Film noir: your favourites

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.

Veg, how did you watch Ride the Pink Horse? The only option I've found (short of buying a used copy, which I may just have to do) would be to activate an AppleTV+ trial...

I watched a cool one called Roadblock (1951) a few weeks back. The plot is a little shaky, but the dialogue is terrific; and there's real chemistry btw the leads. It takes an interesting turn from the usual "good guy led astray by femme fatale" setup; and culminates in a terrific chase in the L.A. riverbed (long before the T-Birds and Pink Ladies got there, haha).

Internet Archive is the best place - they have a ton of noir not streaming anywhere else.

https://archive.org/details/ride-the-pink-horse-1947

I just cast it off my phone onto tv via bluetooth.

Pink horse is on TCM every now and again. If u have a dvr and ur not recording noir alley (sats at 1159PM) ur missing out

Thanx to both. I do try to keep my eye on TCM generally (that’s how I caught Roadblock).

the thing about noir alley is eddie will tell you upfront if the movie is shit or not, which absolutely enhances the experience

eddie is a good source

He is marvelous in person if you get the chance to catch him at a Noir City festival.

when i was sick recently i worked my way through his list of his favorite 25 noir movies, that was how i came across In A Lonely Place

Just looked and In A Lonely Place is in one of the noir anthologies on my shelf. It's called Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s. Might have to pull it out.

From the 1940s, here are Vera Caspary’s famous career girl mystery Laura; Helen Eustis’s intricate campus thriller The Horizontal Man; Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place, the terrifyingly intimate portrait of a serial killer; and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall, in which a wife in wartime is forced to take extreme measures when her family is threatened.

The 1950s volume includes Charlotte Armstrong’s Mischief, the nightmarish drama of a child entrusted to a psychotic babysitter; Patricia Highsmith’s brilliant The Blunderer, which tracks the perverse parallel lives of two men driven toward murder; Margaret Millar’s Beast in View, a relentless study in madness; and Dolores Hitchens’s Fools’ Gold, a hard-edged tale of robbery and redemption.

Mischief is AMAZING. It was apparently adapted into a movie called Don't Bother To Knock which I've never seen.

ooh that sounds like a great collection