Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

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

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

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

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

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175Comments

  1. 1.

    Splitting Image

    The Third Man and Touch of Evil would both be good choices.

    I’m also fond of Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.

  7. 7.

    geg6

    Double Indemnity.  Barbara Stanwyck is so amazing and you can’t go wrong with Fred McMurray and Edward G. Robinson.  The best, IMHO.

    ETA:  And how could I forget Body Heat?  William Hurt and Kathleen Turner are too hot and I love it!

  10. 10.

    wjca

    Why in the world would anyone go for film noir when the real world is way more than noir enough? Totally not getting it.

    Signed, your local compulsive optimist

  11. 11.

    piratedan

    yeah, that whole series of Bogart films (Key Largo, Maltese Falcon, etc) are really good.  The Asphalt Jungle is also pretty tasty as far as noir is concerned.

  12. 12.

    TF79

    Slow Horses is great – I’m sad my partner is traveling or we’d be watching the new episode tonight

  13. 13.

    columbusqueen

    @geg6: Seconded. Having seen My Three Sons reruns when I was young, it was one hellava jolt to encounter Fred McMurray in it. Talk about versatile! And I always love Stanwyck whether she’s a bad or good girl.

  14. 14.

    dmsilev

    Slow Horses is amazing, one of Gary Oldman’s best roles. And that’s a high bar to clear. Apple TV+, not Disney.

  16. 16.

    RandyG

    @Ken: ….which wears thin after about 15 minutes. But a decent flick.

    Noir: Laura, Gilda, White Heat, D.O.A. (the 1949 original), Diabolique, Asphalt Jungle

    Neo: Blood Simple, Manchurian Candidate

  18. 18.

    Wileybud

    @Ken: Same “gimmick” was used by Bogie & Bacall in 1947’s Dark Passage.  Done quite well I might add.

    Lady in the Lake rates as a Christmas movie the same as Die Hard does.

     

    @Ken:

  19. 19.

    Anne Laurie

    @geg6: Hallmark did a mini-series version of Double Indemnity back in the 1980s, starring Diana Rigg!

    We’ve just ordered a DVD copy (but it’s available for streaming) because I’m gradually getting the Spousal Unit into Agatha Christie… and we both adore the late great Dame Diana.

  21. 21.

    frosty

    Other than the good B/W ones from the forties, I gotta say Body Heat. Good lord, Kathleen Turner was smoking hot in that one.

    ETA: I’ve read all the Slow Horses books and liked them. Somehow I’m out of the “sitting down to watch television” phase, probably because I’m spending all my time on this blog. Maybe that phase will come back.

    ETA2. Duh, read the comment below mine. Chinatown of course. Especially because the plot was rooted in LA history.

  24. 24.

    Jeffro

    just chiming in here to recommend “The Last Kingdom” on Netflix.  King Alfred (and later, his son Edward) repel the barbaric Danes and unite England with the help of Uhtred of (many titles)

    Holy cow is it good!  Based on Bernard Cornwell’s novels.  Moves like…(apologies for the cliche’)…LIGHTNING!

  27. 27.

    frosty

    @Wileybud: ​
    Christmas movies? Last Kiss Goodnight with Geena Davis. Not noir, though.

    Best description. She was asked once why there was not Bourne-type movie with a woman protagonist. She said yes, there was, and I starred in it. See above.

  30. 30.

    apocalipstick

    Out of the Past.

    Chinatown.

    LA Confidential.

    The Third Man is a dark classic, but there’s a real debate over whether or not it’s an actual noir.

    Against All Odds (basically a remake of Out of the Past)

    The Last Seduction

    The Late Show (Art Carney and Lily Tomlin)

    One False Move

  34. 34.

    SpaceUnit

    I like Dancing With Wolves.  A lot.  Top twenty.  And in general I don’t much care for mob or prison films.  I find them sort of depressing.

    I understand why actors and directors like making them – they feel that they’re exploring an inverted moral universe, but I just don’t see it that way.  It’s the same old world without the usual veneer.  And I don’t watch movies to be depressed.  I watch movies as a form of escape.  That’s my two cents.

  35. 35.

    David 🐝KHive🐝 Koch

    Off the  top of my head

     

    Noir: Black legion, All Through the Night, White Heat

    Neo Noir: The Long Goodbye, Who’ll Stop the Rain, Q & A

  38. 38.

    H.E.Wolf

    @wjca: ​Why in the world would anyone go for film noir

    @columbusqueen: I always love Stanwyck whether she’s a bad or good girl.​
     I think “The Lady Eve” would satisfy both constituencies.

    Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, William Demarest (“positively the same dame!!”), my forever bae Eugene Pallette, and a supporting cast that’s almost as full of clever con artists as “The Sting”.

  39. 39.

    Torrey

    Dead Again: Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Derek Jacobi.​
     

    Wait, you’re tired of awful people, so noir is where you’re going for a change of pace?

  41. 41.

    Literata

    This is a really minor recommendation, but I was binge-watching Murder, She Wrote while sick recently, and watching a young Jerry Orbach in some of the neo-noir episodes is like a vision of Law and Order Yet to Come. 

  43. 43.

    hueyplong

    • You’ve hit most of my noir choices. Here are 10 (in no order):

    The Big Sleep

    Out of the Past

    The Maltese Falcon

    Double Indemnity

    Crime Wave (young Chuck Bronson)

    Criss Cross

    Chinatown

    LA Confidential

    The Killers

    Asphalt Jungle

    In the 80s I briefly lived in what I believe to be the apartment building out of which Agnes Morehead took a tumble in Dark Passage. I was not on a high floor like hers.

  44. 44.

    JoyceH

    @wjca: same. When real life gets too noirish, my go-to is Gene Kelly movies. When things are really dire, I deploy the big guns – Fred Astaire.

  48. 48.

    RandyG

    @H.E.Wolf: The Lady Eve has 5 — count ’em 5 — of the greatest comedic character actors of all time in one film! Eugene Pallette and William Demarest, already mentioned; also Charles Coburn, Robert Greig, and Eric Blore. Preston Sturges certainly knew how to find them and highlight them.

  50. 50.

    Peke Daddy

    Pickup on South Street. A Sam Fuller joint, with Richard Widmark and Thelma Ritter. Also, Rocky beating Network? Pleeeze!

  52. 52.

    Anoniminous

    @Harrison Wesley: ​
     
    Mitchum’s screen credits reads like a list of Best Films Ever:

    The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), Out of the Past (1947), Angel Face (1953), River of No Return (1954), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Thunder Road (1958), The Sundowners (1960), Cape Fear (1962), El Dorado (1966), Ryan’s Daughter (1970), The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), and the aforementioned Farewell, My Lovely (1975).

  53. 53.

    Yarrow

    Gaslight (1944). It’s a terrific film and you get to see where the overused term came from. Bonus for Angela Lansbury in her film debut film.

  54. 54.

    brendancalling

    I love “Double Indemnity.” “Out of the Past” is great as well.

    Rough day at school. Not enough sleep, realization my lesson was over a lot of my kids’ heads.

  56. 56.

    JiveTurkin

    Out of the Past.  Mitchum at his best, Jane Greer is stunning and evil.  My favorite line is when she is trying to explain that she didn’t steal the $40,000 (which she did) and he says “baby, I don’t care”, and he really doesn’t.

  57. 57.

    Jager

    I was depressed enough last week to escape into comedy. I discovered Deon Cole on Netflix, I’m still grinning when I think about his “Vintage Women” bit.

  62. 62.

    meander

    My favorite is Laura, which plays on TCM now and then.

    Out of the Past is excellent. Some great writing, like Mitchum to the femme fatale:  “You’re like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another.”

    Two with expired copyrights so they are available in full on YouTube and elsewhere:  Detour, and Too Late For Tears (perhaps Dan Duryea’s most nasty villain).

    Dark Passage is fun, especially if you know San Francisco (Bogie’s “shortcut” near the end is a ridiculous geographic garble).

  63. 63.

    CaseyL

    I took a college course on noir movies. I hadn’t really encountered noir before, and the discussions about the characteristics of a noir film fascinated me.

    We saw some, I guess you’d say middle of the pack – films that aren’t as celebrated as the favorites listed here. I remember The Big Heat and Underworld USA in particular for some reason. Maybe because Cliff Robertson is in the latter, and I had only ever seen him play good guys, so seeing him as a (mostly anti-) hero was a shock!

    Seems to me there’s a lot of overlap between original noir and the gangster movies. Same themes, with anti-heroes and corruption everywhere.

  65. 65.

    Anoniminous

    @West of the Rockies:

    Decades ago I got into a ridiculous multi-person discussion (read: Shouting Match) over that very topic.  The crux was whether neo-noir was really film noir or merely borrowed/stole tropes, motifs, and mise-en-scènes of film noir.

    As is the nature of those kind of things we never reached agreement but had a good time yelling at each other.

  70. 70.

    Winter Wren

    Slow Horses is great, we eagerly await each Wednesday drop. Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas are phenomenal and waiting for Hugo Weaving to appear (haven’t seen today’s yet). Books very good too.

    Bad Monkey (also on AppleTV) is well worth watching too – Vince Vaughn is surprisingly good.  Kind of noir vibes, with some light comedy and southern Florida/Key West atmospherics thrown in. The book is also good.

    These are the only shows that we watch currently that haven’t finished their seasons.

  75. 75.

    hueyplong

    @John Cole: It’s easy to overlook modern ones because when someone says “film noir” it’s pretty tempting to go all late 40s-early 50s.

    An off the main path modern neo noir is Red Rock West.

  76. 76.

    Matthew

    We just saw “Double Indemnity” for the first time – awesome. Also, local repertory theatre just showed “The Big Sleep” and, my fav, “The Maltese Falcon”.

  77. 77.

    nasruddin

    Couple obscure ones for ya

    Road House – Ida Lupino

    The Stranger – Orson Welles – kind of a precursor to 3rd Man

    This Gun For Hire – Ladd & Lake

  78. 78.

    Sure Lurkalot

    Notorious (Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains) and the rarely shown Mirage (Gregory Peck, Diane Baker, Walter Matthau).

  80. 80.

    NotMax

    Keeping in mind that favorite is not necessarily the same as best.

    Classic: M, Crossfire, Key Largo, Bad Day at Black Rock, The Thin Man.

    Neo: Blade Runner, Blowup, Cutter’s Way, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Dark City.

  82. 82.

    Geminid

    @Jeffro: It’s always good to remind Cornwell fans that he wrote some good action novels besides the Sharpe series. The protagonist in the Saxon Chronicles slashes and hacks his way through nine novels. The absence of gunpowder doesn’t seem to cramp Uthred’s style one bit.

    The Grail Quest series is pretty good too That hero mopes around France shooting people with his longbow for three novels.

    Cornwell also wrote three other series with eleven novels between them, plus five stand-alones. That’s as of 2016, which is when my copy of The Flame Bearer was printed.

  85. 85.

    Citizen_X

    @frosty: Also has a nice against-type turn by Samuel L. Jackson as a sad-sack alcoholic  detective trying to redeem himself.

    Stretching neo-noir (immediately post-cold war spy neo-noir?): Atomic Blonde. (Which also has a woman, Charlize Theron, as a Bourne-type lead.) Catches the slippery atmosphere of post-Warsaw Pact Berlin well.

  86. 86.

    prostratedragon

    I like the genre a lot; no point in fussing the definition imo, because it becomes a wall that closes off the consideration of stories that belong together.

    Some favorites not yet mentioned are D.O.A., The Big Combo, Scarlet Street, and Act of Violence.

    Back when “women’s pictures” were still a thing there were some very noirish ones, like The Letter, Mildred Pierce, Nora Prentiss, The Reckless Moment, and Cause for Alarm! There’s even a noir case to be made for Sunset Boulevard and, from Eve Harrington’s p.o.v., for All About Eve.

  88. 88.

    H.E.Wolf

    @RandyG: The Lady Eve has 5 — count ’em 5 — of the greatest comedic character actors of all time in one film! Eugene Pallette and William Demarest, already mentioned; also Charles Coburn, Robert Greig, and Eric Blore. Preston Sturges certainly knew how to find them and highlight them.

     Thank you for the other names, and the shout-out to Preston Sturges!

    “The Lady Eve” revealed (to my surprise) that Henry Fonda could do physical comedy.

    Back to noir… does Alfred Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” count as noir? It has un homme fatal, in the person of the glamorous uncle – in the sense of “casting a glamour” – who comes to visit.

  91. 91.

    BR

    Silicon Valley always hits close to home. It is strange how close a show that absurd is to being a documentary.

  93. 93.

    Bupalos

    I love The Sweet Smell of Success but after I watch it my internal monologue goes into a noir patter dialect for days on end, and that gets pretty annoying.

  95. 95.

    Chet Murthy

    @Gretchen: I haven’t watched the series, but I hear they’re pretty faithful to the books.   And yeah, I think you have to start the books with the first.  FWIW.

  96. 96.

    RandyG

    @H.E.Wolf:

    Thank you for the other names, and the shout-out to Preston Sturges!

    “The Lady Eve” revealed (to my surprise) that Henry Fonda could do physical comedy.

    Back to noir… does Alfred Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” count as noir? It has un homme fatal, in the person of the glamorous uncle – in the sense of “casting a glamour” – who comes to visit.

    YW.

    The Lady Eve is perfect in so many ways. It also showed that Barbara Stanwyck could effortlessly play comedy too.

    Shadow of a Doubt would qualify as Noir, which is often the mood/feeling of a film, rather than whether it necessarily checks off the common characteristics.

  98. 98.

    BR

    Harris is really sharp in this Ruhle interview (I’m finally watching). And I almost can’t watch at my usual 2x speed because she’s talking too fast.

  101. 101.

    moonbat

    I’ve seen Night of the Hunter mentioned several times and some Coen Bros films. The Coen Bros must worship NotH because they keep recreating scenes from it in their movies. One of their wildest homages is in The Man Who Wasn’t There when they have Jon Polito recreate the scene with Shelly Winters being ‘buried’ in her car underwater after Mitchum offs her.

    My favorite neo noir has to be Miller’s Crossing though, speaking of Coen Bros.

  103. 103.

    karen marie

    @Eolirin:   It is.  I’ve never seen it because I don’t have Apple TV but I cannot recommend the audio books enough.  Mick Herron is a wonderful writer.  I’ve listened to four or five of his Slough House series on Audible.  I took a break because, as can happen with long series, they can start to run together.  Herron’s short stories collected under the title Dolphin Junction are wonderful.

    To clear my head, I’m on the second book of Caimh McConnell’s Dublin Trilogy. He’s as good as Mick Herron and reminds me of Donald E. Westlake. I love a hapless hero.

  107. 107.

    Honus

    @JiveTurkin: Night of the Hunter is based on a true story and filmed just down the river from the Blogfather’s Bethany home in Proctor, WV.  Check out Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips for the whole chilling true story of the serial killer Mitchum’s character is based on.

  110. 110.

    prostratedragon

    @hueyplong: Crime Wave is good, though I’d say not great. Like many noirs, it has outstanding photography, and that strong debut by Bronson, who I think was billed under his given name. It also is the movie where I saw a man absolutely float across a floor and thought to myself, “This must be a dancer.” Turned out to be Gene Nelson, a couple of years before Oklahoma!.

  115. 115.

    Kent

    I like Noir and have seen most or all of the films listed here.  But I think to be honest, my faves from the classic period of the 1930s tend to be comedies.  Bringing up Baby, Philadelphia Story, My Man Godfrey, Modern Times, etc.

    So would No Country for Old Men and Fargo be considered Neo-Noir?

  118. 118.

    prostratedragon

    English, or at least Anglo-American noir and Hindi noir have been mentioned. Eddie Mueller has promised more Argentine noir to come soon. He showed No abras nunca esa puerta [Never Open That Door] a few months ago and it was well worth seeing, kind of a missing link.

  123. 123.

    columbusqueen

    @schrodingers_cat: I think gangsters can be an element of noir, but not completely necessary. Most ’30s gangster films lack the femme fatale figure that strikes me as essential to ’40 noir.

  125. 125.

    VFX Lurker

    @West of the Rockies: Could it be argued that Blade Runner is noir?

    I wanted to recommend Blade Runner as a good noir film, too, though at least one scene makes me uncomfortable (Deckard’s treatment of Rachael).

  127. 127.

    moonbat

    @Honus: Except for the crucial scene when Tom has been ordered to kill Bernie at Miller’s Crossing on which the whole plot turns and the fact that Tom loves Leo more than he loves Verna, sure. lol

  129. 129.

    Rose Weiss

    For something current that’s noirish – Monsieur Spade with Clive Owen on Netflix. Sam Spade’s life years after the events in the Maltese Falcon. I started watching only because Maltese Falcon is one of my all time favorite movies.

  130. 130.

    dlwchico

    Slow Horses is great.
    So good after I watch an episode I don’t want to watch anything else cause it all seems bland and stupid in comparison.

    For noir, does the movie “Heat” count?

  131. 131.

    trollhattan

    Slow Horses is so great. Gary Oldman tonight, everybody.

    You wouldn’t have lost him if he was a bottle of gin.”

    Me, departing sofa on hearing that.

    ETA Body Heat holds up as modern noir. My vote, that’s it.

  133. 133.

    David 🐝KHive🐝 Koch

    @Honus: He’s barely in the film.  Though now that you mention Widmark he was in a great neon noir with Hackman,  “The Domino Principle”

  136. 136.

    Armadillo

    A friend of mine teaches a college course on noir. During the pandemic I audited it and complied the following rankings based on films in the course and films I saw myself:

     

    1) The Big Sleep – Out of the Past

    2) Double Indemnity
    3) Mildred Pierce
    4) The Last Seduction – Red Rocks West

    5) Force of Evil

    6) Body Heat – Gun Crazy
    7) The Lady From Shanghai
    8) The Maltese Falcon
    9,999) A Touch of Evil

    Also like many of the films others have recommended:. Chinatown, LA Confidential, Miller’s Crossing, Memento.

    One that seems to have been left off: the Coen Brothers’ first film: Blood Simple.

  137. 137.

    RandyG

    @NotMax: Purple Noon, sure! A lot of French New Wave, as mentioned, have rather distinct noirish sensibilities: Breathless, Alphaville, Shoot the Piano Player, Le Doulos,  Le Samourai.

    It took me several tries to get through Purple Noon. Not because I didn’t like it, but because much of it was so troubling.

  138. 138.

    cw moss

    @geg6: the first seven comments name movies that are so dear to my heart that I’m almost brought to tears. Thanks all of you jackals.

  143. 143.

    kalakal

    Stormy Monday neo noir with Sean Bean, Sting, Melanie Griffiths, Tommy Lee Jones

    Get Carter (1971) Michael Caine, Ian Hendry, John Osborne, Britt Ekland

    The Long Good Friday Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren

    Mona Lisa Bob Hoskins, Kathy Tyson, Michael Caine

    The first two are neo noir

    The Long Good Friday is a fantastic film

  144. 144.

    Jim Brown

    Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb is first class anti-Bond entertainment and in a way so too is Ben The Mac of The Times … and if you like real fact based espionage tales of the unexpected try Beyond Enkription where Newcastle Brown and lager rule rather than effeminate martinis.

    If ever there was a bunch of spies that despised the status quo in MI6 when John le Carré’s couch potatoes and Ian Fleming ruled the reading roosts then Pemberton’s People surely deserve the gold medal.

    However, if you do read Beyond Enkription, it is an enthralling read as long as you don’t expect fictional agents like Ian Fleming’s incredible 007 to save the world or John le Carré’s sluggard yet illustrious Smiley to send you to sleep with his delicate diction, sophisticated syntax and placid plots.

    For some Amazonians Beyond Enkription may be a free read but no matter what don’t miss a trip to the advert free website at TheBurlingtonFiles. It’s a museum of espionage exhilaration and true but oft sordid tales of the unexpected. PS Don’t forget the FaireSansDire website link on TheBurlingtonFiles home page.

  145. 145.

    Comrade Scrutinizer

    @NotMax: Hard disagree about Rififi. The heist sequence is the center of the plot, and is the best ever on film, but the heist isn’t the point of the movie. The point is the relationships between characters, and how they fall into the darkness surrounding them. Truffaut called it “the best film noir I have ever seen.”

  146. 146.

    David_C

    Slow Horses is great. I’d start from the beginning because each season is worth watching and for the character development. For great noir, one film not mentioned is I Wake Up Screaming, with Victor Mature and Betty Grable. It came out around the same time as Falcon, but had all the cinematography of noir – lighting, camera angles, shadows – and a noirish plot. The background music included “Over the Rainbow,” which was a little jarring for noir, but the performance by Laird Cregar is downright creepy.

    Also in the public domain is The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, which was Kirk Douglas’s film debut and was also a Stanwyck vehicle.

    Ah, the catching up when one is a morning person.

  147. 147.

    Noskilz

    My favorite is The Maltese Falcon, but a very good noir film is 1946’s Deadline at Dawn   A sailor who isn’t sure what he has been up to needs to clear his name fast.

    Brighton Rock is also worth a look. Where a cheap hood with big ideas finds himself in over his head when a gullible young woman and comic singer cross his path.

  148. 148.

    hueyplong

    I can almost hear Cole getting exasperated and saying, like Polito in Miller’s Crossing, “Running things!”

  151. 151.

    satby

    @Shana: @different-church-lady: 

    If you read the background about that movie, or the book it was based on, it makes sense. The censors of the time forced the sex trafficking and pornographic filming of the drug addicted younger sister to be mentioned so obliquely only viewers in the 40s got it.

  152. 152.

    prostratedragon

    @David 🐝KHive🐝 Koch:
    Like Night and the City, directed by Bronx native Jules Dassin who also did The Naked City.

    Rififi is one of several very similar stories; also The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing, whose title reminds me that no one has mentioned one of the best, The Killers (1940something version). Any of these is a priority view in my book.

  155. 155.

    Jamey

    A lot of great choices here

    I’m watching Alphaville now (First time I saw it, I expected sci-fi.)

    Motherless Brooklyn sticks with me as quality neo-noir. YMMV

  158. 158.

    tokyokie

    @JiveTurkin: Or when Mitchum’s fiancee says nobody can be as evil as he’s described Jane Greer to be, Mitchum’s rejoinder is, “Yeah? Well she comes closest.”

  159. 159.

    zhena gogolia

    All in all, not that they’re my favorites, but it seems to me that Detour, original DOA, and Out of the Past are quintessential noir. Everything else is an amalgam of noir with other genres.

    But it’s just an opinion!

  160. 160.

    tokyokie

    @MaryRC: Sadly, after years of Disney movies and My Three Sons, MacMurray, one of Hollywood’s most right-wing actors, basically disavowed his performances as a heel. But I’ll give him credit for pushing to have William Demarest replace William Frawley in My Three Sons after its first season. The show introduced Demarest to a new generation of viewers and provided him a nice retirement income. (MacMurray and Demarest were from the same hometown in Wisconsin, so MacMurray knew him from way back when.) Still, I find it interesting that an Austrian Jew (Billy Wilder) recognized MacMurray as personifying the banality of evil, whereas most everybody else in Hollywood didn’t see that aspect of him.

  163. 163.

    tokyokie

    A couple of noirs that I consider great that are barely or not touched in this thread: Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (for those wondering where Tarantino got the idea for the mysterious glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction) and Angel Face, in my opinion, Mitchum’s best noir outside Out of the Past. Reportedly, Otto Preminger kept asking for retakes of a scene in which Mitchum slaps co-star Jean Simmons, claiming Mitchum wasn’t hitting her hard enough. Mitchum finally got fed up and went over to Preminger and hit him as hard as he could. “Like that, Otto? Is that hard enough?” As a result, Preminger didn’t ask for any more retakes, and Simmons became a lifelong friend of Mitchum.

    And yes, I should have gotten on this thread last night.

  164. 164.

    Shana

    @JoyceH: my big guns are either The Women or Auntie Mame. With a possible third and fourth being The World of Henry Orient and The Trouble with Angels. None of them noir in the least.

  167. 167.

    Pensive

    I know folks are focused on early noir, but one of my favorites is “Brick” directed by Rian Johnson and starring Joseph Gordon Levitt.  I love that it’s all high school kids (you hear one adult voice and see one adult actor) dealing with serious stuff and the language is a great throwback to those old moves.

    Femme Fatale “Do you trust me now?”

    Levitt “Less now than when I didn’t trust you before”.

    Also recently rewatched “The Last Seduction” – not sure that’s noir (or will cure you of your dislike for objectionable people” but wow what a film.

  169. 169.

    Primer Gray (formerly Yet Another Jeff

    I have a weird and deep love of Murder My Sweet…Dick Powell’s Marlow is more or less  unconscious for 1/4 or the film.

    And after Halloween, it’ll be time for noir xmas films…like Blast of Silence.

  170. 170.

    stinger

    Great noir I don’t think has been mentioned is the 1955 Diabolique with Simone Signoret, and a film probably no one here has seen, the 1982 Praying Mantis with Cheri Lunghi and Johnathan Pryce.

  172. 172.

    Fig Lewton

    This is my first post–I guess the noir question reeled me in. I read the first 40 comments or so and did not see the name Val Lewton, so if someone beat me to it, my apologies. Val Lewton produced low budget horror noir films to compete with Universal studios. In my opinion those films from 1942-46 are all masterpieces of cinematography and suspense. “Cat People” may be the most well-known, but the sequel “Curse of the Cat People” is equally good. Also try, well, try all of them–but I love “I Walked With a Zombie” and “The Leopard Man”. If you have never watched a Lewton film from this era, pop some popcorn and get ready for a cerebral, dreamy, visual masterpiece.

  173. 173.

    gluon1

    @Pensive: I’m so glad you mention Brick which is astonishingly good neo-noir.

    For the old ones, I echo the praise of Out of the Past and The Maltese Falcon and would add The Thin Man, which is noir and clever despite being comedic, Kubrick’s The Killing, and The Big Heat and Kansas City Confidential as excellent classics that I haven’t seen mentioned yet.

  174. 174.

    RandyG

    @Fig Lewton: Gee, I wonder how you came up with your nym? Val Lewton was a master innovator, particularly in how he achieved what he did — making you see and feel things that are NOT actually there — with miniscule budgets. (Of course his approach was required mainly because of the miniscule budgets.) And let’s give a shout out as well to Cat People director Jacques Tourneur, who also directed the very-mentioned-here and superb Out of the Past.

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