Archive for category: Film Noir

Interview: Eddie Muller, the Ambassador of Film Noir

21 February, 2010 (21:17) | Film Noir, Interviews, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker

Author, critic, film authority and festival programmer Eddie Muller was branded “The Czar of Noir” by James Ellroy for his knowledge of and passion for the subject. Since publishing Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir and programming a film noir festival in Los Angeles in 1998, Muller has become not [...]

The Reckless Moment: Max Ophuls’ Masterpiece of Middle Class America

28 September, 2009 (07:48) | Essays, Film Noir, Max Ophuls, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker

The thirty-second year of the Seattle Art Museum’s annual Film Noir Cycle, “the granddaddy of the world’s film noir festivals,” opens with one of the most unheralded masterpieces of shadowy American melodrama: The Reckless Moment (1949), directed by continental stylist Max Ophuls (shortened to “Opuls” for his American screen credits). Known [...]

Jeanne Dielman and Nikkatsu Noir – DVDs for the Week

24 August, 2009 (17:18) | DVD, Film Noir, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
“A singular work in film history,” begins the description on back of the case of Criterion’s long-awaited DVD release of Chantal Akerman’s astounding 1975 Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. That is no hyperbole. Jeanne Dielman is a painstaking, excruciatingly exacting [...]

Reign of Terror and The Yankee Clipper – DVDs for the week

13 April, 2009 (18:09) | Anthony Mann, DVD, Film Noir, Silent Cinema, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker

Reign of Terror (aka The Black Book)
Anthony Mann’s Reign of Terror (1949) has my vote for the most unique film noir ever made. All the hallmarks of great film noir – scheming and backstabbing characters, hard-boiled dialogue, narrow urban streets and dark alleys wet with rain and crowded with disreputable figures, and [...]

Keeping Score – Musique Noir: Investigating the Sound of Film Noir

2 April, 2009 (19:48) | Film Noir, Film music, by Robert C. Cumbow | By: Robert C. Cumbow

The sound of noir—plaintive sax solos, blue cocktail piano, the wail of a distant trumpet through dark, wet alleyways, hot Latin beats oozing like a neon glow from the half-shuttered windows of forbidden nightspots. You walk the sidewalks of big, lonely towns, with no destination in mind, following only the sounds, [...]

Will Eisner, Frank Miller and “The Spirit”

24 December, 2008 (15:40) | Film Noir, Film Reviews, by Sean Axmaker | By: Sean Axmaker

“… I piped up with my own theories about the relationship between comic books and movies. Without realizing it, I’d essentially characterized comics as the poor man’s film, thinking each panel the equivalent of a frozen frame of celluloid. Will [Eisner] ripped me to pieces…. What counts, he told me, is panel content, the function [...]

“Touch of Evil”: Crossing the Line

3 October, 2008 (00:01) | Essays, Film Noir, Film Reviews, Orson Welles, by Robert C. Cumbow | By: Robert C. Cumbow

[Editor's note: This essay was originally written in 1998, before the re-edited version from producer Rick Schmidlin and editor Walter Murch, and is based on the 109-minute version that was rescued from the vaults in 1975, generally known as the "preview version. This version had replaced the original 98-minute theatrical version in retrospective screenings and [...]