Noirvember 2023 - Rate the last noir you watched

Knock On Any Door:



I liked this one quite a bit. Surprisingly the courtroom stuff worked the least for me, usually I am very into it. The neighborhood story is stuff was great though. Tons of cool character moments that just set a fun atmosphere. Really good flick.

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Letterboxd

If you guys wondered where the link on the 1st post for your noir is...whenever two or more people write up the same movie I put them in order. So for Knock on Any Door Sean's review is right under mine towards the top of the page. I've been doing that since the thread started, but never mentioned it before.

The last movie you noired

When Strangers Marry



This is a bland one. Even Mitchum, who may be my Noir viewing MVP, couldn’t save it.

Lightning Strikes Twice (1951) Directed by King Vidor and starring Richard Todd, Ruth Roman, Mercedes McCambridge, Zachary Scott, and Frank Conroy. A woman falls in love with a ranch owner recently acquitted of the murder of his wife. I thought the actors did a fine job, but the story was just okay. Watched on Criterion Channel.

Murder by Contract (1958)


This is a late "B" noir from Columbia with an early starting role by Vince Edwards (Ben Casey) playing a contract killer who is hired to snuff a woman to testify in a high profile trial.

There's not a lot of story here, but the interesting parts are the spare, sparse development accompanied by a single guitar score, in that way almost reminiscent of the use of the zither in The Third Man, although not as busy. Because of its pacing and periods of silence its 81 minute runtime seems much longer.

Evidently several major directors were impressed and inspired by the film, including Martin Scorsese who singled out its "economy of style".

It was likely the first movie of it's type. The only detraction for me was the over written and chatty dialogue of one of Edward's handlers, Marc.


The poster and the scene in which Edwards approaches the victim with a tie for a ligature are surely inspired by the similar scene from Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954).

The film was produced for a minuscule shoestring budget, but it solidly displays a sense of cool through its existential disciplined hit man.

Doc's rating: 5/10

But it's not November anymore, guys.

It's always Noirvember

Never heard of that one. Though I looked it up and see it has Dean Jagger and I've liked him and of course Mitchum. I'll put it on the back burner.

Another that I haven't heard of.

Now there's one that's been on my watch list but I haven't found the time yet to get to it. I see it's a William Castle film so I'd expect it not to be great but to have some showmanship pizazz, at least the Castle films I've watched usually have some sort of gag or device going on.

CR, if you're referring to Murder by Contract, it was actually directed by Irving Lerner. Interestingly he evidently was a Soviet spy...

And, really, there's no pizzazz in Murder by Contract...

I was referring to Murder by Contract...But I have no idea why I thought William Castle directed it? Maybe I had another tab open to a William Castle film?

When Strangers Marry was Castle. When you mentioned him I almost replied but figured you knew. I thought it was a coincidence.

Ah, makes sense, well then that's another noir I need to watch...Hey you're sending in a ballot for the noir countdown aren't you? Most likely you are that's probably why you're watching all these noirs. I'm just getting worried that there's not many ballots coming in.

Definitely. Probably Wed at the latest. Two more I want to watch.

Crossfire



Glad I held out on doing my list till I saw this one. This movie is like Noir All Stars with its cast. The story and dialogue are fantastic. Everything moves by that script and that’s exactly the way I like it. Excellent black and white cinematography as well. Maybe should be a five star but being shot on a set really hurts it towards the end for me. I would have liked to feel the bustle of the city a bit.

Love the tagline from Crossfire, 'Hate is like a loaded gun.' I liked that movie, especially Gloria Grahame's Ginny from Virginia.

I agree that Crossfire is a very good picture. But of course the real issue in the book was homosexuality, not anti-Semitism. The Hays code would not allow homosexuality to be mentioned in a film, so the writers changed the object of hatred to Jewishness.

To me that was the detriment to the movie because it's hard to believe that the Robert Ryan character could be so virulently anti-Semitic that he would beat to death a Jew. OTOH it's more believable in that era that he might kill a homosexual.

After the War there wasn't that much vehement anti-Semitism in the U.S. I grew up in the '50s, and there were a fair amount of Jews in my school system, but no one thought anything about it. My ex father-in-law was Jewish, and was apart of the force that liberated one of the German concentration camps-- perhaps Dachau. He described it as something that was tough to get out of one's mind. He said he never encountered much anti-Semitism in the army.

In more modern times it's even harder to believe Ryan's character's motives-- at least until lately with the bias against Israel in some quarters.