Tag: noir

Oof.  This may be the most daft film noir I actually enjoyed. The movie begins with a priest getting stabbed to death in a dark alley.  Tony Curtis was a ward of the orphanage the priest ran.  Now a motorcycle cop, Curtis presses his superiors to let him go undercover to investigate a hunch he […]

Most of the movies later labeled as film noirs were made simply to fill the second slot of a double bill.  They were made on the cheap and were expected to deliver a moderate amount of satisfaction, at best. Outside The Law may be the most average noir I have seen so far.  It is […]

The cliché says you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.  By that logic, you probably shouldn’t judge a movie by its title, either.  But somebody designed that book cover and somebody named that movie and, by doing so, they were trying to convey something to appeal to certain audiences. So I pounced immediately when […]

Some people know they have reached rock bottom when they wake up in bed with the wrong person, or they suddenly find themselves digging for food in a dumpster.  Few people expect their path their life takes to end up at “magician’s assistant”, but that is where Loretta Young finds herself after doing a stint […]

As a general rule, film noir should take place in urban environments and be filmed in black and white.  Yet there are a few canonical noir films that are in color.  Curiously, those movies usually also take place in the desert. Such is the case with 1959’s The Trap, where Richard Widmark tries to prevent […]

There’s an odd recurring trope in noir movies where a reporter takes the initiative to do the kind of investigations it seems police should be handling.  In 1952’s The Turning Point, William Holden plays a newspaper reporter who, for whatever reason, keeps doing what should be his friend’s job, namely that of special prosecutor. That […]

I have a ton of noir, but Lady On A Train is the first noir comedy I have seen.  That is a bizarre sub-genre, and this movie only operates alternately as noir or comedy, without really mixing the two.  It’s almost like one movie was crudely grafted onto another–with a third movie, a musical, worked […]

Always interesting when a movie does exactly what it says on the tin. Barbara Stanwyck is the titular lady who develops a taste for gambling while honeymooning in Las Vegas with a new hubby.  We learn this in flashback, after seeing Stanwyck get pummeled by two thugs when she tries to use loaded dice in […]

Coleen Gray has a great little speech in this movie.  She’s a nurse and she and a doctor (played by Richard Conte) are taking a smoke break on a balcony.  Gray’s speech is a surprisingly grim assessment of humanity.  Curiously, the actual image in this scene is greyer than anything in any other movie I […]

I love film noir, a genre that only became a genre after the fact.  Before French critics coined the term, noir was simply “crime” pictures, usually the lower-budget second feature on a double-bill (or the “B-movie”).  So, while I may prefer to watch a movie of this type before randomly choosing one from most other […]