Film noir: your favourites

I especially recommend the Anthony Mann triple-threat of T-Men, Raw Deal, and He Walked By Night

French - Bob le Flambeur
Band of Outsiders

I think the first noir was "Stranger on the Third Floor," 1940, RKO.

In any case, frankiemachine, I would have thought you would have mentioned The Man With The Golden Arm, although I guess that's not a noir per se.

common '50s noir police descrip: "white American male"

Brick was a more accurate translation of just about every Raymond Chandler book I've read then any Film Noir I've seen, including say, The Big Sleep or Murder, My Sweet.

I'm such a dumbass for only now realizing it refers to the shadows in the film.

How? Be specific. Give examples.

I had never seen Lady in the Lake, currently on Criterion. Clever idea, bizarre execution.

A film professor of mine always showed it as a must-avoid example; he considered the first-person camera a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium.

i watched suzhou river (2000) this week and parts of that are in first person. i thought it was effective but it's not the whole movie and it's about layers of fiction/perspective anyways so it might make more sense in that context

I actually enjoyed Lady in the Lake, but the first-person camera makes the movie kind of jokey in a bad way. Add to that the miscasting of Robert Montgomery as Marlowe, the stilted line delivery, and the overacting of several of the cast (looking at you, Jayne Meadows) and it's at least an interesting failure, almost a parody of the genre.

The novel is kind of an orphan.

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0hC22q6VrsU/YPGRqq7kvXI/AAAAAAABwqY/5nTPtF0oPBci1-QrHrrMsa2rajzBTjzaQCNcBGAsYHQ/w640-h478/lady-in-the-lake-03.JPG

It is pretty remarkable how few successful experiments there are with first-person POV in film, or maybe how fundamentally ill-suited that device is to the medium. I went searching on ilx for a thread about it and sure enough there is one here, but it has scant examples, and the ones mentioned are the same few that I thought of off the top of my head. If any of you film aficionados in this thread wanna revive that one, would be interested to see if there's been further explorations of the conceit.

A little pricey after shipping--what isn't?--but these look pretty great.

I watched *Night and the City*. Like a lot of noir, I would gladly have every frame of the thing on my wall; something about it being London just amplified all of that. Widmark is so good in it. So frantic and doomed.

Aside: is there a film that contains more running? I'm resisting Run Lola Run.

Licorice Pizza?

Forrest Gump?

chariots of fire obv

Run Fatboy Run

To get back on topic, I watched this recently and it works both as a noir and a comedy. Appreciate Bob Hope isn’t to everyone’s taste but Dorothy Lamour is a pretty enchanting love interest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgIZZfG22wQ

Lol what a weird cast!

Sounds irresistibly horrible

(Also Zohra Lampert.)

I have the urge to rewatch Douglas Sirk movies, and started with Lured (1947), the only one (easily) streaming. It’s described some places as a noir, but really really isn’t, by any measure. Lucille Ball is fantastic in it! It’s very well directed, naturally, though somewhat choppy…

Anyway, the guy who wrote the screenplay, Leo Rosten – who sounds like a very interesting character (among many other things, he apparently coined that famous definition of “chutzpah”) – also provided the story (not screenplay) for a slightly earlier film with Ball – The Dark Corner – that one a true noir, it sounds really good, I’ll have to watch it soon.

…watching The Dark Corner now. Maybe I’m not in the right headspace, but it’s rough going… stilted, low-budget, dull.

most noirs low-budge tho, i thought dark corner was solid of its type but maybe lucy in a different setting doing a lot of the work
"The film earned $1 million at the box office, less than the $1.2 million cost of production"
not even that cheap by 1946 standards, 20th Century Fox B Movies do tend to look a bit anemic compared to the other big studios back in the day

Yeah, maybe “cheap-looking” is a better descriptor…

Aw man, I’m sorry you didn’t like Dark Corner. I thought it was suitably shadowy and pulpy. Mark Stevens (who I don’t recall seeing in any other films) was good, Lucy is of course spunky, and William Bendix and Clifton Webb lend good support. I’ve watched far worse.

Is there another corner of cinema that gets explored so thoroughly as noir does? I think of noir and westerns as relatively equal parts of the classic Hollywood era, but in terms of say boutique label box sets noir has westerns beat so hard it ain't even funny.

Is the fact that it's not a "real" genre and thus you can explore further afield part of it?

Fedoras have retained cultural relevancy longer than Stetsons

Smoking vs. chewing tobacco

Is there another corner of cinema that gets explored so thoroughly as noir does? I think of noir and westerns as relatively equal parts of the classic Hollywood era, but in terms of say boutique label box sets noir has westerns beat so hard it ain't even funny.

Is the fact that it's not a "real" genre and thus you can explore further afield part of it?

― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, January 10, 2024 10:50 AM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

I wonder if another way of thinking about this is 'is there a competing aesthetic within american cinema of this period that holds a similar status as diagnosis of social and political neuroses?' I wonder if a tentative answer is screwball but that is more tightly bound to genre than noir is and relies on a kind of 'success' in a way noir doesn't. just a thought.

Screwball and noir don't overlap really in terms of chronology, screwball p much done by the time noir comes around so they're diagnosing v different societies I think.

The western would once again lend itself to this kind of lens but I guess a lot of it, "psychological westerns" and such, register as noir to some extent.

Of course in the 50's you'd also have sci-fi, not really a fair comparison in terms of the talent involved but certainly another niche that has been deeply explored.

Yeah, I think noir casts the biggest, um, shadow.

I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes, now on Criterion, is my kind of noir: pulpy Poverty Row murder mystery based on a Cornell Woolrich story, with a no-name cast (Don Castle and Elyse Knox) and where “Depressed and anxious, Tom impulsively throws his only pair of tap dancing shoes at howling cats outside his window” is a salient plot point.