Film-Noir Discussion/DVD Review Thread

[drinkanddestroy]

We need this in NYC  

Instead of waiting for someone else to do it, maybe you should MAKE festivals, cj? How much would it cost to rent a local upstate theater on a weekday to play a few of your dvd's? if you advertise it by posting the info on some of the message boards you are a member of, you don't think you can get enuogh noir fans to come and at least recoup the cost of renting the theater? You can speak for a few minutes before and/or after each movie, so you can officially call it a "festival."  

And Of course, I'll jump run out and refill the popcorn whenever necessary 

[cigar joe]

Instead of waiting for someone else to do it, maybe you should MAKE festivals, cj? How much would it cost to rent a local upstate theater on a weekday to play a few of your dvd's? if you advertise it by posting the info on some of the message boards you are a member of, you don't think you can get enuogh noir fans to come and at least recoup the cost of renting the theater? You can speak for a few minutes before and/or after each movie, so you can officially call it a "festival."  

And Of course, I'll jump run out and refill the popcorn whenever necessary 

I don't think its all that simple, I think you have to pay who ever still owns the rights for a public showing, so it would be the theater and the owners of the rights.

You da lawyer, find out the legal aspects. There is a theater called Upstate Films in Rhinebeck , that shows a lot of foreign and off the beaten track films about a mile from the Amtrak Station in Rinecliff.

[dave jenkins]

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film3/dvd_reviews56/columbia_film_noir_classics_III_.htm

[dave jenkins]

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Scarlet-Street-Blu-ray/34566/#Review

[dave jenkins]

Never heard of this one, but it sounds great: http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s3788vice.html

[cigar joe]

Never heard of this one, but it sounds great: http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s3788vice.html

yea I'll probably give that one a shot.

[dave jenkins]

Ordered the Columbia Classics Film Noir Collection 3 from TCM. Even after the discount that brought the set down to 35.99, when adding on shipping and sales tax for NY state the final price was $45. I guess that's still only $9 a film, so, given what MOD discs are going for, a bargain. Now I just hope TCM ships my order promptly. Really looking forward to seeing some of those flicks.

[dave jenkins]

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film3/blu-ray_reviews56/scarlet_street_blu-ray.htm

[dave jenkins]

So, even though I pre-ordered the new noir set (exclusive to TCM) before the supposed release date of 2/14, on that date TCM showed my order status as "backordered." Now they're showing a shipping date of 2/27. What a bunch of clowns.

[cigar joe]

Noir Film Locations a new tour in the making I feel. . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/02/movies/MoviesFeatures/02city.html?pagewanted=all

[cigar joe]

New site found Film Noir.net will add to index also:

http://filmsnoir.net/

[drinkanddestroy]

Ok, I'm continuing the discussion on DETOUR here. (The previous post on DETOUR was here http://www.fistful-of-leone.com/forums/index.php?topic=1822.msg145275#msg145275 . cj: at the end of that post, perhaps you wanna post a link to this? Thanks   )

This was one of the stranger films I have seen. I imagine it's the type that some people just love and others just think it's terribly strange. (As usual), I'm in the latter category.

SPOILER ALERT

This movie has a great premise for a noir but completely falls off the table at the end. Yeah, I get the idea promoted by some that this whole flashback was really Al's imagination and/or what he wants us to believe, and that that final "arrest" is probably not actually happening anywhere other than in his own mind. It gives us the idea that whether or not he is actually arrested, this dude will always be imprisoned in/by his own mind. But still, I did not find the ending satisfactory.

An unsourced sentence on Wikipedia says that the ending was to satisfy the Hays Code, which did not allow murderers to get away free http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detour_%281945_film%29#Censorship Maybe that's true, but I don't know whether I am comfortable giving a free pass to what is IMO a bad ending, just cuz of the Hays Code. I wish they had been able to still find a satisfactory ending. Maybe have him walking down a highway alone, (trying to thumb a lift?) and a cop car starts getting close to him (maybe with sirens flashing?) and then the movie ends. Who knows; maybe the cop is actually arresting him for the murders, or maybe just for hitchhiking. That would emphasize the point that he'll forever have to live paranoid of what will happen, and from his perspective,. it's always the worst.
Sure, you can argue that the ending as is is still pretty ambiguous, cuz we don't really know why he's being arrested, and whether it was only in his imagination. But I just felt the movie fell off the table and was really unsatisfactory.

And I couldn't stand Ann Savage's performance. Sure, she is supposed to be playing a nasty bitch, but it takes talent to play someone like that, while not being grating to the viewer. Anyone can be an annoying villain, but the great performances are those that can make us feel that Al is annoyed and being abused by this woman, without actually wanting to tear our own hair out every time she opens her mouth, which is what I felt like doing. (Reminds me of the actress who played the Gene Hackman character's wife in Bonnie and Clyde: couldn't she have found a way to project to the audience that she was a hysterical bitch, without ruining every scene she was in and making us want to stuff our ears every time she opened her mouth?)

There are some people who are specifically big noir fans and love noirs for noir's sake; ie. even if it's a story that they wouldn't like as a non-noir drama, they'd love it when done in the noir style, cuz they simply love noir.
Then there are others who are simply big fans of drama; whether the drama is a noir or not is not a plus nor a minus, and they judge the film by the same standards either way; and if it's the sort of movie they'd find pretty lame if it were not a noir, they don't enjoy it one bit better if its done as a proper noir.

If you are in the first category, you may love this movie.
I am in the second category, and therefore, I found the ending very disappointing.

Therefore, if I have to rate the movie (which I hate doing  ) I agree with those here that are giving it in the 6.5 range

p.s. The picture quality is beyond awful. The color often switches back and forth between a very weird bluish tinged b/w, and a more "normal looking" b/w. But I guess you can't expect much better from a 1945 film that is in the public domain.
 

[dave jenkins]

An unsourced sentence on Wikipedia says that the ending was to satisfy the Hays Code, which did not allow murderers to get away free http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detour_%281945_film%29#Censorship

I doubt very much whether the makers of Detour submitted their film to the Breen office for approval.

UPDATE: I was wrong. Detour's MPAA certificate number is 11048 (check here if you'd like to see for yourself: http://members.chello.nl/~a.degreef/Filmnummers.html ).

[cigar joe]

Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir by Sheri Chinen Biesen (Oct 19, 2005), and its given me some new insight into what I'm trying to quantify. I suggest everyone read it. Some quotes from the book below.

A number of elements all came together into what The New York Times tagged the "red meat crime cycle" (before French critics coined the term Film Noir) at the onset of WWII. "The PCA' s lapses in code enforcement, the Office of Censorship banning "un-American" Hollywood gangsters but condoning of depictions of war related atrocities, and the Office of War Information's regulation of screen stories depicting the combat front or domestic home front to promote the war effort---all of these developments complicated WWII censorship and encouraged hard-boiled film adaptations that initially reformed gangsters and promoted patriotic crime." Pictures were filmed with "tremendous studio rationing of lighting, electricity, film stock, and set materials" in an uncharacteristically dark urban Los Angeles basin in response to wartime blackouts.

The first Noir where all of the elements came together was Double Indemnity, and along with other wartime productions such as The Phantom Lady and, Murder My Sweet represented some of the most expressionistic, stylistically black phase of film noir (what I'm calling the *Hard Core Noirs*). "The noir aesthetic evolved from the wartime constraints on film making practices. Brooding, often brutal realism was conveyed in low lit images recycled sets (disguised by shadows, smoke, artificial fog, and rain), tarped studio back lots, or enclosed sound stages.

In the post war period film makers redefined noir realism having more flexibility in location shooting and lighting. Wartime Noir created a psychological atmosphere that in many ways marked a response to an increasingly realistic and understandable anxiety---about war, shortages, changing gender roles, and "a world gone mad"---that was distinctive from the later postwar paranoia about the bomb, the cold war, HUAC, and the blacklist which was more intrinsic to the late 40's and 50's Noir pictures." (lighter grayer or Films Gris, *Soft Core Noir*)

And you can see this in the films. Wilder's Double Indemnity is darker in visual style than 1950's Sunset Boulevard, Fritz Langs Ministry of Fear and Scarlett Street are darker than The Big Heat (1953). But there are some exceptions Aldrich's *Kiss Me Deadly*(1955) and Lewis' *The Big Combo*(1955) are pretty dark, but the general trend outlined in the book is distinctive and sort of explains the reason for the range in the pallet of Films Noir.

[dave jenkins]

Sounds like an interesting book, and doubtless it has some interesting things to say, but when I see this kind of B.S. I lose a lot of interest:

Wartime Noir created a psychological atmosphere that in many ways marked a response to an increasingly realistic and understandable anxiety---about war, shortages, changing gender roles, and "a world gone mad"---that was distinctive from the later postwar paranoia about the bomb, the cold war, HUAC, and the blacklist which was more intrinsic to the late 40's and 50's Noir pictures."

Film noir is and always has been escapist entertainment. People don't watch it to see "a response to an increasingly realistic and understandable anxiety." They watch it to divert themselves from the hum-drum pattern of their daily lives. If people are worried about something, they go to comedies or musicals--things that take their minds off human suffering. Noir, which features human anxiety and suffering, is entertaining only to people who are realitively free of such things.