Some good ones on that list. Thanks for sharing!
Out of the Past is rentable, and streaming for free if you have TCM, apparently.
I’d recommend that very, very much.
“You’ll be sniffing that perfume Arizona hands out free to murderers.”
Detour (1945) directed by European émigré Edgar G. Ulmer would be my top choice. It’s not as flashy as its contemporaries, owing to being a lean 68 minute poverty row film, an adjacent production system known for making unassuming cheapies, but its the most fatalistic film I’ve ever seen. The main character is a washed-up concert pianist relegated to playing in dive bars who tries to make his way to Hollywood before his life spirals into chaos following a series of unlikely “accidents.” The whole film is told in flashback from a subjective point of view as the narrator tries to convince the audience of his innocence and its strength is there’s enough ambiguity to support to judge him guilty, his defense a desperate excuse from someone in denial over their actions, or think the poor guy’s being unfairly persecuted and judged guilty, a nightmare where there’s no hope of convincing people otherwise. His recollections are suspect and unreliable.
The director’s a largely unsung figure, chronicled extensively in Peter Bogdanovich’s Who the Devil Made It, had an illustrious background: studied architecture in Vienna, apprenticed for William Wyler and F.W. Murnau, and made the top-grossing film for Universal in 1934 with The Black Cat. But something derailed his career and soon he was making features for the Yiddish market in America usually with shooting schedules of less than a week. Detour contains elements of an expressionist tendency, with sets being assembled out of just shadows, light and fog that are suitably moody and abstract.
It was quickly forgotten upon release until the rights lapsed and it wound up in the public domain which led to a critical revaluation. Its now preserved in the Library of Congress National Film Registry, and was a huge influence on Lynch and the Coens. My only request is if you do seek it out, please opt for the Criterion release. The new transfer is like another world compared to the crappy public domain copies.
The starting point for a crash course in noir, and arguably the high point for noir overall, is 1944’s Double Indemnity. (Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler adapting James M. Cain, ahh bliss.)
My personal fav is the original 1949 D.O.A., though honestly I’d watch Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, and Detour before it: it’s pretty rough around the edges. But it shows what can be done with a tiny budget, some great atmosphere, and a totally over the top premise.
Those are great choices. I’d also look at the Orson Welles works. The Third Man and Touch of Evil really stand out.
For more modern stuff, the early Coen Brothers work: Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo.
And of course Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat is like a distillation of every noir film ever made captured in 2 hours.
Welles steals every scene in the Third Man and Touch of Evil is a sleazy, late noir classic. I also want to shout out The Lady From Shanghai, despite it being very uneven, with Hayworth sporting a ridiculous wig and Welles delivering the worst Irish accent impression I’ve heard, but it offers some of the most memorable images ever committed to film. The legendary hall of mirrors sequence deserves its status. The editing is like magic.
Did you actually watch the whole thing?!?
After reading your write-up long ago, the girlfriend and I finally got around to trying this.
We watched all of Episode 1, and while it was indeed quite slow-moving, we both felt there was a lot to enjoy about it, so we pushed on to Episode 2.
We tried to watch Episode 2 on three different occasions, and at one point made it past the halfway mark, but that was it. We were done.
And we were sad about it, as the first episode was quite promising and well-done, and we hoped for more along those lines. But if you told me it gets better after Ep 2, I’d probably give it another shot.
I made it through the whole thing. It’s a slog. The pace briefly picks up in the middle for a few episodes, which tricked me into thinking it was going to build to a satisfying or at least subversive denouement but the final episode was disappointingly conventional. It genuinely feels like they ran out of money. I’m glad something like this exists because it demonstrates how unusual auteur TV can be, but I will never revisit it, haha.
The library had a display on noir films, and having recently picked up an external DVD player (and thus gained the ability to watch DVDs), I picked up Double Indemnity (1944). And I gotta say, this was great. I guess this must be the movie that all the noir tropes derive from, because it starts immediately with quick (dare I say snappy) dialog and nonstop similes and doesn’t let up for the entire runtime. One bit I found interesting is that there are actually zero law enforcement or PI characters–it’s all about insurance. (That does give the movie it’s frankly fantastic title, made even better because it’s (apparently) taken from the otherwise insufferably tedious insurance policy jargon.)
The movie had a time-to-dame of about five minutes. (Compare this with my previous post in the thread–Nightmare Alley didn’t get to it until 2/3 of the way through, iirc, which made it feel more like a callback than part of the lexicon.)
I also picked up L.A. Confidential, which I think I’ve actually seen before, but it long enough ago that I hardly remember it. Up next!
Double Indemnity is a very solid choice. One of my favorites.
We also recently watched Gun Crazy and really enjoyed it. I’d seen it before, but had forgotten how good it is. I believe it also has the first-ever moving in-car shots ever done. And those long, stylish tracking shots were revolutionary back in that time. It’s worth seeing just for that, but the rest of it is just as good. A prime example of Film Noir.
My wife and I have been film noir fans for a long time. We’re at a point where we are looking for any we’ve not seen (not many.)
If you’re just starting, I highly recommend Out of the Past.
Here is a review of the film, from the New York Times in 1947:
Out of the Past is one of the classics of noir.
I reckon a good entry point is to watch Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and then every film used in that (which includes Out of the Past).
This is a nice piece on writing noir that lays out the elements of a noir story.
That’s like calling Young Frankenstein a good entry point to classic Universal horror.
Don’t get me wrong - YF is fantastic. But you get so much more out of it if you are already familiar with the tropes.
Oh, sure, but it gives you a great list of films to watch and a little dopamine hit of recognition when the sample comes up.
$0.02 on noir types and philosophies.
IMO there are two principal types of noir. There’s American existentialist noir with the white knight detective who makes his or her own morality (true for example of Chandler, Hammett, and Macdonald’s books), and there’s European noir which is typically closer to nihilism than existentialism in that it often has no moral compass and may only feature criminals. American mafia or gangster movies are something like this, except there’s usually an implicit moral axis to them that is typically lacking in the European form. American noir is typically more tropey and conventional in form, too.
For a fun mix of the two types, I recommend Diva from Jean-Jacques Beineix. Great cinematography on top of a fun story and fine singing from Wilhelmenia Fernandez. I may well have recommended it higher in the thread years ago…
I think the yakuza form of the mafia noir movie can be found most typically from Takashi Miike.
The most recent book I’ve read that characterizes European or nihilist noir is Base Notes by Lara Elena Donnelly.
Having just watched Double Indemnity, it seems to fit more in your “European” category–both leads are bad people, and it’s a supporting character who cracks the case. Well, he doesn’t figure it out as much as keep working at it until the leads fall out with each other. It’s very nihilist, but definitely American.
A lot of the best-known classic Hollywood noir is the nihilistic variety IMO. Films like Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, This Gun for Hire, The Postman Always Rings Twice. Even The Maltese Falcon is unambiguously amoral — you’re meant to understand that Spade hated his partner Archer, was sleeping with Archer’s wife, dumped her and then took advantage of Brigid O’Shaughnessy even though he knew the score.
The Philip Marlowe stuff is of a different sort IMO. Marlowe is clearly on the side of the angels, even if almost nobody else in the story is. He’s generally rebuffing the sexual advances of the femmes fatales, not taking advantage of them.
I got lost in the full set of Marlowe novels years ago. I read Hammet, liked it, but loved Chandler. So many of his lines stuck with me:
"You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was…”
“It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.”
“I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.”
“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
“She had eyes like strange sins.”
The great thing is they don’t sound forced, they just come across as natural and the way he thinks and talks.
There was a publisher who had a special edition of all of the Marlowe novels (the ones written by Chandler) and I would read during my lunch break. I was sad when I finished the last one. I’ve reread them over the years, and they still hold up.