John Alton was one of the great noir cinematographers. Alton’s visual poetry in a stunning chase climax in underground city drains in this edited final sequence from the pulp-b He Walked by Night (1948) attest to his greatness.
A select film noir filmography for Alton as DP:
T-Men (1947)
Bury Me Dead (1947 )
Raw [...]Cop Edward G Robinson goes under-cover to break up a gang of racketeers. Hoods include Humphrey Bogart and a mean Joan Blondell. Very noir lensing by Hal Mohr (Johnny Holiday (1949), The Big Night (1951), Woman on the Run (1950), The Second Woman (1950), Rancho Notorious (1952), The Big Night (1951), and Underworld U.S.A. [...]
Marcel Carne’s Hotel Du Nord is seen as part of a trilogy that encompasses two other of his films from the 1930s: Le quai des brumes (Port of Shadows 1938) and Le jour se lève (Daybreak 1939). These films represent what has been termed ‘poetic realism’, a gritty fatalistic French cycle of films seen as [...]Orson Wells in 1939 under contract to RKO developed a screenplay for a film adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novella ‘Heart of Darkness’ (1899) , which sadly was never made.
Film scholar James Naremore in an on-line article discusses the book and the development of Welles’ script, which sets the story in the present day and makes [...]2046 (Hong Kong 2004)
Entrapment of a suave gambler turned pulp-novelist by his muses – femmes fatales all…
Director & Writer Kar Wai Wong
DPs Christopher Doyle & Pung-Leung Kwan
Original Music Shigeru UmebayashiFurther to my February 25 post on Goldman Sachs’ manipulation of the CDO market, The Numbers Racket… , the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed fraud charges against Goldman Sachs for allegedly selling investors a financial product based on sub-prime mortgages that was secretly designed to lose value.
The SEC alleges that Goldman Sachs [...]D.O.A. (1950) Gritty on-the-streets in-your-face melodrama…
Director Rudolph Maté | DP Ernest Laszlo | Score Dimitri Tiomkin
Voici le temps des assassins… ( Deadlier Than the Male – France 1956)
Director Julien Duvivier | DP Armand Thirard
Very young and twisted femme-fatale Danièle Delorme guided by her off-the-wall user mother very nearly destroys Jean Gabin as besotted Paris restauranter of a certain age. The denouement while not graphic is a bitch…Questar Entertainment on May18 will release a 6-DVD Box set of 7 classic films noir. Questar has kindly sent me a complimentary promotional copy.
The nicely boxed set presents each DVD in it’s own case with high quality stills and artwork, and the DVD menu has a cool animated noir motif and voice-over. While the [...]There is a certain irony in this excerpt from the novel by Italo-American Pietro Di Donato, Christ in Concrete (1939), a story of Italian immigrant building workers and their families in Brooklyn during the Depression. In 1949 a film adaptation of the novel by director Edward Dmytryk, featured teeming tenements and residential streets shot with [...]
Screenhead wants you to win big with Tribeca Film On Demand!
Until June 16th—and supported by Founding Partner American Express—the new film distribution initiative from Tribeca Film has kicked off by bringing you films that have been curated (including titles from the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival) right to your home via On Demand!
Something for Everyone—Tribeca Film [...]
Few things can beat seeing one or more of these films on the big screen at a film noir festival with other fans.