Film noir: your favourites

Please fix the director credit for The Big Sleep ASAP

I would have preferred Huston's The Big Sleep tbh

Watch it, Buster, or you'll end up like your friend Joe Brody.

has Alfred really seen any of these?

Think maybe we just guilt-tripped him into listing them, sight unseen

has Alfred really seen any of these?

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius),

oh come now

Big Sleep still has RONG DUDE in the director's chair

Also, wish I could post video of George Sanders as King Charles II in Forever Amber saying "Come, children!" to his dogs.

http://filmfanatic.org/reviews/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Forever-Amber-Sanders.png

You might as well have posted The Maltese Falcon, dir. Roy Del Ruth

Appealing review of the NYRB edition of In A Lonely Place:
http://www.npr.org/2017/08/22/545261350/if-you-want-groundbreaking-noir-try-looking-in-a-lonely-place

Saw Gun Crazy for the second time tonight. I can appreciate why it's famous, and for sure some of it is visually striking (including especially the first robbery). Tempering that for me is 10- or 15-minute escape at the end, which drags a bit (redeemed somewhat by some poetic cinematography right at the end--reminded me of Night of the Hunter), and John Dall, who isn't much of an actor and gets the film's worst lines ("Why do you kill people? Why can't you let them live?"). Peggy Cummins feels original. I knew I knew the name Morris Carnovsky, but I had to look him up to figure out from where: he plays James Caan's grandfather in The Gambler. Possible allusions in other films: "He'd kill us if he had the chance" in The Conversation (Cummins has almost an identical line), and the overhead shot inside the Library of Congress in All the President's Men (very similar to a shot of Dall and Cummins planning their final robbery).

http://criminalbackgroundrobertodiernasmoviereviewblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/gun-crazy-swamp-robert-odierna-sheriff.jpg?w=700

pretty incredible film, i think. and when Peggy Cummins spins around to give this look of glee as they make their escape, it raises the hair on your arms.

https://thehannibal8.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/gun-crazy-direction1.png?w=500

Don't sleep on the '47 Technicolor Desert Fury starring Lizabeth Scott, John Hodiak and Burt Lancaster but stolen by Mary Astor and Wendell Corey. Queer as hell. On a Kino Lorber DVD release from February.

Because of an ILX POLL, recently learned that Burt Bacharach had a thing for and then with Lizabeth Scott.

I'm squeezing in the last few Columbia Noirs from the package leaving CC tomorrow, and watched Experiment in Terror this morning, really enjoyed it. I had a vague childhood memory of a creepy movie where Ross Martin made a woman undress...now I know which one it was.

Somebody posted on the Criterion thread what’s going away in future months but not what’s going away this month so I don’t really know what to binge watch:(

https://www.criterionchannel.com/leaving-june-30

Thanks!

man, Robert Siodmak's Cry of the City is something else, just fantastic. Wasn't that hot on Detour but figured it was minor given the runtime. don't know if COTC is a new restoration but it looked great. Looking forward to Criss Cross.

def recommend the traumatized WWII vet noir of Act of Violence -- Ryan, Heflin, Zinnemann (best?), Mary Astor as a worn skid row lush.

Seeing Fuller’s Underworld USA tonight.

Anyone who works in insurance should watch Double Indemnity and book it to their CPD.
(Um, that may be an insurance-specific reference)

Finally got around to The Maltese Falcon. Passé maybe but absolutely terrific. I also enjoyed The Big Sleep and Cape Fear, no real misses yet in the selections from here.

I've also enjoyed basically everything Dashiell Hammett wrote although a bit inconsistent. I tried some other more pulp writers but wasn't so impressed. James Ellroy is apparently kind of horrible though, he seems to think the way to get the most authentic mood for California noir is to slip in a lot of racial slurs. I was surprised to find out Hammett had radical left sympathies.

Noir Alley on TCM has been a pretty fun time for us (if DVR clogging).

yes! i love it but i forget to check in regularly. he has some real gems though.

seems to think the way to get the most authentic mood for California noir is to slip in a lot of racial slurs

racism in the 20th century LAPD? surely an outrageous slur

d’oh: slur smear

I was surprised to find out Hammett had radical left sympathies

well, he was Lillian Hellman's paramour for awhile

Hammett seems to have been radicalized by his experiences as a Pinkerton strikebreaker:

http://socialismtoday.org/archive/151/hammett.html

anyone seen Ride the Pink Horse?

I've seen Play The Pink Oboe

I have. Solid, essential Montgomery.

Unfortunately Hammett, like many CP members, loyally followed the ‘party line’, dictated by the Stalinist bureaucracy that had removed all vestiges of workers’ democracy in Russia. He publicly supported the Moscow purge trials that were used by the Stalinists to attack Leon Trotsky and other opponents of Stalinism...

[Under McCarthy,] the court sentenced him to six months in jail. Hammett offered no defence. After his release, he was blacklisted. His books that had sold in their hundreds of thousands were removed from public libraries. Screenings of film versions stopped. He became a non-person, dependent on the support of a few loyal friends for accommodation and food in his final years, finally dying from lung cancer in January 1961.

Interesting stuff, Brad C. I wish he would have written more directly about his experiences with the Anaconda strike but maybe he felt that had zero chance of publication. Apparently early in his career he had aspirations to more literary fiction.

racism in the 20th century LAPD? surely an outrageous slur

Touché but with Ellroy the impression is that he was actually expressing his own prejudices. He's a pretty right wing guy, whatever you make of that. Imo any kind of 'true crime' fiction that adheres to the lies of conservative American white supremacist leanings is deeply misguided and not really worth much consideration otherwise. But I did enjoy LA Confidential if I'm honest.

As for watching I don't DVR, I t0rrent tbh.

Ellroy definitely revels in inhabiting and creating voices for pieces of shit in the 1950s novels, but Rampart shows he's aware of the endemic racist problems in the LAPD, and that the earlier books are not simply a reflection of good times for white men that he wishes were still around

(I tapped out on the books after The Kelley Deal Cold 6000 so this is the only thing I've encountered by him set less than 38 years ago)

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers is a weird one -- that bifurcated structure, with Stanwyck taking a back seat to Van Heflin (never better) in screen time -- but I liked it a lot. Weird to see Kirk Douglas playing such a weak character (in his debut), but he's good.

(and wow, that girl playing young Stanwyck is indeed creepy and unforgettable)

Yeah, it rocks.

Watched I Wake Up Screaming (1941) this morning, which doesn't appear to be terribly well known for reasons I can sort of understand: it feels like its still figuring out the rules of the genre, so there are plenty of detours into comedy and romance, but the uncertainty ultimately works in the picture's favour. Great supporting work, especially from a menacing Laird Cregar (who I didn't know before), and a genuinely puzzling use of the an instrumental version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" throughout, acting as a sort of ironic counterpoint to the story.

Not a favorite--too slight, ending goes soft--but watching André De Toth's Crime Wave this morning, I got a fair bit of amusement out of how much Ted de Corsia (as the main heavy) resembles Ted Cruz:

https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w600_and_h900_bestv2/koshCsy9aAqgwH5E15CyNS4J3VZ.jpg

I love Crime Wave because it was filmed in my old neighborhood in Glendale. I used to live a couple doors away from the pet hospital that Charles Bronson walks into here:
http://tropicostation.blogspot.com/2008/09/glendale-on-film-crime-wave-1952.html

I like those kind of discoveries. I watched Kubrick’s The Killing a few days ago, hadn’t seen it before and didn’t realize that part of it was filmed at the former Bay Meadows racetrack in San Mateo

I urge folks with the Criterion Channel to check out So Dark The Night. Part of the Columbia noir series, although its French village setting is not very noir to me. Directed by Joseph Lewis (Gun Crazy) it features beautiful cinematography for a B film, charming acting by a mostly unknown cast, and a plot that gets weirder than the leisurely first half would lead you to believe.

dave kehr's summary: https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/so-dark-the-night/Film?oid=2800203

I watched that one last year on the first go-round for Columbia Noir, it's good.

Just watched So Dark The Night (it's on YouTube): enjoyable but minor. For most of it I was thinking this isn't noir, it's murder mystery... but then the twisty end gets pretty noir.

One aspect that struck me is that it's set in France, and everyone's presumably speaking French all the time although it's English in the movie, and they signal this by everyone speaking in outrageous comedy French accents. This used to be standard cinema practice, but fell out of favour at some point, quite a bit later on, maybe the 70s or 80s? Are there examples beyond that? I think what took that place is instead of foreign accents signifying foreign languages, English accents (as opposed to American) became signifiers of foreign language. But I'm not sure that's done so much now, the suspension of disbelief is not so possible any more. You have to go with subtitles, or you have to forego any attempt to signify "foreign" and just go with a naturalistic American accent

Finally saw the Scorsese favorite Murder by Contract… lean and mean, just like Vince Edwards.

Detour is a wild ride. The Vera character is just nuts. In some scenes, Ann Savage looks glamorously sexy, and in others she looks like a rat that just crawled out of its hole. She's a two-face!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Ann_Savage_in_Detour.jpg
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/--BZFf_JP3w4/XHp-djxGK7I/AAAAAAAARVc/sNi5Pge5mkkxuSE95jPZ1kpwCE-D4jL0ACLcBGAs/s1600/Detour.jpg

i didn't think much of detour (and i was excited to watch); it seemed like more of an experiment/accomplishment in economy than a "great" film

I'd advise catching Ann Savage's performance from a Guy Maddin film about 60 years later