Film noir: your favourites

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

Ann Savage in Detour is amazing!!

Ride the Pink Horse would make a good pair with Flamingo Road

Detour is one of my favorite films of all time. It perfectly captures the vibe of a “racy” paperback purchased at a seedy small town bus station sometime in the Great Depression.

watched So Dark the Night last night based on this thread - came close to switching it off a few times in the first half, but the second half does indeed pay off as advertised itt, some great expressionist touches, particularly loved the shot where Steven Geray is at his desk & suddenly the foreground light disappears except for horror-movie underlighting on his face. Fun discovery.

SPOILER so Dark the night SPOILER is really the dumb film that the twin brother in adaptation is writing

yup. also, it is oedipus rex.

I'm reading James Harvey's Movie Love in the Fifties, and in advance of the Big Heat chapter, I watched it for the first time in ages. Great film. You have to put up with the domestic scenes between Ford and his wife for a few minutes--I realize their importance, but they're the Susie-Dallas scenes in Sweet Smell of Success, the anachronistic wholesomeness that belongs to some other movie. Lots of great lines otherwise--I'd forgotten Gloria Grahame's famous line when she walks into Ford's hotel room for the first time--and Dave Bannion very much belongs to the Ethan/Scottie line of '50s male obsessives who are borderline psychotic.

The Underworld Story is sorta misleadingly titled, in that its basically a proto-Ace in the Hole with a gangster character who plays a pivotal supporting role. It's a good one, though, thanks mostly to a solid supporting cast, including Herbert Marshall as a conflicted rich patriarch, Gar Miller as his creepy son, and the great Howard Da Silva as the aforementioned gangster. Dan Duryea is typically scuzzy as in the lead, and the credits assure me that Alan Hale Jr. is in there somewhere as a hired goon, but I didn't catch him. There is some awkward racial stuff that Eddie Muller explains was the product of director Cy Endfield (who also made the equally terrific noir The Sound of Fury the same year) wanting to inject some social commentary into the piece, only to have the studio intervene and demand the casting of a white actress as the "negro" maid charged with murder so the film would play in the south. It's...distracting, to say the least.

How in the world had I never seen The Big Combo before last night. Dark, brutal, and perfectly cast.

Love that movie. John Hoyt as the world weary Swedish antiques dealer is a highlight.

My favourite half of a film noir is the first half of Dark Passage

Yeah, that blew my mind when I caught it on afternoon tv as a kid.

thanks for the big combo rec. had never heard of it and was amazed by how good it was! Was really surprised at how little standing it has, seemed a lot better than a lot of much more canonical stuff from the period, great performances and some really artful sequences. Helene Stanton as Rita was wonderful and I looked her up on imdb and she basically didn't appear in anything else?

Yeah watched the big combo after reading this thread and really loved it. Gun crazy next I guess

I watched Preminger's Whirlpool and Where the Sidewalk Ends recently, I was surprised to find out the former is more well known/well regarded. WTSE could use much more Gene Tierney but it kind of got me at the end with the turn in Dana Andrews' character.

The extras in the Eureka disc of The Big Combo (in the Film Noir box) spend a lot of time bickering about whether the movie has an auteurist vision or whether ppl trying to say that are evidence of auteurism gone wrong and that it's actually more of a triumph of a lot of different players. The story of how it got rediscovered - UK repertory cinema got a hold of a copy in the 1970's and played the hell out of it - also entertaining.

been patching up my noir blind spots. The Big Heat! amazing! Kiss Me Deadly! slightly overrated beyond the ending!

also, Gun Crazy benefits tremendously from knowing nothing about it when you start in.

I thought the same about Kiss Me Deadly at first, but check out this video about how much Robert Aldrich fucking HATED Mickey Spillane... besides the Cold War horror that runs thru the movie and explodes at the end, Aldrich and his co-writer saw Mike Hammer (who was in a bunch of Spillane novels iirc) as a fascist thug, and Meeker's performance shows that. jamming the guy's fingers in the drawer, I mean his cynicism and cruelty are emphasized over his values (if any) and his mission and his effectiveness in it, which is basically none, the bomb goes off... the most obvious nod towards this is the backwards opening credits. also how Cloris Leachman catching her breath eventually just sounds like aroused moaning.

One of the great things about KMD is just how amped up it is pushing against both the production code and Spillane/Hammer fan service expectations.

Panic In The Streets has become quite timely.

yeah I admired how bleak and cruel it was, I just didn't find it as riveting on a plot/character level as some of the others I've been watching.

flappy, was there supposed to be a video in yr post? :)

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