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Showing posts with label Robert Wise. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Wise. Show all posts
I Want To Live! (1958)
The Captive City (1952)
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The Captive City (1952) is a small town suburban journalism and media gambling and local corruption organised crime exposé with flashback and voiceover film noir, with epic desk to camera and such a strong Kefauver theme that Estes Kefauver himself appears in the film.
Super strong in its categories, this noir is nearly a classic film noir, and maybe even is such, certainly it is a class film noir, if not a classique. Close up paranoid photography and murder, newspaper men against the odds, small town atmosphere to perfection and an intriguing thug hood and mookery-style delivery under professional organised crookery.
The Body Snatcher (1945)
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Presumably one could tune in as many have done in order to see Lugosi and Karloff playing a scene together, which certainly happens within and is worth the wait.
Elsewhere Scotland provides some proper atmosphere and the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle are re-created well given the restraints of a typical studio.
There are a few other Scottish travesties to enjoy, and one of the rarest within The Body Snatcher (1945) is the murdering of the dog Greyfriar's Bobby, much beloved of every soul in both Hollywood, and in Scotland. To see wee Bobbie smashed and disposed of with a shovel is an awesome and horrific sight.
The Set-Up (1949)
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The Set-Up (1949) is a high-intensity weakened male failing old timer boxing set-up patsy takes a dive real-time action concept classic film noir based on a narrative poem published in 1929.
The streets of the night with their emphasis on fun, with arcades and bars, and cigar stands and joints of all sorts, are seen as places of isolation as Julie walks them without aim, unable to watch her man Stoker take part in another fight.
Existential expression is often key to film noir, and of course Albert Camus needed to go to the cinema too, and would have ideally found confirmation of his philosophical expression in a picture such as this.
Born To Kill (1947)
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Born To Kill (1947) is a savage psychopathic murder female seeker hero thriller noir, from the height of the classic film noir period, displaying virtually every noir vice and virtue in a brutal and thrilling tale of toxic male psychopathy and female resilience.
The opening minutes of Born To Kill are a quick and quiet succession of some of noir's best idiomatic themes and settings. All taking place in Reno, these scenes kick off with first the independent women, and then the suburban setting. Within that setting are more independent women, and plenty alcohol.
The next scene is in a casino, not a likely setting for an innocent divorcee perhaps, but a great place for Americana to wash up against itself - - and the scene right after that is back into perfect suburbia, where it's all iceboxes and radio sets, a friendly doggie and a double murder out of nowhere.
The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)
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The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) is the quintessential high quality high concept high tension classic Hollywood 1950's science-fiction presentation.
The nascent and sudden re-invention of the science fiction film in the 1950s does inevitably draw on film noir style when need be.
And although the themes are of a universal and global nature, not quite the subjective and local tendency in film noir, there are still film techniques and themes aplenty which crossover between the film noir of its day and the science fiction.
Directed by Robert Wise The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) is spritely, earnest, playful, philosophical, funny, serious and has distinct Bernhard Hermann music, as well as the most irresistible use of the theremin in film history.
Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)
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Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) is a late noir cycle race-relations civil-rights and jazz-fuelled minor heist film noir movie produced and directed by Robert Wise, starring Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan, Ed Begley, Shelley Winters and Gloria Grahame.
Odds Against Tomorrow is one of the last films to appear in the classic noir cycle, and is notable for a plot which features a serious commentary on racism.
If there were to be such a sub-genre as arthouse-noir from the late 1950s, Odds Against Tomorrow would qualify. The score is by The Modern Jazz Quartet, so it would be hard to groove harder than that in the late-noir groove-yard of arthouse heist noir.
As well as the most solid of noir tropes, such as the ex-soldier turned to crime, and the massive dose of 'one last job' which everybody seems to be on, there are also dramatic shots of birds in flight, city landscapes and children at play, all set to that arty jazz soundtrack by John Lewis — and even some experimental infra-red photography.
Blood on the Moon (1948)
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Blood on the Moon (1948) is a wild Western with film noir credentials. Those credentials are sounder than may first appear, and are real.
Robert Wise, the director of Blood on the Moon brought the urban, psychological, shadowy, violent and complex aspects of film noir to this movie, making it very likely the greatest admixture of the Western genre with the film noir style.
It begs the question as to what film noir and Western have in common, and it's likely the fact that both of them ultimately deal with morality.
The lead elements of film noir are first and foremost visible. These are a difficult to follow and relatively layered plot of crosses, triple crosses and identities.
These typically complex stories are also played out in the shadows where possible. Blood on the Moon not only opens with an epic and miserable rain storm, and in that storm is the figure of the drifter, stoically on the wander, the forever hired hand, here played by Robert Mitchum.
The House on Telegraph Hill (1951)
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She's a paranoid woman but she's not alone. They are all over film noir, and not just in The House on Telegraph Hill (1951).