Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

We still have time to mess this up!

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Innocent people do not delay justice.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

You are here: Home / Medium Cool / Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Noir!

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Noir!

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Tonight we kick off Episode 2 of the weekly Guest Post series: Medium Cool with BGinCHI.

In case you missed the introduction to the series:  Culture as a Hedge Against this Soul-Sucking Political Miasma We’re Living In

Tonight’s Topic: Noir!

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Noir!

Take it away, BG!

In this week’s Medium Cool, let’s talk about noir.

Typically, noir is defined by the moody, dark, psychologically-acute films of the ‘40s-‘50s, involving femmes fatales, gumshoe detectives, pessimism, etc. Contrarily, New Yorker film critic Richard Brody argues that, while this genre is difficult to define, “film noir is historically determined by particular circumstances.” Let’s use this as our jumping-off point.

For example, when Robert Altman made “The Long Goodbye” (1973), he moved Raymond Chandler’s novel from New York to LA and transformed Philip Marlowe into a sleepwalking mess who can barely feed his cat. He’s an honorable man, swimming in a sea­ of damaged, selfish people. Altman uses noir not to nostalgically retell the same story from the ‘50s, but to comment on the malaise of the early ‘70s.

What is your favorite noir (film, book, TV), and why? What makes it noir? Instead of automatically qualifying as noir because it’s “dark,” how does it reflect its particular historical circumstances?

~ Bradley

*****

BG sent me this article last night:

“FILM NOIR”: THE ELUSIVE GENRE

It’s short and informative, just in case folks want to click over there.

~WG

Reader Interactions

260Comments

  4. 4.

    MattF

    Red Harvest. Has an odd vibe, not sure it’s exactly noir, but seems to have all the right plot elements.

  5. 5.

    zhena gogolia

    I love so many of them. Detour, DOA, Out of the Past. Too many to list, really.

  6. 6.

    Wag

    Noir has inspired so many movies.  Blade Runner is the sci-fi one that jumps to mind. The whole “tears in the rain” scene make it worth while.

  7. 7.

    cliosfanboy

    It was a dark rainy nite on Balloon Juice. The pie filter was barely keeping the web’s filth at bay.   The open threads had petered out like a bar emptying just before dawn. The stench of despair and desperation of the primary threads was overwhelming the hopeful scent coming from the pet discussions.  A new thread on noir appeared in the doorway. It was built like a 15 year old virgin boy’s fantasy, all curves and about as subtle as one of Bauds campaign posts. i gazed about the room.  The usual crowd began to wander in like sinners creeping into the back pews of some half empty cold, stone church.  I took a belt of my Diet Coke and settled in with them.  At least it wasn’t another post on health insurance.

  8. 8.

    K488

    The Long Goodbye, at least the original novel, takes place in LA.  It has some of my favorite scenes and lines in it.  I reread it ever five to ten years.  Would Body Heat count?  Again, a favorite line: “You’re not very bright.  I like that in a man.”

  10. 10.

    BGinCHI

    @zhena gogolia: I often start my film class with Out of the Past, then Kiss Me Deadly. Those two are so amazing you almost don’t even have to explain the noir part. They’re just so…..noir.

    My recent favorite film maker (for noir) is Jules Dassin. He made “Brute Force,” “The Naked City,” “Thieves Highway,” “Night and the City,” and “Rififi” all in a row!!

  14. 14.

    delk

    Call Northside 777

    Set in The Back of the Yards, the Chicago neighborhood I grew up in. I picture my dad and his twin brother walking those streets during the time of the film.

  17. 17.

    dm

    @MattF: w-e-l-l, if you’re going to mention Red Harvest (a good choice, by the way),  you could also bring in Kurosawa’s film adaptation, Yojimbo. 

    I’ve always been fond of Wim Wenders’ Hammett, in which a tubercular Dashiell Hammett solves a mystery involving the circle that holds the strings of power in San Francisco

    @Wag: Blade runner‘s “Tears in the rain” monologue was Rutger Hauer’s idea.

  18. 18.

    Ivan X

    @MattF: Nearly all of Hammett’s Continental Op stories (of which Red Harvest represents the longest) are super brilliant and my favorite noir reading. Get a collection of them if you don’t have one already!

  19. 19.

    Bill Arnold

    Reminded of a (really[2]) dark sci-fi novel, Noir by K.W. Jeter[1]. (1998).

    “There are many kinds of “noir” in Noir.”…”There’s the noir of the monochrome, perpetually nightbound, gangster-movie world McNihil’s surgically enhanced vision lays across the ugly world he really lives in. (It’s the noir world, McNihil tells himself, that’s the true one: his altered eyes aren’t adding an overlay, but paring down reality to what’s really there.)”

    [1] KW Jeter has a solid claim to be the originator of steampunk, for some early steampunk works.
    [2] You have been warned. There is some nightmare fuel in it.

  22. 22.

    debbie

    Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, anything with Barbara Stanwyck (even Stella Dallas), and many others. Also, a French noir, “Ou Est Bob?”

  23. 23.

    dexwood

    As a child of the 50s, my mother, who loved movies more than all other expressions of popular culture, often let me stay up late to watch films with her on our old black and white Zenith. The Night of the Hunter, directed by Charles Laughton, stayed with me for decades. I can’t say it’s a favorite, but goddamn, Robert Mitchum scared the hell out me then as he chased the children. And, the shot of Shelley Winters dead at the bottom of the river haunted me for years. So dark, moody, and frightening.

  25. 25.

    MattF

    @dm: Dinah Brand, the femme fatale:

    Her coarse hair – brown – needed trimming and was parted crookedly. One side of her upper lip had been rouged higher than the other. Her dress was of a particularly unbecoming wine color, and it gaped here and there down one side, where she had neglected to snap the fasteners or they had popped open. There was a run down the front of her left stockings.

  26. 26.

    Steeplejack

    (Note: I’ve read only the first few comments so far.)

    It’s kind of hard to tell who is “talking” in this post. WaterGirl starts out, but since it’s a guest post I assumed it was BGinCHI starting with: “In this week’s Medium Cool, let’s talk about noir.” And then it seems to go back to WaterGirl after the “*****” and “BG sent me this article last night.” But maybe it’s WaterGirl the whole time?

    Maybe in the future there could be a clear demarcation of who is writing? This also happens occasionally with “On the Road,” where sometimes the contributor starts right in and other times Alain puts in something about the topic before starting the contributor’s text with no segue.

    In any case, The Long Goodbye never had to be moved from New York to Los Angeles for Altman’s film. The novel is set in Los Angeles. One of the plot points involves Marlowe driving an acquaintance over the border to Tijuana, Mexico. Kind of hard to do from New York.

  27. 27.

    prostratedragon

    “Noir” is a topic that crowds the exits of my mind. Couldn’t possibly name just one or even a couple of favorites, so here are ten, and that doesn’t exhaust the list, just the first ones I thought of. In alphabetical order,

    Act of Violence, The Asphalt Jungle, The Big Combo, Dark Passage, Detour, D.O.A., The Killers, The Killing, Out of the Past, They Live by Night.

     

    Edit: And scrolling up, I see a dozen or more that I just as easily could have named among favorites.

  29. 29.

    BGinCHI

    @dm: I love Frederic Forrest in that (and anything else).

    Interesting, too, that most of Kurosawa’s early films are noir-ish. “Stray Dog,” “Drunken Angel,” and so on. They’re so damn good.

  30. 30.

    What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?

    Is Sunset Boulevard noir? If so, then Sunset Blvd.

    Something more recent is the first season of The Expanse – it has a hard boiled detective trying to solve a mystery, amongst a few other plot lines.

  33. 33.

    BGinCHI

    @debbie: I had a huge crush on Big Valley-era Barbara Stanwyck when I was a kid, and it only got worse after I discovered her earlier films.

    And yes, Billy Wilder. Two of the greatest noirs (Double Indemnity & Sunset Blvd). And two of the greatest comedies (Some Like It Hot & The Apartment).

  37. 37.

    zhena gogolia

    Fred MacMurray does a great job as a noir “hero” in Double Indemnity. Wouldn’t it be nice if Stanwyck and Bogart had done a noir together? The Two Mrs. Carrolls doesn’t really count.

  42. 42.

    Bill Arnold

    OK, sort of; Soviet healthy-living propaganda in black and white (short vid at link):

    “Temper yourself
    If you wanna be healthy.
    Try to avoid doctors.
    Pour cold water over yourself”
    Soviet song pic.twitter.com/liq1iz9l1r

    — Soviet Visuals (@sovietvisuals) September 18, 2016

    I’ll assume that the translation is correct.

  45. 45.

    BGinCHI

    @Craig: I re-read him on purpose once in a while to remind me how spare writing can be, and how plot can move forward without seeming to. He’s an amazing craftsman.

  50. 50.

    Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA)

    If you’re into modern, microbudget independent short film noir by young struggling filmmakers with more ambition than money (did I mention this was low budget?), there’s Hath No Fury on Amazon Prime.  Disclaimer: I did the behind-the-scenes photography and the poster (except for the isolated red color, which was added after I submitted it, and which was a choice I personally might not have gone with, but what are ya gonna do).

  51. 51.

    Steeplejack

    @WaterGirl:

    I was less clear about the demarcation going in, especially after reading the “New York” clunker. All clear now.

  52. 52.

    BGinCHI

    @frosty: Often called neo-noir, but yes. Lots of good 70s films that work to re-create that vibe.

    Chinatown, Long Goodbye, Night Moves (amazing), and even the noir westerns, like McCabe & Mrs. Miller and the films of Monte Hellman (The Shooting & Ride in the Whirlwind, both 1966).

  53. 53.

    EmanG

    Don’t overlook Brick from 2005. A great noir story set in high school that, though it eschews the color palette (it’s in color) still stays strong in the form. Well written, tightly clipped dialogue and a great Chandler styled protagonist played by Joseph Gorden-Leavett. The kind of movie that, back in the day, Joe Bob would’ve said “Check it out!”.

  54. 54.

    prostratedragon

    @frosty:  Absolutely, and one of my favorites all time. When it came out, nothing close to it had been done in a major Hollywood movie for some time, and somebody called it something like noir-in-color. Though I’d say the first noir-in-color is definitely Vertigo, with which Chinatown shares some key elements, and which has a chance to be my favorite if I were forced to say.

  56. 56.

    satby

    So many of my favorites already named. DOA, Big Sleep, Dark Passage, pretty much all the Veronica Lake-Alan Ladd films. Key Largo I would consider noir too.

  58. 58.

    Ruckus

    @dexwood:

    Mom wouldn’t let me stay up late – but.

    Granddad had given me his old TV so I’d go to bed when mom said then get up at 11 and watch B&W movies on The Fabulous 52, which was a different movie they’d run every night on what channel I can’t remember, in LA. Of course it was a B&W TV in a B&W time so everything was. Don’t know if that’s why I’m a night person or that I could do it because I was/am a night person.

  64. 64.

    Omnes Omnibus

    Maybe it’s just me but I have a weakness for French Noir.  Pépé le Moko, Bob le Flambeur, Le Samouraï, as well as Rififi mentioned above.

  65. 65.

    The Dark Avenger

    The Lady in the Lake, which is taken from Arthurian legend.  Also, he makes driving between Big Bear Lake (Little Fawn Lake in the novel) seem like a skip and a jump from downtown LA.

  66. 66.

    smintheus

    @prostratedragon: Noir is about moderately normal people who because of their own weaknesses get sucked into a world much worse than themselves, involving people who ought to repulse them if they were ‘themselves’.

  68. 68.

    Baud

    The defining feature of noir is a lamenting saxaphone playing in the background. Fight me.

  74. 74.

    David C

    My favorites include Out of the Past and I Wake Up Screaming. The latter, which came out around the same time as The Maltese Falcon, has a stunning performance by Laird Cregar, along with some strange scenes (like the indoor pool scene) and a soundtrack featuring “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Great lighting and camera work, too.

  76. 76.

    AliceBlue

    Kiss of Death (A giggling Richard Widmark pushes an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs)

    Sorry Wrong Number

    Pickup on South Street (Richard Widmark again, with Thelma Ritter along for the ride)

    Laura

  81. 81.

    Steeplejack

    @BGinCHI:

    Night Moves is a little gem. It has showed up a couple of times on TCM.

    To me the quintessential noir movie is Out of the Past, despite, and because of, how much of it is drenched in sunlight—the idyll in Mexico, the exteriors around the clean little California town.

  83. 83.

    BGinCHI

    A film I’d add to the neo-noir list is “Blue Ruin” (2013). Highly recommend if you haven’t seen it.

    Made by Jeremy Saulnier, who followed it up with the excellent “Green Room” then “Hold the Dark.”

  84. 84.

    smintheus

    @Baud: Pretty much, except for the garden chats on Sunday; even at their grimmest, they’re more Commedia all’Italiana than noir.

  85. 85.

    zhena gogolia

    In April, TCM’s going to do an evening of 1948 Noir:

    (April 7) 8:00 PM Cry of the City (‘48)

    10:00 PM The Lady from Shanghai (‘48)

    11:45 PM He Walked by Night (‘48)

    1:15 AM Key Largo (‘48)3:15 AM Berlin Express (‘48)

    5:00 AM The Naked City (‘48)

  87. 87.

    BGinCHI

    @Steeplejack: I always picture that film in color in my head. Always.

    He’s going fishing, color. The gas station, color.

    Then when they’re in the city, B&W.

  91. 91.

    dexwood

    @Steeplejack:  Out of the Past is really good. I’ve seen it twice this year on an over the air channel that features Sunday Night Noir. Strong cast, good story.

    ETA: Last year – April and December.

  94. 94.

    BGinCHI

    @dexwood: The ending, too. Holy shit.

    Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoking AT each other, too. It’s a perfect film.

    I need to re-watch Tourneur’s “Cat People.”

  95. 95.

    prostratedragon

    A major subgenre: We’re in San Francisco (at least part of the time). There’s someone in deep disguise, an impostor of some kind. There’s an artist with a studio. The impostor is used to make a patsy of someone who thinks they’re on a different sort of quest entirely from what they’re being used for. The action might go to the Presidio, or down toward Carmel, or both …

    … Nora Prentiss, Dark Passage, Lady from Shangai, Woman on the Run, The Man Who Cheated Himself, Vertigo, Point Blank, Bullitt, …

    Experiment in Terror and D.O.A. substitute Fisherman’s Wharf.

  99. 99.

    piratedan

    @Baud: dunno, sparse stand up bass could also be applicable, like a jazz combo w/o the combo…. :-)

     

    fun fantasy noir read… Glen Cook’s  Garrett PI Books, use a metallic theme in all of the titles

    appreciate that TCM runs marathons of this genre from time to time and I’ve often felt that their progeny gave us the Ocean’s series and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

  101. 101.

    zhena gogolia

    I love Ophuls’s The Reckless Moment with Joan Bennett and James Mason — I’d call it “housewife noir.” They’re both brilliant.

  104. 104.

    Tom Q

    Back in the days of video stores, every time I asked my wife what I should rent, she’d say, get a film noir — till eventually I had to say, I think we’ve seen them all.  That wasn’t literal — this TCM Saturday night series keeps coming up with ones I’ve never seen (recent excellent ones: Repeat Performance and Hollow Triumph).  But it’s truly a favorite genre; I’ve seen 200 or more.

    Double Indemnity just seems the epitome of the genre.  SO much great dialogue, including this exchange that I think is as perfect a distillation of the genre as you could find:

    Phyllis: Come back, next week.

    Walter: Same time, same anklet?

    Phyllis: I wonder if I know what you mean.

    Walter: I wonder if you wonder.

    And, yes, Chinatown is a marvel — somehow achieving in color what seemed impossible without black and white.  There’s a very good book just published about the making of the film, called The Big Goodbye.  It inspired me to watch the film again last week.  You’ll be unsurprised to hear it’s still perfection.

  105. 105.

    logjam

    Gun Crazy. Anything with Peggy Cummins.

    Out of the Past.  Jane Greer walks into a Mexican bar. Best entrance ever filmed.

    Kiss of Death. Richard Widmark pushes a woman in a wheelchair down the stairs. They don’t make em like that anymore.

  106. 106.

    ThresherK

    Ace in the Hole, hopefully getting a bit more recognition among non-movie-geeks in the wake of Kirk Douglas’ passing.

  107. 107.

    prostratedragon

    From Too Late for Tears:

    Jane Palmer: It’s cold in here.

    Danny Fuller: I’ll turn on the oven.

    [Steps over to the kitchenette, noise of oven lighting]

    Danny Fuller: Maybe I shouldn’t bother to light it, huh Tiger?

  109. 109.

    WereBear

    @BGinCHI:I had a huge crush on Big Valley-era Barbara Stanwyck when I was a kid, and it only got worse after I discovered her earlier films.

     

    Same. She’s incredible in Double Indemnity, a film I never get tired of watching. How can there be suspense when you know what is going to happen?

    “All the way down the line.” Still sends a shiver up my back.

    It is so noir to have the sunshine outside, and the shadows inside, that living room where so much unstated or unshown takes place. She’s the trigger that fires the gun; and she does it with that incomparable smile.

  111. 111.

    WereBear

    @Wag: Actually, I understand Rutger Hauer wrote notes on the speech and then acted the best parts, so not improv on the spur of the moment, but certainly pulled together in that moment.

    Amazing by any measure.

  112. 112.

    Steeplejack

    Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder novels (recommended reading) have yielded a couple of good noir movies: Eight Million Ways to Die (1986), with Jeff Bridges, and A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014), with Liam Neeson. I thought there was another one, but IMDB says not.

    The Jeff Bridges movie is a little dated at this point, but Tombstones is solid and Neeson is excellent. Let go of your Taken disdain.

  113. 113.

    WereBear

    @smintheus: Friends of Eddie Coyle is a fascinating example with a modern feel. Mitchum does incredible work as the title character, and I can’t watch it too often because it’s such a wrenching experience.

  114. 114.

    dexwood

    On the same Sunday Night Noir channel, I recently watched Scarlet Street with Edward G, Robinson as an amateur painter, unhappy in his marriage, charmed by a grifter, Joan Bennet, who was terrific, and her boyfriend played by Dan Duryea. An interesting, entertaining film. Duryea always shined as a weasel.

  115. 115.

    Heywood J.

    This thread is awesome. I’m going to have to grab a yellow legal pad and jot down all the suggestions in here that I haven’t seen or read yet. The old Mitchum movies like Night of the Hunter and Cape Fear are certainly up there, and now I’m backtracking through all the fiction I read over the past few years to assess the “noir-ness” of each one.

    I love the “Appalachian noir” books of authors such as Wiley Cash and William Gay. The Texas border crime fiction of J. Todd Scott. Don Winslow’s Cartel trilogy, as well as The Force and Frankie Machine. Cormac McCarthy. Elmore Leonard. David Joy. Daniel Woodrell. Donald Ray Pollock’s The Devil All the Time and The Heavenly Table. Stephen Hunter’s Hot Springs and Havana. Robert Crais’ The Monkey’s Raincoat is a bit lighter in tone, but has all the elements. Ace Atkins’ Devil’s Garden and Wicked City. Some of William Gibson’s and Philip Dick’s works have noir elements. Laird Barron works those well in a horror context. The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All hit me like a ton of bricks.

  119. 119.

    smintheus

    There’s an extremely good Italian noir that’s almost completely forgotten even though it won an Academy Award in 1970: Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion. It’s an offbeat hybrid noir/police procedural/paranoid rollercoaster of a film.

    ETA: I should add that it’s even better if you understand spoken Italian.

  120. 120.

    Steeplejack

    @oatler.:

    Well, and I say this as a big fan of Peter Gunn, it was as noir as network TV could get in half an hour at the time. Which is to say not very. But a good dark look and excellent music (not just the theme song).

  122. 122.

    piratedan

    @Steeplejack: I think his Keller/Hit Man and Bernie Rhodenbarr books also have huge noir elements to them but I think it varies on the feel of the author, I would say that Ms. Grafton’s alphabet books is a yes, JA Jance’s Joaanna Brody series is a no.  In the right hands for any detective series, I think you can find it based on your protagonist.

     

    Finding Stumptown has a lot of that feel to it.

  125. 125.

    Ajabu

    A Touch of Evil even with Heston as Mexican detective is pure noir.

    and I’d have to give a shout out to Jackie Brown. A wonderful adaptation of an Elmore Leonard work.

  126. 126.

    prostratedragon

    I thought of that one, and also think it deserves a subgenre. Another good one is Cause for Alarm! with Loretta Young.

    To me, the classic period of Noirs are often about postwar adjustments, and very often either the failure to make them (In a Lonely Place at the head of the class) or the fact that they require something that might not feel right to the people living them. The housewife movies are views of that. See also a large portion of the 30 minute Hitchcock shows.

  127. 127.

    ThresherK

    @AliceBlue: I almost had to drag Spousal Ms ThresherK to the director’s cut* of Touch of Evil when it was released to the art houses.

    At the end she said, “Wow. It’s really not a B movie anymore.”

    (I, of course, want to see the director’s ending of The Magnificent Ambersons, but we can’t have everything.)

     

    *In the Blu-Ray era, “director’s cut” is almost meaningless, but for this movie it really means something.

  128. 128.

    Anya

    I don’t know if this was mentioned yet but The Dark Corner is a great noir. Lucille Ball is great opposite Mark Stevens.

  130. 130.

    ThresherK

    @dexwood: Tangent: There’s a friggin’ musical called Floyd Collins (the real person basis for Ace in the Hole) which I have to see someday.

  133. 133.

    J R in WV

    @satby:

    Key Largo I would consider noir too.

    We lived in Key West for a couple of years, it was like being in a noir city, but it was a dark little tropical town with bad smells mixed in with the night blooming flowers. Key Largo takes me back to Key West.

    Good times! Thanks!!

  134. 134.

    Steeplejack

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    For Euro-noir, René Clément’s Purple Noon (1960) is excellent. Another sun-drenched one.

    And Claude Chabrol did some good ones, although I haven’t seen any in a long time and they run together a bit in my memory.

  135. 135.

    BGinCHI

    @WereBear: I re-watched it a bunch of times in the last few years (it’s out in the Criterion collection too), and more and more, as much as I love Mitchum (hugely), Steven Keats is really the one to watch. The scene with the hippies in the van and the scene at the factory (or whatever that plant is).

    Died too young, that guy.

    That film haunts me.

  136. 136.

    WereBear

    @Ajabu: and I’d have to give a shout out to Jackie Brown. A wonderful adaptation of an Elmore Leonard work.

     
    Absolutely. He considered it his favorite adaptation, even though it was extracted from only part of his book, Rum Punch. But totally a heist noir.

    Speaking of which, Asphalt Jungle has been mentioned, and it’s a gem of a heist film. I particularly like Sam Jaffe’s work in it; so understated I think it’s been overlooked, but it’s the pivot that everyone else turns on.

    Which leads to in the Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing a few years later. Both with Sterling Hayden.

  137. 137.

    oldgold


    A Touch of Evil written and directed by Orson Welles is excellent.

    The opening 3 minute long take is brilliant.

    The dialogue is edgy and fun.

    (Orson Welles) “That wasn’t no miss, Vargas. That was just to turn you ’round, so I don’t have to shoot you in the back. Unless you’d rather run for it.”

    • (Orson Welles) “Come on, read my future for me.”
    • (Marlene Dietrich) “You haven’t got any.”
    • (Orson Welles) “Hmm? What do you mean?”
    • (Marlene Dietrich) “Your future
  138. 138.

    prostratedragon

    @oatler.:
    When it ran originally, the B&W era was almost over and no one was supposed to talk any more about WWII or Korea, while everyone was supposed to aspire to suburbia. (Part of the socializing I recall from my childhood was the men exchanging summaries of their war service, though usually not detailed stories.) Peter Gunn reads to me like a conscious reaction to these things. Hip, and not stuck in the past but definitely shadowed like Odysseus. And staying in the city, even the “lowdown” parts of it.

  139. 139.

    Anya

    I’ve watched Double Indemnity so much that I can recite long dialogues from memory.

    Walter: sometimes you wish he was dead.

    Phyllis: Perhaps I do

    Walter: And you wish it was an accident and you had that policy for $50, 000 dollars. Is that it?

    Phyllis: Perhaps that too.

  140. 140.

    dexwood

    @Anya:  I watched that about a month ago. Entertaining and Lucille Ball was as good as ever. The plus for me was William Bendix who I’ve always liked.

  141. 141.

    WereBear

    And let me mention a personal favorite, White Heat. “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” is what James Cagney’s character actually says at the end. It’s always quoted around the house, and I like to be accurate.

    “If that battery’s dead, it’s going to have company.”

    And the scene in the mess hall. Wow.

  142. 142.

    BGinCHI

    @Heywood J.: Thanks for this.

    I am a HUGE William Gay fan, since his first book. I love his stuff so much I can’t tell you. The real deal, that fella. I’d do a whole post on him if I thought everyone would read him. Hell, even on just two stories: “The Paperhanger” and “I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down.”

    Sheer perfection.

    Wiley’s books are great too and he’s a good guy to boot. I’ll try to lure him over here at some point.

  143. 143.

    BGinCHI

    And before I forget to mention “Klute,” KLUTE.

    With “Chinatown,” and “Eddie Coyle,” my favorite of the 70s New Hollywood neo-noirs.

    Jane Fonda, and especially her character in the film, are unlike anything else. And the cinematography by the Prince of Darkness (Gordon Willis) is astonishing. For me, a perfect film, except for one scene.

  144. 144.

    PJ

    @smintheus:

     

    @WereBear:

    The 70’s films that get classified as noir are doubly interesting because of the change in the political situation since the 40’s.  Obviously, there are a lot of damaged people in noir films, regardless of the era, but in the 40’s and 50’s there is a sense that the circumstances of some people, even most people, are getting better than they were during the Depression and WWII, even if the people around the protagonist, and maybe the protagonist himself, are doomed.  By the 70’s, there’s no hope anywhere.  Eddie Coyle is doomed, but so are all the people of Boston, trapped in the Brutalist spaces of a corrupt and declining America.  I just watched Taxi Driver, where the contrast was even more pronounced.  The almost documentary but lurid color photography of NYC in 1975, the empty rhetoric of the Presidential candidate Charles Palantine, the psychotic protagonist Travis Bickle who wants so badly to be someone, to do something important, when the only positive he can think of doing is killing someone, and Bernard Hermann’s lush and romantic score combine in a portrait of a diseased society that sees itself as healthy and heroic.

  149. 149.

    BGinCHI

    @PJ: Spot on analysis here.

    And the lucky thing for the 70s is that the studio system had broken down and we got all that great New Hollywood stuff that could really reflect American society back to itself.

    A great doc film on this is “A Decade Under the Influence” (2003).

  152. 152.

    prostratedragon

    @smintheus:

    Haven’t seen that one yet, but director Elio Petri also did Todo Modo, a Noirish movie set in a religious retreat for politicians held during an epidemic of some kind, in which they are to practice the devotions of St. Ignatius. Hard to find. Wonder whether the baptism montage in The Godfather was partly inspired by the Rosary scene in this movie.

    From Peter Gunn, “Spook!” by Henry Mancini.

  154. 154.

    PJ

    @BGinCHI: Another great thing about 70’s cinema, at least before the impact of Jaws and Star Wars upset the financial models for studios, is that you had actors like Elliot Gould or Donald Sutherland or Peter Falk or Peter Boyle in leading roles, where in decades past they might have been stuck as character actors.  The ability to feature different looking faces gives 70’s cinema a sense of being more like real life, though it’s as crafted as cinema has ever been.

  156. 156.

    tokyokie

    @prostratedragon: I’m not sure whether it’s the first noir in color, but Leave Her to Heaven is definitely in color and is definitely a noir, and it predates Vertigo by 13 years. It’s one of my favorites in that the lush colors make the Gene Tierney character even more horrifying. Whereas as cinematographers like John Alton and Nicholas Musuraca used deep blacks to hint that there was something dangerous just beyond our perception, in Leave Her to Heaven, Leon Shamroy puts everything on the screen in luscious Technicolor, turning the dream into a nightmare.

  159. 159.

    zhena gogolia

    @dexwood:

    Isn’t it an opera? It’s by Adam Guettel, Richard Rodgers’s grandson

    ETA: You’re right, it’s a musical. But I think it’s just that it has the same real-world source, not that it’s based on the movie, but I’m too lazy to find out

    ETA: I see that ThresherK said that.

  160. 160.

    prostratedragon

    @tokyokie:  You know, I think I’ve only seen that one on our old B&W set (our family was one of the last on earth to get a color set, sometime in the early 80s). Did not know it was color.

  161. 161.

    cope

    OK, I’ve read up through comment #155 to make sure I don’t step on someone else’s pick.  1931, Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre and M.

  162. 162.

    prostratedragon

    This evening Mystery Street with Montalban and Lanchester will be on the ota MOVIES! channel at 7 central, followed by Angel Face with Jean Simmons and Mitchum. Pretty good double bill.

  164. 164.

    BGinCHI

    @cope: That film and Maltese Falcon are really the first films to establish the noir world, I think. Crime + tone + characters.

  165. 165.

    Tom Q

    Since some people are using this as a rec list, a few lesser-known films I’ve encountered in recent years:

    Wanted for Murder/It Always Rains on Sunday — two British noirs I found on Filmstruck before it closed down

    Woman on the Run — an Ann Sheridan movie that’s much better than the title makes it sound

    Between Eleven and Midnight/Touchez Pas au Grisbi — two top-notch French noirs.  Jean Gabin is in the latter, and he can turn almost anything into noir, single-handed

    As mentioned above, anything by Jean-Pierre Melville: his Deux Hommes dans Manhattan is, in addition to a solid mystery, an on-location tour of NYC c. 1959

    And Clouzot, the guy who made Diabolique and Wages of Fear, had an earlier film called Le Corbeau that may not quite be noir, but it’s close enough (and good enough) to bear looking at.

  166. 166.

    Brachiator

    When I was a teen, I really liked DOA. Currently my favorite noir is probably Out of the Past. I also enjoy the somewhat lesser remake Against All Odds.

    I had not seen Laura in ages, probably a couple of times when I was in high school. I saw it again recently and didn’t realize how deliciously perverse much of it is, particularly Clifton Webb.

    I also didn’t realize how much an independent woman Tierney’s Laura was.

  168. 168.

    PJ

    @BGinCHI: Yes to Scheider and Hackman, Dustin Hoffman maybe as well.  I had completely overlooked that two of the bigger leading men of the 70’s, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss, starred in Jaws, one of the movies that would lead to the end of big (and even medium) budget character-driven studio movies.

  169. 169.

    tokyokie

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Maybe it’s just me but I have a weakness for French Noir.  Pépé le Moko, Bob le Flambeur, Le Samouraï, as well as Rififi mentioned above.

    It’s not just you, as late in life I’ve become a huge fan of anything directed by Jean-Pierre Melville or starring Lino Ventura or having José Giovanni credited somehow with the writing. But I wish that Melville’s Le deuxième souffle would come out on Blu-ray.

  171. 171.

    prostratedragon

    @Brachiator:

    These are the kinds of observation that are not rare in Noir, or in older films, that are missed in the checklist approach –darn right Laura is an independent woman, and as is often the case with Noir women, the only place she’s a femme fatale is in some man’s mind.

  172. 172.

    PJ

    @BGinCHI:  A lot of what makes noir work, for me at least, is the cinematography.  Hollywood cinema had mostly been well-lit or overlit through the 20’s and 30’s, but in the late 30’s and 40’s you had an influx of refugee cinematographers and directors from Europe who had been using a lot more shadows and darkness in their work since Expressionism.

    I also think the threat of war hanging over Europe in the 30’s contributed to the existential aspect of noir.  A lot of the movies Jean Gabin made with Jean Renoir and Marcel Carne in the late 30’s seem to me pretty noir in their themes and the overriding sense of doom as well as the photography.

  173. 173.

    Brachiator

    @prostratedragon:

    If anything, Waldo Lydecker is the homme fatale in the film. And Laura’s  relationship with him is more central to the story than any more conventional romance with the detective.

  174. 174.

    BGinCHI

    @Tom Q: Wow, these are all top-notch. Many thanks.

    Clouzot is really great, as are those Gabin films. And that underrated Melville!

  178. 178.

    Feathers

    Huge noir fan! Drawn into it as soon as I became a real film buff. My peak filmgoing experience was probably catching the first screening of a new print of OUT OF THE PAST, fresh out of the preservation lab, at the Library of Congress, back in the 80s. My favorite flavor of noir is Cornell Woolrich: PHANTOM LADY, DEADLINE AT DAWN, BLACK ANGEL, NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES, and NO MAN OF HER OWN. His books were also the inspiration for REAR WINDOW, THE BRIDE WORE BLACK and MISSISSIPPI MERMAID (remade as ORIGINAL SIN). The latter four really didn’t capture the tone of his books. Waltz into Darkness is still waiting for someone to do justice to the story.

    TCM has Noir Alley, which plays Saturdays at midnight, Sundays at 10am. I don’t have cable anymore, this is really the only thing I miss. Eddie Muller does the intros and wrapups, he is incredibly knowledgeable and a great communicator. He runs the Film Noir Foundation: https://www.filmnoirfoundation.org/  They have a fantastic quarterly newsletter that you get if you donate – highly recommended. The website has a list of noirs in the theaters, streaming, on TCM, as well as the new releases on DVD/Blu-Ray. The Foundation finances restorations of noirs in danger of being lost and puts out great editions. They also sponsor the Noir City film festivals, originating in San Francisco, and now around the country. I am pretty much parked for the weekend at the Boston one. Let me know if anybody wants a meet up.

    I’m going to end this and go back and respond to posts. I have a full shelf of noir reference books, histories, and novels. If anybody has a question that I might have the answer to, I’ll try to help.

    Also: Is there some way for more of a head’s up on what will be the topic on this thread? I’d have watched The King on Netflix if I’d known about it, and I’m a huge fan of noir so I’d have jumped on this from the top.

  179. 179.

    BGinCHI

    @PJ: I was thinking about that too (Jaws). Irony. And also the late, great Robert Shaw. He’s also amazing in another noir-ish film, The Taking of Pelham 123.

  180. 180.

    smintheus

    @prostratedragon: Yes, and it wasn’t just any politicians. It was Aldo Moro, prime minister and head of the Christian Democrats. A couple of years after the film, Moro was kidnapped and murdered. The film basically hasn’t been available since then.

  182. 182.

    prostratedragon

    A good Noir script can put something banal into a sinister context that makes it memorable.

    The moment you know it’s all over:

    Why don’t you come down, and join us?
    —Criss Cross (1949)

  183. 183.

    tokyokie

    If you like French noir — and anybody who dislikes happy endings should — check out Classe tous risques with Lino Ventura and Jean-Paul Belmondo; Criterion released it on standard-definition DVD some years back, and it’s available on Blu-ray from the U.K. (I learned to my utter joy that external computer Blu-ray drives aren’t slaves to Blu-ray regional coding by getting that British disc.) (And José Giovanni has a writing credit on the movie.) And speaking of British noir, Joseph Losey’s The Criminal with the vastly underrated Stanley Baker just came out on Blu-ray in the U.S. Though my favorite British noir is from another American expatriate, the great Jules Dassin, namely Night and the City. Dick Widmark was never twitchier and more certainly doomed than he is in that one. (And again, we have Gene Tierney. Hubba-hubba, indeed. At least until she caught rubella.)

  184. 184.

    zhena gogolia

    @Feathers:

    You had to be glued to the threads to know. I wonder if WaterGirl could do some kind of blurb the day before or two days before.

  186. 186.

    Feathers

    @Omnes Omnibus: @BGinCHI: @Jewish Steel: @Tom Q: @tokyokie:

    I have to give a big shoutout to the Criterion Channel. They are currently running the complete films of Jean Pierre Melville, although it is less complete as of today, as a several of the films left on Feb 29. They have not only the films, but a number of of the Criterion extras, including interviews with Melville and his collaborators. Le deuxième souffle is currently available.

    There are a lot of other noirs as well, particularly from France and Japan. There is the Kurosawa of course, but also a number of films from Nikkatsu. They have a lot, but also films come and go fairly quickly. They had a fantastic series of 70s science fiction, including some I’d never heard of, but it was only up for the month of January.

    The best way to get it is by the year, I ask my siblings to get it for me for Christmas.

  187. 187.

    zhena gogolia

    I always think of noir as kind of adjacent to another favorite genre of mine, “black-and-white film shot in ruined Berlin in the early 1950s.” The Man Between is a great one.

  188. 188.

    PJ

    @BGinCHI: Agreed on The Taking of Pelham 123.  Agreed also on Robert Shaw – such a great actor but I don’t ever recall seeing him in a leading role.

    Speaking of Pelham, Walter Matthau, though he was from a previous acting generation, was another great actor with an unconventional face who got a lot of leading man roles in the 70’s.

  189. 189.

    Ghost of Joe Lieblings Dog

    I wish I’d known about this thread earlier.  Reading through, I don’t think anyone’s mentioned Kem Nunn’s Tapping the Source, a dark and memorable little book (worlds better than Point Break, which supposedy was adapted from it … unrecognizably different).  Worth tracking down.

  190. 190.

    Feathers

    @zhena gogolia: My grandfather was stationed in Vienna after the war. I showed The Third Man to my mother. She had never seen it. Turns out the reason why is her life was saved by penicillin in a postwar Vienna hospital. It was amazing to hear from her how she had been allowed to roam the city on her own. A truly scary, shady street? Oh, that looks just like where my friend lived. I used to have dinner at her house and ride the streetcar home by myself. Times have changed!

    Have you seen the Orson Welles/Anthony Perkins film The Trial? It doesn’t really fit, but I always think of it as a post WWII ruin film. And very noir.

    Jumped onto the computer while cooking dinner during a binge watch of Babylon Berlin. It is 1929 Weimar Berlin, but definitely a noir inspired show.

  191. 191.

    zhena gogolia

    @Feathers:

    I tried to watch The Trial but couldn’t get into it (on TV). Maybe on the big screen?

    The Third Man seems kind of noir to me too. Alida Valli! Walking down the avenue!

  192. 192.

    Avalune

    Noir or noir adjacent I think… Motherless Brooklyn. I loved the book to pieces. The movie did a pretty good job I think.

  193. 193.

    Feathers

    The best noir book is David Thomson’s Suspects. He does a Wold Newtonization of film noir, creating a Film Noir Universe where characters from the films exist beyond the beginnings and ends of the films and their lives connect together. For a slight spoiler, Chinatown‘s Noah Cross dies a la Nelson Rockefeller in the bed of a woman not his wife, who turns out to be Matty Walker from Body Heat. It’s out of print, but you can pick up a used copy fairly easily.

  194. 194.

    mad citizen

    @PJ: I love noir, but haven’t watched a lot of them.  I do remember 40 years ago I did this 3 week pre-college summer workshop thing (at the college I ended up attending) and one of our courses was film.  The teacher would set up the projector (1978) and somehow he had prints and we watched Triumph of the Will, Wizard of Oz, and on the noir side I remember we watched the Maltese Falcon.

    I had not considered Taxi Driver noir until this thread, but I guess it is, as PJ said back at comment #141.  It’s my favorite all time movie.  I have the soundtrack on cd–it’s definitely noir.

    I’ve been watching a few old ones from the library, especially a Joan Crawford collection.  How about Possessed, where she gets off a bus sans makeup with amnesia.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possessed_(1947_film)

    On the modern front, hadn’t considered if it’s noir, but watched Horse Girl on Netflix last night.  Worth checking out.

  197. 197.

    Downpuppy

    Christopher Moore wrote a book called Noir.

    He admitted it ended up Raymond Chandler meets Damon Runyon with more than a dash of Bugs Bunny, but dangit, it’s still called Noir.

    Also too , if you go to your library, at the back of the mystery section, there’s probably a series call <Your Town Here>Noir, and you should check it out. Except Texas. That one is creepy.

  199. 199.

    Feathers

    @zhena gogolia: The Third Man is pure noir!

    I’m realizing that I came up in film noir fandom when the bible was Silver & Ward’s Film Noir Encylopedia. I have a copy right in front of me in the stack of film reference books under my coffee table. During the 80s/90s film noir revival, there were many books on film noir published, almost all of which has lists of what they considered noir. You used them when going through the TV guide and cable listings, or at the video store, trying to see if there was something new you hadn’t seen. I guess the internet kind of killed that. I’ll see people posting crazy talk like The Maltese Falcon isn’t film noir.

    I learned how to set up a database by creating a list of all the film noir listed in the various books. The Third Man is definitely in.

  200. 200.

    Feathers

    @mad citizen: As the lady with the full shelf of reference books, Possessed is definitely noir.

    The Brattle Theater in Harvard Square ran Monday Night Noir double features for a decade or more. That is where I saw Possessed. Several times I’m sure.

  201. 201.

    Anotherlurker

    Could some espionage film be considered Noir?

    I’m thinking specifically of the 1980s version of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” starring Alec Guinness.

    If not Noir, then the greatest espionage film of all time.  IMHO.

  202. 202.

    Groucho48

    A more recent noir that I don’t think has been mentioned, yet, is Devil in a Blue Dress.

     

    DeWitt Albright: Get me some whiskey, Easy.

    Easy Rawlins: Get it yourself. Bottle’s in the cabinet.[Slowly Albright smiles]

    DeWitt Albright: Well, I’ll be damned. Get us a drink, Manny. Easy, you’re a brave man. I need a brave man working for me. But you gotta find Frank Green, so he can lead us to her.

    Easy Rawlins: No, thanks, Mr. Albright. People are gettin’ killed all around me. You never said anything about all this.

    DeWitt Albright: Easy, you’re connectable to two murders. You’ll do whatever I tell you to do. Now you got three days to find him. And you make sure you count ’em right.

  204. 204.

    Feathers

    One thing I’d like to push back a bit on from the intro is the framing of the femme fatale as central to the genre. A class I took pointed out that the femme fatale is basically a female sociopath. The genre has a lot of male sociopaths as well. A more interesting and useful way to look at it is that film noir is a genre where if you want something, there will be a sociopath somehow standing between you and it. If you want sex, the person you desire is a a sociopath (there are homme fatales as well, and good girls/boys who don’t spark interest). If you need dough, Richard Widmark, Lee Marvin, Sterling Hayden or someone of their ilk is somehow involved.

    I brought this up at a panel discussion once and a large man basically wailed that femme fatales aren’t sociopaths, they’re “just selfish.” This still warms me at night.

  207. 207.

    WaterGirl

    @zhena gogolia: @Feathers:

    I can figure out a way to get the word out.  By last Sunday we know what the subject would be today, but we haven’t talked about next week yet.

    Feathers, if you’re not on BJ a lot, you can always send me email mid-week and I can reply with the info. Otherwise, I’ll try to spread the word on the threads.  

    Or something.  I’ll let it rattle around in my head for a bit and see if I can come up with something.

    You know what, once we decide on the subject, I can put the information in Balloon Juice News – it’s in the sidebar on computers and in the menu bar (aka hamburger) on mobile.

    Will that work?

  211. 211.

    PJ

    @Feathers: The sociopath represents the extreme of corrupt behavior – someone who lacks empathy for others, and particularly for the victims of their crimes, and are completely driven by self-interest.  So it’s natural that they are features of noirs, but you can have a noir where they aren’t the antagonist (or protagonist), where the protagonist makes a series of bad choices and institutions do their work.  Of movies I’ve seen recently, They Live by Night is an example from the 40’s, and The Friends of Eddie Coyle is one from the 70’s.

  212. 212.

    WaterGirl

    @Ghost of Joe Lieblings Dog: We have the Medium Cool series every Sunday at 5pm – the subject varies, of course, but it covers film, books, and TV.  If you haven’t had a chance, click the link to our introductory thread in the post, that will give you some background.

    Also, these threads are always available in the sidebar (and in the menu bar / hamburger on mobile).  Look for Medium Cool with BGinCHI under Featuring.

  213. 213.

    John Revolta

    @cope: M is great, really really dark. Lorre is hard to watch in places. Dunno if you could even get away with such a film these days.

    Reminded me of another great prewar German noir, von Sternberg’s Blue Angel with Marlene Dietrich. These films were noir before noir was a thing. Also Cabinet of Dr Caligari, way back in 1920.

    How about noir songs? Elvis C, The Long Honeymoon

    https://youtu.be/hNia8pgdJRM

  214. 214.

    Downpuppy

    @dexwood: that’s Walter Mosley. Only worth nitpicking because Hoak Moseley is the protagonist of an excellent series by Charles Willeford that was the source for the movie Miami Blues, with Alec Baldwin, Fred Ward, & Jennifer Jason Leigh.

  215. 215.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Scrolling through the thread, which I may sit down and read later for ideas.

    Anyone mention The Grifters? One of my favorite underrated (I think) movies. Anjelica Huston was robbed of the Oscar. I love the way it presents (then) present day Los Angeles as still kind of stuck in, if not the forties, maybe the seventies. Definitely not the LA of 1990 as presented by its TV contemporaries, like LA Law ,or pretty much 70% of network shows of the time.

  216. 216.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    as well as Rififi mentioned above.

    trying to remember where I (fairly) recently saw Rififi discussed by characters on a screen, pretty sure it was in The Americans.

  217. 217.

    BGinCHI

    @PJ: I read a great book last year on Billy Wilder and his origins in German/Austrian cinema. Same kinds of observations you make here.

  218. 218.

    BGinCHI

    @Feathers: Every Sunday at 5:00, EST.

    Not sure what the topic will be next week, but if it’s going to be something as specific as “The King” again, we’ll give notice.

    Going to try to keep it general again next week, to meet the broad skills & desires of the Jackaltariat.

    If you have any suggestions, ping WaterGirl.

  219. 219.

    BGinCHI

    @tokyokie: My praise for Dassin is up near the top of the thread. An amazing film maker, fucked over by Hollywood and American red scare.

    I love Classe tous Risques. Anything with Lino…

  220. 220.

    BGinCHI

    @PJ: Apparently Shaw wrote several novels, though I’ve never read one.

    Great Matthau films that need wider release are The Laughing Policeman & Charlie Varrick.

    Both excellent.

  222. 222.

    Feathers

    @PJ: I think we are differing in the definition of sociopath. You are seeing it as something almost monstrous. I’m thinking of the psychological type, which ends up as being around 1-4% of the population: welf-centered and willing to hurt/manipulate others to get their way. Under that definition Chickamaw in They Live by Night and Dillon in The Friends of Eddie Coyle would count as sociopaths. Sure Bowie and Eddie make some bad choices, but everything could have turned out alright for them. It is just that fate has determined that someone they trust turns out to be self centered and willing to hurt them. Noir does feature cold and heartless institutions “doing their work,” but we do see that there are people in those institutions making the choice not to let the protagonist have a happy ending.

  225. 225.

    BGinCHI

    @Feathers: I went to the double features 3-4 nights a week there, summer of 1988. Saw all of Fellini and a ton more stuff. I loved that place.

  228. 228.

    BGinCHI

    @Feathers: It’s a trope that’s almost completely misogynistic.

    Women are “difficult” and want things, which from the male POV is troublesome.

    Women have complex lives and problems, often caused by men, then men get involved to “fix” things and they’re usually worse.

    See: “Chinatown” in particular.

  231. 231.

    Elizabelle

    @BGinCHI:   So glad you are doing this.

    Will catch up on the thread, but I have just begun reading Raymond Chandler’s novels.  Have to finish The Big Sleep, but have been savoring it.  His writing is crystalline.  The phrases and descriptions stop me in my tracks; have to savor them.  But it makes me sad to see the body count, some of them good people in the wrong place.

    Michael Connelly (the Harry Bosch/Lincoln Lawyer series) is a big Chandler fan.

    There’s a recent book — the annotated Big Sleep — out.  Lots of information about the times and city.  On my wish list.

  232. 232.

    Downpuppy

    @BGinCHI: Himes is a bit cheery for noir. Not as cheery as the splendidly silly film version of Cotton Comes to Harlem, but still, fun.

  233. 233.

    Groucho48

    @Downpuppy:

     

    And, boy, his stuff, especially the short stories, are pretty, um, earthy. They also really capture just how dumb and impulsive most petty criminal;s are.

  234. 234.

    Brachiator

    @zhena gogolia:

    I had not seen T”Strange Love of Martha Ivers” until I caught up with it on a local public television channel a few years ago. I thought it a solid film with uniformly good acting. This 1946 film was also the movie debut of Kirk Douglas.

    Oddly enough, the only problem I had with the film is that Douglas plays a morally weak lawyer dominated by Martha Ivers and who can be physically intimidated by the main male protagonist, played by Van Heflin. But I kept seeing Douglas with my knowledge of his later career and powerful performances. So whenever he was in a scene with Van Heflin, I kept thinking that Douglas could have snapped the other man in half like a twig.

    BTW, the Wiki says that the film entered the public domain in 1974.

  235. 235.

    tokyokie

    @Craig: I classify Japanese organized-crime movies as yakuza films, but then I differentiate between Japanese and Chinese martial-arts films. Although yakuza movies tend to have some elements of film noir, I think they comprise a genre to themselves, whereas Korean gangster movies, despite copping a lot of style from Hong Kong gangster movies, owe more to American gangster films. Except the violence always goes to 11.

  237. 237.

    tokyokie

    @BGinCHI: In the supplements to one of the Dassin movies Criterion put out is an interview with Dassin in which he describes his betrayal by Kazan, and he tears up as he does so. That was enough for me to decide that Ed Harris and Nick Nolte were correct to be righteously pissed off when the Academy gave Kazan some lifetime achievement award. Dassin deserved such an honor before Kazan, although moving to Paris and marrying Melina Mercouri seems like a more practical comeuppance.

  238. 238.

    tokyokie

    @Feathers: I picked up the German Blu-ray of Charley Varrick a couple of years back, as the Universal DVD looked like hell. I don’t know anybody who’s seen Charley Varrick who doesn’t love it, and Joe Don Baker’s Molly is one of the all-time great villains.

  241. 241.

    Feathers

    @BGinCHI: Thanks. I’ll keep an eye out. Perhaps when a theme is decided upon, the previous Sunday’s post could be updated to let everyone know. I don’t know if that would work or not.

    Thanks so much for hosting. This is a great idea for getting to know people outside of the politics.

  242. 242.

    Feathers

    @BGinCHI: Our paths undoubtedly crossed, then. I would have been there most Monday nights. Didn’t catch the Fellini. I was taking classes at Harvard Extension, so if a series ran on a class night, I missed all of it.

    The Brattle is still going strong. They are a non-profit now. They host Noir City Boston. This year it’s June 12-14. FYI, Noir City Chicago is July 28 – Aug 3. The theme this year, at least for San Francisco, is International Noir.

  243. 243.

    Feathers

    @BGinCHI: Very much so, but complicated. They are figures of identification for women as well as misogynist fantasies. They really did have an agency and sense of their own desires which are so often lacking in female characters. I wrote above about placing them in context of the male figures in film noir, not just focusing on them as problematic women.

    My favorite comment on the femme fatale was Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner, writing about Lily’s(?) fascination as a teen with Beverly Garland. “Bad girls may get punished in the end, but good girls get punished through the whole movie.”

  244. 244.

    PJ

    @Feathers: I guess I would distinguish this by saying that both Dillon and Chickamaw are Bad Guys, but Dillon, on the one hand, is being squeezed by the Feds (or was it the local cops?) and Chickamaw seems to be just nuts, but the ultimate punishment that comes down on Bowie and Coyle is the cops for the former and the mob for the latter – institutions that don’t give a shit about either.  Their personal crimes aren’t so big, relatively speaking, but neither institution cares.  Someone has to pay, and these small fish are gonna get fried.  So I guess I would say, after this enlightening discussion with the BK jackals, that, aesthetics aside (which is maybe the most obvious aspect of classifying something as noir), the thing that defines it for me is that, no matter how good the intentions of the protagonist may be, they are doomed.  In some ways, it’s a return to Greek tragedy, where all of this has been written beforehand by the gods.

    Which reminds me of a modern movie that was dramatically frustrating but morally satisfying, The Counselor, written by Cormac McCarthy and directed by Ridley Scott.  The protagonist, played by Michael Fassbender, makes his fatal mistake before the movie starts, and we only see him realize he’s doomed as the repercussions play out.  He, and the audience, think there might be some way of winning, but everything was decided before we see the first frame.

  245. 245.

    prostratedragon

    @Feathers:
    My thoughts exactly on the femmes fatales. And often, as with any con, the person who falls for her (or him in some cases) is partly responsible for the disaster, maybe through their own greed, or inability to recognize bait.

  247. 247.

    prostratedragon

    @laura:
    Don’t think I’ve even heard of it! During that time I know the Coens were releasing movies faster than I could keep up. Proof. I prefer them as in Fargo, when they’re not winking at us too much. This looks good from the trailer.

    Btw all Noir all the time, with flavorings of magical realism: David Lynch. I’ve considered the handle “Ronette’s Other Friend,” and might yet go to it.

  249. 249.

    NobodySpecial

    Didn’t read them all, but did anyone mention Outland, with Sean Connery?

  251. 251.

    Geminid

    Way late to this thread, but I rate John Ford’s My Darling Clementine highly for noir. The nighttime scenes especially. And Walter Brennan as the evil Ike Clanton is as noiry as they get.

  254. 254.

    Nancy

    @Brachiator: Is Out of the Past the Robert Mitchum film? I can get lost in that film, anything with Mitchum. Even bad Mitchum films are worth watching.

  255. 255.

    Psych1

    L.A. Confidential.  Ok, Ok, not “real” noir but ish, definitely ish. And excellent.

  256. 256.

    wizend_guy

    @BGinCHI: “On the smooth brown hair was a hat that had been taken from its mother too young.”

    “She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.”

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