Film noir: your favourites

if you've read The Big Sleep you've read Chandler, basically -- but Farewell, My Lovely is my personal favorite Marlowe book.

I've also had the novel Out of the Past is based on -- Build My Gallows High -- forever, but haven't read it (tho I've read that Daniel Mainwaring's adaptation of his own book is judged an improvement).

HA, "loathsome." Yeah, Chandler was pretty irredeemably sour, but you know, Marlowe as chivalrous Arthurian knight in morally bankrupt world and all that; he's the most interesting character in pulp fiction, 'cause he's entirely self-loathing, never shoots or fucks anything, really a sort of pathetic repressed moralist masochist, he's as painful to watch as an early Woody Allen protagonist (impotent but for his cleverness, which just gets him beat up repeatedly), except he gets less satisfaction from this terrible modern society, 'cause Allen protagonists always get laid.

Cornell Woolrich is fun too.

The novels are distinguished by a combination of the hard fiction style of the late forties and a pervasive and morbid sense of psychology, in most cases pathological (psychiatrists and general discussions of insanity pervade the works). The protagonists are subject to extraordinary situations which provoke intense feelings of distress and mental agony, communicated to the reader with a lucidity that makes his storytelling logic surrealistic, fantastic, persuasive and disturbing at once.

Border Incident is in a new Noir box.

!!!

Of course, the only pre-"Space Seed" Ricardo I've seen is Cheyenne Autumn.

Anyone seen Cry Terror!... At Film Forum tonight, intriguing pairing of Mason and Steiger?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051501/

How come we discussed Red Harvest and Enrique didn't come along to mention that Goldoni play?

The Farmer's Daughter is in that movie, Morbs?

I haven't seen it, no. I don't think I ever really watched the other feature either.

Has anyone got the recut of Touch Of Evil? Is it worth paying more for over the original?

Absolutely.

Redd, I don't believe Loretta Young is in it.

Touch of Evil is great if you can stand charlton heston.

it's tough to beat Out of the Past, although the faulkner-penned Big Sleep is classic, too (although the plot literally does not make any sense). I'm also a huge fan of Night and the City and Asphalt Jungle.

An interesting but unsuccessful noir is Dark Passage with Bogey and Bacall, which features a lot of 1st-person shots. Agnes Moorhead is great in it, however.

noirs i dislike: Force of Evil, The Postman Always Rings Twice (both John Garfield vehicles), Cat People (despite its alleged influence), Angel Heart (neo-noir).

Curse of the Cat People is better than plain old Cat People.

noirs i dislike: Force of Evil

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Yar, The Big Sleep film is tough to follow, but that's down to the production code.

The I Love Film noir thread is pretty good; here's the link if it's not already upthread: film noir

Morbius, have you seen that Danish movie that's at FF now?

no.

boo Force of Evil. yay Touch of Evil.

another borderline noir is Kurosawa's High and Low, although a proper noir has to end more pessimistically.

No mention here of D.O.A., which I saw last night. Man walks into police station, claims he's been murdered, then in classic noir fashion the whole movie is in flashback. It's not quite up there with the best noirs (Double Indemnity, Laura, etc.), but it's pretty terrific and almost an A-Z of noir tropes - flashback structure, protagonist doomed from the start, femme fatale/wholesome girl binary, urban paranoia...

Double Indemnity and Touch of Evil are my shit. All-time.

hells yeah, BIG HOOS.

Time to rep for Preminger's Fallen Angel and Where the Sidewalk Ends.

'the big heat' ftw

Naked City was better than I'd expected.

Just saw Murder, My Sweet. Pretty great. I'm still trying to work out the plot.

So awesome that Netflix has its own section for this. Just watched "Woman in the Window", which was okay.

Now have "The Asphalt Jungle" running.

Asphalt Jungle
Le Doulos
The Second Breath
hell - basically just about all Melville that involves a raincoat or gun somewhere
Double Indemnity
T-Men
let's see...

Too many to mention but it's my fave genre

Gotta be The Third Man.

IIRC, Scarlet Street is basically the same movie as Woman in the Window but better. Maybe it's the other way around though. Another Lang/Lorre american noir with a similar plot.

Is Woman in the Window the one where he wakes up at the end and it's all been a dream? Cos that's a shitty shitty ending.

yes, that's the one.