Impulse (1990) Director Sondra Locke. DP Dean Semler. Theresa Russell as undercover cop Lottie Mason at corner of Sunset Boulevard & Las Palmas Avenue.
Category: Lobby
Le quai des brumes (Port of Shadows – France 1938): Poetic Realism
The fog of angst seeps from the faces of two doomed lovers in the dank gloom of Le Havre. Jean is on the run and Nelly is trapped in a psychic prison as real as the physical constraints on her existence. Happiness is something that may exist but neither knows it.
They meet by chance one night in a broken-down bar on the waterfront amongst the detritus of an ephemeral humanity. Panama’s is a haven for the down-and-out named for the hat of the publican, an old shaman with a rusted soul as deep as the canal he visited in his youth. Father confessor of a convent for lost souls. He keeps his counsel, asks no questions, and strums his guitar.
And everywhere the fog and the harbor with rusting hulks at anchor ever-waiting transport for deliverance. The two lovers stroll as tentative friends with a hope as forlorn as it is sublime, when a bright clarity intrudes, a hood with a malice as sharp as his clothes and his shave, and as evil as his cowardice.
A night of bliss follows. Jean and Nelly find love at a sea-side carnival and that elusive union we all seek – in a rented room. They keep missing pernicious Fate a drunken vagabond. The glory of a new dawn is soon shattered. They each leave alone. Fate occupies the sheets of last night’s passion, and they are lost.
“Kiss me. We don’t have much time.”
The Noir City: A Cosmic B-Movie
My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me
‘Til then I walk alone…
Green Day – Boulevard Of Broken Dreams
The origins of this post lie in a book I found in a used bookstore a few months back: The Cinematic City edited by David B Clarke (Routledge 1997). This is an academic book with a collection of essays on the “relationship between city and cinema”, which contains some fascinating essays on the noir city. The central thesis is that the modern metropolis is so large and diverse, that inhabitants’ experience of the modern city is alienated. This experience of modernity has shaped the cinema’s portrayal of the city as a place, and the cinematic city is a place as real as the physical entity it represents.
Having never been to the US, I realised that through my love of film noir, I ‘know’ the cities as Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco as a virtual stranger, and that even for those living in these cities, they experience their city as strangers:
Whereas the social and physical spaces of pre-modem society formed an intimately related, lived totality, modernity brought about their colonization by a thoroughly abstract space, which ensured their fragmentation and disjuncture. A world that was once perceived ‘as a living whole’, so to speak, could no longer be experienced as whole or complete… The ambivalence of the stranger thus represented the ambivalence of the modem world. Time and space were no longer stable, solid and foundational. Hence, the experience of modernity equated… [with ] the world as experienced by the stranger, and the experience of a world populated by strangers — a world in which a universal strangehood was coming to predominate . It was within such a world that the virtual presence of the cinema was to find its place (Clarke page 4)… In the arena of the noir city, protagonists must confront both the strangeness of others and the strange otherness within – as film noir’s scenarios of disorientation and dislocation challenge their ability to chart an identity (F Krutnik page 89).
Almost bankers…
“It was sheer unmitigated crime, a sort of selling bear on a huge scale in a sinking world. The aim of the gang was money, and they already had made scandalous profits. Partly their business was mere conscienceless profiteering well inside the bounds of the law, such as gambling in falling exchanges and using every kind of brazen and subtle trick to make their gamble a certainty . Partly it was common fraud of the largest size… These fellows were wreckers on the grand scale, merchants of pessimism, giving society another kick downhill whenever it had a chance of finding its balance, and pocketing their profits.”
– John Buchan, The Three Hostages (Hodder & Stoughton, London 1924) Graphic: ft.com.
The Black Cat (1934): Erotic nightmare
Edgar G. Ulmer’s trash-noir Detour (1945) has a cult following. The film relates a fatalistic story of a guy so dumb he blames fate for the consequences of his own foolishness. Anne Savage, as the street-wise dame who incredulously falls for the sap, is memorable.
Earlier in 1934 Ulmer directed The Black Cat starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Loosely based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, the movie is a camp masterpiece. Set in the wonderfully gothic modernist house of a sinister architect, it is a mad expressionist tale of abduction, revenge, sexual obsession, camp horror, and unbridled eroticism. Sex is the primary motif and there is a sense of unreality with the action moving with the strange fractured incoherence of a dream. In a sense Ulmer prefigures the oneiric and sexual motifs of the classic noir period. A must-see.
This trailer I have created focuses on the pervasive eroticism… see the shapely legs of the comely heroine get the Von Sternberg treatment!
The clip has been blocked by NBC Universal on copyright grounds.
Betty Draper found in Noir City
Courtesy of GQ Magazine. Photo by Terry Richardson.
‘Slightly Scarlet’ enhancements by FilmsNoir.Net.
NOIR CITY DC: The 2009 Film Noir Festival
The Film Noir Fndation is presenting the NOIR CITY DC: The 2009 Film Noir Festival over October 24 – November 4.
The program features new 35mm prints of these classic noirs:
- SLIGHTLY SCARLET (1956)
- ACE IN THE HOLE (1951)
- GUN CRAZY (1950)
- WICKED AS THEY COME (UK, 1956)
- ALIAS NICK BEAL (1949)
- THE BIG COMBO (1955)
- SHAKEDOWN (1950)
- BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT (1956)
- OUT OF THE PAST (1947)
- THE KILLERS (1946)
- HOLLOW TRIUMPH (1948)
Full details here.
Electric nightmares in dark empty warehouses…
Electric nightmares in dark empty warehouses. Dank with the ocean’s chill and the blood of vengeance.
The rotting planks of a pier are suddenly shaken by a heavy thud and then by pounding footfalls. A running figure traverses the dull cone of light from a fog lamp affixed high on a post where the deck meets the shoreline.
The bent outline of a fugitive runs along a wharf in the macabre shadow of a looming gray hulk a brooding inert sentinel under an empty sky. A car door slams. The glimmering ebony saloon roars away, tires sliding atop the wet asphalt, and the headlights raucously stabbing the squalid shadows grown onto the mercantile mausoleums that hover at the perimeter.
Too late the sirens’ screeching cacophony cleaves the silence the careening car has left behind. More car doors slam. The harsh fevered intersecting headlights of the squad cars survey the scene revealing nothing.
10 Never Before on DVD Noirs Released
This month’s Warner Archive new releases include these never-on-dvd-before noirs.
The last train at the end of the line…
Empty streets of stolen angst. The silent steel sentinels are specters of a hidden horror. A crippling step at a time. Your breathing is labored and the red flood is existence ebbing away. Stumbling and crashing back to the fountainhead. You knew this is where it started and ends. Alone. A dying creature of the long night of the sleeping city. You desperately try to hold it back but you can’t stem the tide of fate. Falling hard on the wet tar in the sordid yellow light of the streetlight’s waning, your head shatters into a thousand fragments of racing memories. A blissful high showers your prone body, a shimmering bundle of rags. Your mouth fills with sweet black honey, and you finally find a sort of peace, the gutter a soft pillow for staring at the stars. A sheltering sky of black oblivion falls gently towards you.
The midnight special thunders in. The pavement an echoing platform at the end of the line. All the way. No stops. Leaving in one minute. “All aboard”. No-one is left behind. All seats are reserved. Who made that reservation? And when? Was it God in his infinite indifference at year zero? Or was it your mother in boundless love calling you back to the womb as you were leaving it. Do something! Make it real. Make it happen like it never did before. Just once. Too late. One final useless effort to go back, then you give it up. Sirens scream. The wails of the condemned a dark chorus do futile battle with the rumble and hiss of the locomotive as it draws the carriages away in a dirty cloud of steam.
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