Amazing to go to YouTube and see the number of classic Film Noirs available for free. Public domain casualities. And the prevailing mentality of the collective societal conscious being free= the Norm. Still, in researching this post I found full movie links on many classics… I was about to list ten but discovered a link from Open Culture that already grouped 60 of them. 60! On that list, check out Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss, Fritz Lang’s Scarlett Street, and of course, D.O.A., with one of the great hooks in movie history, opening scene…
Man strides into the police Homicide Division.
“I want to report a murder”.
Cops looks at him. “Where was this murder committed?”
“San Fransisco. Last night.”
“Who was murdered?”
“I was.”
While no one would ever mistake me for Freddy Nietzsche, if I have a philosophy on life, it’s been profoundly influenced by film noir. Growing up, I was too lazy to learn about shamanism from Carlos Castanada, or to have much use of Zeno of Citium’s School of Stoicism. I worked so many bad jobs for so long, winding up in a casino craps pit–it is any wonder I gravitated to film noir? Here are a few favs…
- NIGHTMARE ALLEY
The blackest of noir. The Great Stanton. The Geek. “You know what a geek is, don’t you? Think you can handle it?” “Mister, I was born for it.”
Philosophical takeaway: No matter how life screws us, things can always get worse.
- SUNSET BOULEVARD
Little known fact: Gloria Swanson got her start at the Essanay Studios here in Chicago circa 1915. She moved on to Keystone and Cecille B. Demille. Sunset Boulevard is the movie most people know her for, which is ironic because when you look at her IMDB profile– if I’m adding correctly– we see only about 20 films from her after the “talkies” came into being around 1930. Thus, the dream casting for Norma Desmond, psycho silent film star whom poor William Holden stumbles upon. Holden as hack screenwriter Joe Gillis is iconic.
Philosophical takeaway: A taste of the good life can be your undoing.
- ASPHALT JUNGLE
John Huston wrote and directed. Marilyn Monroe is in this one. So’s Sterling Hayden, who was born to chain-smoke filter-less Camels, ever on the run from the coppers as noir anti-hero. If you haven’t seen this one, you really must. So many devastating scenes… the Emmerich double-cross scene (“what’s keeping you alive inside?!”), the ending at the horse ranch. Or this clip, which changes the entire course of the movie. Doc pauses for just one moment to watch the high-school girl dance, and it costs him everything.
Philosophical takeaway: “Crime is only a left-handed form of humor endeavor.”
- LADY FROM SHANGHAI
How you gonna pick just one Orson Wells noir? The Third Man or Touch Of Evil not making your Top 5 is a travesty. I’ll double back for those two in another post, but Lady From Shanghai needs to make this list. It’s interesting to read the Wiki on this one:
“The Lady from Shanghai began filming on 2 October 1946, and originally finished filming on 27 February 1947, with studio-ordered retakes continuing through March 1947 – but it was not released in the U.S. until 9 June 1948. Cohn strongly disliked Welles’s rough-cut, particularly what he considered to be a confusing plot and lack of close-ups (Welles had deliberately avoided these, as a stylistic device), and was not in sympathy with Welles’s Brechtian use of irony and black comedy, especially in a farcical courtroom scene. He also objected to the appearance of the film – Welles had aimed for documentary-style authenticity by shooting one of the first major Hollywood pictures almost entirely on location (in Acapulco, Pie de la Cuesta, Sausalito and San Francisco) using long takes, and Cohn preferred the more tightly-controlled look of footage lit and shot in a studio. Release was delayed due to Cohn ordering extensive editing and reshoots. Whereas Welles had delivered his cut of the film on time and under budget, the reshoots Welles was ordered to do meant that the film ended up over budget by a third, contributing to the director’s reputation for going over budget. Once the reshoots were over, the heavy editing ordered by Cohn took over a year to complete; veteran editor Viola Lawrence cut about an hour from Welles’s rough cut. Welles was appalled at the musical score and particularly aggrieved by the cuts to the climactic confrontation scene in an amusement park funhouse at the end of the film. Intended as a climactic tour-de-force of editing and production design, the scene was cut to fewer than three minutes out of an intended running time of twenty. As with many of Welles’s films over which he did not have control over the final cut, the missing footage has not been found and is presumed to have been destroyed. Surviving production stills show elaborate and expensive sets built for the sequence which were entirely cut from the film…
“The film was considered a disaster in America at the time of its release, though the closing shootout in a hall of mirrors has since become one of the touchstones of film noir. Not long after release, Welles and Hayworth finalized their divorce.”
Matters not to Orson that Lady From Shanghai these days has an 86% on Rotten Tomatoes Critics Polls. He’s gone but this one stands the test of time. Picking one scene, what else could it be but the mirror sequence?
Philosophical takeaway: “It’s a bright, guilty world.” “One who follows nature, keeps his original nature in the end.”
- DETOUR
Edgar G. Ullmer directed this 67-minute 1945 micro-budget. Tom Neal and Ann Savage as the fated roadside duo. The death of Charles Haskell sets up at attempt at impersonating him to cash in on a family fortune. You can find the full movie on that freebee list I gave above as it’s fallen into Public Domain. Roger Ebert summed it up well:
“This movie from Hollywood’s poverty row, shot in six days, filled with technical errors and ham-handed narrative, starring a man who can only pout and a woman who can only sneer, should have faded from sight soon after it was released in 1945. And yet it lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it.”
Philosophical takeaway: “Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me, for no good reason at all.”
