An intriguing new play will premiere in Los Angeles at the Bootleg Theater in mid October. THE STAND-IN looks behind the scenes during the filming of the film noir classic “Double Indemnity”. Billy Wilder, the picture’s director, and Kasia, an enigmatic younger woman, struggle for identity as foreigners while the movie is written, shot, … [Read more…]
A team of young independent film-makers from the UK is seeking crowd funding for a new noir-themed web series titled The Run, which is being promoted as a story about power, ambition, trust, loyalty and betrayal set in a world of corporate intrigue. The pilot was a finalist at last year’s Raindance Web Festival in … [Read more…]
I have just returned from Japan and would like to share some night shots I snapped in Tokyo.
The Bad Sleep Well (1960) Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well (1960) is a caustic tale of corporate corruption and greed, where the surface hides the ugly truth. The death of a fall guy thrown from a multi-story office block in central Tokyo precipitates a simmering revenge by the victim’s son. Using a stolen identity … [Read more…]
“A little girl is returning from the beach, at dusk, with her mother. She is crying for no reason at all, because she would have liked to continue playing. She moves off into the distance. She has already turned the corner of the street, and do not our lives dissolve into the evening as quickly … [Read more…]
Film noir evokes the dark side where the noir protagonist is usually trapped in a web of dire circumstance. A particular noir trope is amnesia. Hemmed in by internal barriers the noir amnesiac struggles to recover memory and meaning. The lost doppelganger, usually the dark flip-side of a new better self. In the redemptive noir … [Read more…]
“Dusk gently smooths crispangled streets. Dark presses tight the steaming asphalt city, crushes the fretwork of windows and lettered signs and chimneys and watertanks and ventilators and fireescapes and moldings and patterns and corrugations and eyes and hands and neckties into blue chunks, into black enormous blocks. Under the rolling heavier heavier pressure windows blurt … [Read more…]
Film noir aficionado Ray (“Cigar Joe”) Ottulich has launched a new blog where he will collect his film noir reviews from various forums, and post new reviews and noir-related snippets. The blog is appropriately titled Noirsville. Ray over the past few years has introduced me to a number of b-movies and little-known neo-noirs, and Noirsville is a very … [Read more…]
A reader has asked which American films noir have been inducted into the US Library of Congress National Film Registry. I did a little digging and identified 26 Hollywood movies in the list that fall under the film noir umbrella. There are 650 films in the list so the standard e&oe disclaimer applies. Film Title … [Read more…]
Film Noir had antecedents in the German Expressionist cinema of the 20s and French Poetic Realism in the 30s, but there are movies from other national cinemas that also explored the corrosive aspects of modernity. Three films that have recently come my way are in this vein. One is a German silent and the other … [Read more…]