Film noir: your favourites

Smoking vs. chewing tobacco

Is there another corner of cinema that gets explored so thoroughly as noir does? I think of noir and westerns as relatively equal parts of the classic Hollywood era, but in terms of say boutique label box sets noir has westerns beat so hard it ain't even funny.

Is the fact that it's not a "real" genre and thus you can explore further afield part of it?

― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, January 10, 2024 10:50 AM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

I wonder if another way of thinking about this is 'is there a competing aesthetic within american cinema of this period that holds a similar status as diagnosis of social and political neuroses?' I wonder if a tentative answer is screwball but that is more tightly bound to genre than noir is and relies on a kind of 'success' in a way noir doesn't. just a thought.

Screwball and noir don't overlap really in terms of chronology, screwball p much done by the time noir comes around so they're diagnosing v different societies I think.

The western would once again lend itself to this kind of lens but I guess a lot of it, "psychological westerns" and such, register as noir to some extent.

Of course in the 50's you'd also have sci-fi, not really a fair comparison in terms of the talent involved but certainly another niche that has been deeply explored.

Yeah, I think noir casts the biggest, um, shadow.

I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes, now on Criterion, is my kind of noir: pulpy Poverty Row murder mystery based on a Cornell Woolrich story, with a no-name cast (Don Castle and Elyse Knox) and where “Depressed and anxious, Tom impulsively throws his only pair of tap dancing shoes at howling cats outside his window” is a salient plot point.

spent the past week or so watching a bunch of noir movies

delights included these first-time watches

Detour (1945)
I was middling on this until Ana Savage shows up and then hot damn boys we got us a movie. Super great. (Neal is a bit of a nothing though tbh?)

In A Lonely Place (1950)
Never seen Bogart play a character so menacing & unlikeable. Top shelf. Awesome twist at the end, so bleak. Ugh! Love. Based on novel written by dorothy b hughes who I am definitely going to seek out.

Ride The Pink Horse (1947)
Um is this the most perfect noir I’ve ever seen? Maybe. So grim & taut & the dialogue is crisp & funny, supporting actors are all terrific. Goddamn what a movie.
Also this is another based on a novel written by Dorothy B Hughes, who promises to become my new favorite author based on this output.

The novel In a Lonely Place is vastly different from the film but very much worth reading, it's a little disorienting to read if you go in with any expectation that it will line up with the film, but I think both are brilliant in their own way.

Interesting. Have always wondered about that one.

There is also the song by The Smithereens, which relies heavily on the film's catchphrase:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlOVlqUcB8A

Dorothy B Hughes is great!

Read another Arthur Lyons novel in his Jacob Asch series, and seems to me there's been some missed opportunities to make a particularly feverish, sweaty, nightmarish 1970s set private eye film based on one of those.

Good reminder that I'm overdue to watch Ride the Pink Horse.

The novel of IN A LONELY PLACE is even more bleak than the film.

IALP is diffused a little for a having a protagonist/antagonist named Dix Steele.

"Hi! Dix Steele, meet I.Ron Johnson..."

xo to Omar -

iirc, Lyons was involved with a major film noir festival, so I bet he would have loved to see an Asch novel on film.

I read the plot summary for the novel of In A Lonely Place & my reaction was “100% Veg-bait”

i mean: a serial killer moonlighting as a crime writer? sounds like a fever dream <3

The novel of In a Lonely Place is SO GOOD!

:D

my local library has three of her novels on the shelf so i will def be grabbing those in the next day or two.

The novel is excellent and is definitely in that 1940s/50s sub-genre of "the bad or mad guy is the protagonist", ie Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith etc. Another great one in that category is "Beast in View" by Margaret Millar.

ooh thx for the rec

xo to Omar -

iirc, Lyons was involved with a major film noir festival, so I bet he would have loved to see an Asch novel on film.

― ian, Wednesday, May 29, 2024 7:04 PMp-

still going strong, just celebrated 25 years!

https://variety.com/2024/film/news/palm-springs-film-noir-arthur-lyons-festival-25th-anniversary-1235992647/

i keep my ear to the ground for these things normally, but events have had me distracted. gonna be on it for 2025, i hope. might make a desert trip.

After Dark, My Sweet (James Foley, 1990) is probably my favourite neo-noir and the best Jim Thompson adaptation to date, just a hair above Serie Noire (1979). It really captures the bleakness and sadness of his novel, and it has career-best performances fromJason Patric, Rachel Ward, and Bruce Dern

There’s a certain famous band who would lazily look at a calendar for a local repratory folk theater when they needed to come up with song titles and this gave us classics like In a Lonely Place, Cries and Whispers, Thieves Like Us, Age of Consent etc

I thought New Order even wrote lyrics using Scrabble tiles

"folk" should read "film" obv.