Film noir: your favourites

me too, but i bought the film noir collection! all great films. love alan ladd in these.

The Maltese Falcon, which I could watch on a loop forever

It's nearly perfect.

I got to see most of the Noir City festival earlier this year - looks like they are playing Chicago later this week. Opening night was a double-bill of 2 newspaper noir classics: Deadline USA and Scandal Sheet. The Big Sleep is the best ever though.

I think Night and the City is my favorite movie, noir or otherwise. Picked up a Chandler collection from the library and so far it's fantastic. Never read him before.

Chandler is probably my favorite writer ever. Everyone needs to get to The Long Goodbye eventually.

btw just watched Red Rock West last night, it was a fun little western noir with nick cage and jt walsh and dennis hopper all hamming it up. it felt like a showtime adaptation of a jim thompson novel.

Oh yeah, I got to see In A Lonely Place last Friday. Not quite the film I was expecting it to be, but a good film nontheless. What an ending!

Movie Madness's film noir collection was like crack to me when I was studying in Portland, OR. The bulk of the most choice noirs have been mentioned already.

A few which haven't that immediately come to mind:

Ride the Pink Horse (massively underrated because it hasn't got a DVD release - would make a great double bill w/ Touch of Evil)
Sunset Blvd (obviously not at all underrated but nobody's listed it yet - do you guys not consider it noir?)
Touchez pas au grisbi (Jean Gabin classic, also see Pépé le Moko)
On Dangerous Ground (Robert Ryan was never better)

Also very good:

His Kind of Woman (Mitchum and Russell reunited!)
Kiss of Death (Widmark pushes infirm down stairs)
Sweet Smell of Success (badass Burt Lancaster)
Criss Cross (probably Siodmak's best)

The Narrow Margin is highly rated by some, but it's not in the top tier for me.

Sui generis but essential and noirish in their own ways:

Johnny Guitar
Vertigo

FYI, my absolute top four:

Out of the Past
Touch of Evil
The Killing
Kiss Me Deadly

with noirs i always get mixed up with titles, all the noirs blend into one for me.

for example, what is the noir with a guy half-dead and dying at the beginning, relating his story in some kind of office, maybe even a tape-recorder (nah?) a typewriter hmm. i am sure it's famous.

Ludo, sounds like it might be the previously mentioned awesome classic Double Indemnity, but there are a lot of noirs that have that sort of structure.

anyone seen Detour? I think its a great one that doesn't seem to get mentioned often.

oops, i just ctrl+Fed Detour and i see its already been mentioned a few times...

Ludo, sounds like it might be the previously mentioned awesome classic Double Indemnity, but there are a lot of noirs that have that sort of structure.

exactly. i think that's the one though. it was one of the first noirs i saw. (ah it's a dictaphone!)

for example, what is the noir with a guy half-dead and dying at the beginning, relating his story in some kind of office, maybe even a tape-recorder (nah?) a typewriter hmm. i am sure it's famous.

DOA has the dying guy sitting in an office with a police officer explaining how he came to be dying.

for example, what is the noir with a guy half-dead and dying at the beginning, relating his story in some kind of office, maybe even a tape-recorder (nah?) a typewriter hmm. i am sure it's famous.

Double Indemnity?

Absolutely it is. Double Indemnity is one of the top five noirs ever. Probably my #1.

Sorry, "films noir."

Ebert is very good on it: "Standing back from the film and what it expects us to think, I see them engaged not in romance or theft, but in behavior. They're intoxicated by their personal styles. Styles learned in the movies, and from radio and the detective magazines. It's as if they were invented by Ben Hecht through his crime dialogue. Walter and Phyllis are pulp characters with little psychological depth, and that's the way Billy Wilder wants it. His best films are sardonic comedies, and in this one, Phyllis and Walter play a bad joke on themselves."

anyone know if Key Largo features the song 'Moanin' Low' in full or just a brief extract?

Just watched Sudden Fear. Worth it for Joan Crawfords facial expressions and Jack Palances acting.

Young Jack Palance in that and 'Panic in the Streets' looks like an Easter Island statue come to life.

Double Indemnity, sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar

totally just watched Rififi...it's great! i wondered how they'd sustain it after the heist sequence...the second half of the film is even better, even more engrossing. the bit where the money was delivered and Tony clearly didn't give a fuck about it any longer = noirest of noir

Carl Mohner dedicated a painting to me once.

Am watching Kurosawa's Stray Dog tonight.

Will be watching Le Cercle Rouge tomorrow. Saw Un Flic a few weeks back, and absolutely adored it. The stylish brilliance of the crooks. The mechanical, self-denying inexorability of the cop. Crime glorified in a way that only serves to heighten its tragedy, only serves to emphasise its ultimate folly. Morality plays, as they should be told.

I need to get Un Flic next week. Have you watched Le Samourai yet?

not yet but it is in the offing

All time fave tbh

Am slightly annoyed that said friend watched it the other night with a mutual friend. Will have to borrow it. He's generally not averse to re-watching films, mind.

I love Double Indemnity, but it's too glossy and clean to be as purely noir as, eg, Out of the Past.

xpost

Even though I watched it on a beat-up VHS copy, IMO the most perfectly realized noir-ish Melville is Le Deuxieme Souffle.

Morbs - there's one line of yours concerning film that I really dig - the one about a film's greatness being assured if it still works well with the dialogue removed. This kind of film strikes me as the sort for which this might actually be truer than in other cases. Would you say that the best films noir stand up without their dialogue, in practice?

(cheers mr goethe)

Forgot to mention, but I watched The Big Heat a couple days ago. That was some gritty shit. I don't remember Bogie ever dealing with a dead wife, a mob moll with disfiguring facial burns, dead hookers, etc etc.

Panic in the Streets is really great.

Un Flic I found not as good as the others, but still fun and stylish. But that train sequence...get one budget!

the helicopter model attached to visible wires represents the impossibility of crime except as an artificial fantasy, dude

in all srsnss, scene is carried off by the acting and the in-train filming

*impossibility of SUCH a crime, even

This is such a boy genre.

ilx's own Lauren P would beg to differ.

cm, especially with the chiaroscuro lighting effects usually featured, sure.

Great, now I have to use Google! ;)

the starkly separated pools of light & shadow

Jane Greer, oh brother!

http://voiceover.blogdiario.com/img/outofthepast.jpeg

Yep, got it! When done well (Night Of The Hunter, anyone?) that technique can be dazzlingly tense.

Forgot to mention, but I watched The Big Heat a couple days ago. That was some gritty shit. I don't remember Bogie ever dealing with a dead wife, a mob moll with disfiguring facial burns, dead hookers, etc etc.

The protaganist in this movie is the like the angel of death. Every woman he comes in contact with dies.

mob moll with disfiguring facial burns

Wasn't Jane Greer married to Rudy Vallee for a while? She was young, Vallee told her mom he would bring her out to Hollywood "under my auspices." He liked to have her dress up like a Marilyn Manson girlfriend. She eventually balked, although not before her marriage had got her into trouble with Howard Hughes, who was obsessed with her. She had a similar facial palsey to Sylvester Stallone, which gave her that intriguing expression.

Fans of OOTP should also see the "sequel" with Mitchum and Greer, The Big Steal. Here is an informative obit http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/jane-greer-729365.html

Janey Janey, what a gal

a friend of mine used Greer for a radio narration job not long before her death. Apparently she turned down the Gloria Stuart role in Titanic.