Word: noire
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...westerns, the hero rode alone. The villains always had a gang. Think Gary Cooper. High Noon (1952). The hero always won. In international politics, though, that elegance disappears. Too many cooks? Try too many allies. The common enemy suddenly gets complicated. The Third Man (1949) knows this. A film noir with real profundity, the movie is home to one of moviedom's great villains: Harry Lime. Yet Orson Welles' performance is very nearly secondary; Harry Lime is a creation of his American friend (Joseph Cotten), his lover (Alida Valli), his pursuer (Trevor Howard). Of the Americans, the British, the Russians...
...woman, also." And with that satisfying jolt, we're off, as Amis once again bombards, delights, excites and irritates the reader with his hard-edged writing and warped spirit. Paying homage to the American tough-guy novelists of yore--Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler--Night Train pushes the boundaries of noir almost to the edge of darkness. The experiment does not always work, but this little book never gets boring...
...kind of sentimentality--tough-guy picturesque. He's the Norman Rockwell of the Ratso Rizzos, the Currier & Ives of the roughnecks. He took his share of kids at the circus and sweet old couples, but the images we love him for are the ones that flesh out our film-noir fantasies. They reassure us that the bad news of our own tabloidy times is just the recurrence of something eternal in human nature. Weegee's world is one where the cops have just beaten the suspect, where the crowd leers at the beauty queen and where the accused nanny gazes...
...CONFIDENTIAL Everybody knows the rudiments of the classic film-noir manner: chiaroscuro lighting, labyrinthine plots, dialogue written in battery acid. Working up imitations of it has become one of modern Hollywood's minor vices. But--a point usually missed--the style was never an end in itself. At its best it conveyed an idea about how the rottenness of big cities touches everyone, high and low, respectable and raffish. Director Curtis Hanson, working off James Ellroy's bitterly brewed novel about corrupt 1950s cops, gets that wonderfully right in a smart, complex film that exuberantly mixes comic excess, melodramatic pressure...
...Portishead Portishead (Go! Beat/London) Distorted, wraithlike vocals, blaring Big Band noir horns and deconstructed hip-hop beats--Portishead's eponymous album is both bravely strange and weirdly compelling. This is futuristic and cerebral music, but always heartfelt. The sound of the next millennium, today...