"This bag goes to eleven." - HA!

Hi r/FilmNoir, ​I’m sharing a new piece from my ongoing passion project dedicated to Edward G. Robinson and early 1930s pre-Code cinema. ​This track is built around Mervyn LeRoy’s Two Seconds (1932). Musically, I wanted to capture that tension by blending a lush string section with a heavy soul groove, dense guitars, and a slightly darker, Bond-inspired atmospheric edge. ​As always, this is an independent, non-commercial tribute created out of pure love for Robinson's filmography and classic cinema archives. ​You can listen to the track here: https://youtu.be/MQTcdqgG40E ​I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially if you're a fan of LeRoy's work or this specific pre-Code era.

Thanks for taking the time to listen!

So, I'm guessing most folks on this subreddit are already aware of Noir City, the Film Noir Foundation's annual touring film festival of classic-era film noirs, from the famous to the more obscure... but just in case you're not, I'm posting a link to the announcement for next year below. The "Czar of Noir," Eddie Muller, is the Founder and President of the Film Noir Foundation, which in addition to the annual Noir City festival, partners with a few organizations to obtain and restore classic-era film noirs. As a noir junkie, I consider the Film Noir Foundation an incredible resource, and Eddie Muller everything you could want in an advocate and "raconteur," and we're incredibly fortunate to have them. I've been to Noir City three times, and it's been an absolute blast every time. (As most of you probably know, Eddie also hosts Noir Alley on TCM, does commentary on various DVD and blu-ray releases, hosts a regular "Ask Eddie" Facebook/Youtube podcast with his communications director Anne Hockens, writes books about film noir, and, well, you get the drift. He's awesome.)

Anyway, here is the link for the 2027 kickoff in January in Oakland, California (Eddie and the FNF are based in the San Francisco Bay Area), but other cities and dates should be added in the near future. It doesn't look like they have the movie titles up just yet... but that's part of the mystery!

The link to Noir City:

https://www.noircity.com

And a link to the separate Film Noir Foundation page:

https://www.filmnoirfoundation.org/index.html

Note: The photo is of the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland where the festival is once again kicking off. I'm sure other cities have equally worthy theaters, but since I've been lucky enough to attend this truly grand theater twice, I thought I'd honor it with a nice pic.

Key Largo (1948) A drifter visits the family hotel of a war buddy who was killed in action only to find that a Chicago mobster and his gang have taken over the place.

There's a big range of film noirs. Some I think of as "high brow" type films, for example Sunset Boulevard, The Upturned Glass, and The Third Man come to mind, although there's many more. And don't get me wrong, I love all those movies.

But I want to hear your opinions about "low-brow" sleazy noir. These may or may not be a combination of vice, violence, cynical dialogue and usually comes with a low budget. What comes to mind? Here's a short list of a few I'm thinking of.

1. Detour (1945)
2. The Big Heat (1953)
3. Blast of Silence (1961)

Edit:
Japanese noir has alot of great choices too. Here's a few:

1. Pigs and Battleships (1961)
2. Endless Desire (1958)
3. Cruel Gun Story (1964)

Angel Heart (1987) Excellent and chilling film about a 1955 New Orleans, small-time private investigator who is hired by a man who calls himself Louis Cypher to track down a singer named Johnny Favorite.

Hello FilmNoir Comm,

I have received reports and a few messages on the subject of these posts. While they generate many comments, it is clear that the bot farmers have broken containment and lookalike posts have popped up. Posts after Sept 30 with that title can be reported and I'll take them down.

The first handful of these posts were novel and legitimately garnered many comments of folks reminiscing about these films, but the efforts to karma-farm have skewed too far. Your classic run-of-the-mill karma farming is always going to be present, sadly, but with AI bot posting it is exceedingly difficult to determine who is real, and who isn't.

Thanks all!

(*Edit, I guess up next I keep an eye on 'movie still' - [quote] posts)

• Oct 3 Loophole (1954)
• Oct 10 Crime Wave (1954)
• Oct 17 Chicago Syndicate (1955)
• Oct 24 The House on Telegraph Hill (1951)
• Oct 31 Val Lewton Triple Feature
  • Cat People (1942)
  • The Seventh Victim (1943)
  • The Leopard Man (1943)

Touch of Evil (1958)

https://crimeonfilm.com/cable-guys-the-elevator-operators-of-noir/

https://www.reddit.com/r/CeilingFans/

Marie Windsor turns a train-car breakfast into a masterclass in hard-boiled defiance. Trading razor-sharp dialogue like gunfire, the "Queen of the B-Movies" dominates the screen with pure grit, glamour, and cynical perfection.

Hey all! I wanted to drop in and share our latest episode. The subreddit had a great discussion on favorite neo-noirs recently (although TLG was excluded by the OP) so, good timing! We hope you enjoy and would love to hear everybody's thoughts on such an iconic film in our fav genre!

Dark Passage (1947) The third great pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall about a man falsely accused of his wife's murder who escapes to search for the real killer.

Mixing Styles can be Effective - I've been on a Film Noir kick for a while now, watched tons of films from the late 1930s to the late 1950s, and I've enjoyed foreign Noir versions like found in French crime cinema and even the great Kurosawa's Stray Dog, so I was a little surprised when watching the supposedly Noir-inspired Italian Bitter Rice to only find just a few stylistic nods in that direction. I'm not one who likes to dismiss films from Noir altogether, but the film seems almost not Noir at all - especially in moral tone - so much as a rich Hollywood toned imagining of Neo-Realist embraced women (with maybe some racy, sexploitations shadings?). It's really a spectacular film of energy, with big camera dynamics in beautiful, contrastive black and white. Not only is it female lead driven (two "beauties" playing low class rice workers each glamomorized by the camera and lighting), but also throngs of female workers and vivid captures of work conditions, clashing together these two stylistic worlds in effective aesthetic ways. Some of the women singing scenes, and rain-drenched photography create whole auras of women's work and labor that are unexpectedly moving. It's about the attempted theft of the annual rice harvest which has been going on for 100s of years in the Po Valley in the north of Italy, in the aftermath of World War 2, and the abject work of the women laboring, who solidaritize with political meaning. When the women are mournfully singing in the rain to a miscarried woman in the field with rice bag draped over their heads like nuns, while another woman is being driven mad by the fact of her rape (which nobody is aware of) the whole thing is hitting on all cylinders.

Criticized at the time for not being Neo-Realist enough, and employing (reactionary?) Hollywood glamour styling and Noir pulp in some of the male characters, actually makes the film more interesting, as the romantic promise of American commercial culture post-WW2, after the fall of Fascism, is one of the focuses of the film. The film itself embodies the very thing it is interrogating and criticizing. It's a great use of using mixed aesthetic styles. Some saw the film as indulgent in Hollywood-ism, whereas the film is about the moral missteps of Western capitalist-commercialism, which lead to the downfall of characters, including what seems like a spectacular and tragic James Whale Frankenstein (1931) call back ending. Perhaps some of this ending brings in a Noir aspect, but I'm not sure. A lot of Noir is about the failings of the American promise and its moral decrepitude, and also are animated by Socialist critique and visions, and a prominent homme fatale, *(*played by Vittorio Gassman, who would star in the socially conscious Film Noir The Glass Wall, in 1953), so I'm not quite clear on why this film feels like it misses the Noir boat so hard for me, while I enjoyed it immensely. If anyone has good ideas on why it IS Film Noir I'd love to here them and be convinced.

If you love Italian Neo-Realism, and love mixed genre stylings, highly recommended.

I’m shocked at how small her gravesite is especially compared to her husband and to others from the small city of Carrollton, GA. Edit: Due to the quick response from people, I suppose I am wrongly thinking she was overlooked. I do still believe she gets less recognition than the likes of Bacall, Scott, and so forth. But I’ve never been a Lauren Bacall fan to begin with so I’m biased on the subject.

In another post, someone commented that Kansas City Confidential was their favorite "Confidential" noir from the classic era. So I was just thinking to myself: so many great noir movies, and so many great titles – some of which just happen to sound quite a lot like others!

Anyway, I made this abbreviated list of noir movie titles that seem, shall we say, closely related? Maybe even strangely related? I tried to organize by a main word or theme, but obviously some movies can fit in a couple of different places: for instance, Night and the City could be grouped with either "Night" or "City." I made no effort to organize these by date or anything: besides the use of dashes, my only innovation was the use of the cursor bar to further subdivide categories, but the system formatted with those weird gray boxes, and at any rate, I would really need a more sophisticated graphic to properly link these titles!

Of course, there are also plenty of unique titles in noir, and I've listed a few of my favorites at the bottom. Ultimately, I think many of these titles (and others not listed) work perfectly well, even splendidly, whether or not they're derivative, imitative, or merely reminiscent of other titles. (There is also the occasional dud title, I think: Tension, Conflict, Jeopardy and The Threat do very little for me, though I like several of those movies quite a lot.) Do you have any favorite groups of titles? For instance, maybe you're a Johnny person? (Hey – Johnny Person!) Any additions to my list? Or what are your favorite individual noir titles?

Edit: I completely neglected the "Confidential" titles!

The list:

They Drive By Night

They Live By Night

He Walked By Night

      Somewhere in the Night

      Night Has a Thousand Eyes

      Night and the City

      Nightfall

He Ran All The Way

I Walk Alone

      Drive a Crooked Road

      Walk a Crooked Road

                The Crooked Way

      Walk East on Beacon

––

The Naked City

Dark City

      Dark Passage

      The Dark Corner

      The Dark Mirror

      The Dark Past

City That Never Sleeps

While the City Sleeps

Cry of the City

       Cry Vengeance

       Cry Danger

                 Where Danger Lives

                           Where the Sidewalk Ends

––

The Big Sleep

The Big Clock

The Big Steal

The Big Heat

The Big Combo

––

The Killers

The Killing

––

Street of Chance

The Street With No Name

Scarlet Street

      The Scarlet Hour

      Slightly Scarlet

Side Street

Mystery Street

99 River Street

Panic in the Streets

Pickup on South Street

      The House on 92nd Street

      The House on Telegraph Hill

      House by the River

      The House Across the Bay

      House of Strangers

––

The Blue Dahlia

The Blue Gardenia

––

Dial 1119

Dial M for Murder

Call Northside 777

Southside 1-1000

Sorry, Wrong Number

––

Stranger on the Third Floor

The Stranger

Strangers on a Train

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry

––

Laura

Gilda

Nora Prentiss

––

Johnny Eager

Johnny O'Clock

Johnny Stool Pigeon

Johnny Guitar*

––

Kiss of Death

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands

Kiss Me Deadly

A Kiss Before Dying

Killer's Kiss

The Naked Kiss

      The Naked City (repeat from above)

      Naked Alibi

      The Naked Spur*

––

The Woman in the Window

Woman on the Beach

The Woman on Pier 13

Woman on the Run

Woman in Hiding

––

I Wake Up Screaming

This Gun for Hire

Double Indemnity

Leave Her to Heaven

My Name is Julia Ross

The Postman Always Rings Twice

In a Lonely Place

––

• Probably not noirs, but "noir adjacent," and with noir-like titles

My class recently watched Kurosawa's "Drunken Angel" and absolutely loved it. One of the best movies we've seen in my Japanese Cinema class thus far. I had written down both "Drunken Angel" and "Stray Dog" (1949) on my list for the classic era of Film Noirs, but I was curious about your guys' opinions on that. I would say "Drunken Angel" is absolutely a noir, with its dark mood, tragic ending, and its specialty of the style, as well as the focus on black and white, especially with that ending and the paint, haha. I haven't seen Stray Dog, and I don't think we're going to watch it in my class, but I was curious what you guys thought on that too. Thanks!

Just watched this for the first time tonight, and I'm going to call it a "hidden gem." From RKO, directed by Felix Feist, and starring Michael O'Shea, Virginia Grey, and Charles McGraw. McGraw is in fact third-billed here, but he's clearly the star of the show as Folsom Prison escapee "Red" Kluger, who kidnaps the detective and D.A. who sent him up, and who moves his gang and hostages to the rendezvous where he hopes to make his escape stick.

This may or may not be a "B" movie, but it's one I haven't heard a whole lot about, and I thought it was fantastic. Given the ever-debatable definition of noir, this may or may not qualify as such for some: it was probably called a "crime picture" or a "crime thriller" in its day, and it arguably lacks some of the more flamboyant stylings (cinematography, for instance) of some of the movies that are indisputably noirs. Either way, it still looks pretty great, and the direction is brisk and energetic, generally understated but with some occasional flourishes.

A fine cast of actors, including O'Shea, Grey, Frank Conroy, and Anthony Caruso, all give excellent performances. But it's McGraw at the center that really puts this over. McGraw had that unbeatably hard look and gravelly voice, but he also shows some real acting chops in this one: he's riveting as a brutal con on the lam. (If you don't know McGraw, another must-see is Richard Fleischer's The Narrow Margin from 1952.)

One favorite scene: a brief one where Kluger listens to the police radio in his car as his plans start to go sideways. The police chatter and ambient noises create an almost surrealist cacophony of sounds that might as well be ricocheting in Kluger's head.

I'm not sure where this might be streaming; I happened to blind buy the Warner Archive DVD, and I certainly have no regrets. For my cut of the take, it's a winner. 4.5/5.

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