With Halloween over but still lingering in our devilish minds, #BNoirDetour on Sunday 11/1 presents a day-after treat with a title that sounds like pure horror but a film that's pure noir, based on an original story by Dashiell Hammett. I Wake... Continue Reading →
BNoirDetour will truly earn its name with tonight's film, 1943's The Leopard Man. Produced by B horror king Val Lewton and directed by Jacques Tournier, with a budget of only $150,000, the film makes the perfect entry for the week of... Continue Reading →
As a noir blogger, I have yet to post on silent films, for mostly obvious reasons. One can, however, find gems of pre- or proto-noir, particularly in the silents of Weimar cinema. So, when In the Good Old Days of Classic... Continue Reading →
Don’t miss next Saturday’s #GangstersAllHere live tweet!
This week, The Gangsters All Here makes a bid for legitimacy with a film-noir gem titled The Big Combo. It stars Cornel Wilde as Police Lt. Leonard Diamond, who is on a one-man quest to bring down Mr. Brown (ultra-slick Richard Conte), a racketeer who appears to control everything and everyone in town except for Lt. Diamond. The worthy supporting cast includes Helen Walker (in her final film role), Jean Wallace, and Brian Donlevy (who seems to play a slobbering syncophant in about every other one of these types of movies).
And my dear online blogger-friend Salome at BNoirDetour would never forgive me if I didn’t mention two other memorable supporting actors: Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman as Mr. Brown’s henchmen Fante and Mingo. When I first watched this movie, I regarded this less-than-dynamic duo as simply the movie’s answer to Of Mice and Men‘s…
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Hugo Haas (1901-1968) is the director and star of #BNoirDetour's next film, Pickup. A Czech actor, director, and writer, he was a celebrated comic star in Czech films whose reputation and fame grew as he began to write, direct, and produce.... Continue Reading →
Latino noir for Hispanic Heritage Month.
Today, September 15th kicks off Hispanic Heritage Month (although this Latina celebrates her ethnicity every day 🙂 ) and my heart is full by seeing so much content spread across the internet in honor of Latinos. A topic I’ve been trying to write about but haven’t had the time to discuss is the contributions of Hispanics and Latin American countries and filmmakers present in film noir.
Anthony Mann’s Border Incident (1949)
During this TCM’s ‘Into the Darkness‘ film noir course, a recurring theme I noticed was Latin American settings. As you may be aware, films noir take place in urban settings. Alleys, bars, tiny apartments, and New York City are just some of the signature elements present as the background of a film noir. During the film noir movement in the 1940’s, American cinema went away from New York City to more exotic locales such as Argentina in Gilda (1946) and…
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For this noir blog, it was tempting to participate in Once Upon a Screen's Hispanic Heritage Blogathon by sharing the disturbing tale of abused young Margarita Cansino, the lovely girl who was transformed into troubled Hollywood celebrity Rita Hayworth. But it's a... Continue Reading →
After last week's melodrama, #bnoirdetour returns to darker noir suspense with 1949's The Hidden Room (originally released as Obsession in England, where it was produced). London psychiatrist Dr. Clive Riordan (Robert Newton -- a year after playing Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist and a... Continue Reading →
Raymond Chandler's novel The Big Sleep introduces us to Philip Marlowe, the quintessential private dick, a character that would "plague" Chandler's career and delight millions in literary, film, radio, and television versions. In The Simple Art of Murder (1950), Chandler describes this type... Continue Reading →
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