Sgt_Markoff

Here were the titles in the 'True Crime' series. Fifty films, four weeks! 10 RILLINGTON PLACE BADLANDS BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ BONNIE AND CLYDE BOOMERANG! CASINO COMPULSION THE GIRL IN THE RED VELVET SWING DARKNESS AT NOON DILLINGER ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ DOG DAY AFTERNOON DONNIE BRASCO HEAVENLY CREATURES IN COLD BLOOD IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES LUCKY LUCIANO M (Fritz Lang version) M (Joseph Losey version) MEMORIES OF MURDER MONSIEUR VERDOUX NED KELLY THE TRUE STORY OF JESSE JAMES REVERSAL OF FORTUNE THE KRAYS ROPE SACCO AND VANZETTI SCARFACE I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG SERPICO STAVISKY SUGARLAND EXPRESS SWOON THE BODY SNATCHER I WANT TO LIVE! THE FRENCH CONNECTION THE GOOSE WOMAN THE HONEYMOON KILLERS THE LODGER THE MATTEI AFFAIR THE PHENIX CITY STORY HE WALKED BY NIGHT THE RISE AND FALL OF LEGS DIAMOND THE UNTOUCHABLES THE WRONG MAN VENGEANCE IS MINE

I attended this festival as well. We really need to acquire the list of titles for discussion. The theater site unfortunately doesn't keep their schedule information available for perpetuity. If I have to I will email them for the info... I do have the info on their "French Tough Guys" festival: ARMY OF SHADOWS BREATHLESS CLASSE TOUS RISQUES GRAND ILLUSION ILLUSTRIOUS CORPSES LA BANDERA LA BÊTE HUMAINE LA HORSE LA TRAVERSÉE DE PARIS LE DEUXIÈME SOUFFLE LE DOULOS LE JOUR SE LÈVE LE MAGNIFIQUE L’ARME À GAUCHE MISSISSIPPI MERMAID MODERATO CANTABILE MONSIEUR GANGSTER MOONTIDE MÉLODIE EN SOUS-SOL PIERROT LE FOU PORT OF SHADOWS PÉPÉ LE MOKO STAVISKY THAT MAN FROM RIO THE BURGLARS THE IMPOSTOR THE LOWER DEPTHS THE NIGHT CALLER THE SICILIAN CLAN THE VALACHI PAPERS TOUCHEZ-PAS AU GRISBI TWO MEN IN TOWN

I never really gave much thought to these two Frenchmen and their article before exploring this website. Not sure why, except that I always look at noir from a structural perspective. Why is it different than other films? How is it able to achieve the effects that it does? Those are the questions to start with. Whereas, this Gallic pair --and their rather fumbling first look at 'dark US films they hadn't seen thanks to WWII'-- is more of an 'aristocratic' argument for what is noir. Incorrectly-defined noir thus comes down to us via 'lineage' and 'pedigree' as a result. Its a taxonomic argument; one based on nomenclature and claddistics rather than analysis. "These gentlemen said what noir was and ...(even if they said it in error) ...therefore that must be what it is. They said so!". But they get things off on completely the wrong foot, unfortunately. Might have done more harm than good!

Thanks. There's no way for you to know but I almost never watch videos. I might view an occasional clip of few second's length on that site...maybe at most, only two times in an entire year. I simply dislike the whole 'look' of Youtube. That's just how I roll, pilgrim!

Sounds mighty slipshod. I agree with Bill Holmes. You don't need to define good noir with a checklist; you only need such tools to sluice away the seemingly endless array of "other stuff" which is called noir. What next, "Andy Hardy" noir? "Meet Me in St. Louis" noir? "Cheaper by the Dozen" noir? Mutual of Omaha's 'Wild Kingdom' with Merlin Olson, noir? Bill Bixby in "The Courtship of Eddie's Father" ...that HAD TO BE noir (because he had black hair?) Sheesh this gets my goat...its madness

SilverScreen dot com?

It would be pretty easy to look up this term on-line. What was the puzzle over it?

Truth be told, I've never seen a film studies class, or moderated film discussion that did little else but "saunter through" film clips and identify various bits-and-pieces of ideas for students, all in very piecemeal fashion. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Of course, when this 'Summer of Darkness' course I completely missed. But my guess is this was the format? It stands to reason. No one wants to be lectured to as if they're in a class in a local community college. Everything on-line is made for casual browsing...

TV noir? Groan-n-n-n-n-n-n!!!

List of 37 titles, for future reference. https://www.nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?t=4128

EJ, that's just an old vaudeville phrase I love to use.

They need me as host. Unfortunately, my face was made for a career in RADIO

Can a 'Land of the Giants' movie be far behind? How about 'Time Tunnel'?

I voted for 'Poltergeist'. Its the only genuinely original and iconic movie listed. Everyone else was thin, or a gimmick, or a remake of some kind. Y'know...horror movies which become big-hits often seem like random flukes but usually, they are carefully-chosen by their producers. They're watersheds. 'Poltergeist' codifies a whole swathe of stories which many authors might embark on, but which ultimately end up as 'indian spirit stories' with indians as the story-engine driving the suspense. That's probably why Spielberg was involved: his story-sense is super-sharp; the same way Stephen King's is. They know what has been done and what hasn't been done; so they know what to put their name on. Both those guys between them, they cover the most 'archetypical' yarns it is possible to give modern audiences.

One of the titles on the list not often mentioned: "The Day at the Fair" or something like that. Jean Simmons. It's a historical suspense flick; set in 1800s Paris. Competent and smooth from start to finish; the kind of flawless storytelling ease which practically vanished with the great studios. Certainly not a 'noir' although it was naturally very 'dark' and 'atmospheric' in the stage sets; characters were (ostensibly) lit only by those old-fashioned hurricane-lamps or maybe some wall-sconces. Anyway, its is the most exemplary version of the kind of thriller where the protagonist is being 'gaslit' by a bunch of other characters; similar to the ploy used in "The Lady Vanishes". You know the kind of thing. Whole rooms in a hotel are suddenly "gone"; no one recalls seeing her; there's not even a floor in the building where the event took place; the heroine swears she was accosted by this man who 'no, doesn't remember her at all'...trying to convince her that 'she imagined it'...etc etc etc

I was scheduled to include that one, in my ten day's breakneck movie-watching sprint (attending as many of these flicks as I could) but something prevented me from catching it. In New York City--at most times of the day--you literally can not get across town in less than an hour no matter what. The sheer density of people milling about. It's more than your life's worth, to even attempt. So I had to let that one pass.

Wow. This is gossip I hadn't heard. Thanks, EJ Man.

My 'Peeping Tom' review! Send the children out of the room! https://tinyurl.com/ya8uwqxh

But that's not the logic by which I rank the sequences as flawed or not. It was a visual effect which bypassed the mind and acted on me viscerally; and it succeeded. It was simply "more vivid" and made me forget I was sitting in a cushioned theater seat. I'm sure if I was riding in a truck going even at a 'safer' ten mph less than the director depicted, I'd probably have been white-knuckled in the actual truck. So that's what the director found a way to convey to me. No complaints! Anyway it immediately became one of my favorite films; astounding for it to leap right onto maybe my short-list of "top 25 flicks of all time"; just a bargain-basement noir-actioner like that, rather than an 'art' film which I usually go for. Incredible.

Said better, said another way: I don't believe that once film noir became identified as such, became famous, that you could set out to make any ole film like a studio thriller or a studio crime and wind up with noir instead, as if by accident. Not once you've seen noir yourself. The filmmakers who wound up forging noir for everyone else (late 1940s) didn't have a choice; this is the crucial difference. Its like when scientists accidentally stumbled into the making of penicillin, the first time. They were intensely bent on making something else; meeting some other requirement---and that exact same 'spur' can't be reinvented. Why would we? There's no need. The method is now known. Similarly, (from what I gather) the early noir directors mindset went simply something like this; Did you see the budget they gave is? Holy cow Yeah I know. How the hell are we gonna do anything with a budget like that? Its crazy. You can't make anything hard-hitting that cheap. What do they want from us? They want something hard-hitting. Any ideas? No. Hell no. I have no idea what I'm gonna do. Maybe a heist or a burglary, or something, the usual...but even so, how to make it pop? Well...let's start fooling around with something anyway and see what turns up. I don't know what we're gonna tell 'em, though. See the difference? They were groping for something that (as yet) had no name. They had a few goals in mind (taut drama) but didn't know the exact way it would turn out under these new conditions. They were arriving at a new working method; doing so under pressure. But it means some later director working on a 1955 musical can't claim he too, "accidentally" landed up in the same place. If you're directing a glitzy musical and surprised how 'dark' and 'taut' the dailies look, then you scratch your chin and say "hey maybe I can pull in a little bit of that film noir stuff of Sidomak's" as you sip your coffee and munch your scone on your big-budget production.

Hey pretty good score there, Joe Man. Good innings. I've seen 7 of the 12 you rattled off. I dont recognize the last two. Generally agree with your appraisals too; (except I see no flaw in 'Hell Drivers') And also excepting, 'Peeping Tom'. I loathe 'Peeping Tom'. Did you see my scathing review of that right here on this site maybe eight or ten days ago?

When it comes to a film like 'Night and the City' or 'Detour' the proof of the pudding is in the eating. No label can cover up the lack of noir if it isn't intrinsically present. No checklist needs confirm the experience of a real mccoy. Checklists are needed by pictures which don't provide true noir. The tiresome process of verifying ('is this noir?') with a lists, is instigated time and time again, by all the non-noir films which are incorrectly labeled. Think of it like this: there's many red wines in France but French law forbids any other red wine except that grown in the beaujolaise region to label itself beaujolaise. Such thorny labeling issues--and drastic remedies to eliminate them--plague many industries. A powerful noir --missing some minor technical hallmark--wouldn't mean we dismiss it. That would mean we accept that noir 'can happen (or not happen) by accident' or that it is a 'style'. I submit that film noir is not an effect that can be arrived at by accident. Checklists are enlisted by non-noir films which accidentally happen to exhibit a few measly characteristics of noir These films are mistakenly advocated by their proponents as genuine noir. When the claims are not taken at face-value; then "the checklist" is drawn up as their argument. Its as if they're trying to jeer at purists that "Ohh, these purists can't even say what a noir is, only that they know it when they see it" when instead; its more like "purists know what noir isn't and its easy to see when something isn't it". Remember what I explained a few days ago: never start with a non-noir and tally up a few earmarks which "should make it" a noir. That's not the way.

Look at all those juicy titles. Its to salivate over! But yeah look at how almost every critic goes wildly off the rails with misuse of their terminology. ('Citizen Kane' a noir? One critic goes so far as to make that statement). Its almost like the term has so much cachet that everyone has the blind urge to wield it. Its become a cache-all. What's wrong with calling a crime film ...a crime film? Eh, I'm digressing again. Maybe I'm one of those guys who hates to see someone fold up a road-map the wrong way. Maybe only 'Detour' is fit to call film noir. There's middle ground somewhere...

This super festival, I attended some years ago. Not all of these 37 movies (probably most of them) are really accurately described as noir. But this is what happens; things get lumped together for the sake of convenience. Anyway it was all very fine viewing, no matter what. Review: https://tinyurl.com/y7zdgy7t Review: https://tinyurl.com/y9tfdf9y Review: https://tinyurl.com/y7fzp4wm The festival page itself (as would appear on the theater's website) is no longer still up; but here's a list of titles with accompanying blurbs: https://tinyurl.com/yddt6kjn

p.s. maybe it shouldn't be called 'noir alley' if the host isn't really going to be serious about exclusively airing true noirs. Maybe there oughta be one program for crime and a companion program for noir. I'm sure we could come up with appropriate program titles if we had to.