Noirvember 2023 - Rate the last noir you watched

Nightmare Alley

3 1/2 out of 4.

Kind of dragged a it past the one hour mark but picked up around the 90 minute mark.

Detour (1945)


I wasn't such a fan of this one. It looks shoddily made and the plot is fairly preposterous. The main character is either an idiot... or he really is lying. That's a more interesting angle to the whole thing that's never quite explored but then again it's barely more than an hour long.





Cast a Dark Shadow (1955)



Intriguing British noir that stars Dirk Bogarde as a gold digger whose plot to kill his wealthy older wife for her inheritance goes awry. I like Bogarde and I liked this, there was an interesting class angle that added a new dimension to the noir plot. It goes a bit overwrought towards the end but otherwise recommended. Good performances.





Elevator to the Gallows (1958)



Noir meets French new wave. Noir-wave, perhaps. A man's plot to kill his boss goes wrong when he is trapped in an elevator and his car is stolen, implicating him in a crime elsewhere. Beautifully shot with lots of long silences as he commits his crime and tries to make his escape.

That's a good point. And films mis-labeled as noir are plentiful. The tendency is for sites to label any crime picture shot in black and white --particularly chiaroscuro-- and was made in the '40s, as "noir". There's a big distinction, but sites seem to not understand it.

Dark Passage



Been looking forward to this one quite a bit. Gimmicks aren’t necessarily a bad thing for me but I do think when you lead with one it usually puts you behind the eight ball. This movie never escapes that for me. The first person pov through the first forty minutes truly feels like what you experience at an amusement park show. It just did nothing for me at all.

That would haven’t been enough to lose me completely if the story had been more compelling. It’s pretty paint by numbers and bland. I won’t say I guessed the ending, but it also didn’t surprise me at all. Plus, I really didn’t care.

Hard to mess up a Bogart Bacall vehicle this badly in my opinion.

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I liked it more than you did, but I can see your points. Detour was actually meant to be a much longer film, but much of the script was not used. That's maybe why it felt so collapsed. OTOH it enhances the claustrophobia.

I think Al Roberts could have been better cast than by using Tom Neal, but he kinda grows on the viewer. A small thing that bugged me was his hat, especially at the beginning. It made Neal look like a caricature.

Ann Savage's Vera is definitely one of the nastiest, shrill, low down femme fatales in all of noir. Between Roberts' defeatist and very noir decisions and Vera's rottenness, the story keeps up on the paranoia and depression.

One thing that I think is interesting is that

Ouch! Surprised by your rating, don't think I've ever given a noir a real low rating. I believe it was Whitbissel who said he'd never seen a noir that he didn't like at least somewhat. But yeah I get the criticism of the film and agree that it did seem like a gimmick. I guess I must have really liked Agnes Moorehead as I see I gave this a which is probably too high now that I think of it. You should check out Lady in the Lake which uses the same camera as pov of the lead...it's not a great noir but it will expand your noir-ledge

Read about Tom Neil at Wiki, especially what he did to his last wife....OMG if ever an actor was a noir baddie it was him. In comparison bad noir guy Dan Duryea in real life was a family man, involed in PTA with his kid's school and liked to garden in his greenhouse. Just interesting how some of these actors were in real life.

Yeah, it is interesting to discover some of these people's private lives when reading up on them. As you know Lawrence Tierney was a genuine badass trouble maker in real life. Hardly ever went into a bar without starting a fist fight. But yet his best friend was Elisha Cook, Jr. who never got into any trouble.

Ah, I just seen Elisha Cook Jr last night in The Maltese Falcon. He was a gunsel (sp)? Now there's a term I don't hear much in movies, not ever noirs.

Yeah, gunsel means gunman, and there were oodles of them in noir, especially low level bodyguard types like Wilmer was in TMF. According to Webster, it comes from a Yiddish word. They say the term was first used in a movie in 1943, which was right when noir really got rolling. That'd be tough to run down that movie..

I would've expected more from a Budd Boetticher film, but back in the day, director's were often under contract to a studio so if they were told to make a hour long b-movie, they had little choice. At any rate the problem isn't with the direction it's the insipid simple minded script. Boetticher himself called it a "nothing" picture.

The movie plays out like it was made for Sunday matinee viewings...that's where you'd find a lot of kids. It seems like a kid's story about German spies trying to steal a secret document from a federal agent. This is tagged noir at IMDB and Wiki, but it's not noir, it's straight up adventure mystery.

I've seen some under-whelming noirs but this one is a favorite - The Stranger (1946), in which Orson Welles is living under an assumed identity as a private school teacher in a small town, but he has a secret, which is that he is an escaped nazi war criminal, Franz Kindler, a death camp officer. He's in love with a town woman played by Loretta Young and being pursued by a nazi hunter played by Edward G Robinson. When Robinson's character deliberately releases a sycophantic follower of Kindler, he follows him to the real quarry, which is the camp commandant. Of course, being the kind of movie it is, there's lots of high drama, tense dialog and fast talking, leading to the inevitable end of Kindler.

What with Welles, Robinson and Young all doing their noir-best, Welles directing, everybody wearing trench coats and hats, dramatic music and mostly night scenes, this one is about as noir as you can get and it's early in the time cycle of the noir style. It has an unusual way of dispatching the bad guy related to the trailer still.

This has got to be the most noir trailer ever done. The full movie also contains some brief documentary footage from real death camps, the first time anything like that appeared in movies.

That graying hair they did on Orson makes him look all the more imposing. Of course with that voice and cadence he's already imposing! Good noir I've seen a couple of times.

It doesn't seem to be a high profile movie, surprising since it was Welles' most conventional film; quite clear and concise. I've heard people confuse it with the Camus novel, which is completely different and unrelated. It would be interesting for someone to do a musical analysis of that style of orchestral drama. It's highly dramatic, orchestral and romantic, quite different from some noir movies I've seen where they went for jazzy music, sax solos, etc. There's additional drama added to the movie in that Jewish actor Edward G Robinson (Emmanuel Goldenberg) was an activist, alleging war crimes and accusing the nazis even before the war. He was subsequently "gray listed" due to making Hollywood investors nervous with his anti-nazi statements.

Good old Eddie G. I've seen some documentaries on him and everything I heard about him was that he was, one nice guy! I'm not surprised to hear he had the guts to speak up against the Nazis even before the war. I didn't know that he had been gray listed at one time, thanks for posting that. I really should check out my of his films.

I liked that one quite a bit. Good movie with sharp dialogue and strong performances. An entertaining film noir.

I didn't consider it a noir, BUT it is eligible for the countdown, as it is tagged film noir at IMDB (just scroll down the movie page to the middle and you'll see the tags)...I didn't see them at first but they are there! Hence I'm editing this post right now

Not a bad film, not a great film. This was Lawrence Tierney's first starring role. He's not particularly good here but then again it is an hour long b movie from a poverty row studio, Monogram Pictures. It's saving grace might be that it was the first film to portray an actual criminal by name, that pissed off a lot of people According to IMDB:

Good movie. I just checked imdb and it is tagged as film noir, so I believe it would be eligible.

Thanks Allaby, let me check IMDB again I was in a BIG hurry to write that so I could get off to work. Back in a few.