Film Noir?

[Flitcraft]

Eddie Muller, founder of the FNF has the one of the best definitions of Film Noir I have found. He says (and I am quoting from memory) that Film Noir is "about people who make bad decisions. They know that they are wrong, but they are compelled to make them anyway".

Kinda like Swede in The Killers when asked why he was being pursued by hitmen: "I made a mistake one time..."

 

[Feraud]

The Film Noir Reader series by Silver and Ursini are worthwhile reads on the subject.

 

[Dr Doran]

Film Noir in general plus the Noir City Festival

I'm a huge film noir fan, have read Eddie Mueller's book Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir and many others, but most of all and prior to such books of course I love the movies. My favorite may be Out of the Past, but there are so many it's hard to decide. The Killing is just amazing, and don't be fooled by the bland title. It stars Sterling Hayden and concerns a racetrack crime and its temporal form is jumbled a la Pulp Fiction, a very interesting early forerunner of that sort of narrative. I loved Key Largo deeply, especially for the moral ideas, but it does not take place in a city, which some argue is essential to film noir. I don't know where to stop.

I went to the opening night of the Noir City Festival (this is its eighth year) at the Castro Theater in San Francisco last night.

The theme of this year's festival is newspapers. All the films concern newpapers and journalism. This is a good topic for the times, considering the suffering that newspapers are enduring now that their content is available free on Google and elsewhere. Newspaper staffs are shrinking and good investigative journalism is suffering. This year's film noir festival has movies full of lines of dialogue that foreshadow the present newspaper crisis. It's very appropriate.

The first film last night, Deadline-USA, had Humphrey Bogart. It wasn't exactly a film noir but it was from that period. It also featured a young Warren Stevens, who many people know from probably the greatest 50s sci-fi film, Forbidden Planet. Warren is the father of a family I have known for 20 years and I have eaten dinner at his house many times. But I know him as an old man, so it was great to see him as a young actor. It's not available on DVD. The second film last night, Scandal Sheet, also unavailable, starred Broderick Crawford. Both were excellent.

(If any Loungers were there, I was wearing a dark blue early 1940s DB, a gray fedora, my black and oxblood two-tone saddle shoes, and a blue hexagon vintage tie that I got from Baron Kurtz. I'm only saying this because I saw a few people who looked vaguely familiar from other events, but whether it was from the Lounge or the Art Deco Society or something else, I'm not sure.)

 

[Blackthorn]

an overlooked masterpiece

Resurrecting an old thread here...a modern classic that I can never get enough of is Chinatown. It's (IMHO) a perfect tribute to the genre. It's also fitting that John Huston is the villain.

 

[Lone_Ranger]

Check out Out of the Past- with Robert Mitchum in the protagonist's role. Chronologically, its late in the Noir Era, but stylistically, its a blueprint for all Noir, before or since... just my 2 cents, and worth every penny.

Out of the Past, is a great one. I always put Detour on my "must see" list.

 

[K.D. Lightner]

Liked Maltese Falcon, and some of the other Bogart films.

My favorite Noir film was Sunset Boulevard, has that been mentioned yet?

 

[Doc Average]

"Murder My Sweet" (AKA "Farewell My lovely" from the Chandler novel of the same name) starring Dick Powell is one of my all time favourite movies. Definitely worth seeing. I was blown away by it as a teenager back in the '80s. Great sets, great casting, great costumes...and fantastic dialogue:

"I caught the blackjack right behind my ear...a black pool opened up at my feet, and I dived in...it had no bottom...I felt pretty good. Like an amputated leg..."

Also, I love Dick Powell's performance as Marlowe. Behind his flippant facade, there's a vulnerable, decent human being, with a touch of wry melancholy, which for me, is the essence of the character. Bogart, though I admire his performance in the role as well, is a little "autopilot" for me. I can picture Powell playing chess by himself - but not Bogart.

But yeah..."Touch of Evil" is also fantastic, as is "Kiss Me Deadly", "The Asphalt Jungle", "Sunset Boulevard", "The Dark Corner"...so many more. Watch them all, as many as you can, you won't be disappointed. For some Brit-Noir, try "Brighton Rock", "The Third Man", "Night & the City" and "Hell is City" (filmed in my home town, Manchester!).

By the way, I don't know if this has been mentioned, but the casting of Mary Astor in "The Maltese Falcon" was thought 'risque' at the time because a few years previously her diary had been made public, and in it she explicitly confessed to a string of torrid affairs. Apparently in private life she was quite a gal, and the public knew this. Huston was quite calculating about that.

 

[kuwisdelu]

Personally, I preferred The Big Sleep over The Maltese Falcon.

 

[Blackthorn]

Personally, I preferred The Big Sleep over The Maltese Falcon.

I do, too, but those are the top two all time, in my book.

 

[hailey greenhat]

Mildred Pierce has always been a favorite of mine and i don't think it's been mentioned yet. Starring the very crazy Joan Crawford as Mildred who tries in vane to win the affections of her daughter after her cheating husband leaves.

 

[Orsini]

Resurrecting an old thread here...a modern classic that I can never get enough of is Chinatown. It's (IMHO) a perfect tribute to the genre. It's also fitting that John Huston is the villain.

Lot of swell duds in that film...

 

[SweetieStarr]

I really like The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, In a Lonely Place and Conflict. All Bogie movies and all great.

 

[Blackthorn]

I really like The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, In a Lonely Place and Conflict. All Bogie movies and all great.

I just saw In a Lonely Place tonight for the very first time (and changed my signature line here for that reason). Interesting movie!

 

[SweetieStarr]

I just saw In a Lonely Place tonight for the very first time (and changed my signature line here for that reason). Interesting movie!

I love that line!

 

[Dr Doran]

I just saw In a Lonely Place tonight for the very first time (and changed my signature line here for that reason). Interesting movie!

Loved the film ... loved the line ... loved the fact that the protagonist was an intellectual and not a grifter, drifter, or thug.

 

[Widebrim]

I've always been a fan of 'Kansas City Confidential'

I second that! Great cast, including John Payne in a classic "man in the middle" role.

 

[Lusti Weather]

I just saw In a Lonely Place tonight for the very first time (and changed my signature line here for that reason). Interesting movie!

That's possibly my all-time favorite movie. It's been a while since I watched it...probably about time for me to dig out the old VHS!

 

[Blackthorn]

Loved the film ... loved the line ... loved the fact that the protagonist was an intellectual and not a grifter, drifter, or thug.

Good point, Doran, I hadn't looked at it that way.

 

[Blackthorn]

That's possibly my all-time favorite movie. It's been a while since I watched it...probably about time for me to dig out the old VHS!

Sounds like you're due for another showing.

 

[Dr Doran]

One comparison that I have not seen enough of is the set of parallels between film noir and one of my other favorite, although far older, genres: namely, Greek tragedy of the fifth century BC. (I am a doctoral student in Greek and Roman history at Berkeley, so I study the stuff closely.) Both film noir and Greek tragedy contain strongly driven protagonists who are not virtuous and clean. Both contain elements of horror in the sense of not vampires and werewolves but murder and revenge. Mueller argued that Psycho was the film that ended noir and began the genre of modern horror and there is truth in that. And the Greek tragedies are chockful of the kind of gory, grotesque crimes that are the lifeblood of film noir: Sophocles' Oedipus has inadvertently killed his father; Aeschylus' Orestes kills his mother, after a truly harrowing scene of her begging for her life, because she killed his father Agamemnon and Agamemnon's slave-concubine Cassandra in a bath, with a net and an axe. He is then pursued by her agents (they are supernatural, which is not very film noir-ish, but autres temps, autres moeurs). The trial scene, ubiquitous in film noir, started in the third play of Aeschylus' Orestes trilogy -- this is the first trial scene in Western literature and it was performed in 458 BC. Both film noir and Greek tragedy take place in haunted worlds in which fate is monstrous and inevitable and the protagonists are often doomed, not necessarily because of something they did, but because of something they didn't know about: Sophocles' Oedipus Rex is a fine example. Both film noir and Greek tragedy make very great use of the femme fatale: Clytemnestra is a fine example, as is Medea in Euripides' play of that name. Both genres use the same kind of plot line quite often, with characters discovering things that moves the plot forward to a grisly conclusion. There are many more comparisons. I would like to see a book on this topic. Perhaps there is one, and I am unaware of it.