Category Archive: Classic Film
À bout de souffle (Breathless)
(Directed by Jean-Luc Godard) (1960) (Adelaide French Film Festival, 25 March 2021) “Roughly speaking, the subject will be the story of a boy who thinks of death and of a girl who doesn’t.” So said the Director, and that is not a bad summary of a shallow but hip tale of ne’er-do-well Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a Humphrey Bogart wannabe who is more like James Dean, acting like the poor kid In the Ghetto (of Marseilles): he borrows a gun, and steals a car, [and shoots a cop], and he tries to run but he don’t get far…Needing cash to fund…
Continue Reading →Out of the Past
(Directed by Jacques Tourneur) (1947) (Script by Daniel Mainwaring (“Geoffrey Homes”) from his 1946 novel Build My Gallows High, with uncredited revisions by Frank Fenton and James M. Cain.) Before we review this complicated, compelling film, first allow us to modestly refer you to our discussion: what is Film Noir? Furthermore, in the spirit of commercial DVDs, can we clear away some preliminaries? Don’t you hate it when, having purchased a film with your hard-earned, you then have to suffer some minutes of being lectured against pirating and illegal downloads? Or trying to disable the o-so-welcome options of surtitles (in…
Continue Reading →What IS film noir?
Black Film: It’s perhaps more of a style than a genre, the descendant of German expressionist films of the 1920s such as Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) and Pandora’s Box (1929), along with American gangster films of the 1930s , and crime and detective stories (published in France as série noire; then roman noir, and, on film in the 1940s and 1950s, film noir). There are homages or ‘neo-noirs’ (Chinatown, Marlowe (1969), Night Moves (1975)) and parodies (The Long Goodbye (1973), and The Big Sleep – the 1978 version, of which Lauren Bacall, asked if she had seen it, said…
Continue Reading →Black Angel
(Directed by Roy William Neill)(1946) This obscure Universal film noir is rather odd in an intriguing, almost surreal way. A blackmailer, Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling), ex-wife of part-time pianist/composer and full-time drunk, Martin Blair (Dan Duryea), turns up strangled in her apartment, one of Blair’s songs reverberating on the record player. Blair was on the spot earlier but the Doorman, under instructions, told him to go jump, whereupon he went on a bender of epic proportions. Meanwhile, Kirk Bennett, a poor sap who’s been having an affair with Mavis, visits, but finds her dead and busily incriminates himself by leaving…
Continue Reading →Sean Connery
(25 August 1930 to 31 October 2020) He wasn’t quite what Ian Fleming had in mind, but on the big screen, he was the first and best James Bond: moving like a panther, coiled like a spring, throwing away his throw-away lines with an amused accent that seemed to cross Eton with Edinburgh. The Bond films were a sociological event in the 1960s and 1970s, before they descended to a worn-out party joke of a franchise. Connery starred in Dr. No (1962), From Russia With Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965), You Only Live Twice (1967), Diamonds Are Forever (1971), and…
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