Laiqualaurelote's Top 10 Classic Noirs
It's Noirvember! and I'll be posting the last chapter of my DBDA Big Bang noir AU These Mean Streets tomorrow! many people have asked me about the film noir that influenced this AU, so I've put together a list of my top 10 classic noirs* from the 1940s to 1950s (top 10 neo-noirs here!)
1. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The best of the best - if you watch nothing else on this list watch this! Humphrey Bogart in an iconic turn as Dashiell Hammett's wise-cracking, hard-hitting private detective Sam Spade! everyone else here is top-notch: Mary Astor as the splendidly duplicitous femme fatale, legendary villainous duo Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, even a young Elisha Cook Jr. as Wilmer the gunsel (and no, that doesn't mean a man with a gun). "If they hang you, I'll always remember you." It's certainly not a film to forget.
Another Hammett adaptation, this time featuring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake (not their most popular noir together, but my favourite). Ladd plays Beaumont, a gambler who's loyal to his shady politician friend Paul Madvig, even while being beaten to an inch of his life by gangsters and even while falling for Madvig's posh love interest Janet (Lake). Lake's dresses here are some of my favourite understated noir costumes - see this sophisticated little black number here.
3. Double Indemnity (1944)
There has never been a sexier film made about life insurance. Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) cooks up a plot with scheming housewife Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanywck) to off her husband for the insurance money, only for both of them to turn on each other as the guilt and paranoia set in. The way the dialogue flirts with the limits of the Hayes Code! "There's a speed limit in this state, Mr Neff. Forty-five miles an hour."
Laura, quite unusually for a film on this list, does not have Laura as the femme fatale, though she is an astonishing heroine for her era: a career woman written by Vera Caspary (one of very few women to write noir), played by the luminous Gene Tierney. The film opens with the investigation of her murder, but there's more to it than that. A young Vincent Price plays her feckless fiancé, though he's unrecognisable without his moustache.
Second Bogart on the list! another of my all-time favourites, as he takes on Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, opposite a stacked cast of femmes fatales - chief among them his real-life partner Lauren Bacall, with whom he has electric chemistry. But also literally every other woman in this is phenomenal: Martha Vickers as Bacall's psychotic little sister, a sadly uncredited Sonia Darrin as a hard-nosed hustler, even Dorothy Malone as an unnamed but highly sultry bookseller. From Bacall singing And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine in a nightclub to Elisha Cook Jr's appearance as Yet Another Loser With A Gun to Bogart visiting bookstores, this film is just full of treats.
Was there ever a woman like Gilda! Rita Hayworth changed my life with one hair flip. "Sure I'm decent." Vaguely aware there are some other chaps in this film and they're doing their best to achieve some semblance of a plot, but it's hard to pay attention when Gilda's doing glove striptease. Yet she's a femme fatale with depth, trapped in her own gilded image of herself - as Hayworth herself would be for the rest of her life: 'Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda - and woke up with me.'
7. Out Of The Past (1947)
Jane Greer, the ice queen of noir, plays one of the coldest femmes fatales ever in this Jacques Tourneur adaptation of the novel Build My Gallows High. Robert Mitchum plays world-weary bounty hunter Jeff Markham, hired to find gangster moll Kathie Moffatt (Greer), who shot her ex and stole $40,000 from him. Everyone's framing everyone, as Jeff tries repeatedly to break with his past and comes to recognise he and Kathie are each other's doom.
Should Key Largo be on this list? Probably not, but I'm a huge sucker for Bogart/Bacall, here cast as the army veteran and the war widow whose father runs a hotel that's just been shuttered for hurricane season - only for all of them to get trapped there with notorious gangster Johnny Rocco (an excellent Edward G. Robinson). What really makes Key Largo for me though is Claire Trevor as the ageing alcoholic ex-moll, whom Rocco forces to sing for a drink and then denies it to her anyway - a performance so stunning in its pathos that it won her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Not just one of the best noirs, but I think one of the greatest films ever made. Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives in the ruins of post-war Vienna to meet his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), only to discover Lime has mysteriously died - which Martins refuses to believe was an accident. (SPOILERS in the clip above!) This film has so much! The way the scenes are shot at an angle, so that Vienna looks like a grand painting knocked askew; the tensions of the different factions trying to control the city; Anton Karas' surreal and disturbingly jaunty zither score. The best use of a Ferris Wheel in a movie! the best use of a sewer grate in a movie! the credits roll over Alida Valli walking silently through a cemetery and she doesn't say a word and it's the most gripping thing ever. I love this film.
I dithered between this and The Asphalt Jungle (1950), both great noir heists starring Sterling Hayden, and even though the latter has a cameo from a young Marilyn Monroe and Hayden yelling "DON'T BONE ME" repeatedly, I've gone with this early Stanley Kubrick feature (he was 28!) because of Elisha Cook Jr., who achieves peak scrungly here, and Marie Windsor, one of noir's most underrated femmes fatales. Here she plays Cook's grasping wife Sherry, whose scheming contributes to the unravelling of the heist.
*these are my top 10, not THE top 10 of all time! I'm obviously very biased towards Bogart/Bacall films. Don't come at me.
