Noirvember

For the month of November, I'll be watching 10 noir pictures that I've never watched before as well as sporadically revisiting some favorites.


Watchlist
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The Big Sleep (1946)
The Killers (1946)
The Third Man (1949)
The Big Heat (1953)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Le Samourai (1967)
Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
Blade Runner (1982)
L.A. Confidential (1997)


Top 5
Out of the Past (1947)
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Ace in the Hole (1951)
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Chinatown (1970)

What are your favorite noirs? Thoughts on the genre? Interest in participating?

__________________
Letterboxd | ReverseShot | SlantMagazine

No matter the month, I'm always in for Film Noir! Excellent titles, by the way. My favorite noirs are mainly within the forties' era, or very shortly after. My thoughts on the genre are that Goth and black, rubber suits are not the only path towards the dark side. Gritty, stark realism still works. I'm probably going to have to watch The Scar, tonight ... thanks to this thread!

You got a pretty good group there. Three I haven't seen so I may try to check them out if they are not too much trouble to get. Confidential, Third Man, and The Killers are my favorites of the ones your going to watch. I love the genre and have really just got into it the last couple of years. I have already found many new favorites in that time. Enjoy your Noirvember.

__________________
Letterboxd

Your watchlist contains some major essentials. I like or love all of them. The only one I need to rewatch because I can't remember it at all is L.A. Confidential.

__________________
I may go back to hating you. It was more fun.

Off the top of my head, my ten favorite Noirs are:

The Long Goodbye
Double Indemnity
The Third Man
In A Lonely Place
Chinatown
Sunset Blvd.
The Sweet Smell Of Success
L.A. Confidential
The Killers
Out Of The Past

"Noirvember," I like that. Good one.

I have Out of the Past and The Killers on my DVR and I expect to watch them very soon.

The Maltese Falcon is my favorite film noir that I've seen. I just got the DVD so I need to watch it again. I have Chinatown on DVD but have never seen it, believe it or not. Soon. Soon.

I've seen Kiss Me Deadly, Ace in the Hole, and L.A. Confidential and loved all of those.

If you haven't seen it, might I suggest Murder, My Sweet (1944) which stars Dick Powell as Phillip Marlowe. He is the first actor to portray him and does a great, cynical/humorous performance.
Another fine "Marlowe" movie is Lady in the Lake (1947), starring Robert Montgomery. This movie has a bit of a gimmick in that most of the movie is seen through Marlowe's (i.e. the camera's) eyes, and he is seen only through brief glimpses in mirrors, although his voice is the narrator of the story and we hear him talk to all the co-stars. Very good film noir.

__________________
"Miss Jean Louise, Mr. Arthur Radley."

The Long Goodbye Is definitely in my top 10. Really want a fan of In a Lonely Place, but I think I watched it to early in my noir exposure. Felt like a picture that played with conventions of noir romance that I wasn't yet familiar with.

The Third Man, Le Samourai and The Maltese Falcon are among my favourite ever films. From the others i've only seen Blade Runner which i respect alot but i'm not a fan and LA Confidential which i like quite a bit.

Been meaning to do something like this myself so if i can find the time i might join you here.

I like this thread already!

Noir:

Kiss Me Deadly
Double Indemnity
Rififi
He Walked by Night
The Killing
High and Low
Sweet Smell of Success
The Asphalt Jungle
The Killers
The Big Heat



Neo Noir:

Taxi Driver
Blade Runner
Mulholland Drive
Blue Velvet
Le Samurai
The Big Lebowski (it is a lot like The Big Sleep, and has a lot of Noir traits)
Body Heat
Sin City
Point Blank
Chinatown

__________________
Fear and Loathing in MoFo... The Gunslinger 45's Top 50 Favorite Films

In the 10 Ring: Gunslinger45's reviews

And a third category...
Noir Comedy Mash-Ups:

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid

The Maltese Falcon (1941)
(Dir. John Huston) (Wri. Dashiell Hammett)


Noirvember (1 of 10)

I decided to kick off Noirvember chronologically and start with a Bogart picture. Firstly, why don't we get posters like these anymore? Not necessarily hand drawn, but in the more square format or fat rectangular? I suppose it made sense with VHS boxes being thin, bookish rectangles, but DVDs and Blu Rays lend themselves to a square package a la the CD. Blu Rays almost commit but end up looking like midget DVDs shelved awkwardly alongside them.

Back on topic, I didn't have many expectations beyond knowing this is a classic staple of the genre. One expectation I did have was your typical, growling, iconic Bogart and well- he's kind of a mad man in this. Sam Spade is a grinning, griefless, violent, scheming, joking, bullying lunatic with a death wish. Most noirs leave me unconvinced romantically, but his fall for the compulsive liar Ruth (Mary Astor) makes perfect sense to me. Or maybe they're both pretending. Either way, they're on equal footing when it comes to sanity.

Sam's secretary Effie (Lee Patrick) decays along the way, but early on she's kind of a sisterly, sidekick who might work alongside Spade in a more equivalent society. The scene where she reports on Archer's widow with a Sherlockesque breakdown is sharper than anything Spade does. She's rolling his cigarette for him in more ways than one. Unfortunately, this dimension of her character is abandoned shortly after.

Speaking of decay, Peter Lorre's introduction is by far his character Joel Cairo's finest moment. Lorre was (type) casted perfectly as the strange, beady, accented little fellow. The bit with the gun almost feels like a comedy sketch and played straight works twice as effectively.

The Maltese Falcon is a snappy picture, hooking you in from the jump with lots of fragmented details to piece together. There's a peculiar case from an untrustworthy client, a double murder, and an affair all to be reconciled in time. The audience is usually a step behind Spade, ignorant to the affair, ignorant to his intuition when being lied to, ignorant to how he's slipping his tail, etc. There are some major developments you can guess early on, but you don't lose any interest in watching it all unfold. A very tricky feat for a mystery.

The only real gripes I had were the redundant text crawl and the couple long stretches of exposition that made it redundant in the first place. Contrary to most, I think exposition is fine if you can slip it into a conversation rather than a monologue. That way there's character interaction to go along with it which can also provide information rather than just a lecturing page and a half.

I like that Huston's adaptation doesn't pack the dialogue so thick with quips that it sounds unnatural. Spade dishes it out the heaviest, but of course a psychopath will have his quirks. The movie closes with a memorable line, as all noir's should. The twist ending is also pretty brilliant but we have Hammett to thank there.

Overall, this is my favorite Bogie performance yet. Probably my favorite classic detective noir as well.

http://letterboxd.com/redwell/film/t...e-falcon-1941/

I watched Maltese Falcon earlier this year. I liked it but failed to see the classic transcendent quality that most people do. It was very solid but there is nothing in it that sets it apart for me. I will see it again eventually but I'm not in a hurry. Glad you liked it so much.

It was made in 1941. That makes it the kickoff point for the entire noir film movement in America. The first successful adaption of the detective novels that would drive it. That's a pretty easy case to make for considering it a classic without even touching on the quality of the movie itself.

I've not seen The Maltese Falcon in some time, but I don't remember Sam Spade being especially psychotic. There were moments, though, like when he had the falcon, itself, in his possession. I remember he hurt Effie when he grabbed her by the arm, in excitement. He even had this look on him that kind of suggested that he was on the verge of acting crazed. But there were only rare moments like that. One thing I do remember clearly was Spade calling the fat man's henchman a gunsel (sp.?) which I had to look up. Sam called him it a number of times and it seemed significant. Turns out it's slang for a homosexual, at the time, which is interesting because the Peter Lorre character seemed gay to me, not the young henchman.

In the book, apparently, all of this is very clearly spelled out and gets all into it. I expect audiences at the time just took it for granted. But these details have been lost, over time. What I like about John Huston's direction is that he hints very strongly through lighting, sometimes and through costume and the way the scene's blocked, occasionally, that Mary Astor's character's jail-bound. Today we're used to orange jumpsuits and the like for prison outfits, back then, they were often represented in movies as black and white stripes. So much subtlety is lost that exists in the film, because it speaks only to the audience of the day. It's just another reason why these movies are almost forgotten, except for niche audiences ... and that's a shame!

Very insightful thoughts.

I have no doubt my reading on Spade isn't a very common one, but I will try to list some observations.

First and foremost, the guy isn't afraid of guns at all. They might as well be water pistols. He viciously bullies the gunman who almost always has the upper hand. After he knocks out Cairo and takes his gun he hands it right back to him. He has no conception of mortality.

He doesn't even comprehend that he can be tortured during the final standoff, but yet he persuades everybody to fall in line with his bat **** thinking. The same when the cops hear the screaming. He just brushes of the fact that his cover story is stupid by acknowledging it. He's a psycho who hypnotizes rational people to go along with him.

I'm pretty sure he doesn't even know whose side that he's on. He double and triple crosses everybody like 5 times. The absolute good turn in the end is a cop out. Nobody undercover laughs as maniacally as he does after leaving the fat man or knocking people out repeatedly. He takes absolute pleasure in doing bad only to shrug it off.

He shows zero remorse for the death of his long time partner or for the situation with his wife. He falls in love with a morally corrupt character. While that's a standard noir theme, it's usually a result of being misled or under a spell. He had her figured out from the jump and loves her anyway. Is manipulated by her anyway. All that only to dump her in a cell without a tear.

His mannerisms alone are just so wacky. Always grinning in the wrong moments.

All in all, it's a fun way to look at things.

This thread reminds me of a class I had in college - it was called Detective Fiction.
We started off in the Victorian age with Arthur Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" of course, and Poe's detective "C. Auguste Dupin". Then we covered Agatha Christie's detectives, and on to Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler.
The class wasn't focused on "Noir" per se, but that's the era of movies that most of the novels we read ended up in. Once in a while we'd watch the film versions - which were all Noir movies.

That sounds like a fun class.

It was pretty cool - wish I'd appreciated it more (but in college you're overwhelmed, and everything you're assigned to read is just another thing put on the stress pile). It was one of those lecture hall classes with about 200 students.

Detective Fiction is difficult to write - authors have different methods, but some have to start at the end and write backward for all the clues to fit together without a bunch of plot holes.

Everything that you stated about the Sam Spade character rings true. I have to admit that it did bring back a few things. Between the book, itself, John Huston and Humphrey Bogart, it's a nice collaboration that pays off very well. Despite Spade's personality picadillos, or perhaps because of them, he's a very dynamic individual and an interesting character study. ... Nicely done!

Failed the October challenge on day two. Might give this a try.