what a great list, and i'm so glad somebody besides me loves Blast Of Silence. great time of the year to watch it as well, since the whole film takes place around Christmas time...not that it's all that uplifting or anything! it always makes me think of Samuel Fuller, since the unforgettable Ralphie was also in Shock Corridor. i always thought that Anthony Mann directed some of the best noirs, especially the ones with John Alton as his cinematographer...T-Men, Raw Deal, Border Incident, etc...great expressionistic photography and also extremely violent for the era. -scott
From: nicola negri <noizerve@yahoo.com> To: zorn-list@mailman.xmission.com Subject: Re: film noir - spillane - any favorites Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 16:52:08 +0100 (CET)
hello
about the "hard-boiled" school of writers i admit that i know only the classics, and my favourites are Dashiell Hammett (a gifted writer and a great story teller. i love all his books but "Red Harvest" is my favourite one) and Raymond Chandler (especially "Farewell, My Lovely " and "The Lady In The Lake"). as i said my knowledge in this field is limited, it seems to me that Skip Heller can tell us much more about it, read his previous post on the subject, he gave me precious indications on future readings..
about Mickey Spillane, well, i like reading his books, i think he created a genre of his own, BUT most of the time his misogynous and macho attitude is a little annoying to me..
talking about "film noir", well there are lots of movies i love, but the best noir films ever for me are:
- The Maltese Falcon (1941) - John Huston (the film traditionally regarded as the progenitor of noir cinema) - Detour (1945) - Edgar G. Ulmer (the film that took fatalism, one of the defining aspects of film noir, at its highest degree) - Out of the Past (aka Build My Gallows High) (1947) - Jacques Tourneur (for me this is THE classic film noir, the cinematography is by the master of shadows, Nicholas Musuraca) - Gun Crazy (aka Deadly Is The Female) (1949) - Joseph H. Lewis (ever heard the term "femme fatale"?) - The Big Heat (1953) - Fritz Lang (incredibly modern and harsh for its age; with one of Lee Marvin's first appearances) - Kiss Me Deadly (1955) - Robert Aldrich (super-modern and stylistically gorgeous film) - The Night of the Hunter (1955) - Charles Laughton (a different pont of view on noir, a timeless masterpiece) - The Killing (1956)- Stanley Kubrick (Kubrick's second (!) film; one of the best constructed movies of all time) - Touch Of Evil (1958) - Orson Welles (in my opinion Welles's real masterpiece, simply astonishing) - Blast Of Silence (1961) - Allen Baron (an unknown masterpiece, a Dostoevskijan film noir)
these are only (some of) my favourite ones, but many others are great masterpieces and classic noirs. i'm thinking about: The Big Sleep, In a Lonely Place, Double Indemnity, The Stranger, Scarlet Street, Sunset Boulevard, The Third Man, The Asphalt Jungle, The Lady from Shanghai..
an historical note for anyone interested: the term "film noir" was first used in 1955 by Borde and Chaumeton in their book "Panorama du Film Noir Américain", the first critical essay on film noir and the only one actually written during this genre's golden age (traditionally 1941-1958).
hope this post will be of any interest to the list, i'd like to see more on the subject.
bye
nic
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