Tag: crime film
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‘Dementia’: A Feverish, Tortured Night on Skid Row
“Dementia” (1955) has many of film noir’s hallmarks: a dingy hotel room with a well-worn electric sign outside that nervously flashes off and on, shady characters prowling skid row’s streets and a posh-looking fat man who glides around town in the back seat of his limo. And of course tobacco smoke, deep, dark shadows and…
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One Step Beyond: Film Noir and the Supernatural
We can all daydream of possessing special powers, because who wouldn’t want greater insight into their life and extraordinary abilities to manipulate the hands of fate? But if there’s one thing that speculative fiction teaches us is that supernatural powers — mind reading, communicating with the dead and other such phenomena — all come with…
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Jazz Mania: Film Noir, Bebop and the Devil’s Music
You might be surprised to learn that jazz didn’t show up in film noir right away even though by the 1940s swing was part of the popular music landscape and bebop was well on its way to becoming a solid American art form. But you wouldn’t know it by watching “The Maltese Falcon” and other…
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‘Highway 301’: There’s a Killer on the Road
It’s a wonder that anyone gets through the first few minutes of “Highway 301,” a noir based on the true-life crime wave perpetrated by an outfit called the Tri-State Gang. The film is a taut little thriller that starts off with wooden speeches by three, count ‘em, three state governors, the honorable gentlemen of North…
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‘Eddie Coyle’ Introduced Us to ‘Boston Noir’
No one was quite ready for the grittiness of “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” when it arrived in theaters in 1973. It didn’t look like most films that Hollywood turned out — it had a certain rawness in each shot that probably wouldn’t pass muster in Tinsel Town, and there’s not a single hint of…