Tag: film noir
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Pickup on South Street (1953) – Sam Fuller’s Apolitical Cold War Noir
This was written as the introduction for the Mesilla Valley Film Society’s screening of Pickup on South Street in November, 2024. Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street stands as one of the most visceral and authentic crime films of the 1950s, its gritty realism stemming directly from Fuller’s own experiences as a teenage crime reporter. At just…
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“Bad Day At Black Rock” is a Sun-Blasted Southwestern Post-War Noir with a Dark Heart
Spencer Tracey faces down Robert Ryan in the middle of nowhere in a story that goes harder than you’d expect for a major studio release in 1955.
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Sam Fuller’s “Underworld U.S.A.” is a studio system triumph despite compromise.
Fuller’s penultimate picture for Columbia is among his best.
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“Phantom Lady” or: How Two First-Timers Made a Genre Classic You Really Should See
This was written as the introduction for the Mesilla Valley Film Society’s screening of Phantom Lady in May, 2024. 1944 was a great year for noir — you had Otto Preminger’s Laura; George Cukor’s Gaslight; Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, to name a few — so it’s easy to understand when a picture worthy of consideration gets shuffled…
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Sam Fuller’s “The Naked Kiss” is sordid, weird and revealing. I love it.
This was written as the introduction for the Mesilla Valley Film Society’s screening of The Naked Kiss in April, 2024. I don’t know if there’s an American filmmaker whose work I admire more than Sam Fuller. A high school dropout who became a journalist, then a screenwriter, then a soldier in World War II before…
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“Hell Or High Water” – Western Noir about the Working Class and Capitalism
This is barely rewritten from my notes given before the Mesilla Valley Film Society’s March 2023 screening of Hell and High Water for the noir series I’ve been curating.
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“Lone Star” – Borderlands Noir at its Most Mature
I wrote this introduction for The Mesilla Valley Film Society’s screening of Lone Star in February, 2023.
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“On Dangerous Ground” – A Hard-Boiled Trip to the Hinterlands
I wrote this introduction for The Mesilla Valley Film Society’s screening of On Dangerous Ground in December, 2023. Robert Ryan is Jim Wilson, an embittered big city detective who’s exiled to the intentionally ambiguous “Upstate” to track down a killer. Ida Lupino plays Mary Maiden, a blind woman who’s dragged into his quest through circumstance. He…
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Noirvember: “Double Indemnity” (1944)
When you get a group of two or more noir nerds together, there are two things that are inevitably going to happen: 1. They will argue about what is film noir. 2. They will agree that Double Indemnity is in the top three films noir, if not the absolute best of the genre.
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Noirvember: Fritz Lang’s “Human Desire” (1954)
Fritz Lang is one of those directors whose name is synonymous with film noir: a German expatriate who brought his expressionistic storytelling technique to Hollywood and quickly began to change how studio films looked and felt. His debut, Fury (which I talk about here) still shocks in spite of its studio-mandated happy ending, and movies like…