Curious tale of a private eye who is hired by a villain to find his homicidal girlfriend. But the story takes a twist when he tracks her down and promptly falls in love with her.”Build my gallows high, baby”–just one of the quintessentially noir sentiments expressed by Robert Mitchum in this classic of the genre. Mitchum, in absolute prime, sleepy-eyed form, relates a complicated flashback about getting hired by gangster Kirk Douglas to find femme fatale Jane Greer. The chain of film noir elements–love, money, lies–drags Mitchum into the lower depths. Director Jacques Tourneur gets the edgy negotiations between men and women as exactly right as he gets the inky shadows of the noir landscape (even the sunlit exteriors are fraught with doubt). This is Mitchum in excelsis, with his usual laid-back cool laced with great dialogue and tragic foreshadowing. As for his co-star, James Agee immortally opined that Jane Greer “can best be described, in an ancient idiom, as a hot number.” Remade in 1984, unhappily, as Against All Odds (with Greer in a supporting role). –Robert Horton

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Humphrey Bogart stars as Rip Murdock, a World War II veteran ensnared in a web of crime and conspiracy when his best friend, Johnny Drake (William Prince), disappears en route to Washington, D.C., to receive a war medal. Murdock follows the trail to Drake’s hometown in the Deep South, where he finds his friend’s body burned beyond recognition at the local morgue. Murdock, determined to find the murderer, begins his own investigation but soon falls for Drake’s ex-girlfriend, femme fatale Cory Chandler (Lizabeth Scott). When Murdock finds his first lead dead in his own hotel room, he begins to suspect that Chandler may be a lot more than just a local singer. Directed by acclaimed veteran John Cromwell (SO ENDS OUR NIGHT, ABE LINCOLN IN ILLINOIS), DEAD RECKONING provides sharp and merciless suspense. The dark, winding plot twists in this classic film noir are held together and energized throughout by Bogart’s commanding, inimitable screen presence and his paradoxically expressive, world-weary deadpan.

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This 1946 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story adds well over an hour of new material to the original tale. The reason is, while director Robert Siodmak, star Burt Lancaster, and an outstanding supporting cast are faithful to Hemingway’s work, his story only takes up about 15 minutes of screen time. Burt Lancaster plays the doomed man sought by hired guns in a small town. Hemingway’s bruisingly concise dialogue makes an early sequence set in a diner quite unnerving, but after the killers dispense with their prey, Siodmak turns to an insurance investigator (Edmond O’Brien) who looks into the reasons behind the murder. An exemplary film noir (complete with a fickle femme fatale played by Ava Gardner), The Killers is all mood and fatalism.–Tom Keogh

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Lana Turner: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, They Won’t Forget, Ingenue , Love Finds Andy Hardy, Johnny Eager, Ziegfeld Girl, Somewhere I’ll Find You, Femme Fatale, Film Noir

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Product Description
The laconic private eye…the corrupt cop…the heist that goes wrong…the Femme Fatale with the rich husband and dim lover – all are trademark characters of the movement known as film noir, that elusive mixture of stark lighting and even starker emotions. Noir explores the dark side of post-war society – gangsters, hoodlums, prostitutes and killers – and showed how it corrupted the good and the beautiful. Many of these films are now touchstones of what we regard as ‘classic’ Hollywood – The Maltese Falcon(1941), The Big Sleep(1946), Double Indemnity(1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice(1946). This Pocket Essential charts the progression of the noir style as a vehicle for film-makers who wanted to record the darkness at the heart of American society as it emerged from World War into Cold War. As well as an introductory essay on the origins of Film Noir, this Pocket Essential discusses all the classics from the heyday of the movement in detail and includes a handy reference section for readers who want to know more.

Film Noir – The Pocket Essential Guide

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Amazon.co.uk Review
Pandora couldn’t resist opening the forbidden box containing all the delusions of mankind, and let’s just say in Mulholland Drive David Lynch indulges a similar impulse. Employing a familiar film noir atmosphere to unravel, as he coyly puts it, “a love story in the city of dreams”, Lynch establishes a foreboding but playful narrative in the film’s first half before subsuming all of Los Angeles and its corrupt ambitions into his voyeuristic universe of desire. Identities exchange, amnesia proliferates and nightmare visions are induced, but not before we’ve become enthralled by the film’s two main characters: the dazed and sullen femme fatale, Rita (Laura Elena Harring), and the pert blonde just-arrived from Ontario (played exquisitely by Naomi Watts) who decides to help Rita regain her memory. Triggered by a rapturous Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying”, Lynch’s best film since Blue Velvet splits glowingly into two equally compelling parts. –Fionn Meade

Mulholland Drive

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Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up

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Amazon.co.uk Review
Pandora couldn’t resist opening the forbidden box containing all the delusions of mankind, and let’s just say in Mulholland Drive David Lynch indulges a similar impulse. Employing a familiar film noir atmosphere to unravel, as he coyly puts it, “a love story in the city of dreams”, Lynch establishes a foreboding but playful narrative in the film’s first half before subsuming all of Los Angeles and its corrupt ambitions into his voyeuristic universe of desire. Identities exchange, amnesia proliferates and nightmare visions are induced, but not before we’ve become enthralled by the film’s two main characters: the dazed and sullen femme fatale, Rita (Laura Elena Harring), and the pert blonde just-arrived from Ontario (played exquisitely by Naomi Watts) who decides to help Rita regain her memory. Triggered by a rapturous Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying”, Lynch’s best film since Blue Velvet splits glowingly into two equally compelling parts. –Fionn Meade

Mulholland Dr.

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Met het oog op de femme fatale: Een verkenning op het terrein van de film noir

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Femme Fatale: Seduction, Witchcraft, Misogyny, Gender role, French language, The Lady from Shanghai, Film noir, Antihero, Asymmetry, Girls with guns, Gun moll, Succubus

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