Film noir: your favourites

I was amused to find out that the 1946 Postman was already the third adaptation, one of them being a foundation-stone of Italian Neo-realism.

Fred MacMurray playing SATAN in 'the Apartment' is even weirder.

'Gilda' to thread!

I got Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street today. Looks noiry.

the big sleep
the third man
strangers on a train

outside of the definition i have to include

rififi
le cercle rouge
chinatown (my favorite noir, period.)
the long goodbye

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.

I got ahold of The Asphalt Jungle on Blu-ray... as with others I've watched recently, it's one I've seen in the past, and certain lines/characters were dimly familiar (but I remembered nothing else about it).

The first strike is that it was filmed almost entirely on a studio lot (no actual city streets), which is kind of a bummer for a movie like this. Plus, it's set in a generic Midwestern city (that's not Chicago or Cleveland); so it lacks even an attempt at geographic specificity.

Beyond that – it's a long, somewhat slow & plodding film about a not-very-interesting heist and its not-very-interesting aftermath. If they had tightened it up by 30 mins or so, it may have played better? – but as it stand, most scenes feel roughly the same length, with actors circling the set, visibly hitting their marks, and chewing the scenery a bit (Sterling Hayden is an exception, but he also doesn't quite seem to know what to do with his character). The best performance (IMO) is by Louis Calhern, as the caddish lawyer who "finances" the heist.

There's also a super awkward "thin blue line"–type speech by the police commissioner at the end; I assume the studio required this, to compensate for the crooked-cop character, but oy. I did like the swing dance scene in the diner.

Yeah Asphalt Jungle is a plodder

There's a YouTube channel that posts full length film noirs frequently often reasonable enough quality. The films themselves are a mixture of classics and a good dose of by-the-yard b movies starring people with names assembled from the names of bigger stars. A date with dignity starring Rita Hayes and Joseph Powell, that sort of thing. In general this golden era stuff seems increasingly unguarded by copyright claims. I've been wondering if studios have started writing off the last few years of copyright for large chucks of this beyond the obvious play it again Sam type perennials. Does anyone know if this is true or a totally spurious hunch?

Anyway I like it in the sense that it feels like catching a movie on TV in a way I have felt robbed of in recent years, it doesn't have to be any good (most aren't) but when you hit a seam it's good. For instance I had seen desert fury but nothing else with Lizbeth Scott and really enjoyed a couple of films where she was pure simple evil. Obviously this all applies to a far broader range of films than noir but it does fit that genre's ready-to-be-pulped appeal.

Sounds cool, what's the name of the channel?

Whenever I go searching for old films on YouTube, it seems that Warner Bros Inc still closely guard their back catalogue - other studios/rights holders, not so much. Boutique physical media labels like Indicator also tend to protect their remastered scans, for understandable reasons. When you go deep diving in places like YT or Vimeo you realise just how many films there are, and how quickly it became impossible to see everything in one lifetime.

Last noir I enjoyed on YT - Preminger's Where the Sidewalk Ends.

In general this golden era stuff seems increasingly unguarded by copyright claims. I've been wondering if studios have started writing off the last few years of copyright for large chucks of this beyond the obvious play it again Sam type perennials. Does anyone know if this is true or a totally spurious hunch?

Good question! I do have success finding old stuff on YT more often than I'd think - but it's also true that when I then suscribe to these channels they get taken down on a pretty regular basis.

Then there's the wild west of DailyMotion...

I went the pricier route of b noir by buying all of those Indicator Columbia box sets - I can't say that they justify the price but they did leave me with a larger appreciation of people like Lizbeth Scott, Dan Duryea, director Phil Karlson.

and how quickly it became impossible to see everything in one lifetime.

Well you're never gonna get there with that attitude!

not noir, but this week I was ill off work and watched a bunch of Jean Arthur movies. All the classic ones were easy to find on YT.

the noir channel i use is literally the one that comes up if you type 'film noir' into the search bar. its called dk classics ii

it seems to have been around for ages. But yeah when one gets yanked there's never a lack of other channels.

Cool, thanks.
I don't noir much during the summer for some reason, but looking for"ard to diving back in soon...

sounds like a Criterion Channel playlist..."Summer Noir"

The summer noir
Came creeping in
From a dark alley

I recently came across a new website devoted to film noir, but I lost the link. It had the movies sorted into around 4 ranks. Seemed to be a single guy doing the whole site. Does this ring a bell to anyone?

I recently heard about "Ride the Pink Horse" (via a recommendation); I see it's been discussed somewhat extensively above. I'll have to check it out... (hard not to hear the title in the cadence of a certain Laid Back song).

The summer noir
Came creeping in
From a dark alley
Smelling like gin

Anyway I like it in the sense that it feels like catching a movie on TV in a way I have felt robbed of in recent years, it doesn't have to be any good (most aren't) but when you hit a seam it's good.

Totally feeling this. Although we have multitudinous cable channels, there's none showing the kind of stuff that used to be on late night TV. (Criterion is great but it's mostly too curated to show B-grade cheapies.) I'll watch almost any 40s/50s crime drama regardless of quality. I just love looking at the suits/dresses, the cars, the architecture, the furnishings, and all the forgotten actors. It's my happy place.

I just watched Step Down to Terror, a 1958 remake of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt starring Charles Drake and Colleen Miller.

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.