Film noir: your favourites

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? :)

xp

Yes and now I can’t find it 😭

I liked The Big Combo a lot (with that one particularly amazing moment about 3/4 of the way in) but found the lead a little too punchable.

This is a very good list I thought, a season of women's picture noirs. I'm very interested in this overlap and me and my boyfriend often talk about the large contiguities between these two genres and I wonder if anyone has written extensively about it?

Sorry, list is https://docfilms.uchicago.edu/dev/calendar/2019/winter/fridays.shtml

Particularly intrigued by the insane-sounding fuller picture from 1964 that I have never heard of

the naked kiss bangs. it went public domain for a while so there are free/shitty/direct from VHS copies floating around that are varying shades of watchable - i think it's worth paying to see a good/criterion version

sudden fear is also dope

Yah sudden fear is amazing. I watched it on YouTube once (mistitled 'who is the cast and who is the mouse' out something) and was so delighted when I realised Gloria Graham was in it!

Both ophuls films are amazing, my favourite bel geddes performance and my favourite Joan Bennett performance. The reckless moment is the classic of this genre for me fuck Mildred pierce

The Naked Kiss is awesome, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

THE STAR with Bette Davis & Sterling Hayden is the one that immediately springs to mind. Same year as Sudden Fear, Joan won over Bette I think

+ FLAMINGO ROAD !!!!!!

other great ones I can think of:

Leave Her to Heaven
Not Wanted
Don't Bother to Knock
Another Man's Poison (not as good as Now, Voyager but noir & lots of overlap/same crew)
Crime of Passion (minor Stanwyck, decent Hayden)
Daisy Kenyon
Lured
The Petrified Forest
Lured
Dead Ringer
Strait-Jacket
Black Widow [1954]
Thirst & Dreams by Bergman

thats a typo Lured isn't *that* good

Joan is the star of the genre for sure.

What is interesting i guess is how the women's noir sees the immediate post-war curtailment of women's social positions as a landscape of moral hazard. It is the moral ambiguity of this transitional moment of the late 40s that animates the peril of these films.

Joan was perfectly positioned for this, she was always playing a woman threatened to be cast back to wherever she came from (the bride wore red, the women, there are better examples from the 30s but I can't think of them this instant...). Her hardened stoicism in Mildred pierce and similar seems borne of something inherent in her earlier star image.

Marked woman is too early to be noir but feels like an early example of this.

On dangerous ground always feels like a very dark Sirk film to me

Ida lupino is Jane Wyman in magnificent obsession

IS Jane Wyman IN

daisy kenyon is one i had a very emotional connection/reaction to.