Smart Words About Cinema
[This is a slightly edited version of a program note written for an Autumn 1971 University of Washington Office of Lectures and Concerts Film Series, "The Cinema of Orson Welles." It is submitted for your consideration because The Lady from Shanghai is a cardinal film noir and the stylistic points made about Welles's direction are [...]
“Kansas City Confidential” (HD Cinema Classics/Film Chest) The first of three collaborations between Phil Karlson, a director who graduated from B-movies with a strong storytelling punch and a tough, two-fisted sensibility, and John Payne, a former light romantic lead and bland song-and-dance man of Fox musicals, was a career changer for both of them. Payne [...]
[Originally published in the National Society of Film Critics anthology The B List] If you had to select a single film to justify the present enthusiasm for film noir and define its allure, few movies could compete with Gun Crazy. The same goes for celebrating the potential of B-movies to achieve grade-A flair, excitement, and [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 48, February 1976] Detour is a masterpiece of wry perversity, a film virtually constructed on irony and paradox: an incredibly claustrophobic film about hitchhiking on the “open road”; the bleakest of films noirs, with the bulk of the action taking place during the day and away from the city. But [...]
99 River Street (MGM Limited Edition Collection) Phil Karlson is, to my mind, the toughest of the film noir directors. Films like Kansas City Confidential (1952) and Phenix City Story (1955) gives us heroes who get knocked around by life and come up for more. 99 River Street (1953), arguably Karlson’s greatest film and certainly [...]
Film noir historians trace the roots back to the silent era and the full flowering to the war years, but most tend to agree that the first true American film noir came in the otherwise modest package of an ambitious B-movie crime thriller from 1940. Before the hard-boiled world of suspicious private eyes, double-crossing dames [...]
[Originally published in Seattle Weekly, July 21, 1999; written in anticipation of a noir package on Turner Classic Movies] The great French director Jean Renoir, obliged to become a great American director by the German occupation of his country, records in his memoirs a moment around the end of World War II when his two [...]
[A portion of an introduction originally published in They Went Thataway: Redefining Film Genres, Mercury House, 1994] Whichever way you turn, Fate steps out a foot to trip you. –Tom Neal’s Everyschmuck in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945) Film noir may be the hottest genre in American filmmaking these days—a strange development when you consider [...]
For the next week, Seattle is Noir City and Parallax View is helping put it on the map. “Noir City,” the traveling portion of The Film Noir Foundation’s annual San Francisco noir festival, opens it fifth edition in Seattle on Friday, February 11 and casts its long shadow with a week of double features, all [...]
The Prowler (1951) (VCI) has been one of those acknowledged classics of film noir that many have had to take on faith for far too long. All but absent from TV screenings since the early days of cable TV, never released on VHS and previously unavailable on DVD, The Prowler has been almost impossible to [...]
In the wee hours of this a.m., Turner Classic Movies showed a film that’s been a lifelong favorite of mine. The term ‘lifelong’ is used casually: the movie was made the year I was born, a coincidence in which I take irrational satisfaction; I didn’t actually see it till a rainy schoolday in the early [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978] I believe the really good people would be reasonably successful in any circumstance; that to be very poor and very beautiful is most probably a moral failure much more than an artistic success. Shakespeare would have done well in any generation because he would have refused to [...]
By Norman Hale [Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] Max Ophuls, the great European film director, once observed in conversation with a friend that different love relationships are expressed by different tokens: traditionally a man gives fresh-cut flowers to his mistress, but a potted plant to his wife.* Social rituals with their attendant [...]
The Only Son/There Was a Father: Two Films by Yasujiro Ozu (Criterion) It’s a cliché by now to call Yasujiro Ozu the most “Japanese” of Japanese directors, even if it is true to a point. The restrained style and quietly contemplative tone of his family dramas are a distinct and deliberate break from the western [...]
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 simply the most [...]