Film noir: your favourites

In any case, frankiemachine, I would have thought you would have mentioned The Man With The Golden Arm, although I guess that's not a noir per se.

common '50s noir police descrip: "white American male"

Brick was a more accurate translation of just about every Raymond Chandler book I've read then any Film Noir I've seen, including say, The Big Sleep or Murder, My Sweet.

I'm such a dumbass for only now realizing it refers to the shadows in the film.

How? Be specific. Give examples.

(though similarly, my favorite Hammett adaptation is Miller's Crossing)

Anyone seen The Girl in Lover's Lane? I watched it as an MST3K episode, but it seemed like a really successful small town noir.

Oh yeah, I saw that on TCM last year during the Mitchum festival.
-- Sons Of The Redd Desert

Actually, I haven't seen that one, but it looks pretty good. I was talking about Angel Face, which is mentioned in the very first post of this thread.

- House Of Bamboo (Robert Stack & Robert Ryan in post-WWII gangster Tokyo. Sam Fuller directs)
- Scandal Sheet
- Nightmare Alley (Tyrone Power as a carny mentalist)

I found the dialogue in Brick, like Millers Crossing, totally stylized in a way similar to the books, they also shared the protaganist as punching bag cliche so common in the books. There was just something about the way the lead in Brick kept being knocked out, then seeing just a hint of light, then passing out again, then waking up somewhere else, then getting beat up, that to me represented the feeling I get from the Chandler books. Murder, My Sweat is one vintage noir that does this, of course, with it's expressionistic passing out sequence. The complicated plot that really doesn't matter so much, crime lords and their henchmen, the playing of sides against each other. All classic pulp fiction/film noir things.

"I’d hate to think of your having a smashed fender or something while you’re not, uh, fully covered."

It's still amazing that they could get away with some of this stuff considering the times.

Neo-noir can also be fab.

Is this the one about the athelete with really stinky perspiration?

I second the recs for Detour and Long Goodbye because they seem to not get as much respect as they deserve.

This is madness, surely? "The Thin Man" may be a Hammet adaptation, but it's still basically a screwball comedy where the main characters solve crimes!

Are these as good as that warner bros gangster box set that they resemble?

Not exactly what you're asking for, but it's in my bookmarks.

check it out

if you've read The Big Sleep you've read Chandler, basically -- but Farewell, My Lovely is my personal favorite Marlowe book.

I've also had the novel Out of the Past is based on -- Build My Gallows High -- forever, but haven't read it (tho I've read that Daniel Mainwaring's adaptation of his own book is judged an improvement).

HA, "loathsome." Yeah, Chandler was pretty irredeemably sour, but you know, Marlowe as chivalrous Arthurian knight in morally bankrupt world and all that; he's the most interesting character in pulp fiction, 'cause he's entirely self-loathing, never shoots or fucks anything, really a sort of pathetic repressed moralist masochist, he's as painful to watch as an early Woody Allen protagonist (impotent but for his cleverness, which just gets him beat up repeatedly), except he gets less satisfaction from this terrible modern society, 'cause Allen protagonists always get laid.

Cornell Woolrich is fun too.

The novels are distinguished by a combination of the hard fiction style of the late forties and a pervasive and morbid sense of psychology, in most cases pathological (psychiatrists and general discussions of insanity pervade the works). The protagonists are subject to extraordinary situations which provoke intense feelings of distress and mental agony, communicated to the reader with a lucidity that makes his storytelling logic surrealistic, fantastic, persuasive and disturbing at once.