You remember the opening of The Killers ? Burt Lancaster (in his film debut) has been working in a little out-of-the-way filling station, hiding out from a gang of mobsters who want to find him. One day, the wrong car pulls up at the petrol pump. For Burt Lancaster, that was the end of the story. He knows that he has been found, and he makes a decision to stop running. When the killers inevitably arrive, they find him lying in bed, ready to accept his fate. But not every noir protagonist takes such things lying down. Our next film opens exactly the same way, with a sleepy little town and a filling station attendant with a past. And sure enough, the wrong car pulls in and that filling station attendant realises that his past has caught up with him. But this isn't Burt Lancaster. This is Robert Mitchum. And he's not ready to lie down and die just yet. Last week's film ( Born to Kill ) was directed by Robert Wise, the young (at the time) editor-turned-director whose whose fir...
Do you remember the scene in King Kong (1933) when little Fay Wray was trapped in the hand of the mighty ape? Slowly, he begins to peel away her clothing as she struggles in vain. More curious than lustful, Kong strips away layer after layer of her garments, holding them up to his nose before discarding them and turning back to his little blonde plaything. Fay Wray is of course convinced (as are we, presumably) that she is about to meet A Fate Worse Than Death, but no, Kong halts his exploration before he gets too close to any excessively naughty bits. He does tickle her a couple of times, and he sniffs his fingers, the big pervert. They are then attacked by a Pterodactyl. If you don't recall any of this, it might be because the entire scene was cut by the censors in 1938, and wasn't properly restored until 2005 (along with a few other choice moments). King Kong , like so many other films of the early 30s, had been deemed "objectionable" by the Legion of Decency, and...
The films I have shown thus far in this season all fit into a bit of a pattern, so it's not hard to understand why critics and audiences were tempted to group them into something of a category. They all deal with individuals who find themselves on the wrong side of the law, usually because of a murder. They are all told in flashback, so the eventual fate of the protagonist is never in question. They usually have some form of voice-over narration, either by the central character, or (in the case of The Killers ) by his friends as they relate their memories of the events. But film noir is not as formalist as all that. Noir is neither a genre nor a structure, so it doesn't have specific criteria it needs to meet. Sometimes (as with a film like Detour ) noir can deal with the very intimate and private. And sometimes it deals with crime on a much, much larger scale. The Stranger was the third film directed by Orson Welles (or the second-and-a-half, since The Magnificent Ambersons ...
Movie Nights at the Victoria Park Baptist Church And so life goes on. Some of you may remember that our film series in early 2020 was rudely interrupted by a Global Pandemic. The subsequent year and a half has been, well... You know things are pretty bad when you find yourself wondering if there is a plural for "Apocalypse". But at any rate, here we are ( Apocalypses? Apocali? That's going to bother you now, isn't it?) facing the prospect of attempting to pick up the pieces of Civilisation - assuming of course we don't go into another Lockdown first. ( Apocalyae? Apocalim? ) Movie-going, like so many communal activities, has taken a severe hit during the Pandemic, and I'm willing to hazard a guess that most of the films you have watched over the last eighteen months have been from the comfort of home, with, at most, a family member or two. But watching a film like this: ....isn't really the same as watching a film like this : Sadly we don't quite...
____________________________________________________ The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means. Oscar Wilde; The Importance of Being Earnes t ____________________________________________________ Depression/Comedy Part II: Are you Being Funny? Last January (a year ago!) I launched a film series that I called Depression/Comedy . As I said at the time, film-makers of the 1930s made a conscious decision to make their films as positive and enjoyable as possible, in an effort to help the country get through a very difficult and painful decade. Putting that series together was a genuine pleasure for me, and allowed me to showcase some of my all-time favourite films. This year, I want to look at what happened next . You might think of this as Depression/Comedy without the Comedy. Not that this season is going to be depressing . Not remotely. Like Depression/Comedy , this is going to be a celebration of a very specific period in the history of Cinema. ...
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