cigarjoe

I remember seeing it but it was a bit off as far as Noirs for me anyway, probably because of the over emphasis on the romance.

Common sense says that if you go to Hoboken, NJ on a street called River Street you would try to get the Hudson River and the Manhattan skyline in the background of the action or why the hell go, no? Most of the studio set NYC noirs have establishing shots but then go right to the backlots. A native New Yorker can tell the diff. As soon as they started more and more on location shooting (Naked City, Crime Wave for Los Angeles etc., etc.) going back to the backlot sets looked more and more fake-ish. Pickup on South Street did a great job of recreating the city without ever being there, but take a look at 60s noir The Money Trap (1965) where they do live location shooting but use a studio NYC set for a downtown LA location and it's obvious that it isn't, it's a visually jarring experience. I always say where the f are the cars/traffic. Case in point a picture of "The Street" Noir mode below. and color... It was one of the Jazz hotspots of Manhattan.

Getting back to..... WHY DO SOME CLASSIC MOVIE FANS BASH NEWER FILMS? I think we have to differentiate and define "new films" we are now 60 years removed from the end of the studio era, and 100+ from the rudimentary beginnings of film. I'd define new films as probably the last 10 to 15 years looking back from from today. I see the bashing usually of two very different entities, the first is of the usually benign contented, simple plotted. comic/superhero based blockbuster. These are quite akin to Classic Hollywood's Flash Gordon serials, I don't see much difference in the two besides budgets. The second bashing is of all films after the demise of the MPPC where anything goes. This is usually from the mid sixties to the seventies. After that we had the gradual rise of the original blockbusters with occasional edgy, off the wall, anything goes independant productions.

I enjoyed it also.

Hollywood Magic.

I think this one was all shot on studio sets and it worked. I don't believe any of this was shot around NYC. I checked IMDb and it lists Hoboken, NJ and Petersburg, Va, but those got to be bogus.

More... Chump Change A Lip or a Mouthpiece for a lawyer Muckty Mucks - the rich or important Shiv - knife

Bennie (Warren Oates) in Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia (1974)

The Women.... Matty (Kathleen Turner) Body Heat (1981) Dorothy Valens (Isabella Rossellini) in Blue Velvet (1986) Fay (Joanne Whalley) in Kill Me Again (1989) Dolly (Virginia Madsen) in The Hot Spot (1990) Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) Mona Demarkov the "Queen of Queens" (Lena Olin) in Romeo Is Bleeding (1993) Missy (Rosanna Arquette) in The Wrong Man (1993) Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) in The Last Seduction (1994) Mallory (Juliette Lewis) in Natural Born Killers (1994) Monique Roux (Laure Marsac) in Hit Me (1996) Patricia Arquette as Bettie Page-ish Renee top and blond bombshell Alice below in Lost Highway (1997) Carol Lakewood (Gina Gershon channelling Ava Gardner) in This World, Then The Fireworks (1997)

The two Jacks in Kiss Me Deadly (1955) Sugar Smallhouse (Jack Lambert) Charlie Max (Jack Elam)

A fave Brit Noir I love how Sellers rages on about the "little nob, lipstick salesman," and how he's going to "kill him, put him in his car, and burn it!" 😎

I think with the comic book films you don't have to worry about translating a lot of intricate dialogue, it's all a pretty much films with universally understood visual storytelling with minimal amounts of dialogue type of Cash Machine.

Going South is pretty funny also. P.S. I have a couple of Sellers films listed also

May 2008... This was a pretty low budget Western that looks like it. Too many exterior shots were done in the studio & well, it looks like it. Its bad but bad the way Johnny Guitar is bad. The story is interesting however basically an Eastern Dude from Vermont (Duryea) teams up with (Fuzzy Knight) an ex ship captain (who sailed a prairie "wind wagon" across the Great Plains until it broke down) and they turn into bounty hunters after a failed payroll robbery where they kill the would be robbers and collect their bounty. Its at first sort of goofy and played tounge in cheek but after Knight gets killed off Duryea goes cold blooded. Its got some twists and turns and even a Spaghetti Western like ending. Its got Duryea designing a sawed-off double barrel shotgun that he wears in a holster (like Mississippi (James Caan) in El Dorado) with a bandoleer gunbelt filled with shot shells). Its chock full of veteran 30's-40's era Western Stars and even has G.M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson (from the "Great Train Robbery" (1903) make an appearance. Duryea is just not very believable tough in the part. His son Peter gets a interesting part in the film.

R.I.P.

I don't think Buckholz was that well known either.

I like 99 River Street and Kansas City Confidential about equal, my favorite Payne noir is The Crooked Way (1949) and least is Hell's Island (1955). I'm not sure if I've seen all of his noirs I don't remember Larceny (1948) or Hidden Fear (1957) which may or may not be noir-ish, I like him in Slightly Scarlet (1956) but it's more of an ensemble noir with Rhonda Fleming, Arlene Dahl, John Payne and Ted de Corsia all equally good.

As a Kid I also loved It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963).

As I kid this was a favorite also. Loved the sight gag where the guys are being chased by Frankenstein and they hide in a room and push stuff up against a door only to have it open the wrong way.

I first saw The Great Silence back in 2004, way past the Spaghetti Western era. As a kid growing up in New York City I saw Leone's For A Few Dollars More on its premier in 66 on the big screen followed by a double bill of it and A Fistfull of Dollars. In 67 out came The Good The Bad And The Ugly. So that was followed by a number of other non Leone Spaghetti Westerns, The Big Gundown, Death Rides A Horse, and I believe Sabata which was marketed all wrong. Sabata was more like The Wild Wild West (WWW) TV program and should have been marketed as a "secret agent' Western, since there was that built in market for WWW to tap into. It wasn't I was expecting something more realistic, I didn't like it the first time I saw it. Here are my posts upon seeing it for the first time. I had problems with it's script not the visuals. But my thoughts evolved.... I enjoyed seeing Klaus Kinski Frank Wolf and Luigi Pistilli and some of the rest of Leone's character stable. The shots in the snow were great and it reminded me of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, but where it lacked was in its budget. It looked cheap and would have improved with better sets. The town of Snow Hill didn't have any reason to exist. The action shots were good and also the stage in the snow. The other weak area was in the gang of horseless outlaws that were running around out in the snow they didn't seem to have much of anything not even snowshoes and not much of an explanation of why they were there. There was not a believable story line on the process of the bounty hunting and why would there seem to be more wanted men than townspeople, lol. Ok here again is an example of buyer beware. I plunked down about $20 for the Great Silence, mostly through researching different boards and accumulating opinions, and for the most part I picked this film based on that. Now my tastes in westerns run to stories that are believable and plausible. Basically, is it a storyline that could have happened? Once you throw in weird stuff and add jugglers and acrobats and hidden guns in banjos (Sabata for example) you loose me. If I want to see that I'd watch re-runs of the Wild Wild West, lol. The Great Silence was a dark and brooding story it had what at that time was some pretty graphic violence and the juxtaposition of blood and snow was good, it had a good flash back sequence a shocking (for that time ending) and music by Morricone. As a Spaghetti Western at face value it delivered, which at the time was what it was created for. The back story line of Silence and his motives was good. And the portrayal of the character of Loco was done well by Klaus Kinski. But the rest was very far fetched. Like I posted before you have a gang of outlaws some with sickles (looking like medieval grim reapers with their hoods and great coats) with no reason to be there, walking easily over the top of deep snow unaided by snow shoes, while at the same time horses are breaking through and struggling. Its as if it was filmed at a ski resort with packed powder, which it come to think of it probably was, lol. The town of Snow Hill was way too small and the gang of outlaws and the gang of bounty killers seemed to out number the town. This like I said was ok, also, must add that except for Klaus Kinski the dubbing wasn't up to snuff and it was noticeable, but it was very low budget, so get it if you want to see violence more graphic than Leone and very nice western winter snow shots, but check reality at the door. I was thinking today about how the story may have been made a little more believable. Let's say the "gang of outlaws" who live up in the mountains walk over the top of the snow and feed on dead horses are instead a gang of cannibals who feed on dead travelers (or even kill and eat travelers) who have tried and failed to make it over the passes into Snow Hill. That would make Klaus Kinski and his band of bounty killers more believable, and it would make the reward offer understandable. The way its portrayed now the outlaws are just pathetic. I've watched it twice more now and it does grow on you, its a different and a more graphic style for sure, and if you take the raggedy outlaw scenario with a grain of salt, its a good spaghetti. Morricone's music also lingers in your mind. It is a great Klaus Kinski part, and if you liked his bit part in FADM you'll get a kick out of him here. Was discussing the massacre at the end and Snow Hill There is no town existing now that's called Snow Hill in Utah, and in the film Frank Wolff was going to take Klaus Kinski to a jail in Tonopah, now Nevada. Now I think Utah Territory included both states, but there is no Snow Hill in Nevada either. Actually there were a number of Unionizing Wars and a massacre of striking miners and their families that happened around this time period late 1880''s through 1920 that this may be loosely based on. Ludlow Massacre 1914 Near Trinidad, in Southern Colorado the Rockerfeller owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company''s mine workers tried to unionize under the UMWA. The company sent in the Baldwin Felts Dectective Agency (basically hire guns) to break up the organizing activities. They gunned down the union organizer and the mineres went on strike. Since they were striking they were violently evicted from the company homes they were living in. They took to the surrounding hills and set up tent camps. The Baldwin Felts then used an armored car equiped with a Browing Colt (potato digger) machine gun to do a drive by and terrorize the miners, they dug rifle pits inside the tents and continued fighting throught the winter. In the spring Rockerfeller had the Governor send in the state militia. The striking miners at first thought that the militia was there to protect them but the militia took up positions above the tent camps. At the biggest tent camp at Ludlow the militia opened fire with more machine guns an 11 year old boy trying to get water for his family was gun downed. A freight train that stopped on a siding between the Militia and the tent camp enabled a lot of the women & children to escape abord the train. An attemp by the miners for a truce was attempted but the negotiator was clubbed and shot as he reached the militia. That evening the militia entered the tent city and set fire to the canvas. By morning it was a smouldering ruin. Two women and eleven children were found dead in a pit under a metal cot. It was known as the Ludlow Massacre in all 66 miners were killed. The news of the massacre put pressure on both Rockerfeller (negative publicity), and Pres. Wilson to send in the regular army to defuse the situation. It was on Wild West Tech on the History Channel not too long ago. Basically this film was made for Italo/ European audience so I don't think it mattered much to Corbucci to go into a whole explanation of WHY. To an American audience (like me) that part matters more because we look for some kind of link to something that may have really happened. The Spaghetti West is another dimension a twilight zone parallel universe, a place where things just are, distances and time are bent, place names are thrown in weird juxtapositions. It's a tight compact little world where everything especially the small things are exaggerated. It's almost as if the great lot of SW directors or their audiences had no clue that the whole vastness of American West approximately 2,000 by 2,000 miles could not possibly fit in a country the size of Spain or Italy though the films usually don't express these great distances. Neo Noir Western The Great Silence. You just need tone down your overly inquisitive brain, and watch it's images of the barren snow bound wilderness of 1898 Snow Hill play out, and you'll better enjoy the the sightly off kilter stylistic Neo Noir Western world that Corbucci creates. Corbucci utilizes the bleak alpine landscape to the maximum, creating an atmosphere of desolation and despair that clings and haunts you long after its over. The rock, pines, shanties, and blood sharply contrast against the white snow noir-ishly with another Morricone masterpiece of a soudtrack, and one of the bleakest endings of any Western out there. Back to the nature of the "outlaws." My trouble with that is the old Utah Territory, the surrounding environs of Nevada, Northern Arizona, and Southern Idaho are Mormon-ized so it doesn't quite make much sense to just hint at it when you could have say tied in some actual historical incidents like the Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act of 1882, passed in a wave of Victorian-era reaction to the perceived immorality of polygamy, or the Edmunds–Tucker Act on May 19, 1890, that dis-incorporated The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or even the non religious Ludlow Massacre in the snow on April 20, 1914 where workers at Colorado mine went on strike, company guards fired machine guns and killed several men, 2 women and 11 children. What we get instead from Corbucci is a total out and out fantasy, with a fake epilogue, when it could have been so much more.

There are a lot of Exploitation films made in the years 1968-70 that switch from Black & White to Color roughly when Black & White films were being abandoned. They usually make the switch when someone drops acid or does some other drug and it's a hallucinatory sequence. One title that comes to mind is The Animal (1968).

Yes Barquero was Lee Van Cleef's first American Western after all his Spaghetti Westerns. Sort of like Hang 'em High was Eastwood's first American Western after his three Leone Westerns, I included it because of Lee Van Cleef, they even have similar sounding scores by Frontieri. check that part out sometime. El Condor, Villa Rides, and 100 Rifles were "Euro" Westerns international productions shot in Almeria, Spain. Red Sun is another Euro that's pretty good with Charles Bronson and Toshirô Mifune as is Pancho Villa with Telly Savalas, Chuck Connors and Clint Walker.

I'd pick Arsenic and Old Lace

Check out Run Man Run, A Bullet For the General, Tepepa, Keoma, Face to Face, Cemetery Without Crosses, and maybe The Four of the Apocalypse..., to round out your viewing of Spaghetti Westerns also El Condor and Barquero (two other Van Cleef Westerns), Villa Rides, and 100 Rifles are pretty good. If you haven't seen them. 😎

Very Good Noir