Taste of Cinema is at it again! This time with the 10 best films involving the great noir author Raymond Chandler. Agree or Disagree with the choices or the placing if you like, but read the full article for some great knowledge about the author and these movies you may not have known. Well worth your time to check it out if you are a fan of noir or Chandler. Here is the link to the full article:
Broken Horses is an American film from Indian writer and director Vidhu Vinod Chopra. This has gotten some amazing accolades from other film makers like Alfonso Cuaron and James Cameron. This film has not got a very good reception from audiences or some critics. So what did I think of this film?
This film stars Anton Yelchin as Jakey and Chris Marquette as Buddy. They are brothers and Buddy is mentally challenged. This film starts out with Buddy as a young boy meeting his father played by Thomas Jane at the shooting range. They have a little father-son talk and out of nowhere the father is shot and killed. We then see a young Jakey playing his violin at a recital. When Buddy goes back to work after his father’s funeral, he meets crime boss Julius Hench played by Vincent D’Onofrio. Hench tells Buddy who killed his father and where he lives, buddy goes to the house with no fear and kills the man. The film flashes forward 8 years when Jakey is getting married soon to Vittoria played by María Valverde. He goes back to his hometown to visit his brother and have him be his best man at the wedding. Buddy has been working for Hench for the last 8 years and Jakey sees he is different person then he remembers. Will Buddy be able to quite his job with Hench and go live with his brother? Will Jakey be able to accept his brother the way he is now? Will Hench let either of the brothers live?
This film also has Sean Patrick Flanery in a small but disturbing role worth mentioning. This film is beautifully filmed with a classic film noir feel in a number of scenes. The story is a simple but very dark plot. The brother dynamic is interesting, with the blood thicker then water theory tested. This movie adds up to a very good film. It is not the best low-budget neo noir I have seen this year, but it is worth watching. I think fans of noir will enjoy this film even if the general movie public doesn’t.
Favorite Tidbit: This is actually a remake of a Bollywood film called Parinda from 1989. That film was written and directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra as well. Parinda was one of the first neo noir Bollywood films to make a profit, ushering in a wave of Bollywood noir film. Here is another film I will be adding to my never-ending “must see list.”
This is a documentary from 2006 about classic film noir. This is very interesting with modern noir legends like Frank Miller, Christopher Nolan, and James Ellroy giving you their take on film noir. We also get some insight from the Czar of Noir, Eddie Muller and other experts of film noir. It is a short film and in my opinion lacking a little. Sure it is entertaining and informative, but it over looks a lot! The stuff they cover, like a look at Robert Mitchum and Elisha Cook Jr. as some of the great actors of film noir is very good. They also cover Raymond Chandler slightly and discuss Philip Marlowe and how he fit into noir and film noir, which is great, but they only really cover Murder, My Sweet in this part of the film. Just to show how lacking this documentary is, neither The Big Sleep or Humphrey Bogart is mentioned in either of these sections of the film! Even after they show some footage of Cook Jr, in The Maltese Falcon with Bogart they don’t really cover Bogie. They of course have a section of the film about the femme fatale’s role in film noir, and talks about a few great actresses but doesn’t even mention Rita Hayward, Ava Gardner, or Lauren Bacall! I think this film must have run into movie rights issues. I say this because they cover a lot of RKO stuff and even though this film was distributed by Warner Home Video, it doesn’t even cover most of the Warner Bros. classics. Though Maltese Falcon, The Letter and White Heat clips show up, none are covered in-depth. I also noticed Fox and Paramount films are not covered at all.
I would say this film is still worth checking out for what it does cover and is nice to see what some of today’s noir greats think about the era. It is also a good primer for people just starting to learn about the classic film noir era. I watched this film on DVD which came with a few extras, but you can watch the film here for free.
The Last Run is a neo noir film from 1971. It stars George C. Scott a year after his Academy Award Winning performance in Patton. When asked why he made this movie he said “I’m doing it because it reminds me of old Bogart pictures.” This film originally started out being directed by the man who made Bogart famous, John Huston. After constant fighting with Scott, Huston quite the film. Richard Fleischer took over as director and the films original leading lady was fired and Trish Van Devere replaced her. Interestingly Scott’s wife at the time Colleen Dewhurst had a small role in this film. Her and Scott’s marriage was pretty much over by this time. Scott would go on to marry his new co-star Devere a year later.
Scott plays a retired mob driver, who takes a job after his wife has left him. We are left in the dark on what this job is, but we know he needs to drive across the border into France. Soon there is a daring escape when a wrecked truck explodes and a prisoner runs to Scott’s 1957 BMW convertible. This escaped prisoner is played by Tony Musante. Musante demands a detour from their intended path to pick up his girlfriend played by Devere. When Scott delivers the couple to his employers, Musante tips Scott off that something is wrong. Scott rescues the couple from sure death and our trio’s adventure begins. We learn a little more about our trio’s history and a love triangle of sorts begins. Will our three make a clean escape? Who will our girl choice?
This film bombed at the box office and was not well received at the time by critics. Not sure why, maybe critics and audiences were looking for something different from the current Academy Award winner. I enjoyed this film for what it is, a simple neo noir with some good performances, an interesting, mysterious plot, and some great car chases. If you are a fan of Scott or other neo noir film of the early 1970’s I think you will enjoy this film.
Charlie Huston is an author I’ve really enjoyed reading in the past. The Hank Thompson trilogy is one of my favorite modern noir stories I have read. I also read the first Joe Pitt book, Already Dead about a hardboiled private investigator that happens to be a vampire. This is also very good, and I enjoyed the mixing of urban fantasy with classic noir. I found The Shotgun Rule on sale for my Nook and had to snag it up.
This book is a noir coming of age tale revolving around four friends. Two are brothers, the younger one is a genius and the older one is the leader of the gang. We also have a Latino with a Mohawk who loves punk rock music and a boy who has lost his mother and has a strained relationship with his father. When the youngest brother gets his bike stolen, the gang knows it is the family of criminals down the street. When a fight ensues and the bike thieves go to jail our gang explores the house to find a new meth lab. As our story progresses we find a lot of interesting characters, including a drug dealing aunt, a father with a mysterious criminal past, a friend that has never truly grown up and a fat drug dealer who likes to use a scooter rather than walk.
This is another very good book from Huston with some interesting dialog and a twisting violent story line. I enjoyed the mixing of coming of age tale with a gritty crime saga. If you have never read Huston before I would start with Caught Stealing, and if you are already a fan of Huston and have not read this book, I think it is worth your time.
Here is an article about the film noir career of Gloria Grahame and bit of history of her personal life, which sounds like a noir tale itself! This is written by Graham Fuller over at The Village Voice and is well worth reading. Here is the link:
They Live by Night is a classic film noir based on Edward Anderson book Thieves Like Us.
This is also director Nicholas Ray’s first film, a pretty good start to an amazing career. This film stars Cathy O’Donnell and Farley Granger as a young couple in love. They would go on to team up again in Anthony Mann’s Side Street a few years later. I reviewed that film here:
https://everythingnoir.com/2015/06/10/review-side-street/
This film starts out with a quick scene before the credits role of our happy couple. We than flashback to three men in the process of a prison escape. We see Granger and his two cohorts played by Howard Da Silva and Jay C. Flippen. There is an interesting scene here, where Ray shot from a helicopter for a bird’s eye view of our trio fleeing. This is one of the first action scenes ever shot from a helicopter(pretty amazing idea for a first time director). As our hero has a bum foot or ankle, he hangs by a billboard as his fellow escapees move on to their destination and will send help back for him. When a truck pulls up we meet Cathy O’Donnell as the farmer’s daughter there to take him to meet his friends. We can see the attraction right away between our two leads as she drives him to her father’s farm. As the trio regroup they decide the best move is to rob a bank to raise some money to make their getaway. Will they succeeded? Will our happy couple live happily ever after?
I’m not sure if Edward Anderson wrote this story as a fictional tale of Bonnie and Clyde or not, but it at least had to be a huge influence. This is a twisted love story in more than a few ways. This film is a must see for film noir fans, though I would not rank it among my favorites and maybe my expectations were to high going in. This is a good film and when you know it is Ray’s first film, I do appreciate it. I hope to read the book on which this film is based someday and revisit this film again.
Favorite Tidbit: Another film was made in 1974 based on this novel as well. It goes by the novel’s title Thieves Like Us and stars Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall. I have not seen this film but may have to watch both of these films back to back for an interesting double feature.
https://litreactor.com/columns/what-works-what-doesnt-chinatown
New World is a neo noir from South Korea written and directed by Park Hoon Jeong. Park Hoon Jeong is a writer I have enjoyed before, if you have not seen I Saw The Devil, go do it right now! I will be re-watching that film and posting about it here soon.
This film is based around Jung-Jae Lee’s character as an undercover police officer in the Korean mob. The current mob boss is killed in a shady car accident and a power struggle in the mob begins. The top two candidates to lead the mob are Jeong-min Hwang and Seong-Woong Park. This starts a gang war between the two factions. Our hero’s boss is played by Min-sik Choi who is the sector chief in charge of bringing down this mafia. We soon find Choi will do anything to gain his own power in this struggle and is maybe a little dirty. This story goes back and forth as we find new alliances and just as you think you know somebody, they will change alliances and who you are rooting for.
The film puts into question where your loyalties should lie. Friendship, family or should you just do your job? Does good and evil come in to the equation? What is good and what is evil in this dark world of crime and violence? This film is an epic gangster film from Korea in the vein of The Godfather or Goodfellas. No, it isn’t in the same class as those two classics, but if you like gangster films, especially those from Asia, you will love this film.
Desperate is a B-film from 1947. Anthony Mann Directs and helps with the original story. Of course Mann went on to A films soon after this and created some classics in the noir genre as well as some other Hollywood classics. I recently reviewed Two O’Clock Courage from Mann which he made 2 years before Desperate and you can see his growth between those two films is petty huge. Though I liked Two O’Clock Courage, Desperate is darker, the story is better and the cinematography is way ahead. There are a couple of scenes in this film that are noir cinematography at its best. The first scene where Burr and his gang is torturing our hero is amazing. The last scene with the chase/gun fight on the stairwell is worth watching the whole film just to for this one.
Our story is a basic noir tale, but it is always worth seeing different takes on it all these years later. Our hero is played by Steve Brodie who has his own truck and is recently married to Audrey Long. He gets a call from a stranger for a last-minute trucking job. He had plans with his wife but can’t pass up the $50 this job will pay.
What he doesn’t know is this is a job where he will be hauling stolen goods for Raymond Burr and his gang of thieves. When he figures out he is on a robbery, he flashes his lights at a police officer. The officer is shot and soon dies by the hand of Burr’s little brother. Our hero pulls the truck away and Burr’s brother falls off the loading dock and is knocked out. Burr’s little brother is caught and charged with murder. Burr is soon on a rampage to free his little brother and frame our hero for the whole job, including the murder of the police officer. Our hero’s sole objective now is to get his wife to safety before Burr can find them. Will he succeed? Will he be able to save himself too? Will Burr and his gang get revenge?
This is a very good B-movie noir and well worth checking out. Fans of Mann will like this film and will want to seet his early work. As per usual Raymond Burr steals the show, this being only his 4th film and his first film noir. This maybe the reason Burr was cast for years to come as the ultimate heavy in film noir. His performance is worth watching this film for as well.
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