The bookends of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage) consist of a wordless journey, given demented affection by Maurice Jarre’s score, to dispose of a female corpse dressed in men’s clothing and the escape of one animal after another, culminating in the brutal poetry of angry dogs attacking their captor and [...]

In the spring of 1958, director Nicholas Ray was tumbling a bit commercially. Ray’s filmmaking had never been exactly easy. Like his fellow Wisconsin native Orson Welles, it was on Ray’s first picture, the young lovers on the lam film noir They Live by Night, where he had the greatest control of his career and, [...]

While Nicholas Ray’s work is still treated with little respect on DVD in R1, there are a couple of films he directed which seem especially difficult to track down. One, which I’ve still not seen, was a project Ray made for Paramount, between Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause, called Run for Cover. The [...]

Among the actors and actresses most at home in film noir, the ideal teaming, as evidenced by the header on this site, would be Sterling Hayden and Gloria Grahame. He of the tall, strong, Scandinavian stock flecked with cool authority and she burning with a pouty sensuality that flashes a warning you won’t heed. When [...]

(This was supposed to accompany a review of the new DVD release, but Universal didn’t send me a copy. I wrote it after a theatrical screening a few weeks ago, and there’s no reason to let a few hours of writing go to waste.)
It’s either to Orson Welles’ credit or the result of a contrarian [...]

Even several years into the DVD format, it’s still a pleasant surprise when one particular filmmaker has multiple, unrelated releases hit shelves around the same time. Now, over 40 years since his untimely death, 2008 seems to have accidentally turned into the year of Anthony Mann in R1. His two epics, El Cid and The [...]

If film noir had an official sport it would be boxing. Black and white cinematography perfectly captures the sweat and grit of two men pounding their gloved fists into each other’s raw skin. Raging Bull isn’t a film noir, but it accomplishes the visual doom of a fight without the use of color, as does [...]

You know you’re in for a bit of “social enlightenment” when a prologue comes up even before the studio logo. In the case of The Sniper, Edward Dmytryk’s 1952 return from the Hollywood blacklist, the viewer is promised a “man whose enemy was womankind.” In several ways, this is a novel approach. Here we have [...]

Richard Fleischer’s 1955 CinemaScope extravaganza Violent Saturday isn’t the small town film noir I was led to believe, but its dual climaxes certainly live up to the noir-appropriate title. I might more aptly characterize the film as some odd noir-melodrama hybrid, Stahl or Sirk via John Sturges maybe. Violent Saturday reminded me especially of Bad [...]

(There are a lot of spoilers here, more than I usually include.)
Late in Lewis Gilbert’s The Good Die Young, Miles “Rave” Ravenscourt, expertly played by Laurence Harvey, opines that the men of the film’s title perish in war while the surviving soldiers are, in my words, sort of like sediment shifting to the bottom of [...]