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Not Your Grandmother's Femme Fatale...

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I Regret to announce that this film presentation has been cancelled for unavoidable personal reasons. Please check back for further updates, and thank you for your understanding. **Original listing follows** Please note that this week's film has been rated  18  in the UK. Remember Too Late for Tears ? Lizabeth Scott's Jane Palmer is often regarded as the femme fatale to end all femmes fatale, in part because she proves herself to be so completely amoral. Outwardly, she is a typical post-war housewife with a devoted (if slightly bland) husband... but then someone drops a bag of blackmail cash into the wrong car, and sweet, demure Mrs. Palmer reveals herself to be capable of extremes that would give Joan Bennett and Barbara Stanwyck pause. Her film ends (a trail of corpses in her wake) with her almost, almost getting away with it. Too Late for Tears was released in 1949, and Scott's character was the perfect expression of the femme fatale for a society in transition. All ...
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You can take your Indemnity and Double it...

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Please note that this week's film has been rated  18  in the UK. Funny thing about "Dark Cinema". It doesn't stay dark forever. Film Noir was the result of a specific set of elements that happened to coalesce in the post-war years: the influx of European film-makers trying to adjust to the American system; the highly restrictive Hollywood production codes; the appetite of a war-weary audience for complex stories with a little meat, etc. etc. If you pull too hard on any one of those threads, the whole "noir" tapestry can unravel, and that's more or less what happened as the 1940s gave way to the 1950s. Time passed. Society changed. The Government began cracking down on "subversive" elements in the film industry, the Baby Boom led to a drastically different movie-going demographic, and there was an explicit push to undo many of the social freedoms that women had enjoyed during the war years. (Remember all those juicy femmes fatale of the 1940...
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Black and White movies were often one of those far more than the other...

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Please note that this week's film has been rated    15   in the UK. One of the hallmarks of the "noir" film style has to be its stark and very distinctive black-and-white cinematography. Black and white was by no means unique to film noir, but there were few other film styles of the era that made such constructive use of the contrast between light and shadow. A lot of this was of course a legacy of the German Expressionist style, which had exerted an outsized influence on many of the film-makers who found themselves in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s. Shadows in noir are not just a side-effect of room lighting; they are almost characters unto themselves, advancing the story, establishing the dynamics between characters and giving noir its distinctive flavour. This is what Expressionism means. The images themselves are telling the story. Black and White. But Not Necessarily in That Order. When talking about noir (or about any aspect of cinema from this particular era in Am...
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Killers are Very Bad Men.

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Last week I screened Anthony Mann's low-budget Raw Deal, one of the noir-est of noirs of the 1940s, and a mini expressionist masterpiece of shadow and psycho-drama. It tells the story of an escaped convict who makes an ill-fated break for freedom in the company of his devoted girlfriend and another woman who gets dragged along as a semi-hostage. This week's film was released six years later and stars Edward G. Robinson as... an escaped convict who makes an ill-fated break for freedom in the company of his devoted girlfriend and another woman who gets dragged along as a semi-hostage. The two films may have a very similar premise, but that's more or less where the resemblance ends, and the contrast between Raw Deal and Black Tuesday provides a stark insight into just how much had changed in the American zeitgeist during those intervening years. In Raw Deal , Joe (Dennis O'Keefe) is presented as a sympathetic character. We are never told exactly what he had done to wind ...
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