Again, they’re in no particular order. He-e-e-e-ere we go.

THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE (1973) / Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle. Director: Peter Yates. This powerful tale of a small-time street guy (Mitchum) facing a prison sentence is the flip side of The Godfather. Shot entirely in the Boston area in the most nondescript locations, totally deglamorizing the criminal life. Dreary autumn scenery adds to the proceedings rather than subtracting from them. Characters kiss their wives goodbye in the morning and then go to “work”, in other words, they hang around grimy coffee shops and bars and parking lots talking endlessly to each other. Based on a novel by George V Higgins, whose ear for dialogue has never been matched (not even by Higgins himself in subsequent books). Director Yates wisely lifted most of the novel’s dialogue verbatim. Without question, this was Mitchum’s finest hour. His muscular performance of a working-stiff street criminal stays with you forever. One of the greatest noirs of all time.

BODY HEAT (1981) / William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Richard Crenna. Director: Lawrence Kasdan. Kasdan’s remake of Double Indemnity hits the bullseye. Hurt is a lawyer who’s going nowhere, and Kathleen is…well, let’s just say the movie was aptly titled. She corrals Hurt into killing husband Crenna in a steamy south Florida town. Amid rustling wind chimes, Hurt throws a chair through a window to get at her in one of the most erotic scenes ever put on film.

SEXY BEAST (2000) / Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, Ian McShane. Director: Jonathan Glazer. Winstone is a world-class safecracker living the quiet life of retirement in Spain. He lays out in the sun, sips cool drinks with his friends, and loves up his woman. One day, however, Kingsley shows up on behalf of British crime boss McShane, trying to lure Winstone into one more job. Kingsley’s character is a violent sociopath, and his menacing presence throws everything off-kilter. Glazer’s debut feature is a knockout, as he extracts top performances from these three great actors. Winstone is properly nervous throughout, and after watching Kingsley swagger around in his short-sleeved shirts, it’s hard to believe he once played Gandhi!

ACROSS 110th STREET (1972) / Anthony Quinn, Yaphet Kotto, Anthony Franciosa. Director: Barry Shear. Three men rob a numbers bank in Harlem and it’s only a question of who gets to them first, the cops or the mob. Not the cops and robbers movie it appears to be, rather a compelling, noir-drenched tale of desperate men, each driven by different forces. Quinn is the aging tough-guy cop who has outlived his time, Franciosa the Mafia enforcer called upon to retrieve the money and teach the robbers a real lesson. The stickup men just wanted a little money to better their own lives. Film looks like it started off in producer meetings as blaxploitation, but with the addition of Quinn and Franciosa, quickly superseded that genre. Shear shows a real feel for the material. Title song by Bobby Womack is memorable.

THE GRIFTERS (1990) / John Cusack, Angelica Huston, Annette Bening, Pat Hingle. Director: Stephen Frears. One of the best of the post-1970 noirs. Riveting tale of small-time swindlers and their tangled relationships. Cusack is satisfied with making a few bucks a day on short cons until he meets up with sexy Bening, who has big things cooking. Complicating matters is Cusack’s mother, played with relish by Huston. She works for racketeer Hingle and struts around like she means business, inserting herself between Cusack and Bening at every opportunity. Penetrating look at the underbelly world of the con artist. Donald E Westlake’s script follows Jim Thompson’s 1963 novel virtually scene for scene. Harrowing finale comes out of nowhere.

CITY OF INDUSTRY (1997) / Harvey Keitel, Stephen Dorff, Timothy Hutton. Director: John Irvin. Retired thief Keitel returns for one last score with his brother (Hutton) and getaway driver Dorff. Things go very wrong, and Keitel heads for LA looking for those responsible. Director Irvin provides plenty of sweaty scenes in this hard noir tale. His sense of pacing keeps things moving and lets the viewer know that no matter what happens, no good is going to come from any of it. One of Famke Janssen’s early films. Elliot Gould appears unbilled.

AFTER DARK, MY SWEET (1990) / Jason Patric, Bruce Dern, Rachel Ward. Director: James Foley. Patric escapes from a mental hospital and falls in with Ward. Enter Dern, who urges them to pull a high-profile kidnapping job. Classic noir tale of a guy who’s in way over his head. Set in a California desert town, where no one knows anyone and no one cares. Moody, dark film, even though much of it was shot in blinding sunlight. Patric and Ward are perfect for each other. Dern is remarkably restrained. Based on the 1955 novel by Jim Thompson.

THE LAST SEDUCTION (1994) / Linda Fiorentino, Peter Berg, Bill Pullman. Director: John Dahl. Fiorentino rips off her drug dealer husband Pullman to the tune of $700,000 and all hell breaks loose. She flees to a Buffalo suburb, of all places, and attempts to melt into society unnoticed. Pullman, however, is in hot pursuit. She eventually hooks up with Berg, and supposedly becomes involved in a murder plot. Plenty of twists in this one as the walls begin to close in on Fiorentino. Sharp direction and grade A performances make this an outstanding 1990s film noir.

THIEF (1981) / James Caan, Tuesday Weld, James Belushi, Robert Prosky. Director: Michael Mann. Early Mann effort centers around Caan as longtime jewel thief who wants to start a family with Weld. Unfortunately, however, he eventually falls in with Prosky, who forces him into a big job with big promises of milk and honey on the other side. Needless to say, things don’t go exactly as planned. Everything about this film is noir to the max. Story probes deeply into the mindset of a professional thief, with great attention to detail and the tools of the trade. Outstanding score by Tangerine Dream. Film marks the debut of Belushi, Prosky, Dennis Farina, and William Petersen. Caan carries the film in fine fashion.

HOUSE OF GAMES (1987) / Lindsay Crouse, Joe Mantegna, JT Walsh. Director: David Mamet. Psychologist specializing in addictive personalities gets drawn into the personal problems of one of her patients, a compulsive gambler. What follows is a nightmare trek into the demimonde of the grifter. Mamet’s directorial debut. He also wrote the screenplay, but the cast brings his difficult, unorthodox dialogue to life. Performances are top-notch, with Mantegna a standout. Look for William H Macy in a small role.

As I wrote in Jim’s blog, the first real novel I ever read (or can remember reading) was Moby-Dick. Naturally, we all had to read it in school and we trudged through it as best we could, but something about that book stayed with me, so about a year later, I reread it on my own. I then realized for the first time what could be done with a story, how it can be taken to the farthest reaches of the human experience, how incredible it was that someone could open with something so deceptively simple as “Call me Ishmael” and then follow those three little words with one of the most powerful tales ever conceived.

Anyway, being as young as I was, I’m sure I missed a lot of what Herman Melville was trying to say, but I got enough to fuel my desire to read more. I read other novels of his, but of course, none of them measured up to Moby-Dick.

So I read a few more books and pretty soon I started seeing James Michener’s Hawaii in everyone’s hands. I went ahead and read it and was astounded by the scope of the tale, from the actual formation of the island chain itself up to the tangled politics of statehood. Again, I read several other Michener novels, and while a couple of them were excellent, Hawaii remained at the top of the heap.

Ayn Rand showed me how personal one’s writing could become as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged insinuated themselves into my being. To this day, I curse the Hollywood powers that cast Gary Cooper as Howard Roark, because Cooper clearly did not get the character at all. His key scene at the end, a very long courtroom speech (which Rand insisted go into the movie word for word as a condition of her signing the rights deal) was completely out of his range and he just did not understand anything Roark was saying. It was a good thing I’d read the book first.

Love Rand or hate her, The Fountainhead is still a great novel and a milestone in storytelling.

My father read a couple of Mike Hammer novels by Mickey Spillane, so I got them as hand-me-downs. Spillane’s visceral, in-your-face style proved to be the other side of the hardboiled coin from Raymond Chandler’s cool detachment. They could take a routine plot and spin it so you would think the story has never been told before. And in doing so, Spillane’s New York and Chandler’s LA burst off the pages at me in ways I will never forget.

I discovered Jim Thompson almost by accident. I read an article about a movie that Anjelica Huston was going to make called The Grifters, based on Thompson’s 1963 novel. Huston said that the novel was a page-turner, with dark and desperate characters. Somewhere in this article, I believe, was the first time I’d ever hear the word “noir” applied to novels. They said the movie, despite being shot in color, was a perfect example of film noir, and that Thompson’s book was an equally perfect example of noir fiction. Being an aficionado of film noir, I rushed out to buy the book, fortunate that Black Lizard had re-released the work of a bunch of the old noir authors. Of course, The Grifters was great, both the novel and the movie, and I loaded up on Thompson immediately afterward. No one, and I mean no one, has ever penetrated the inner workings of the criminal mind as thoroughly as Jim Thompson.

Well, naturally, from there it was only a short hop over to David Goodis, Charles Willeford, Lawrence Block, and Gil Brewer. Noir city, baby.

Somewhere in there, James Ellroy drifted into my sights. I read his LA Quartet and saw how highly stylish and rhythmic an author could be without ever losing control of the story, keeping the reader’s eyes glued to the page. I still look forward to every Ellroy novel.

There have been many others, of course, like Elmore Leonard, Donald Westlake, and Andrew Vachss, but you know, this blog has to end sometime, so I guess it’ll be now.

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?

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?