Life's a Noir

When a movie has a title like Fingerprints Don't Lie you can pretty much guess that it’s going to turn out that fingerprints can indeed lie. And that is the case here. But how can fingerprints lie?

( read more )



x-posted to movie_greats

Most accounts I’ve read of Seijun Suzuki's career suggest that after making a series of very successful crime thrillers for Nikkatsu he fell out of favour when he developed his own idiosyncratic, outrageous and somewhat surreal personal style in movies like Tokyo Drifter (1966) and Branded to Kill (1967). Which may be so, but that personal style (in a less developed form) is already clearly present as early as 1960 in Take Aim at the Police Van.

( read more )


x-posted to movie_greats

I’ve always maintained that if you’re a halfway competent film-maker you can’t make a bad film from a Cornell Woolrich story. RKO’s 1949 thriller The Window, directed by Ted Tetzlaff, tends to support that theory.

( read more )



x-posted to movie_greats

Otto Preminger’s Daisy Kenyon is essentially a women’s picture made in a film noir style. Made at Fox in 1947, this is also a superb example of Preminger’s film-making at its best.

( read more )



x-posted to movie_greats

Rusty Knife is one of five movies presented in the Nikkatsu Noir boxed set by Criterion in their “budget” Eclipse series.

( read more )



x-posted to movie_greats

Payroll is a 1961 British crime thriller with at best marginal claims to be a film noir but it does have some interesting features. It can be seen as a heist movie (and a very good one) but it can also be seen as a revenge movie. Unusually for 1961, it has a woman as the righteous avenging angel.

( read more )



x-posted to movie_greats

Please Murder Me is an ingenious little 1956 murder mystery with noir overtones and a clever plot gimmick.

( read more )



x-posted to movie_greats

His Kind of Woman is one of those films that can best be described as a glorious mess. It is in fact two different films spliced uneasily together, films from entirely different and incompatible genres, but both films are terrific and compulsively watchable.

( read more )



x-posted to movie_greats

Before establishing himself as one of the masters of gothic horror director Terence Fisher honed his skills making crime B-movies like The Unholy Four (original British title The Stranger Came Home) for Hammer Films in the early 50s.

( read more )



x-posted to movie_greats

I must confess to having a bit of an obsession with Fritz Lang. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s my favourite film-maker off all time but he’s certainly one of my favourites. I’m also a staunch defender of Lang’s American movies. So naturally I had to get hold of a copy of Peter Bogdanovich’s Fritz Lang in America.

( read more )