The Film Noir Thread! Gats, dames, and cheap hooch welcome.

[Randy G Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Randy G]

With Payne and de Toth you'd think it couldn't miss. Love 99 River Street.

[Andrew Monroe Pallid Hands Find all posts View Profile Close Andrew Monroe]

Had word from Amazon that the TRY AND GET ME! BD should arrive on the 19th. Can't wait to finally see this one! On another note, those upcoming BDs of TOO LATE FOR TEARS and WOMAN ON THE RUN are expensive as hell. Amazon is listing the preorders for 35 bucks each - Import CDs has them for the more reasonable (but still high) $27. The list price on them at Import is $59.98!!! Holy shit. I get that they spent some money restoring these but I doubt casual noir fans are going to cough up 27 - 35 dollars for them.

[Quot Bark! Go away Find all posts View Profile Close Quot]

Andrew, are you familiar with rarefilmm? Their noir section is aces. Every film is Vimeo-viewable. Be sure and check out the older posts.

[Andrew Monroe Pallid Hands Find all posts View Profile Close Andrew Monroe]

Andrew, are you familiar with rarefilmm? Their noir section is aces. Every film is Vimeo-viewable. Be sure and check out the older posts.

Was familiar with the name but haven't really explored it a great deal. Amazing selection of stuff not on disc for sure. Thanks for the heads-up! TCM runs a fair bit of those.

[Andrew Monroe Pallid Hands Find all posts View Profile Close Andrew Monroe]

TRY AND GET ME! (1950) is a pretty amazing accomplishment for an independent production. There's a lot going on here - much more than what you'll find in even the typical studio noir of the same time - an searing indictment of mob violence and rabble-rousing journalism as much as a crime story. Two sterling performances at the center from Lloyd Bridges and Frank Lovejoy, and a fine supporting one from Richard Carlson. Lovejoy, desperate for work with a wife and young son, as well as another child on the way, starts driving getaway for charismatic sociopath Bridges on a series of robberies. He's been assured no one will get hurt. That lasts about as long as you'd expect, and then they try to move up to kidnapping. It all goes sideways and they end up in jail with a growing mob outside screaming for their hides. Carlson has a great turn as a newspaper columnist who stirs up the fury with some very one-sided stories. Based on the same real story that inspired Fritz Lang's FURY, this film also brings to mind ACE IN THE HOLE in many ways. The original title was THE SOUND OF FURY which is far more chilling and on point when you see the ending. It's simply deeply, deeply disturbing and absolutely haunting. The underlying message of the film hits even harder when you know director Cy Endfield would shortly be forced to return to England, a victim of The Blacklist. I can't recommend this film highly enough, and the Olive BD looks very nice overall.

[Clive Smith noodle doodle Find all posts View Profile Close Clive Smith]

The Film Noir Thread! Gats, dames, and cheap hooch welcome.

Great write-up, Andrew. I'm in.

[Andrew Monroe Pallid Hands Find all posts View Profile Close Andrew Monroe]

It's so deserving of a bigger audience, Clive. Hopefully this new BD will take some steps to rectify that. So glad I finally got to see it. Hope you like it!

[Quot Bark! Go away Find all posts View Profile Close Quot]

I don't know if this belongs in this thread, but I do know that Andrew is going to want to see it:

Mario Soffici's Rashomon-inspired 1958 Argentinian thriller, Rosaura a las 10 (***½/****)



I'm going to quote a mini-review from a buddy of mine who does it better justice than I could do..

"Begins innocuously enough with the small, shy painter, Canelo, moving into a boarding house and receiving mysterious love letters from a beautiful woman none of the other excessively nosy boarders ever see. The first half of the film plays out as a low-key gothic romance of sorts with Canelo acting as the savior of the trapped Rosaura, whose father is forcing her to marry a man whom she does not love. Or so we thought. The unreliable narrative of the first half is cracked open the moment that clock strikes 10 and Rosaura arrives at the boardinghouse and is greeted with gleeful pandering by the women who believe she has run away to marry Canelo. This titular moment however begins to reveal the cracks in the story we were first told and the narrative breaks apart giving several different accounts of the events before and after Rosaura's arrival that bring into question the motives not only Canelo and Rosaura but many of the secondary characters as well. What was at first a more classically shot film transforms into something more sinister, a spiral into a surreal fever-dream that leaves you questioning which reality is reliable and questioning whether these point-of-views are memories or a playfully cinematic expression of the deceptiveness of memory itself. What begins as something more akin to The Picture of Dorian Gray ends up as something closer to an Alain Resnais film - a puzzling yet enrapturing film that deftly uses the structural and visual nature of cinema to deconstruct and reconstruct its own story. An undiscovered gem for sure."

What he said. I would only add Susana Campos makes for a helluva femme fatale. It's available for free on Rarefimm and it's a must-see.

Also, there was a very brutal scene of violence near the end of that film that really caught me off-guard. IF you watch this Andrew, I'd be curious for your input re: similar scenes from the same time period (or earlier) that match the intensity of this scene in Rosauara.

[Paul L Scholar of Sleaze Find all posts View Profile Close Paul L]

TRY AND GET ME! (1950) is a pretty amazing accomplishment for an independent production. There's a lot going on here - much more than what you'll find in even the typical studio noir of the same time - an searing indictment of mob violence and rabble-rousing journalism as much as a crime story. Two sterling performances at the center from Lloyd Bridges and Frank Lovejoy, and a fine supporting one from Richard Carlson. Lovejoy, desperate for work with a wife and young son, as well as another child on the way, starts driving getaway for charismatic sociopath Bridges on a series of robberies. He's been assured no one will get hurt. That lasts about as long as you'd expect, and then they try to move up to kidnapping. It all goes sideways and they end up in jail with a growing mob outside screaming for their hides. Carlson has a great turn as a newspaper columnist who stirs up the fury with some very one-sided stories. Based on the same real story that inspired Fritz Lang's FURY, this film also brings to mind ACE IN THE HOLE in many ways. The original title was THE SOUND OF FURY which is far more chilling and on point when you see the ending. It's simply deeply, deeply disturbing and absolutely haunting. The underlying message of the film hits even harder when you know director Cy Endfield would shortly be forced to return to England, a victim of The Blacklist. I can't recommend this film highly enough, and the Olive BD looks very nice overall.

I've never seen this one. Thanks for the info, Andrew. Think I'll have to import that US BD now :)

[Andrew Monroe Pallid Hands Find all posts View Profile Close Andrew Monroe]

I don't know if this belongs in this thread, but I do know that Andrew is going to want to see it:

Mario Soffici's Rashomon-inspired 1958 Argentinian thriller, Rosaura a las 10 (***½/****)

I'm going to quote a mini-review from a buddy of mine who does it better justice than I could do..



What he said. I would only add Susana Campos makes for a helluva femme fatale. It's available for free on Rarefimm and it's a must-see.

Also, there was a very brutal scene of violence near the end of that film that really caught me off-guard. IF you watch this Andrew, I'd be curious for your input re: similar scenes from the same time period (or earlier) that match the intensity of this scene in Rosauara.

Thanks, Quot, this sounds very intriguing. There's a whole world of Argentinian and Mexican noirs yet to be really discovered. I can tell you off the top of my head that the one film noir of a similar era I always think of in terms of violence is Phil Karlson's THE PHENIX CITY STORY (1955), one of the mob exposé pictures that came in the wake of the Kefauver Committee's investigation of organized crime. It's genuinely shocking for its time, the violence is brutal and wades pretty deeply into taboo territory in one instance.

[Andrew Monroe Pallid Hands Find all posts View Profile Close Andrew Monroe]

I've never seen this one. Thanks for the info, Andrew. Think I'll have to import that US BD now :)

Hope you and Clive will weigh in with your thoughts after you guys watch it, Paul.

[Ian Jane Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Ian Jane]

I watched it last week and just finished writing it up for the site. It's excellent. I couldn't believe how completely slick, sick and bad ass LLoyd Bridges is in it! The ending took me by surprise too. The story behind the movie is also pretty interesting, what with the communist witch hunt going on around this time and pointing its bony, creepy finger at a lot of the players. It kind of makes the point of the story a bit more poignant I guess. Really great stuff though. Was glad that Olive brought it out. Would have loved a commentary on this but I'll take what I can get, at least it looked pretty good even if it wasn't really restored.

What was beautifully restored, or at least just transferred from pristine elements, was Dark Passage, which I also watched recently (on a Bogart kick lately). It looks sooooo much better than the DVD and the DVD looked good. I know this one gets put down for being preposterous and maybe even silly in some circles but I love it. Bogart is as cool as they come in this one and Bacall.... hot damn. The surgery scene is still really powerful and completely bizarre (it reminded me of the scene in Batman where Nicholson as the Joker gets to see his face) and the POV thing works a lot better here, in my opinion, than in Lady Of The Lake.

I also got around to checking out Woman On The Run and Too Late For Tears. Woman was good. The transfer is a big step up from the old Alpha DVD that I used to have - it's still got plenty of damage and splices but it's wayyyyyyyyy better looking. The movie holds up well enough and I still really like the twist at the end. I liked Too Late For Tears better. Lizabeth Scott is so damn good in that one. She looks fantastic but her performance is just spot on - rarely has unbridled greed been so beautifully personified!

[Andrew Monroe Pallid Hands Find all posts View Profile Close Andrew Monroe]

Yeah, the ending of TRY AND GET ME! is a real punch in the gut, and quite disturbing as well. The original title - THE SOUND OF FURY - has a poignant meaning after you see the ending. I too wish someone like Eddie Muller had done a commentary for it, this seems tailor-made for him. Oh well. Bridges is a revelation here, I was never a huge fan of his other noirs for the most part, they're mostly forgettable Bs, average at best but he's absolutely jolting in this film. Lovejoy was good too (and the film has yet another layer with its story of his WWII vet unable to adjust to civilian life).

Looking forward to DARK PASSAGE, I freaking love that one! Never gets old. There's something so...comforting in this film, with the way Bogey and Bacall play off each other and their domestic scenes in her apartment. Great bits with the taxi driver and the plastic surgeon too. I think part of the reason this works better than LADY IN THE LAKE is we do eventually get to see Bogart, it doesn't do the POV thing the whole film. I like LADY quite a bit, and admire Montgomery for the bold gamble (and Audrey Totter is a HUGE part of the plus side), but it does have a gimmicky feel to it.

WOMAN ON THE RUN and TOO LATE FOR TEARS are priced too high but I did preorder them (they're cheaper at Import CDs than Amazon). Really like Ann Sheridan in WOMAN.

[Quot Bark! Go away Find all posts View Profile Close Quot]

I can't remember if I ever posted this delightful noir homage -- a 10 minute short titled The Bloody Olive:

[Andrew Monroe Pallid Hands Find all posts View Profile Close Andrew Monroe]

Watched WOMAN ON THE RUN the other night, and wow! Even with some wear and tear to the print, it was like seeing the film for the first time compared to the eyesores that populate those cheap PD collections. The San Francisco location photography on this film is fascinating, there's a ton of it. While I do think these two (the other being TOO LATE FOR TEARS) are overpriced, they have gone all out to make these nice BDs. Great extras, cool booklets with essays and lots of photos. The story behind the search for the film is a thriller in its own right too, finding it then losing it to that awful Universal fire, then stumbling on another one. Cool that, along with Eddie Muller, Alan K. Rode turns up in the mini-doc. on the film - he wrote that great Charles McGraw biography - and does the commentary on TOO LATE as well I believe. I also really enjoyed all the backstory on Ann Sheridan's behind the scenes involvement in the film, a real shame it didn't do better financially for her. Looking forward to Muller's commentary on WOMAN, I'll check that out next week.