The director’s name was Joseph H. Lewis. Sniff around film noir long enough and you’ll soon find reference to him. Lewis is often written about with reverence and admiration for elevating the material he was given into something far more interesting, more cinematic. Behind the camera, which he tended to place in such unique locations [...]

Giddy over these:

There really aren’t that many ice skating noirs. And while that very well could be for the best, the 1946 picture Suspense proves that it’s indeed possible to effectively merge the two worlds of chilly entertainment and even cooler displays of morbid unraveling. Here we have yet another delicious reminder of what we mean when [...]

(This is also at the DVD Times site. Same content both places. I just wanted to have it here too.)
When Warner Home Video opted last year to drastically change its business model in terms of classic film releases in R1, the impact was most felt by those who had loyally been purchasing the studio’s box [...]

I have a Noir of the Week entry to share. It’s an appreciation for Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake that I wrote and it went up today. A few weeks ago when I agreed to do the piece December seemed like it would have more time for writing than it’s actually proven to. As [...]

A maniac who wears his hat tilted to the side, Richard Attenborough’s teenage thug Pinkie Brown in the Boultings’ Brighton Rock brings to mind the signature Hollywood gangsters played by Paul Muni, James Cagney, and Richard Widmark. Pinkie’s a proud, impressively attired sociopath who holds a position of some power in the local syndicate. Though [...]

A few things really got my attention with the 1949 film noir Follow Me Quietly. Its director Richard Fleischer was the epitome of the solid noir director, always churning out something interesting without fully dazzling the viewer. He made short, cheap crime films for RKO like The Narrow Margin, Armored Car Robbery, and The Clay [...]

We’re nearing the one-year anniversary of director Jules Dassin’s death and his films, as ever, have been on my mind lately. It was last March 31st when Dassin died at the age of 96, a survivor of the film industry’s schizophrenic ups and downs. At the time, I was compelled to lay a little wreath [...]

There are two reasons I’ve been anxious to see Hold Back the Dawn. One is Billy Wilder and the other is a nonexistent cockroach. I’ve brought this up before, but it’s a good enough story that you really can’t tell it too many times. When Wilder was still under contract as a writer for Paramount, [...]

The Shop Around the Corner is a 1940 film directed by Ernst Lubitsch and adapted for the screen by Samson Raphaelson. James Stewart stars as a sales clerk in a small Budapest shop and top-billed Margaret Sullavan plays a newly hired shop girl in the same quaint little store. The plot point that usually grabs [...]