“A little girl is returning from the beach, at dusk, with her mother. She is crying for no reason at all, because she would have liked to continue playing. She moves off into the distance. She has already turned the corner of the street, and do not our lives dissolve into the evening as quickly … [Read more…]
Film noir evokes the dark side where the noir protagonist is usually trapped in a web of dire circumstance. A particular noir trope is amnesia. Hemmed in by internal barriers the noir amnesiac struggles to recover memory and meaning. The lost doppelganger, usually the dark flip-side of a new better self. In the redemptive noir … [Read more…]
“Dusk gently smooths crispangled streets. Dark presses tight the steaming asphalt city, crushes the fretwork of windows and lettered signs and chimneys and watertanks and ventilators and fireescapes and moldings and patterns and corrugations and eyes and hands and neckties into blue chunks, into black enormous blocks. Under the rolling heavier heavier pressure windows blurt … [Read more…]
Film noir aficionado Ray (“Cigar Joe”) Ottulich has launched a new blog where he will collect his film noir reviews from various forums, and post new reviews and noir-related snippets. The blog is appropriately titled Noirsville. Ray over the past few years has introduced me to a number of b-movies and little-known neo-noirs, and Noirsville is a very … [Read more…]
A reader has asked which American films noir have been inducted into the US Library of Congress National Film Registry. I did a little digging and identified 26 Hollywood movies in the list that fall under the film noir umbrella. There are 650 films in the list so the standard e&oe disclaimer applies. Film Title … [Read more…]
Film Noir had antecedents in the German Expressionist cinema of the 20s and French Poetic Realism in the 30s, but there are movies from other national cinemas that also explored the corrosive aspects of modernity. Three films that have recently come my way are in this vein. One is a German silent and the other … [Read more…]
Hollywood made two attempts at adapting Dashiell Hammett’s pulp masterpiece The Maltese Falcon before John Huston scripted and directed the definitive adaptation in 1941. The stunning serendipity of the casting of Huston’s film defines the characterisations in concrete for all time. Yet it is still worth looking at the earlier movies as they each offer … [Read more…]
I haven’t posted here for a while: I have my own demons to contend with and my attention scatters. The recent release of Ride the Pink Horse (1947) on Blu-ray coincided with my reading of Dorothy B. Hughes original novel. The film has the same principal characters and the story-line is similar, but when you … [Read more…]
Late night LA. A taxi-driver on the graveyard shift picks-up a fare. The passenger is edgy and well-heeled. He will pay good money for the cabbie to just drive while he waits for a call on his cell phone. It isn’t long before the edginess infects the driver. When can he dump this guy who … [Read more…]
The HBO television hit True Detective (2014) on its face is a mystery thriller with gothic overtones. The pursuit of justice for children disappeared and remembered only by loved ones and an obsessed damaged cop, is itself a dark journey through a dank swamp of troubled minds. Here is where the resonance of writer Nic … [Read more…]