“Do you know…
once, off the hump of Brazil…
I saw the ocean so darkened with blood it was black…
…and the sun fainting away over the lip of the sky.
We´d put in at Fortaleza…
and a few of us had lines out for a bit of idle fishing.
It was me had the first strike.
A shark it was.
Then there was another.
And another shark again.
Till all about, the sea was made of sharks…
and more sharks still.
And no water at all.
My shark had torn himself from the hook…
and the scent or maybe the stain it was, and him bleeding his life away…
drove the rest of them mad.

Then the beasts took to eating each other.
In their frenzy…
they ate at themselves.
You could feel the lust of murder like a wind stinging your eyes.
And you could smell the death reeking up out of the sea.
I never saw anything worse…
until this little picnic tonight.
And you know…
there wasn´t one of them sharks in the whole crazy pack that survived.
l´ll be leaving you now.

George, that´s the first time..
anyone ever thought enough of you to call you a shark.
If you were a good lawyer, you´d be flattered.”

A brilliant jigsaw of a film noir from Orsone Welles, with a femme-fatale to die for, and a script so sharp and witty, you relish every scene. You can watch it again and again, and find something new each time.

The long yacht voyage is used to both develop the characters and as a homage to Hayworth’s beauty and the eternal feminine in the flesh and in nature.

The climactic confrontation and shootout at the end in an amusement park mirror-maze is breath-taking. The restored print available on the DVD is so sharp that it is hard to believe the picture was shot 6o years ago.

To be savoured with patience and your full attention.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Most film analysis favours the auteur approach, where the creative credit is focused on the director.

The 1992 documentary on great cinematographers from the silent era to the 80’s, Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography, shifts the spotlight to those who actually wielded the camera.

Orson Welles in recognition of this creative contribution, in the credits for Citizen Kane (1941), shared direction credit with his collaborator and director of photography, Gregg Toland:

The following slideshow features 32 great examples of the “black” light of film noir featured in Visions of Light. Director of Photography credits are list at the end of the post.

Mildred Pierce (1945) - Ernest Haller
The Killers (1946) - Woody Bredell
Out of The Past (1947) - Nicholas Musuraca
The Naked City (1948) - William Daniels
Young Man with a Horn (1950) - Ted McCord
The Big Combo (1955) - John Alton
The Night of the Hunter (1955) - Stanley Cortez
Sweet Smell of Success (1957) - James Wong Howe
Touch of Evil (1958) - Russell Metty

“discomfited staggering between camp, noir, and grotesque melodrama, might be more a result of studio tampering than Fuller’s misdirection. It is also difficult to discern just what sort of censorship the studios achieved, for whatever they did was austerely permeated by social taboos the likes of abortion, prostitution, child molestation, and murder.” IMBD Comment from jeanpesce

Samuel Fuller, writer, director, and producer of The Naked Kiss, apparently disclaimed this film after alleged re-editing ordered by studio bosses before its release.

I found the film largely emotionally distant, but the story of a prostitute who tries to remake her life in the face of social prejudice and male misogyny is perversely involving. A noir sensibility pervades, but it is not really a film noir as the anti-hero is a woman who is punished for being good: though her violent actions may be justified in a closed sense, they are not necessarily the only reasonable responses.

The best scene is when the text of a newspaper headline is flashed across the screen: it is a veritable punch to the stomach.

Fuller was a pulp director who tried to understand women and support their empowerment, unlike directors like Quentin Tarantino, who seek to debase the feminine.

Something different.

Jim Emerson, the founding editor-in-chief of RogerEbert.com, a Seattle-based writer and film critic for the Seattle Sun Times, in his blog, jim emerson’s scanners :: blog, has posted an interesting article on the site Film Noir: Woodcuts by Guy Budziak.

Anthony Hopkins in an interview with Cinema Blend about his new film, Slipstream, which he not only wrote and directed, but in which he also stars and wrote the music, says of his influences:

Our existence is beyond our explanation… I believe that everything is illusory, because we can’t grasp anything… The films that I really like were the film noir movies […] Those film noir things just got to me as a kid. A film that’s non-linear, Burt Lancaster in The Killers…

This iconoclastic debut by the French New Wave pioneer, Jean Luc Godard, has been re-released on a 2 disc DVD set with a new HD digital transfer from Criterion. The transfer has been supervised by the original director of photography of Breathless, Raoul Coutard. In the words of Amazon contributor, Jonathan E. Haynes “jehaynes” (Berkeley, CA): “With Coutard involved in Criterion’s issue, the film has undoubtedly been restored to some of its original, shocking, ragged beauty”.

The second disc includes archival interviews with the director and Jean-Paul Belmondo, who plays the young punk with noir affectations. Jean Seberg is perfect as the young American student in Paris ‘living dangerously’.

Australian critic, Adrian Martin in 2004: “there is a semblance of a thriller plot complete with a betrayal, tailing cops, and a final shootout… but the subtle, formal pleasures of Breathless have yet to be fully appreciated. Whether through accident or design, Godard’s low-budget on-the-fly shooting style produced remarkable innovations.”

Forget about Tarantino, Godard is the genuine originator of (Martin again) “the mixture of loose gangster-crime plot, a smart attitude, and a hip array of high and low culture citations… and there is an insolent mildly outrageous rap pouring from Belmondo’s punk motormouth, but even that scarcely contradicts the Chandler-Hammett-Spillane tradition of hard-boiled talk.” (1001 Movies)

The original film noir jazz score by Martial Solal is available on CD:

“I’m a janitor.”

George Clooney plays Michael Clayton, a fixer for a big NY law firm’s well-heeled clients who get into trouble. When the firm’s top litigator Arthur (Tom Wilkinson) goes off the wall, Clayton’s called in to clean up. Any more and I risk spoilers.

My only comment: the wrong guy is given the film’s title, and that another protagonist risks more for higher purpose and deserves fuller exploration.

Don’t miss it.

I recently became embroiled elsewhere in a debate about the films of Quentin Tarantino, which I dislike, finding them ugly and fascist in their violence, misogyny, and concern with the squalid aspects of contemporary America.

Others however, wax lyrical on his “vision”, the “beauty” of his dialog, and his technical re-invention of the exploitation genre of the 70s. This perspective is justified using high language and erudition.

What has this got to do with film noir? Well, it is about film, why films are made, and what makes them of value.

Films are essentially entertainment, Hollywood films anyway, and commodities produced for profit. Somehow, this endeavour has produced and continues to produce films that not only have wide appeal but value as works of art to a lesser or greater degree. The great films noir had both popular appeal and artistic merit because their themes address the human condition and the frailty of normal lives, which at any moment can be plunged into the chasm of chaos, through chance or individual action - innocent or otherwise. How moral ambivalence, lust, love and greed can destroy lives is explored outside the closed romantic realism of mainstream movies.

What do the films of Tarantino offer outside some appeal to a coterie of aficionados who elevate technique over content? Violence, criminality, and baseness as urban cool.