hotels with a neon sign blinking through the window

Film noir is...

(1) A French term meaning "black film," or film of the night, inspired by the Series Noir, a line of cheap paperbacks that translated hard-boiled American crime authors and found a popular audience in France.
(2) A movie which at no times misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending.
(3) Locations that reek of the night, of shadows, of alleys, of the back doors of fancy places, of apartment buildings with a high turnover rate, of taxi drivers and bartenders who have seen it all.
(4) Cigarettes. Everybody in film noir is always smoking, as if to say, "On top if everything else, I'e been assigned to get through three packs today." The best smoking movie of all time is Out of the Past, in which Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoke furiously at each other. At one point Mitchum enters a room, Douglas extends a pack and says, "Cigarette?" and Mitchum, holding up his hand, says, "Smoking."
(5) Women who would just as soon kill you as love you, and vice versa.
(6) For women: low necklines, floppy hats, mascara, lipstick, dressing rooms, boudoirs, calling the doorman by his first name, high heels, red dresses, elbow-length gloves, mixing drinks, having gangsters as boyfriends, having soft spots for alcoholic private eyes, wanting a lot of someone else's women, sprawling dead on the floor with every limb meticulously arranged and every hair in place.
(7) For men: fedoras, suits and ties, shabby residential hotels with a neon sign blinking through the window, buying yourself a drink out of the office bottle, cars with running boards, all-night diners, protecting kids who shouldn't be playing with the big guys, being on first-name terms with homicide cops, knowing a lot of people whose descriptions end in ies, such as bookies, newsies, junkies, alkies, jockeys, and cabbies.
(8) Movies either shot in black and white or feeling like they were.
(9) Relationships in which love is the only final flop card in the poker game of death.
(10) The most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear, and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic.

- Roger Ebert, "A Guide to Film Noir Genre"

A dissent

I recently watched the new movie "The Master" and was totally underwhelmed. Instead of insight into the dismal cult of scientology, American culture, or science fiction, we get a succession of archly significant scenes that neither deepens the one-dimensional characters nor furthers the little plot that exists. This movie contains all the usual gaucheries of contemporary film-making: gratuitous nudity, a confusion of yelling and profanity with dialogue, an inability to say anything concisely, a heavy-handed approach to theme, and overblown, sententious acting. Save your money.

GRADE: D-

Apart from a personal statement by Andrew Sarris

"Ms. Kael's work has been praised as "great...a body of criticism which can be compared with Shaw's" (Times Literary Supplement). She has won a National Book Award. So far as I know, apart from a personal statement by Andrew Sarris, which appeared in The Village Voice as this piece was going to press, the book has received uniformly favorable reviews. The New Republic describes it as consisting of "all peaks and no valleys." None of this is Ms. Kael's fault. It is only symptomatic. The pervasive, overbearing, and presumptuous "we," the intrusive "you," the questions, the debased note of righteousness and rude instruction - the whole verbal apparatus promotes, and relies upon, an incapacity to read. The writing falls somewhere between huckster copy (paeans to the favored product, diatribes against all other brands and their venal or deluded purchasers) and ideological pamphleteering: denouncings, exhortations, code words, excommunications, programs, threats. Apart from the taste for violence, however, which she takes to be a hard, intellectual position, there is no underlying text or theory. Only the review, virtually divorced from movies, as its own end..."

- From Renata Adler's review of a collection of Kael's "criticism", from 1981. With just a few substitutions, this attack can be used against any number of figures whose success depends upon "an incapacity to read" (Toni Morrison springs to mind).

a very bad winter

An entertaining website of curiosities and mementos involving The Shining can be found here.

An immoral face...

- Cavett with R. Mitchum. Has there ever been another actor less like the parts he plays?  Part 1 of 7.

Quiet, you lousy amateurs!

"Ben Hecht played the violin with amateur gusto, so he decided to organize what he called the Ben Hecht Symphonietta, which was to meet for concerts every Thursday night in Hecht's hilltop home. He recruited a peculiar variety of talents. Charles MacArthur played the clarinet, and Harpo Marx the harp, but only in A major. George Antheil, the composer, was supposed to keep order of a sort on the piano. Groucho Marx wanted to join in, but the others decided that he was ineligible since the only instrument he could play was the mandolin, which the others considered beneath the dignity of Ben Hecht Symphionetta. It was all partly a joke, but all chamber music players take their obsession seriously.

On the night of their first rehearsal, in an upstairs room of Hecht's house, the musicians had just started to play when someone began a loud banging on the door of their rehearsal room. The door suddenly flew open, and Groucho Marx appeared on the threshold.

"Quiet, please!" he shouted, then disappeared again, slamming the door behind him. The assembled musicians looked at one another with some embarassment. "Groucho's jealous," Harpo Marx explained. Hecht thought he had heard strange sounds downstairs, but the musicians all decided to ignore the interruption and let Groucho go his own way. They started playing again. Once again, there came a banging on the door. Once again, Groucho Marx appeared.

"Quiet, you lousy amateurs!" he shouted. When the musicians still ignored him, Groucho turned and stamped down the stairs. Yet again, the musicians turned to their instruments. Then came a resounding orchestral flourish from below. It was the overture to Tannhauser.

 "Thunderstruck," Antheil recalled, "we all crawled down the stairway to look. There was Groucho, directing with great batlike gestures, the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra. At least one hundred men had been squeezed into the living room. Groucho had hired them because (as he later explained) he had been hurt at our not taking him into our symphionetta. We took him in."

- from City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's, Otto Friedrich, 1986.

All Known Vagrants Are Picked Up

- From the excellent Gun Crazy, made back when the police had the ability to detain every last known vagrant. 1950.