For noir cum jazz fans, and if you are in NY there are other venues and dates:
Shades of Jazz on Noir
Wednesday, April 23 7-9pm
Shades of Jazz on Noir is a performance project combining excerpts from classic films noir of the 40s and 50s projected onto a cinema screen and accompanied by live improvised jazz. More
A public domain copy of this classic noir from Elia Kazan is available from the Internet Archive. The blurb on the site is worth quoting in full:
One night in the New Orleans slums, vicious hoodlum Blackie (Jack Palance) and his friends kill an illegal immigrant who won too much in a card game. Next morning, Dr. Clint Reed (Richard Widmark-this time not seen pushing little old ladies in wheelchairs down the stairs) of the Public Health Service confirms the dead man had pneumonic plague. To prevent a catastrophic epidemic, Clint must find and inoculate the killers and their associates, with the reluctant aid of police captain Tom Warren (Paul Douglas), despite official skepticism, and in total secrecy, lest panic empty the city. Can a doctor turn detective? He has 48 hours to try. Spellbinding
The Maltese Falcon: others may argue about its place in the film noir canon, but none can question its greatness.
Sam Spade is fully the creation of Dashiell Hammett and his book informs the film totally. What John Huston and his ensemble cast did was to make the story forever theirs. Having seen the movie, one cannot imagine any of the characters as other than the players that portray them. This picture is a defining moment in film history. The Maltese Falcon takes us beyond what is on the screen into a nether world of desparate love, existential angst, mystery, and the pain of irredeemable loss.
Spade is the quintessential noir protagonist: a loner on the edge of polite society, sorely tempted to transgress but declines and is neither saved nor redeemed.
Brigid will never make up the years she will lose in prison, and Sam will never recover from the necessary betrayal of their love. For Sam and Brigid are truly lovers. Sam was not seduced. Brigid is not a femme-fatale: she manipulates Sam, but never seeks to have him act as her surrogate. Together they discover the desperate emptiness of their lives. She true to her nature can’t comprehend how he can send her down if he loves her. He can’t fathom her lying while knowing she loves him.
The famous ad-lib by Bogart on the leaden black bird at the end says it all … the stuff that dreams are made of.
In the 40s and 50s, The Adventures of Sam Spade, was a popular US radio show based on stories written by Dashiell Hammett, featuring Howard Duff in the lead. But the story Blue Moon features the the chemistry of Bogie and Bacall!
The Free Information Society has five of the original broadcasts available for free download:
The Thrilling Detective site has more information on the shows on it’s excellent Sam Spade page.
Thanks to a pointer to the Mercury Theater on the Air site from Lloydville of mardecortesbaja.com.
Amongst many broadcasts from this famous Orson Welles radio-play project, is a 1939 radio adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel, The Glass Key, which was adapted for the screen in 1935 and again in 1942.
You can download an MP3 of the original broadcast from the Mercury Theater on the Air site.
What is Film Noir? There as many answers as there are noir movies.
I consider a film for posting to FilmsNoir.Net only some time after a recent viewing. I want the film to return to my memory on its own terms, and when this happens, it is more often than not, a response to what I describe as the picture’s noir sensibility. This sensibility must have a redemptive focus for me to value a film, whether redemption is achieved or not. This is what the great films noir have in common: a profoundly and deeply human response to the chaos and random contingency at the edge of existence.
It is with this in mind that I am posting on the recent release: In The Valley of Elah (2007). On the surface it is a police procedural framed against US soldiers returning from the Iraq war. On a deeper level it is an exploration of contingencies and responsibility.
Three crimes: the heinous unnecessary invasion of Iraq, the brutal killing of a child by a US humvee on the streets of Baghdad, and the gruesome murder of a returning soldier on the outskirts of an American army town, bring chaos to the life of a father, who no longer understands his son or his country and its institutions. Everything including the American flag is upside-down.
This film is the true heritage of film noir, not banal and unredeemably violent films such as No Country For Old Men.
Film noir movies to catch ad-free on Australia’s ABC HD Digital TV over the next fortnight:
Macao (1952)
1:25am Thursday, 06 Mar 2008
A wandering American in the Far East falls for a singer and helps a detective trap a killer. CAST: Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, William Bendix, Gloria Grahame, Thomas Gomez, Philip Ahn DIR: Josef Von Sternberg
The Narrow Margin (1952)
1:40am Thursday, 13 Mar 2008
Followed by the mob, policeman Walter Brown and his partner are assigned the task of
protecting a prosecution witness travelling by train to Los Angeles. CAST: Charles McGraw, Marie Windsor DIR: Richard Fleischer
The Narrow Margin (1952): B plus
Desperate (1947)
2:45am Wednesday, 19 Mar 2008
A truck driver goes on the run when falsely accused of a crime. CAST: Steve Brodie, Audrey Long, Raymond Burr DIR: Anthony Mann
The Woman On The Beach (1947)
1:35am Wednesday, 19 Mar 2008
A man comes between a woman and her sadistic husband. CAST: Robert Ryan, Joan Bennett, Charles Bickford, Nan Leslie, Walter Sande DIR: Jean Renoir
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