Film noir: your favourites

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.

(though similarly, my favorite Hammett adaptation is Miller's Crossing)

Anyone seen The Girl in Lover's Lane? I watched it as an MST3K episode, but it seemed like a really successful small town noir.

Oh yeah, I saw that on TCM last year during the Mitchum festival.
-- Sons Of The Redd Desert

Actually, I haven't seen that one, but it looks pretty good. I was talking about Angel Face, which is mentioned in the very first post of this thread.

- House Of Bamboo (Robert Stack & Robert Ryan in post-WWII gangster Tokyo. Sam Fuller directs)
- Scandal Sheet
- Nightmare Alley (Tyrone Power as a carny mentalist)

I found the dialogue in Brick, like Millers Crossing, totally stylized in a way similar to the books, they also shared the protaganist as punching bag cliche so common in the books. There was just something about the way the lead in Brick kept being knocked out, then seeing just a hint of light, then passing out again, then waking up somewhere else, then getting beat up, that to me represented the feeling I get from the Chandler books. Murder, My Sweat is one vintage noir that does this, of course, with it's expressionistic passing out sequence. The complicated plot that really doesn't matter so much, crime lords and their henchmen, the playing of sides against each other. All classic pulp fiction/film noir things.

"I’d hate to think of your having a smashed fender or something while you’re not, uh, fully covered."

It's still amazing that they could get away with some of this stuff considering the times.

Neo-noir can also be fab.

Is this the one about the athelete with really stinky perspiration?

I second the recs for Detour and Long Goodbye because they seem to not get as much respect as they deserve.

This is madness, surely? "The Thin Man" may be a Hammet adaptation, but it's still basically a screwball comedy where the main characters solve crimes!

Are these as good as that warner bros gangster box set that they resemble?

Not exactly what you're asking for, but it's in my bookmarks.

check it out

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.

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.