“The thumb isn’t good enough for you. You have to use your whole body.”  Naked underneath her trenchcoat, frightened hitchhiker Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman) gets private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) to stop his car by standing in the middle of the highway with her arms outstretched in an X pattern.  This is the first time we ... read more »

Is Two Seconds (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) the first American noir? I’ve read some historians who trace American film noir as far back as Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927). But Underworld, with its light-hearted gangster protagonist, is a veritable romp compared to the unrelenting descent into darkness that is Two Seconds. Two Seconds is a showcase ... read more »

Although most film noirs take place in an urban setting, the “dark city,” Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) shows how the noir vision can thrive almost anywhere – it is an effectively written and directed ”rural noir.” You could hardly get more rural than the bleak Missouri backwoods where Winter’s Bone takes place.  Yet it shares with the ... read more »

A MATRIX OF CONNECTIONS For a long time, I avoided watching The Thirteenth Floor (above) due to the name Roland Emmerich in the credits. Emmerich was responsible in one way or another for such turkeys as the American Godzilla remake and 10,000 B.C.  However, prompted by Bright Lights After Dark commenter, Hal O’Brien, I finally screened the film ... read more »

Director Robert Siodmak was born on August 8, 1900, in Dresden, Germany. If alive today, he would be 110. In 1994, in an article entitled Beyond the Golden Age: Film Noir Since the ’50s, I wrote: It is almost (but not quite) a rule of thumb that the more personal a director’s vision, the less ... read more »

The Dark House (Dom Zły) Dir. Wojcieh Smarzowski, Poland 2009 What the Inuit language is to snow, Polish is to varieties of squalor and mess.  Take melina, an alcoholic’s den, lined with old newspapers, empty bottles, cigarette butts, and plates of half-eaten food.  Syf – the stinking pile of vegetable scraps behind the chicken coop ... read more »

Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann likes to capture rooms and the lives within. His camera remains stable or abruptly shifts, as if just discovering the element central to the layout. At the beginning of Revanche, his first release in the US but fifth overall, Spielmann seems to depict Vienna lowlifes as they are – the aim ... read more »

I just learned, via Peter Nellhaus, of the passing of one of America’s most obscure-but-talented directors, Paul Wendkos. Wendkos would be far better known today if his first film, the great low-budget noir, The Burglar (1956), were more readily available. The Burglar, an unabashedly arty film based on the David Goodis novel of the same ... read more »

The Daily Beast’s Scott Horton reports that a judge in Spain decided today that an investigation of Bush officials involved in torture policy will go forward and can lead to prosecution. In a ruling in Madrid today, Judge Baltasar Garzón has announced that an inquiry into the Bush administration’s torture policymakers now will proceed to ... read more »

Sometimes one role is all it takes – if it’s the right role. Blacklisted Dorothy Comingore didn’t have much of a film career, but she will always be remembered for having played Susan Alexander in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane – or if not always, for at least as long as film is revered as an ... read more »