Hell is the Choices We Make“You ever wonder what hell is like?Maybe it ain’t the place you think.Fire and brimstone?Devils with horns poking you in the butt with a pitchfork?What’s hell?The time you should’ve walked…but you didn’t.That’s hell.You’re looking at it.”How right Al Capone was when he said, “Once corrupted always controlled,” and this maxim comes into play in the marvelous 1993 neo-noir film, Romeo Is Bleeding. The film is from director Peter Medak who created the phenomenal film T... Read Full Story

Alice Faye Noir and Brooding Darnell as Femme FataleThe 1945 film noir drama Fallen Angel was seen by Twentieth-Century Fox’s boss Darryl F. Zanuck as an opportunity to show a new Alice Faye as a transformation to dramatic star from her hugely successful previous career as the studio’s premiere leading lady of musicals.Alice Faye’s meteoric rise to stardom beginning as a Great Depression is the stuff of which inspiration is generated. Young Alice Leppert, son of a New York City policeman, us... Read Full Story

1946 was a big year for film noir. Two years earlier Double Indemnity was a smash. The-yet-to-be named film-noir style was the rage in Hollywood. All American movie studios scrambled to put out the next big Cain-like crime thriller. After the '46 release of the classic noirs The Postman Always Rings Twice and Gilda came Monogram's biggest budgeted film, Suspense.Suspense – with a storyline that's almost exactly like Gilda released a month before – was put together by the King Brothers aft... Read Full Story

“You worked a whole day just to dance a minute at Dreamland?”“It was worth it.”Woody Allen’s most sentimental gesture comes at the end of The Purple Rose of Cairo, when Mia Farrow, kicked around by men and by life, finds joy in the fleeting images of Fred and Ginger dancing across the screen. In that moment, so wonderfully free of dialogue, Allen speaks directly to the audience more poignantly than in all the times he ever tossed witticisms through the fourth wall. For me Tomorrow Is Another ... Read Full Story

Secrets and Power in The Fallen Idol (1948)“It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.”I can’t remember the exact year I saw The Fallen Idol for the first time, but I wasn’t much older than Phile (Bobby Henrey), the child star of the film. While I identified with the child’s point of view, the film had an even greater significance for me as my grandparents were life-long professional servants, and they worked, coincidentally, in a mansion complete with a marble staircase very like the staircase i... Read Full Story

[Editor's note: This article by the "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller originally appeared in April 2009 as the first “Noir … or Not?” feature in the Film Noir Foundation’s bimonthly periodical, the Noir City Sentinel.]When Jerry Wald began production at Warner Bros. on Storm Warning in 1950, his intention was to serve up a message picture disguised as a crime thriller, something along the lines of RKO’s 1947 sleeper hit Crossfire, which used an all-night murder-manhunt to sell its underlying attac... Read Full Story

Chicago Deadline is one more entry into that sub-genre, the newspaper noir. You know the story; hard-boiled reporter follows a hunch and uncovers layers of corruption.This time the story starts innocently enough with Ed Adams (Alan Ladd) chasing down a runaway girl in a cheap hotel. Just so happens while the girl agrees to return to her home and her worried mother, the girl occupying the room next door is found dead by the cleaning lady. So what would any reporter worth his salt do, of course... Read Full Story

Magician, burlesque dancer, ballistics expert and assassin: Like Norman Foster's taut thriller, Journey Into Fear, all of these professions rely on excruciatingly good timing."The terror of waiting for the final revelation, not the seeing of it, is the most powerful dramatic stimulus toward tension and fright." Curtis Harrington, Hollywood Quarterly 1952.Timing is the essence of this particular journey into fear.The year of the film's release is 1943, and presumably, that is the time period i... Read Full Story

If you have ever wondered how to turn your vacuum cleaner into a satirical film noir, then this movie is for you.British novelist and screenwriter Graham Greene and director Carol Reed, who brought you Harry Lime, The Third Man (1949), team up again for Our Man in Havana (1959). Shot on location, it’s noir in the tropics with a strong rip current of dark humor.It’s a cross genre flick. Although my library classifies it as a comedy, the movie has elements of film noir.Expatriates and Amateur E... Read Full Story

There's a lot to like in 1953's City That Never Sleeps. Unfortunately there's plenty off unintentional laugh-out-loud scenes as well.City That Never Sleeps is one of the last Noir documentaries – a noir film filled with newsreel-like location shooting and “voice of God” narrations – also known as semi-documentaries. The 1953 film is clearly modeled after the best noir doc The Naked City released five years earlier. Noir documentaries were popular for a short time during the classic noir pe... Read Full Story