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Miguel 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 serves as head of Marketing and Editorial, and the innovative multimedia course materials created by Ball State University, where Edwards is Executive Director of iLearn Research. The course is free and open to the public, will run in conjunction with the two-month “Summer of Darkness” festival on TCM, featuring 24 hours of film noir every Friday in June and July, 2015.
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OUT 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 where every image perfectly accompanies or contrasts every line of dialogue, where the whole is so self-conscious that it forces us to view each moment through every other, creating a true mise-en- abyme. It would be as impossible for the viewer to enter into such a story as it is for the characters to escape it, if it weren't for the decision to create a "Meta" narration at exactly the halfway point of the film, allowing the viewer to sort past from present in a film that constantly blurs that distinction in order to show how lives are always lived in servitude to what comes out of the past. For all of these reasons, the film is a constant source of inspiration, and a constant obsession, for those who watch it carefully. Artist and novelist Jonathan Santlofer joins Clute and Edwards to discuss how the film has repeatedly inspired his work, and Clute and Edwards consider how the case they would make for this movie is reframed each time they reopen their investigation into its means and motives.
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Appearances 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 common to films noir than to science fiction movies. As Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) and Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) fight to remain human, they question the mass hysteria of the era, recognize that all appearances are misleading in a mass media culture, and discuss how we lose our humanity in times of social dislocation. Director Don Siegal, screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring and producer Walter Wanger draw on their extensive experience in creating iconic films noir to craft a movie that self-consciously adopts a noir style and noir thematics whenever the stakes are high, demonstrating in the process that noir is ideally suited to addressing human questions in the years following WWII, when retaining our humanity in spite of technological progress is precisely what is in question.
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A 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 wars and other evidence of the havoc wreaked by modern "progress" those storytelling traditions evolved into something darker and more nuanced—something that offered less certain outcomes. L.A NOIRE plays on both traditions: it is linear and problem-based in its narrative structure, yet its underlying worldview is as brooding and morally ambiguous as the finest films noir and hard-boiled novels. Like all great digital works it is a mashup that weaves together swaths of historical events and pop culture yarns, and the result is a vast tapestry of noir at once familiar and altogether unique.
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While 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 how these gestures function to generate both compelling narratives and critical reflections upon those narratives. Drawing on the on the concept of "constraint" articulated by the Oulipo (a French acronym for "Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle," or "Workshop of Potential Literature"), Clute and Edwards demonstrate that noir was the most constrained of film styles, and the constraints noir embraced gave rise to its infinite variability and unprecedented self-reflexivity--the very characteristics that have often forced scholars to bracket off noir, framing it as an exception to the otherwise tidy world of studio-era American cinema. In this video essay, Clute and Edwards use the simple constraint of run time percentage to recombine iconic moments from 31 films noir and neo-noir, and in the process create a short film that is at once a noir narrative and an investigation into the narrative constraints embraced by noir.
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A 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 question, we must first displace the many frames through which we have become accustomed to viewing the film—most notably Producer John Houseman’s apocryphal account of how Chandler’s alcoholism impacted the screenplay. If we divest ourselves of these frames and really focus on the film, we see that Chandler’s script rescues, rather than compromises, this movie. THE BLUE DAHLIA is more a victim of an identity crisis, a film unable for reasons of censorship and limited artistic vision to commit fully to the noir worldview that came home full force in 1946. And thus, as a marginal success, it’s a film that can teach us a great deal about how noir came to be both a dominant Hollywood style and a philosophical stance.
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In 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 Division of French and Italian at UK. He is joined by Honor students Bethany Futrell, Jesseca Johnson, Ryan Palmer, Nick Purol, and Daniel Robbins. To leave a comment on this episode, or make a donation to the podcast, please visit Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir at http://outofthepast.libsyn.com.
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Clute 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 PLACE, starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. To learn more about Megan's work, visit www.meganabbott.com. This podcast is brought to you by Clute and Edwards, of www.noircast.net. To leave a comment on this episode, or make a donation to the podcast, please visit Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir at http://outofthepast.libsyn.com.
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Howard 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 www.noircast.net. To leave a comment on this episode, or make a donation to the podcast, please visit Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir at http://outofthepast.libsyn.com.
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Thanks 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 Founder and President of the Film Noir Foundation, and the man who organizes the Noir City Film Festival in San Francisco. He is also the author of three superlative studies of film noir (Dark City, Dark City Dames, and The Art of Noir) and two supernal throwback hard-boiled novels (The Distance and Shadow Boxer). Eddie's selection is the 1949 Jules Dassin Film THIEVES' HIGHWAY.
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FORCE 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 so rich in its ability to expose the poverty of our dreams, and so stylized and impossibly catchy in its dialogue, that it can't help but feel more real than the real. With this script, and uncommon directing talent, Polonsky coaxes career-best performance from John Garfield, Thomas Gomez, and Marie Windsor. And with Director of Photography George Barnes, Polonsky frames some of the most beautiful and narratively rich shots in film history. FORCE OF EVIL may be the noir that most perfectly captures the ambivalent and fearful relationship Americans had to the great cities and great institutions that were the sclerotic backbone of the country after WWII. This podcast is brought to you by Clute and Edwards, of www.noircast.net. To leave a comment on this episode, or make a donation to the podcast, please visit "Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir" at http://outofthepast.libsyn.com.
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Rian 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 budget and limited crew–just as these same techniques allowed classic films such as DETOUR or THE HITCH-HIKER to do. In fact, financial constraints lend BRICK an artistic coherency it might otherwise lack, for Johnson was forced to write, direct, and edit the entire picture, and to use family to finance and score it. The resulting work is as disarmingly familiar as classic noir and as surprisingly fresh and inventive as its creator, who clearly understands how to borrow from the past where appropriate and innovate whenever possible. Like the work of all great artists, BRICK demonstrates that aesthetic leaps forward find their surest footing in the past.This podcast is brought to you by Clute and Edwards, of www.noircast.net. To leave a comment on this episode, or make a donation to the podcast, please visit "Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir" at outofthepast.libsyn.com.
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THEY 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 lines their hearts and dreams. Beyond the sublime writing, acting, and directing, what truly sets the film apart is its ruthless humanity, its unwavering determination to show the full spectrum of good and bad in everyone—the shades of gray that haunt the war-battered world of black and white. It is as poignant now as it was upon its release sixty years ago. This podcast is brought to you by Clute and Edwards, of www.noircast.net. To leave a comment on this episode, or make a donation to the podcast, please visit "Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir" at outofthepast.libsyn.com.
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This 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 movie plays down the moral crisis and plays up the comedy, but director Harold Ramis manages to recreate some of the brooding atmosphere of the original story by staging a series of noir tribute shots. Phillips, and Clute and Edwards, all weigh in how successfully the film adapts the book in this double-feature holiday special. This podcast is brought to you by Clute and Edwards, of www.noircast.net. To leave a comment on this episode, or make a donation to the podcast, please visit "Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir" at outofthepast.libsyn.com.
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Stuart 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 novel finally received proper treatment in the Coens' 1990 masterpiece MILLER'S CROSSING. Though filmed in color, this movie borrows heavily from classical noir, and gives us characters as complex and morally flawed as any envisioned by Hammett. This podcast—the third double-feature of "Out of the Past" to examine how the Coens' films have been inspired by the fiction of Cain, Chandler, and Hammett, as well as previous film adaptations of these masters of hardboiled—is brought to you by Clute and Edwards of www.noircast.net. To leave a comment on this episode, or make a donation to the podcast, please visit "Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir" at outofthepast.libsyn.com.
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Rita 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; the elaborate staging and framing of staircases make us wonder whether each character's fate is ascending or descending. While the Triad of superb players (Hayworth, Ford, and Macready) fleshes out the elaborate story, it is Maté's camera that builds the suspense. In then end, the cinematography combines with lines of dialogue pronounced by philosopher Uncle Pio to give us the world through noir-colored glasses—a "worm's eye view" that lends Hollywood's biggest stars a distinct earthiness. This podcast is brought to you by Clute and Edwards, of www.noircast.net. To leave a comment on this episode, or make a donation to the podcast, please visit "Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir" at outofthepast.libsyn.com.
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Shane 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 could be likened to BRICK and THE ICE HARVEST, which similarly find comi-tragic inspiration in a literary tradition while largely abandoning the classic noir visual style. While noir fans may be tempted to track down the movie's numerous references to other novels and films, the greater payoff comes from simply appreciating Black's superb writing and the sublime comic acting of Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer. This podcast is brought to you by Clute and Edwards, of www.noircast.net. To leave a comment on this episode, or make a donation to the podcast, please visit "Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir" at outofthepast.libsyn.com.
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I 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 traditional light-saturated, protagonist-centered staging and elaborate off-kilter compositions bathed in darkness. It is a Janus film, and it is debatable whether it looks primarily backwards or forwards, is principally an ending or a beginning. This podcast is brought to you by Clute and Edwards, of www.noircast.net. To leave a comment on this episode, or make a donation to the podcast, please visit "Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir" at outofthepast.libsyn.com.
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With 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 Edwards agree, but disagree on whether the 1980's were a decade capable of producing true noir--with its nuanced blend of existentialism and fatalism--or whether the fundamentally hedonistic zeitgeist of the era lead to films that simply retained the stylistic trappings of the classic period while delivering a more superficial message. This podcast is brought to you by Clute and Edwards, of www.noircast.net. To leave a comment on this episode, or make a donation to the podcast, please visit "Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir" at outofthepast.libsyn.com.
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"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 actor and slapstick hysteric--an inordinate amount of time to strut and fret his stuff. For all of these reasons, the film seems light years away from the gut-wrenching bare-bones noir world of the 1940's. However, the presence of Mitchum, strong cinematography by Harry Wild, and John Farrow's coy and self-conscious direction at once recuperate a noir atmosphere and pose important questions about the commercialization of filmmaking in the 1950's. This podcast is brought to you by Clute and Edwards, of www.noircast.net. To leave a comment on this episode, or make a donation to the podcast, please visit "Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir" at outofthepast.libsyn.com.
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