Ten Best Film Noir?

Maltese Falcon is my favourite; Double Indemnity is probably the best. Born to Kill is another good one. I like Body Heat for a neo-noir. Vive les femmes fatale.

 

There are a lot of opinions at imdb. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038355/board/nest/11262888?ref_=tt_bd_5

Brody could have done more than beat up the chauffeur and lied to Bogie (why would he confess it to him) about commiting the murder; however, movies back then "told the truth" and what the actors say is what happened, so that would mean he didn't do it . The "lie" Hitchcock told in "Stage Fright" wasn't appreciated by the audiences of the time.

 

It seems that Moontide was released in 1942, not 1944 as I thought... strange movie.

That reminded me of a story Faulkner told about working on location with Tod Browning, on a project called 'Louisiana Lou', which eventually became Lazy River (George B. Seitz, 1934). Also, many of Browning's films do have elements of noir. From the Tod Browning biography Dark Carnival:

"I asked Browning when I was supposed to start work, and what was the story? Browning said I should go see the continuity writer and ask him. I found him, introduced myself as the dialogue writer, and said 'What's the story?' The continuity writer said 'Never mind about that, you go off and write some dialogue and then I'll tell you what the story is.'" Faulkner related the continuity man's response to Browning, who exploded, "Why, that son of a bitch. You tell him to tell you the story right away."

Shortly thereafter, said Faulkner, a telegram arrived from Hollywood: FAULKNER IS FIRED. "Browning blew up," the writer recalled, the director assuring him he would be reinstated. Browning filed his complaint, and another telegram arrived: BROWNING IS FIRED.

 

That's an interesting point - but I would have to disagree somewhat. In specific film genres historically there's always been an implicit understanding between filmmaker and audience that information will be withheld, distorted or denied in the course of generating suspense and interest in the film fiction. And film noir is perhaps the film form (or genre, if you believe it to be) where that occurs - to the sometimes near-complete disruption of the formal and thematic paradigms of classical Hollywood cinema. Convoluted and downbeat narratives, red herrings, duplicitous characters, formal devices that distort and fracture the seamless classical style (off-kilter framing, chiaroscuro lighting, labyrinthine flashbacks, questionable narration) etc., all work to undermine the assumptions and 'truth' of classical cinema.

 

1. In a Lonely Place
2. Sunset Boulevard
3. Out of the Past
4. The Killers
5. Touch of Evil
6. The Postman Always Rings Twice
7. White Heat
8. Night and the City
9. He Ran All the Way
10. The Lady from Shanghai

 

I wonder if film makers back then though of film noir as a genre, and they were making "film noir," or just making movies about thugs, detectives, average guys in the wrong place at the wrong time (and we wouldn't have a movie if they had common sense .)

 

This is a photo of director Robert Aldrich on the set of Kiss Me Deadly (1955). He's holding a copy of "A Panorama of American Film Noir,” the seminal French book which coined the term 'film noir' in film criticism and outlined elements of the form. So, at least by 1955 (which is certainly late in the cycle) the question of conscious artistic intention certainly does arise...

 

Thanks.

Does anyone condsider Hitchcock's "Psycho" to be film noir? It starts out like one and then the shower scene kills it.

 

Of the 10, Blood Simple is the only one I haven't seen. About half them wouldn't be in my top 10 but probably would be in my top 25, so no major quibbles.

 

We just lost one of the all-time great noir actresses in Eleanor Parker. In her honor I nominate "Caged." She got an Oscar nomination for this one. Unfortunately, Eleanor was up against Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Gloria Swanson and winner Judy Holliday. Tough crowd...

 

One would think Hitchcock's thematic and stylistic predispositions would rate a significant mention within film noir commentary; however, it appears to be habitual critical practice to situate him within a single solitary genre: the Hitchcock genre. But films like Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, The Wrong Man, etc. obviously fall within the form.

I'd suggest the question arises mostly because of Psycho's B+W photography - but certainly Vertigo, North by Northwest, Rear Window, etc. would all very likely be deemed noir if they had also been shot in a similar fashion. There seems to be some kind of critical inability to see Hitchcock's films in any other terms than as 'Alfred Hitchcock: A Universe Unto Himself'. Very odd.

 

Hitckcock is to noir as Woody Allen is to comedy; their names form sub-genres.

 

Thanks for the picture. I'll be ordering that book. There are also some writings from the early and seminal days of Cahiers du Cinema available in book format through Amazon, BN and other sources. Regarding another poster, I wouldn't view Psycho or Clouzot's Diabolique as noir, they are more pure thrillers than anything else. I do think that Hitchcock made some nourish films. I would view Strangers on a Train as pure noir, and possibly The Wrong Man. Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious and Vertigo I would consider quasi-noir. There are some elements there, but not enough to be a pure noir. Other great films that are sort of noir, but not pure noir would include The Night of the Hunter (more of a gothic fairy tale in an agrarian setting), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (too much of an adventure flavor to the film) and M (pure horror without a prototypical nourish lead or femme fatale). I think pure noir really needs to end in the 50's as post-WWII paranoia is oft part of the setting. Films such as Chinatown and Blood Simple should be viewed as neo-noirs. Some even include The Lost Weekend by Wilder as noir, but I don't see it as such as it lacks too many essential elements of noir.

If one is going to so broadly define noir then it begins to lose its meaning. To be a pure noir, I believe there need to be at least two elements that would at the very least include a dark, foreboding mood to the story from a mysterious or suspenseful angle, but not from an angle of straight terror, such as in Psycho. The other should be the use of shadows and darkness to present some of the scenes and characters and to provide a sense of the unknown. A pure noir should contain some additional elements, although not necessarily all of them, including sexual tension/innuendo, a manipulative femme fatale, a manipulative leading man, a villain (sometimes sympathetic and sometimes not), pretense, a situation where characters lack a sense of control and a fatalistic strain that feels as though something bad and, quite possibly, deadly is going to happen. Generally, the setting should be post-WWI and post-WWII.

 

I just watched "I Wake Up Screaming" this past weekend and thought it was very good.

 

Criss Cross is way up there on my list. Ya gotta love Burt Lancaster's line: "A man eats an apple. He gets a piece of the core stuck between his teeth. He tries to work it out with some cellophane from a cigarette pack. What happens? The cellophane gets stuck in there too. Anna? What was the use. I knew that somehow I'd wind up seeing her that night." Classic! Fantastic rumba number performed as well (Esy Morales & His Rumba Band).

Some of my other favorites are: Roadhouse (Ida Lupino does an amazing performance in general, but specifically, her rendition of "One For The Road" is amazing.) Nightmare Alley is great (but I saw that ending coming at the very beginning). The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Killing. Not sure if Petrified Forest, with Humphrey Bogart is Noir, but it's at least close.

 

Criss Cross is so great. I like how lines or phrases are repeated.

Anna - "I want to cry, I want to cry"
Steve says a few times "The way you know everything, the way you got it all figured out".
A fever dream film. I need a blu-ray of this.

Re: Petrified Forest. Because of the early date it isn't considered noir generally but I think it is.

 

I think the films on the original list are - generally - so good that it's difficult to argue with their choice unless your definition of the bundaries of noir is less fluid, BUT there are so many other exceptionally good examples of this genre. It would be hard to counter anyone's argument for the inclusion of the many films mentioned so far.

I mean, to take one recent example: Criss Cross is a superb film.

 

That's pop-culture's way of dealing with Hitchcock's monstrous destruction of pop-culture itself: By singling it out you're defusing it.

 

Night Moves is pretty amazing. I think it's by a reasonably wide margin Penn's best film after Bonnie and Clyde. Studio was so iffy about it they sat on it for two years -- and it just got better, like a bottle of good wine.

 

Always liked this Gene Hackman film.

 

The Sound Of Music? Not on anybody's list?

 

How could that be? That movie reeks of noir!

 

PK didn't like that movie, you know. That's probably why I haven't seen the whole thing. I will one of these days, though.

 

I love Pauline, as you know, but I fear that she would not love me. I hung with a couple of her acolytes back in film school in the 1990s, and they actually mentioned that she was much nicer and more forgiving in person than in print. I was even offered an introduction, but the next thing I knew, she had died. :-(

My propensity for late-period Kubrick would have no doubt rankled her...

I have zero reservations about recommending Night Moves, at least -- it's a fascinating, gritty movie. I have seen it at several different points in my life, beginning when I was in high school in the early 80s, and each time I get something new and different out of it.

Penn is so inconsistent. There are a lot of things I love about The Chase, Alice's Restaurant, Little Big Man, The Missouri Breaks, etc., but none of these films has the consistency of Bonnie and Clyde. Night Moves has it.

 

Where did Out of the Past come from? Was this recent ressurected from obscurity by critics? Never even heard of it until this thread and I've known the film noir genre for decades. That kind of thing happens. Some finally recognizes the greatness of a forgotten gem (or deservedly overlooked) and it and becomes a lost classic. Same thing happened with Kiss Me Deadly (which I still think is a medicore film.)

I think film noir is getting tossed around without any real definition these days. Hitchcock is not film noir, for example. Hell, is Citizen Kane film noir because it's film in B&W? The wikipedia entry on film noir is garbage. The author tries to put Raging Bull as film noir. Absurd. Film noir should only encompass films of the 40s and 50s. After that, a film may borrow aspects of film noir, but you can't classify them as film noir, because they are not of that period. That's like calling Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man a "German expressionist" film. Monsterio's list is solid film noir classics, though I'm not sure about the Sweet Smell of Succes.


The Third Man
Strangers on a Train
Double Indemnity
Sunset Boulevard
The Postman Always Rings Twice
The Big Sleep
Sweet Smell of Success
Touch of Evil
The Big Heat

Should add DOA and Ace in the Hole (talk about bleak).