Class System · Crime · Hollywood · Noir · Pre-Code
When the Production Code loosened and America lurched through assassinations, riots, and televised body bags, the gangster stopped functioning as a moral lesson and started reading as a symptom –[…]
Activist & Political · Counterculture · Drama · Exploitation & Erotica · Indies · LGBT & Queer · Neo-Noir · New Genres · Noir · Road Movies · Sex & Relationships
Though several deliciously sordid queer noirs have made their way into the cultural fabric of the past decades (Mulholland Dr. [2001], Stranger By The Lake [2013], The Handmaiden [2016]), 2024[…]
The film is intent on the present, an element of the fifties go-getter types and the emergence of the organization man. The stress on “man” comes during post-World War II[…]
Counterculture · Music & Musicals · Noir
In noir, tales of wrongful accusation tend to play out on mean streets that reflect social inequalities, which at times do have a nasty way of tilting normally upright people[…]
Books · Noir · Uncategorized
Leon Lewis (Ed.), John Alton: Essays on the Cinematographer’s Art and Craft (McFarland, 2020) * * * Widely regarded as epitomizing the visual style of high film noir as it[…]
Expanding and redrawing Ginette Vincendeau’s incomplete map of French film noir * * * Let it be said here first: I come to praise Ginette Vincendeau,1 not to bury her.[…]
If Harry, viewed through the lens of Greene’s perverse Catholicism, is some kind of dark Jesus, then Holly is his betraying Judas, and Anna is his Magdalene. Both Harry and[…]
Drama · Fashion · Noir · Women in Film
The fact that even if that zipper did come down it would simply reveal more dress, a never-ending vortex of clasps and corsets leading to nowhere, seems precisely what the[…]
Altman admitted never finishing the novel and saw no need to remain faithful to it. For that reason, the movie wasn’t well received by Chandler fans. Most didn’t appreciate the[…]
Hollywood was just beyond the horizon for the émigrés. There is no doubt that Curtis Bernhardt, Robert Siodmak, and Max Ophüls thought they would settle down in Paris and become[…]
It’s OK with Me: Hollywood, the 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye, by Jason Bailey. $11.99, 78 pp. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018. Across individual analysis of about[…]
Andrew Stone and his fantastically helpful wife-editor have evolved an entirely different ethos of film-making.… If they want to blow up a train, they blow up a real train. If[…]
Actors & Personalities · Noir · War
An examination of two of these émigrés – Fritz Kortner and Ernst Deutsch, major Central European actors, very well known in their home countries before leaving them in duress, both[…]
The box office and critical reaction to many of these film noirs varied wildly and widely, especially with viewers in the middle of the country. “The picture is too long[…]
First daring and experimental in an era of conformity, then classical in the age of the new wave, and finally nuanced and introspective when fashionable tastes ran radical and revolutionary[…]
This review of L.A. Confidential first appeared in Bright Lights in May 1998. We’ve always been fond of this piece, and are happy to repost it now, not least because[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Horror · Noir
How do you begin a story? If I told you a story begins with the arrival of a stranger in town, you would probably think I was talking about a[…]
The Worldwide Film Noir Tradition: The Complete Reference to Classic Dark Cinema from America, Britain, France and Other Countries Across the Globe by Spencer Selby. Ames, Iowa: Sink Press, 2013. […]
“This noir heroine comes very close to having it all: the house, the money, and the freedom. Kitty Collins, Kathie Moffatt, and the rest of the femme fatales would have been exultant. They’d have tried to knock some sense into Diane, told her not to mope about and enjoy the jackpot. But she is something of an angel. She repents.”
If film noir is defined by any single image, it is the dark city. Yet a film doesn’t have to take place in the dark city to be noir. Any fallen world[…]
