Category: Directors

Stray Dog (Japan 1949): Kurosawa 5-star Noir

Stray Dog (Japan 1949): Kurosawa 5-star Noir

After a rookie cop loses his gun to a pickpocket in a crowded bus on a steamy Summer day, he begins an obsessive search for the weapon.

Akira Kurosawa’s 10th film, Stray Dog(aka Nora inu), directly inspired by Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948), explores the nether world of post-WW2 Japan in a story that parallels the American noir theme of the returning soldier’s re-integration into civilian society. Top-line acting, innovative editing, and Kurosawa’s deft direction bring the real streets of Japan into deep focus. A western soundtrack reinforces, for a western audience, the familiarity of the urban milieu depicted on the screen, where hotel signs and night club neon are in English.

Kurosawa uses the weather brilliantly to build an atmosphere charged with frustration, and most impressively in an erotic night club scene where exhausted chorus girls slump to the floor backstage breathing heavily their skin glistening with sweat.

Stray Dog (Japan 1949)Stray Dog (Japan 1949)

Contrary to received expectations, the female protagonists are drawn deeply and sympathetically.

The ying and the yang of the oriental take on reality informs the theme: two men’s different responses to a chance event underlie the story of pursuit tempered by empathy, and the realisation that the pursuer could as easily have been the pursued.

Stray Dog (Japan 1949)

Not to be missed.

Ace In The Hole (1952): The Media Circus

Ace In The Hole (1951)

“A brilliant arrangement of cause and effect…
unique as a mirror of the morbid psychology of
crowds… revolting but incontrovertibly true.”
– New York Times

“Terrific drama. Grim tale of a big city reporter
who capitalizes on a disaster to ride himself back
to the big time. Unrelenting in its cynicism.”
– Steve H. Scheuer, Movies on TV and Video.

Ace in the Hole (aka The Big Carnival) is a savage critique not only of a corrupted but also corrupting modern mass media. Perhaps Billy Wilder’s best film, this subversive morality tale was not a box office success when first released. As Wilder said of the audience response at the time: “Americans expected a cocktail and felt I was giving them a shot of vinegar instead.”.

Kirk Douglas as the self-seeking journalist, Chuck Tatum, dominates the screen and develops by the climax as one of Wilder’s more complex characterisations. There are noir elements in the movie, but classifying it as a noir unfairly limits its scope and the depth of social criticism. Only the poor trapped man, his inconsolable parents, and the owner of the small town newspaper, have any true decency. Everyone else, is either corrupt or corruptible, if not downright stupid or plain evil – the trapped man’s floozy of a wife included, and Tatum’s naive young photographer is easily seduced by the reporter’s phoney charisma. The corrupt sheriff who actively conspires with Tatum, even after he is told the poor trapped man is doomed, wants to use this turn of events to his political advantage.

The power of this film resonates today, when countries go to war on manufactured evidence and manipulative spin. Innocent lives are as expendable today as they always have been in the cause of political ambition and warped ideological agendas: a world where the spin doctor rules.

This is a must see movie.

Drunken Angel (Japan – 1948)

Drunken Angel (Japan - 1948)

Filmsquich.com has posted an interesting review of the Akira Kurosawa noir Drunken Angel (1948) aka Yoidore Tenshi. Kurosawa’s other noir feature is the excellent High and Low (1963) aka Tengoku To Jigoku.  Both movies star the uber cool Toshiro Mifune.

Filmquish has also reviewed another early Kurosawa drama as noir: Stray Dog (1949) also starring Mifune.
Full list Filmsquish noir reviews:

13 Tzameti (2006)
Ace In The Hole (1951)
Angel Face (1952)
Angel Heart (1987)
Big Sleep, The (1946)
Blade Runner (1982)
Drunken Angel (1948)
Element Of Crime, The (1984)
L.A. Confidential (1997)
M (1931)
Man Who Knew Too Much, The (1934)
Man With the Golden Arm, The (1955)
Notorious (1946)
Reckless Moment, The (1949)
Rififi (1955)
Se7en (1995)
Shadow Of A Doubt (1943)
Sin City (2005)
Stage Fright (1951)
Strangers On A Train (1951)
Stray Dog (1949)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Third Man, The (1949)
Wrong Man, The (1956)

Melville’s Film Noir

Le Doulos (1962)

San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter has published a good article, Double-crossed in the City of Lights, on French noir director Herman Melville, centered around his film Le Doulos (1962), playing August 17-23 at the Castro.

Pickup On South Street (1953)

Pickup On South Street (1953)

I am ambivalent about Pickup On South Street. Somehow the gestalt is off: the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts.

A weak story is propped up by Sam Fuller’s spirited direction and strong performances from the two female leads. Thelma Ritta received a deserved Academy Award Nomination for her role as the bag lady with soul. Jean Peters is great as the gutsy B-girl, and Richard Widmark makes the sparks fly in his scenes with Peters. The repartee in Fuller’s script is great and adds to the enjoyment. But I was left flat by the pat resolution and feel-good ending.

While Pickup On South Street is not readily identifiable as a noir as it does not follow the genre’s conventions, there is a noir sensibility. Flawed characters are portrayed sympathetically and redeemed by their essential humanity. As Fuller said in a 70s interview, he is not really concerned with the wider “reds under the bed” plot, but with how the drama of the lives affected plays out.

Pickup On South Street (1953)

But the flaws in the film are there and limit its impact. The strongest scene in the film should have been when the bag-lady, Moe, confronted late at night in her apartment by the commie stooge, goes into a relatively long monologue on her fate. An excellent performance by Thelma Ritta is undermined by an unconvincing delay, as the stooge waits for her to finish her story (which he is patently not interested in) before plugging her.

Recommended but over-rated.

They Live By Night (1948)

They Live By Night (1948)

Clydefro on his filmjournal.net blog has posted an interesting review of They Live By Night (1948) the first feature of director Nicholas Ray, in which Clydefro firmly establishes Ray’s auteur credentials.

While Clydefro’s exploration of They Live By Night is original and penetrating, I don’t quite agree with his take on the noir Outsider:

“Watching They Live by Night, I was reminded of the music of Bruce Springsteen and, specifically, the song “Atlantic City” off his Nebraska album. Both artists were able to locate the pulse of the outsider, someone not particularly special in any way but undeniably American in spirit and attitude. The idea of bettering one’s self and family, even if it means turning to crime or working outside the margins, is a recurring theme in both men’s work. Of course, Ray put his finger on this pursuit some twenty and thirty years before Springsteen.”

To me the persona of the outsider is more complex, and a universal (not parochial) archetype. The outsider is outside bourgeois society and does not share its aspirations, and in the noir genre this is manifested generally but not always in criminality. Ray and Springsteen both share this wider vision: consider Ray’s In A Lonely Place (1950) and Springsteen’s Streets Of Philadelphia.

They Live By Night is one of the 10 films noir released on July 31 by Warner Home Video in the Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4 DVD box set.

Noir Directors List

This page provides a full listing of directors credited with a film noir, and the films noir for each director.

Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman

A few of the obits on the passing of the great European director, Ingmar Bergman, refer to the influence of film noir on his ouvre. Personally, I don’t see it, unless perhaps you refer to the significant influence of 40’s Hollywood on all film-makers of his generation. His films were mostly dark intellectual ruminations on life and death, and appealed only to narrow audiences. Film noir is a genre that talks to everyman. The interesting thing for me is the realisation that he was at his peak when aged in his 40s and 50s. In today’s ageist realm, most of us in that age groove are considered history. The Financial Times obit on Bergman is recommended.

Film Noir: “All I can see is in the frame”

Out Of The Past (1947)

Tonight I came across a deeply interesting paper by fellow Australian, Rafaelle Caputo, titled Film noir: “You sure you don’t see what you hear?, published in the Australian Journal of Media & Culture (Vol5 No 2 1990). Caputo studied cinema at La Trobe University and has been a writer on film for over 15 years, contributing to various journals and newspapers. The title of the paper includes a line from Out of the Past (1947).

The paper is scholarly, but has something very important to say to all fans of the genre:

There certainly is something one can point to called film noir, which starts and stops at certain points in time, which has been written about and tabled in the history of cinema, and which has been the focus of much critical debate. Equally, however, there tends to exist another film noir whose style seemingly departs from that tradition, locked away in a kind of time capsule, but which forms it own delicate lines of tradition, continuing to creep around. Finally, I feel the best way to proceed in the reading of film noir is along a path suggested by another line from Out of the Past: “All I can see is the frame … I’m going inside to look at the picture”.

Caputo’s thesis is that defining a movie as a film noir derives from it a having a “noir sensibility” rather than fitting a pre-defined template of rules or guidelines. His argument is coherent and established, inter alia, by reference to a set of films made in Hollywood over a period ranging from the 40s though to the 70s. His analysis of Out of the Past is so brilliant it makes you want to tear away and watch that timeless work yet again.

The film [Out of the Past] opens with exterior shots of an expansive landscape of mountains and forest dissolving into each other while the credits fade-in with each dissolve, until finally there is a dissolve into a stretch of highway with a road sign in the foreground pointing directions and distances for various towns. Into the shot drives a black car, casually travelling into the distance of the frame; then a cut to a travelling-shot from the rear of the car, at an angle over the shoulder of the figure dressed in black behind the steering wheel. The shot knits our point of view with his as we pass another road sign indicating the approaching town of Bridgeport. This shot is maintained until the car pulls into a gas station, but as soon as the car comes to a halt there is an almost immediate cut, still from the same camera position but at a slightly lower angle. The gas station building now takes up most of the screen space, horizontally spilling onto the road from left of frame, and in view atop the building is another sign set off against the clouds which reads ‘Jeff Bailey’. This slight change in camera angle gives the impression of the building jutting out into the car’s diagonal path as though it has forced the black-clad figure of Joe Stefanos to stop abruptly rather than stop by his own volition…

Caputo convincingly argues that Klute (1971) is not a noir. It is interesting that the forthcoming NYC Noir noir festival organised by Film Forum includes a screening of Klute.

Other films noir referred to in the article:

The Killers (1946) and The Killers (1964)
Kiss of Death (1947)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977)

The Asphalt Jungle (1950): When The City Sleeps

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

The The Asphalt Jungle adapted by Ben Maddow from the novel by R.W. Burnett is a movie with soul. A film that treats every character in the story as someone with a life worth knowing: the essence of a film noir. The command by director, John Huston of his story, his ensemble players, and the filmic context is profound and breathtaking.

From the opening shots, dramatised by the almost post-modern score of Miklos Rozsa, you know you are entering the realm of a great film-maker:

The Asphalt Jungle (1950) The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

The Asphalt Jungle (1950) The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

Throughout this opening sequence we hear the police radio chatter from inside the police car, but the visuals are never disturbed by a cut to inside the vehicle.

I will not cover territory more ably explored by others, but will focus on one scene that transcends melodrama and the noir genre. Safe-cracker Cavelli after being wounded during the robbery is seen in the background dying in his marital bed, through the open door of the bedroom from the kitchen of his apartment, where his distraught wife, Maria, beautifully played by Teresa Celli (who appeared in bit parts in only a handful of movies before moving into obscurity in 1953), at the kitchen table admonishing the hunchback getaway driver, Gus, for bringing this tragedy upon her young family.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950) The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

Maria has the best line in the picture. As a police siren wails in the background:

“Sounds like a soul in hell.”