Word: noires
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...Damn the filmmaker who tries to weave too many new wrinkles into the same plot to justify the whole enterprise, thus producing a convoluted pattern that exceeds the limits of our credulity. Claude Chabrol has earned these conflicting reactions from his latest venture into the realm of the film noir, Dirty Hands, and his ultimate failure amounts to a minor tragedy. Seeing the 1976 release leaves you with the initial thought that Chabrol came so close to making a reasonably competent suspense thriller, only to blow it in the final minutes, when the money was really on the line...
...Gilda. Done in 1946 by King Vidor, Gilda is the best of the film noir style that emphasized the dark side of the American character in the climate of national disillusionment following World War II. The film features Glenn Ford, Rita Hayworth, and an actor whose name I always forget, who plays a Rio casino owner-cum-international tungsten cartel boss. It revolves around two sinister triangles: one, a quasi-homosexual link between the tungsten boss, the boss's sword-cane, and Glenn Ford (the other, between Rita Hayworth, the Tungsten boss (who marries her), and Ford...
...such passenger, on April 28,1972, was Ralph Nader, bête noir of the American business establishment, who showed up at the Washington National Airport just five minutes before Allegheny Airlines flight 864 was to take off for Hartford. Nader was on a tight schedule to appear at two consumer rallies in Connecticut. He had no seat...
...best film noir showing this weekend is not part of the festival: Orson Welles's The Lady From Shanghai. Rita Hayworth, whose performance in Gilda so defined the fascinatingly sensual but dangerous woman of the period that her picture was painted an atom bomb, lures Welles into a deadly and mysterious web of murder and corporate intrigue. The film's atmosphere, evoking a sinister world whose logic is not apparent at the surface, is exactly what Polanski was trying to achieve in Chinatown. Welles's eccentric camera angles are carried to new extremes which accentuate the uncertain character of reality...
Capra's State of the Union (1948) is in no sense part of the film noir style, thought it too deals with political corruption. The uneasy balance Capra strikes between his exposure of corruption and his reaffirmation is very much the same as that of his films of the 30s, like Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and Meet John Doe. While State of the Union is politically the least sophisticated of Capra's serious films, it is also emotionally the most exhilarating. Hepburn gives the best performance of her career as the wife of Spencer Tracy, presidential candidate, who wins...