This is a cool video essay from Drew Morton. This is educational as well as entertaining. Here is the link to the first part:
Here is the link to Part 2:
http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/watch-what-are-the-parts-of-a-good-film-noir-story-20150317
Drew Morton is doing 5 of these and I can’t wait to see the rest of them.
25th Hour is a neo-noir from a not so likely source, Spike Lee. This takes place in New York, so Lee isn’t a bad choice. Lee has actually been making some great neo-noir and crime films before and since this. I really liked Son of Sam, Inside Man and though it isn’t as good as the original, I thought Oldboy was pretty good.
This film revolves around Monty, played by Edward Norton. Norton is one of my favorite actors in today’s films. He usually picks pretty strong scripts and always does a great job. Monty is going to jail tomorrow and is going out with his friends for one last night of freedom. Monty is a drug dealer that gets busted and doesn’t know who ratted him out.
His girlfriend is played by Rosario Dawson, is she our femme fatale? She is another actress I’ve liked in most of the things she has done. Barry Pepper plays the sleazy stock broker that thinks he’s better than everybody else. He plays the part well. Our hero’s other friend is played by the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman who plays a shy teacher with a bit of a dark side. Other standouts in the cast are Brian Cox as Monty’s father and Anna Paquin as a high school student. We also see Isiah Whitlock Jr. as the DEA agent and swearing like only he can.
The film is based on a book by David Benioff who also wrote the screenplay, his first. He has gone on to do many more screenplay adoptions for movies and television.
We have a lot of great stuff in this film and one of the things I forgot about was this being made in New York City in 2002, the loss of the Trade Centers is an import part of the back drop.
The movie opens with Monty and one of his mafia friends picking up an abandon dog, left on the street to die. Monty takes the dog in as his own. I guess this is to show our hero is a good guy at heart and a drug dealer by necessity.We flash forward to Monty’s last day of freedom and we have the occasional flash back to explain how we got to this point. Monty needs to make a decision, go to jail for 6 years, run, or suicide, all of which, him and his friends consider on this final night.
Favorite tidbit: Edward Norton says he believed in this project so much that he used all his earnings from Red Dragon to help make it. This seems to fit Norton, do a few big films so he can do many small films he believes in. I always look forward to anything with him in it, and this might not even be in his top 10 films, but it is a good film worth seeing.
A must watch for Norton, Dawson, Hoffman or Spike Lee fans, as well as neo-noir fans. It’s a film that will make you think and stay with you awhile after you see it. What would you do in this situation?
Beware, My Lovely is based on a play, based on a short story that is written for the screen by Mel Dinelli. Dinelli was a writer on many film noir and thrillers through his career. It is directed by Harry Horner who also directed Vicki, a film noir I plan on watching and reviewing on this site at a later date.
Of course the attraction to this film is its two leads, both film noir legends. Ida Lupino not only starred in many film noir movies, she also wrote, directed and produced. Something not to common for a female in the 40’s and 50’s. Lupino is an under rated talent in the history of Hollywood and more people should know about her. Robert Ryan known to play an intimidating tough guy in film noir, war and western movies. In real life he had the make up of a hard man, at 6’4” and a World War II vet with boxing experience, you can see why he was perfect for a lot of the roles he played. Though these traits got him a lot of tough guy roles, he was a pacifist in real life.
This film opens with Ryan cleaning a house, when he opens a door and sees a dead women on the floor. He takes off on the run and ends up at Lupino’s house, hired as a handy man. Ryan’s character is a dangerous schizophrenic that imprisons Lupino in her own home.
This is a very claustrophobic film, with a cat and mouse element. Not sure if this is the first film of its kind but has to be an influence on future works like Misery, The Panic Room,and especially Funny Games. This had to influence in some ways many horror movies as well. This shot is one of the coolest shots I’ve ever seen:
This is slow-moving pot boiler that gets hotter and hotter as it goes. If you’re a fan of Lupino or Ryan you need to check it out. This is not a widely viewed film with less than 1,000 user votes on IMDb, and should be viewed more, especially by film noir, thriller and even horror fans.
This is a great article about The Gunman and some other noir like movies out or coming out soon.
Anybody going to The Gunman this weekend?
This is an interesting article on what Zeltserman considers noir. He has some good points, and some interesting reading recommendations.
http://artery.wbur.org/2015/03/16/dave-zeltserman-noir
Zeltserman is making a counterpoint to Dennis Lehane’s view of noir in this article:
I like both there takes, but Hammett and Chandler will always be noir heroes to me, no matter how good an argument Zeltserman has.
Crack-Up is a film noir from 1946 staring Pat O’Brien!
No, Not that one, this one:
Crack-Up is based on a short story from Fredric Brown and is directed by Irving Reis. Our leading lady is played by Claire Trevor. Trevor appeared in many film noir threw out her career. Character actor Wallace Ford plays our lead detective.
The story starts out with our hero breaking into a museum and looks to be drunk and out of control. He is followed in by a police officer who wants to arrest him for public drunkenness and for trying to take a swing at him. The board for the museum is having a meeting at this time and recognize our hero and ask if the police officer will let them take care of him. He isn’t drunk he is sick. Our hero comes to and tells our detective how the last thing he remembers is being on a train when it wrecked with another train. The only problem is there was no train wreck! This is where the mystery takes off. Why does he think there was a train wreck? What happened to our hero? Was he drugged? This mystery is just the beginning, as we have murder, art, money, dames, conspiracies and a twisting plot that will leave you swinging in the wind.
Another great looking film noir, this one by camera man Robert De Grasse. The story sometimes doesn’t make a lot of sense and may have some holes in it that are hard to overlook. I really thought this movie might have a mentally ill main character, given the name of the film and the way he acts at first. I guess in 1947 the public wasn’t ready for mentally ill main characters. As the movie goes along we find a perfectly good reason for the way our hero is acting. Then it is made light of with our last line, “Everybody is nuts around here, but me.”
This is not a widely watched film with a 6.6 rating on IMDb from only 657 voters. I would say this is a far rating and is worth watching for the hard-core film noir fan, but not a film I would recommend for somebody that is looking for just a few good examples of the genre.
I’m taking part in my first Blogathon! Not sure what I’m doing but look forward to it. I will be looking at Catherine Tramell for my part. Here is the list of everybody taking part and who they will be looking at:
https://hqofk.wordpress.com/2015/02/18/great-villain-blogathon-2015/
Look forward to taking part and looking at everybody else’s take on their villains. If your a blogger, grab a villain and take a crack at it.
A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes starts out with the stupidest scam I’ve every heard of. They put $10 bills in some cardboard and put it in an oven and change it to $100 bills. Our protagonist Jackson falls for this con, he gets all his money together, some not even his and has our con men try to change it for him. I thought how stupid is our main character to fall for this? Then I see how his girlfriend, our classic femme fatale, Imabelle is the driving force behind him being involved. The first part of this book I found funny but found our criminal characters not intelligent enough to be entertaining. Then I got to thinking, most criminals in real life are not that intelligent are they? I was not liking this book at first, but then it was like a snowball getting bigger and bigger as it rolled downhill and I started liking it more and more.
Jackson’s twin brother, Goldy, who most people think is a nun, is a slightly smarter criminal then Jackson and an interesting character. Our trio of bad guys/con men are not characters we get to know very well, but it’s their history that we learn and drives the story towards the end.
The characters of Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones are introduced, but play secondary characters in this book. Not sure if they play this secondary part in the rest of the Harlem Cycle, but they do appear in all the books.
Himes’ descriptions of Harlem in the 1950’s are amazing. His humor is great through out. The situations our characters get into are sometimes a bit over the top. As the book went on, I found the story only getting better and enjoyed it all the way to the last page.
Here is a cool cover of the book, under its original name, For Love of Imabelle.
Himes was a criminal himself and went to prison for armed robbery. When in prison he began to write crime stories. This gave him respect from other prisoners and the guards, as well as a new career when he got out. His story might be better than any of his books. He moved to Europe where he eventually died in 1984. This is a classic of the noir genre and I look forward to reading more in the Harlem Cycle. I read this book, because it was the group read of the month for the Pulp Fiction Group over on Goodreads, here is a link to see what other noir fans thought of the book:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2234732-march-2015—a-rage-in-harlem
A classic must read for noir fans, give it a chance and you will enjoy the ride.
Alphaville is the first sci-fi neo-noir film that I’m aware of. It is the predecessor for films like 12 Monkeys, Donnie Darko, and Predestination, but it may be closer to Matrix, Terminator and Blade Runner. Why? you ask…, the theme. The Theme of this movie and the other three are not time travel but machines taking over and running the humans. This film is very strange, beautiful, unique, challenging, and trippy. I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t understand a lot of this film. I think each person that watches it may take something different away from the experience. A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution is the tag line of this film and seems to be a far assessment.
This film is written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, a french director that started directing in 1955 and is still going strong today. He has made a few noir type films and I look forward to reviewing some of those later on this blog. This film is filmed in a classic film-noir fashion, black and white, interesting angles and lighting, an odd perspective that makes it interesting to watch. It takes place in the future in the city of Alphaville, but is just filmed in than modern-day 1965 Paris. This gives it a unique look, its futuristic for classic noir era, but probably felt old-looking to 1965 viewers.
Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution in this film, he also played this character in 13 other films. Though I have never seen any of these other movies, they look to range from traditional crime dramas in the 1950’s to musicals to a drama in 1991, also directed by Godard. This is interesting to me and would like to see a few of these to see how the character evolves over time.
Anna Karina plays our femme fatale, we never know if we can trust her, if she is just a pawn for the computer Alpha 60, or she is working with her engineer father to take down Caution. Karina was married to Godard at this time and starred in many of his films in the 1960’s.
I still don’t know what to think of this film, it will definitely stay with you and make you think. It may be a movie worth watching a couple of times to get all the subtleties. I would not recommend this film to just anybody, but if you find the science fiction neo-noir movies I listed above interesting and some of your favorites, I would check it out. Would this replace any of the above movies on my favorite 1001 movies of all time? No, but this movie gave me some prospective of where they came from.
T-Men is a B-movie film noir from 1947. It’s told in a documentary-drama style story. This movie is directed by Anthony Mann and showcased his talent. It is filmed in a low light, classic film noir style that looks amazing. Mann directed a few more film noir B movies and then moved on to westerns and eventually full on Hollywood historic epics. Even though T-Men was a fairly low-budget film it got nominated for an Academy Award for Sound. The movie was written by John C. Higgins and Virginia Kellogg both of which wrote many crime films in their career.
Dennis O’Keefe plays our main hero and undercover T-man. He definitely had a good presence is this role and did many B-movies including a few more film-noirs, he also did a lot of television work, including having his own show for a while. Wallace Ford plays The Schemer and that describes the character well. He is always looking for an angle and scheming for his next score. Ford played the most interesting character in the film, in my opinion. Alfred Ryder plays O’Keefe’s undercover partner and comes across as an average every-man that may be in over his head.
I could not find anything about the story behind this movie. It plays as a true case from the Secret Service, but I can not find if it really is. Anybody out there shed some light on this? If these bad guys were real, they where both incredibly brutal and smart.
This story is about two T-men or I.R.S. Agents sent undercover to break up a counterfeit ring. The ring seems to be based in Los Angles, but anytime anybody gets close to the root of the group it leads to a dead-end. They trace some counterfeit stamps in Detroit that are from the same group. Are hero’s are sent to Detroit to infiltrate the ring from there. This is where are adventure takes off.
This movie isn’t the most interesting story or have many twists and turns to it, but if it is a true story that would make sense. I would not put this noir in my top ten, but it is worth viewing for hardcore film noir fans.
everythingnoir 