Film noir

The Long Goodbye (1973)

By / / 1970s, 1973 / Leave a Comment

Despite being based on Raymond Chandler’s last book, The Long Goodbye is not a film noir or hard-boiled detective movie. It’s a Robert Altman film, which means it’s anything but straightforward.

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The Long Goodbye

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Altman was known for his satirical approach, and The Long Goodbye is no exception.

Instead of relying on voice-over narration, Altman’s version of Philip Marlowe (played by Elliott Gould) frequently mutters to himself and offers commentary on the situations he and others find themselves in. Marlowe is more concerned with finding his missing cat (Morris the Cat) than with solving the case or dealing with the topless yoga vixens next door, or even the $5,000 banknote he’s received from the missing man. He’s a private eye who drifts through his cases.

Set in 1970s Los Angeles, The Long Goodbye is a far cry from the film noir-ish LA of the 1940s. However, this Marlowe is a man out of time, always wearing a suit and tie (even on the beach) and driving a 1940s Cadillac, all the while chain-smoking.

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The Woman in the Window (1944)

By / / 1940s, 1944 / Leave a Comment

I’d watch a movie starring Edward G. Robinson any day. He’s one of my favorite actors, always turning in nuanced, mesmerizing performances.

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The Woman in the Window (1944)

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Pair him with director Fritz Lang, and toss in Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey, and Dan Duryea, and you can’t go wrong.

That’s the lineup we get in this week’s club pick, The Woman in the Window (the 1944 version).

There’s little of the Expressionist light and shadows of many of Lang’s other films or of other films noir, but he layers on the genre’s moral ambiguity in The Woman in the Window. It’s a solid thriller.

Robinson plays psychology professor Richard Wanley brilliantly. In one day, Wanley goes from sending his wife and kids off to visit family to hiding the body of a man he’s killed in a mysterious woman’s apartment. And, Bennett is alluring as Alice Reed, the unintentional femme fatale.

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Body Heat

By / / 1980s, 1981 / Leave a Comment

Like a lot of the country, we’ve been having a heat wave in Florida. Temperatures last month were over 100, matching the daily record one day where I live.

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There’s also a heat wave — in more ways than one — in 1981’s Body Heat, our club’s pick for the week.

Several weeks ago, we discussed how the rain was a character in its own right in The Hole. From the opening scene (which reminded me of the opening of Psycho, set in a hot Phoenix) to the final one, the heat is equally ever-present.

You can almost feel the heat just watching, thanks to writer/director Lawrence Kasdan. The characters talk about it, their clothing shows the sweat, and the movie uses a very warm color palette.

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Double Indemnity

By / / 1940s, 1944 / 2 Comments

Double Indemnity is one of those movies that I’ve seen countless times, and will happily watch again.

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Double Indemnity

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For many of us, Fred MacMurray was the easygoing father, Steve Douglas, in the long-running TV show My Three Sons. In Double Indemnity, he’s the fast-talking, unsmiling insurance salesman Walter Neff, who is easily pulled into a scheme with a woman he’s fallen for, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), to murder her husband for the insurance money.

Visually and plot-wise, Double Indemnity is a film noir, but the dialog is straight out of hard-boiled detective fiction. It makes sense since the script was co-written by Raymond Chandler.

Chandler was one of the “Black Mask Boys,” a group of crime-fiction authors lured by editor Joseph T. “Cap” Shaw to the pulp magazine. Black Mask introduced readers to hard-boiled detective fiction with the short novel “Three Gun Terry,” by Carroll John Daly, in its May 15, 1923, issue. The main character, Terry Mack, was a smart-alecky private detective who talked tough and in the vernacular of the streets, unlike the drawing-room detectives that had been familiar to readers.

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Shoot the Piano Player

By / / 1960, 1960s / Leave a Comment

French New Wave films are an area that I’ve woefully overlooked.

While I’ve seen a handful — La Jetée, Bob le Flambeur, Alphaville, and (thanks to film club) The Umbrellas of Cherbourg — I haven’t seen the essential movies.

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Shoot the Piano Player

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(Curiously, one list of New Wave films included François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451. I love the movie, but don’t consider it New Wave.)

So much has been written about the New Wave and Shoot the Piano Player that it doesn’t make sense to rehash things. But a few thoughts came to mind while watching the movie and an accompanying interview with Truffaut from 1965.

During the chase at the end of the movie, one of the gangsters, Momo (played by Claude Mansard), twirls his pistol before firing a fatal shot. It’s incongruous with the seriousness of the scene.

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Blood Simple

By / / 1980, 1980s / Leave a Comment

I first saw Blood Simple, not at the theater, but on a 27-inch color TV from a VHS tape that I’d rented. After watching Raising Arizona, I wanted to check out Joel and Ethan Coen’s first film (and back then, that was the way to do it).

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Blood Simple

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At first, it’s a textbook film-noir plot: A Texas bar owner (Dan Hedaya) hires a private detective (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill his wife (Frances McDormand) and the bartender (John Getz) she’s been stepping out with. But, it’s not as simple as that, of course.

I understood the term “blood-simple,” as used by the Continental Op in Dashiell Hammett’s fix-up novel Red Harvest, to mean a craziness, not necessarily limited to one person, where they think that killing is the easiest way to get what they want, without thinking of the ramifications to themselves or anyone else.

Toss in the fact that it’s not easy to kill someone as you think, and that you may not be seeing the whole picture, and it makes “blood-simple” much more complex.

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