Distribute This! Blast of Silence (Allen Baron, 1961, U.S.A.) This missing noir masterpiece enters the canon in first place.
Nightmare Alley Set in a cheesy carnival, the film presents an unforgettable galleryof grotesques whose lives intertwine romantically, criminally, and, ultimately, fatally.
On Commies, Stoolies,and Assorted Lowlife: Pickup on South Street on DVD While Widmark and Peters turn up the heat, Thelma Ritter steals the show in this seminal noir, now on DVD.
“I Like His Face”: Nicholas Ray’s Noir Classic [In A Lonely Place] Restored on DVD Do you like his face?
TheNot-So-Straight Story: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive It’s just Lynch being Lynch. And that’s a good thing.
Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour Detour (1945) has one of the more convoluted plots in noir, packing a flashback structure, an extended voiceover, a cross-country trek, a mysteriousdeath, an “accidental” murder, an identity exchange, an unforgettable femme fatale, and one of the most pathetic, masochistic antiheroes ever into its 67-minute running time.
Fritz Lang’s M The roots of noir go back to German Expressionism, and there’s no movie that’s more German, Expressionist, or noir than Fritz Lang’s masterful M (1931).
High Gallows: Out of the Past Jacques Tourneur’s riveting 1947 film noir, usually rankedas one of the best of the genre.
Percolating Paranoia: Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat Fritz Lang brings the terrors of noir into the bright kitchens of America.
Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir A review of Foster Hirsch’s book on neo-noir.
L.A. Confidential The only things not taken from Chinatown are a post-plastic-surgery makeup job from The Long Goodbye and that gag from “The Lucy Show” where Lucy meets Orson Welles but doesn’t believe it’s really him: “Why, these fake whiskers wouldn’t fool a child!”
