I just discovered this wonderful NY movie poster house.
Their collection of original noir posters is truly magnificent, and includes many foreign posters. Prices are very reasonable. Check out these samples:
Category: Lobby
Paranoia Noir: The Post-War Nightmare
In this week’s post mardecortesbaja.com explores a maze with no center, featuring references to Nightmare Alley (1947) and The House On 92nd Street (1945).
Out Of The Past (1947) – Tourneur’s Mise En Scene
Ten minutes into Out of the Past, when Jeff picks-up Ann for the trip to Lake Tahoe to meet with Whit, and during which Jeff begins to tell Ann about his mysterious past in flashback, Jeff opens the car door for Ann, and while he moves to the driver side and takes the wheel, the director, Jacques Tourneur, frames Ann alone inside the divided windscreen of the car for a full 10 seconds.
It is early morning and the scene is dark with foreboding, as Jeff’s past races to catch up with him. By framing Ann alone in the car, with the dividing upright of the car windscreen closing the frame and excluding Jeff from the scene, Tourneur precisely conveys the relationship as doomed.
This is a master craftsman at work.
Tourneur’s other Hollywood noirs include:
Experiment Perilous (1944)
Berlin Express (1948)
Nightfall (1957)
Film Noir Radio
Download these original radio broadcasts featuring the original cast and director’s commentary from mystery.otr.net:
Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino in the Screen Guild Theater’s production of High Sierra, April 17, 1947.
Radio Film Noir Episode 12
Orson Welles, reprises his role as Harry Lime, in The Adventures of Harry Lime, The Golden Fleece Oct 12, 1951.
Radio Film Noir Episode 11
The Lux Radio Theater production of The Third Man, starring Joseph Cotten, Apr 09, 1951.
Radio Film Noir Episode 10
The Screen Director’s Playhouse production of Life Boat, Nov 16, 1950.
Radio Film Noir Episode 9
The Maltese Falcon Jul 03, 1946 starring Humphrey Bogart and Sidney Greenstreet.
Radio Film Noir episode 8, presents Lux Radio Theater production of Gaslight
Radio Film Noir Episode 7
Lux Radio Theater Manhattan Melodrama Sep, 09, 1946.
Radio Film Noir Episode 6
The Screen Director’s Playhouse version of The Big Clock, starring Ray Milland.
Radio Film Noir Episode 5
Screen Director’s Playhouse Spellbound Mar 08 1948 starring Joseph Cotton.
Radio Film Noir Episode 4
Burt Lancaster in the Screen Directors production of Criss Cross Oct 10, 1949.
Radio Film Noir Episode 3
The Lux Radio Theater production of The Woman In The Window Jun 25, 1945 starring Edward G Robinson.
Radio Film Noir Episode 2
Shadow of A Doubt starring Joseph Cotton from the Academy Award series Sep 11, 1946.
Screen Director’s Playhouse, The Killers
Radio Detective Story Hour Episode 83 – Screen Director’s Playhouse
Newspaperman as detective as Jimmy Stewart (right) turns detective as he tries to solve a miscarriage of justice. A radio play based on Call Northside 777.
The Big Heat (1953) Revisited
I am responsible for everything … except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world … in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.
– Jean Paul Sartre, ‘Being and Nothingness’ (1943) [my emphases]
Debbie Marsh is an existential hero, as are the other major femmes in Fritz Lang’s brooding noir, The Big Heat (1953), the murdered barfly and the caryard clerk, who each take responsbility and act.
Films Noir: No-Budget Thrillers?
Lloydville from mardecortesbaja.com with yet another rather romantic take on noir:
…As early as 1945, in Edgar G. Ulmer’s no-budget thriller Detour, the combination of an exaggerated, expressionistic visual style and a sense of the world as morally unhinged at its core produced a template for the classic film noir, a vehicle for the subterranean mood of existential dread that gripped America in the wake of WWII… More
Noir and Neo-Noir: Articles from Brightlights Film Journal
Distribute This! Blast of Silence (Allen Baron, 1961, U.S.A.) This missing noir masterpiece enters the canon in first place.
Nightmare Alley Set in a cheesy carnival, the film presents an unforgettable galleryof grotesques whose lives intertwine romantically, criminally, and, ultimately, fatally.
On Commies, Stoolies,and Assorted Lowlife: Pickup on South Street on DVD While Widmark and Peters turn up the heat, Thelma Ritter steals the show in this seminal noir, now on DVD.
“I Like His Face”: Nicholas Ray’s Noir Classic [In A Lonely Place] Restored on DVD Do you like his face?
TheNot-So-Straight Story: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive It’s just Lynch being Lynch. And that’s a good thing.
Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour Detour (1945) has one of the more convoluted plots in noir, packing a flashback structure, an extended voiceover, a cross-country trek, a mysteriousdeath, an “accidental” murder, an identity exchange, an unforgettable femme fatale, and one of the most pathetic, masochistic antiheroes ever into its 67-minute running time.
Fritz Lang’s M The roots of noir go back to German Expressionism, and there’s no movie that’s more German, Expressionist, or noir than Fritz Lang’s masterful M (1931).
High Gallows: Out of the Past Jacques Tourneur’s riveting 1947 film noir, usually rankedas one of the best of the genre.
Percolating Paranoia: Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat Fritz Lang brings the terrors of noir into the bright kitchens of America.
Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir A review of Foster Hirsch’s book on neo-noir.
L.A. Confidential The only things not taken from Chinatown are a post-plastic-surgery makeup job from The Long Goodbye and that gag from “The Lucy Show” where Lucy meets Orson Welles but doesn’t believe it’s really him: “Why, these fake whiskers wouldn’t fool a child!”
The Lost Weekend (1945): An offer that was refused…
In The Lost Weekend
Not so trivial Trivia: The liquor industry offered Paramount a cool US$5 million to bury the movie before its release…
Noirs You Must See
I have been going through the first edition of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (2003 New Burlington Books), and highly recommend it to film noir fans. All the major noirs are included, and the commentaries are fresh and incisive.
On Dangerous Ground (1952) – A Definitive Noir?
Another interesting post from the mardecortesbaja.com blog:
Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground is a problematic film noir on many grounds but in an odd way it helps define the genre. More precisely, it helps us realize that film noir isn’t really a genre at all but a way of identifying a particular strain of post-WWII dread as it came to infect many different kinds of film…
FilmsNoir.Net - all about film noir 