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A timely moment to dump some noir writeups, I guess

The Tall Target (Revisit): Wildly entertaining period noir full of delightfully surprising turns that threaten to upend Dick Powell's rogue efforts to protect the president at each stage of the game. The high stakes are rattled with tension as our protagonist barely hangs on by a thread - Powell strips himself, or is forcibly stripped of nearly every asset and piece of credibility he has, which supports each twist with extra heft. The finale may not live up to earlier set pieces, and one character's involvement might be too obvious, but it hardly matters in such a brisk and eventful film.

Reign of Terror aka The Black Book (Revisit): Another period noir from Mann with emphasis on style, but the relentless momentum of its plotty narrative trajectory is what sells this as a great work. No history prerequisites required for enjoyment, but an appetite for brash activity and violence is -

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There's one up-close gunshot to the face that feels impossible to include here, but it made the cut!

Robert Cummings fits right in as a dynamic lead forced to play both sides convincingly, but every player gets a chance to chew scenery - especially Richard Basehart as a particularly evil incarnation of Robespierre. It's gothic historical fiction so pulpy you can cut it with a knife.

Dark Stranger: Arthur Ripley directs an episode of Edmond O'Brien getting vacuumed up into his own dimestore novel, cast against type from the preferred narrative of his identity. It makes sense that the helmer of The Chase would be drawn to this surreal mess, but the metacontextual aspects everyone seems to baldly accept wind up sucking the fun out of the story instead of adding clever touches to it. The reveal is anticipated from a mile away, and it's plainly uninteresting, just as the ambiance lacks any mood to sell it with feeling. Speaking of no feeling, O'Brien spends his time courting Joanne Woodward in a career-worst performance that's essentially Stepford-wife robotic - though I suppose one could argue that she's a paper-thin caricature created by a terrible writer! Either way, this is a waste of time that even fans of Ripley's work should avoid.

He Walked By Night: Fake semi-doc police procedurals are my least favorite type of noir, but this was above-board thanks primarily to the quick pace and enveloping yet tempered style of the picture (John Alton plus an uncredited Mann surely contributed greatly to this achievement). The violence is brutal and its consequences are portrayed in an effectively curt manner. I enjoyed how the film gives as much time to the killer feeding his cute dog as a wife of his victim grieving - its all-around objective gaze is punishing but cool and distanced, casting aside tragedy right after giving it a sensitive close-up. The movie cares but allows brevity to be enough, and, like Fincher, is more interested in professional process than anything else - from the detective work to the villain's self-surgery. Unfortunately all these parts don't add up to a memorable whole, and in the end I wished we were given some more investment in character to make this a kind of lite-Crime Wave, which it doesn't even come close to embodying. Props for doing The Third Man's ending first though.

99 River Street: This has got to have one of the stupidest set-ups in noir history: Jewel thief is so infatuated with a woman that he brings her along to his crime business meeting, making out with her the whole time, only to find out that.. wait for it.. criminals don't like it when civilians see their crimes! He's somehow surprised at being outcast, and has to do away with her, which suddenly comes pretty easy to him. What a dope. Anyways, from there things heat up and get exciting due to Payne's hotheated would-be-patsy taking the lead. At first he’s emasculated time after time (there's even an opportunity taken to sully him via a rando acting audition occurring out in public! What?) only to come back harder in each and every instance. Payne's ex-boxer-turned-cabbie has an urgent temperament that finally gets a release in the back half as he cracks down on the plot against him, and it's a joy to behold. It’s an uneven picture, but worth checking out for the cathartic bits, including an unanticipated morality in Payne's demeanor that shines brightly between the beatdowns. The finale's kinda lame though.

The Prowler (Revisit): Van Heflin's sleazy cop dominates the opening act of this Losey masterpiece. A specialist of slippery role-shifting, the protector becomes the abuser (or the titular prowler) from the outset, and things move on unpredictably from there. While the film eventually settles into a reverse-Double Indemnity sitch, Trumbo's script is exalting. Even when activity seems to follow a foreseeable rhythm, there are still nuggets of idiosyncratic menace and ambiguity in personality and motive sewn into the fabric of these dynamics as the progression unfolds. The audience isn't primed for the familiar beats in part because these characters are just slightly unknowable (and cheekily to one another just as much as to the viewer - Evelyn Keyes sells this blind hysteria well), creating a surreal effect that distances us further from them in a dramatically unsettling fashion.

Sunset Boulevard (Revisit): I've already written about this film on the forum, so I'll keep this brief - I still really want to like this but find it rather obnoxious. The satirical self-reflexivity is a bit overblown -though I do appreciate the bite of a dead screenwriter narrating the story with a silver tongue- but Wilder and co. generally know what the material is and run with it semi-constructively. I always come back to the sadness inherent in the transactional relationship and Holden's performance of guilt in particular; how he lashes out and engages in a series of behaviors that don't spell out his 'tough love' sensitivity but hint at it underneath the veneer of pure greed. As far as I'm concerned it's his film more than Swanson's. The sense of place is well-drawn - the sets are striking and feel lived-in (that garage, with the leaves and all, etched in my mind forever). It just.. doesn't add up to anything worthy of its little sardonic touches or sincere attempts at dramatics. The sum of its parts is weak, even if a few of the brushstrokes are amusing. Its gaudiness is only partially self-conscious and ironic, but the bulk of it is oblivious and cringe-inducing.

The Racket: With stars like these, we should've gotten a better movie. Robert Mitchum plays a good 'ol boy cop going after Robert Ryan's big-time crime boss with Lizbeth Scott as witness in tow, and the result is hardly more than a forgettable programmer. Ryan confiding his family problems in Mitchum and then becoming upset by his 'who cares' reaction is a good example of the puzzling activity this film tries to drum up for some kind of effect, but falls flat on its face each time. It's no surprise that Hughes cycled through five directors, as the tonal and narrative resolutions are routine, leading to a banal and final product. It'd be more appealing if they were drastically incongruous because at least that would be stimulating in some direction.

Hollow Triumph aka The Scar: Absurdly plotted but fantastically surprising noir, with inconsistent doses of strong style and inspiring directorial wit. Paul Henreid, a gangster on the run from other gangsters he's robbed, finds a doppleganger and decides to take his identity before wild complications ensue. There are some lulls, but the economical pacing hardly allows them to drag down the picture. From the crackerjack opening robbery to the clever twist on inescapable fatalism in the last act, this is a leisurely good time peppered with juicy supporting parts and strong location shooting. If you're able to suspend disbelief, you’ll probably find something to like here.

He Ran All the Way: John Garfield is a feral hood caught up in a manhunt, and relentlessly engages in immoral self-preservation when he shacks up with an unsuspecting family. A precursor to stuff like Desperate Hours and Good Time, this potboiler rides on Garfield's anarchic spirit, and the tension is almost painful as we wait for a terrible implosion amidst the psychological torture Garfield unleashes on Winters et al. This might be perfect if cut to an even leaner hour, but it's a strong firecracker of a movie that's well worth seeing if just for Garfield's perf handsomely shot by Howe.

Body and Soul: A well-crafted boxing noir / fictional biopic by Rossen. There's not too much to say about this one - the performances, direction, writing are all solid, and the time allotted to each section of Garfield's life is well-timed and edited. Even though everyone is good here, I thought Lilli Palmer was the standout as his primary romantic partner - she radiates the screen in a novel, quirky manner at times. Great use of montage, too.

Kiss Me Deadly (Revisit): The apotheosis of film noir is also its most experimental and nihilistic work, that's somehow also one of the more entertaining genre entries. Inspiring everything from nouvelle vague to cyberpunk sci-fi, Aldrich's urgent picture aims its fury at a range of targets, from narcissistic personalities to the studio system to the world at large. Today would be a good day to revisit it again if I hadn't already four times this year.

Angel Heart (Revisit): Absolutely ludicrous neo-noir-horror, even before the shark-jumping twist comes that soils every good element that came before. Alan Parker just doesn't know how to create a strong atmosphere, nor engage in the right kind of meditation on details to warrant such swift narrative propulsion. We simply don't care about anything that happens - mainly unexplained grisly deaths - because he didn't take the time to feel out the characters or concoct even briskly involving dynamics between them and Rourke. De Niro phones in a small but significant part, while Rourke slums it a bit too hard; neither selling what they desperately need to in the end.

The Driver (Revisit): Excellent stylish slice of reductive (in the most positive sense) neon-noir. The larger-than-life character actors amusingly offset Ryan O'Neal's silent steady, particularly Joseph Walsh's frantic hood, and of course Dern's salivating hound copper. Meanwhile Isabelle Adjani's introverted vessel works well scene-paired with O'Neal's temperament. Though clearly a plagiarizing-level inspiration for Drive, I always liken this more to Le Samouraï's narrative trajectory and character dynamics. There isn't an ounce of fat on this bone. The ending can feel like a bit of a deflating letdown, but it's also the most fitting cap to the action thanks to the driver's stoicism.

Chinatown (Revisit): [Mostly a slightly edited compilation of other writings on the forum] Set to the perfect tempo and engaging across all aspects of filmmaking, Polanski's brooding drama and mystery become less about the whodunit plot and more about the mystery of the drama, i.e. will the fatalism inherent in these systems finally be broken? I love how after an unrelenting methodical pace, the final scene descends into chaos on a dime, seemingly shot in a single take as it recalls a Kafka-esque nightmare- exploiting the subjective surrealism in raw realist experiences of pandemonium.

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Huston fake-crying and then dragging an innocent Katherine away into the dark like a literal monster, as the camera continues to pan on the wreckage and impotence of Nicholson, is a more unsettling ending than any of Polanski's horror films. Absolutely chilling.

Not only does the ending reflect Polanski's cynical worldview following Tate's death, the immoral haze of the 70s drowning out 60s naive optimism, etc., but it's perfectly fitting a noir worldview as an extension of the macro-systems of power that are inescapable and their effects on the most micro-vehicles in our vicinity. "Chinatown" isn't just a symbol for the fatalism behind society's moral erosion, but it's the erasure of all that's beautiful, loved, innocent, worthy, the 'possible' that is close and dear to us and that leaves a mark when it's erased. Evelyn's eye is the answer: her off-color iris that makes her special, a unique detail that brings singularity and meaning to her physical existence and a signifier that Nicholson notices and ignites a surge of loving energy between two moral people. But it doesn't belong, and it's no match for what's coming.

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So that eye getting shot clear out is the most blatant symbol of Chinatown's pull- from the enigmatic systems pulling the strings right down to the palpable organic material that defines us individually and to the ones we love. Destroying that eye is the only way this film could properly end.

It may not be my favorite neo-noir (that needle slowly moves towards Inherent Vice as the years progress), but it is one of the most unimpeachable artworks and a defining noir, enough to be in consideration for the "greatest." How does one contend with this picture? I think some great artists like Fincher have spent entire careers trying.

Somehow I still possess quite a few unseen Noir discs, and some of these have been in my possession for a while, like this set that has been sitting in the stacks since it was released almost fifteen years ago. #kevyipwasinnocent

Bad Girls of Film Noir Vol 2:

Night Editor (Henry Levin 1946) Based on a popular radio program, this brief noir gives us a superfluous framing story, probably to pad the time, around an intriguing premise: a cop having an affair with a society dame witnesses a murder while out at a lover’s lane, but is talked out of stopping the villain by his paramour. As you’d expect, an innocent is arrested and somehow sent to the electric chair within a matter of days (time has the same function here as it does in Fringe or Angels and Demons), giving the cop a ticking clock to make things right. Predictable, moralistic, entertaining.

One Girl’s Confession (Hugo Haas 1953) Cleo Moore steals $25k from her boss, hides it, turns herself in, does her time, and then gets out and… works as a waitress, because she can’t get the money for fear of reprisal, even though literally no one is watching her? Whatever, the plot doesn’t matter here, especially once the charismatic Haas pops up as Moore’s new gambling-prone boss. Even better is Helene Stanton as Haas’ girlfriend, Smooch (what a name!), and the wordless shot of her pretending to sleep while pocketing money from Haas’ card game into her bra is worth sitting through everything else here.

Women’s Prison (Lewis Seiler 1955) Belated Caged cash-in (and truly the number of Letterboxd reviews claiming this is the first “women in prison” movie shows how valuable that app is as a crowdsourced resource) that knows it cannot compete with Cromwell’s film in artistry or acting and so it amps up the melodrama to a million (and casts Jan Sterling again, creating a false link between the two films). And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love every minute of this film’s well-intentioned but highly didactic collection of worst case scenarios and social messaging. Husband and wife team Howard Duff and Ida Lupino are also on board, and they do their best with their one-dimensional Good and Evil representations. But it’s the little things that add up here, like a matron telling her colleague that she’s going to go see a prison movie after work to critique its flaws, or the movie’s variation on the Snake Pit wherein everyday woman Phyllis Thaxter is absurdly brutalized by the staff upon her arrival while the inmates themselves are wholly supportive and without malice, or, y’know, Lupino's superintendent kicking the shit out of a pregnant Audrey Totter. Not subtle, and not trying to be. Recommended.

Over-Exposed (Lewis Seiler 1956) Cleo Moore learns the craft of photography and uses it to get ahead in the nightclub scene in a fairly conservative “Ambitious woman gets comeuppance” narrative. Other than being indicative of the death of the genre around this time due to the rise of TV, the only other thing of note here is the bizarre footnote that the screenplay is co-credited to beat author Gil Orlovitz, perhaps best/only known as the other author whose work was seized for obscenity alongside Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. No such liberties, or poetries, undergone here, though. Watchable, overlit, disposable.

The Black Dahlia (De Palma, 2006). I'm a De Palma true believer, and greatly enjoy maybe 4/5ths of the many films by him I've seen (actually, my De Palma enthusiasms and dislikes seem to be almost a perfect inverse of Domino Harvey's. As in, I have the exact opposite take on just about everything.) The Black Dahlia however is like a big buffet of rotten food. Acting, script, visuals--every component of this flick oozes the yuckiest kind of creative energy, which is no creative energy at all really--just sickeningly tired, overstuffed, stale, and off-key to the nth degree. All four, or all three, or whatever, of the leads seem utterly at a loss as to how to play their characters. Hilary Swank is not well-suited to play a femme fatale, but they're really all terrible. It's hard to believe this was based on material by the same guy who wrote L.A. Confidential--could it just be that the actors are so bad, and so miscast, that they ruin the dialogue? The film's style is disorienting enough that it was actually hard to tell. I adore Vilmos Zsigmond and i don't deny that he merited an Oscar nomination in a weak year, but nonetheless his talents just amount to lacquered barf here, with all the swollen purples and blacks and golds and greens and chintzy, bling-y metallic glinting looking like an infected wound or something, which I, again, found pretty sickening. It's a very barf-y film. However, this is not the worst De Palma I've ever seen--that honor I would probably jointly award to Hi, Mom!, Passion, and Domino (haven't seen Mission to Mars). The narrative through-line is fairly strong and can still be enjoyed, although the resolution to the mystery really sucks. Minor points to Fiona Shaw, okay not really, but her

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blowing-her-brains-out scene

made me titter. But i guess it's a De Palma film for those who don't like De Palma films.

Jealousy (Gustav Machatý 1945) A working woman financially supports her loser novelist husband and falls in love with another man, which causes the titular emotion in more than one character... It is incredible, after nearly twenty years of watching hundreds upon hundreds of film noirs, to somehow still be able to discover a new-to-me classic like this. This Republic feature, which currently only circulates in a battered and blurry VHS rip of a TV broadcast from who knows when, is the best poverty row film noir I've ever seen, and one of the best film noirs from any studio. Undoubtedly some of this is because this tale of a tormented ex-pat was directed by one too. Certainly once this thing begins and immediately Jane Randolph's taxi cab routine is transformed into something out of Soviet Montage, one wonders what the fuck is happening, and how. The film quickly abandons this, but it does not forgo its abundant visual wit. This is a Christmas noir too. The most emotionally painful moment of the entire film is framed against all of the images of familial warmth and love that are wholly absent from those occupying the screen. The film does not employ big stars-- yet another immigrant, Hugo Haas, is probably the most recognizable face here, and like every character but one in the film, he suffers humiliation on his journey to survive (and his cantina appearance looks awful close to the reality of Haas' own indignities, including perhaps films of this ilk depending on who you ask). What the movie does have is a remarkably mature scenario and script, and the unexpected mirrored construction in the second half works so well that we don't even mind the

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complete shift in focus from the impossibly wide-eyed Randolph to Karen Morley-- Randolph, our initial protagonist, doesn't even appear on screen in the last fifteen minutes!

If there's a better version of this masterpiece sitting on a shelf somewhere and all this other crap still keeps getting restored, released, and slapped with a "noir" label by boutiques, home video is truly dead. Find this. Watch it.

Interesting, I wasn't even aware Machatý had made films in the U.S.

Letterboxd says he also directed 1939's Within the Law and an installment of MGM's Crime Doesn't Pay series-- I have seen and enjoyed the latter

I would also, of course, never suggest that one could find Jealousy on YouTube quite easily, and that the quality there matches what I saw

More recent viewings:

Accused of Murder (Joseph Kane 1956) Imagine paying to make this in Naturama and color and then filming everything just like you would for an Academy ratio production— I don’t know why I waited for a widescreen copy to materialize, it wouldn’t have mattered if it was cropped. Not that anything matters in a film this bad. A hard-nosed detective falls for the least-appealing murder suspect imaginable, much to the chagrin of his partner, an aggressively obnoxious Lee Van Cleef. There is exactly one good idea here involving an extended misdirection of guilt, and the film bungles it mercilessly. The brutal scenes of Warren Stevens beating the shit out of Virginia Grey are among the most regrettable ever depicted in one of these films, just ugly misogyny utilized for prurient means. All around a great reminder that this genre was dying and perhaps the tide was a mercy killing…

Dernier atout (Jacques Becker 1942) How does the police department settle a tie for valedictorian in their newest graduating class of new cops? Why, they let them both work on the biggest case in history and whoever solves it is named top of the class. And, somehow, the film is even dumber than that set-up lets on. I have two more Becker films left to tie a bow on his output, and I pray neither are as awful as this.

End of the Road (George Blair 1944) A detective magazine writer tracks down a murdering florist, played with great relish by That Guy John Abbott. This is an efficient and fun little cheapie noir, competently made and with an amusing fast-paced opening scene with the protagonist's editor that sadly the film never quite lives up to.

Johnny Apollo (Henry Hathaway 1940) Buried in Fox’s second Tyrone Power box set, this tale of Power’s journey from Good College Boy to Bad Criminal Boy straddles the waning gangster/message film period (which Fox was never all that enamored with) with the burgeoning Film Noir movement for surprisingly satisfying proto-noir that could pass for the real thing if you didn’t know the date going in. The moralistic stuff from Edward Arnold as the rich father imprisoned for embezzlement is regrettable and highly dubious, as is Power’s trajectory towards crime, but Dorothy Lamour makes a credible downbeat dame and the perennial highlight of anything he appears in, Lloyd Nolan, gives one of his best perfs as the baddie.

Le Vampire de Düsseldorf (Robert Hossein 1965) A meek day laborer spends his nights in pre-war Germany pining after a cabaret singer and murdering women who look like her. Hossein’s direction is fine if unremarkable, but he is woefully miscast as the killer. Hossein is one of the great on-screen pricks, and you don’t put him in a movie like this and have him act vaguely autistic instead of lashing out violently with the full-force of his capacity for assholedom. On one hand I admired the film’s initial restraint at eliding the violent crimes themselves, but eventually this too goes away. I also found it entirely unlikely and more than a little self-serving to have the cabaret singer actually fall for Hossein's character. A couple scenes of Nazis tormenting Communists while ignoring Hossein on the street are, I’m sure, Totally Deep.

Money, Women and Guns (Richard Bartlett 1958) In the words of Orson Welles, they should have just released the title! Like noirs, western titles rarely seem to have any connection to what’s depicted on-screen, but surely this is the least likely film to feature this excellent title? At any rate, this is an unusual genre riff as we get a Christmas-set mystery western, with Jock Mahoney investigating the new heirs of a murdered prospector to find which one killed him. The film is oddly genial and highly episodic, and the highlight is def the sequence with James Gleason and Lon Chaney Jr as poker buddies too entrenched in their regular games to ever let anything else interfere. A favorite of Bertrand Tavernier, I can’t say I had any special affection for it overall, but I wasn’t sad I sat through it, either. Would have been better off just smiling at the title and stopping there, though.

Toutes peines confondues (Michel Deville 1992) Deville had already made a couple films that would fit into the noir category, but here is a bold, smooth, endlessly entertaining amalgamation of pulp literature brought to life like only Deville would tell it. Knowing that, as the Big Sleep taught us, that the plot doesn’t matter, Deville throws us in and doesn’t stop to explain anything, to the point that it’s maybe a half hour in until we really get how most of the pieces fit. And then a half hour after that he reveals he’s also evoking a famous Hitchcock film (to say which one would be to deny one of this film’s many surprises, but I doubt it’s one you’d guess going in). And then once we meet our twelfth or thirteenth vibrant and memorable character, he just keeps swirling them together, shaking up their relations and interactions. Watching this all unfold gave me as much pure joy as any other great film I’ve ever seen. What is so apparent at this stage in Deville’s career is that all that matters is the rhythm and movement. In many ways, this is a companion film to a movie that could not be any more different on a plot level, L'Apprenti salaud, and it shares that film’s virtuoso sense of editing and elision, of knowing exactly what to film and depict and when and why. And yet, there’s a playful admission, as in the Big Sleep, that none of this really matters. Indeed, as in Hawks' film, there’s at least one violent act late in the action that cannot be rationally explained on a plot level and seemingly only exists to upend our already weak notion of understanding what’s happening. Leave it to Deville to make a modern noir that’s simultaneously superfluous and also one of the greatest examples of the genre. Highly recommended, and my God, I could actually see a boutique label releasing this one some day. [P]

domino harvey wrote: Sun Jan 12, 2025 5:27 pm Men, Women and Guns (Richard Bartlett 1958)

Money, Women and Guns?

Yes-- my God, how embarrassing. You'd think I'd double check that I got the title I loved so much correct in my writeup

Reminds me of Guns, Girls and Gambling, which I only know about since they shot part of it outside my work and I saw Christian Slater and Tony Cox through the window while I was talking to my boss

Strangers in the Night: Early, brief noir from Mann, in which a wounded soldier seeks out a pen-pan from the war he's fallen for, only to stumble into another breezy romance and a mystery surrounding the pen-pal's disappearance. This has no right to be as good as it is, but Mann shows early creative wit (details like the abrasive sound design during a train crash, or a shot established from inside a fire place, stand out and brighten the picture during moments that would've been unspectacular or dull if filmed straight), and the movie really goes off the rails quickly in the last act, which is fun to observe. The event comprising its final shots in particular is a hoot. William Terry threatens to ruin each scene he's in, but thankfully the rest of the cast turn in engrossing performances that make up for any flaws in the material. Recommended.

Strange Impersonation is another excellent Mann noir, which I wouldn't even begin to describe the premise(s) of, since nearly each narrative pivot is a complete twist - squarely due to Mann's commitment to the idea of elastic identity. Almost every character subverts, and fluidly shifts their own characterization on a dime in the grandest fashions as soon as an opportunity is presented to them, to preserve the self above any moral value. I enjoyed the parallels of science and love bringing both rescue and destruction throughout the film. The trite ending feels like a total cop-out at first, but because the film reflects a range of genuine anxieties in the most absurd demonstrations imaginable, it makes sense and can be forgiven. This is certainly a better case than its most famous and mass-accepted usage in a noir!

Two O'Clock Courage starts off promising but its story just isn't involving, and it bores even at an hour's length, which is saying a lot considering how populated the material is. Railroaded! is a lot of fun, especially its bookends of violence - not too much to say beyond that except John Ireland is truly terrifying in an enigmatic way, amplifying the effect of the stress he stirs.

The Mask of Dimitrios (Jean Negulesco, 1944)
Directed by Negulesco, not a studio craftsman who ever really rose to being an auteur, this is actually enormous fun. Beautifully shot by Arther Edeson, it's a film, rare for the era, of no stars, just great character actors: Peter Lorre as the mystery novelist tracking down the elusive Dimitrios across Europe (Turkey, Greece, Switzerland, France), and encountering a magnificent Sidney Greenstreet (his line readings are hypnotic) and Victor Francen, a wily silver lion just waiting to show his claws. Zachary Scott is actually pretty good as Dimitrios, playing him as a sleazy gigolo, but the film's structure demanded a huge, charismatic star turn, à la Orson Welles in The Third Man or John Huston in Chinatown. The ending could've been a littler bleaker, a little more potent in its existential confrontation. In its flashback structure, clearly influenced by Citizen Kane and perhaps in turn, an influence on Mr Arkadin.

Berlin Express (Jacques Tourneur, 1948)--A perhaps peculiar attempt by Tourneur & Co. to do The Third Man before The Third Man...I guess...to the degree that this film is seriously attempting to do anything of note. Okay just forget about The Third Man, just forget it! Buncha random strangers take the train from Paris to Frankfurt (the film is contemporarily set), including wry and randy Robert Ryan, a diplomat on board is killed by a bomb, and then his fellow car-travellers are rounded up by police and questioned.

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It turns out that the man who was killed was a decoy for the real diplomat, who ends up getting kidnapped, and the group ends up teaming up to find him. Despite in some ways seeming to be rather carefully constructed and sharply etched, and despite having a rather fancy cast, this film is lightweight, over very fast, and sorta dumb and pointless, and the plot hinges in part on a highly improbable and stupid coincidence.

The best/only truly good thing about it is the lovely (war-shellacked) location photography by Lucien Ballard.

Fly-by-Night is an early entry in Siodmak's American output, where he attempts to bridge screwball comedy tendencies within a noir structure, and... it kinda works? That is, if you surrender to the ludicrous nature of the plot. This is a bit like a cheap Sabotage narrative, with some wooden performances that also function effectively within the comedic atmosphere. Just when it seems like our protagonists are in a situation that would normally play out with grave suspense, we get deadpan deliveries followed by unpredictable bursts of manic behavior, wonderfully done in a bit when realizing that a pointed gun isn't loaded (I also laughed out loud at a reaction shot after Carlson inquires about scissors). There isn't a direct throughline here - it's not like the mystery is fully established and our heroes are seeking anything specific we can latch onto - so we have to go with the flow until the ultimate evil ring materializes. I'm not sure if that's a flaw or a strength, but it's somewhat refreshing to watch a movie where you're aligned with the principal character's utter confusion and aimlessness while he runs from and seeks unknown threats. We definitely have to suspend disbelief regarding the couple's chemistry and how it develops, but that's not exactly new. This is a very fantastical noir, emerging as a clear piece of tonally-twisted artifice. Warning - the transfer is a shoddy mess, but that's fine as it matches the broad spirit of the picture. And since the finale is extremely dumb and anticlimactic, it's pretty obvious this was an exercise in genre-meshing, about the journey not the destination.

I Love Trouble (1948) is a real messy gem. The direction is all over the place - tight and impressive with real visual wit when Simon is interested in something, and slapdash and clunky when he doesn't seem to care. The script is convoluted and ridiculous, but there are so many wonderful quips in dialogue exchanges, and some wild bouts of violence in the middle. I need to revisit it again to take in and memorize all the wonderful exchanges, but I had a blast with it, taken for what it is: a cheesy, pulpy slice of noir attitude. Not all the acting is great (Tom Powers comes off as funny in the end when he's supposed to be intense, which just adds to the glory) but Franchot Tone nails his delicious lines, and John Ireland is always a treat, even in a small part.

The Argyle Secrets is a lean and mean noir about a newspaperman who nonchalantly beats men and women in order to get to the bottom of a Nazi ring. The haphazard feel to it matches its production history - apparently shot in just a few days on a micro budget - and reflexively adds to the stress and disorganization within the investigation. Unfortunately, nothing too interesting happens in the back half. The film is all set-up and peters out hard. There were big opportunities to fill a very short final act with some action, but they whiffed it.

Shield for Murder finds the always reliable Edmond O'Brien acting as perhaps the most corrupt anti-protagonist cop I've seen in a starring role. The movie starts with a literal bang and doesn't let up from there. Carolyn Jones steals scenes as a rando bar maiden slurping down booze and spaghetti for seemingly no reason other than to add to the insanity of this world, where only an innocent and young dame and cop duo manage to break free of the sludge infesting all corners of systems. It's fun watching the ante up for O'Brien, but I could watch an entire movie of him and Jones just trading lines at the bar - and might even prefer such a hangout movie to the wild suspense at play here!

Party Girl is Nicholas Ray's noir musical, and it's a real treat. More of a crime melodrama than going hard in either genre's direction, the use of color is illuminating and Ray's engagement with morality is somehow both mature and breezy. The film is deceptively simple on the surface. I quite liked Cobb's heavy - there's more complexity to this film than meets the eye, especially within the shocking, agile finish, which leaves grace notes of wonder about what's occurring beneath the psychological icebergs long after the film ends.

Suddenly's strength in deliberate pacing during its narrative establishment nearly makes up for its hokey moralism. Thankfully the second act kicks into gear with a boom, and the insulated tension only escalates from there. A lot of languid didactic dialogue really hampers the film. Hayden is lame, while Sinatra tries to make a more complicated impression that transcends one-note maniacal villain - and though he doesn't quite succeed, he's the best thing here. I enjoy his rationalizations and worldviews that go against the grain of Hayden's ideological highground because it can make more sense sometimes, even when you know he's morally wrong! Fantastic use of physical space and savage good-guy trickery in the finale too

The Gingerbread Man (Robert Altman, 1998)--I've heard others disparage this Altman effort elsewhere on the board, and I don't even really know whether it qualifies as a noir, but I kinda loved this. As I think I've said before Altman's ennobling craftsmanship strikes me as the ideal way to, among other things, deal with the limitations of a Grisham Kindergarten Ersatz Noir script like this one. There's little beyond some especially creative and dexterous instances of filmmaking prowess here and there* as specific examples of this, along with Altman's usual diffuse, indirect, and subtle way of putting across his material, but somehow Altman's style here manages to always both make the Grisham material seem better, more adult and compelling than it is, and to not make the film itself seem "implicated", if you know what I mean by this, in the escalating stupidities of the material, the way a more conventional directorial style/approach invariably does with this kind of script. And I don't mean that Altman takes an inanely "superior", "ironic", or just smug approach to putting across the material, he doesn't.

*I was quite impressed with Altman's, and Geraldine Peroni's, magical, intricate, and elegant staging and editing of the scene where Kenneth Branagh and some cops perform a raid on the house where the Embeth Davidtz character's crazy eccentric father (Robert Duvall) is squatting with a whole bunch of other homeless people, where Duvall manages to slip away and escape amidst the confusion and noise of all the other derelicts and cops and Branagh running about from room to room, opening and closing doors, being chased after by the cops to see if each of the hobos is or isn't Duvall, etc. This sequence must have been an absolute bitch to film, and to put together in the editing room. I also loved things like the hilarious entrance of Robert Downey, Jr.'s disreputable amateur private detective character, or whatever he was exactly, which felt very Altmanesque in their style--was this something he contributed to the script? I'm pretty confident that any other director and any other stylistic approach to filming this script would have resulted in something virtually no-one would think was anything other than considerably sub-par. It's a good testament to the idea that every script should be directed by Altman.

Recent viewings:

the Cobra Strikes (Charles Reisner 1948) A scientist is gunned down (impressively the gunman also shoots out the street lamp eight feet above his target with the sole bullet fired) moments before he can present his new secret invention to the world. The bad guy or gal then uses the device to execute victims in the manner of a cobra. Could a secret street gang called the Cobra Men be behind it? Look, I love the idea of the Cobra Men just as much as you do. And Philip Ahn, the most recognizable face here, may or may not be a member of said gang, which means they may or may not rule even harder. But this somehow isn’t a movie about the Cobra Men, it’s a random zero budget poverty row cheapie with a dumb detective serial plot condensed into less than an hour. I had the grim realization while watching this that as I near a light at the end of my first time viewing tunnel, it’s highly likely most of my remaining unseen noirs will be more like this and less something like Jealousy, and that does not rule.

Federal Man (Robert Emmett Tansey 1950) I like procedural noirs more than most but this one stretched even my patience. A drug running ring is undermined by feds who figure out their scheme and undermine it using, well, not know-how, more like “What now?” There are a few component bits here that could work in a film with any modicum of intelligence, but that is not this film.

Hell Bound (William J Hole Jr 1957) A criminal masterminds a needlessly complicated smuggling heist which relies on blackmailing/bribing four people into completing one component each. To say none of it goes off as planned is not a spoiler in this genre, and this is not a film where the pleasures are found in the plot anyway. Where they are found, and in abundance, are in the consistently oddball and compelling stylistic choices made at every step of this lean late period noir. I’m talking fun and novel stuff like how multiple characters in this movie, including an unforgettable blind drug dealer named “Daddy”, are obsessed with drinking milk, or how one of the characters is constantly depicted in the act of removing her shoes, or the meta opening of the film which mocks the procedural noir format with glee. Lovely brutal lead perf by John Russell too. This is the kind of singular movie that you know the French critics would have appreciated, if only it had played over there. It is astonishing to me that KLSC licensed all those other UA noirs that MGM put out on DVD-R but ignored this one— though, I guess if you look about what they think makes for a good noir, of course they wouldn’t “get” this one. Also, as a side note, bizarrely this was the second noir in a row that I watched in which diabetes was a plot point. Recommended. [P]

Her Kind of Man (Frederick de Cordova 1946) Not only does it have nothing to do with His Kind of Woman, but this one actually came first! This is an odd movie, focused on a genial love triangle that could be carried over from a screwball comedy, only with a few more murders than you typically find in that genre. Zachary Scott was of course born to play gambling flaneurs, but any points for believability go out the window in the last twenty minutes or so as the film calls upon him to commit a mindless and wholly unlikely act of violence just to get all of its remaining plot pieces into place. I did enjoy the lickspittle who hitches his wagon to Scott’s applecart fairly early in his rise and proceeds to gladly absorb all of his abuse for the rest of the film, but the film doesn’t really know how to wring that setup for any payoff save the obvious and like everything else here, it just fizzles out.

Homicide (Felix Jacoves 1949) A detective is sure that the suicide of a itinerant worker is in fact a murder and goes undercover at a resort to find the culprits in this WB programmer that fills lots of minor parts with the usual stable of bit players but makes a nearly fatal error of entrusting the lead to a truly not ready for prime time Robert Douglas. That said, this one is more fun than I expected, and Robert Alda is quite charming as a duplicitous bartender who may or may not just be a cog in the criminal machine at work here.

Strangers in the Night (Anthony Mann 1944) Silly melodrama that withholds information that is immediately obvious anyways and has nothing else going for it. Watchable, but I think less of the overall cast here than TWBB did a few posts back, especially the delusional mother at the heart of the film. Mann really paid his dues on some of these early movies, didn’t he?

I went through the rest of my Mann blind spots earlier this year, and he definitely paid his dues from '42-'46. I think it's fair to say that he really started making the movies he wanted to, in the way he wanted to, with T-Men at Eagle Lion. However, I have a soft spot for the previous year's Strange Impersonation, which spins a chaotic and messy narrative trajectory (though so does T-Men! - which greatly benefits the film upon revisits) but ultimately one with enough turns to keep one interested. It's a great example of Mann transforming silly material into something much more engaging than it deserves to be. I'll be curious what you make of that one, but it's still a night-and-day difference from the kind of control of material he possesses starting in '47, when he became intimately involved in his projects

Tendre poulet (Philippe De Broca 1978) Police inspector Annie Girardot embarks on a whirlwind romance with Greek studies professor Philippe Noiret while trying to solve a case involving several high profile political assassinations. I am including this recommendation in this thread because I only even was prompted to watch this after it featured in Robin Buss' book French Film Noir, but this is ultimately a romantic comedy and it is one of the best examples of that genre that I have ever seen. Girardot is not a favorite of mine but she and Noiret (who is) are excellent here, completely inhabiting their characters with likable and realistic traits and details. Michel Audiard too is not a favorite of mine, but surely this is one of his greatest successes, and while the superbly structured plot doesn't exactly deliver a laugh a minute, it does have two brilliant comic sequences that are so simple and yet so effective that you wonder how no one came up with them before this. I was reminded a lot of En liberte! here, obviously with the Girardot character keeping her profession hidden from the man she's getting involved with, but also due to their shared awareness of screwball comedy structures. While De Broca is not quite as bold or successful as Salvadori in embracing these compositions, the trade off is that the romance here is more believable and compelling. Ultimately what I appreciate about this film is that it is so warm and pleasant, one of those rare movies where I had a big smile on my face the entire time. Not bad for a movie with so many bloody murders!

It's been a minute since I've been prompted to go through my schtick, so here it goes: I know an HD master of this exists (it's not even yellow or teal!), so why has no boutique label released this? I would bet that anyone here who watches this would at least like it (assuming that they like any romantic comedies), even if they don't love it to the extent that I do. This is money in the bank for some label. I look forward to the day I can quote this post in another thread if/when this gets announced.

The Human Factor (Preminger, 1979)--I suppose one could make a case for this film, as it has a cast that includes several very classy actors--Nicol Williamson in the lead, as well as Robert Morley, Richard Attenborough, and Derek Jacobi--and they're all quite decent if perhaps a bit sleepy and lowkey, and there is at least some significant trace, I wouldn't know as I'm not familiar with it, of whichever Graham Greene or John le Carre stuff, I forget, the film is based on, in the dialogue and plot. That's all true enough, and yet in many ways this is a rather decrepit, feeble, sad last effort from Preminger, what with Iman bringing whatever little forward momentum and tautness or even minimal involvement the film is able to muster, not very much at all, what with this filmmaking, to a screeching halt every times she opens her mouth, and with Preminger's mise-en-scene disintegrating before your eyes (it's not like there is literally no trace at all of Preminger's skill with a camera in this film, although it doesn't actually amount to any good effect really, but to think that this was directed by the same man who provided, at least in part, us lucky moviegoers with the fabulous visuals of Bunny Lake is Missing!). It's funny to think that Preminger or whoever felt it was alright to go ahead with Iman in this film, since her character actually has at least one modestly demanding scene for an actress, while it's not at all clear from the finished film that Iman even speaks or understands English. This looks and feels like an oddly unfinished or damaged film, whose polish, tension, and ultimate raison d'etre blew away in a tornado, or were eaten by termites.

domino harvey wrote: Wed Oct 03, 2018 5:25 pm Highway Dragnet (Nathan Juran 1954)
Richard Conte is wrongly accused of strangling a woman he was seen drinking with the previous night. He evades the cops and takes up with Joan Bennett and Wanda Hendrix in this cheapie notable, I guess, for featuring Roger Corman’s first on-screen credit for co-writing the script. The movie is standard issue b-string noir stuff with the world’s most obvious Real Culprit, but the film has one original idea in its finale, which is set in an abandoned house in the middle of a flood plane. It’s a visually striking locale, and even though the film doesn’t do much with it, it’s a nice touch.

My wife figured out the twist in this before I could. Wasn't blown away, but but I feel like I liked it more on the than it seems Dom did years ago. I love how grimy and lo-fi this film felt. In the first scene where Conte encounters the stranded car, the sound of wind whipping in interferes with the dialogue. Some of the misdirection was so bad it was almost charming, such as

Spoiler

the scene where they are passing the California border and the cop pulls a "hold it right there" at the last minute, only for the cop to say "you forgot your registration!"

The Salton Sea finale was also great, especially as someone who discovered that locale in the last few years (thank you to my aforementioned wife!) Given the way the place looks now it's pretty wild to see waves flowing in that body of water!