Author Topic: Noir-vember Group Marathon 2013  (Read 25710 times)

JakeIsntFake

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Re: Noir-vember Group Marathon 2013
« Reply #10 on: October 31, 2013, 08:59:02 PM »
Will try to participate, but with my usually 4 films a month and my Spielberg Saturdays, I doubt I'll get one in.
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oldkid

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Re: Noir-vember Group Marathon 2013
« Reply #11 on: October 31, 2013, 09:42:09 PM »
I'm in.  I've already watched The Hand (by accident).  I've also purchased a four Noir set for this month:

The Second Woman
Kansas City Confidential (did I already watch this one?)
The Naked Kiss
The Red House


I'll choose a few more on Netflix Instant as well.
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Re: Noir-vember Group Marathon 2013
« Reply #12 on: November 01, 2013, 01:17:51 AM »


Nightmare

A musician has a nightmare involving murder. When he wakes up he finds physical evidence. This may have been no dream and he sets out to find the truth with the help of his brother-in-law who is a police officer, who is played by Edward G. Robinson. He is why this month begins with Nightmare. I've now read posters and plot descriptions that reveal the truth behind the nightmare, sapping the story of its mystery. Thankfully, I missed all that so I spent most of the film wondering what the secrets were.

The film is an okay time killer. Pretty entertaining for such standard fare. That's probably because of the dual leads of Kevin McCarthy and Mr. Robinson, who I'm becoming convinced never gave a bad performance. He's always such a joy to watch. Even though he's top billed, the film belongs to McCarthy who's good enough that I'm not complaining about the lack of Robinson. A nice start to this Noir-vember.
RATING: * * *

Jared

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Re: Noir-vember Group Marathon 2013
« Reply #13 on: November 01, 2013, 12:10:21 PM »
I've got 31 movies to go on TSP noir list. Id like to cut that in half, but we will see how availability plays into that.

Remainders are:

Beyond the Forest
The City that Never Sleeps
The Crimson Kimono
Cry of the City
The Damned Don't Cry
The Dark Mirror
THe Dark Past
Dark Waters
The Desperate Hours
Follow Me Quietly
GUilty Bystander
I, The Jury
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye
Lady Without Passport
M (1951)
THe Night has A THousand Eyes
Nightmare
One Way Street
The Red House
Ride the Pink Horse
Roadblock
Secret Beyond the Door...
The Sleeping City
So Dark the Night
Southside 1-1000
Street of Chance
Suspense
Talk about a Stranger
The Tattooed Stranger
The Thief
The Unknown Man

If anyone watches one of these streaming somewhere, I would be very obliged if you could PM me a link. I suspect Ill have to shell out some money to watch the last few without using torrents, which I don't do.

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Re: Noir-vember Group Marathon 2013
« Reply #14 on: November 01, 2013, 12:53:39 PM »
THe Night has A THousand Eyes
Nightmare
The Red House

I've seen these three on youtube

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Re: Noir-vember Group Marathon 2013
« Reply #15 on: November 01, 2013, 01:15:06 PM »


Do You Know This Voice?
"That little kid is better off than most of us.
He's dead, but he died while he was clean and innocent"


One of my plans this month is to complete Dan Duryea's Noir-ography as much as I can. Some of the remaining MartinTeller has rated Very Good and a few are supposed to be just awful. I'm going in not knowing which is which until afterwards. This starts like one of the awful ones. Cheap TV looking production values, uninteresting characters. Even Duryea's first scene is awful, maybe as bad as I've ever seen him. Coming late in his career, I thought maybe this was a paycheck job where he no longer cared and liked to do lots of exaggerated expressions to make the producers happy.

I am thrilled to report the film gets a lot better after that first 15 minutes. We've barely met the real leads until then and the other Duryea scenes are so good, I now suspect that first one was a last-minute reshoot. For the rest of the film, Duryea is deep in his comfort zone as the scuzzball in a kidnapping plot that quickly went bad. I talk about Duryea being a great weasel, well he's also a master of blind desperation. His face pinches up in angst and confusion over plans that don't go according to plan. He can't stop dwelling on how it got so bad. Meanwhile, he keeps assuring his wife that he's going to get them out of this mess.

That relationship with his wife (Gwen Watford) is the soul of this film. Their scenes get to the heart of great Noir, ultimately elevating the film to something any Noir fan shouldn't miss. There's another great relationship between Duryea and a neighbor who may or may not be a witness. (Her story is best discovered on your own.) The back half contains a few of dynamite suspense sequences, some of which contain no dialogue, and the ending turns pack a punch. This is a very obscure film I found on Amazon Instant Video and it's well worth the $2 rental and 80 minutes time. Just brace yourself for that lousy beginning.
RATING: * * *

Jared

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Re: Noir-vember Group Marathon 2013
« Reply #16 on: November 01, 2013, 01:43:49 PM »
THe Night has A THousand Eyes
Nightmare
The Red House

I've seen these three on youtube

Cool. I had the Red House pegged on archive.org (a great source) but not the other two.

FYI everyone, a link to the Internet Archive Film Noir collection. 90 movies for free and legal downloading or streaming. https://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3AFilm_Noir&sort=-publicdate
« Last Edit: November 01, 2013, 01:49:31 PM by Jared »

verbALs

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Re: Noir-vember Group Marathon 2013
« Reply #17 on: November 01, 2013, 02:36:08 PM »
Thanks Jared. I'm a Richard Fleischer nut, and I found Trapped on that list. Who doesn't need to see Lloyd Bridges being a badass? (Rhetorical question)

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Re: Noir-vember Group Marathon 2013
« Reply #18 on: November 01, 2013, 05:44:07 PM »


Death of a Cyclist
"Business ends at sundown all over the world. How do you spend your evenings?"

A wealthy socialite housewife is having an affair with a university professor when he kills a bicyclist with their car. Tension arrives in the form of a piano player who works at the housewife's social parties and may know about the lover and the murder. The film is more than the average Noir because of this high/low class contrast. Is money more important than character, and can you use one to cover up a lack of the other?

The blackmailing piano player is the most interesting character. I wasn't half as interested in the professors relationship with a student or the socialite's husband. This social/political content comes with a large amount of neo-realism. Many locations here look like the bombed out Vienna streets from The Third Man. In fact, for a Spanish film it looks remarkably Italian. Half neo-realist, half Antonioni meditation. So it's not a tense film, but it has a perfect ending and some incredible images.

There's a lot to like here, and I bet if put to a Ratings Number, mine would be on the low end of the scale. Because the film has a much wider agenda than regular Noir (which would just wind the blackmail plot tight), I didn't find it as interesting as I prefer. It's not the film, it's me.
RATING: * * *

MartinTeller

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Re: Noir-vember Group Marathon 2013
« Reply #19 on: November 01, 2013, 08:38:41 PM »


"Fat, old women who have too much money and too many jewels. They think the jewels make them beautiful, and they fight to keep them like they fight the years that make them ugly."


Cry of the City (rewatch) - Marty Rome (Richard Conte) is being held in the hospital.  He's taken four bullets during a shootout in which he killed a cop.  Attorney W.A. Niles (Berry Kroeger) wants Rome to confess to a jewel robbery/murder, clearing his client's name.  It's known that a girl was involved, and it's known that a mysterious girl visited Rome in the hospital.  Rome's childhood pal Candella (Victor Mature) is a now a police lieutenant, duty-bound to investigate the allegation.  Meanwhile Rome scrambles to protect his innocent gal Teena (Debra Paget), dragging down his mother (Mimi Aguglia), his kid brother (Tommy Cook), an old flame (Shelley Winters), a prison guard (Roland Winters) and trusty (Walter Baldwin) and an underworld doctor.  Candella picks up the pieces of fragile human lives that Rome leaves in his wake.

Director Robert Siodmak's noir credentials rest most heavily on his adaptation of The Killers, but for my money, this is his masterwork.  It's not an exciting film, the film moves rather slowly.  And it isn't stacked with snappy dialogue.  But it achieves a thick aura of melancholy.  Everyone in this film seems desperate, sad, hopeless... at the end of their rope, clinging to some vague dream of a better life.  It's the minor characters who really drive this home, from Baldwin's hopeless con with a bum ticker to the always reliable Shelley Winters as a used-up floozy.  It's Hope Emerson who absolutely steals the show, intimidating and bitter, jaded and cynical.

Conte and Mature are both noir mainstays.  Neither is an actor I get particularly excited to see, but both do among their best work here.  Mature with his heavy eyelids has a lovely sincerity to him, and yet his adherence to the letter of the law shows no mercy, even while his heart is clearly full of it.  And Conte is manipulative, conniving and vicious, yet his strongest motivation is his love for Teena, his desire to protect her. 

With wonderful location photography and an unobtrusive, downbeat score, Cry of the City isn't an edge-of-your-seat noir thriller, but it excels at establishing mood.  The ending is surprisingly moving.  Rating: Great (90)