Classic Film Noir exposes the myths by which we fulfil our desires and lays flat the means by which we created the audiovisual dispositif — sex — murder — and the suburban dream — 1940 to 1960 — FEATURING: amnesia, paranoid women, lousy husbands, red scare and HUAC, boxing, drifter narratives, crooked cops, home invasion noir, docu-style noir, returning veterans, #KEFAUVER! cowboy noir, vacuum cleaners in film noir, outré noir, espionage noir — and more.
Allotment Wives (1945)
Duel in the Sun (1946)
Duel in the Sun (1946) is a big budget, trashy, overblown, fuss and lust in the dust perfect and strange Technicolor violence against women and girls epic ethnically unengaged and super-classic Jennifer Jones ill-informed diegetically failing mainstream meta-normative-narrative and hegemonic conservatism-inducing psychological western family feud and patriarchal posturin' romance fantasy drama David O. Selznick dream cinematic vision directed by King Vidor, with several directors being left uncredited for their work in the film, such as Josef von Sternberg, William Dieterle, William Cameron Menzies, Otto Brower, Sidney Franklin and Selznick himself, while production unit managers Glenn Cook and William McGarry were also uncredited, and starring Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, Herbert Marshall, Lillian Gish, Walter Huston, Butterfly McQueen and Lionel Barrymore.
High Noon (1952)
Not even in this sense then can High Noon (1952) be quantified as a film noir western, like many movies of the period may be. And yet there are so many minute noir markers placed within, and a certain sensitivity to the ailing male and some more complex female relations, as well as commentary on the public body politic, and the influence on community of criminal fear, direct from the government as much as from the villains in our midst, those determined unto lawlessness.
Saboteur (1942)
A sheer joy of rollicking war time entertainment, Saboteur (1942) refuses to suffer critiques that it is too preachy in deep pro-Protestant American messaging, promoting the great values of its great self, and going too far in its reaching into the pockets of the nation's moral code.
But this is not the case, given that Hitchcock would go on to film the country, re-recreate the country, give the States such direction and place an immortal stamp on the nation's culture and film industry.
Black Widow (1954)
Attention spans alerted everyone this slider of a slow noir is another object lesson in the class of colon noirs which feel their way in a cinematic dark so much of the time and are managerially staid with a tragic inability to fill the vacant screen space created by colour-vision and wide screen tech. A double whammy of screen emptiness.
Come diving headlong into the murky waters of a slow burn noir flick that's as sluggish as a slug on a warm sidewalk. This one's a textbook case of those colour noirs that stumble in the shadows, groping blindly through the cinematic darkness, like a gumshoe with one too many shots of rum, yum. Yeah, it's got all the fancy-pants tech — living colour, widescreen — but it's like watching paint dry in a rainstorm. A double-barreled blast of cinematic emptiness that hits you square between the eyes.
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