Scarface (1932) directed by Howard Hawks and starring Paul Muni, the proto-ganster flick, has just been released on DVD from a pristine transfer. Buy the DVD

The New York Times review yesterday by David Kehr:

this is the greatest of the early-’30s gangster films. Paul Muni, in what would remain his most uninhibited performance, is the simian title character, a thinly disguised Al Capone who machine-guns his way to the top of the Chicago rackets. (In a darkly playful touch, each of his assassinations is marked, somewhere in the frame, by an X.) Universal has made a new transfer of this essential title, making it available for the first time on DVD apart from its perverse inclusion as an extra in the deluxe edition of Brian De Palma’s dimly satirical, ultraviolent 1983 remake with Al Pacino.

Hawks’s film begins as an uncomfortably exhilarating comedy about the joys of unchecked desire, and ends as an expressionistic horror movie with howls of madness and intimations of incest. This disc includes a censor-pleasing alternate ending in which Muni’s Tony Camonte is caught, convicted and hanged, instead of going down, still a compelling force of nature, in the heat of battle.

The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have [these] dangerous impulses, yet they keep up a pretence, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganised, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for truth… the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois… because he stands for Truth. What can be said to characterise the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality… The Outsider is a man who has awakened to chaos… Even if there seems no room for hope, truth must be told… chaos must be faced.

Colin Wilson - The Outsider (1956, Gollanz, London)

“Insurance detective unravels the killing of a washed-up boxer.”
- Steve H. Scheuer, Movies on TV and Video.

One of my favorite films noir. Burt Lancaster plays the former-boxer turned hoodlum with elegance and style, and Susan Hayward is hot as the femme fatale. A brilliant narrative technique by director Robert Siodmak, employing flash-backs and the story of an insurance investigation to hold it all together, produces a taut and entertaining movie.

Like most great noirs, this picture transcends the genre and is not only a story of greed, love, and betrayal, but is also about loss, friendship, innocence, and the brutal realities of trying to make a buck in a hostile world. There is a wider socio-historical context, which is more than ably discussed by Jim Groom in a recent post on his BavaTuesday blog.

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 NY Times today published an article, Noir and the City: Dark, Dangerous, Corrupt and Sexy, by Terrence Rafferty, covering the N.Y.C. Noir film noir festival organised by Film Forum starting Friday. See my post of July 11 for the full program.

Rafferty reviews the major pictures and the article is supported on-line with high quality stills.

GUILT, desire, fear, ambition and the bad behavior those human frailties give rise to are the favored themes of the sort of film we now call noir. So it’s hardly surprising that a fair number of these pictures are set in New York City, where guilt, fear, desire, ambition and bad behavior are pretty much a way of life. Any city will do, of course, because all cities generate a certain amount of the anxiety that film noir feeds on. And all cities, somewhere, have dark, scary streets that can, in noir’s violent allegories of moral ambiguity, stand in for the dimmer, grubbier recesses of the soul. But New Yorkers pride themselves on having more of everything than people in other cities do. If noir is the great urban style of the movies — and it is — then New York City is surely the noirest place on earth. More

Just a quick post of current stats for FilmsNoir.Net and an overview of how you can use the FilmsNoir.Net Film Noir Catalog:

Posts - 132
Posters in the Poster Gallery - 589
Stills in the Stills Gallery - 150
Wallpapers - 12
Trailers - 34
Fully cataloged movies in the Film Noir Catalog - 599

There are as many lists of films noir as there are web sites on the topic, so in the Catalog I have not listed my personal choices or tried to be definitive, but cataloged all movies that have been nominated as noir by another blog or site. The catalog is fully search-able and supports data-mining.

Let’s look at one of my favorite film noirs, Out Of The Past.

On the Catalog’s home page, I enter “Out Of The Past” into the Find box and hit <Enter>:

This search not only returns the film, Out of the Past, but also 6 other movies related on a parameter such as actor, director, producer etc. Clicking on a blue text link will search all of the catalog for that term. For instance, clicking on Robert Mitchum, will list all films in the Catalog which star Robert Mitchum. Clicking on the film’s title or the Poster thumbnail, takes you to a more detailed entry for the current movie:

Again, you can dig down into the catalog to locate related movies.

Clicking on the IMDB rating will take you to that film’s entry at the IMDB web site.

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:

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.

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

“Sounds like a soul in hell.”