Film noir: your favourites

Triggered by the name-that-still thread, I was looking at some images from Force of Evil last week; fantastic.

http://wondersinthedark.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/filmnotebook-forceofevil_b.jpg

David Thomson reviews a re-release today and says it's better than On the Waterfront:

http://www.tnr.com/article/film/105544/david-thomson-force-of-evil

I'd be surprised if I liked it that much, but I do need to see this.

It's really great.

But I don't think of it when I think of the most expressionistic cinematography. It's more about the script and characters.

I watched a neat one last night (actually 3AM, damn insomnia) -- Without Warning!

Quiet, unobtrusive LA citizen Carl Martin picks up look-alikes for his estranged blonde wife and murders them with garden shears.

http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRrfv0k0yZi0l_c9ezLmJqMMTx5tcSScjX3cV8qSqgjWs2wg-y9qhO1srXVqw

Actually more police prodecural than straight noir, but what made it better than average for me was location footage of a long-gone Hollywood, including many scenes shot around Chavez Ravine, a ramshackle Latino neighborhood in the hills above the then-under-construction freeway system. I didn't know the story of this area until I researched this morning; I found it fascinating.

All bulldozed for Dodger Stadium. Still a contentious issue.

This is a nice piece; great pics and a salient quote:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2009/05/eric-avila-is-an-associate-professor-of-chicano-studies-history-and-urban-planning-at-ucla-his-book-popular-culture-in-the.html

the city reneged on its promise to build housing for poor people because government-subsidized housing was "socialistic," then turned around and subsidized (Walter) O'Malley's bid to build a stadium in the area... Many Angelenos saw that as pure hypocrisy (and it very much reminds me of current accusations of "socialism" in the U.S.)

Force of Evil is great, much less sentimental than Waterfront, no sop-to-the-audience finish.

think I can only catch one of two lesser-known Siodmaks at Film Forum tonight... probably Christmas Holiday, w/ Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly! Yes, it's a noir, apparently!

http://www.filmforum.org/movies/more/the_dark_mirror_christmas_holi

Thanks for the alert!

This really turned out to be an excellent double feature by the way, both Christmas Holiday and The Dark Mirror, with Olivia de Havilland and Thomas Mitchell.

My wife, who's not much of a movie buff, is for some reason really interested in the Noir City festival. What should we see? Kiss Me Deadly is probably at the top of my list (I haven't seen any of them); The Window looks intriguing, but we've already got plans the night it's screening.

Besides KMD, I would recommend On Dangerous Ground, White Heat, Phantom Lady, Caught.

Yeah, those look good, thanks!

What Dr Morbius said, plus This Gun for Hire

glass orchid

sorry, conflated glass key and no orchid for miss blandish

Is No Orchid any good? Never seen it. Glass Key was cool.

no, it's not any good, that's what it's famous for.

Ha, right--I knew the book had that rep, didn't know about the film.

video essay on Chandler adaptations:

http://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.de/2012/10/hard-boiled-studies-of-raymond.html

Just watched Blast of Silence, partly for its Christmas setting. When it was done, one of my friends said, "Well that was a fuckin' gangster movie." Pretty amazing film. So much in it that could be ridiculous and kind of is -- especially the sneering narration -- but it's so uncompromising and flinty straight to the end that you can't laugh it off.

Anthony Mann's Side Street makes really amazing use of NYC locations and a great cast of supporting players. MGM was clearly trying to cash in on Naked City's success of the preceding year, but I think this one's better.

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, July 14, 2010 11:34 PM (1 year ago)

I forgot to second this two years ago.

― The Unbassful Serpent (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 14 May 2012 00:50 (7 months ago) Permalink

Thirded. I just stumbled across this one last night, it's really great.

It seems I rated Blast of Silence five stars on Netflix, but I don't remember watching it. Will have to re-screen.

I had never seen Dark Passage before last night. The POV camera gimmick, Bogey's dream sequence, nonsensical plot, odd supporting characters, beuatiful San Fran location shooting... even if this isn't maybe a great movie, it's great fun!

Michael Atkinson:

Auteurism has encouraged us to think of a director’s filmography as a whole, but within it each film is measured by how beautifully or not it expresses that director’s aesthetic personality.

Noir isn’t like that. It often doesn’t matter who directs which film, what studio made it, or even how “good” each individually is. If we’ve learned anything from catching up with the genre—and I expect to still be seeing “new” noirs made between 1945 and 1962 into my dotage—it’s that each noir is not an individual piece of work, and shouldn’t be diminished by being seen that way. Rather, it’s a zone you enter into, a gallery of bastards and luckless fools, of urban lostness and night streets. It’s bigger than both of us, bigger, certainly, than the often-too-precious romance between a director and his auteurist fan. You go there and find what you can. Simply, noirs are best considered as a whole, as a hive-mind bum’s rush, America whiskey-talking to itself after an innocence-torching war and during a social moment that was supposed to be bliss and was instead empty and scarred. Each noir itself is not equivalent to a painting or a symphony, but all of them together are a cathedral, the massive and chastening temple of the mid-century American Dream betting the Devil its heart, and losing.

This is why noir-based fiction, like David Thomson’s novel “Suspects” and Martin Rowson’s outrageous Eliot-meets-Chandler graphic novel lark “The Waste Land,” come at this particular cultural eruption folding scores of films and characters and references into their narratives. It may be the one page in cinema history where it’s not only permissible but desirable to mix the films and storylines and character arcs together, commingling the experiences of Robert Ryan’s various bigots and Charles McGraw’s various trenchcoated badasses and Yvonne DeCarlo’s various vampire-tramps into one midnight stumble into the shadowlands. Still, that doesn’t mean that noirs are or can be homogenized, or that their use of familiar genre tropes are what’s interesting about them. Each noir has a layer, a dose of beleaguered humanity, to add to the larger story.

http://blog.sundancenow.com/weekly-columns/viva-mabuse-22-noiristan

Wow. Well put. Have you ever read that one book by Geoffrey O'Brien where each chapter is the retelling of a dreamlike uber-film based on one particular genre? The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century

I have not

I remember it being an evocation of something like what Atkinson is describing.

holy shit at the final scene of Kiss Me Deadly

Just skimming through this thread I noticed Devil In A Blue Dress gets mentioned but no One False Move?? Surely not. Like the look of Side Street.

Where is the love for Phil Karlson and Kansas City Confidential?

Thanks for all the compliments about Gene Tierney, my great aunt!

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lz3wmmSvHn1qbsbnoo1_500.png

she was great!

Kudos to you and your gene pool.

I tend to forget she's in Advise and Consent; I wish she'd lived long enough to play these tart roles.

sexy auntie

Watched The Big Sleep again this week, and can say that it is definitely *not* one of my fave noirs, though I don't really have any very interesting reason for not liking it all that much. The story is, as many have noted, a muddle, and watching it is mostly a case of killing time between the handful of classic scenes or lines.

The guy who intro'd it on TCM (forget name) actually dismissed its status as one of the great noirs, opting to think of it as a particularly atmospheric screwball comedy instead. That works.

Kudos to you and your gene pool.
― Pastel City Slang (James Redd and the Blecchs)

Ha! Good one, Pastel, and thanks everyone for the nice words. I really only got to know her when I was a kid and some as a teenager before she passed away, but she was a terrific person, very funny and nice as can be. She had some rough times in her life (her memoir "Self-Portrait" is pretty good and tells all about it) but was very happy in her final years.

Will have to read that.

After watching Kansas City Confidential and various Allan Dwan films this weekend have to say John Payne as ambiguous hero is really growing on me.

That's fantastic, Iago.

that is such a great photo of your great aunt, iago. is that from a film still or is it a promo shot?

production still

Continued thanks, all. Treeship, that is a 1947(?) portrait by George Hurrell...pretty stunning picture!

I am scanning some family albums this summer and there are a few very cool snapshots of her that I will post soon if you all are interested

Risking overkill but wishing I posted the Hurrell above in color...OK, no more!

http://25.media.tumblr.com/5effbd945acdb479e812355d05143a05/tumblr_mp1gggArKW1rkh6xoo1_1280.jpg

Caught a 35mm screening of The Blue Dahlia tonight. Raymond Chandler script. Alan Ladd & Veronica Lake. HUGH BEAUMONT. William Bendix was a creepy looking dude. Finally came to dvd last year. Film only mentioned once in this thread.

That's the one where William Bendix forgets stuff, right? I've seen it a couple of times, but many years ago.

Yeah, he's got a plate in his head making him mad every time he hears that "Monkey Music", cursing the day Michael Nesmith was born.

Watched Pushover (1954) last night (Fred MacMurray and "introducing Kim Novak.") Really good, if somewhat derivative of Double Indemnity, and also sharing the spying-across-the apartment-courtyard motif of Rear Window which was released the same year. It has enough twists and turns and double-crosses to satisfy.

yeah, that one's OK.