Before Eddie Muller took over the Saturday night/Sunday morning niche on TCM with his Noir Alley, I was only familiar with a few classics of film noir such as Double Indemnity (directed by Billy Wilder, starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (directed by Tay Garnett, starring John Garfield and Lana Turner). Whoever loves well-made movies with a kick must love those films. Following Muller’s introductions to the films he features on Noir Alley, I learned that film noir was a genre (Muller persistently calls it a “movement”) populated by hundreds of lesser known movies. I use Michael F. Keaney’s Film Noir Guide for orientation.
I’m thinking of the genre this morning because TCM recently played In a Lonely Place (directed by Nicholas Ray, starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame), a lesser known noir that has become a favorite of mine courtesy of TCM, and because TCM has now announced that Robert Mitchum is January’s star of the month. TCM kicks off the Mitchum festivities tomorrow night with Out of the Past (directed by Jacques Tourneur, starring Mitchum, Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas) and four other Mitchum films. They aren’t all noirs, of course, but many are and Mitchum made at least a few classics of the genre. Out of the Past is one of them. Donald Liebensohn previews TCM’s January Mitchum lineup here.
To borrow a phrase, there’s something about film noir. The shadows, the temptations, the stars, the life lessons, the legacy of German expressionism — they all appeal to me. Terry Teachout summed it up in the title of his October 2021 Commentary essay on the genre: “Some Like It Dark.” The influence of the genre lives on in such modern derivatives as Chinatown and Body Heat, to take two of many examples.
Titus Techera followed up in his PostModernConservative post “Terry Teachout on noir” and tracked Teachout down for his own America Cinema Foundation podcast series on the genre. Techera and Teachout discuss Double Indemnity and the essence of film noir here. They take up Out of the Past here. I have listened and learned. This is great stuff (and it is great to hear Teachout talking).
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