More Films Noir
Summary of my World Noir 2024 watch project
Summing up my 2024 noir watches
I started the film noir watch project before I knew I’d write about it. It was mostly a way to give me some structure while watching movies from my film library. I didn’t take notes and will just recall movies that stood out. This is a follow up to the post where I recommended four top films from this project.
In that post I also explain what I think film noir is and isn’t. As a reminder, this time I focused mainly on proto-noir (everything before 1940s) and neo-noir (everything after 1950s).
Proto-noir (1929 - 1939)
I saw 5 movies from this period, of which Dragnet Girl was my recommendation. But there were other very good movies.
Thunderbolt (1929) from director Josef von Sternberg is an interesting one about a jailed gangster plotting the death of another inmate. Movies that old were sometimes less concerned with dramatic structure and this seems to start out that way as a rather simple story. But it keeps developing and getting better as we find out more about the plot and the characters, until it becomes almost a masterpiece by the end. Thunderbolt is available on YouTube.
I got more than I expected out of the 1930s gangster movies. The original Scarface (1932) doesn’t fall short of the later remake by Brian De Palma. In Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and The Roaring Twenties (1939), James Cagney gives two great performances.
Classic noir (1940 - 1959)
The Whistler (1944) and The Mark of the Whistler (1944) from the Indicator box set offered some light evening entertainment with mild mystery elements. I am looking forward to seeing the other movies.
I am sometimes easily amused by wordplay so the two oddly similarly named movies They Drive by Night (1940) and Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1948) prompted me to create a list of more films where they by night.
The Radiance World Noir Vol. 1 box set has great movies from three countries - I Am Waiting (1957) from Japan, The Facts of Murder (1959) from Italy, and my favourite of these was Witness in the City (1959) from France, featuring some amazing scenes of a cat-and-mouse game in night-time Paris with a great jazz score by Barney Wilen that is perhaps surpassed only by Miles Davis’ Elevator to the Gallows score.
Neo-noir (1961 - 2023)
This was the longest section of the project and thanks to having more in it also contained more ups and downs. I am not mentioning the downs to keep it short, but the full Letterboxd list is sorted by my ranking if you are curious.
Staying with Radiance releases, there was the World Noir Vol. 2 box set. The Japanese Cruel Gun Story (1964) was a bit weak for me, but the French-Italian Symphony for a Massacre (1963) is a fun heist movie where the aftermath results in a complicated plot of murders driven by greed. My favourite from the box was the German Black Gravel (1961), which is weirdly already the second release from Radiance of a movie where a body is hidden under gravel (the first being the mafia movie Day of the Owl). A more meditative noir from them was Le combat dans l'île (1962). And wait, there was also Truffaut’s sprawling Mississippi Mermaid (1969) and a more urban French Tchao pantin (1983), and Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974), which shares the same story with They Live by Night. Radiance has really been putting out some great film noir since they started in 2023.
Get Carter (1971) is a brutal British movie with Michael Caine in the lead. 52 Pick-Up (1986) is an exploitation film from John Frankenheimer that’s maybe a tad more optimistic than usual for film noir.
King of New York (1990) from Abel Ferrara is dripping with style and is a quintessential neo-noir. Twilight (1990) from Hungary is a slow cinema piece in the Bela Tarr (Sátántangó) style. In this movie even the landscape and weather feel oppressive and threatening while a murder investigation plods on.
Red Rock West (1993) tries to be a great movie that reminded me of The Hot Spot, and Nicholas Cage almost carries it there. But most of the other actors, including Dennis Hopper, are either not quite keeping up or their characters have been written or directed in a way that doesn’t match the heart of the film. I think it’s worth a watch anyway. Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) is another great neo-noir from Carl Franklin, the director of One False Move, which was one of my main recommendations from this project.
Finishing up this period are two recent neo-noirs - Decision to Leave (2022) is a really good Korean mystery and Mars Express (2023) is a well paced French cyberpunk animation. The latter felt very refreshing - I hadn’t seen any recent movies in a while that does as many different things at once.
Coming up: more classic noir next year
That sums up my World Noir 2024 project, but I’m not done with film noir yet. I’m not sure when the next noir post will be - could be in six months or a year. I am not committing to a specific schedule, but the rough plan is in my World Noir 2025 watchlist.