The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[Sloper]

Where the Sidewalk Ends - hmmm... The whole thing is beautifully shot, and the first twenty minutes or so are spellbinding. Right from the title sequence I was hooked: I love Dana Andrews and he's so wonderfully edgy in those first couple of reels, you really get drawn into his predicament by those scared, blank eyes of his. And all the business disposing of the body - great stuff, well supported by Cyril Mockridge's tense score.

But then the film seems to have nowhere interesting to go, and by the halfway point I couldn't wait for it to end. I'm used to Ben Hecht being a sign of quality, but during some of the talkier scenes in this film I couldn't help but think of Police Squad, especially the sequence where Karl Malden laboriously arrests Tierney's father. So much dialogue could have been cut out to make this a nice lean thriller. Even at the climax, when Andrews is confronting the bad guys, rather than just frisking him and taking his gun they have a long conversation about how they need to frisk him and take his gun. The punchline comes when good old Dana remarks, in his best Leslie Nielsen voice, 'We're wasting time.'

And my god can Gary Merrill not act. He's even worse than in All About Eve. I mean he looks like a very nice man, but my grandmother would make a more convincing mob boss. Where's Richard Conte when you need him? Still, it was nice to see Andrews and Tierney together again, and very nice to see Karl Malden getting tough with a witness towards the end. He's always at his best when he gets angry.

[domino harvey]

Still, it was nice to see Andrews and Tierney together again

Just don't seek out Belle Starr for that reason! When I was going through all their appearances together for a paper on commonly coupled studio stars, that's the one that made me fear God

[Tribe]

Well if acknowledgment means being remade Litvak redid Jour as The Long Night in 1947 with Henry Fonda taking the Gabin role.

Which is a pretty decent version of the original French movie. So somebody must've been watching these movies...and Renoir and Clair did some Hollywood work ( but that was when the noir style was fairly established by then).

Even so, The Long Night doesn't have the poetic grittiness of the original, the grit is more urban in the Litvak version.

[zedz]

La bete humaine is another 'poetic realism' film remade as a noir. Then there's La chienne / Scarlet Street and the Hollywood remake of Pepe le Moko, so it seems clear that US directors were well aware of what was going on in France. For me film noir is by definition an American phenomenon, but those 30s French films were clearly important precursors, perhaps the most important precursors, of the style.

[tojoed]

That's true, especially as Duvivier has said that he hoped to make an American style gangster film in the first place.

[Tribe]

I don't find lots of analysis about the import of French poetic realism into film noir though...at best, a paragraph here or there. German expressionism gets the bulk of the coverage, and what with it's higher profile and so many of those German directors ending up in Hollywood, it's something of a no-brainer that the influence was there (and not just when it comes to classic film noir).

While it is clearly a predominately American phenomenon, I become less convinced that it is only American (as Silver, Ursini, Ward and Porfirio would have it). Early French and German films that are typically treated as proto-noir are clealy full-blown film noir and will be reflected in my list. I just don't think that one can ignore things like Lang's M or Renoir's La Bete Humaine when it comes to film noir.

[zedz]

Although I agree that there are a number of non-American films that display many, if not all, of the same characteristics, my perspective on it is that since the term "film noir" was coined specifically to describe a strain of post-war US filmmaking, that's where it belongs. The other films may be noir-like, but they're never going to be noir for me, just as 'poetic realism' will only truly apply to French films and 'neorealism' is exculsively Italian, even though there are countless examples of films from all over that arguably embody the supposed tenets of 'neorealism' far better than most of the canonical films.

It will be interesting to see how the admirably laissez-faire guidelines for this project will work themselves out in practice, since there's such a diversity of instinct and conviction about this particular genre definition.

And getting back to the original topic, I find 'poetic realism' far closer to noir than Expressionism, since it's also defined by its gloomy content, characterization and mood. M is surely noir-ish, but it's not expressionistic, and the vast majority of actual noirs never approach the radical stylization of core Expressionism, give or take the odd dream sequence. There's so much fuzziness around both definitions that, even though it's easy enough to trace biographical and stylistic connections between key films and filmmakers, it's much harder to make a cast-iron case for overwhelming influence. At any rate, most of the key components of noir were already present in American films in various combinations made before anybody had heard of Murnau or Wiene.

[tojoed]

I just thought that Duvivier's statement was interesting, showing that there were links between French and American crime films even before the term Noir was coined.
But I agree that for this project only American films should qualify and my list will reflect that.

[Tribe]

I understand where zedz and tojoed are coming from...and there was a time when I agreed with the both of you. But after considering it all while working on my list, I find it difficult to justify the exclusion of a German or French film that exhibits the qualities of what we all deem "noir" just because it's not American. For example, does anyone doubt that The Third Man isn't a film noir?

Which all goes to illustrate how illusive noir is. Also, I have become convinced that noir isn't a genre, but is more appropriately described as a style. The fact that it transcends genre illustrates this for me.

I agree with zedz that French poetic realism appears much closer to the core noir ethos and style. It's unfortunate there isn't greater recognition of this. While German Expressionism was influential in film noir, it was also influential with any number of film movements and film styling in general.

[tojoed]

I don't disagree with you entirely, Tribe. It's just that applying the term, as the young French critics did, to American films makes it simpler to come up with a list.
And as this is primarily a genre project, to go with westerns,etc, then I'm going to treat it as one rather than a style, even though you make a convincing case for style over genre.

[Tribe]

I still have my own lingering questions about the style v. genre tensions. Even though I lean towards the style end of it, I cannot bring myself to deem Them!, Invaders From Mars, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I Shot Jesse James, and The Day the Earth Stood Still, for example, as noir films as Ursini, Ward, Porfirio and Silver now do. On the other hand, I can see how Rancho Notorious and Johnny Guitar have enough of that subjective noir quality that I can be convinced otherwise.

[tojoed]

Yes, possibly, "Rancho" and "Johnny Guitar", but those others simply no.
I haven't read those writers but I bet they tie themselves into some knots to include them.

[Cold Bishop]

Anthony Mann Double Feature: T-Men (1947) vs. Raw Deal (1948)

Like The Hitchhiker, these are two examples of simple stories well told. While Lupino does it by stripping her story down to its bare essentials, Mann piles on the style. Enough has been said about the Mann/Alton combo - one of the greatest director-cinematographer teams in all of cinema - that saying anything more seems redundant. Yet, in the realm of mise-en-scène, no one spoke the language of what would become identified as film noir more fluently. Alton's inexhaustible invention in framing and brilliance with light; Mann's masterful ability to navigate the murky, turbulent waters between morality and violence ("the use of violence by thoughtful men") - in a segment of filmmaking that required practical ingenuity to compensate for the lack of budgets, these were two rising talents that found each other in a moment of perfect serendipity. Alton would lend his visual mastery to many more film noirs (The Big Combo being on the shortlist for my top 10) and Mann would examine his thematic concerns in the perhaps more appropriate framework of the Western, but I feel neither ever found a better visual-thematic compliment than they did with each other in their brief four year partnership.

The guiding visual principle of these films is Alton's masterful "single-bulb" lighting: patches of violent bright whites tearing through a world of impossible pitch-blackness. Form being content, this could also describe the subjects of both films - whether the two t-men, trying to navigate an insulated-but-boundless world of crooks and corruption; or Joe Sullivan, torn between revenge and redemption in his journey back to the infernal chaos of Corkscrew Alley - it is this conflict that the films describe: flickering beacons of morality and justice maneuvering across a dark night of crime and violence.

T-Men (1947)

How appropriate that a film about duplicity is itself deceptive in regards to the subject of genre. T-Men begins in a setup that is pure docudrama, situating the scenario firmly in the territory of House by 92nd Street and the rest of its ilk which emerged from the shadow of March of Time: bright sunlit montages of the various landmarks of Washington D.C.; stirring but non-descript patriotic music; a booming, monotonous Westbrook Van Voorhis-esque narrator. We're even greeted by the Treasury Department’s own Elmer L. Irey, ensuring us of the veracity of the story we are about to see. But all this falls away as we’re immediately emerged into the antithesis of the semi-documentary realism which the opening promises us: the grey-drabness of the opening is replaced with hyper-stylization, the opening murder of a stoolie being filmed with all the bizarre angles, violent cutting, and baroque lighting that characterizes the rest of the film.

From then on, the only thing to remind us of the trendy docudrama that Edward Small was certainly expecting is the occasional jarring and intrusive appearance of the film’s narrator. Sticking out like a sore thumb, its certainly the one major flaw of the film, and possibly what lends critics to so often overlook the film in comparison with the following Mann/Anton achievement. But even this element has its own, possibly unintentional, charms. A major tension in the film is the t-men’s role as upstanding agents in real life versus the ease with which they embrace the appearances and brutality of gangsters. As such, this voiceover itself embodies the contrast between the films face-value glorification of law enforcement on one side, and the deeper acknowledgement of both the allure of criminality and the cruelty of the war on crime. Docudrama voiceover versus film noir filmmaking. The emotionless, just-the-facts tone of the narrator’s voice versus the expressionism of the mise-en-scène and the intensity of the drama. The voice-over’s steadfast belief in the agents’ cause versus the ambiguity and complexity of their actions and performances.

This dilemma is certainly nothing new in the movies. Since then (and likely before) we have seen many movies in which an undercover cop walks the line between pretending to be a criminal and becoming one, to the point it has become cliché. T-Men’s striking accomplishment is the manner in which it is able to make the dilemma seem so potent, understating it by necessity instead of shouting it out. The two agents’ descent into the criminal underworld is only excusable if we understand the mantra that the film’s opening and narration ensures us of: that these men are doing a job and their doing it for us, the law and Uncle Sam. This mantra is the anchor that ensures the moral certainty of the characters. Yet the film is structured and filmed in a manner that the anchor is often left far from sight. In its economical structure and characterizations, the film nearly denies the two agents all hints of a personal life beyond their job, so that they begin and end to exist only as so far as the immediate task at hand. Not only is the personal denied, but the film is structured in such a way that once they enter the heart of the criminal underworld, the film is wary to acknowledge anything beyond its borders. The world of morality, decency and lawfulness that they’re supposed to be defending disappears completely from view, and even the debriefings with their superiors become rarer as the film progresses. The manner in which the methodical operations of the police are echoed in the methodical operations of the counterfeiter, and the obvious glee, early in the film, with which the two leads take on their roles, like two actors preparing for a role, in their new expensive clothes and in their new license to use force and graft, points towards this. More than any other film of its type, it is easy to forget we are watching two officers of the law, being so swept up in the succession of scenes that we need to be reminded by the narrator that these are agents of the government, and not simply criminals attempting to outmaneuver other criminals. The film doesn’t write their characters as obsessives, but their obsession to their job emerges from a complete absence of anything beyond work. It doesn’t obviously tell the loss of identity between cop and criminal, but subtly shows us it, by emerging us deep enough into the world of crime that even the leads shaky identities as cops seems to vanish. Furthermore, in the wide gap between the murder, mayhem and psychological trauma that the characters suffer, and the identity of those they are pursuing – not murderers or drug pushers, nor even dreaded fifth-columnists, but simple “victimless” counterfeiters – the film subtly hints at a question which it can never literally acknowledge: is it worth it?

This is all raised subtly and economically. Mann and Alton’s work completely transforms the material and takes it to a completely different level. Its mise-en-scène is so transformative that its easy to ignore just how normal its procedural scenario is (and alas, my main caveat with He Walked by Night is its inability to transcend the procedural). It’s a stylistic tour-de-force. In fact, all things being relative, the films stylistic flourishes seem even more flashy and bombastic than those of Raw Deal. Whether it came from a concerted effort to overcome the drab material, or from the pent-up energy released by Mann and Alton finally finding the perfect collaborator, the film constantly astounds with its visual imagination. The sharp-contrast lighting is starker and more immediately stunning than the next film; the set-ups and compositions more insistently flashy and bizarre; the pace is quicker and more economical; the material is tougher and more relentless.

Try to recall the visual prowess of the film, and your mind is confronted with an almost endless of barrage of moments of visual ingenuity. Of course, everyone remembers the bath-house murder, but even the earlier sojourn into the steam-baths is palpable with heat. At one point, O’Brian (Dennis O’Keefe) is ambushed by two thugs, and the scene plays out in a pitch-black room, the only visible light coming from the occasionally flashing neon sign off-screen; each flash of light reveals O’Brien in a further state of incapacitation. At one point, O’Brian tails the Schemer (Wallace Ford) into a restaurant, and the entire methodical surveillance plays out from the reflections of a glass phone-booth door. The finale plays out aboard a ship, and its low-ceilings and claustrophobic hallways point towards the chase at the end of He Walked by Night. O’Brian and the Schemer examine a dollar bill with a lamp, and the scene plays out low-angle, shot between the lampshade, with its single bulb as the only source of light. Later, that exact shot finds its echo when O’Brien has to steal the counterfeit plates – the very used to create the earlier bill – from beneath a bathroom sink, this time with Moxie (Charles McGraw) in the place of the Schemer. Another noteworthy shot is when O’Brien intentionally has himself thrown out of a gambling joint: the shot is deep-focus and low-angle, shot from pavement-level across a back-alley, with the door of the gambling joint in the background. Silhouettes appear in the door, it swings open, O’Brien is thrown into the middle of the alley/shot, and in a dangerous looking stunt, rolls away towards the foreground just as a car plummets through the alley, narrowly missing being run over. The shot ends with O’Brien’s battered face in the foreground, practically a close-up, and his grimace-smile expresses a wide-range of contradictory emotions: the physical fatigue and pain of having been beaten up; the bruised ego and petty grudge towards those who did the beating; and the joyful satisfaction of having accomplished his plan.

In fact, this last example is of particular interest. While many people talk about the lighting and inventive framing that Mann and Alton employ, rewatching T-Men reveals them to be unheralded masters of the close-up. Alton’s framing of the close-up and Mann’s talent with his actors have brilliants results, allowing his characters to show a range of emotion, conflict and ambiguity which simply isn’t there in the actions and dialogue. Two examples stand out:

1) The scene where Tony Genaro (Alfred Ryder) is nearly outed as Undercover by his wife’s friend. To cover the situation, his wife (June Lockhart) must disavow him. In a film with a near lack of female characters, and an even less in the way of romance, this scene already stands out. That it’s the only brief moment of the “personal” in a movie that seems to deny its protagonists a life beyond their work makes it especially significant. The manner in which Mann/Alton rings tension and heartbreak through such economic makes it remarkable. In dialogue and action, it’s quick and simple: Genaro is confronted by his wife, and she denies ever meeting him (“My husband is taller and much more handsome”). Mann’s ability to get understated, quietly emotional (almost non-verbal) performances from his actors, and his ability to bring out the subtleties of those performances with close-ups, makes it emotionally powerful. Lockharts’s mix of stoicism and emotional torment, Ryder’s dumbstruck paralysis, Ford’s calculating, suspicious leer. The most remarkable shot, however, is Lockhart’s final glance back as Ryder and Ford walk off. In a brief but quick close-up, Mann/Alton is able to draw a wide range of emotion from Lockhart: loneliness, longing, alienation, fear, guilt, resentment, resignation, sacrifice and ultimately a premonition: that it may be the last time she sees him, and furthermore, it may very well be this episode that causes it..

2) The other significant creation of an unbearable tense and moving scene through close-ups is the direct answer to the earlier scene: Genaro has been discovered, and the counterfeiting ring, O’Brien included, go to rub him out. It’s a brief scene – only about 30 seconds long – and a common one: the undercover cop torn between stopping a murder or maintaining his cover. Mann/Alton’s use of successive close-ups turns into a powerhouse of tension and emotion. The first close up is of McGraw: already captured in a tight CU, he steps forward a few more inches, bringing his face closer to the camera, highlighting the emotional coldness in his face, lit so that his entire eyes look pitchblack. Then there are the suspicious, prying glares of his two henchman. Ryder is filmed so that the only thing lit in his shot is his own sweaty, exasperated, but stoically resigned face. O’Brien starts in a medium close-up in the doorway, but throughout the shot is propelled farther into the room, until he leans-in to a very tight shot of his face, capturing the conflict and ultimate shameful resignation. A strong example of Alton’s ability to contrast bright whites and pitch blacks is the final shot of the scene after Ryder is shot: O’Brien bows his head in shame, an with only a small tilt of the head, his face goes from being completely lit to being completely drowned in darkness.

Raw Deal (1948)

Watching these back to back, it is easy to spot the differences that exist behind the stylistic and thematic consistencies. Starting with the script. With T-Men, Mann often seemed hamstrung by the docudrama scenario and its unfailing belief in the t-men. Despite his accomplishment in transcending it, the government-approved prologue and jarring narration still remains on the film, a blemish that it can’t erase. Whether by a newly earned freedom from its success, or pure luck, Raw Deal is a more dramatically well-rounded script, closer to the moral and philosophical dilemmas that concern Mann. In T-Men, Mann had to walk a thin line in presenting a morally ambiguous portrayal of his “glamorized” agents. In Raw Deal, he can embrace the ambiguity, his character being a criminal. T-Men was a claustrophobic film, taking place in a succession of shady hotel rooms, night clubs, warehouses and offices. Raw Deal is a road film covering the entire west coast. T-Men denied its lead a life beyond their work. Raw Deal is preoccupied with its characters past, and puts a love-triangle front and center. T-Men were more stylistically forceful, relentless with its scenes of tension and brutality. Raw Deal is a comparatively quieter film, more focused on mood and atmosphere sporadically punctured with moments of shocking violence.

Raw Deal is perhaps the ultimate expression of a trope common to noir, and one for which it is especially indebted to poetic realism: the doomed man ensnared in the mechanics of a fate that he is tragically destined to fulfill. Fatalism is one of the key ingredients of noir, but Raw Deal, more so than any other film in the genre, makes the inescapable pull of fate tangible. At the end of this fate lies Corkscrew Alley, where Joe Sullivan (Dennis O’Brien) came from, and which he feels destined to return to. Probably more so than any other of the Mann noirs, Raw Deal points towards his Westerns. Joe Sullivan, like the James Stewart of later years, is a compromised hero with a troubled past, who sets out on a journey following both a call of justice and a call of vengeance. The way these two parallel callings mesh, contradict and clash provides the moral and psychological anguish of the hero, their sense of morality fighting against their inner violence.

It slowly transforms into a story of revenge versus redemption. Will he escape the life of crime with either Pat (Claire Trevor) or Ann (Marsha Hunt)? Or will he return to Corkscrew Alley, with its certain violence and likely doom? Ultimately, the two paths become ensnared, and to choose one means to carry out the other. The love triangle at the center of the film embodies this conflict. Pat belongs to his world of crime, an old flame and accomplice. Ann is a symbol of normalcy and morality, a social worker. Ann means a clean break from his old world, and a possible promise of a new beginning. While Pat would want nothing more than the same, she will forever link him to the past, and to the unfinished business in Corkscrew Alley. Pat grows to want to escape the world of crime and tries to compel Sullivan to make a run for it. Ann is pulled in unwillingly, and ultimately becomes corrupted, learning her own capability for violence. Pat is masculine, hardened, deglamourized, from an actress certainly capable of being feminine. Ann is completely feminine, beautiful, almost pure. Even their names mark the difference – one is ambiguously gendered, the other is clearly female.

This later trait reveals an undercurrent of sexuality running under the film (such as Nancy Steffen-Fluhr highlights here). While I can try to avoid the questionably homophobic undercurrent here, all too common to the genre, there is no denying that Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr) and his henchmen are perhaps the most depraved and perverse of all his noir heavies. With their ambiguous sexuality, pathological perversity and penchant for misogynistic violence, it could be easy to read an unpleasant queer subtext here, a “defeating the fag within” allegory much like Strangers on a Train. While I’m certainly not the person to tackle such a claim, I must also point out it ignores some conflicting information. You can’t look at the homoerotic undercurrent in the villains of T-Men, without acknowledging the homoerotic bond between O’Brien and Genaro. And likewise, here, Sullivan doesn’t triumph like Farley Granger, but it is in fact left incapable of escaping the underworld. It’s a fact worth pointing out, although heterosexual anxiety is only one part of the moral confusion that propels Sullivan.

Like I mentioned, its stylistically a quieter and more atmospheric film, although no less brilliant in its style than the previous film, just more assured. While the masterful lighting and framing is here, Mann/Alton does a stronger job of stringing together recurring motifs to drive the film. The use of fire is compelling, with Sullivan’s history as a boy who saved someone with a fire, Coyle’s pyromania, and the two coming together at the end. The continuous use of “bars” to signify entrapment appear in practically every scene starting literally at the prison, and then continuing on from there. The most obvious one is the use of Venetian blinds in Ann’s apartment, but Mann and Alton continually find more ingenious ways to include them. Two of my favorites: in the forest, a shot of trees perfectly lined up, with shafts of light drifting from the roof of the trees, echoing a similar shot earlier in the prison. There is also the close-up, near the masterful clock scene near the end, of Pat, in a mesh veil, entrapped just as much as Joe Sullivan is. And it difficult no to reiterate the scene with the clock as a master-class of noir photography in itself, and one of the ultimate expressions of noir fatalism.

In fact, this fatalism is so potent in the film precisely due to fact Mann and Alton seem to imbue the film with a supernatural edge. They seemed to be somewhat under the spell of Hitchcock making this film: the theremin score echoes Miklos Roszas score for Spellbound, and the uncharacteristic use of female narrator, and even the use of miniatures at the beginning, point back to Rebecca. But neither of these are simple swipings. Mann uses both of these excellently, and manages to give the film an edge to is completely its own. The theremin and Alton’s luminous photography gives the film a ghostly quality, as if the film emerged from a half-remembered dream, a ghost play from a past-life meant to be relived over and over again. The opening prison break is an especially compelling example of this. Pat waits outside of Joe’s prison in a car silently. Suddenly, a passing car comes toward Pat, and the headlights grow to a blinding light, taking on the properties of a ghostly apparition, a contact with something not of this world. As it recedes, the entire world seems to erupt into a cacophony of industrial sounds, the mechanics of destiny at work.

This supernatural dimension also colors the final showdown in a completely different light, turning Joe Sullivan’s descent into the criminal underworld into a descent into a literal underworld. First there gunfight in the streets, bathed in a world of fog were differentiation becomes impossible, and even the solidity of forms begin to vanish, a veritable chaos. Even the first image, the improbable figure of a boy skating through the fog, has a supernatural dimension, perhaps even the ghost of a boyhood Joe Sullivan. Rick Coyle rules over this underworld, and it is appropriate that Sullivan meets him in a room submerged in hellish fire. The “boy in the fire” that Joe once was returns, but he is carried along by the tide of inevitable doom. The hand of fate pulling Sullivan to his destiny is also pulling him back into his past, into moral and spiritual chaos, a redemptive sacrifice and ultimately death, a metaphorical river Styx and Hades where fate finally severs the thread.

Two Film Noirs

Inextricably linked, T-Men and Raw Deal form one of those pairing which often accompany a burst of cinematic genius, and which often raises the question of choosing one over the other: La Dolce Vita or 8 1/2, Grand Illusion or Rules of the Game, Rear Window or Vertigo, Taxi Driver or Raging Bull and so on the game is played. Of course, the sensible thing to do would be to put aside such boyish categorizations and simply embrace both works. But a list like this, asking us to rank such works, brings back the unfortunate question. Certainly Mann and Alton made other fine film noirs (Border Incident and He Walked by Night), and perhaps made one better than both these (Reign of Terror/Black Book, that is, if I can bring myself to rank a period film as noir). Yet is these two films that are constantly mentioned in the same breath and which require some sort of answer.

Comparing these films and trying to make a judgment on them, one is face with something of a contradiction: in their own way, each film seems more pure than the other. Let me explain:

The T-Men Argument: While it is true that there are ultimately flaws with the script which Mann can't overcome, specifically the prologue and voice-over, the film that these "blemishes" contain is purer in the fact that it is leaner, stripped-down, and a more economical film than Raw Deal. Here the characters and conflict is stripped down completely to its fundamentals, the style is more forceful, the pace is swifter, leaving a film that pummels you with white-knuckle tension from beginning to end and doesn't let up. Raw Deal, on the other hand, is a road film, which by design meanders (especially in the middle, with its cabin in the woods subplot). It may be more atmospheric and philosophical, but as such, it loses the bite and tension of the former film. T-Men is categorized by a world of men, which has barely any room for women, and certainly no room for romance. Raw Deal is anchored by romance and two female characters, and for all its achievement, it must look like A Letter to Three Wives in comparison. It's a lean and muscular film, film noir cut down to a diamond, and even the so-called "blemishes" serve a purpose, partitioning off the superfluous and the essential, allowing the economy of the film to become real clear.

The Raw Deal Argument: As mentioned above, the material and script is attuned to the moral and existential concerns of Mann. T-Men may be more stripped-down, but Raw Deal is ultimately more ambitious, more evocative, perfectly capturing the fatalism at the heart of film noir. It may not be as lean or as swiftly paced as the former film, but its elements are no less essential, and it doesn't suffer from details like the prologue and narration. The extreme physicality of the former film is compensated by a stronger moral and thematic coherence. And the style may not be as bombastic, but it is more assured and poetic, giving the film a quiet intensity to match T-Men's MacMahonist-like brute strength. It's one of the few film noirs as worthy on a bill with Le jour se lève and Pepe le Moko as it would be with Night and the City and A Lady from Shanghai.

Both films have Mann raising the b-film to the level of art film. The main difference may be that T-Men skews towards the b-film side of the equation, Raw Deal towards the art film. They're both brilliant films, and its difficult to come to any consensus on the two, even with my own contradictory impulses. Rewatching the films, I was ready to declare T-Men the better film, but writing this makes me love Raw Deal all over. T-Men hits you in the gut. Raw Deal works over the brain and spine. Anyone who doesn't see both these films for their list is fooling themselves. You don't know what noir is until you see these two geniuses work their craft.

[GringoTex]

Diving in a bit late, but I've loaded up my Netflix queue with everybody's suggestions and am ready for roll.

My swapsie is Nightfall.

[zedz]

Great Mann write-up, Cold Bishop. My vote goes to T-Men, at least until I watch Raw Deal again. The Black Book and The Tall Target - Mann's two period noirs - make for another great double feature. The latter in particular makes a very strong case for the inclusion of period films within the 'noir' category, since it meets just about every other requirement.

[Yojimbo]

cold bishop, if only because 'Raw Deal' was the first Mann noir I saw, some 20 years ago, and which made me realise there was more to Anthony Mann than Mann-Stewart Westerns, I'm inclined to give the nod to it; plus, its got Claire Trevor,..and one of the great Raymond Burr bad-guy turns.

But I haven't seen either in almost 20 years, so I'll definitely be giving them a re-watch before submitting my list
(having said that, I'd be very surprised if I changed my preference)

[domino harvey]

This is really one of the better threads to come out of a List Project, I think

[Titus]

cold bishop, if only because 'Raw Deal' was the first Mann noir I saw, some 20 years ago, and which made me realise there was more to Anthony Mann than Mann-Stewart Westerns, I'm inclined to give the nod to it; plus, its got Claire Trevor,

Yeah, Trevor's presence is a major benefit to any film. I also prefer Raw Deal to T-men, for largely the same reasons that Cold Bishop cites in his great post on the two pictures. The flag-waving narration in T-Men is a big obstacle, especially compared to the beautiful narration by Trevor in Raw Deal. There's just something indescribably lyrical about the film. It casts a spell right from the outset, with the eerie, hypnotic score playing while Claire Trevor's car slowly crawls up to the prison gate, with her whispery voice-over: "This is the day. This is the day. The last time I shall drive up to these gates" (Cold Bishop's comparison to Rebecca is one I never thought of before, but it's right on the mark). And then the beautiful close-ups of her when she's talking with Joe in the next scene, in a black veil and with a gleam of light in the corner of her eye -- it reminds me of the close-ups of Dietrich in Scarlet Empress. And then the prison breakout, with the layering of sounds that Cold Bishop mentions -- the train, prison alarm, police siren, etc. all combining in some kind of howl of despair. The whole film is bathed in this dreamy, poetic ambiance. This is also aided by the way the film is told from Claire Trevor's POV. She is remarkably vulnerable in this, and the way the film is told from her perspective is a great counter-point to Mann's typical masculinity. The film still has that visceral edge that one expects of a Mann film, but it's softened by being viewed through a more tender perspective. This has the added effect of enhancing the sense of fatalism and inevitability that Cold Bishop writes about, given that Trevor is mostly helpless in the film, both in her attempts to steal Joe's affections and to rescue him from his fate.

It's an absolutely incredible movie. Anybody that hasn't seen it yet needs to as soon as possible, even if it's via the lousy Sony DVD. God, how great would it be for this film to be rescued by Criterion...

[Tribe]

Thanks for taking the time to write those up, Cold Bishop. Very nice analysis.

[Cold Bishop]

Several notes of interest

Upcoming on TV:

Short notice, but tonight at 12am PT/3am ET, TCM is showing Cavalcanti's masterful British noir They Made Me a Fugitive. While I fall on the side that film noirs an American genre (and an era-specific one), this film so perfectly embodies the ethos of film noir despite its transplant that I can't help but note it. Neither The Third Man or Brighton Rock convince me of their noir-ness. This film does. Absolutely essential viewing for this list.

Also at 1:15 pm/4:15, they'll be showing The Blue Dahlia. More on that below.

Also, if you get TCM on demand, they currently have Stahl's Leave Her to Heaven. Probably as questionable a film to apply the noir label to as you can get - it is a period piece and in Technicolor, with plenty of Stahl's melodrama flourishes - but damn if Gene Tierny doesn't do her best to convince us.

Calling All Partisans::

I'm sure we all have come across film whose reputation confuses us. For the sake of this project, I'm seeing if anyone can step up to the plate to give an impassioned defense of these following films, or even point my way to any particularly perceptive pieces of criticism about them. All are films I am looking to rewatch, so here's your chance to sway my opinion.

Out of the Past - I actually quite like this film. It also has sentimental value as one of the first (if not the first) film noirs I saw. But I have never loved the film as much as its many admirers do.

The Big Sleep - I also quite like this film, it surely captures the fun of Hawks films, but to me it lacked the heart and soul that his best films have (Only Angels Have Wings and Rio Bravo). In fact, I remember preferring Murder, My Sweet to it, although I need to rewatch that film as well.

The Asphalt Jungle - To me, Riffifi is so much of the pinnacle of the heist film that its hard for me to rate the rest, even The Killing. But even then, Huston film left me cold. It's prototypical for certain, but it never really pulled me in.]

Somewhere in the Night - Hopefully you can tackle this zedz, because I found it a forgettable film. Quite literally. Despite seeing it quite recently, I completely forgot I had seen it, and it wasn't until I was reading a synopsis that bits and pieces started coming back to me. Considering the subject, perhaps it was the intended effect.

The Blue Dahlia - #2?! Really? It's an entertaining film, but it always seemed like a second-tier noir. Marshall's direction is simply workman like. Chandler's script is the definite virtue, but even that seems hampered by censorship.

The Big Heat - I remember enjoying the film, but it never really resonated with me, despite liking most of Lang's other noirs.

The Killers - Am I the only person who prefers the Don Siegel version? Everything based off Hemingway's story is great, but after that, it descends into a dull post-Citizen Kane string of reminisces. Only the brief Conrad and McGraw appearances kept me interested.

Laura - I also enjoyed the film. Yet, despite some lovely moments, I just remember a lot of people in rooms talking. Not exactly my type of film noir, but it's obviously a well-loved film.

The Postman Always Rings Twice - My admiration for the Visconti, as well as that other husband-killing noir, have always made me keep this film at arm's length. Any arguments for it?

Swapsies

Time to settle these. dominoharvey, the ball's in your court. zedz, I think its established that you've seen everything, so unless you have a line on how to see A Voice in the Wind (my ultimate holy grail noir), we can probably call it square. I'm sure to tackle The Glass Cage and The Last Seduction as soon as I can.

Tom Hagen: I've seen Point Blank, so I'll have to ask for an alternative. Which is for the best, since I have a strict neo-noir policy.

Matt: Are the other two films in the Something Weird set any good? There the main deterrent to me renting the film, since I'd have to see them, and I don't know if I can take that much 60s NY sexploitation.

tojoed: I've seen Stranger on a Third Floor, so I also need an alternative.

[Steven H]

I have similar feelings toward The Postman Always Rings Twice so I won't be defending it, but I"d be interested in hearing how forum members feel about it. As a side note, I posted about my swapsie choice earlier in the thread (Don Siegel's The Verdict) but didn't realize that it wasn't readily available on DVD so I deleted that (I don't think anyone had noticed anyway, though).

[zedz]

Calling All Partisans::

I'm sure we all have come across film whose reputation confuses us. For the sake of this project, I'm seeing if anyone can step up to the plate to give an impassioned defense of these following films, or even point my way to any particularly perceptive pieces of criticism about them. All are films I am looking to rewatch, so here's your chance to sway my opinion.

Although I like a lot of the films on your Partisan list, the only two that will make it into my 50 will be Out of the Past and Somewhere in the Night.

The former I don't know exactly how to defend, as it just seems so classic. It's probably the first film my mind goes to when I hear the words "film noir". Ditto Jane Greer and "femme fatale." But pressing on, I think that Tourneur treats all of the generic components of the film with an elegance and seriousness that elevates pulp to mythic status, as well as giving everything a haunting dream / nightmare edge (as in his horror movies), which is one of the things I savour about the best noirs.

That's all there in spades with Somewhere in the Night. I fully acknowledge that, viewed from a different angle, the film could be considered silly, convoluted, curiously flat and poorly acted. But for me, all of those potential flaws simply enrich the bizarre dreamlike atmosphere of the movie, which is as close as any film of the forties ever got to Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive: pulp fiction as identity crisis as waking nightmare. The ridiculous plot is, I find, a thing of beauty.

I'm sure I went into more detail for an earlier Lists Project. I'll root around and post what I find.

EDIT: Found it, but it was one of those long posts which was truncated (just before the slutty girl let loose her zinger) in the recent crash.

[Matt]

Matt: Are the other two films in the Something Weird set any good? There the main deterrent to me renting the film, since I'd have to see them, and I don't know if I can take that much 60s NY sexploitation.

They're run-of-the-mill roughies, nowhere near as good or interesting as Aroused. You could rent the disc and safely skip the other two features without feeling as if you've missed out. But if it's just for swapsies sake, don't bother. Despite my initial enthusiasm for the project, I probably will not submit a list. And I didn't realize the disc was now out of print and rather scarce (Netflix no longer carries it).

[tojoed]

Swapsies
tojoed: I've seen Stranger on a Third Floor, so I also need an alternative.

I doubt whether there are many others that you might have overlooked, but I'll have a think and let you know.

[Murdoch]

After getting through a whole pile of noirs - and since no one's bit on my swapsie and I have yet to watch anyone's as well - I'll propose an alternative with Arthur Ripley's The Chase with Robert Cummings as an ex-GI who finds a mobster's wallet and is given a job after he returns it, then flees to Cuba with the mobster's wife. The film's a little clunky but the final act pushes it toward a headtrip that will either seem like a cop-out or a great play on the character's sense of reality. I don't know how many lists it will make, I'm mainly interested in reading responses.