Category: film noir
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The Man From Nowhere: Who is Larry Cravat and why do so many people want to do him harm?
John Hodiak, Nancy Guild, “Somewhere in the Night” (1946). Battle Fatigue on the Homefront: Two views of life after the big one By Paul Parcellin “Somewhere in the Night” (1946) George Taylor (John Hodiak) awakens in a military hospital, and to his horror discovers that his memory has been wiped clean by a serious wound…
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The Demimonde After Dark: Two Visions of Paris, and the Gangsters Who Inhabit Each are Worlds Apart
Roger Duchesne, “Bob le flambeur” (1956). Contains Spoilers By Paul Parcellin Two films about the Parisian underworld are as different as fire and water. One is awash in old world charm, a nostalgia-tinged tale of the gangsters and gamblers of Montmartre. The other takes place in a Paris at odds with the city’s romanticized past.…
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Gumshoe Confidential: Would-Be White Knights, Reluctant Heroes and Rotten Apples, Otherwise Known as Private Detectives, Walked the Mean Streets of a Noir Hellscape
Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, “The Maltese Falcon” (1941). By Paul Parcellin Private eyes, those lone rangers who traverse bleak urban landscapes, are romanticized in books, radio dramas and movies as upholders of right and wrong. They do the dirty work that the cops can’t or won’t touch. Often hired by those…
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An American Story: Murder In the Living Room
Left: Gloria Swanson, William Holden, “Sunset Blvd. (1950)Center: Gene Nelson, Phyllis Kirk, Sterling Hayden, “Crime Wave” (1953)Right: David Janssen, “The Fugitive” (1963). By Paul Parcellin The first time I saw a film noir I didn’t know what I was watching. Sure, I could tell that it was a crime film, a detective story, a mystery,…
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Two Couples Who Murder: “Double Indemnity” Faces Off Against “Body Heat” — And It’s Not Even Close
Left, Kathleen Turner, William Hurt, “Body Heat” (1981). Right, Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, “Double Indemnity” (1944). Warning: Contains Spoilers By Paul Parcellin After I moved to L.A. in 2008, I got together with a Meetup group that was going to see a screening of “Double Indemnity” (1944) at the ArcLight Theater in Hollywood. I was…
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In the trenches: deep in the heart of Hollywood the rough and tumble world of bargain basement noir thrived for a while
Joan Blair, John Hubbard, “Whispering Footsteps” (1943). Script’s running too long? Grab a handful of pages, rip them out, shoot the sucker! I’m on a Poverty Row tear these days. As you probably know, many of the films made there aren’t quite as polished as the gems turned out by Paramount, Warner Brothers or 20th Century…
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Alton and Mann: A Partnership in Post-War Noir
Dennis O’Keefe, Marsha Hunt, Claire Trevor, “Raw Deal” (1948). They made only a handful of films together, but John Alton and Anthony Mann’s work threw a new light on film noir, police procedural dramas and documentary filmmaking Silhouettes, fog, great pools of inky blackness — that’s a king-sized portion of the visual drama in store…
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Three Films that Set a Noir Mood: How John Alton Helped Define the Light and Shadows of Film Noir
Lynn Bari, Cathy O’Donnell, “The Spiritualist” (1948). ‘It’s not what you light, it’s what you don’t light.’ — John Alton As legend has it, in the summer of 1923…
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Poverty Row Noir II: Scheming Communists Walk Among Us … and So Does a Future Sitcom Dad
Hugh Beaumont, Frances Rafferty, “Money Madness” (1948). Ward Cleaver as a psychotic killer? Say it ain’t so! Like many up and coming Hollywood actors, Hugh Beaumont appeared in noir B-pictures before he became better known as an all-American TV dad, and he played some pretty despicable characters, too. But more about that later. From the…
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It Came from Poverty Row: Hollywood’s B-Movie Factories Mined Noir Gold
Ann Savage, Tom Neal, “Detour” (1945). Hitchhiking on the road to hell. So many westerns were filmed at the small, independently owned studios near the intersection of Sunset Blvd. and Gower St. in Hollywood that people began calling it Gower Gulch. From the 1930s to the ’50s it was the epicenter of low-rent film production and the gaggle of…