Word: noires
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Union City, made for $500,000 by Mark Reichert, 32, has been called the first punk-rock film noir. At first glance, the phrase fits. Deborah Harry, making her dramatic-film debut, is the blond of Blondie; Chris Stein, who composed the sepulchrally melodious score, is Blondie's lead guitarist; Pat Benatar, in a featured role, has an album of her own. And Union City is faithful to the tones and undertones of film noir, that postwar style of moviemaking that transposed Raymond Chandler's mean-streets prose and James M. Cain's haunted losers to celluloid...
...Union City has other things on its mind. For a start, this is a film noir in garish, ominous primary colors; the design takes its cue from the camp surrealism of modern Germanic directors like Daniel Schmid and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. More important, however funny-peculiar the plot, Union City tracks its characters' shabby lives and squalid passions so relentlessly that it becomes a portrait of lower-middle-class despair. And Lipscomb's performance is devastatingly acute. His gestures are just too broad, his harsh voice much too loud; Harlan's swagger and insecurity...
California is by no means the vinous El Dorado pictured by its publicists or by many writers who would not know a Chardonnay grape from a supermarket Thompson Seedless. Americans using the Pinot Noir grape of Burgundy have yet to make a red wine that is remotely equal to its ancestor in body and authority. Many California wines, particularly the often overpraised Zinfandels, lack finesse and balance. Some, like Heitz Martha...
...polish of his low budget productions and his obvious debt to and affection for earlier movie-makers have tempted a number of critics to consider him a clever contemporary heir to several 40s and 50s directors whose exciting grade-B films have been sauvely generalized under the label film noir. Just now, with the success of Halloween, more careful critics are insisting that Carpenter is not as good as all that...
...Sleep and To Have and Have Not. He was shrewd enough to realize that it was not the story lines of his sources that gave them their hold on our affections. Bogart's incisive, ironic characterization of the urban loner, the Hemingwayish dialogue and the film noir look that gave Warner Bros, films their unique quality in the '40s, the forcefulness of the studio's stable of character actors-all of these elements combined to create a style that is the real target for a would-be satirist...