A few favorite noirs
Jul. 26th, 2008 10:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersYesterday ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kdotdammit posted a still from This Gun for Hire, and we got to talking about film noir, as you do. Film noir was arguably my gateway to becoming a film freak as an adult. (I wasn't much of one when I was younger.) At some point a few years back I decided to investigate film noir thoroughly, so I started reading about it. Pretty soon I was watching root material such as silent German Expressionist movies, gothic horror movies, French poetic realist movies, gangster movies, bizarre, overwrought Josef von Sternberg femme fatale movies, and then I started following favorite cinematographers and directors into other genres, then getting interested in those genres, and before I knew it I was watching Carmen Miranda wearing a mile-high banana hat in The Gang's All Here, which is about as far away from film noir as you can possibly get. Well, okay, it does have the hallucinatory quality of noir.
Anyway, I have watched a fair few noirs along the way, and here are some of my favorites.
Above all, Out of the Past (1947) by Jacques Tourneur, which is one of my perfect movies. A gangster hires a private dick to find the woman who shot him three times and disappeared with $40,000 of his money. He doesn't want revenge, rather he still wants her love. This is a visual masterpiece, photographed by Nicholas Musuraca, who is one of the great noir stylists. The dialogue is as snappy and Chandlerian as Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946), and a young Robert Mitchum, as the detective, and Kirk Douglas, as the gangster, vie for the affections of the enigmatic, erotic Jane Greer. Romantic, tragic, fatalistic, twisting (perhaps two or three twists too far), and hypnotizing in its dreamlike quality. Almost certainly the movie I've watched the most times.
Scarlet Street (1945) by Fritz Lang. This is a remake of a Jean Renoir movie, La Chienne (The Bitch, 1931), which I've never seen. A conman and his "model" girlfriend (Hollywood code for a pimp and his girl) try to swindle a meek, hen-pecked cashier and amateur painter (Edgar G. Robinson) who falls for the girl. Although Lang is often cited as the father of noir, this one doesn't have much of the noir visual style, despite its darkness. It's a character study of three not very admirable people who only see what they want to see, and who pay a heavy price for their illusions. It's also a fascinating look at artistic creativity and its illusions.
Phantom Lady (1944) by Robert Siodmak. Based on a Cornell Woolrich novel, this is a wrong man movie, about a man accused of murder and the efforts of his secretary to prove him innocent. Some of Siodmak's later noirs, such as The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949) are probably more interesting narratively, but I love the look of this one, which like Scarlet Street is a completely stagebound recreation of the city streetscape. I love that artificiality, which is reminiscent of the stylization of German Expressionism. (Siodmak and Lang were both refugees from the Berlin film industry.) The famous jazz scene in the middle of the movie is a wild burst of sexy weirdness, with a great mugging, leering performance by Elisha Cook Jr. as a drummer in a nightclub jazz band.
The Chase (1946). Okay, this is an odd one, and I've only seen it on the crappy DVD from VCI. This is an indpendent production from Nero Films, which was the German producer Seymour Nebenzal's company. Nebenzal was the producer of many classic Weimar films, including Pandora's Box (1929), Threepenny Opera (1931), and Fritz Lang's great proto-noir crime film, M (1931). This strange movie, based on another Cornell Woolrich novel, The Black Path of Fear, is a good example of what people mean when they say that noir is hallucinatory. An amnesiac war veteran is hired to be the driver for a gangster, and he falls in love with the gangster's beautiful moll, who is played by the French actress Michèle Morgan, Jean Gabin's co-star in the poetic realist film, Le quai des brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938). The lovers flee to Havana, where she is then murdered. But is it all a dream? Peter Lorre is the gangster's jaded, fretting henchman. If there is any logic to this one, it's definitely a dream logic.
Nightmare Alley (1947) by Edmund Goulding. Perhaps not a true noir, but dripping with noir visual style thanks to cinematographer Lee Garmes, who also worked with Josef von Sternberg on Morocco (1930), Dishonored (1931), and Shanghai Express (1932). A young circus performer seeks to learn the scam secrets of a psychic, and is seduced by a scamming psychoanalyst as his success and sway grow. Hey, the psychoanalyst's a femme fatale, so it must be noir, right? Tyrone Power is utterly riveting as the self-deluding protagonist, andkdotdammit has argued that he's heavily coded as a gay beauty. His gradual descent into hell is unforgettable.
Speaking of descents into hell, Act of Violence (1948) is a new favorite. It begins with a bland depiction of American middle-class domestic tranquility and then slowly peels away the surface to show the hidden war crimes beneath. The sequence in which the good, suburban family man flees into the urban underworld is brilliant. There he finds Mary Astor as a washed up hooker, and she is brilliant too, almost completely unrecognizable as the woman who played the brittle femme fatale in The Maltese Falcon (1941). Robert Ryan plays the terrifying figure of vengeance, dragging his war-wounded foot behind him like a lurching gothic monster.
Raw Deal (1948) by Anthony Mann. Photography by another great noir stylist, John Alton. A guy who took the rap for a gangster boss breaks out of prison with the help of his devoted girl, and seeks revenge. The sadistic gangster boss is played by the cruel, beautiful Raymond Burr. There's a theremin in the soundtrack, lending paranoia to the doomed, fatalistic atmosphere. Mann builds to explosive scenes of gritty violence. This was made for a Poverty Row studio, but Alton turns the cheap sets into fantastic landscapes of sharp shadows and skewed angles.
Caught (1949) by Max Ophuls. Another that's probably not true noir, but rather, in this case, a woman in peril movie. But those are in some ways the flipside of noir, featuring an homme fatal rather than a femme fatale. A shop girl dreams of marrying a millionaire, and then finds herself trapped in an unhappy marriage to a sadistic monster. Cinematography by Lee Garmes again, and he draws nets of shadow across the familiar apartment sets. Robert Ryan this time plays the tormented, abusive husband, supposedly based on the meddling, monomaniacal owner of RKO studios, Howard Hughes.
In a Lonely Place (1950) by Nicholas Ray. Another homme fatal, woman in peril movie. (Okay, I'm not doing a very good job of listing true-blue noirs!) Bogart plays a screenwriter with an explosive temper who may have murdered a hat-check girl. Gloria Grahame plays the damaged goods who falls for him. I always associate this one with Sunset Boulevard, because it came out in the same year and is very much a movie about Hollywood, with Robert Warwick -- an early star of such silent films as Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915) -- appearing as an alcoholic former movie star who spouts hammy Shakespeare and leeches drinks off anyone who remembers his name. This one feels very personal for a Hollywood movie, and Bogart gets one of his chewiest roles. The novel by Dorothy Hughes is very different, very obsessive and tricky in point of view, and well worth seeking out too. Another great noir by Ray is On Dangerous Ground (1952), about a violent cop (Robert Ryan again) who chases a killer and his own demons into the countryside.
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) by Otto Preminger. Another violent cop (Dana Andrews) kills a robbery suspect with an errant punch and attempts to cover up his crime while investigating it. Preminger's Laura (1944) is more famous, but this is a far darker, grittier film, set on the street rather than in penthouse suites. Who watches the watchmen? Screenwriter Ben Hecht wrote early proto-noir gangster films such as Sternberg's silent Underworld (1927) and Howard Hawks' Scarface (1932).
Okay, that's ten plus, which is plenty enough for now. This is one of those things where it seems pretty natural for you to join in with your favorites too. If anybody's reading this kind of thing on a weekend!
kdotdammit posted a still from This Gun for Hire, and we got to talking about film noir, as you do. Film noir was arguably my gateway to becoming a film freak as an adult. (I wasn't much of one when I was younger.) At some point a few years back I decided to investigate film noir thoroughly, so I started reading about it. Pretty soon I was watching root material such as silent German Expressionist movies, gothic horror movies, French poetic realist movies, gangster movies, bizarre, overwrought Josef von Sternberg femme fatale movies, and then I started following favorite cinematographers and directors into other genres, then getting interested in those genres, and before I knew it I was watching Carmen Miranda wearing a mile-high banana hat in The Gang's All Here, which is about as far away from film noir as you can possibly get. Well, okay, it does have the hallucinatory quality of noir.Anyway, I have watched a fair few noirs along the way, and here are some of my favorites.
Above all, Out of the Past (1947) by Jacques Tourneur, which is one of my perfect movies. A gangster hires a private dick to find the woman who shot him three times and disappeared with $40,000 of his money. He doesn't want revenge, rather he still wants her love. This is a visual masterpiece, photographed by Nicholas Musuraca, who is one of the great noir stylists. The dialogue is as snappy and Chandlerian as Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946), and a young Robert Mitchum, as the detective, and Kirk Douglas, as the gangster, vie for the affections of the enigmatic, erotic Jane Greer. Romantic, tragic, fatalistic, twisting (perhaps two or three twists too far), and hypnotizing in its dreamlike quality. Almost certainly the movie I've watched the most times.
Scarlet Street (1945) by Fritz Lang. This is a remake of a Jean Renoir movie, La Chienne (The Bitch, 1931), which I've never seen. A conman and his "model" girlfriend (Hollywood code for a pimp and his girl) try to swindle a meek, hen-pecked cashier and amateur painter (Edgar G. Robinson) who falls for the girl. Although Lang is often cited as the father of noir, this one doesn't have much of the noir visual style, despite its darkness. It's a character study of three not very admirable people who only see what they want to see, and who pay a heavy price for their illusions. It's also a fascinating look at artistic creativity and its illusions.
Phantom Lady (1944) by Robert Siodmak. Based on a Cornell Woolrich novel, this is a wrong man movie, about a man accused of murder and the efforts of his secretary to prove him innocent. Some of Siodmak's later noirs, such as The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949) are probably more interesting narratively, but I love the look of this one, which like Scarlet Street is a completely stagebound recreation of the city streetscape. I love that artificiality, which is reminiscent of the stylization of German Expressionism. (Siodmak and Lang were both refugees from the Berlin film industry.) The famous jazz scene in the middle of the movie is a wild burst of sexy weirdness, with a great mugging, leering performance by Elisha Cook Jr. as a drummer in a nightclub jazz band.
The Chase (1946). Okay, this is an odd one, and I've only seen it on the crappy DVD from VCI. This is an indpendent production from Nero Films, which was the German producer Seymour Nebenzal's company. Nebenzal was the producer of many classic Weimar films, including Pandora's Box (1929), Threepenny Opera (1931), and Fritz Lang's great proto-noir crime film, M (1931). This strange movie, based on another Cornell Woolrich novel, The Black Path of Fear, is a good example of what people mean when they say that noir is hallucinatory. An amnesiac war veteran is hired to be the driver for a gangster, and he falls in love with the gangster's beautiful moll, who is played by the French actress Michèle Morgan, Jean Gabin's co-star in the poetic realist film, Le quai des brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938). The lovers flee to Havana, where she is then murdered. But is it all a dream? Peter Lorre is the gangster's jaded, fretting henchman. If there is any logic to this one, it's definitely a dream logic.
Nightmare Alley (1947) by Edmund Goulding. Perhaps not a true noir, but dripping with noir visual style thanks to cinematographer Lee Garmes, who also worked with Josef von Sternberg on Morocco (1930), Dishonored (1931), and Shanghai Express (1932). A young circus performer seeks to learn the scam secrets of a psychic, and is seduced by a scamming psychoanalyst as his success and sway grow. Hey, the psychoanalyst's a femme fatale, so it must be noir, right? Tyrone Power is utterly riveting as the self-deluding protagonist, and
kdotdammit has argued that he's heavily coded as a gay beauty. His gradual descent into hell is unforgettable.Speaking of descents into hell, Act of Violence (1948) is a new favorite. It begins with a bland depiction of American middle-class domestic tranquility and then slowly peels away the surface to show the hidden war crimes beneath. The sequence in which the good, suburban family man flees into the urban underworld is brilliant. There he finds Mary Astor as a washed up hooker, and she is brilliant too, almost completely unrecognizable as the woman who played the brittle femme fatale in The Maltese Falcon (1941). Robert Ryan plays the terrifying figure of vengeance, dragging his war-wounded foot behind him like a lurching gothic monster.
Raw Deal (1948) by Anthony Mann. Photography by another great noir stylist, John Alton. A guy who took the rap for a gangster boss breaks out of prison with the help of his devoted girl, and seeks revenge. The sadistic gangster boss is played by the cruel, beautiful Raymond Burr. There's a theremin in the soundtrack, lending paranoia to the doomed, fatalistic atmosphere. Mann builds to explosive scenes of gritty violence. This was made for a Poverty Row studio, but Alton turns the cheap sets into fantastic landscapes of sharp shadows and skewed angles.
Caught (1949) by Max Ophuls. Another that's probably not true noir, but rather, in this case, a woman in peril movie. But those are in some ways the flipside of noir, featuring an homme fatal rather than a femme fatale. A shop girl dreams of marrying a millionaire, and then finds herself trapped in an unhappy marriage to a sadistic monster. Cinematography by Lee Garmes again, and he draws nets of shadow across the familiar apartment sets. Robert Ryan this time plays the tormented, abusive husband, supposedly based on the meddling, monomaniacal owner of RKO studios, Howard Hughes.
In a Lonely Place (1950) by Nicholas Ray. Another homme fatal, woman in peril movie. (Okay, I'm not doing a very good job of listing true-blue noirs!) Bogart plays a screenwriter with an explosive temper who may have murdered a hat-check girl. Gloria Grahame plays the damaged goods who falls for him. I always associate this one with Sunset Boulevard, because it came out in the same year and is very much a movie about Hollywood, with Robert Warwick -- an early star of such silent films as Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915) -- appearing as an alcoholic former movie star who spouts hammy Shakespeare and leeches drinks off anyone who remembers his name. This one feels very personal for a Hollywood movie, and Bogart gets one of his chewiest roles. The novel by Dorothy Hughes is very different, very obsessive and tricky in point of view, and well worth seeking out too. Another great noir by Ray is On Dangerous Ground (1952), about a violent cop (Robert Ryan again) who chases a killer and his own demons into the countryside.
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) by Otto Preminger. Another violent cop (Dana Andrews) kills a robbery suspect with an errant punch and attempts to cover up his crime while investigating it. Preminger's Laura (1944) is more famous, but this is a far darker, grittier film, set on the street rather than in penthouse suites. Who watches the watchmen? Screenwriter Ben Hecht wrote early proto-noir gangster films such as Sternberg's silent Underworld (1927) and Howard Hawks' Scarface (1932).
Okay, that's ten plus, which is plenty enough for now. This is one of those things where it seems pretty natural for you to join in with your favorites too. If anybody's reading this kind of thing on a weekend!
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no subject
Date: 2008-07-27 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-27 02:35 pm (UTC)If you hadn't said you thought you'd shown me Legend, I would have been pretty sure I had never seen it. But now I'm thinking maybe you did! Can you describe one memorable scene? (I assume there were several.)
As S.R. Delany wrote so eloquently in that novel with a misspelled surname for a title, "How many days from the last year will you never think of again?"
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Date: 2008-07-27 04:06 pm (UTC)As for Legend, it's a fantasy by Ridley Scott with unicorns, fairies, goblins, and Tom Cruise playing a character named Jack. You might remember Tim Curry playing a scarlet Satanic character. Very twee, but also rich and strange in its own way. Heavily influenced by Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast in visual design. I seem to recall you saying, "This is actually pretty good" at one point, followed later by, "This is actually pretty bad, isn't it?"
no subject
Date: 2008-07-27 04:27 pm (UTC)As for Kurosawa's Drunken Angel, although I do think it's a great film, I realized after posting my earlier comment that I'm not qualitifed to judge it specifically as a work of film noir. I do hope you might watch it someday, because I think you'd dig it of course, but also so you can tell me if it is good noir, and whether that nightclub scene really is in direct homage to the one in Phantom Lady. Meanwhile I'll try to see the latter film myself.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-27 05:05 pm (UTC)Alas, Phantom Lady is not available on DVD. I watched it on a rental videotape.
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Date: 2008-07-27 09:00 pm (UTC)I'd like to see a good movie version of Red Harvest some day. Incredible book.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-28 12:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-28 12:39 am (UTC)