#noirvember
My Black Friday sale is my biggest this year. 20% off every item! Prints, tote bags, magnets, and original art available at my Etsy shop. My paintings of Karen Black (no pun intended) in Hitchcock’s Family Plot, Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North By Northwest, and Madeleine Carroll in Secret Agent, all part of my 13 Hitchcock Blondes series. They are sold individually and also in a set with 10 other blondes.
-– Elizabeth Yoo
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Some Favorite Films Noir:
Notorious (1946, Alfred Hitchcock; Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant pictured)
Gilda (1946, Charles Vidor; Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth pictured)
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, Tay Garnett; Lana Turner and John Garfield pictured)
Nightmare Alley (1947, Edmund Goulding; Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell pictured)
The Naked City (1948, Jules Dassin; Barry Fitzgerald pictured)
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Some Favorite Films Noir:
Johnny Eager (1941, Marvin LeRoy; Robert Taylor and Van Heflin pictured)
This Gun For Hire (1942, Frank Tuttle; Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd pictured)
The Woman in the Window (1944, Fritz Lang; Joan Bennett and Edward G. Robinson pictured)
Laura (1944, Otto Preminger; Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney pictured)
The Dark Corner (1946, Henry Hathaway)
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Some Favorite Films Noir:
Nightfall (1957, Jacques Tourneur; Anne Bancroft and Aldo Ray pictured)
3:10 to Yuma (1957, Delmer Daves; Glenn Ford and Van Heflin pictured)
Witness for the Prosecution (1957, Billy Wilder; Marlene Dietrich and Charles Laughton pictured)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959, Otto Preminger; Lee Remick, Eve Arden, and James Stewart pictured)
The Crimson Kimono (1959, Samuel Fuller; Victoria Shaw and James Shigeta pictured)
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Some Favorite Films Noir:
The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed; Orson Welles pictured)
Thieves’ Highway (1949, Jules Dassin; Lee J. Cobb and Richard Conte pictured)
Strangers on a Train (1951, Alfred Hitchcock; Robert Walker pictured)
99 River Street (1953, Phil Karlson; Evelyn Keyes and John Payne pictured)
The Big Combo (1955, Joseph H. Lewis; Jean Peters and Cornel Wilde pictured)
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Veterans Day is Thursday, Nov. 11 and TCM has a great 24 hours of movies on the schedule.
The daytime lineup features films made by old Hollywood actors and directors who served in the military. The most bang for your buck is in the action film The Dirty Dozen (1967) at 3:30 pm ET/12:30 pm PT, which features a whopping eight World War II veterans, including Lee Marvin (Marines), Charles Bronson (Army Air Corps), and Ernest Borgnine (a veteran of both the U.S. Navy and McHale’s Navy).
The primetime lineup is equally good starting with director William Wyler’s masterpiece The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT, which is still the best film ever made about the effects of combat on those who served and on their loved ones. The late night lineup includes Gary Cooper’s Oscar-winning performance in Sergeant York (1941) at 1 am ET/10 pm PT.
Here’s the best of the rest for the week of Nov. 8:
1. The Band Wagon (1953) at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT Monday, Nov. 8: The early ‘50s were the golden age of old Hollywood musicals with literally dozens of all-time classics made within the space of four or five years. There’s lots and lots of great dance numbers to choose from, but the cream of the crop (at least in our book) is Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in “The Girl Hunt Ballet” in this wonderful backstage musical.
2. Bulldog Drummond marathon on Wednesday, Nov. 10: There’s nothing quite like a good classic-movie detective series to relax with on a cold autumn day. TCM is airing several Bulldog Drummond films on Wednesday starting at 8 am ET/5 am PT with The Return of Bulldog Drummond (1934) starring Sir Ralph Richardson as detective.
3. Flamingo Road (1949) at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT Wednesday, Nov. 10: This Southern-fried noir about a woman (Joan Crawford) who fights corruption in a small Florida town is one of our favorite guilty pleasures. Joanie’s battle with star-of-the-month Sydney Greenstreet (he Boss Hoggs it up as a small-town sheriff) is EPIC.
4. The French Connection (1971) at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT Saturday, Nov. 13: TCM is celebrating the 50th anniversary of this fantastic police procedural with a special airing on Saturday night. The French Connection is both an excellent flick for a night on the couch and one of the best auteur-driven films of the '70s.
BTW, It’s not old Hollywood, but Tuesday night’s lineup of Australian New Wave movies is beyond excellent. The lineup starts with Walkabout (1971) at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT.
TCM’s star-of-the-month for November is Sydney Greenstreet. TCM will be showing the rotund character actor’s films each Wednesday in November starting with The Maltese Falcon (1941) at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT Nov. 3.
Greenstreet, who was a well-respected theater actor, made his film debut at age 61 as Kasper “The Fat Man” Gutman in director John Huston’s 1941 version of Dashiell Hammett’s detective novel. Greenstreet’s menacing giggle and air of casual cruelty makes him the perfect choice to play Gutman, but, behind the scenes, he was reportedly terrified, tearfully imploring costar Mary Astor to hold his hand.
Greenstreet later said, “Pictures are much harder to do than theater. . .you can get wonderful cooperation out of the lens [camera] if you are true, but God help you if you are not.”
Noirvember is approaching its end for 2020, and yet I have a lot of seasonal spirit to share. Here is my closet cosplay of Marie Windsor in The Narrow Margin (1952). When I first brought up the film on this blog, it was its production and style that stuck in my mind–I didn’t even mention Windsor. So, even though I plan on bringing up that style again here, let’s let the cosplay make amends for my previous oversight. Windsor is too good to omit.
The film follows detective Walter Brown (Charles McGraw), who has been tasked with escorting Mrs. Neall (Windsor), the widow of a gangster set to testify before a grand jury, by train from Chicago to Los Angeles. As gangsters try to cut Mrs. Neall’s journey short, Brown realizes the situation he’s in is more complicated than it seems.
The Narrow Margin is swiftly-paced and tense with impeccable sound design. Every performance is on point and each role is well-cast. Obviously, Marie Windsor as the brash and defiant moving target stands out. I really can’t recommend The Narrow Margin strongly enough, even putting aside my penchant for train movies.
That said… setting a feature film on a train (or any other vehicle) presents a unique challenge in keeping the film’s visuals and space dynamic. Failing at it can result in overly static visuals, unintentional claustrophobia, or the space of the film becoming too artificial; all of which can lead to viewers disengaging from the story. But, The Narrow Margin sets a gold standard by focusing on interplay between planes of action.
READ ON below the jump!
The crew of the film is stacked with noir experience:
- Cinematographer George E. Diskant (They Live by Night(1949),The Racket(1951),On Dangerous Ground (1952), and so on),
- Art Director Albert D’Agostino (too many to cite TBH, but he tackled limited space again with Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker(1953))
- Art Director Jack Okey (Out of the Past(1947),The Racket,The Set-Up (1949) and quite a few more)
- And the oh-so-versatile director Richard Fleischer, who wasn’t all that well established before The Narrow Margin, though he was already in a noir groove around this time.
In my opinion, it’s worth considering that Fleischer’s father, animator Max Fleischer, might have had some influence on the kinetics of this film. Even if you don’t immediately recognize Max Fleischer’s name, you’ve likely seen one of his Betty Boop, Superman, or Popeye cartoons. Max Fleischer was hugely innovative in the technology of animation. He invented the process of rotoscoping and often experimented with photography.
Check out the awesome establishing shot here in Christmas Comes But Once a Year(1936)
Side-by-side comparison of Cab Calloway dancing and rotoscoped animation from multiple cartoons
I can’t help but think that the strong compositions and careful balancing of planes of action in The Narrow Margin were influenced by Fleischer’s awareness of his father’s work.
