Howard Penning
Reproduced under Creative Commons License

From Raymond Chandler’s novel, The Little Sister (1949):

They were never young and will never be old. They have no beauty, no charm, no style. They don’t have to please anybody. They are safe. They are civil without ever being polite and intelligent and knowledgable without any real interest in anything. They are what human beings turn into when they trade life for existence and ambition for security.

This year’s 56th Annual San Sebastián International Film Festival is titled Japan in Black: Japanese Film Noir.

From 18-27 September, the series will screen 40 noir and crime films including, Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog and High and Low, Seijun Suzuki’s Youth of the Beast and Kinji Fukasaku’s Graveyard of Honour, and rarities such as  Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower, Rokuro Mochizuki’s Onibi: The Fire Within and Yoshitaro Nomura’s Zero Focus.

Visit the San Sebastián Film Festival site For the full program.

The Dark Knight is worth seeing for Heath Ledger’s bravura study in psychopathology, but as a movie it rarely strays from the confines of its comic-book origins.

Many are waxing lyrical on the “dark vision” and the portrayal of a flawed Batman, and this is true, but to say that the picture “is a straight-up gritty, dirty, soul-rending film noir crime drama” *, is pure hyperbole.  In the film noir universe, there are no super-heros.

As a film it has also major flaws: confused editing with dis-jointed dialog, and an obsession with the minutiae of violence.

* Review by Movie Blawger at SportingNews.com.

A WW2 ex-POW suffering from amnesia is accused of treason. (RKO 1949, Directed by Richard Fleischer 63 mins).

The Clay Pigeon is a tight b-thriller from Richard Fleischer, who also directed the b-noirs Bodyguard (1948), Trapped (1949), Armored Car Robbery (1950), and The Narrow Margin (1952). Set on the streets of LA’s Chinatown with a realistic chase sequence, and a nail-biting climax on a train at night, the movie is energetic and great entertainment. A Japanese villain adds to the exotic mix, with good performances all-round from a solid b-cast.

There is an interesting interlude in the apartment of a Chinese widow of a Sino-American war vet where the protagonist hides from his pursuers, which is deftly woven into the story and adds considerable depth. The widow is nicely played by Marya Marco, who had a short career as a bit-player in the 40s and 50s.

…Drivin’ down your freeways
Midnight alleys roam
Cops in cars, the topless bars
Never saw a woman…
So alone, so alone
So alone, so alone
Motel money murder madness…
Lets change the mood from glad to sadness

LA Woman - The Doors (1971)

From Raymond Chandler’s novel The High Window (1942):

The night was all around, soft and quiet. The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don’t find.

Evelyn Keyes, who died on July 4, starred in a number of films noir: Johnny O’Clock (1947), The Killer That Stalked New York (1950), The Prowler (1951), and 99 River Street (1953).

Violent femme and husband with a gun fetish decide to emulate Bonnie & Clyde (Orig title: Deadly is the Female, King Bros Productions 1950, Directed by Joseph H. Lewis, 86 mins)

I greatly admire Lewis’s film noir The Big Combo (1955), but Gun Crazy is a lesser work.  I am not sure it is even a film noir.

While there is a potent mix of sex and violence, layered with psycho-sexual motifs and fetishes, the narrative lacks tension and some scenes are very slow. Peggy Cummins is strong as the psychopathic urban gun-slinger, Laurie, but there is no depth or history to this woman who kills on reflex and with no remorse. The rest of the cast is ok only, and it is the director’s signature obsession with violence as a sexual psychosis that drives the story.  Gun Crazy is really a robbers-on-the run movie with noir pretensions, and these are only really evident in the climactic early morning shoot-out at the end in a fog-laden creek.  Bart, Cummins’ partner in crime, achieves some sort of redemption by shooting Laurie dead before she can kill two of his un-armed child-hood friends, one a deputy sheriff, who approach them  pleading that they give themselves up, after which he is killed in a hail of police bullets.  There is a tragic irony here: the man who is not a killer kills his reason for being.

The much-acclaimed long take inside the get-away car before, during, and after a bank robbery, is innovative for the period, but the action is flat until after the heist and they are pursued by the cops.  Low and high camera angles are used by Lewis to express mood and suggest sexual undercurrents, but if they operate on the audience, do so only unconsciously. While much has also been made of the ‘amour fou’ of the two protagonists, it is more an instinctual sexual attraction that is sustained on Laurie’s part by the sexual gratification that she achieves in their life crime.

Interesting historically and although it transcends its b origins, Gun Crazy is not a great movie. It’s cult status has more to do with the perversity of the theme and the performance of Cummins, than its merits as a filmic work.