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 [...]

I have seen the Technicolor light and it is good. The Cobweb, not so much. Let’s say it’s a bad film, a ridiculous film, even a hideously dangerous film. It’s still kind of fun and it still has an auburn-haired Gloria Grahame in a low-cut glamour dress, a darkly lit nightgown and a [...]

Four viewings of movies designated as film noir in a 24-hour period and the only side effects I seem to have are the almost uncontrollable desires to rob a bank and get mixed up with a woman who’s no good for me. It’ll pass, I’m sure. The new Warner Bros. Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. [...]

In the Criterion Collection’s monthly newsletter, they ask a prominent figure associated with a previously released title to compose a list of ten favorite selections among the Criterion catalog. Even though it was just released this past week, I know for certain that I would choose their Ace in the Hole DVD if that question [...]

It’s that time again, as the Criterion forum’s Lists Project focuses on the decade of the 1950s. As described in my list for the previous decade (here), a master list of 100 films is calculated from participating members’ individual 50 film lists. I probably take this whole thing way too seriously as I try to [...]

American film comedy took a creative hit in the 1950s. Absent are the screwball antics and the witty sophistication from the previous two decades of talking pictures. To be fair, World War II and its aftermath would be reason enough to sober up a nation full of writers, filmmakers, and audiences. Yet, it’s fairly difficult [...]

I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.

I can’t even pretend to feign objectivity when discussing Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place. I think it’s one of the most exquisite, fascinating films to ever come from Hollywood. [...]