the performance of Rita Hayworth in her defining role; it is also deliciously laced with dark and sinister sex appeal. I wish I was qualified to provide a Freudian interpretation of Gilda but I am not; however, Hayworth’s part is fascinating both for her own complex and self-destructive personality as Gilda and for the way she brings out the worst in the men of the film. She is a textbook example of the femme fatale, the eternal feminine.

Her part in the story is mainly to act as a catalyst releasing deadly reactions inside the men surrounding her. She revels gloriously in her sensual power, for example in the stage performance of Put The Blame on Mame. That black dress and those long sleeved gloves are a stroke of stylistic genius. So also is the timing of the slap of her face in the blazing quarrel with Glen Ford’s Johnny Farrell, delivered not because she has flaunted herself immodestly on stage, but to stop her saying the thing Glen Ford cannot bear to even hear himself say in his own head, that she is a whore.

The triangular relationship between the hero, the villain and the femme fatale is at the core of the drama in this film. In order for it to work, the tensions must be generated organically from the action and from the character-flaws of the principals. All three players need to be in top gear, fully understanding of their parts and equal to the sheer acting necessary. All three of them are.

George MacCready is first class as the sophisticated, urbane and genuinely frightening Ballin Mundson, frightening because he is so full of latent menace and yet so quietly under self-command. The relationship between Mundson and his second-in-command, Johnny Farrell is really interesting. It is a strange bond of evil friendship, mutual complicity in a crime Farrell doesn’t even initially understand. Farrell is not exactly a sterling character, if he had been then his and Mundson’s paths would never have crossed; yet Farrell is bizarrely and staunchly loyal to his boss, for reasons which are not spelt out, but which run much deeper than money. I am a little bit tempted to think that it is an unacknowledged homo-erotic relationship but that’s too simple and too easy. It is at least as true and probably even more true to interpret their bond as a surrogate father-son relationship. The two men are closely friendly and yet both have secrets from one another and these secrets are ultimately fatal.

Glen Ford as Farrell is the narrator as well as the “hero”; the inverted commas are to indicate that in some respects Farrell is even more villainous than MacCready’s character, the official villain. Farrell is a potent study in jealousy and paranoid control freakery. The wise washroom attendant at the casino, old Tio Pepe, calmly notes that Farrell smokes far too much, a sign of frustration. How true; Farrell is a control freak who cannot control the things which matter most to him. Gilda, hedonistic and rebellious, makes a point of flaunting her wrong doing, man-hunting and partying in order to hurt his feelings. He ran out on her in that previous life in New York, and she is revengeful. It is very interesting that Farrell would like to control Mundson too, but can only do so to a certain extent and indirectly by concealing Gilda’s infidelity from Mundson, supposedly in order to protect Mundson from a truth too cruel, but in reality to maintain the unstable status quo, keep Gilda in self-destructive torment and also continue to torture himself.

Later, when Mundson is missing presumed dead, Farrell reveals an extra-ordinary capacity for mental cruelty, effectively punishing Gilda for merely being his nemesis by turning her whole world into a prison, with her relationship with him as a ball and chain. It is classic angel/whore confusion. He cannot let her go because she is his angel; he hates her with absolute venom because she is (in his mind) a whore. Even by the standards of film noir, Johnny Farrell is one extravagantly screwed up character, all due to his contradictory obsession with Gilda.

In the end, the confusion in Farrell’s head is unravelled by the external denouement of the complex plot, during which the police detective, Senor Obregon, calmly and disdainfully explains that Gilda’s wild promiscuity was all a front to wound Farrell’s feelings, a richly deserved revenge for the shabby way he behaved towards her. She was never actually unfaithful either to her lawful husband, Ballin Mundson or, in essence, to her real lover, Farrell himself. Farrell first releases her from her invisible chains, granting her permission to flee him at last, and then humbly asks her to take him with her. The point of this is that he has surrendered his claim to control her life and placed his own destiny in her hands instead. She understands what makes him tick even more than he does and she is willing to admit that she deliberately pressed all his hot buttons, deliberately drove him into fits of blind jealousy. She is more the injured party than he is, but she isn’t blameless and she has also won her chief point; Farrell has capitulated on the issue of controlling behaviour. It is not ridiculous to forgive him on these terms.

Talk about the rocky road to romance.:eek:

[marlon]

A great movie Nev, but is it film noir?:rolleyes:

[nevermind]

You are absolutely right marlon, ....No crime scenes.. :cool:
Forgot that th e thread was dedicated to just noir movies,
So i moved it to another thread.
By the way, do we have a non porn "classical movie thread". ?

[marlon]

You are absolutely right marlon, ....No crime scenes.. :cool:
Forgot that th e thread was dedicated to just noir movies,
So i moved it to another thread.
By the way, do we have a non porn "classical movie thread". ?

Not that I know of.;)

[scoundrel]

We have various movie genre discussion threads, such as Best war films (http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/showthread.php?t=59789&highlight=war+movies), which would arguably be a fit for Hornblower. There's also a Favorite regular classic movies (http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/showthread.php?t=53855) thread, less frequented than I might wish, where you could post this one if you liked.

We have lots of film threads. The trouble is that our search engine is a rather imprecise instrument and just because it doesn't show a thread doesn't necessarily mean we haven't got one.

If you have searched and can't find a thread, it's an opportunity to start one. I won't make a fuss if I have to merge a new thread with an old one. Of course, after merging half a dozen new threads in short order, I'll get the impression that you weren't searching the threads quite hard enough...:rolleyes:

[Joszka]

http://thumbnails36.imagebam.com/11189/ff9dc0111882102.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/ff9dc0111882102) http://thumbnails22.imagebam.com/11189/c91b51111882108.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/c91b51111882108) http://thumbnails22.imagebam.com/11189/7759e7111882113.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/7759e7111882113)

Nightfall -Jacques Tourneur. 1957 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049552/)

http://thumbnails35.imagebam.com/11189/6d0781111882130.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/6d0781111882130)

Not my fav, it's a minor movie in that genre & from this director, but just seen on TV two days ago.
With Aldo Ray & Anne Bancroft (http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/showthread.php?t=35787&highlight=Anne+Bancroft).

To me, Nightfall can be considered a mistaken noir, or a film that starts as if it were a noir using all the familiar tropes or conventions of the genre, a paranoid loner on the run in a foreboding urban landscape pursued by both ruthless criminals and a government man with a femme fatale for a companion, and then undermines them all one by one, the woman is true and only seeks to help, the government man turns out to be an insurance agent whom he befriends and even the thugs are given a soul, if not fully redeemable, the dark night of the city gives way to a country morning in a field of blinding white..

http://thumbnails18.imagebam.com/11189/deb809111882121.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/deb809111882121) http://thumbnails37.imagebam.com/11189/1e5970111882125.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/1e5970111882125)

Heroes that have a dark side from which violence can erupt, and villains that could be the heroes of the stories if it was just reconfigured ever so slightly. Tourneur doesn’t seem to see his characters as inhabiting one side of a divide, but as being capable of being on either side of it depending on circumstance and, often, their desire for wealth or comfort.

http://thumbnails30.imagebam.com/11189/db3d96111882133.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/db3d96111882133) http://thumbnails18.imagebam.com/11189/eb57ea111882145.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/eb57ea111882145)

French director Jacques Tourneur (OUT OF THE PAST, CAT PEOPLE, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE) was a man who thrived on peculiar shadows, a fine mist, and the the realms of the unknown- whether it be in one of those frightening, out-of-the-way places, or somewhere deep within the dark, bracken-carpeted forest of a man's soul. And despite being best known for his accomplishments in horror and films noir, the man had a great affinity for nature, and never shied away from reveling in the grandeur of a majestic American landscape. NIGHTFALL is darkness and light. Neon-bedaubed, ice-rattling-in-a-highball-glass, murderous alleyway thug mystery is contrasted with gleaming snowscapes, the smell of pine, a mislaid bag of dough, and a traumatic memory- the flashback-driven answers

http://thumbnails30.imagebam.com/11189/093a11111882159.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/093a11111882159) http://thumbnails29.imagebam.com/11189/76c704111882165.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/76c704111882165)

Scenario is from a David Goodis novel.
And also to noticed that an English language monograph of J. Tourneur is tittled "The cinema of nightfall",
which is for now the best description of his work and special talent.

http://thumbnails22.imagebam.com/11189/050af0111882116.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/050af0111882116)

[haldane4]

Scenario is from a David Goodis novel.


The Goodis novel is brilliant, as are almost all his novels.

I was less than happy about the casting of Aldo Ray in this one.

[scoundrel]

http://img245.imagevenue.com/loc440/th_63368_CatPeople1942_122_440lo.jpg (http://img245.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=63368_CatPeople1942_122_440lo.jpg) http://img142.imagevenue.com/loc47/th_63370_IWalkedWithAZombie_122_47lo.jpg (http://img142.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=63370_IWalkedWithAZombie_122_47lo.jp g)
Cat People and I Walked With A Zombie are classic horror movies in the expressionistic style: horror noir. They do not rely on gore or slasher-type violence but on the power of atmosphere and suggestion. Tourneur filmed them superbly, with instinctive skill in the use of shadows; he elicited acting performances from his lead players which were contained, restrained yet pregnant with paranoia, fear, malice and tension. I think, BTW, we sometimes forget that bad acting is also the fault of the director and can often be the exclusive fault of the director. David Niven, who was a great actor but could be really shocking when he was being lazy, related in The Moon's A Balloon how he was tyrannically treated by William Wyler, who once made him and Laurence Olivier do 42 takes on the bounce. Niven kept quiet and did as he was told; Olivier finally lost patience and fumed at Wyler, demanding what he wanted of the 43rd take that he hadn't got in the previous 42. Wyler replied, very cooly, "Just do it better."

I don't know a thing about Tourneur, the man, except what I see in his films. There I see a pin-sharp eye for significant details, a natural flair for symbolism and a perfectionist as work. He created swift and delicate context-defining opening scenes in both these movies. Cat People shows the beautiful and charming "heroine" catching the eye of and making her first winning impression on the hero, then as they leave the lions' enclosure of the zoo, we see her discarded sketches of the cats in their cages, strange and disturbing images of pain, rage and alienation. This is surpassed by the opening scene of I Walked With A Zombie, in which Canadian nurse Betsy Connell, played by Frances Dee, speaks to her new employer, Paul Holland, played by Tom Conway. Nurse Connell has no idea this handsome but enigmatic and rather sinister fellow is her new boss, whom she has not officially met yet; he knows exactly who she is. She is being hired to look after Mr Holland's catatonic wife, the zombie of the movie title.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8PUsose3kE&feature=related

It's basically Jane Eyre on uppers and Tourneur instantly, effortlessly re-defines the traditionally romantic ambience of the Caribbean as a Gothic backdrop in this memorable opening scene. This is quite typical of his style. He had an instinctive noir vision.

[Joszka]

I don't know a thing about Tourneur, the man, except what I see in his films. .
A gentleman and real artist.
Just a small memory : he's dead in 77 in Bergerac, small town of deep South-West France. I was there a few months before, I knew where he was living, I was in front of his door.. and I didn't dare to knock.
I think I was right.. But maybe I wasn't.
He's in my "Pantheon" of strange and venerated people.

[scoundrel]

http://img223.imagevenue.com/loc993/th_91408_FarewellMyLovely_122_993lo.jpg (http://img223.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=91408_FarewellMyLovely_122_993lo.jpg )
This film was originally re-named as Murder, My Sweet to compensate for the effect of Dick Powell’s previous career as a leading man in musicals: the studio wanted a title which made it clear this film is not a musical. I can confirm that this film is not a musical, though it has dark romantic themes.

The film simplified Raymond Chandler’s source novel but kept the essence of the plot. The mystery is complicated and full of misleading indicators. Dick Powell delivers a really fine central performance as the self-deprecating, confused, frustrated and increasingly angry detective who is living someone else’s nightmares and trying to make sense of surreal events. This process culminates in a great film passage when Jules Amthor, the overt villain of the film, detains Powell’s character bogusly as a mental patient at a mental hospital, and tortures him for information using mind-altering drugs This is a really masterful piece of montage camera work and surrealism employed in a very practical manner to compress and suggest Phillip Marlowe’s ordeal in the space of a minute, and explain the venom and violence exhibited by Marlowe afterwards, the pro-active drive to force events to unfold when beforehand his character has been patient and willing to observe.

The directing of Edward Dmytryk is tight, linear and skilful; I particularly liked the way he used the interior spaces to tell us about the people who inhabit them, from Marlowe’s shabby office to the chill grandeur of the Grayle mansion and grounds, to the neat homeliness of Anne Grayle’s modest suburban house, when as Marlowe dryly observes, her father and stepmother could have made over a spare billiard room for Anne to live in within their too-luxurious and alienating maze/palace of a house, a place so big that Marlowe asks the butler for directions so he can leave and is only half joking. The lighting effects of Dmytryk’s film are classic noir: the shadows Anne Grayle hides in to eaves-drop on her step-mother’s scheming; the mental asylum passage of course; the early scene when Marlowe discovers for the first time that Mike Mazurski’s Moose Malloy, whose speeches suggest a very low IQ and whose physical size suggests an inbuilt lack of subtlety, is deathly quiet on his feet. The way Moose Malloy’s reflection appears and disappears in Marlowe’s office window as the neon light on the other side of the street goes on and off, and how close Malloy got before Marlowe even knew he wasn’t alone in his own private space, is a fine and sinister cinematic moment. Even before Moose speaks, Marlowe and the audience knows that Moose is really dangerous. This is the real art of directing, to tell without telling, to show rather than explain.

Anne Shirley gave a good turn as Anne Grayle, the hero’s love interest and ambiguous secondary figure in the unfolding mystery. Anne is basically one of the good guys but she isn’t, until very late on, whole-heartedly on anyone’s “side” because no-one is whole-heartedly on her “side”; she is moral, but she also very tough and not too squeamish; a born survivor. Claire Trevor was excellent as always, giving a fine performance as the snake in the grass villainess who yet has a certain pathos and whose manipulative tugging on the heart-strings of the various men she uses against one another are all the more deadly because always she lies, yet always there is truth used to make her lies convincing. Mrs Grayle is a top flight femme fatale, completely understood and completely loathed and despised only by her step daughter. Their scene of confrontation at the beach house is magnificent, words superbly employed as weapons by both combatants. In fact, the whole of this film script is true to the hard boiled and cynical dark humour of Chandler’s source novel, and Phillip Marlowe’s bleak wit as the narrator is a joy.

What a classy film this is.

[DaveHam]

US-Movies:
"The maltese Falcon" John Huston 1941
"Laura" Otto Preminger 1944
"Scarlett Street" Fritz Lang 1945
"The Killers" Robert Siodmak 1946
"The big Sleep" Howard Hawks" 1946
"Angel Face" Otto Preminger 1952
"Night of the Hunter" Charles Laughton" 1955

Others:
"Ascenseur pour l’échafaud" Louis Malle
"Der Verlorene" Peter Lorre
"The third Man" Carol Reed

Never seen:
This Gun for hire
D.O.A.
Strangers on a Train

...I was never dissapointed after watching this films...

[elf4736]

The 9th annual San Francisco Film Noir Festival
10 days-24 films January 21-30, 2011
The Castro Theatre san Francisco Ca

Link to this years program guide
http://www.noircity.com/program1.html#strangers

[navvet]

One of the best, and most imaginative, film noir flicks is "Lady in the Lake (1947)." It is based on a book by Raymond Chandler, and it stars Robert Montgomery. The imaginative thing about it is that the viewer is Phillip Marlowe. Well, actually Robert Montgomery is Philip Marlowe, but when other characters speak to Marlowe, they look directly into the camera as if they are speaking to the audience. The only time you see Marlowe is when Montgomery looks into a mirror, at himself. It also stars Lloyd Nolan and Audrey Totter.

[scoundrel]

One of the best, and most imaginative, film noir flicks is "Lady in the Lake (1947)." It is based on a book by Raymond Chandler, and it stars Robert Montgomery. The imaginative thing about it is that the viewer is Phillip Marlowe. Well, actually Robert Montgomery is, but when other characters speak to Marlowe, they look directly into the camera as if they are speaking to the audience. The only time you see Marlowe is when Montgomery looks into a mirror, at himself. It also stars Lloyd Nolan and Audrey Totter.

One of the things I love about the classic film noirs is the way they frequently experiment with the actual medium of film. The Lady in the Lake is a fine example of such experimentation. Hollywood was like an adolescent discovering its' powers and exploring what was possible and not possible, pushing the boundries. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't but always lessons were being learned and knowledge was being assimilated. The best noirs are nearly always directors' films, in which really good actors cooperate with a director and help him (nearly always him rather than her, Ida Lupino is the only exception which springs to mind) to achieve a result which he has already imagined and crafted inside his own head. Hollywood was making art films commercially and audiences were sophisticated enough to really appreciate them.

How sad things have to move on when they only "move on" and don't actually progress.

[thrustbailey]

Some of my favourites:

The Big Combo ( 1955 )
The Score ( 1956 )
Kiss Me Deadly ( 1955 )

Kiss Me Deadly is such a stylish filn that it is hard to believe it originated in a thick-ear Micky Spillane novel. The catchpenny plot ( heroin smuggling ) is transformed into an atomic noir. The prize which the P.I looks for is a mysterious suitcase ( later used in films like Repo Man ) that is incredibly unhealthy for the curious.

The nominal hero of the piece is Mike Hammer, a sleazy immoral bedroom peeper who sets up married men with his girlfriend. The blackmail that follows leads to a juicy divorce and payday for the thuggish P.I. Played with the right amount of greasiness by Ralph Meeker, Hammer is one of the most unlikeable leading men ever. In the end he finds a tiny part of a conscience when his girlfriend is kidnapped.

Filmed in black and white, the film is a succession of haunting images and odd angles. There is a sense of menace throughout - just look at the scene where Hammer visits the gangster at his mansion. You feel that he has just signed his own death warrant. Furthermore it manages to convey Tarantino-esque violence without any graphic onscreen images. The scene where the woman is tortured in a bath is done only with sound and the image of her feet thrashing.

The last hurrah for late noir? What a way to go!

( Having said that there have been a few decent modern noirs such as Body Heat and Chinatown ! )

[thrustbailey]

Saw The Big Heat for the first time last night. A meaty noir especially with the "coffee-pot" scene. I imagine that for the fifties this was strong meat !

Nice to see a young Lee Marvin as a twisted woman-hater. He really oozes menace yet is a coward when a "real man" ( Glenn Ford ) fronts him up. The cocky thug that Marvin hangs around is a " pretty boy" who caves in quick too. Hmm, these criminals are a cowardly lot!:)

I wasn't sure about Glenn Ford - his hard man didn't really work for me. Plus there was a lot of 50's cheese ( army buddies, cute kid ) in the mix. A good noir nonetheless.

[Mr Bond]

My favourite " Film Noir ", in some posters from around the world...
Bogart is :thumbsup: but Ted de Corsia is :thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup: !

http://thumbnails22.imagebam.com/11648/5d5f48116473783.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/5d5f48116473783) http://thumbnails22.imagebam.com/11648/3cf06d116473791.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/3cf06d116473791) http://thumbnails7.imagebam.com/11648/67d8e7116473796.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/67d8e7116473796) http://thumbnails13.imagebam.com/11648/9beb0a116473804.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/9beb0a116473804) http://thumbnails26.imagebam.com/11648/e1c946116473808.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/e1c946116473808) http://thumbnails11.imagebam.com/11648/76ea9a116473813.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/76ea9a116473813) http://thumbnails31.imagebam.com/11648/a4653c116473816.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/a4653c116473816) http://thumbnails33.imagebam.com/11648/b1fee0116473820.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/b1fee0116473820) http://thumbnails7.imagebam.com/11648/f0703d116473826.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/f0703d116473826)
:cool:

[tabler]

This is just a 'heads up' post really. This film is on Tues 8th at 11-30pm on Film4.

Filmed in 2006 in Black and White, it is a classic Film Noir in the true sense.

Starring George Clooney, Toby Maguire and Cate Blanchett. The story is set in Berlin just after WWll.

I thoroughly recommend this one.:cool:

http://img173.imagevenue.com/loc373/th_96283_Good_german_123_373lo.jpg (http://img173.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=96283_Good_german_123_373lo.jpg)

[thrustbailey]

If you were to make a Noir now, who would you cast ? Who has that noir look?

A few ideas

Steve Buscemi ( creepy sidekick )
Billy Bob Thornton ( as above )
George Clooney ( P.I )
John C Reilly ( Copper/ Bent Copper )
http://thumbnails34.imagebam.com/11847/b9db85118466864.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/b9db85118466864)
William H Macy ( Dodgy D.A )

[scoundrel]

http://img194.imagevenue.com/loc493/th_02443_IWalkedWithAZombie_122_493lo.jpg (http://img194.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=02443_IWalkedWithAZombie_122_493lo.j pg) http://img34.imagevenue.com/loc101/th_02456_IWalkedWithAZombie1_122_101lo.jpg (http://img34.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=02456_IWalkedWithAZombie1_122_101lo. jpg) http://img282.imagevenue.com/loc345/th_02460_IWalkedWithAZombieFrancesDee_122_345lo.jp g (http://img282.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=02460_IWalkedWithAZombieFrancesDee_1 22_345lo.jpg)
http://img280.imagevenue.com/loc162/th_02467_IWalkedWithaZombieNurseConnellandMrsHolla nd_122_162lo.jpg (http://img280.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=02467_IWalkedWithaZombieNurseConnell andMrsHolland_122_162lo.jpg) http://img141.imagevenue.com/loc421/th_02473_4892_89960527100_86625752100_2382812_2275 337_n_122_421lo.jpg (http://img141.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=02473_4892_89960527100_86625752100_2 382812_2275337_n_122_421lo.jpg)

Both Joszka and I have mentioned this film a couple of times, but it's really good and I've decided it merits a proper write up.

I like the way in which the film plays artfully with the fine line between the supposedly normal and the paranormal. This hints strongly at the latent power of things we consider normal, how easily they can morph into dangerous passions and wickedness. Jessica Holland, the Zombie, no matter how you cut it, is at once the victim and the instigator of lethal jealously. Her nurse, Betsy Connell, finds quickly that very little is exactly as it seems on this wildly sinister and screwed up island, where the supposedly cultured and “superior” white Europeans are even more superstitious and paranoid than the descendents of the Africans their ancestors once enslaved. In fact one of the things I like about I Walked With a Zombie is the clear-sighted way in which it portrayed the racial divide on this Caribbean island, and the way the black characters, themselves three dimensional and nicely drawn, know and see the white characters very clearly, while most of the white characters are unable to transcend their patronizing assumptions and see what’s really going on with the black characters. The black characters are the official custodians of the voodoo, the paranormal haunting the island, yet it is in the vicious love triangle of Paul Holland, Wesley Rand and Jessica Holland where the true heart of this darkness lies.

Nurse Connell has unwittingly entered at the start of Act Three. Some really potent melodramatic stuff has already happened, stuff which will rebound straight back on her. I relished the film device of having Sir Lancelot, a 1940s calypso singer, sing a really dark and cruel calypso in the hearing of Nurse Connell and Wesley Rand when Wesley is trying to turn on the charm and Betsy, though keeping her options wide open, is enjoying the flirtation game. It tells the back story which both Paul Holland and Wesley Rand tried to hide from Betsy’s knowledge, a sordid and discreditable back story, and it shows how the local black population actually see, hear and evaluate the antics of these oh so superior white aristocrats. The singer sings most of the song before knowing that Wesley Rand and Nurse Connell can hear him; it was a request by others in the audience who wanted Betsy to hear and to know the story.

There was a family that lived on the isle
Of Saint Sebastian a long, long while
The head of the family was a Holland man
And the younger brother, his name was Rand

Ah, woe! Ah, me!
Shame and sorrow for the family

The Holland man, he kept in a tower
A wife as pretty as a big white flower
She saw the brother and she stole his heart
And that's how the badness and the trouble start

Ah, woe! Ah, me!
Shame and sorrow for the family

After Wesley has shown his true colours and had so much to drink that he has completely passed out at Betsy’s table, Sir Lancelot decided to finish the song. He too thinks Betsy deserves to be warned about what she is getting into.

The wife and the brother they want to go
But the Holland man, he tell them no
The wife fall down and the evil came
And it burned her mind in the fever flame

Ah, woe! Ah, me!
Shame and sorrow for the family

Her eyes are empty and she cannot talk
And the nurse has come to make her walk
The brothers are lonely and the nurse is young
And now you must see that my song is sung

Ah, woe! Ah, me!
Shame and sorrow for the family
Ah, woe! Ah, me!
Shame and sorrow for the family


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4hmp9A99S8

The scene works on several levels. It tells the back story with targeted efficiency and strongly indicates that the song is sung, but the story isn’t over. The young nurse now knows, if she didn’t know already, that she is the new bone of contention and that the brothers are feuding again. The link between Jessica Holland’s inadequately explained medical condition and the night when she was going to elope with Wesley Rand is also spelled out. The presence and importance of the black community in this story is being set up as well; the white characters tend to forget that Sir Lancelot and the black people of St Sebastian are even there, yet these are the people who know what’s really going on at Fort Holland. What a contrast, by the way, between the mild and courteous singing voice of Sir Lancelot, and the quiet venom of the words which he sings. It's not surprising he has Nurse Connell's full and undivided attention at that highly charged moment.

This film is a minor masterpiece of atmosphere, suspense and muted drama. The supernatural elements are nicely done, creepy and sinister but not over the top. Most of the sinister things which happen seem to have a possible rational explanation, taken one at a time. However, taken collectively, they lead inexorably towards the view that things are really seriously out of whack around here. What gradually becomes apparent is that the supernatural elements are a metaphor for the power of the human dark side, and that what is really wrong is the unfinished business between the feuding brothers, Paul and Wesley.

The central acting performances, Frances Dee as Nurse Connell and Tom Conway as Paul Holland are both first rate. Their troubled romance, he not being free to return her simple hearted affections, works very well; they have good screen chemistry. James Ellison, as the drunken and embittered half brother, Wesley Rand, also acted very well, although his part is less well-written, a bit stage-melodramatic for my taste. The actress who played the zombie was Christine Gordon; she had no lines, but was quietly disturbing as the walking dead, her eyes both blank and intent. She was rather menacing and a credible focus for the superstitious fear of the voodoo congregation.

What really raised this film to the level of real art was the quality of the script and story line, freely improvised around a set film title by Carl Siodmak, and the sheer excellence of the cinematography and direction by Jacques Tourneur. Here is where the tools of film noir were deployed to deadly effect, in all the perfectly observed details. One which especially stands out to me is the polished use of lighting effects. For example, we see Nurse Connell enjoying her new room in daylight; the wooden louvre doors for coolness and the large white double bed. She’s a humble working girl from Canada who has worked jolly hard to get a start in life as a registered nurse; this place is the lap of luxury in a romantic touristy Caribbean setting, she’s getting treated like a lady and waited on hand and foot, and she likes it, oh yes indeed. Then, a bit later, she wakes in the same room because she can hear crying from the tower directly opposite her louvred doors. The moonlight is shining through the slats in the wooden doors and falling onto her in lines of light and darkness as she lies and listens to the mysterious weeping. That beautiful and luxurious room seems much less reassuring now; but only the lighting has changed. The whole film works like this; taking the mundane and changing it into something surreal and dangerous with a tiny alteration of perspective, a really subtle transformation of atmosphere. This, rather than the gothic storyline, is what marks this film out as a high class example of film noir.

This film is 67 minutes of top quality entertainment for whenever you don’t feel like leaving your brain outside the room.

[Joszka]

http://thumbnails37.imagebam.com/11859/af2d23118580806.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/af2d23118580806) http://thumbnails34.imagebam.com/11859/6d5c8e118580813.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/6d5c8e118580813) http://thumbnails35.imagebam.com/11859/4a5da4118580819.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/4a5da4118580819) http://thumbnails37.imagebam.com/11859/f3e91d118580825.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/f3e91d118580825)

Thanks for ur great post, Scoundrel.
Reading it, I was trying to find out who could actually be a sort of Tourneur "spiritual son" or at least work in the same porous borders & themes and to be finally close of these atmospheres.
More than David Lynch, the only one I have in mind is maybe David Cronenberg. Of course with a different art of directing, but very often with that same ambiguity between light & shadow, good & bad, dream & reality, life & death, humanity & animality, normality & monstruosity, etc, etc.

"I walked with a zombie" (splendid tittle) is a great example of "noir romantic gothic fantastic" movie..

http://thumbnails37.imagebam.com/11859/f3e91d118580825.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/f3e91d118580825) http://thumbnails34.imagebam.com/11859/ac093a118580829.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/ac093a118580829)

[jaydogbones]

Touch Of Evil - (1958, Orson Welles)

[scoundrel]

Touch Of Evil - (1958, Orson Welles)

This is a good choice. However right back at the begining of the thread I said:
My proposition is: Which film or films noire do you particularly like, and what is it about it/them which especially pleases you . A post naming the film is all very well, but with no extra information the members who haven't already seen the movie won't get any value from your contribution, and might not click the 'Thanks' button!

For example, the opening scene of Touch of Evil is legendary for the absolutely breathtaking audacity of Orson Welles' tracking shot: a flourish of exuberant cinematic skill, yet far more than mere showing off. Look how much we learn, how much back story and character is revealed to us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg8MqjoFvy4

[Joszka]

http://thumbnails41.imagebam.com/12246/8e0d5d122453047.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/8e0d5d122453047) http://thumbnails33.imagebam.com/12246/794a27122453051.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/794a27122453051) http://thumbnails23.imagebam.com/12246/f2ce43122453069.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/f2ce43122453069) http://thumbnails41.imagebam.com/12246/28e43d122453070.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/28e43d122453070)

Criss Cross. 1949. Robert Siodmak (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041268/)

One of my real favs. The film has obvious similarities with "The Killers", big success Siodmak made two years earlier, with music of Miklos Rosza too, a hero played by Burt Lancaster and a femme fatale interpreted this time not by Ava Gardner but by Yvonne de Carlo.

"Criss Cross", aka "I killed for you" in French, is a Siodmak masterpiece: more lyrical and implaccable than "The Killers", more fragile and stretched to the tragedy without the formal affectations of many flashbacks.

Unlike "The Killers" shot in studio, "Criss Cross" got some documentary aspects: the steep streets of Bunker Hill neighborhood in Los Angeles and its funicular, the clothing workers of Burt Lancaster, etc.

But it's the relentless trajectory of a fool love which is perpetually sustained by the art of director.

"Romantic, obsessive Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) is drawn back to L.A. to make another try for Anna (Yvonne de Carlo), his former wife. However, Anna belongs now to the L.A. underworld. Steve believes he can rescue her, ignoring the advice and warnings of people who would try to save him. He commits himself to a dangerous course of action that quickly takes everyone somewhere unintended.."

Steve, Anna and Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea, the bad guy) are a tragic trio, but the very special Siodmak style is again essential.

The opening flyover shot is great, as the camera swoops over and then descends into Los Angeles at night. The depiction of L.A., and specifically the Bunker Hill section of Steve’s home, has a very realistic quality, showing a working class area that is becoming more and more middle-class in the postwar boom.
L.A. is a common setting for noir movies, but Criss Cross has a feel that makes it distinct from others set in this (very graphic) town. The underbelly of the city obviously exists..

http://thumbnails39.imagebam.com/12246/7885a2122453092.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/7885a2122453092) http://thumbnails36.imagebam.com/12246/314155122454301.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/314155122454301) http://thumbnails4.imagebam.com/12246/5c08de122453073.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/5c08de122453073)

Note : uncredited in the cast, Tony Curtis made here briefly his 1st steps in a movie.. as a rumba dancer.

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Lot of painting or sculpture references in this movie & especially the final sequence, cold and dry : sudden appearance of the death in the black frame of the door and brief mention of "the Pieta" with the dead bodies of Anne and Steve..

http://thumbnails39.imagebam.com/12246/53f2c8122454298.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/53f2c8122454298)

[scoundrel]

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The Well is widely considered as a film noir. What makes it so is not so much a stylistic signature; the lighting and cinematography is very competent but nothing special. Rather, it’s a noir due to the themes and the harsh, spare and cruel dialogue, in which ordinary bourgeois respectable citizens morph into grotesque figures of venom and alienated rage. Some of their words and deeds, coming from people who ordinarily wouldn’t hurt a fly, are fit to chill the blood of a fish finger.

This is a really unusual thriller, full of disturbing insights into the dark side of human nature. It was made at a time when the violent tensions underpinning the civil rights struggle were just starting to express themselves; but much of what we see here is universally relevant. Apparently it was filmed in small town California and the film makers specifically distanced the accents and social scene depicted to suggest that it’s not the Deep South, but anywhere in backwater middle America. This makes sense because the really disturbing theme of this film is that the hatreds and bigotry which boils to the surface on both sides of the argument – this isn’t good guys versus bad guys – are lurking within any racially divided community anywhere you go. The town doesn’t even have a name; it could be any town.

The flashpoint is the sinister disappearance of a 5 year old black girl. The reaction of Sheriff Kellogg, nicely played by Richard Rober, is remarkable. He is deeply alarmed on two fronts; a 5 year old girl is missing and she is black. If she has come to harm, that will be horrible, one of the worst things which comes up in police work. The girl’s mother is weeping and begging ‘The Man’ to care; Kellogg cares and is rather ashamed that the woman thinks she has to beg. But he is already afraid; if it was foul play, and if the perpetrator should happen to be white, he smells really bad trouble.

The trouble starts to brew. Kellogg’s enquiries, quite objective and professional, assemble a strong prima-facae suspicion against a white stranger in town, who was seen talking to the girl before she disappeared. This is the excellent Harry Morgan (Colonel Potter in MASH) playing a mining engineer called Charles Packard, visiting the town for a business meeting with the local big shot, Mr Quigley, who runs a manufacturer of drilling and mining tools and heavy plant. As soon as Packard is arrested on suspicion of abducting a 5 year old girl, all the racial tensions rapidly boil over in a process which the film presents in horribly believable detail; the rumours escalate and the divisions open up. The forbidden N word, already frowned on in 1951, starts to be bandied on both side of the argument to express the alienation of the two communities. The white citizens react with denial that the perpetrator could be “one of them”; the black community reacts with bleak and embittered suspicion, waiting for the establishment cover up to start. Mischief makers ratchet up the tension on purpose by starting false new rumours to fuel the gathering flames.

Quigley, really well portrayed by television actor Jess Kirkpatrick, thinks Packard is guilty and is horrified because Packard is in town on his invitation. But his concern is not with an entirely expendable 5 year old black girl, but with the reputation of his business. He is quite prepared to bear false witness and cover up what he thinks to be Packard’s crime, then banish him from all further contact with the state. Reputation and silence is everything, and there is a lynch mob mentality starting to build up, chiefly among the black citizens; the wilder teenage white youths are getting riled about all this “uppity” behaviour. Sheriff Kellogg has already demanded that the mayor call the governor but the State Militia can’t come for much too long a time. Quigley wants to smuggle Packard out of time, quick-step. There follows the first great scene of the film where Kellogg listens illegally to what is supposed to be a private conversation between Packard, Quigley and a lawyer; Packard, in a fine Harry Morgan trademark exhibition of quiet fury, radiates hatred and defiance. He is innocent and he will fight and die rather than submit to any man calling him a child murderer. The fact the Quigley thinks him guilty is an insult which cannot be bourn; Kellogg is forced to enter the room to prevent violence. Kellogg is deeply shaken; guilty men don’t act like this. But it’s too late, the ball is rolling. An attempt to remove Packard to the custody of the State Troopers backfires; we see a bruised and hopping mad Packard brought back into the station, having survived an attempt to lynch him. He is not so much frightened as fighting mad, cursing the deputy who didn’t remove his handcuffs so he could fight back.

The film returns to the community at large. The rival mobs are gathering. Quigley is leading a mob of his own workers and other poor whites; the missing girl’s father is assembling the black mob, determined to have either justice or revenge in spite of ‘The Man’. Sherriff Kellogg is breaking out the riot guns and insisting that if he and his handful of deputies must fight to restore order, the mayor and town council must fight too. He isn’t handing over his prisoner and he isn’t letting his streets go out of control while he is still alive. The stage is set for mayhem.

The next step in the drama is absolutely fascinating. The gig is called off. The missing girl has fallen down a well and has been found, injured but alive, and trapped a long long way down. Quigley was all set to lead a mob against the black citizens; we see him sat alone, the mob gone, stunned, shocked, but thinking, thinking...

The Sheriff has released his prisoner and gone to the scene, but he’s distressingly helpless. The Fire Department are there and the Fire Chief is stumped too, with neither the equipment nor the skill to rescue this girl. The next great scene is brief but telling. Quigley, the mining tool expert, has turned up uninvited to help and he and Kellogg hate each other like poison after their earlier conflict and Quigley’s activity inciting racial hatred. But Quigley has, to his own surprise, discovered that he cares about a girl stuck down a well and he wants to save her after all. The silent confrontation of the two men is superb; Quigley has completely changed his position and, just for a moment, Kellogg doesn’t know how to take it. Then they tacitly act as though the whole day never happened; it’s the best way to get this job done. Quigley designs and locates a parallel shaft and starts drilling; but he knows his own limitations. The fine work needs to be done by a qualified mining engineer, it would be too easy to crush or drown the little girl while trying to save her. The only qualified mining engineer in town is Charles Packard, who has vowed to leave on the next train after spitting on the platform before he goes.

Now we get the next great scene. Kellogg and Quigley intercept Packard and Quigley listens to his well-deserved and lurid cursing and denunciation. Not unnaturally, Packard refuses to help; this is a whole town full of people he hates enough to want to kill them. Quigley literally begs:
“Charlie, please! She’s only five years old. Please!”
Packard refuses and leaves in bitter silence and we see Quigley savouring the consequences of his earlier conduct. Kellogg has to work with him; he’s the sheriff and he’s forced to feel lucky that a citizen is willing to help him do his duty. Packard hates him so much that he would rather let a little girl die than work with him. Quigley has nothing to say, no defence to offer.

Back we go to the well and Quigley is putting a brave face on things for the sake of the agonised parents. He has some idea what to do and has to hope beginners luck will swing the difference. Once the shaft is deep enough, he’ll drill a parallel shaft and hope to pluck the girl to safety. It’s damned dangerous and he has decided to go down and take the risk himself as a penance. Then Packard turns up and we reprise the earlier silent shelving of past differences; the conversation is cold, formal, but severely technical. Packard approves of Quigley’s parallel shaft but revises the plan for the next phase to drill upwards; it’s a well, and should they hit water, the shaft will now take the water away from the girl where it can be pumped dry and thus she will not be drowned accidentally by her rescuers.

The rest of the film is fairly standard disaster-rescue drama but very nicely acted. Harry Morgan’s voice booms over loudspeakers expressing classic Colonel Potter irritation whenever Quigley and Kellogg start to panic and think the shaft is about to collapse in him.
“I am not coming up! I repeat: I am not coming up! Now are you going to send that power saw down or do I have to chew through the wall of this damned well with my teeth?!”
What I really liked about the story was the way it did not cop out. Quigley and the girl’s father were beacons of racism –it comes from both side of the argument- and blind knee-jerk hatred. Yet we see that they are not monsters, not even naturally villainous. As soon as the issue became humanitarian rather than criminal and divisive, they reverted back to a concerned and shame-struck ordinary man and a father in emotional torment because he can hear his baby crying. We don’t get to dismiss either of them as wicked, alien or “other”; they are our neighbours. Sheriff Kellogg, who tried so hard to make a criminal charge of the worst possible kind stick against an innocent man, acted always out of sincere devotion to what he thought was his duty. This was a tremendous drama of visceral hate and passion fought out between ordinary people. It could have been anywhere, anyone, anytime.

The story, the script, the acting are what makes this film so good. I was gripped, shocked and very disturbed.

[Estreeter]

Thunder Road (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf-OHcivvos)

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I loved this film, firstly I only watched it out of curiosity as it has the same title as my favorite song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQpyxh3xpv8), to my shock the film and the song had nothing to do with each other. The film though is fantastic, starring the legend Robert Mitchum and having the story of running shine and battling gangsters was right up my alley, I'd recommend it to anyone :thumbsup:

[Mal Hombre]

Thunder Road (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf-OHcivvos)

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I loved this film, firstly I only watched it out of curiosity as it has the same title as my favorite song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQpyxh3xpv8), to my shock the film and the song had nothing to do with each other. The film though is fantastic, starring the legend Robert Mitchum and having the story of running shine and battling gangsters was right up my alley, I'd recommend it to anyone :thumbsup:
Mitchum originally wanted Elvis to play His Younger brother in the movie,but Col. Parker nixed the idea.

[nevermind]

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The Naked City is a 1948 black-and-white film noir directed by Jules Dassin. The movie, shot partially in documentary style, was filmed on location on the streets of New York City, featuring landmarks such as the Williamsburg Bridge the Whitehall Building and an apartment building on West 83rd Street (Manhattan) where the murder took place. William H. Daniels won an Academy Award for his cinematography.[




Plot

In the late hours of a hot New York summer night, a pair of men subdue and kill Jean Dexter, an ex-model, by knocking her out with chloroform and drowning her in her bathtub. When one of the murderers, conscience-stricken, gets drunk, the other kills him, then lifts his body into the air and throws it into the East River.

Homicide Detective Lt. Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) and his young associate, Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor), are assigned to Jean's case, which the medical examination has determined was murder, not an accident. Muldoon has been a homicide cop for 22 years; Halloran for three months.

At the scene, the police interrogate Martha Swenson (Virginia Mullen), Jean's housekeeper, about Jean's friends, who tells them about a "Mr. Henderson." They also discover a bottle of sleeping pills. Halloran questions Dr. Lawrence Stoneman (House Jameson), who prescribed the pills, and Ruth Morrison (Dorothy Hart), another model.

Back at the police station, Muldoon questions Frank Niles (Howard Duff), who lies about everything, including claiming only a business relationship with Jean and denying knowing Ruth, to whom he is engaged. The police quickly discover the truth behind many of his lies. Later, Muldoon deduces from the bruises on Jean's neck that she was killed by at least two men. That evening, Mr. and Mrs. Batory, Jean's estranged parents, arrive in New York to formally identify the body, and tell the detectives that they have no knowledge of Jean's acquaintances. The next morning, the detectives learn that Frank sold a gold cigarette case stolen from Stoneman, then purchased a one-way airline ticket to Mexico. They also discover that Jean's ring was stolen from the home of a wealthy Mrs. Hylton (Enid Markey). At Mrs. Hylton's Park Avenue apartment, the police learn that the ring actually belonged to her daughter, who, to their surprise, turns out to be Ruth.

Learning that Ruth's engagement ring is also stolen property, Muldoon and Halloran take Ruth to Frank's apartment, where they coincidently interrupt someone trying to murder him. The killer takes a shot at the cops and escapes onto the nearby elevated train. When questioned about the stolen jewelry, Frank claims that they were all presents from Jean, which reveals his true relationship with her, much to Ruth's chagrin. Frank is then arrested for the jewel thefts, but the murder case remains open. Halloran learns that a body recovered from the East River (that of Peter Backalis (Walter Burke), a small-time burglar) died within hours of the Dexter murder and connects the two incidents. Muldoon, although skeptical, lets him pursue the lead and assigns two veteran detectives on the squad to help Halloran with the legwork.

Through further tedious investigation, Halloran discovers that Backalis' accomplice on a jewelry store burglary was Willie Garzah (Ted de Corsia), a former wrestler with a penchant for playing the harmonica. While Halloran and his team canvass the Lower East Side of New York using an old publicity photograph of Garzah, Muldoon compels Frank Niles to identify Jean's mystery boyfriend. Dr. Stoneman is "Henderson". At Stoneman's office, Muldoon uses Frank to trap the married physician into confessing that he fell in love with Jean, only to learn that she and Frank were using him in order to rob his society friends. Frank then confesses that Garzah killed Jean and Backalis. Halloran and Muldoon, using different approaches, have come up with the same killer.

Meanwhile, Halloran finally locates Garzah and, pretending that Backalis is in the hospital, tries to trick Garzah to accompany him back to the hospital, but Garzah (knowing he killed Backalis) sees through the ruse. The ex-wrestler "rabbit punches" the rookie detective, momentarily knocking him unconscious. Garzah attempts to disappear in the crowded city, but as police descend upon the neighborhood, a panicked Garzah draws attention to himself when he shoots and kills a blind man's guide dog on the pedestrian walk of The Williamsburg Bridge. Garzah attempts to flee over the bridge but as police approach from both directions, he starts climbing one of the towers, and is shot and wounded. High on the tower, Garzah refuses to surrender, gunfire is exchanged, he is hit again and falls to his death



Cast


Barry Fitzgerald as Detective Lt. Dan Muldoon
Howard Duff as Frank Niles
Dorothy Hart as Ruth Morrison
Don Taylor as Detective Jimmy Halloran
Frank Conroy as Captain Donahue
Ted de Corsia as Willie Garzah aka Willie the Harmonica
House Jameson as Dr. Stoneman
Anne Sargent as Mrs. Halloran
Adelaide Klein as Mrs. Paula Batory
Grover Burgess as Mr. Batory
Tom Pedi as Detective Perelli
Enid Markey as Mrs. Edgar Hylton
Walter Burke as Pete Backalis
Virginia Mullen as Martha Swenson
Mark Hellinger as Narrator



.

[whop]

There is a very cool scene in that movie, when Bacall asks for a light, Bogart throws her some matches, she lights up and throws them back. They never look at the matches.

OK, maybe you have to see it and maybe it was a lighter, but it IS a great scene.

I haven't seen a tenth of the movies mentioned in this thread, but my absolute favourite is Farewell my Lovely, mainly because of the story.

[Joszka]

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"The woman in the window" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037469/). Fritz Lang. 1944.

Just between "Ministry of Fear" (44) and "Scarlett Street" (45), his 2 major contributions in the noir genre, Lang's "Woman in the window" is often considered as a minor movie, very disappointing coz of its happy ending..
So, I won't reveal the end. ;)

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"The focus here is Professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson), a middle-aged man, bored with life, whose only excitement seems to come from the philosophical discussions he engages in with friends his swanky social club. When Wanley becomes enamored with a painting of a young girl in a nearby storefront, they chide him about his new fascination with a young lady. Later that night, when Wanley stops to view the painting again, he suddenly sees the woman herself (Joan Bennett) reflected in the storefront glass. Stunned, the married Wanley buys the beautiful girl a drink and then goes back to her apartment. Suddenly, Wanley finds himself in a dire situation, when Alice’s boyfriend storms the apartment and Wanley must kill hims in self defense. Scrambling, they resolve to dump the body, but things do not go smoothly and clues are left behind in the confusion. As the police begin to piece together the clues, Wanley and Alice also must deal with extortion demands from the dead man’s bodyguard (Dan Duryea) who threatens to go the police unless he is paid off."

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A classic story-line then, with all the expected ingredients but with the Lang's touch on more. With a very precise art direction, a superb black and white photography, Lang opted for a clever stylization skillfully shaping a climate full of dreamlike mystery with a few scenes borrowing much to German Expressionism (the first meeting between the teacher and Alice Wanley before the window of the gallery) and he doesn't skimp on a few violent moments (the concealment of the victim's body) which injects a real intense suspense to the ensemble.

Known primarily for his roles as thugs and gangsters, Robinson is used here in an interesting job-cons in the role of a professor with refined intellect, a role similar to what Robinson was in real life : a renowned collector of art, passionated by literature.. and hating guns at the highest point.
And Joan Bennett is just perfect.
The same cast, Robinson-Benett-Duryea, will be used one year later in "Scarlett Street".

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But what I like the most in this movie is the theme of "the portrait".
Paintings - and especially paintings of women"- are very present in a lot of "films noirs" : "Laura" (Preminger) of course, "Scarlett Street" (Lang again), "Born to be bad" (Nicholas Ray), "Vertigo" (Hitchcock) and I don't talk of "The picture of Dorian Gray" (Allbert Lewin) nor of "The isle of the dead" (Mark Robson), one my RKO all times favs, in wich the painting itself is the movie.

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"The isle of the dead", painting by Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin, 1880, also appears in
"I walked with a zombie" (J. Tourneur) previously described by our friend Scoundrel..

Is it possible to fall in love with an icon, a myth, a portrait (like Tamino, the 1st one, in love with the painting of Tamina in Mozart's Magic Flute) ? How to go from stillness to motion ? From dream to reality, silence to language, hope to dillusion ?
All these questions are the main topic of the "film noir" genre..
And that's why , but not only, "The woman in the window" is a very interesting one.

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[snorkie]

One of the best, and most inventive, films noire is Lady in the Lake (1947). It is based on a Raymond Chandler novel, and stars Robert Montgomery (he also directed).

It's worth noting that in the view of some film buffs, this inventive movie essentially sank Montgomery's career. I've read that he used a lot of his star status influence to get "Lady" made his way. When the film tanked at the box office he never completely recovered (I can't find the article so this lacks proper attribution).

I've seen "Lady in the Lake" and admit that it leaves me cold. Still, it's a hundred times better than "Lady in the Water"! :(

[scoundrel]

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When a satellite movie channel such as UK’s Film4 is so desperate that it will screen absolute garbage such as The Fighting Kentuckian it cannot forever stave off the inevitable. A time inevitably comes when, if only by random accident, it is forced to give airtime to an obscure and forgotten gem like Call Northside 777.

Call Northside 777 is full of stylistic film noir visual images. For example, the interior scenes of the Illinois State Penitentiary are exquisite; the route taken by the prisoner from the cells to the governor’s office is through archways and corridors of stark black and white art-decor rectangularity which convey claustrophobic imprisonment more subtly than but just as effectively as mere bars would. Later, Jimmy Stewart is taken right into the heart of the jail to interview a different prisoner in his cell. The jail is circular, each cell a mere cage wide open to view from a guard post in the centre. There are seven or eight stories of these cells linked by iron stairs and iron walkways. Every step, every gangway, every bar in the cells is painted a bright and sterile white. It’s a sepulchre, or it’s the reading room of the British Museum, with each prisoner as a separate book gathering dust on the shelf. The film was shot by a director (Henry Hathaway) and by a lighting cameraman who understood visual imagery.

This is a psychological thriller about injustice, with the investigative journalist as hero, pitted against both the establishment and the criminal underworld, trying not so much to prove that a convicted cop-killer serving 99 years in the pen is innocent, but to satisfy his own reluctant curiosity and determine whether or not he is guilty. It borrows well from an earlier Cagney classic, Each Day I Die, in which the journalist, played by Cagney, is himself framed and railroaded into life with hard labour just for asking the wrong questions; this journalist though is played by Jimmy Stewart in a really fine, witty and coldly cynical performance which anticipates some of his best acts in the Westerns of Anthony Mann.

PJ McNeal is a veteran chief-reporter who has been lied to and deceived much too often to accept sob stories at face value and who didn’t even want the assignment; after all, the dead cop had little children and the paper isn’t very interested in his story. But in a really well scripted and well observed story, we see the seeds of doubt slowly germinating in McNeal’s mind. The mother of the convict is an elderly Polish washerwoman who has scrubbed floors every day from 1933 to 1944, all the eleven years her son has been in jail, so she could raise $5,000 and offer a reward for fresh evidence which would secure a re-trial for her boy. Kasia Orzazewski, whom I don’t think I’ve seen in any other film, is magnificent as this quietly valiant woman, who worked Sundays against God’s law, every Sunday of her life since 1933, who would have worked on Christmas Day if people would let her, who walked to work and home again to save every nickel so she could raise $3,000 and offer a reward; when no one responded to her personal ad in the paper, she did it some more until she could raise $5,000 and then tried again. Ms Orzazewski’s delivery is full of dignity and quiet, implacable conviction; Mrs Wiecek thinks Frank Wiecek is innocent and has invested her whole life into proving it. McNeal is not persuaded, but he is impressed.

Then we get to meet Frank Wiecek in the pen. The attitude of the Governor is odd, strangely cooperative and friendly. Wiecek himself is played by the excellent Richard Conte, who delivers a very restrained and yet powerful performance as a wronged man crushed in a hideous vice of injustice, resigned to his fate rather than desperate or bitter. He too wishes his mother would stop doing as she is doing because it’s harmful to her and will do no good. His wife has divorced him and never visits. He has never even seen his son; his wife announced the pregnancy on the very night, December 21st 1932, when the police arrested both of them in connection with the dead copper. He wasn’t even there; he is arrested for having harboured the suspected gunman, an old school-friend who stayed the night two weeks previously, having argued with his own parents. What a tiny thread to strangle a man with; but the Chicago police did it. Interestingly, the Governor believes Wiecek is innocent; of course all 1,500 of his inmates maintain that they are innocent, but very few of them believe that anyone among their fellow inmates is innocent. There are 1,498 men in the Governor’s jail who believe that Frank Wiecek and his alleged accomplice, Tomek Zaleska, actually are innocent. The Governor and his guards don’t know for sure, but they respect the opinion of the entire population of convicts as a body, and are strongly inclined to support it.

Little by little, McNeal finds himself morally obliged to reconsider his original view. His own wife, nicely played by Helen Walker, is caught up in the sentimental drama of her husband struggling to reopen the case of a wronged man and mildly reproachful of her husband’s Doubting Thomas attitudes. There are some cleverly scripted conversations in which she helps him with his stubborn task of solving an incomplete jigsaw puzzle on their living room coffee table, symbol of the real puzzle McNeal is caught up in.
McNeal: No darling, that’s not a piece of the forest, that’s blue sky.
Mrs McNeal: Yes, I know it is. But did you?

It’s also satisfying and well observed that McNeal starts to really believe in Wiecek’s innocence when he discovers that the divorced wife, who remarried a man who loves her but who she doesn’t love, purely to get a new name and a new life for the little boy, somewhere where the kids at school won’t know his dad is a cop-killer, backs up her ex-husband. She thinks he is innocent. It turns out that Frank Wiecek pleaded with her to divorce him and marry the other guy:“I’m in here for 99 years. Love…that’s all over between us. I might as well be dead; but you can still have a life. If you won’t do it for yourself, at least do it for little Frank. Now, while you’re still young enough to start again. Forget about me. I’m finished. But live.”Her new husband, EG Marshall as Mr. Rayska, is calmly resigned to being the lifeboat rather than the tall ship in her life. He took another man’s leftovers because he loved her that much; and he still does. He provided for the boy as well and he accepts the cruel situation without any complaint. The woman needs him and this is enough. He is supportive of McNeal’s campaign, even though it will do him no favours if Frank Wiecek is released; he too firmly believes Frank is not guilty and he is a man of decency and honour, otherwise Frank’s ex-wife would never have married him.

Then the police start to clam up and the District Attorney starts to pressure McNeal’s ultimate boss, the owner of the paper, to get the story dropped, in the public interest naturally. They are making a tactical mistake. McNeal is mule-stubborn, doesn’t take well to being bullied, and their very attitude confirms his growing suspicions. They have something to hide. They don’t want the truth to be revealed. It’s more convenient to let an innocent man rot.

Re-examining the case, the flimsiness of the evidence which convicted Wiecek becomes very evident. The cop was killed during prohibition busting a speakeasy run by the only prosecution witness, a Mrs. Wanda Skutnik. Two other eye-witnesses, a mailman and a newspaper vendor, both with clean records, both saw the gunman flee the scene and sturdily maintained that neither Wiecek nor Zaleski look the least bit like him. After twice failing to pick Wiecek out, Mrs. Skutnik (who does have a bountiful criminal history) identifies him on the third attempt and he is booked, more than a day after his original arrest. There’s no forensic evidence at all. The police succeeded in tripping Wiecek up on minor details in his alibi and in making him look like a liar when he was just a frightened and confused man telling them a truth which they didn’t want to know. That was sufficient to fool the jury. But now, establishing a reasonable doubt won’t cut it. McNeal has to prove that the prosecution case is no good. Made uneasy by the pressure McNeal has managed to exert, the authorities concede a hearing of the State Pardons Board, heavily stacked with their own stooges, and McNeal’s boss concedes an end to the story, one way or the other. McNeal must either put up or shut up.

There is an interesting cameo from Paul Harvey as Martin Burns, the paper’s legal adviser, who urges McNeal not to be sentimental and to drop the case unless he can produce cast-iron proof of the man’s innocence. Mere doubt won’t cut the mustard; and a failed hearing at the Board of Pardons will combine with Wiecek’s refusal to admit guilt and almost certainly prevent him ever being paroled. Burns, as McNeal once was, is being cruel to be kind. But even though McNeal knows he hasn’t got the evidence which could sway the Pardons Board, even though he puts himself through the agony of telling the man’s ex-wife and his mother that he has given them false hope and they must give in for Frank’s sake, neither McNeal nor Burns is quite comfortable, and they keep gnawing the bone. Burns is crystal clear; with hard evidence that the state’s witness lied under oath, he’ll get Frank Wiecek out and he’ll get her locked up for perjury, just for good measure. She maintains she never saw Wiecek after the crime and before the ID parade, and that the police didn’t coach her. Everyone knows that’s a lie because McNeal unearthed a photograph from a rival paper showing the two together entering the police station, before she picked him out. Even in 1932, that was illegal; the police were cheating. But that photo doesn’t count as legal proof unless it can be established that it was taken prior to the positive ID.

There is a newspaper vendor in the background of the photo. Expanding that fragment could establish when the photo was taken from the edition being sold. In 1944 that technology is still a very specialist military and police forensic application; and the Chicago PD won’t cooperate. But McNeal knows someone in the technical division of another police agency who owes him the favour and and who also has the intelligence to reject the herd mentality. If Wiecek didn’t kill the cop, then someone else did, and that someone else is laughing. So McNeal succeeds; the blown up photo proves the woman did see Wiecek in police custody before picking him out; the Pardons Board is satisfied and Wiecek’s conviction is quashed.

Is it a happy ending? It is not. Are the establishment vindicated as they claim to be, congratulating themselves that they gave Wiecek fair play and let him out when they were satisfied his conviction was unjust? They are not. Conte’s Frank Wiecek emerges a free man but he has lost every single thing which he once had. The woman he loves and who still loves him is lost to him forever; he can’t even hate her new husband, who has been loyal to her and a friend to him, and who wants him to see his son whenever he likes. But all he has left is an old and tired mother, who weeps and prays with joy when perhaps it would be more rational to curse God instead. Leaving in his new suit, standard issue to discharged prisoners, Wiecek receives his prison workers pay for his work as a trustee in the infirmary. It is ten dollars. With a raised eyebrow and no hint of anger, but a hint of dry humour, he remarks, “Gosh. That’s almost a dollar a year.”

That says it all.

[Laydback]

99 River Street was the last surprisingly good one I saw.

A few twists & turns along the way (Something that you don't expect to see in older movies) Eveleyn Keyes also delivered an amusing performance (Again, one that you don't often seem to find since some of the moles/fatales are often in a cold mood)

[wakman11]

Rear Window for me

Have fun

[navvet]

Another haunting film noir is "Sorry, Wrong Number." Made in 1948, it stars Burt Lancaster and Barbara Stanwyck. It's an absorbing movie, based on a radio play. It starts out calmly, and builds to a truly terrifying climax. I recommend watching it at night, with all the lights out.

[scoundrel]

http://img169.imagevenue.com/loc988/th_25915_Boomarang1947film_122_988lo.jpg (http://img169.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=25915_Boomarang1947film_122_988lo.jp g)

Boomarang is law and order or procedural noir, based on a case which really happened in the 1920s, where a man was acquitted of murder when the States Attorney sifted through the points of an extremely strong case and found, one by one, that none of the points stood up to a really rigorous examination. The Attorney presented each point of his own case to the court and explained in detail where the flaw lay, before making a motion of dismissal and getting the case thrown out. He was staking his own career because he preferred not to get an innocent man hanged. In the event, his actions greatly enhanced his own prestige and he rose in his profession, but when he made the decision to get the case dismissed, a case he could very easily have won and a case which he was under political pressure to prosecute, he had no way of knowing that his career would survive, let alone prosper. He ultimately rose to the office of Attorney General of the United States, a position he retained for the first 6 years of the FDR administration. He was called Homer Cummings.

In the film, the Cummings part is called Henry L Harvey and is very ably played by Dana Andrews. It’s a strong and controlled acting performance in which Andrews presents the self-doubt and uncertainty which lies beneath the calm and unflappable alpha-male surface of the authority figure. There is a very good supporting cast which includes Lee J Cobb as a grim and relentless police chief investigating the murder and chafing under the pressure of press and politicians for him to find and nail a killer, almost regardless of whether the killer is the right guy or just a patsy. His quiet fury when Attorney Harvey goes back on him is nicely observed as well; he actually had done his job scrupulously without fear or favour, assembled a strong case quite honestly and without malice, and he has a right to feel betrayed.

Boomarang is an early work of director Elia Kazan and has some of the sense of wheels within wheels which informs his later masterpiece, On The Waterfront. It is particularly strong on the malignant hidden hand of corruption and self-interested politics in the justice system. A nice twist is that the main corrupt elements are in opposition and that the ex-Mayor has marshaled the local newspapers, so often the emblems of free speech and integrity in these films, to undermine the investigation with rabble-rousing pressure, and later to whip up a public mood of hostility to the hapless defendant, all calculated to prepare the ground for the ex-mayor to run at the next election. One of the states witnesses is an ex-girlfriend of the defendant, wanting to swear away his life out of personal malice because he stepped out on her; the worm is in the low apples as well as the high ones. The film is a critique of the venality and selfishness of human nature and presents a really interesting morality tale. The Andrews character has few allies and most of these are ambiguous figures; but his enemies are a disparate and intriguing crew as well.

The most interesting one is the Public Defendor,played by George Petrie, who is ostensibly in the ex-mayor’s pocket, but who at the end we can see was playing a lone hand of his own, much more self-interested than Harvey, but not as apt a tool for anyone else’s schemes as the ex-mayor thought, and willing to defend his client once he sees there is a point in doing so. The ex-mayor is also an interesting character, cool and fast on his feet; when one scheme is thwarted, he never runs short of an alternative plan, and in the end he can even see advantages to be taken of Harvey’s legal “success” in convincing the court to dismiss the case. The world of this film is murky and full of strange and shifting allegiances. Luck favours the State Attorney in that he achieves a strange popularity, partly through the theatrical gesture of making his assistant shoot him with the alleged murder weapon to prove it will not fire when used as it would have to have been used in the crime. The whole court winces at the potential Darwin Award winner, who smiles and then shudders and comments: “We tried that experiment sixteen times on a dummy.” Another shudder. “That was the seventeenth time.” His bizarre triumph makes him persona grata in political circles again and both camps begin to court him; he now knows that neither camp is trustworthy.

As well as an entertaining drama, Boomarang is a double edged satire on the fallibility of justice.

[Joszka]

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In a lonely place (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042593/). Nicholas Ray. 1950.
With Humphery Bogart & Gloria Grahame.

Trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fu8E3LooDZo).

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My fav Bogart's character. Far from the usual detectives he played (great too, ofc)
and as a window opened on his darkest backgrounds..
And the movie itself, produced by Bogart -a sign, could be in my top10.


Nicholas Ray’s film noir IN A LONELY PLACE has the unique distinction of being less about a murder – one that may or may not have been committed by Humphrey Bogart’s troubled screenwriter Dixon Steele – and more about the emotional turmoil raging inside him, brought to a boil under the murder’s long shadow of doubt.

Much of the violence in LONELY is emotional and involves the stunning Gloria Grahame.
Just as identical magnets repel one another, these two lovebirds are ultimately too isolated within themselves to forge a lasting union.

The murder investigation hangs over everyone like a dark cloud.
Steele’s paranoia intensifies. His near-fatal assault of a road rage rowdie sends Grahame’s suspicions into overdrive.

IN A LONELY PLACE is heart-wrought noir.
No redemption, no easy answers, no possibility of re-union. The parting shot lingers long, long in your mind.http://thumbnails45.imagebam.com/13631/3af9ac136306000.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/3af9ac136306000) http://thumbnails46.imagebam.com/13631/d4e2eb136306001.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/d4e2eb136306001) http://thumbnails45.imagebam.com/13631/744572136306003.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/744572136306003)

Bogie's Dix Steele is a supposedly brilliant, obviously embittered writer whose career has foundered not as a result of his left-wing politics, but because of his heavy drinking, bad attitude, and terrible temper.
The opening scene—set in a fashionable Beverly Hills boîte modeled after Bogie's lunchtime clubhouse, Romanoff's—allows Dix to mock his agent, insult a successful director ("You're a popcorn salesman"), and physically assault the son of a studio head ("You give nepotism a bad name").
Rather than read the inane bestseller he's been given to adapt, he inveigles the simpleminded hatcheck girl—the embodiment of Hollywood's imagined audience—to just tell him the story.

If Dix's existential alienation is palpable, the film itself verges on psychodrama.
Dix had traits in common with the volatile, hard-drinking Bogart, a proud man who'd been
publicly humiliated after the Congressional hearings—attacked by the press for initially defending
the Hollywood 10 and compelled to publish an admission that he had been a Communist dupe.
For Ray, Bogart was "much more than an actor." He was a symbol, "the very image of our condition [whose] face was a living reproach."
An ex-Communist who was never persecuted, and must have wondered why, Ray saw himself in Dix as well.
He cast his soon-to-be-estranged wife, Gloria Grahame, in the role that might naturally have gone to (and even seems written for) Bogart's wife, Lauren Bacall. Ray used his own first Hollywood apartment as the tormented writer's lair and, after splitting with Grahame, began living on the set.

Building in intensity, In a Lonely Place is the story of a writer who tries to change his
(if not the) world and is ultimately betrayed by his own nature. In one prophetic bit of business,
Dix unfairly attacks his loyal agent, played by Art Smith, a former member of the Group Theater who would be professionally destroyed several years later when he was named as a Communist by his erstwhile comrade (and Ray's sometime mentor) Elia Kazan.

Hollywood atmosphere, existential malaise, and political subtext combine to inform a sensational love story, played on the edge of the void and strong enough to sustain one of the most shamelessly romantic lines in any movie:
"I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived a few weeks while you loved me." http://thumbnails16.imagebam.com/13631/3bfb0d136306009.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/3bfb0d136306009) http://thumbnails30.imagebam.com/13631/383dac136306010.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/383dac136306010) http://thumbnails36.imagebam.com/13631/9f89d8136306013.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/9f89d8136306013)

Like other films directed by Nicholas Ray, In a Lonely Place works on many different levels.
There’s the romance between Dix and Laurel, ill-fated but fleetingly happy prior to Steele’s inevitable self-destruction.
We also have a scathing look at the superficiality of Hollywood, exemplified by Mildred’s mothlike attraction to Steele’s “fame”
that directly leads to her murder. It’s also frequently categorized as film noir, and the murder investigation,
with Dix remaining a prime candidate despite Laurel’s alibi, is constantly lingering in the background.
Laurel’s confidence in Dix steadily erodes and she begins to fear what he’s capable of and what he might do to her.
Like other great noir protagonists, Dix Steele is unable to overcome his fatal flaw and adapt to the outside world.
More atypical is that it’s not death or imprisonment that Steele must face, but loneliness after knowing and feeling
the happiness that a change of temperament could have yielded.

It’s that reason, through the film’s brilliant portrayal of the pangs of loneliness,
that the relationship between Dix and Laurel surfaces as the most compelling aspect of Ray’s film.
Rarely has Hollywood been able to expose with such painful truth the rollercoaster realities of finding someone to heal our innermost pain.
As Dix slices open a grapefruit and tenderly exposes part of his soul to Laurel, whose own feelings have begun to ebb,
his words about how Hollywood is always getting love wrong become poignantly ironic.
The film’s title thus works simultaneously as a literal description of the place where Mildred Atkinson’s body was discarded
and the painful, metaphoric emotional state shared by the two main characters.
The common denominator, since Dix is a screenwriter and Laurel a struggling actress, is the equally lonely setting of Hollywood.
http://thumbnails38.imagebam.com/13631/4b8ef7136306015.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/4b8ef7136306015)

A true deep "noir" then, intense, hypnotizing, at same time with real suspens & real characters,
and depicting at same time a world and a conscience.

[snorkie]

RE: In a Lonely Place


As I understand it, the delicious Gloria Grahame was cast as a substitute for Lauren Bacall, who was under contract to another studio. Said studio apparently would not release Bacall because they were angry with Bogart.

[wowser]

The Big Sleep
Farewell My Lovely
The Maltese Falcon
Where The Sidewalk Ends
The Blue Dahlia

The Third Man (which I've never really considered film-noir)

The Good German, LA Confidential and Body Heat (Katharine Turner - hot or what) are all good modern films in true Noir style)

[scoundrel]

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This is a very sinister and disturbing film in which the murkiest action occurs in the bright sunlight. What makes it noir in my estimation is the anti-hero and anti-heroine (the man deeply sick in his mind and the woman extremely fatale), and the fascinating juxtaposition of innocent and peaceful-seeming locations with haunting, eerie, atmospheric music which brings out the hidden undercurrents of meaning in the simple actions of the characters on screen. Also, of course, it has that recurring noir theme of the bad heroine as an object of destructive desire.

The ex-policeman turned private detective (James Stewart as Scotty Ferguson) is the one with vertigo, but that is the most innocent of his neuroses. He is a twisted and obsessive man, driven by desire for a woman he thinks to be dead and by guilt because it was his job to keep her alive and he couldn’t do it; she threw herself off a tall building and his vertigo meant he could not follow her and restrain her from suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed. The woman is seemingly reincarnated when he meets Judy Barton (Kim Novak) accidentally in the street, stalks her, makes himself known to her and pays court, all because she looks exactly like the woman who died.

The film is a fascinating and horrifying depiction of two people who are both in the grip of an equal and opposite, terrible obsession. It gradually emerges that Judy and the “dead” woman are one and the same; that she was an accomplice in an elaborate deception to use Scotty as an alibi for a real woman’s murder; that she did not cross paths with him accidentally, but is also self-destructively obsessed with the hero, just as he is with her. The scene where the two lovers finally kiss is poisonously Gothic; in order to seduce him, she is reduced to making herself resemble the dead woman in a way which resonates with symbolic necrophilia. He is so obsessed that he needs it to be this way; she is so obsessed that she will knowingly collude with this phantom in his mind. Were there ever two more sinister lovers?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN6xyG82c90&feature=related

The music acts like a ratchet, exerting incremental pressure at key moments. The score was written by Bernard Hermann and is a perfect film score, superbly tailored to enhance the action and drive home the message, which is that this film is all about a love corrupted and insane, yet still with all the grandeur and majestic force of great tragedy.

[TCO95]

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/12/Treasuremadre.jpg/220px-Treasuremadre.jpg

Based on the book of the same name. Three Americans travel to Mexico to prospect for gold. They face dangers from the environment, bandits, other prospectors and each other. Humphrey Bogart plays Dobbs and is brilliant in portraying his characters slide into paranoia. When bandits pretending to be Federales arrive to inspect the camp they are asked for badges replying with the iconic "Badges, we don't need no stinking badges."

A classic from legendary director John Huston.

[JimmiN]

Thanks scoundrel! I had been trying to remember the name of this great movie for years! The Narrow Margin is great film noire!

[lothian]

Not sure if it counts but I always thoight that Blade Runner was very noireish.

[johnnywaddd]

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For me, there are countless favourite films noir, which qualify as sublime. However, there is no question is that the preferred motion picture of bleak darkness is undoubtedly 'Crime Wave', a Warner Bros. release from 1954.


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Directed by Hungarian emigré, Sâsvári Farkasfalvi Tóthfalusi Tóth Endre Antal Mihály, who thankfully shortened his name for us non-Magyars, to André de Toth, 'Crime Wave' is an incredible feast for the eyes and ears, taking full advantage of the kind of creativity, when one is making a flick on a limited budget.

Almost entirely shot on location in early fifties L.A. and environs, the film captures a world which really existed, untainted by the phony gloss of Hollywood hyperbole.

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But let's not forget the actors! In this movie, you'll find memorable performances by 2 actors associated with Stanley Kubrick: Sterling Hayden (Dr. Strangelove), and Tim Carey (The Killing).

One more, who shouldn't escape notice is Charles Buchinsky, who later anglicised himself into Charles Bronson!

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'Crime Wave' withstands the test of time due to its taut direction, artful blend of hyperrealism & expressionism, superb performances by top actors, and a refreshing lack of high-budget Hollywood schtick.


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[vzok]

The Big Heat is on BBC2 tonight/this morning at 1.00am. Plus more Fritz Lang movies over the holidays.

Mon 1.00am - The Big Heat
Tues 1.00am - Secret Behind The Door
Wed 1.10am - Scarlet Street
Thurs 0.40am - While The City Sleeps
26th 1.55am - Beyond A Reasonable Doubt

[PlayBoy_ART]

My favourite:

This Gun for Hire
The Glass Key
The Blue Dahlia
Double Indemnity
Call Northside 777
Fury

[Joszka]

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Rainy weekend : time to grab some oldies & a bottle of whisky..
"I walk alone", Byron Haskin, 1948.
With Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas (their 1st appearance together)
& Lizabeth Scott.

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IMDB (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039482/)
Complete movie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ReV6_PTIVI)

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Not my favorite film noir, a lack of inventivity maybe but a classic
(in all meanings of the term) : classic situation, classic themes, classic art direction.
Byron Haskins is more known for his "The War of the Worlds" (1953).

"After 15 years in prison, Frankie (Burt Lancaster) is released and he beats
a path to the nightclub run by Noll (Kirk Douglas). It seems that when
Lancaster was caught by the police, he could have implicated Noll as well
but kept his mouth shut. And, the two had a deal that when the other got
out of prison, they'd split everything 50-50. However, despite having a
very successful club and lots of dough, Noll isn't about to give half of his
fortune to Frankie.."

And Lizabeth Scott is a perfect -& classic- film noir vamp too.
Worth to see.

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[ubu55]

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52 Pick-Up (1986)

Based on Elmore Leonard's novel of the same name.

Directed by John Frankenheimer, whose credits also include: the original 'Manchurian Candidate', Grand Prix', 'Seconds', 'Reindeer Games' & 'Ronin'

***Spoilers***

Harry Mitchell (Roy Scheider) has it all: A successful metallurgical business; Palatial house in a ritzy LA neighborhood; A vintage XKE; Ageing, but still lovely wife (Ann Margaret)... and a gorgeous young mistress, Cini (Kelly Preston, only a year after her spectacular nude scene in 'Mischief'), who, unbeknownst to Harry has unsavory ties to a trio of pimps & pornographers.
The three lowlifes make a video of Harry with Cini & try to extort $105,000 from him by threatening to send a copy to his wife, who's running for city council. Fearing compliance will result in continuing & perhaps escalating payments, he tells them to take a hike, and attempts to defuse the situation by telling the wife of the affair. She's not surprised & wonders why he bothered.

Undaunted, the blackmailers up the ante, forcing Harry to watch another video, this time of Cini being murdered with Harry's own gun, acquired in a burglary. Now truly between a rock & a hard place, Scheider/Harry is forced to let the lead extortionist, Raimy (John Glover), who has an accounting background, take a look at the company books, which show him strapped for ready cash. His counter offer is $52,000, which Raimy reluctantly accepts.

While Harry buys the time he says he needs to get the money together, he begins to push back: Finds the identities of the other two blackmailers and begins driving wedges of suspicion between them, playing on their mutual mistrust of one another...

... just as Raimy begins to wonder if, faced with a reduced payoff, he really wants to share?

Scheider is a solidly convincing pleasure to watch as Harry, but the real standout of the film is John Glover, as sneering, wise-cracking, black-hilarious Raimy. A raconteur of Sleaze. Makes me once again regret the cancellation of Sci-Fi Network's 'Brimstone" in which he stole the show playing a gregarious, engaging-even-though-you-know-it's-wrong Satan. Raimy torments & taunts Harry, (whom he envies & seriously underestimates) derisively calling him "Sport". He easily outmanouvers his accomplices: schmoe porn-theatre owner Leo Franks (plump, pasty Robert Trebor), and even the lethal muscle of the partnership, Bobby Shy (Clarence Williams III, exuding sociopathic menace in every frame).

The climax sees Raimy trying to take all he can from Harry & destroy/defile the things he can't steal.

Gratuitous guilty pleasure: A party at Raimy's house with half the guests 80's pornstars. Honey Wilder & a young Amber Lynn topless & making out; blonde bombshell Lorrie Lovett; Sharon Mitchell; Barbara Dare; Erica Boyer; and Cara Lott. All as alluring and comfortable in front of the camera as any of their straight counterparts. (Most pornstars can't act? Take a look at almost any 70's or 80's Hollywood film & tell me you don't see as bad or worse in the minor roles) Question: Honey Wilder isn't in the imdb credits. Is one of the cast list "party goer's" Wilder working under her own name or another aka?

Good violent, prurient fun.



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