The Noir File: ‘The Big Heat’ tells a searing story

July 5, 2013 by

By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington

The Noir File is FNB’s guide to classic film noir, neo-noir and pre-noir on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which broadcasts them uncut and uninterrupted. The times are Eastern Standard and (Pacific Standard).

PICK OF THE WEEK

Gloria Grahame and Glenn Ford star in “The Big Heat.”

“The Big Heat” (1953: Fritz Lang). Tuesday, July 9: 9:15 a.m. (6:15 a.m.).

“When a barfly gets killed, it could be for any one of a dozen crummy reasons,” says Police Lt. Ted Wilks (Willis Bouchey) in “The Big Heat.” Fritz Lang’s grim but gratifying crime drama from 1953 is laced with violence that’s still a bit shocking even by today’s standards.

Lee Marvin plays Gloria Grahame’s gangster boyfriend.

Easy on the eyes Glenn Ford, the incomparable Gloria Grahame and ever-glowering Lee Marvin star in this unforgettable noir.

You can read the full FNB review here.

Friday, July 5

2:30 p.m. (11:30 a.m.): “Hangmen Also Die!” (1943, Fritz Lang). With Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan and Anna Lee. Reviewed on FNB Feb. 27, 2012.

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “The Four Hundred Blows” (1959, François Truffaut). Noir-lover Truffaut’s astonishing Cannes prize-winning feature film debut: the semi-autobiographical tale of the write-director’s boyhood life of parental neglect, explorations of Paris, street play, movie-going and petty crime, with Jean-Pierre Léaud as the young Truffaut character, Antoine Doinel. Truffaut and Doinel made four more Doinel films, and they might be making them still, but for the great French filmmaker’s untimely death in 1984. (In French, with English subtitles.)

The beginning of a month-long Friday night Truffaut retrospective, hosted by New York Magazine movie critic David Edelstein.

Saturday, July 6

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “Key Largo” (1958, John Huston). With Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Edward G. Robinson and Claire Trevor. Reviewed on FNB August 10, 2012.

Sunday, July 7

4 p.m. (1 p.m.): “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955, Nicholas Ray). With James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. Reviewed on FNB April 18, 2013.

4:30 a.m. (1:30 a.m.): “The Fugitive” (1947, John Ford). With Henry Fonda, Dolores Del Rio and Ward Bond. Reviewed on FNB July 28, 2012. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Classic Noir Reviews, Neo Noir Reviews Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

‘Sea of Love’ is a neglected neo-noir with hidden depth

July 2, 2013 by

Sea of Love/1989/Universal Pictures/113 min.

“Sea of Love” is what you might call a neurotic and erotic thriller, dealing as it does with one of the most terrifying settings imaginable: the New York City singles scene.

Deftly directed by Harold Becker, with a magnificent script by Richard Price, “Sea of Love” is a deeply satisfying neo-noir, which has been oddly neglected since its 1989 release.

One of the movie’s many strengths is a knock-out lead performance by Al Pacino as veteran NYC police detective Frank Keller. Frank is feisty, hard-working and intense, but he’s got weaknesses aplenty: he drinks too much, as does his elderly father (William Hickey), he’s sick of his job, and his ex-wife left him to hook up with his fellow cop, Gruber (Richard Jenkins).

Meanwhile, Frank’s got a crime to solve: Two men have been shot in the head in their bedrooms. Lipstick-smeared cigarette butts point to a female killer. Said killer apparently finds her victims by answering singles’ ads in a magazine.

Frank figures: why not place an ad and see if the murderess shows up for a get-to-know-you drink? So, aided by jovial chubster Det. Sherman Touhey (John Goodman), they meet a procession of available women, including one who quips, lest you forget you’re watching a neo-noir: “Fate sucks, I swear!”

The most intriguing candidate, though, is a slim, flinty blonde in a red-leather jacket named Helen Cruger (Ellen Barkin). Finding that he’s attracted to her, Frank puts her name at the bottom of the suspect list, and the two begin an uneasy love affair. We learn that Helen runs a shoe store on 57th Street and that she’s divorced with a young daughter.

The passion grows and the police work proceeds, but neither are smooth sailing especially when another man (this one married, with a family) turns up dead, with the same MO. No one likes to put pressure on a relationship in those early, heady days, but at the same time it’s best to know asap if firearms are tucked inside a gal’s baggage.

It’s a tense wait to see how Frank rates as a judge of character. But I didn’t mind the wait one bit; in fact, I didn’t want this flick to end. Even though the plot is fairly straightforward, there are many layers of subtext to the central narrative and there’s an earthy realness in every scene. For example, the opening is a police bust that has nothing to do with the imminent murders – don’t blink and you’ll see young Samuel L. Jackson.

All in a day’s work: Sherman (John Goodman) and Frank (Al Pacino) go on fake dates to catch a killer who targets victims through the singles pages.

In the DVD commentary, director Becker, a New York native, calls these slightly off-track parts “moments that build the rich texture of New York life.” To that end, Becker took particular care casting the many smaller roles, choosing “New York actors who would give authenticity and richness to the scene.”

Pacino’s wonderful in this part, his first screen role after a several-year hiatus during which he worked in theater, his first love. Though it’s not much of a stretch for him, the always-engaging Goodman makes the ideal partner for Pacino. Barkin effortlessly inhabits Helen – a tough working girl who gives as good as she gets, as Becker puts it. (Becker further describes Barkin as being beautiful with a boxer’s nose, which might not exactly endear him to her.)

Of course, Gotham City itself also serves as a major character, with brash, bold attitude and cheeky swagger, that has lent an air of mystery to many a noir. Becker says he tapped cinematographer Ronnie Taylor to help him tell a story with light and shadow.

Harold Jones’ sax-drenched score helps conjure the mood of a New York nightscape: thrilling and sad; transient and eternally alluring. (The soundtrack also includes a Tom Waits cover of “Sea of Love.” The original was a 1959 Phil Phillips song.)

Helen (Ellen Barkin) and Frank (Pacino) deal with each other’s baggage.

Another key ingredient: “Sea of Love’s” first-rate script by Richard Price, a precise and accurate rendering of police work and their lingo as well as a sympathetic take on singles seeking other singles.

And it’s funny. There are many LOL moments – for instance, when Frank and Sherman are assessing their lonely-heart suspects, Sherman asks Frank: “Think you could go for a babe with a dick?” to which Frank replies: “Depends on her personality, really.”

I suspect that “Sea of Love” served as inspiration for 1992’s “Basic Instinct,” written by Joe Eszterhas, who reportedly snagged a $3 million paycheck for the story of police detective Michael Douglas falling in love with murder suspect Sharon Stone. I’d bet $3 million that Price didn’t get nearly as much Eszterhas. “Basic Instinct” can boast high gloss, inventive cinematography and a famous shot of Stone without underwear, but “Sea of Love” is a smarter, far more human, and funnier movie.

Does anyone know what Richard Price is doing these days? In this era of online dating, maybe we need a Sea-quel.

“Sea of Love” is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Universal on Amazon.

Filed Under: Neo Noir Reviews Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Noir File: Woolrich and Chandler are two of the best

June 25, 2013 by

By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington

The Noir File is FNB’s guide to classic film noir, neo-noir and pre-noir from the schedule of Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which broadcasts them uncut and uninterrupted. The times are Eastern Standard and (Pacific Standard).

FRIDAY NOIR WRITERS SERIES: CORNELL WOOLRICH and RAYMOND CHANDLER

All this month on its Friday Night Spotlight screenings, TCM has presented a series of classic film noirs, with each Friday night devoted to movies based on or written by top-notch noir authors.

Cornell Woolrich

Tonight, the first spotlight shines on one of the darkest, loneliest, most prolific and most personally tragic of all the major noir authors: George Cornell Woolrich-Hopley, better known as Cornell Woolrich.

Woolrich, who lived a tormented life, spent much of it typing out tales of suspense, shock and murder in his mother’s New York City suite in the Hotel Marseilles. And he wrote more stories that were turned into film noirs –sometimes great ones like “Phantom Lady,” “The Bride Wore Black” and “Rear Window” – than any of his competitors. In the ’30s and ’40s, he was virtually a story machine, cranking them out fast and flawlessly, earning a penny a word at first.

These stories typically were set in the city, recognizably New York, where Woolrich lived most of his life – after a failed attempt to become an F. Scott Fitzgerald style novelist of flaming youth and a failed effort at being a Hollywood screenwriter and a Hollywood husband – something on which Woolrich’s lifelong homosexuality put the kibosh.

Most noir writers are tough, hard-drinking, streetwise guys. Dashiell Hammett was a Pinkerton detective. Raymond Chandler was a Canadian Army WWI veteran. Jim Thompson was a hard-nosed Texas news reporter. Woolrich drank, but he wasn’t tough. He was the most sensitive of the top noiristos. Many of his key protagonists are women and many of his best stories are written from a woman’s point of view.

Bill Williams and Susan Hayward star in “Deadline at Dawn.”

Woolrich was the kind of writer who could freeze your blood, creating a nerve-racking sense of impending doom. The best of his dark tales plunge the reader into dead ends and blind alleys and the shadow of the hangman: deadly traps in which his characters struggle often helplessly, sometimes escaping their harsh fates, sometimes not. But always Woolrich was a master of nightmare, the king of pulp suspense – as a lot of his colleagues and competitors believed. He wrote and sold his many stories and then, in the ’50s and ’60s, he started to dry up. He died alone, in his New York City hotel room, from a gangrene infection and leg amputation caused when he didn’t take care of a foot injury.

When I read Cornell Woolrich’s stories, it’s always night fall, even if I’m reading in the morning or afternoon. And I always hear an insistent, pounding sound in the background – the percussive clack and ring of an old manual typewriter, an Olympia maybe, as Woolrich types out another of his terrifying stories. It is night. The trap is sprung. Death is in the air. He’s almost done. And when he’s finished and the clacking stops, he’ll pour himself a drink.

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “The Leopard Man” (1943, Jacques Tourneur). With Dennis O’Keefe, Margo, Jean Brooks. Reviewed on FNB Nov. 10, 2012.

9:30 p.m. (6:30 p.m.): “Deadline at Dawn” (1946, Harold Clurman). With Susan Hayward, Paul Lukas and Bill Williams. Reviewed on FNB Oct. 13, 2012.

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler seemed to be something of a failure when he took up pulp fiction writing (a genre then little respected) in 1933. Shamelessly imitating his main model, Dashiell Hammett, Chandler wrote hard-boiled private eye stories that feature a tough, wise-cracking heavy drinking private eye, most famously Philip Marlowe. (Hammett was then the most admired of all the crime writers working in Hollywood. But by 1934 when Hammett wrote his last novel, “The Thin Man,” his career was pretty much done and Chandler‘s was just beginning.)

Chandler was an accountant for a Los Angeles oil company. Married to a woman many years his senior, Cissy Chandler, he drank himself out of his business career, and decided to try to pay his keep by writing. He took five months to write his first detective story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” which he sold to the best of the pulp crime magazines, Black Mask.

He wrote plenty more for Black Mask and Dime Detective magazines, and then he “cannibalized” some of the stories to write his novels, including “The Big Sleep” (one of his masterpieces), “Farewell, My Lovely” (another), “The Lady in the Lake,” “The High Window” and “The Long Goodbye” (another). Most of his novels were made into movies, and Chandler helped adapt as films the books of other excellent writers like James M. Cain (“Double Indemnity”) and Patricia Highsmith (“Strangers on a Train”).

Farley Granger and Robert Walker star in “Strangers on a Train.”

Chandler wrote of Los Angeles, and of crime in the sun, on the Pacific shore and under the palm trees. He wrote of a world of bars and night clubs and rich people’s big homes and of cops, blackmailers, thieves and killers –the criminal classes of which he probably knew relatively little, certainly less than Hammett. But he wrote beautifully, in a style that was creamier and full of crisp gorgeous metaphors and witty turns of phrase than Hammett’s bare-bones facts.

Chandler was born in Chicago but he was raised in England by his Irish-born mother and her family, and he has a good English writer’s impeccable sense of style and language. British writers, like novelist Iris Murdoch, tend to love him. Ian Fleming modeled James Bond after Marlowe. Of course, many of Chandler’s American colleagues, in or out of his time, loved his work too.

Today, it is common to hear Chandler called the best of all the hard-boiled noir writers, and that may be true. He is also sometimes called the best American writer, period. And that may be true too.

(The “Noir Writers” films, all of which show on Friday, June 28, were curated and will be introduced by film noir expert Eddie Muller.)

Dick Powell, a musical star, broke new ground by playing Philip Marlowe in “Murder, My Sweet,” an adaptation of “Farewell, My Lovely.”

11 p.m. (8 p.m.): “Murder, My Sweet” (1944, Edward Dmytryk). With Dick Powell, Claire Trevor and Mike Mazurki. Adapted from Raymond Chandler’s novel “Farewell, My Lovely.”

1 a.m. (10 p.m.): “The Big Sleep” (1946, Howard Hawks). With Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Elisha Cook, Jr. and Dorothy Malone.

3 a.m., (12 p.m.): “Strangers on a Train” (1951, Alfred Hitchcock). With Farley Granger and Robert Walker.

Wednesday, June 26

9 a.m. (6 a.m.): “Born to be Bad” (1950, Nicholas Ray). With Joan Fontaine, Robert Ryan and Mel Ferrer. Reviewed on FNB April 9, 2013.

3 p.m. (12 p.m.): “Armored Car Robbery” (1950, Richard Fleischer). With Charles McGraw, Adele Jergens and William Talman. Reviewed on FNB Jan. 28, 2013.

Sterling Hayden, Sam Jaffe and Marilyn Monroe lead “The Asphalt Jungle” cast. John Huston directed this seminal heist film.

6 p.m. (3 p.m.): “The Asphalt Jungle” (1950, John Huston). With Sterling Hayden, Sam Jaffe and Marilyn Monroe.

10:30 p.m. (7:30 p.m.): “Rebecca” (1940, Alfred Hitchcock). With Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, Judith Anderson and George Sanders.

1 a.m. (10 p.m.: “Notorious” (1946, Alfred Hitchcock). With Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains.

3 a.m. (12 a.m.): “Casablanca” (1942, Michael Curtiz). With Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Classic Noir Reviews, Neo Noir Reviews Tagged With: ,

The Noir File: James M. Cain rings twice

June 20, 2013 by

By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington

The Noir File is FNB’s guide to classic film noir, neo-noir and  pre-noir on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which broadcasts them uncut and uninterrupted. The times are Eastern Standard and (Pacific Standard).

FRIDAY NOIR WRITERS SERIES:  JONATHAN LATIMER and JAMES M. CAIN

This month, TCM is presenting a series of classic film noirs, with each Friday night devoted to movies based on or written by (or both) one of  six top-notch noir authors.

Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray star in “Double Indemnity.”

This week’s Friday Spotlight features two noir novelists: James M. Cain and the lesser known Jonathan Latimer, a punchy pulp crime novelist who became one of the most prolific and reliable of all noir screenwriters. Latimer’s novels were notable for both hard-boiled suspense and  sharp humor.

Noir icon Cain was a hard-boiled prose master whose unsentimental stories of perverse sexuality and murder are unsurpassed.  A one-time prospective opera singer, journalist, screenwriter and magazine editor as well as a best-selling novelist, Cain didn’t follow the self-destructive path of some of his noir colleagues, like Goodis and Woolrich. But he had one of the darkest visions, and one of the tightest, hardest-edged word-perfect styles of any of them.

Two of his most famous and influential film noirs are on the schedule tonight: Billy Wilder and co-screenwriter Raymond Chandler’s tense and brilliant 1944 adaptation of  Cain’s thriller “Double Indemnity” and Tay Garnett’s glamorous and gritty 1946 movie of another Cain scorcher, “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

John Garfield and Lana Turner in “Postman.”

Together, they make  an incredible double bill. And you can stretch it into a Cain triple feature by catching, right after “Postman,“ Anthony Mann’s 1956 “Serenade.“ Though not part of the noir writers series, it‘s  adapted from another Cain novel, directed by noir master Mann, and it boasts an operatic background.

The best American noir novelists were much admired by French critics and intellectuals, none more than Cain, who was one of the favorite writers of the great existential novelist and Nobel Prize winner, Albert Camus.

(The films will be introduced and discussed by film noir expert Eddie Muller.)

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “Nocturne” (1946, Edwin L. Marin). Cop George Raft investigates night club murder of a songwriter. Standard stuff, well-written by Latimer.

9:45 p.m. (6:45 p.m.): “They Won’t Believe Me” (1947, Irving Pichel). More Latimer: Robert Young plays a rake, guilty of adultery, but innocent of  murder. Susan Hayward, Jane Greer and Rita Johnson co-star.

11:15 p.m. (8:15 p.m.): “Double Indemnity” (1944, Billy Wilder). With Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson. Reviewed on FNB, December 30, 2010.

1:15 a.m. (10:15 p.m.): “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1946, Tay Garnett). With Lana Turner,  John Garfield and Cecil Kellaway. Reviewed on FNB October 11, 2012.

3:15 a.m. (12: 15 a.m.): “Serenade” (1956, Anthony Mann). Cain was once a singer, with aspirations to opera, and here, one of his novels became a movie vehicle for Mario Lanza – a superb natural tenor, whose own meteoric career and untimely death might make a good film noir. Unusual material for Cain and Mann, but you‘ll want to see it. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Classic Noir Reviews Tagged With: ,

The Noir File: ‘My Name Is Julia Ross’ today on TCM

June 19, 2013 by

Playing Wednesday, June 19, on TCM

1:30 p.m. EST (10:30 a.m. PST): “My Name Is Julia Ross” (1945, Joseph H. Lewis). The B-movie prodigy Joseph H. Lewis made two great low-budget noirs: “Gun Crazy,” which almost everyone knows and admires, and the lesser known British-set thriller “My Name Is Julia Ross,” which was a sleeper in its time. It’s a kind of knockoff of the 1944 Ingrid Bergman–Charles Boyer driving-you-crazy suspense drama “Gaslight,” with Nina Foch as the title heroine.

She’s a working (or not-working) woman hired for a mysterious job at a seaside Cornish mansion by a rich family (Dame May Whitty, George Macready), who then insist that her name is not Julia Ross, but that  she’s instead Macready’s young wife who’s gone insane.

Wonderful mood, images and atmosphere; it’s a crime Lewis didn’t make more films like this.

More of the Noir File is on its way!

Filed Under: Classic Noir Reviews Tagged With: , , , ,

The Noir File: Bogie, Bacall shine in quirky ‘Dark Passage’

June 13, 2013 by

By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington

The Noir File is FNB’s guide to classic film noir, neo-noir and  pre-noir from the schedule of Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which broadcasts them uncut and uninterrupted. The times are Eastern Standard and (Pacific Standard).

PICKS OF THE WEEK

“Dark Passage” was the third of four films Bogart and Bacall made together.

“Dark Passage” (1947, Delmer Daves). Friday, June 14:  8 p.m. (5 p.m.)

I recently wrote about 1947’s “Lady in the Lake,” a Raymond Chandler/Philip Marlowe tale, starring and directed by Robert Montgomery. Its chief claim to fame is the experimental subjective camera – the story is told entirely from Marlowe’s point of view.

In that review, I noted that “Dark Passage,” starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, also from 1947, uses a subjective camera as well, though just for the first half-hour of the movie. The limited use of the technique in “Dark Passage” pays off much better than the full-on treatment in “Lady.” Though “Dark Passage” wasn’t a huge hit in its day – audiences weren’t crazy about being deprived of Bogart – it’s a film noir treasure that rarely gets its due.

You can read the full FNB review here.

NOIR WRITERS SERIES: DAVID GOODIS
All this month on its Friday Night Spotlight screenings,  TCM is presenting a series of classic film noirs, with each Friday night devoted to movies based on or written by (or both) one of  six top-notch noir authors: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, David Goodis, Jonathan Latimer and Cornell Woolrich.

Tonight the spotlight is on David Goodis, one of the strangest and most poignantly self-destructive of the great film noir novelists. Goodis, a well-educated  Philadelphian, and an outsider for most of his life, came to Hollywood when his best-selling novel, “Dark Passage” was sold to Warner Brothers as a vehicle for the red hot movie team of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. “Dark Passage” allowed Bogie and Bacall to shine, and is now considered a classic.

“Dark Passage” uses a subjective camera for the first half-hour of the movie.

But Goodis, who liked to explore the lower depths,  proved too weird even for Movieland, and he soon returned East where he spent the rest of his relatively brief life (1917-1967) writing pulp novels for paperback publishers, which he occasionally sold to the movies. (See below.)

They were cheap, supposedly trashy books, churned out fast. Goodis filled them with a  keen insight into darkness, loneliness and the underworld, a flair for strong perverse characterization and a poetic command of language few writers in his genre could match. “Dark Passage” remains his most famous novel. The most personal and revealing  may be “The Burglar,” directed by his Philly friend Paul Wendkos. It’s a powerful film, but the book is better.

David Goodis was weird, even for Hollywood.

(The “Noir Writers” films, all of which show on Friday evening, June 14, were curated and will be introduced by film noir expert Eddie Muller.)

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “Dark Passage” (See Above.)

10 p.m. (7 p.m.): “Nightfall” (1956, Jacques Tourneur). With Aldo Ray, Anne Bancroft and Brian Keith. Reviewed on FNB, May 29, 2012.

11:30 p.m. (8:30 p.m.): “The Burglar” (1957, Paul Wendkos). David Goodis’  eerie, haunting novel about a gang of burglars, inlcuding platonic lovers Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield, and how they come apart. The diretcor, Paul Wendkos (“The Mephisto Waltz”) was another Philadelphia guy and a friend of Goodis’, and he did very well by the book, which is one of the great pulp paperback novels of the ’50s. The movie isn’t on that level, but, in its way, it’s a neglected, if melancholy, gem.

Charles Aznavour and Michèle Mercier in François Truffaut’s “Shoot the Piano Player.”

1:15 a.m. (10:15 p.m.): “Shoot the Piano Player” (1960, François Truffaut). The greatest movie ever made from a David Goodis novel is also the ultimate fusion of film noir with the French New Wave. Noir-lover François Truffaut (“Jules and Jim”) takes one of Goodis’ best novels, “Down There,” resets it in a Paris dive, and comes up with melancholy black-and-white movie magic. Truffaut makes the material his own. He keeps the original  tale of a concert pianist (legendary torch singer Charles Aznavour) who, heartbroken at the loss of his love, goes down there to the depths of show biz – tinkling the keys in a neighborhood bar, until, despite his best efforts, he falls in love again and falls in with criminals. Like most Goodis stories, it’s a bluesy tale touched with terror.  But Truffaut opens it up with innovative filmmaking and breezy, saucy, seemingly off-the-cuff scenes that shoot vibrant life into a very dark subject. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Classic Noir Reviews, Neo Noir Reviews Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The Noir File: Edgar Ulmer’s ‘Detour’ and Friday Night with Dashiell Hammett

June 6, 2013 by

By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington

The Noir File is FNB’s guide to classic film noir, neo-noir and pre-noir from the schedule of Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which broadcasts them uncut and uninterrupted. The times are Eastern Standard and (Pacific Standard).

PICK OF THE WEEK

Ann Savage and Tom Neal star in the ultra low-budget “Detour.”

“Detour” (1945, Edgar G. Ulmer). Tuesday, June 11: 2:45 p.m. (11:45 a.m.).

Luck so bad it borders on absurd, a story as flimsy as cardboard, a femme fatale who’s downright feral. That would be 1945’s “Detour,” a B classic that director Edgar Ulmer shot in less than a month for about $30,000.

Despite these limitations (or maybe because of them) Ulmer manages to work some visual miracles. Those foggy scenes where you can’t see the street? He didn’t have a street so he filled in with mist. Born in what is now the Czech Republic, Ulmer came to the US in 1923. He brought a high-art, painterly disposition to this tawdry little flick, as he did to most of his work.

You can read the full FNB review here.

Friday, June 7

11:15 a.m. (8:15 a.m.): “Stranger on the Third Floor” (1940, Boris Ingster). With Peter Lorre, Margaret Tallichet and Elisha Cook, Jr. Reviewed on FNB Nov. 3, 2012.

NOIR WRITERS SERIES: DASHIELL HAMMETT

Dashiell Hammett

All this month, on its Friday Night Spotlight screenings, TCM will show a series of classic film noirs – with each Friday devoted to movies based on or written by (or both) one of four top-notch noir authors – Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich.

Tonight the spotlight is on the matchless hard-boiled crime writer Dashiell Hammett – who, along with Ernest Hemingway, was probably one of the most influential American writers of the decades after World War I, and since. Terse, lean and brutally direct, empty of flourish, cliché or artifice, Hammett’s style owed a lot to his own years as a Pinkerton detective.

He decisively reveals a world of greed, murder, illicit sex, gangsterism, corruption and treachery among the rich and the crooked, telling it all with a flair and a punch that was copied endlessly but rarely recaptured. (The “Noir Writers” films were curated and will be introduced by film noir expert Eddie Muller.)

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “The Maltese Falcon” (1931, Roy Del Ruth). The first movie adaptation of Hammett’s classic dark private-eye novel, with Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade, Bebe Daniels as the femme fatale and Dudley Digges as Gutman – all chasing the priceless black bird. It pales beside John Huston’s great version of course (see below). But it’s not bad, in a raunchy pre-Code way.

9:30 p.m. (6:30 p.m.): “City Streets” (1931, Rouben Mamoulian). Hammett’s only original movie story: an underworld romance stylishly directed by Mamoulian, who was in his most innovative period. With Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sidney as lovers caught in a vicious world of big-city crime, and Paul Lukas and Guy Kibbee as off-type bad guys. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Classic Noir Reviews Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

On her birthday, thoughts from and about Marilyn

June 1, 2013 by

I put this together last year and liked it so much I decided to run it twice. ; )

For what would have been Marilyn Monroe’s 86th 87th birthday (she was born on June 1, 1926), I’ve compiled quotations from her and about her. If you have a favorite quotation from or about MM, please send it and I will add it to the list. I have credited the photographers wherever possible; copyright of all photos belongs to the photographers and/or their estates/representatives.

An early shot of Marilyn on the beach; she loved the water.

FROM MARILYN …

“The real lover is the man who can thrill you by touching your head or smiling into your eyes or just staring into space.”

“I love champagne – just give me champagne and good food, and I’m in heaven and love.”

Marilyn started out as a model.

“The body is meant to be seen, not all covered up.”

“Sex is part of nature. I go along with nature.”

“My illusions didn’t have anything to do with being a fine actress, I knew how third rate I was. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside. But, my God, how I wanted to learn, to change, to improve!”

Marilyn shot by Milton Greene

“I don’t mind living in a man’s world as long as I can be a woman in it.”

“Husbands are chiefly good as lovers when they are betraying their wives.”

“People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn’t see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts, then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one.”

Marilyn shot by Milton Greene

“All the men I know are spending the day with their wives and families, and all the stores in Los Angeles are closed. You can’t wander through looking at all the pretty clothes and pretending to buy something.” – on why she hated Sundays

“Everyone’s just laughing at me. I hate it. Big breasts, big ass, big deal. Can’t I be anything else? Gee, how long can you be sexy?”

I love this shot and the elegant hat.

“Looking back, I guess I used to play-act all the time [as a child]. For one thing, it meant I could live in a more interesting world than the one around me.”

“No one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl. All little girls should be told they’re pretty, even if they aren’t.”

Marilyn in New York, shot by Ed Feingersh

“I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”

“My problem is that I drive myself … I’m trying to become an artist, and to be true, and sometimes I feel I’m on the verge of craziness. I’m just trying to get the truest part of myself out, and it’s very hard. There are times when I think, ‘All I have to be is true.’ But sometimes it doesn’t come out so easily. I always have this secret feeling that I’m really a fake or something, a phony.”

Marilyn shot by Richard Avedon

“Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.”

ABOUT MARILYN …

“Our marriage was a good marriage … it’s seldom a man gets a bride like Marilyn. I wonder if she’s forgotten how much in love we really were.” – Jim Dougherty talking to Photoplay magazine, 1953; they were married from 1942-46.

Marilyn and Joe DiMaggio were married less than a year.

“It’s like a good double-play combination. It’s just a matter of two people meeting and something clicks.” – Joe DiMaggio; he was married to Marilyn from Jan. 14, 1954 to Oct. 27, 1954

Marilyn and Arthur Miller, her third husband

“She was a whirling light to me then, all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a lyrical and poetic sensibility that few retain past early adolescence. …

“She had no common sense, but what she did have was something holier, a long-reaching vision of which she herself was only fitfully aware: humans were all need, all wound. What she wanted most was not to be judged but to win recognition from a sentimentally cruel profession, and from men blinded to her humanity by her perfect beauty. She was part queen, part waif, sometimes on her knees before her own body and sometimes despairing because of it. …

“To have survived, she would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was. Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.” – Arthur Miller, her husband from 1956-61

Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller in front of the Queensboro Bridge, New York, 1957. Sam Shaw/ Shaw Family Archives, Ltd.

“There’s a beautiful blonde name of Marilyn Monroe who makes the most of her footage.” xxxxx– Liza Wilson of Photoplay magazine, writing about “The Asphalt Jungle,” 1950

She was, “a female spurt of wit and sensitive energy who could hang like a sloth for days in a muddy-mooded coma; a child girl, yet an actress to loose a riot by dropping her glove at a premiere; a fountain of charm and a dreary bore … she was certainly more than the silver witch of us all.” – Norman Mailer

Marilyn shot by Bert Stern, 1962

‘‘From families that owned little but their own good names, she had inherited the fierce pride of the poor. Because she was sometimes forced to give in, to sell herself partially, she was all the more fearful of being bought totally.’’ – Gloria Steinem

“She deeply wanted reassurance of her worth, yet she respected the men who scorned her, because their estimate of her was her own.” – Elia Kazan

Marilyn shot by Bert Stern, 1962

“All the sex symbols were endowed with a large portion of earthy coarseness. Marilyn had the most. … Only an inherent whore could walk like Marilyn and dress like Marilyn. … She had a trick of making all men feel she could be in love with them and I think she could be, a sort of saving each one for a rainy day, for when things would get tough again in her life and she would need help. … I saw the hope and the disappointments. The longing to give what the people wanted and, at the same time, to become a complete person herself. She was also selfish, rude, thoughtless, completely self-centered. She kept people waiting for hours.” – Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham

Marilyn shot by Bert Stern, 1962

“The luminosity of that face! There has never been a woman with such voltage on the screen, with the exception of Garbo. … She was an absolute genius as a comic actress, with an extraordinary sense for comic dialogue. … Nobody else is in that orbit; everyone else is earthbound by comparison.” – Billy Wilder

“If she’d been dumber, she’d have been happier.” – Shelley Winters

“Everything Marilyn does is different from any other woman, strange and exciting, from the way she talks to the way she uses that magnificent torso.” – Clark Gable, her co-star of 1961’s “The Misfits,” about which he said: “This is the best picture I have made and it’s the only time I’ve been able to act.

Marilyn shot by Lawrence Schiller on the set of “Something’s Got to Give,” 1962

“Her mixture of wide-eyed wonder and cuddly drugged sexiness seemed to get to just about every male; she turned on even homosexual men. And women couldn’t take her seriously enough to be indignant; she was funny and impulsive in a way that made people feel protective. She was a little knocked out; her face looked as if, when nobody was paying attention to her, it would go utterly slack – as if she died between wolf calls.” – Pauline Kael

“What I particularly liked about Marilyn was that she didn’t act like a movie star. She was down to earth. Although she was 28, she looked and acted like a teenager. … I was most impressed that Marilyn was always polite and friendly to everyone on the set. She was no phony or snob. … Marilyn always seemed determined to talk to me about her childhood. We would be discussing a subject of current interest to her and she would somehow bring up an incident from her bygone days.” – Photographer George Barris

Marilyn shot by George Barris, 1962

“I liked her. She was a good kid. But when you looked into her eyes, there was nothing there. No warmth. No life. It was all illusion. She looked great on film, yeah. But in person … she was a ghost.” – Dean Martin, her co-star in 1962’s (unfinished) “Something’s Got to Give”

“Nobody could be as miserable as she was in such a loving, good-natured way. No matter how sad she may have been, she was never mean, never lashed out at me. Instead she just wanted to hug me and have me hug her and tell her it was all going to work out. That it didn’t, broke my heart.” – George Jacobs, who was Frank Sinatra’s valet

“Marilyn Monroe was a legend. In her lifetime she created a myth of what a poor girl from a deprived background could attain. For the entire world she became a symbol of the eternal feminine.” – Lee Strasberg in his eulogy

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The Noir File: ‘Mask of Dimitrios’ is an underseen ’40s gem

May 31, 2013 by

By Mike Wilmington and Film Noir Blonde

The Noir File is FNB’s guide to classic film noir, neo-noir and pre-noir from the schedule of Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which broadcasts them uncut and uninterrupted. The times are Eastern Standard and (Pacific Standard).

PICK OF THE WEEK

“The Mask of Dimitrios” (1944, Jean Negulesco). Tuesday, June 4, 1:15 a.m. (11:15 p.m.)

Tracking down an elusive international criminal named Dimitrios Makropoulos (Zachary Scott) becomes the obsession of a Dutch writer named Cornelius Weyden – a prime Peter Lorre role and the mild-mannered hero of the neglected but first-rate “The Mask of Dimitrios.”

Weyden learns of Dimitrios and his sordid career when a corpse is washed up near Istanbul and a talkative Turkish police colonel (Kurt Katch) tells colorful stories of the great swindler’s crimes. The inquisitive little scribe thinks he can use this material for a book.

When Weyden meets one of Dimitrios’ victims in the (ample) flesh – the genial Mr. Peters, played by Lorre’s usual partner-in-crime Sydney Greenstreet – the two join forces to try to unearth the villain’s trail through war-threatened Europe.

“The Mask of Dimitrios” was one of nine movies Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet appeared in together.

They piece together Dimitrios’ dark history as they cross paths with his other partners and/or victims, including blonde intriguer Faye Emerson, Victor Francen, Steven Geray, Eduardo Ciannelli and the irrepressible Florence Bates. As Lorre and Greenstreet close in on their prey, dark questions loom. Is Dimitrios really still alive? And who are his next victims?

If you’ve never seen “Dimitrios” (from the novel known as “A Coffin for Dimitrios” in the U.S.), you’re in for a surprise and a treat. Faithfully adapted from master spy novelist Eric Ambler’s classic thriller by pulp fictionist/screenwriter Frank Gruber, shot in high noir style by cinematographer Arthur Edeson (“The Maltese Falcon,” “Casablanca”) and artfully directed by Romanian émigré and Warner Brothers’ “melodrama king” Jean Negulesco (in what is probably his best film), “Dimitrios” is an underseen gem of ’40s noir. It’s what used to be called a corker.

(Another Ambler adaptation with Lorre and Greenstreet, “Background to Danger,” immediately follows “The Mask of Dimitrios.” See below.) [Read more…]

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Noirish ‘Some Like It Hot’ at Hollywood Forever Cemetery

May 30, 2013 by

Marilyn Monroe as Sugar Kane in “Some Like It Hot.”

To celebrate Marilyn Monroe’s birthday, on Saturday, June 1, Cinespia.org will present “Some Like It Hot” (1959, Billy Wilder) at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Though the film is considered one of Tinseltown’s all-time best comedies, Marilyn reportedly objected to the fact that her character, Sugar Kane, actually believed her fellow musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon dressed in drag) were women. No girl is that dumb, she said. Nevertheless, the movie was a hit and her performance is unforgettable. You can read Mike Wilmington’s review here.

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