Film noir: your favourites

And Kiss Me Deadly?

And Gun Crazy?

(Alfred tells us all to shut up)

at least Devil in a Blue Dress is in the mix, I'd take out The Limey and add One False Move instead.

Big Sleep raised my eyebrow the most but maybe it's not fully noir. if that's the rationale then maybe In a Lonely Place raises my eyebrow the most.

It's Night AND the City, not in the city.

too many color films

Ossessione is much more of a noir than Maltese Falcon, ditto many Melvilles.

Huston's most blatant noir was Asphalt Jungle, and as Orson Welles pointed out, Kubrick then left him in the dust with The Killing.

Force of Evil is not #17 fer chrissakes

No "Sunset Boulevard" because you dont think its a noir or just dont rate it?

I love The Late Show.

Positive reinforcement, people.

Good point. But feel like whatever I might have had to say probably already said upthread somewhere.

Alfred is sentenced to ten hours of Robert Ryan noirs for leaving all of them out

Eddie Muller shakes his head

Gloria Grahame season at BFI Southbank

Running concurrently alongside BFI Thriller, BFI Southbank will also present a season of films celebrating the irresistible and alluring Gloria Grahame. The season will tie in with the release of Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (Paul McGuigan, 2017), about the passionate relationship between British actor Peter Turner and the Academy Award-winning actress, starring Annette Bening and Jamie Bell. Graham was most famous for her femmes fatales roles in films such as In a Lonely Place (1950), The Big Heat (1953), Sudden Fear (1952) and Human Desire (1954), all of which will be screened alongside non-thriller titles she starred in, shining a spotlight on her formidable talent

Big Sleep raised my eyebrow the most but maybe it's not fully noir. if that's the rationale then maybe In a Lonely Place raises my eyebrow the most.

Saw In a Lonely Place for the first time just this week. Was pretty disappointed tbh, maybe because I loved the book so much. But the Dix character's hate and rage wasn't explained v well I think, so it was just lots of him being a dick to his girlfriend. A shame.

The book is being reissued on NYRB classics.

was reprinted in the Femme Fatales series almost 15 yrs ago, which is the copy I have. much more nuance than the film.

not read the book. Dix's hatefulness isn't explained in the film - he's just presented as a dick and i think that's enough in that context. he is the film's villain, whatever else happens, dunno that i'd want there to be "mitigating" circumstances

Fuckin villains.

i think his nature adds a layer of irony to the title :)

I will take "The Asphalt Jungle" over "The Killing" any day.

Alfred, I applaud the fact you put the great "Devil In A Blue Dress" on your list. I watch that about 2-3 times a year.

List needs Melville, though.

Think one has to disallow French, otherwise...

Oh, but he included Diabolique so...

ian, he's a desperate middle-aged screenwriter. 'nuff said

The book is a whole diff story, also excellent; read it for the first time last year.

Gloria Grahame's marriage to Nick Ray was falling apart at the time, wasn't it

Yes, I think she took up w/ his teenage son around then...?

Bogart's Dix is an antihero, not a villain. one pities him.

Alfred is sentenced to ten hours of Robert Ryan noirs for leaving all of them out

I wish I could be sentenced to this, and have the time to carry it out

maybe yer supposed to pity dix but... nah, he's... a dick.

People often cite it as Bogart's deepest performance. You can see the pain and self-hatred.

Think it was Last (x) Movies where I had a good conversation about Nightmare Alley, but might be too spoiler-y for some---but from the same thread (didn't know about this one, it's great):

Act of Violence---1948, dir. Fred Zinneman, starring Robert Ryan, Van Heflin, Janet Leigh, Phyllis Thaxter, and Mary Astor ( In her autobiography, A Life on Film, Astor recalled filming her scenes for Act of Violence while simultaneously shooting Little Women: "For two weeks or so I was with the Zinneman company playing a sleazy, aging whore, with Van Heflin and Robert Ryan. It was such a contrast that it was stimulating - and reviving....---thanks TCM!). Shit you can't take back, no matter how much you pay, in a star-spangled suburban way or otherwise---crisis of the intractable, locked gears, film fucking noir. (I got a bit tired of the earnest running around that Leigh, Astor, and Thaxter have to do, but the guys do it too, in a grimmer way, all in the maze.)

― dow, Thursday, July 6, 2017 5:11 PM
Also liked the three versions of Postman I've seen, was disappointed by Double Indemnity, despite being a Stanwyck stan.

Agree about Bogart, and reminds me I still need to read this, which I got when it first came out:

Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Sarah Weinman ed., Library of America)
Laura, Vera Caspary | The Horizontal Man, Helen Eustis | In a Lonely Place, Dorothy B. Hughes | The Blank Wall, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding | Mischief, Charlotte Armstrong | The Blunderer, Patricia Highsmith | Beast in View, Margaret Millar | Fools’ Gold, Dolores Hitchens

Laura the book is camp as hell. In a Lonely Place, The Blank Wall, The Blunderer and Beast in View are all great.

People often cite it as Bogart's deepest performance. You can see the pain and self-hatred.

totally agree. antihero, villain, that's just semantics, i wan't really trying to put an easy label on the character. but the film draws the conclusion that he's probably capable of murder, and in the end Laurel has to escape him. it's not an accident that the murderer himself is so tangential to the story.

anyway before ian repped for the book yesterday i was already thinking i'd like to read it, will have to get round to that.

Forgetting The Big Sleep was an oversight. I should've had Melville too, maybe Ossessione. As for Ryan, I hope y'all don't have Crossfire in mind (The Set-Up and On Dangerous Ground, however).

Ophuls' Caught too

Clearly I need to check out more Ophuls. Clash By Night seems spiritually noir, kind of a sun-and-moonlight, healthy sea air Nightmare Alley: Stanwyck finally comes back because she has nowhere else to go, and when Ryan sees her again, neither does he, not that he was all healthy before. Her husband is delusional, Uncle Billy is silly with demented malice, on a spree.

I'll take The Reckless Moment over Caught in this context.

me too

no one (since alfred's revive) has mentioned Night Moves -- I think that's a great movie. nice to see it on your list, alfred.

Alfred's list needs more Sam Fuller on it. House Of Bamboo at least.

that's true!

I may write a sequel tbh

That's more like it!

Night Moves is coming out on blu-ray at the end of this month

I just need to call anything as '70s as Night Noves neo-noir.

btw i don't think i've ever seen the R Ryan-starring Act of Violence:

http://www.eddiemuller.com/top25noir.html

Caught that one on TCM a couple of years ago, it's good.

Actually saw Eddie Muller once at Film Forum. He was introducing The Prowler, which he said he often watched with James Ellroy.