Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir
67 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 9 years ago - ★★★★★ - 87 ratingsEach film noir weaves its own yarn of longing, corruption, and fateful decisions. In each episode of this podcast series, Clute and Edwards investigate one noir or neo-noir in detail. Following various threads of inquiry, they attempt to unravel the vast canvas of noir. More info at www.noircast.net
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Noircast Special 4: TCM Presents Into the Darkness: Investigating Film Noir
June 04, 2015 00:34 - 1 hour - 46.1 MBMiguel Rodriquez of Monster Island Resort and Will McKinley of Cinematically Insane interview Clute and Edwards on the topic of TCM Presents Into the Darkness: Investigating Film Noir, a free multimedia online course presented by Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and Ball State University. This course is the latest collaboration by the creators of the Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir podcast series and will benefit from the promotional and social media support of TCM, where Clute now ser...
Let Us Know About Your Favorite Films Noir
April 15, 2014 16:00Leave a comment here about your favorite films noir for the Out of the Past community. Whether you are a long-time fan or just discovering the great films of the noir tradition, browse through these comments to get viewing suggestions based on what listeners to Out of the Past recommend. These comments create a great crowd-sourced list of film noir titles.
Out of the Past's Top Ten Episodes on Australian Broadcasting Radio National
July 08, 2012 22:57Clute and Edwards are pleased to announce that the Out of the Past podcasts were broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ABC Radio National, as part of their Top of the Pods programming--their selection of the world's best podcasts. (http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/topofthepods/) It was truly an honor to be included in this program, and a pleasure to hear the podcasts introduced by ABC host Robbie Buck.
Episode 53: Out of the Past Act II
November 24, 2011 04:14 - 45 minutes - 52.6 MBOUT OF THE PAST is perhaps the most carefully structured of all films noir--a narrative divided (like protagonist Jeff Markum/Bailey) between an inescapable past and an impossible future, teetering on the slimmest hope for the present such that any action taken by its poor players tips them down into the abyss. Director Jacques Tourneur, cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring perfectly synchronized their efforts on this film, creating a narrative masterpiece whe...
Episode 52: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (with Scott McGee)
October 15, 2011 20:03 - 43 minutes - 50.1 MBAppearances can be deceiving. On the surface, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS is pure science fiction, the tale of seed pods from outer space that produce emotionless body doubles of each citizen in the small town of Santa Mira. Often read as an allegory of either Communism or McCarthyism, where every person who becomes "one of them" loses autonomy by willingly buying into the unthinking collective, the film in fact plumbs questions of humanity in the modern era with subtlety and nuance more ...
Episode 51: L.A. Noire
August 16, 2011 03:18 - 37 minutes - 43.4 MBA product of Clute and Edwards' longstanding fascination with film noir and hard-boiled literature, this podcast investigates how certain mid-century visual and storytelling conventions evolved into Rockstar Games/Team Bondi's new video game L.A. NOIRE. To some degree, noir and hard-boiled themselves evolved from a 19th-century literary tradition that involved contests of deduction and linear modes of problem-solving (a tradition established by Edgar Allan Poe), but in the wake of two world...
Noircast Special 3: The Maltese Touch of Evil Video Essay
June 11, 2011 20:47 - 6 minutes - 60 MB VideoWhile many scholars have focused on noir as a dark visual style, or a worldview marked by the anxieties and stark realities of modernity, few have addressed noir's high degree of self-consciousness or its profoundly quirky humor. In their new book,The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism, Clute and Edwards focus on these underappreciated characteristics of noir to demonstrate how films noir frame their "intertextual" borrowings from on another and create visual puns, and ...
Clute and Edwards Publish New Noir Book!
June 03, 2011 02:27Grab a copy of Clute and Edwards' new noir book today at Amazon.com: http://amzn.to/jCePwG and at other online booksellers. In December 2011, Dartmouth College Press (University Press of New England) released Clute and Edwards' new study of film noir, The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism. This exciting book builds on crucial insights from the Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir podcasts, and draws on the work of the experimental literary group Oulipo (an ac...
Episode 50: The Blue Dahlia
November 08, 2009 00:19 - 42 minutes - 48.7 MBA script by Raymond Chandler. Veronica Lake, Alan Ladd, and William Bendix in leading roles. Costumes by the great Edith Head, and cinematography by Lionel Lindon, who had been nominated for best cinematography just the year before for the Oscar sensation GOING MY WAY. In short, THE BLUE DAHLIA seems to have everything going it’s way. Why, then, does the film fail to deliver the emotional impact of near contemporary titles like THE KILLERS or THE BIG SLEEP? To frame an answer to this ques...
Episode 49: Bande à part (with Dr. Jeffrey Peters)
August 24, 2009 23:18 - 36 minutes - 50.3 MBIn this episode, guest investigator Jeffrey Peters (Associate Professor of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of Kentucky), leads a panel of five undergraduate students from his Honors Program course "French Film Noir" in a discussion of Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 BAND OF OUTSIDERS (Bande à part), starring Anna Karina, Sami Frey, and Claude Brasseur. Jeff is a specialist in early modern French literature and culture, poetics and rhetoric, and film studies, and former chair of the D...
Episode 48: In a Lonely Place (with Megan Abbott)
December 27, 2008 05:12 - 50 minutes - 46.7 MBClute and Edwards welcome guest investigator Megan Abbott , the reigning Dark Dame of Noir. Megan is the author of a superb nonfiction study of hardboiled and noir protagonists entitled THE STREET WAS MINE, and three gut-wrenching throwback crime novels: DIE A LITTLE, THE SONG IS YOU, and QUEENPIN. The first title is scheduled to be released as a United Artists feature film in 2010, with Jessica Biel in the lead role. Megan's choice for this episode is the 1950 Nicholas Ray film IN A LONELY P...
Episode 47: Bob Le Flambeur (with Howard Rodman and Mike White)
August 12, 2008 20:45 - 38 minutes - 53.5 MBHoward Rodman and Mike White are this episode’s guest investigators. Rodman and White discuss Jean-Pierre Melville’s great 1956 film, Bob Le Flambeur. Howard Rodman is a screenwriter, novelist and USC film professor. His most recent screen credits include Savage Grace and August. Mike White is the publisher and editors of Cahiers du Cinemart, an obscure and obtuse film magazine from Detroit. Visit Mike’s website at impossiblefunky.com. This podcast is brought to you by Clute and Edwards, of w...
Episode 46: Thieves Highway (with Eddie Muller)
June 18, 2008 15:37 - 52 minutes - 48.2 MBThanks to listener support, Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noiris a featured podcast at iTunes, has generated nearly 200,000 downloads worldwide, and has a per-episode audience of over 4,000. With such a record of success, Clute and Edwards are now able to reach out to a wide range of noir scholars, to use the program as a forum to broaden public discourse on the enduring importance of this distinctively American film style. May's guest is the Czar of Noir, Eddie Muller. Eddie is the Fou...
Episode 45: Force of Evil
March 11, 2008 06:50 - 48 minutes - 44.2 MBFORCE OF EVIL shows us that small-time graft is less dangerous than big-time rackets that have the law, the trust of the public, and the appearance of respectability on their side. Ultimately, the crime is the system itself, and the very philosophical underpinnings of capitalism are liable. And while Abraham Polonsky's courage in addressing these themes is remarkable, the degree of craft he exhibits as a rookie director is nothing short of astonishing. With Ira Wolfert, he co-authors a script...
Episode 44: Brick
February 05, 2008 21:02 - 39 minutes - 36.4 MBRian Johnson's superlative 2005 debut film BRICK is neither a nostalgic tribute nor a modern reaction to noir style. But due to the conditions surrounding its production, it has more in common with classic noir than most films that play overtly with noir tradition: stiletto-tongued hard-boiled dialogue, razor-sharp editing, on-location shooting, the creative use of ambient sound, and narratively-rich canted angle shots and high-contrast lighting allow BRICK to overcome the pitfalls of a small...
Episode 43: They Live By Night
January 04, 2008 04:23 - 34 minutes - 31.6 MBTHEY LIVE BY NIGHT is film noir at its best. Edward Anderson's little-known hard-boiled rural bandit novel is made into a screenplay as lean as the post-war dreams of its players. The shifty camera frames every sucker that comes its way, making them false promises then plunging each into a darkness more than night. Rookie director Nicholas Ray mercilessly rolls rising stars Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell in the existential muck, but manages nonetheless to show us the ethereal gold that li...
Episode 42: The Ice Harvest
December 05, 2007 17:46 - 1 hour - 60.6 MBThis special episode of OUT OF THE PAST is full of holiday surprises. Clute and Edwards investigate the 2005 neo-noir Christmas comedy THE ICE HARVEST, then speak with Scott Phillips, author of the 2000 hardboiled novel on which the film is based. While the book contains its share of dark humor, it is largely a tale of the moral tipping point in the life of Witchita Mob lawyer Charlie Arglist (played by John Cusack), who discovers his capacity for ruthlessness when backed into a corner. The m...
Episode 41: The Glass Key and Miller's Crossing
November 10, 2007 15:21 - 1 hour - 60.3 MBStuart Heisler's 1942 film THE GLASS KEY retained the personages and major plot twists of Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel by the same name, but wiped the grim off the original tale. By cleaning up the characters and their motives, the film missed an opportunity to picture its stellar cast (Dunlevy, Ladd, and Lake) in a noir light. Instead, for much of its running time it looks and feels like the glamour whodunnit pictures, or populist clean-government reform films, of the 1930's. Hammett's nove...
Episode 40: Gilda
October 08, 2007 19:55 - 38 minutes - 35.2 MBRita Hayworth is GILDA. From the flip of her fiery hair to the reprise of her incendiary song, she sizzles the celluloid and burns herself indelibly into our collective consciousness. In fact, her presence so scorches that we are apt to miss the technical artistry of this film. Rudolph Maté's superlative cinematography uses banal objects pedagogically, to teach us to read the images: the blinds in Mundson's office make us aware of the fact we're looking, then show us how and where to look; th...
Episode 39: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
September 01, 2007 04:01 - 35 minutes - 32.4 MBShane Black's 2005 KISS KISS BANG BANG is a film of delirious contradictions. It is part comedy, part tragedy, a bawdy pulp parody and a heartfelt hardboiled homage. The mix would be too eclectic if the film didn't constantly signal its awareness that it is doing something that should be impossible. Black's self-conscious screenplay uses the generic traits of hardboiled to examine the status of hardboiled stories and characters today, poking fun at itself all the while. In this vein, it c...
Episode 38: I Wake Up Screaming
August 03, 2007 20:38 - 38 minutes - 34.9 MBI Wake Up Screaming was produced concurrently with The Maltese Falcon and released shortly after, and thus stands as one of the earliest examples of noir. The Maltese Falcon is the more uniform achievement, successfully coupling a consistent noir visual style with noir themes of disillusionment. But for these very reasons I Wake Up Screaming may be the more important film to scholars of noir. It vacillates between a 1930's-style love story and a war-era tale of existentialist dread, between ...
Episode 37: Body Heat
July 06, 2007 18:42 - 34 minutes - 31.1 MBWith its throwback hardboiled script and careful restaging of iconic noir shots, Lawrence Kasdan's 1981 BODY HEAT is a noteworthy neo-noir. However, it is no mere nostalgia piece, but rather a daring updating of the tradition: Kathleen Turner's sizzling portrayal of a femme fatale inspired such diverse 1980's and 1990's classics as FATAL ATTRACTION and BASIC INSTINCT, and Kasdan's intricate plotting may even have served as the model for THE USUAL SUSPECTS. On all these points Clute and Edward...
Episode 36: His Kind of Woman
June 13, 2007 03:17 - 35 minutes - 32.8 MB"His Kind Of Woman" makes viewers aware of what they expect from noir by disappointing their expectations. The film moves quickly from the down and out digs of gambler Dan Milner (Mitchum) to a sunbathed beachside resort in Mexico. There, it takes its time setting up a complicated intrigue involving a large ensemble cast. It introduces the sultry Lenore Brent (Russell) as a mysterious dame, only to domesticate her by the end of the film, and gives the character of Mark Cardigan (Price)--a B a...
Noircast Special 2: Alternative Noir Publications
May 18, 2007 01:28 - 56 minutes - 52.2 MBThe "Noircast Special" podcasts allow Clute and Edwards to address topics of interest to listeners of "Out of the Past" and "Behind the Black Mask." This episode features interviews with the creators of three alternative noir publications: Tee Morris, founder of podiobooks (www.podiobooks.com) and author of the fantasy-hardboiled podiobook "Billibub Baddings and the Case of the Singing Sword;" Kevin Burton Smith, creator of the superlative "Thrilling Detective" website and ezine (www.thrillin...
Episode 35: Pickup on South Street
May 11, 2007 05:57 - 36 minutes - 33.2 MBSam Fuller's 1953 "Pickup on South Street" leaves open important questions that Elia Kazan's "On the Waterfront" will feel compelled to answer, and Fuller's film has a more timeless quality as a result. With artful minimalism, Fuller captures the claustrophobic paranoia of the HUAC era. He uses alternating points of view, pitting each character's vision of America against another's, to create narrative tension and an ambiguous moral. The film is a fork-tongued parable--a warning to all in ...
Episode 34: The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
April 01, 2007 21:07 - 35 minutes - 16.2 MBVan Heflin, Barbara Stanwyck, Kirk Douglas and Lizabeth Scott all turn in stellar performances in this 1946 gem. For much of its running time the film lacks many of the visual hallmarks of the noir style, but Robert Rossen's pitch-perfect script, delivered with such subtlety by the fine cast, builds a dark backstory that makes what might have been a standard melodrama into a noir masterpiece: the drama of a few individuals is transformed into a parable of post-war America. Add Edith Head's go...
Episode 33: Hollywoodland
March 02, 2007 05:06 - 43 minutes - 39.9 MBRecently, several Hollywood films, including HOLLYWOODLAND, have revisited traumatic events of the 1940's and 1950's. This new film cycle begs several questions--chief among them, why do the malaise and murder of the postwar years resonate with filmmakers today, and do these films share characteristics that allow us to speak of an emerging film style? Clute and Edwards maintain there are significant differences lurking behind the apparent similarities, and such differences call for more nuanc...
Episode 32: Kiss Me Deadly
February 02, 2007 02:31 - 40 minutes - 18.4 MBThe 1955 film "Kiss Me Deadly" makes telling changes to Mickey Spillane's 1952 source novel. What was a story of greed and social corruption becomes an allegory of Cold War hysteria. Plot and character cede the stage to emotion and character type. While earlier films noir portrayed the downfall of a flawed person whose bad decisions had far-reaching social consequences, "Kiss Me Deadly" instead pits simplified personages and storylines against an ecstatically elaborate camera vision and sound...
Noircast Special 1: Kill Me Like You Mean It
January 26, 2007 00:02 - 40 minutes - 18.3 MBThe "Noircast Special" allows Clute and Edwards to address topics of interest to listeners of "Out Of The Past" and "Behind The Black Mask." This inaugural episode features a roundtable discussion with the director, playwright, and lead actors of The Stolen Chair Theatre Company's off-Broadway play "Kill Me Like You Mean It." Inspired by film noir and the theatre of the absurd, the play is an artful mash-up that demonstrates how dark is the heart of absurdist theatre, and how absurd are the c...
Episode 31: Touch of Evil
January 02, 2007 04:47 - 33 minutes - 30.7 MBOrson Welles's 1958 "Touch of Evil" is considered the last film noir of the classic period. Clute and Edwards investigate why it deserves this designation, arguing that it uses the conventions of noir in such a self-conscious manner that henceforth it will be impossible to tell a straight noir tale. Indeed the film is so self-conscious that it is no more a narrative than it is a demonstration of how to create film narrative. It is considered a great film for this reason, but also because it f...
Episode 30: The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Man Who Wasn't There
December 02, 2006 02:37 - 1 hour - 33.9 MBIn this double-feature podcast, Clute and Edwards investigate Tay Garnett's 1946 "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and the Coen brothers' 2001 "The Man Who Wasn't There"--considering their merits as films, and as adaptations of the novels of James M. Cain. While Garnett makes noir acceptable mainstream fare, with high production quality and glamorous stars like Lana Turner and John Garfield, his film loses the hauntingly arid psychology of Cain's novel. Conversely, the Coens decide not to adap...
Episode 29: Detour
November 01, 2006 16:59 - 41 minutes - 19 MBEdgar G. Ulmer's 1945 film "Detour" is commonly lauded as a B-noir that overcame production limitations with artful minimalism. In this context, instances of obtrusive lighting and camerawork are viewed as minor blemishes--the best quality that could be expected from a poverty row feature. Clute and Edwards argue that the film should be granted a far greater measure of technical mastery, that the so-called flubs purposefully call attention to the very cinematic means used to construct the nar...
Episode 28: The Black Dahlia
October 02, 2006 04:06 - 31 minutes - 18.2 MBIn the murder of Elizabeth Short, novelist James Ellroy found a means to grieve over the rape and murder of his own mother. In the novel THE BLACK DAHLIA Betty is at once a symbol of the post-war era torn apart by its passions, and a symbol of Bucky Bleichert's/James Ellroy's search for meaning. Likewise, but dissimilarly, Betty serves a double function in De Palma's film. She seems to be an embodiment of cinematic history split between classic and post-modern eras, and of De Palma's search t...
Episode 27: D.O.A.
September 02, 2006 00:46 - 34 minutes - 19.8 MBDid noir die in 1950? As a filmic style, certainly not; many of the most daring visual and narrative experiments of the classic period date from 1951-1958. However, 1950 seems to mark a dramatic transition in what might be called noir philosophy. The strong men of the post-war years, who were victims only of their own errors in judgment, cede the screen to indeterminate men, who fall victim to forces they never grasp. This transition infuses the noir universe with a crueler sense of irony...
Episode 26: Murder, My Sweet
June 30, 2006 04:01 - 31 minutes - 21.9 MBDick Powell was cast as Philip Marlowe in the 1945 film "Murder, My Sweet." Was it a stroke of genius to allow a song and dance man to reinvent himself in this role, or the desecration of a literary icon? Clute and Edwards are deeply divided on this issue, but find many topics on which they agree: whether the viewer considers Powell's performance a triumph or a tragedy, it is evident that the tension between the two strong female leads (Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley) is a fundamental driving fo...
Episode 25: He Walked By Night
June 15, 2006 02:23 - 35 minutes - 20.5 MBThis film deserves its reputation as an important early police procedural and precursor to the television series "Dragnet," but does not deserve to be viewed reductively--as only that. Anthony Mann's un-credited direction was among his best. He coaxed strong performances out of actors given few lines, and made every shot count. Cinematographer John Alton brought the darker sides of Los Angeles to life, and Alfred DeGaetano made brilliant editing choices to overcome limited sets, a bare-bones ...
Episode 24: Chinatown
June 01, 2006 00:00 - 34 minutes - 23.8 MBRobert Towne's screenplay for the 1974 film "Chinatown" tells an original story, but a story whose scope, intrigue, characters, pacing, and style owe a great debt to the work of Raymond Chandler. That said, it would be a mistake to view "Chinatown" as a simple nostalgia piece. In this tale of the fundamental--indeed foundational--corruption of Los Angeles, Director Roman Polanski, Writer Towne, and Cinematographer John Alonzo tell a hard-boiled tale in a modern filmic style, and this produc...
Episode 23: On the Waterfront
May 15, 2006 04:00 - 36 minutes - 25.1 MBElia Kazan might have broken the Hollywood Blacklist. Instead, when HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) asked him to name names, he sang like a canary. His actions ended many careers, and broke the spirit of many Hollywood players. Kazan never apologized; indeed, his career and life from that moment staged a defense of his decision. "On the Waterfront"--which won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director for Kazan, Best Actor for Brando, and Best Actress for Eva Marie Saint--was his mo...
Episode 22: Good Night, and Good Luck
May 01, 2006 04:01 - 33 minutes - 15.3 MBAs America intoned the mantra "Communism," fear became its religion and McCarthy its high priest. George Clooney's "Good Night, and Good Luck" investigates Edward R. Murrow's brave act of voicing dissent, at a time when dissent was seen as un-American. The film shows an America living in fear of Communism in the 1950's that is very much like an America living in fear of Terrorism today, and demonstrates why the media--then and now--rarely question controversial pundits and their pronounceme...
Episode 21: Sunset Blvd.
April 15, 2006 04:00 - 30 minutes - 21 MBThe most famous texts of any canon are rarely the most typical; rather, they push the limits. The fame of Billy Wilder's 1950 masterwork "Sunset Boulevard" is of this problematic sort. The film plays on all the usual themes of noir: mysterious deaths; a male protagonist doomed by a single bad decision; a femme fatale who twists his hopes to resemble her own, and slowly trims away his universe until she is the sole star guiding his fateful journey. But these themes are absurdly exaggerated. Th...
Episode 20: Reservoir Dogs
April 01, 2006 05:01 - 36 minutes - 25.2 MBKubrick's "The Killing" weaves the narrative threads of each character's story into the complex yarn of a heist. Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" ties references to numerous films into a dense knot. The pleasure of watching, and difficulty of discussing, Tarantino's work arises from having to pick at, and follow, seemingly infinite threads to their points of origin. Text is henceforth hypertext. As Clute and Edwards follow the many links from Tarantino back to Kubrick, they investigate what's...
Episode 19: The Killing
March 15, 2006 05:01 - 35 minutes - 24.1 MBStanley Kubrick and Quentin Tarantino both launched their careers by updating the noir tradition. In the first episode of a two-part comparative analysis, Clute and Edwards demonstrate how Kubrick's "The Killing" (1956) and Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" (1992) come more clearly into focus when each is viewed through the lens of the other. "The Killing" might be considered a masterwork on its own merits. Kubrick's careful composition of every shot demonstrates his deep sympathy for noir trad...
Episode 18: The Set-Up
March 01, 2006 05:01 - 30 minutes - 21.1 MBAs crisp and fluid as a boxer's footwork, Robert Wise's editing turns a lightweight script into the heavy-hitting drama "The Set Up." Art Cohn's screenplay is a very Hollywood adaptation of a 1928 poem by Joseph Moncure March. The poem is a shot to the gut--a powerful meditation on race that shows a black American is never in for a fair fight. The 1949 screenplay is the flyweight story of a down and out white fighter who thinks he's one punch away from glory. But Robert Wise and Robert Ry...
Episode 17: Gun Crazy
February 15, 2006 05:57 - 42 minutes - 24.2 MBWhat good is it to be a sharpshooter when there's no war on? If you want to understand the sense of impotence and angst that defined the postwar generation, "Gun Crazy" is a case study. With a deft and almost whimsical touch, Joseph Lewis sketches a country in transition--uncertain whether to gratify its thirst for heroism or its hunger for things, big things, lots of things. The film also signals a dramatic transition in filmmaking. In a giant stride, it seems to have one foot in the sil...
Episode 16: The Grifters
February 01, 2006 05:01 - 29 minutes - 20.4 MBThis is perhaps the most noir of all neo-noirs. Never has 1990 Los Angeles looked and sounded so much like 1950 Los Angeles. While Stephen Frears sets Jim Thompson's source novel at the time the film is made, he carefully trims away modern LA. The film moves between the Bryson Apartments, the racetrack, and scenes on a train. Gone are the glitter and glitz of modern downtown and its skyscrapers. In their place are the greed and grift that have always been the motor driving the City of Angels-...
Episode 15: The Lady From Shanghai
January 15, 2006 05:01 - 38 minutes - 22.1 MBEvery Orson Welles film demonstrates the great director's ability to work with and against filmic tradition. "The Lady from Shanghai" is a compendium of noir conventions: it tells a tale of post-war greed, of Americans willing to tear each other asunder for a dollar; it is the story of an irresistible dame and the smart guy who becomes a chump the second he lays eyes on her; it uses A-stars against type so as to bring out their blemishes and inner demons (even daring to cut and dye Hayworth's...
Episode 14: Notorious
January 01, 2006 05:01 - 36 minutes - 21 MBThe question of whether Hitchcock is a noir director remains open. What is certain is that by 1946 noir aesthetics began to inflect every genre from the Holiday picture ("It's a Wonderful Life") to the espionage/thriller film. Like "The Third Man," "Notorious" is best described as the latter, for its political and geographical scope exceed what is typical of noir, and justice is defined and done in unambiguous terms. Nevertheless, at crucial moments a noir camera vision is manifest. More impo...
Episode 13: It's a Wonderful Life
December 15, 2005 06:10 - 39 minutes - 22.6 MBWith "It's A Wonderful Life" Capra launched his independent studio, Liberty Films. He thought he had a guaranteed box office winner, with stars Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, and the power-to-the-people message that had made his pre-war films such successes. He was wrong. Capra never seemed to realize what a dark film he had made, nor understand that his populist message no longer resonated. This film would not acheive great success until decades later, when the divorce generation would (m...
Episode 12: Rififi
December 01, 2005 05:42 - 46 minutes - 18.7 MBHollywood began tearing itself apart with accusations of Communism in 1947, and in 1949 American director Jules Dassin was blacklisted. In order to pursue his craft he fled to France, where he cobbled together a small budget and a motley crew of B stars. Together they created the heist masterpiece Rififi, the tale of a ragtag international band of thieves who use inferior tools and superior know-how to pull off the job of a lifetime. They are in the clear until somebody rats and then one b...
Episode 11: The Big Sleep and The Big Lebowski
November 15, 2005 06:19 - 1 hour - 32.2 MBWhen "The Big Lebowski" was released in 1998, Ethan and Joel Coen claimed its "episodic" narrative structure found its source in the work of Raymond Chandler. In this super-sized double-feature podcast, Richard and Shannon examine "The Big Lebowski" against Howard Hawks's 1946 noir "The Big Sleep," and both films against Chandler's 1939 novel "The Big Sleep." Beyond their similar narrative structures, these works all present consummate dialogue, a panoply of memorable characters, and crimes...