Noir fiction for the modern reader.

Heath Lowrance drew up a list of his ten favorite films noir and put them up on his Psycho-Noir website. He had quite a few of the greats in there, and some of the more obscure ones, too. Anyway, I got the bright idea to put my own list up and see where it takes me. Later on, I might do a similar list of newer films, but these are my Top 10 favorites from pre-1970.

In no particular order, they are:

DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) / Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G Robinson. Director: Billy Wilder. This is, IMHO, a true classic in the noir tradition, inspiring many other similar movies. MacMurray, an average Joe if ever there was one, is an insurance salesman who gets reeled in by the slick cunning of Stanwyck and her anklet. Barbara’s the original femme fatale in this one, and a more vicious bitch never walked onto the silver screen. Fred didn’t stand a chance.

NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950) / Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, Herbert Lom. Director: Jules Dassin. I devoted an entire blog to this film some time ago. You can check it out here. Widmark shows what a superb actor he was with this very layered portrayal of a loser whose reach exceeded his grasp. Shot entirely in London under Dassin’s steady hand. Cinematographer Max Greene’s use of shadows and angular shots is breathtaking and Franz Waxman’s exciting score hits all the right notes. Lom steals every scene he’s in.

HOLLOW TRIUMPH (aka THE SCAR) (1948) / Paul Henreid, Joan Bennett. Director: Steve Sekely. Ever hear that line about how everyone’s got a twin somewhere? Kind of makes you want to find yours, right? Well, you might think differently after seeing Sekely’s nightmare masterpiece. Henreid plays a minor-league crook who, with a few associates, robs an underground casino. This sweat-inducing scene occurs near the opening and sets the tone for the entire film, as the casino boss orders his men to find the robbers and dispense justice. A youthful Jack Webb appears in a brief sequence.

PLUNDER ROAD (1957) / Gene Raymond, Wayne Morris, Elisha Cook Jr. Director: Hubert Cornfield. Superior film with plenty of tension throughout. Raymond’s hardass gang plots a midnight hijacking of a huge gold shipment in a treacherous downpour. There’s plenty of gold involved, enough to make them all rich, rich, RICH!! Raymond has every detail worked out. The whole thing is foolproof. What could possibly go wrong? But of course, you see Elisha Cook Jr’s name in the credits, and you realize nothing is foolproof. This taut little film is a true gem, rarely seen, almost never on television. It’s a B-picture that was thoughtlessly cranked out by the studio, but under Cornfield’s clever direction, it became a film noir classic. You should make every effort to locate a copy of this one.

RAW DEAL (1948) / Dennis O’Keefe, Claire Trevor, John Ireland, Raymond Burr. Director: Anthony Mann. One of the toughest noirs of all time. O’Keefe escapes from prison with Trevor’s help, looking to settle a score with Burr, who is hundreds of miles away. The journey won’t be easy, though, because the cops are never far behind him, and neither is Ireland, whom Burr has dispatched to intercept him. Mann’s direction shows how thoroughly he understands film noir, while cinematographer John Alton skillfully mixes shadows, light, and angles to provide breathtaking visuals. O’Keefe is perfect in this great film, and Burr is at his absolute vilest. The tension rises to incredible heights, pulling the viewer to the uncompromising, violent climax.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950) / Sterling Hayden, Sam Jaffe, Jean Hagen, Marc Lawrence, James Whitmore. Director: John Huston. A group of down-on-their-luck small-timers assemble for an improbable jewelry heist that will solve all their problems. Yeah, right. Huston pours on the grit and realism in this MGM film. The studio balked at the filming of WR Burnett’s classic noir novel because they felt it was too big of a departure from the Hollywoodized version of reality usually shown in their films. Wiser heads prevailed, however, and sixty-one years later, this one still packs a wallop. Marilyn Monroe got her break in this film, playing a lawyer’s midnight girlfriend. She gets to say, “You big bananahead.” Whitmore’s café is one of the grimiest places ever portrayed on film. Hayden gives the best performance of his career.

OUT OF THE PAST (1947) / Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas. Director: Jacques Tourneur. Mitchum thinks he can run away from his private investigator past by owning a gas station in a remote town in northern California. He goes fishing a lot, has a steady girl, and generally minds his own business. One day, however, a stranger rolls into town and tells him Douglas would like to see him up in Lake Tahoe. Mitchum and Douglas have a contentious history, but Douglas is willing to forget about it if Mitchum will locate some income tax records for him. Their history, however, won’t be so easily swept aside. Cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, who also shot the stunning Val Lewton film, The Cat People, fills the screen with striking, unbalanced images in a perfect blend of black and white. Considered one of the best films in the noir genre. Greer, as the deadly femme fatale, is sensational.

THE NARROW MARGIN (1952) / Charles McGraw, Marie Windsor. Director: Richard Fleischer. Tense, claustrophobic film shot mostly aboard a moving train. McGraw is in full trenchcoat regalia as he plays an LA cop, sent to Chicago to pick up Windsor, a key witness in a big case back in California, and return her safely. McGraw smokes plenty of cigarettes and Windsor is one of the hardest babes you’ll ever see, as she proves difficult to control. Her dialogue brims with tough talk and she’s the full match for McGraw, not an easy thing to do. More hardboiled than noir, really, because the good guys and bad guys are clearly defined, but the crisp direction and cinematography bring it back into the realm of noir. A scene with a car traveling parallel to the train is one of the most original noir shots ever.

SCARLET STREET (1945) / Edward G Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea. Director: Fritz Lang. Quintessential noir. Robinson is a meek corporate cashier who becomes ensnared in a web spun by sexy Bennett and slimy Duryea. Even the daylight scenes look dark in this one. Robinson makes one poor choice after another and we all know what happens to noir protagonists in that spot, right? The characters’ names are definitely for the ages. Robinson is “Chris Cross”, prostitute Bennett is “Kitty March”, and her pimp Duryea is “Johnny Prince.” Lang’s erotic morality play holds up to this day.

DETOUR (1945) / Tom Neal, Ann Savage. Director: Edgar G Ulmer. Classic noir made by Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), one of the poorest of the “Poverty Row” studios in Hollywood. Ulmer shows what can be done with a microscopic budget as he transforms clunky dialogue and borderline acting into a haunting noir tale of one man overwhelmed with guilt. Neal, a veteran of low-grade B-movies, scores as a New York piano player who hitchhikes to LA so he can be with his cutesy-poo girlfriend. What he gets instead is Ann Savage. I’ll just leave it at that. This film holds the distinction of being the only film noir ever made in which no real crime was committed.

Patti Abbott posed an interesting question today. She asked if it made a difference whether you watched a movie on DVD or saw it in the theater. My answer: the theater.

Movies are larger than life. They are, and always have been, made to be viewed in a theater. They were intended to be mechanically projected through light onto a giant screen in front of perhaps hundreds of people. The viewers are colonized into a large room, where they sit in darkness with total strangers, gazing at a screen several stories high. When the image appears, they almost involuntarily surrender to the wonder of Hollywood magic.

Television is smaller than life. DVDs, as presented over television, are, and always will be, made to be shown in a small room. They are intended to be electronically projected through a (relatively) small screen in front of perhaps four or five people. The viewers are colonized into a small room where they sit with the lights on among friends, gazing at a screen dozens of inches wide. When the image appears, they may talk to one another, get up to go to the kitchen, pass around refreshments, go to the bathroom, or answer the phone. The remote is never far away, and the image can be, and usually is, paused at will. The continuity effect that the director built in constructing the movie is virtually destroyed. The suspense, as enhanced by lighting, setting, and dialogue, is destroyed. Large-scale action scenes lose all magical quality.

Years ago I saw The Last Emperor in the theater. I sat there in awe of the story, the acting, the look, the detail, the whole presentation. A few months later, I saw it on TV. I was looking forward to reliving my experience I’d had in the theater. It was terrible. I turned it off after about fifteen minutes.

Say what you will about Titanic (1997), but it was a sensational movie. The haunting story, which could never have been invented, was so faithfully rendered on the screen, and of course, the effects…the ship, the clothing, the sinking, the faces of the victims…all of it touched me. Needless to say, when I saw it on TV, it played like a network movie of the week. None of it, and I mean none of it came across as the director had intended.

This is not to say that all movies fail on TV. Just most of them. Woody Allen movies would be among the exceptions. His movies are small, heavily reliant on sharp dialogue, and utterly lacking in real action. They seem a perfect fit for TV. There are others, too, but not many.

Film noir plays much better in the theater, in my opinion, although it doesn’t lose everything on TV the way that big-production movies do. Classics like Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, and Detour can still be enjoyable on TV. The big screen, however, really brings out those shadows and angular camera shots.

Not long ago, I watched The Lost Horizon (1937) on DVD. It’s a great film, but the sweep of the Shangri-la scenes and the frigid desolation of the mountain-climbing scenes were really lost. Another one was The Hurricane (1937), directed by John Ford. The mind-blowing special effects, especially for 1937, were extremely impressive. But they were greatly diminished by the smallness of television. There are a lot of older films like that, where you can only see them on DVD because they’re so old.

Nothing much you can do about movies made in 1937; DVDs are really the only way we can usually see them. But movies made in 2010 deserve your attendance at the theater, where you can see them and be overwhelmed by them as you ought to be. If you’re not overwhelmed, then it’s a bad movie and it ain’t gonna get any better by the time the DVD comes out.

Besides, popcorn doesn’t taste the same in front of a TV.

While surfing the blogosphere today, I came upon Rob Kitchin’s blogspot. Rob is an Irish author who’s in search of pre-1970 crime fiction classics to read. Okay, Rob, here’s my list, in no particular order.

1. The Grifters, Jim Thompson, 1963

2. Double Indemnity, James M Cain, 1936

3. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett, 1929

4. The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler, 1953

5. The Asphalt Jungle, W R Burnett, 1949

6. Street Of No Return, David Goodis, 1954

7. The Killer Inside Me, Jim Thompson, 1952

8. 13 French Street, Gil Brewer, 1951

9. His Name Was Death, Fredric Brown, 1951

10. Branded Woman, Wade Miller, 1952 (back in print, thanks to Hard Case Crime)

Rob is looking for an introduction into pre-1970 crime fiction, so these are my recommendations. They all lean heavily toward noir and away from traditional whodunits, so no Sherlock Holmes or Nero Wolfe here. Holmes and Wolfe are fine, as are other much older novels, like The Woman In White. But these 10 books are what I feel would be a good intro to the darkside.

I’ve included two novels by Jim Thompson. The Grifters is a much more “standard” crime novel, but only as compared to everything else that went through Thompson’s twisted mind, while The Killer Inside Me is a sheer trip on the fast train to hell.

Anybody else got any good ideas?  Any good additions to this list?

Some of my favorite movies are in the film noir genre.  What a surprise, right?  Thing is, I’ve always liked them, since before they were called film noir, or at least since before I was aware of that French phrase.

Of course, it’s well-known that the filmmakers weren’t really aware that they were creating a whole new approach to cinema.  They were just doing their best with the low budgets they had to work with.

 These movies were almost always made by the “B” picture crews of the old Hollywood studios.  That meant less money, less time to shoot, lesser-known actors, and so on.  You want to shoot a scene with dark dialogue in it?  Just turn down the lights, cast a few shadows, and point the camera in such a way as to create a dark mood to match the dialogue.  These directors, among whom were greats such as Jacques Tourneur and Anthony Mann, would go on to “bigger and better” movies, but they will always be remembered for their role in forging the path through the uncharted film noir wilderness.

Growing up in a very small town meant one movie theater, where they had double features (an “A” picture coupled with a “B” picture) all the time, and would change the program three times a week. This meant a tremendous number of movies were passing through that little burg. We got a good smattering of everything Hollywood was cranking out in those days, but the black-and-white crime movies always got my attention.  Just seeing Richard Conte’s name on a poster was enough for me to circle the date and see the movie.

Some of my all-time favorites include Double Indemnity, Out Of The Past, Scarlet Street, The Damned Don’t Cry, The Narrow Margin, Raw Deal, Detour, The Asphalt Jungle, and the Jules Dassin classic, Night And The City.  I might add that all of these came out either before I was born or before I was old enough to go to the movies by myself, so I really became acquainted with these through TV.

Some of the great films noir I actually saw in my hometown theater include New York Confidential, Kiss Me Deadly, The Killing, Violent Saturday, and that sleeper of sleepers, Plunder Road.

Recent years have seen an upswing in the genre.  Movies like Body Heat, The Grifters, and After Dark My Sweet (all of which were in color, by the way) have shown there’s a substantial demand for well-done treatments of these great stories.

Also, the rise of the DVD has seen the floodgates open up in terms of releasing many of the really obscure examples of film noir.  Gems like The Naked Kiss, Bad Blonde, Shoot To Kill, Railroaded, and The Scar are now available after decades of oblivion.

Anybody got any favorites they’d like to share?