Best cinematography, best music, best. Orson’s character is the most perfectly amoral man ever. Valli is heartbreaking beautiful.
Gun Crazy (dir. Joseph H. Lewis)
Scarlet Street (dir. Fritz Lang, w/Edward G. Robinson)
Criss Cross (dir. Robert Siodmak, w/Burt Lancaster)
The Naked Kiss (dir. Sam Fuller)
And I will second the second on Big Bad Voodoo Lou’s suggestions as well as twickster’s.
I will also add The Man Who Wasn’t There.
What, nobody’s mentioned Detour?
And DOA is a classic. Mrs. R, usually a tough sell, liked it a lot.
And I’ve been on that ferris wheel.
I always think of Double Indemnity as the ultimate noir; people scheming to do really rotten things to each other, and you trust people about as far as you could throw them.
And after you’ve seen all the movies in this thread, try Steve Martin’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.
[trivia hijack]The little seen but quite excellent Bond film The Living Daylights has a homage to The Third Man (which is appropriate given its storyline), and shows the same ferris wheel in the background while they’re in Austria. Very cool for fans of The Third Man. (The same film also has a blatent homage to Lawrence of Arabia and a rather complex storyline, 'specially for a Bond film.)[/trivia hijack]
I love the way MacMurray always calls Stanwyck, “Baby”, in this totally disaffected tone, as if he doesn’t give a crap one way or another. Great film.
I don’t think anyone has yet suggested Clouzot’s Diabolique (not the pointless remake with Sharon Stone), Sunset Blvd, and the original Cape Fear. The other suggestions in the thread have all been excellent, but my personal favorite is Out Of The Past with Robert Mitchem. “You say to yourself, ‘How hot can it get?’ Then, in Acapulco, you find out.” The Blue Dahlia is a little stilted but quite watchable, and Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai (with then wife Rita Hayworth) is quite enjoyable if not actually a classic. Hey, any film with The Man is worth seeing.
The newer color films don’t really qualify as film-noir (they’re usally considered neo-noir, or in the case of Blade Runner and Dark City, scifi-noir) but Chinatown and LA Confidential are great ones. Two of my favorites are adapted from Jim Thompson novels: the underrated After Dark, My Sweet and the absolutely terrific (both film and the gut-wrenching novel) The Grifters with John Cusack, Angelica Huston, and Annette Benning. I saw a showing of this at the Arclight a few years ago and Angelica Huston introduced it with an anecdote about how she and “Marty” (producer Martin Scorsese) had to convince director Steven Frears to cast her in the role by inviting him to dinner and having her dress what she described as an incredibly low-cut, slinky cocktail dress.
The Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple is also a good, if not great neo-noir in which there always seems to be one more body than can be legitimately explained or concealed. Most of the Coen’s output (ignoring the last couple of excretions they have shat out) have been noir-ish in theme, but The Man Who Wasn’t There is a great homage to/satire of noir films. The remake of Cape Fear is also worthwhile, as is the little-seen The Deep End, which is a redo of the rather tepid The Reckless Moment. And Christopher Nolan’s Following and Memento are neo-noirs (although the former is B&W) told with a nonlinear technique, similar to Kubrick’s The Killing (yawn).
There are many, many more (it’s my favorite genre) but I think that, in addition to the other many excellent suggestions above should keep you occupied for a bit.
Stranger
But be really careful with this one - even the author got confused and couldn’t remember who done it. It is a very confusing story.
Oh, I don’t know how I managed to skip over this one but Hitchcock’s Strangers On A Train, based (more or less) on the Patricia Highsmith novel, is a great film-noir right up until the cop-out ending. I see some asshat named Noam Murro is making a remake slated for 2006. Great. Next thing you know, they’ll be trying to remake The Big Sleep again. ::sigh::
The Asphalt Jungle is a terrific heist film with Sterling Hayden and Sam Jaffe. Not sure how I or anyone before me overlooked that one. It should be quite high on your list. It has Marylin Monroe in a bit part as a dim blonde bombshell that is just totally appropriate for her.
Stranger
Specifically, he coudn’t remember whether the chauffeur committed suicide or was murdered, and if so, by whom.
Still, the high point of that film wasn’t solving the crime (which was deliberately convoluted) but the interaction between Bogart and Bacall. Extra dialogue between the two was added in after principle photography (no doubt spiced up by their off-camera chemistry).
Stranger
Stranger, I’ve seen The Living Daylights; never considered it an homage to The Third Man, just them having to find some glamorous, but previously unused city for Bond to travel to.
I’ve read somewhere that there’s still a theater in Vienna showing The Third Man, and I think I passed by it. It would have been cool to see that movie in that place, but I only had a day-and-a-half and couldn’t spare the time. I did try to recite the cuckoo clock speech from memory on the ferris wheel, though.
That kinda bothered me the first time I saw it (The Big Sleep), but then I realized it didn’t matter. That movie isn’t about the gather-all-the-suspects-in-a-room-and-explain-what-happened scene; the style and dialog is so fantastic that it isn’t necessary. Once you accept that there’s no conventional, satisfying wrap-up, it frees you to revel in how the story unfolds.
Spoiler for those who haven’t seen one or both films:There’s the ferris wheel, the balloon man (in TLD he’s the assassin) plus the general theme of playing one side against the other and perpetrating a scam in order to make a profit (in TTM Lime is selling diluted antibiotics, in TLD Whittaker is making a fraudulent sale of weapons in order to purchase narcotics). Both Lime and Koskov fake their own deaths in order to confound authories, and sacrifice their respective girlfriends in order to seal the deception. Of course, in the end, Anna walks right past Holly Martins, whereas Bond gets the girl (as usual), but the parallels are significant and in the case of the Vienna highlights, deliberate.
BTW, Bernard Lee (who plays Bond’s boss “M” throughout most of the Bond series) has a significant role in The Third Man as the Sergeant; however, he’d passed on several years before The Living Daylights was filmed and so didn’t appear in that film.
Stranger
Grr…I meant to put this into the last post, but the Coen film The Big Lebowski is, in part, a deliberate satirical riff on The Big Sleep, including its many asides and red herrings and the intentional mess of a plot and lack of resolution. Most people think the movie is a scattered mess, but it is deliberate. Whether the joke is funny or not is dependant upon individual tastes.
Stranger
TEPID?!?!? The remake pales in comparison to the terrific original (by the always worthwhile Max Ophuls). Hint: If you cast a charismaless void like Goran Visnjic to fill the shoes of James Mason, you know you’re in trouble. Tilda Swinton’s good, though (as usual).
And you might-possibly-on-the-outside-remote-chance have a point about Hitchcock’s Strangers’ ending if the film was actually a noir–but it’s really not. There were plenty of thrillers back then; they don’t all automatically qualify as “noirs”.
Another heist film that’s also worth a look (and also starring Sterling Hayden) is Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing.
My top recomendations are Out of the Past which has been mentioned but really it’s all you could ever want and is so easy to find. I love The Big Heat because it has steak, hideous facial disfiguration, awesome liptick and Lee Marvin. I also love The Sweet Smell of Success featuring the hot and evil Burt Lancaster fetching as hell in ugly glasses.
I agree with everything Stranger said about how The Grifters and After Dark my Sweet are great. Jim Thompson rules noir. I read all his books as a teen and that’s how I grew up all wrong. There’s something about The Grifters that sticks with you forever! The movie version of the Grifters is weird because it feels 80s but that’s okay in a way. It feels like whatever time was cool.
I’d like to fourth or fifth (whatever we’re up to now) Touch of Evil. Orson Welles bravely gives himself the most unlikeable of roles and manages to make it almost sympathetic. Watch for the magic trick where the dynamite just ‘appears’ where he expects to find it in a search.
For my own contribution; does Psycho count as noir? Looks to me like it ought to. Either way a great film.
I can’t believe someone beat me to Laura. So, I guess I’ll have to mention one of the most unusual film noir I’ve ever seen - Lady in the Lake. Shot in first person, as though you, the viewer, are the main character. Very, very strange.
Sorry, gotta stick by my comment. James Mason is excellent in it, of course, but the film is firmly rooted in the morality of the time and the story plods along. The Deep End raises the stakes considerably, and Swinton plays the role of the housewife cum conspirator to a hilt. I especially love how she ends up co-opting Visnjic into helping with her father-in-law.
Well it is…sort of. The film’s femme fatale isn’t a chick, but Bruno, in one of those subversive implied homoerotic relationships that Highsmith loved to write about. Guy is the naïve schlub who gets pulled into the web, et cetera. It’s certainly as much of a noir as, say, DOA or Cape Fear and moreso than Key Largo.
Yeah, even though we’ve seen it all on Ricki Lake and Jerry Springer, the love triangle between the three main characters and the nihilistic, out of a dark alley ending is just a rabbit punch to the kidney. Everybody I’ve recommened the book to agrees. It’s a pity not all of Thompson’s work was of such caliber, but this one is a veritable Shakespeare of noir. (Cain is great too, even though his work is considerably more literary and often dryly satirical.)
The script for the film The Grifters was adapted by Donald Westlake and he does the neat trick of adapting the time period to the 'Eighties while at the same time remaining almost completely faithful to both the spirit and text of the novel, given dialog and situations that are anachronistic and yet still plausible. The end result is that it creates its own world, a sort of Los Angeles out of time where one expects Philip Marlowe to walk right around the corner. That he and director Frears managed to maintain the same dynamic between the characters (especially between Lilly and Myra) and the sucker punch ending is a tribute of vision over the usual Hollywood pandering. Not that it’s an art house film or at all pretentious; it just rolls toward the necessary conclusion without giving way to the normal expectation that things will work themselves out. A real kick-ass film.
Stranger
Psycho starts out pretending to be a noir, but then shifts to a thriller/original slasher flic with the (then) surprising death of a main character when Janet Leigh is stabbed in the shower. It was unheard of then to do such a thing. A good film to be certain (not sure about great; other than Anthony Perkins’ exceptionally creepy performance and the cinematography the film doesn’t actually hold up all that well, especially the hokey explaination in the end) but definitely a groundbreaking film.
Another occurs to me that I don’t think anyone has yet suggested, but Kurosawa’s entry into the genre is Stray Dog, about a cop who has his pistol stolen by a pickpocket and has to locate and retrieve it.
Another entry to the list should be the noir/Western hybrid of John Sturges Bad Day At Black Rock, which contains what is unquestionably Spencer Tracy’s best film role.
Stranger
I’d certainly second this - not only a template for Kubrick’s later work and obsessions, but also for the slavish tribute Reservior Dogs and Pulp Fiction pay to it. . And a darn good yarn it is, too.
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