Film Noir

IdleRich said:

I watched a film called The Killers yesterday with Ava Gardner and Burt Lancaster and I thought it was great. I've enjoyed pretty much all the film noir I've seen (which isn't much) and I would be grateful if people could make some recommendations.

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Killers is ace, amnd you saw the right version (it was remade with Ronnie Reagan in the Lancaster role). Check Kiss Me Deadly - film noir meets end-of-the-world paranoid madness (and an influence on Repo Man).

Anything with Bogart goes without saying, though the greatest of all is Third Man, even if it's not officially recognised as one.

The amount of FN on Google Video (uncut) is pretty amazing, if you can watch movies on the PC without falling asleep (which I cant)

Check out http://www.bibi.vlog.br/

The last one I saw was Port of New York, which is about opium dealers in the early 30s(?) Starring a bitch slapping Yul Brenner, and a pretty awesome semi-documentary/film noir narrative style. It is also 1) complete sample fodder for all the producers out there and 2) has an AWESOME shot of canal street.

You HAVE to see Riffifi if you haven't already, like, see it now.

I'm no expert, but I LOVED "Sweet Smell of Success". Burt Lancaster KILLS as J. J. Hunsecker.

shudder said:

I'm no expert, but I LOVED "Sweet Smell of Success". Burt Lancaster KILLS as J. J. Hunsecker.

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That's an incredible film, but not sure it's noir, more straight up misanthropic.

crackerjack said:

That's an incredible film, but not sure it's noir, more straight up misanthropic.

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you might be right on that - there's no detective or nothing. But definitely has some of the snappy dialogue, the dark atmosphere, everyone out for themselves. MUST SEE!

Some suggestions, apart from those already mentioned, many of them perhaps obvious:

Classic noir: Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Gilda, Detour, In a Lonely Place. Night of the Hunter, Asphalt Jungle, The Killing Touch of Evil [have to include a Hitchcock too; he made at least a dozen noirs, but Strangers on a Train , Notorious, and Vertigo should suffice]

Neo-noir: Chinatown [still unsurpassed as the greatest portrayal of US patriarchal capitalism ever filmed], The Conversation, up to Obsession, Taxi-Driver, Body Heat and The Last Seduction [David Lynch being psychogenic-noir: Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, along with Cronenberg's Naked Lunch , Crash, and A History of Violence]

[Also 'pastiche noir': Coen Bros, De Palma, Tarantino etc, but I'll skip that ...]

These are virtually all American, of course, but as early film noir/proto-noir largely originated in Weimar Germany, its reasonable to include a classic from that era too: Lang's M,

German Neo-noir: Wim Wenders' The American Friend and Hammett. French: Godard's Breathless.

Some British noir: Carol Reed's work - Odd Man Out, The Third Man, Dennis Potter's superlative, singular The Singing Detective, up to Christopher Nolan's contemporary neo-noir, Memento.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH

i was gonna start a film noir thread last week....

my fav movie genre...

the killers is def one of my favorites ever... burt lancaster plays a a doomed man so well and ava gardner is a vamp... and the ciascuro (however you spell it) lighting is great... out of the past is damn good too.,..

other must sees:

Kiss Of Death: Richard Widmark is the best psychopath ever... i heard John Wayne subbed him at the oscars b/c he really thought he was that sick... the scene where he throws the old woman in the wheelchair down the stairs while laughing like a fucking nutjob is next level...

the phantom lady: good plot, crazy jazz scenes, and nice studio city,,,,

night and the city: not to beat a dead horse, but i love richard widmark and this one is a beauty... filmed in post-war london... another doomed protaganist...

the big clock: not a big fan of the main actor in this, but great pacing and great sets...




just watched D.O.A. last night.... very very solid and another great jazz nightclub scene...

hundredmillionlifetimes said:

Some suggestions, apart from those already mentioned, many of them perhaps obvious:

Classic noir: Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Gilda, Detour, In a Lonely Place. Night of the Hunter, Asphalt Jungle, The Killing Touch of Evil [have to include a Hitchcock too; he made at least a dozen noirs, but Strangers on a Train , Notorious, and Vertigo should suffice]

Neo-noir: Chinatown [still unsurpassed as the greatest portrayal of US patriarchal capitalism ever filmed], The Conversation, up to Obsession, Taxi-Driver, Body Heat and The Last Seduction [David Lynch being psychogenic-noir: Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, along with Cronenberg's Naked Lunch , Crash, and A History of Violence]

[Also 'pastiche noir': Coen Bros, De Palma, Tarantino etc, but I'll skip that ...]

These are virtually all American, of course, but as early film noir/proto-noir largely originated in Weimar Germany, its reasonable to include a classic from that era too: Lang's M,

German Neo-noir: Wim Wenders' The American Friend and Hammett. French: Godard's Breathless.

Some British noir: Carol Reed's work - Odd Man Out, The Third Man, Dennis Potter's superlative, singular The Singing Detective, up to Christopher Nolan's contemporary neo-noir, Memento.

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That's a pretty fabulous, spot on list. M is a film I'd clean forgotten and one all would-be paediatrician-haters should be forced to watch.

IdleRich said:

Another British film noir I've seen is Hell Is A City, really enjoyed that one and it comes with two endings a la the French Lieutenant's Woman.

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I'm told you can see the old Hacienda buiilding in the rooftop chase too.

IdleRich said:

Great stuff.
I watched Riffifi a few weeks ago actually but I haven't seen M for years, I'd really like to see it again.
I also watched Millers Crossing (Coen brothers) the other day and I'm with you, while it is fairly enjoyable I would have to agree that it doesn't quite hit the spot like (say) The Killers. Hard to put your finger on it, it just seemed to fit together a little too neatly - though then again that happens in a lot of noirs and doesn't bother me in the slightest. Maybe a noir ought to be in black and white to get just the right atmosphere across but that doesn't seem like a fair restriction. It had the requisite femme-fatale and pummeling for the hero with the morally ambiguous ending but something really did suggest pastiche.
I was just arguing with my friend yesterday as to whether Sunset Boulevard counted as a film noir.
Another British film noir I've seen is Hell Is A City, really enjoyed that one and it comes with two endings a la the French Lieutenant's Woman.

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The Coens' debut, Blood Simple established their inscrutable approach: having all the 'ingredients' of noir, using its mode, but ultimately delivering and exemplifying a pomo noir pastiche, right up to The Man Who Wasn't There (which is in Monochrome). The Coens' are so ensnared in their own web of references that all they are ultimately able to offer up is a pastiche: without any meaningful context, without, without anysense of an Outside. Similarly with De Palma's Dressed to Kill or his last one The Black Dahlia (another re-make of a classic noir to boot). Too lurid, too much 'ironic cleverness', too deintensified, too hermetic, and the tongue-in-cheek if often cartoonish sensibility (cf Tarantino's Pulp Fiction).

But to ramble on.

What's always been fascinating about noir is that it is not so much a genre as a hyper-genre: not only has it spawned whole new sub-genres, within horror, SF and cyberpunk along with all their still-evolving derivatives, but it infuses numerous older ones: the thriller, the crime drama, the police procedural, espionage, the mystery, etc, though its defining criteria are so vast as to defy any easy rules of thumb, and those criteria were only first developed (most memorably via Paul Schrader's influencial "Notes on Film Noir" in Film Comment in 1972 and before that the French critics) retrospectively, long after the classic noir period had ended approoximately with Welles' Touch of Evil. Some concentrate on technical-aesthetic criteria: chiaroscuro, German Expressionism (later joined by French poetic realism and Italian neo-realism), Baroque and Gothic literature, the hard-boiled pulp crime fiction, dramatic low-key B/W lighting, low-angle/wide-angle perspective etc. Others instead focus on narrative structure (femme fatale, private eye, voice-over narration, elliptical editing, dischronic flashbacks/forwards/sideways, labyrinthine locations, ominous denouements, etc) or on broader psychic characteristics (oneiric, uncanny, erotic, fatalistic, ambivalent, bitter, brutal, existential, hidden powers, psychologising). Again some films that should be noir, like Citizen Kane (with so many of noir's characteristics) or Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, clearly aren't, and vice versa (eg Night of the Hunter, or the neo-noirs The Manchurian Candidate, Night Moves, Point Blant), with many hovering as indeterminate (Curtiz's Casablanca. Michael Mann's movies (Heat). Are Hitchcock's Spellbound and Marnie noir? Maybe Freudian noir, but no - I've just made that up. Though so much of noir is unimaginable without psychoanalytic ideas; indeed, John Huston, maker of such classic noirs as The Maltese Falcon , Key Largo, and The Asphalt Jungle also made a feature-length doc on Freud. And as for Wilder, Siodmak, Polanski, Hitchcock, Lynch ...). And then there's the film-theoretic approach to noir, but that might spoil the fun, in fact is guaranteed to do so, so I'll wait till I'm in a noirish mood.

Next: most stunning femme fatale.

Edit: Forgot to add that you can watch M online here (very quaint screen). That site has a few other gems too - Detour, D.O.A. Dunno how they still have The Shining (with daughter Vivian's making-of doc) there too; Oh, I forgot: Kubrick's dead, and WB are asleep ...

adruu said:

The amount of FN on Google Video (uncut) is pretty amazing, if you can watch movies on the PC without falling asleep (which I cant)

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http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6420203474077317808

scarlet street w/ edward g robinson playing a good guy, in fact a pushover... great film and the one that introduced me to dan duryea, one of one film noir's great heels...

The Coens' debut, Blood Simple established their inscrutable approach: having all the 'ingredients' of noir, using its mode, but ultimately delivering and exemplifying a pomo noir pastiche, right up to The Man Who Wasn't There (which is in Monochrome). The Coens' are so ensnared in their own web of references that all they are ultimately able to offer up is a pastiche: without any meaningful context, without, without anysense of an Outside. Similarly with De Palma's Dressed to Kill or his last one The Black Dahlia (another re-make of a classic noir to boot). Too lurid, too much 'ironic cleverness', too deintensified, too hermetic, and the tongue-in-cheek if often cartoonish sensibility (cf Tarantino's Pulp Fiction).

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I'd sort of agree with all this, although I absolutely loved Miller's Crossing. The Coens deal in pastiche (Fargo excepted), but they're brilliant at it, unlike De Palma who's always been a hack. Black Dahlia was shocking, making a hamfist of the great James Ellroy and making a dreadful actress out of the divine Scarlett (which for entirely sexual reasons i refuse to believe).
Noir has always been curiously susceptible to pastiche, from Gumshoe right up to last year's Brick. I think it's just very easily adaptable to the nod-and-a-wink appraoch.

crackerjack said:

unlike De Palma who's always been a hack.

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Oh not always, his early Seventies period was great -
Sisters (1973)
Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
Obsession (1976)

and then peaking with Carrie (1976)

which is one of the few films I come back to again and again.

Black Dahlia was amazingly bad though

OK, I was forgetting about Carrie. I think I've had more arguments about Scarface than any film other than Apocalyspe Now though.

crackerjack said:

OK, I was forgetting about Carrie. I think I've had more arguments about Scarface than any film other than Apocalyspe Now though.

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Oh god I can't stand Scarface, what a bad remake. Mind you, I'm not a fan of Taxi Driver or Apoc Now either so I should shut up cos I obviously don't know anything about film