Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (0)

How Do You Take Your Noir?

November 4, 2009

Sony’s just-released Film Noir Classics I collection compiles five prime examples of the oft-discussed post-war genre, including previous issued classic The Big Heat (1953) by Fritz Lang with Lee Marvin and Gloria Grahame, and the first-time-on-DVD films 5 Against the House (1955) by Phil Karlson and starring Kim Novak and Guy Madison, Edward Dmytryk’s The Sniper (1952) starring Adolphe Menjou and Marie Windsor, Murder by Contract (1958) directed by Irving Lerner and starring Vince Edwards, and Don Siegel’s The Lineup (1958) with Eli Wallace and Warner Anderson.

 

It’s a respectable boxed set that gets extra points for its impressive array of supplements, which are led by a trio

of fine contemporary filmmakers—Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann and Christopher Nolan—who provide introductions to their favorites and discuss film noir, in general. As usual, Scorsese is the most excited and natural of the trio, particularly when he’s offering his feelings about The Big Heat and director Lang’s visual style:

 

“It’s about the obsessive, all-consuming nature of revenge,” Scorsese says. “The flatness of Lang’s compositions forces you to look at it as an objective observer. It directs your eye to the movement and behavior of the characters.

 

Mann also appears to be quite enamored of The Big Heat, going so far to say that Glenn Ford’s cop characters in the Lang work influenced the protagonists in his own early films, such as Thief and Manhunter. He’s also apparently very into the female characters in The Big Heat, which is all the more fascinating when one considers the collection of intelligent women that populate Mann’s own cinematic landscape (Ashley Judd and Diane Venora in Heat, Marion Cottilard in Public Enemies, Madeleine Stowe in The Last of the Mohicans).

Posted by Laurence Lerman on November 4, 2009 | Comments (0)