I remember wanting to see the neo-noir back in 1991 when it played at a local art house theater. Somehow, I never made it to the theater and missed the movie entirely.

The Grifters, adapted from the novel of the same name, stars John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, and Annette Bening as con artists, i.e. grifters, Roy, Lilly, and Myra respectively . Roy is Lilly’s son but because she was so young when he was born he was passed off as her younger brother for most of his life. Lilly works for a major Maryland mobster, Bobo, traveling to racetracks and placing large bets to reduce the odds for longshot horses and is estranged from Roy. Roy is a short con artist, playing trick on marks that pay off quickly with elaborate set-up allowing him to avoid most form of legal entrapment and enforcement. Myra is a long con artist looking for a new partner and is involved with Roy though at the start of the story neither are aware that they are both grifters. Grievously injured by a mark, Roy lands in the hospital bringing all three of the character together and dynamic of the triangle are established. Lilly wants her son out of the racket and to go ‘straight,’ Myra wants to displace Lilly as a major influence in Roy’s life, and Roy struggles to find a way to satisfy both women while maintaining his independence. Stakes quickly rise and soon it becomes a matter of life and death over Roy’s stash of cash and his relationship with Lilly.

Directed by Stephen Frears and produced by Martin Scorsese The Grifters is a bleak, cynical look at humanity and the self-destructive nature of greed and the need to dominate. I enjoyed the film thought I found the ending less than fully satisfying. While the story and plot are both resolved I tend to prefer for a story to force a character to make a choice, a hard, difficult choice, rather than having an impulsive action produce unintended consequences that resolve the conflicts. This is not the same as a deus ex machina where an unestablished power or character magically removes the troubles but rather in this case a realistic and predictable outcome comes from a moment’s anger rather than a character making the decision to produce that final outcome.

Still, I am glad I watched the film before it finished its run on The Criterion Channel at the end of the month.

Recently a friend and I watched The Sniper as part of The Criterion Channel’s March programing of Columbia Noir. This movie, released in 1952, is shockingly relevant today and presents a story and complexity about its central character well ahead of its time.

Directed by Edward Dmytryk, who also gave us one of my favorite films The Caine Mutiny, and written by Harry Brown, The Sniper is focused on Edward Miller a troubled young man recently released from prison. Miller struggles against a deep-seated hatred of women and after a couple of attempts to get help fail and he is romantically rejected Miller loses control and begins a murderous spree as a sniper killing dark haired women. The police led by Lieutenant Frank Kafka and his partner Joe Ferris are nearly helpless to catch Miller. Stuck in a mindset that looks for motive their focus on peeping toms and men with a history of sexual assault their investigation gets nowhere until the department’s psychologist Dr. Kent, redirects their attention by use of what would eventually become psychological profiling. In a final inversion of classic film tropes, the ending doesn’t rely upon exciting gunplay but instead leaves the viewer with a haunting image of a man in pain.

When we decided to watch The Sniper with its subject matter of random murder we expected a film that leaned heavily towards the exploitive but instead we were treated to a thoughtful, though occasionally didactic, and serious treatment of the problems American society has, then and now, in dealing with psychological trauma and the use of a prison system in lieu of hospitals. Aside from one scene where the plot is brought to a full stop to allow for speechmaking by the filmmakers The Sniper does an excellent job of presenting its themes within the context of a compelling narrative. This one is well worth seeking out and watching.

Apparently, the Criterion Channel recently dropped a bunch of noir films into their streaming service. Yesterday as I browsed the ‘recently added’ queue I stumbled across noir after noir and the titles were unknown to me. Under the limitations of a time and temperament I selected Murder by Contract as the one to watch Sunday night.

Hailing from 1958 Murder by Contract is a low budget quickly produced film noir centered on Claude and man with large dreams and no empathy. Claude leaves the respectable life of an upright citizen and becomes an assassin for the mob in order to secure the funds for his dream home. Curious for a character of this type and profession Claude rejects firearms for most of his contracts and quickly establishes himself as a killer of unusual competence. The mob sends Claude out west to Los Angeles where he meets up with two local hoods, George and Marc, for the most challenging assignment of his cruel career where nothing goes as anyone planned.

Though the word is never used in the film Claude is presented as a sociopath. He professes to have taught himself to have no feeling but it is more likely that this is a justification for the character than an actual achievement. His intellect and cool demeanor carry him through most of his assignments unperturbed but as this final contract goes awry the illusion of his self-control crumbles.

Shot in seven days Murder by Contract presents the material in a spare and unadorned style. Aside from Vince Edwards as Claude who would later go on to portray Doctor Ben Casey from 1961 thru 1966, the aspect of casting that leapt out to me was that four future Star Trek (the original series) guest actors also appeared in the crime drama, Phillip Pine, who played the genocidal Colonel Green in the episode The Savage Curtain, is the hoodlum Marc, Kathie Brown plays a secretary who moonlights as an escort and she appeared in the episode Wink of an Eye as Deela one of Kirk’s alien romantic conquests, Joseph Mell who plays Harry also was in the pilot for Star Trek as a trader from Earth who sparks Pike’s interest in the Orion slave woman, and finally David Roberts as a Hall of records clerk but got a promotion to doctor for the episode The Empath.

While lacking the depth of characterization found in classic noir such as Double Indemnity and with a jazz inspired soundtrack that bordered on irritating, Murder by Contract still proves to be an interesting entry in the sub-genre from the end of its classical period.

Last night after I finished a few rounds of on-line Call of Duty: WWII I surfed my streaming services looking for something to watch before heading off to bed. What I found was What Did Jack Do? an odd two-character black-and-white short film, just 17 minutes, about a detective interrogating a witness at a train station. Aside from a waitress that brings coffee during the interrogation the entire film is unnamed Detective and the suspect Jack having a non sequiturfilled absurdist conversation.

Written, starring, and directed by David Lynch it’s normal to expect the absurd and strange but I was not fully prepared for this little gem. You see, Jack is a capuchin, a South American monkey. Utilizing n ungraded effect similar to what was used in the cartoon Clutch Cargo of superimposing a person’s speaking mouth on a pre-photographed image, Jack rebels, denies, and dodges the detective dogged digging into a murder.

What Did Jack Do? carries a copyright from 2016 and was shown at festivals but only last month did Lynch allow it to be added to Netflix’s service. I must admit that with suggestions of barnyard deviancy and murder this film worked for me more than some of Lynch’s feature films. It was oddly compelling, tense, and downright funny and certainly worth it’s brief running time.

Directed by Fritz Lang The Woman in the Window is a noir film about a married professor (Edward G. Robinson) who becomes fascinated by the subject of an oil painting hanging nears his gentlemen’s club. The subject, a lovely dark-haired woman (Joan Bennet) also fascinate the professor’s two pals, the city’s district attorney and a physician. A late-night chance encounter brings the professor and the subject together while the professor’s family is out on vacation for a week. They become friendly and her returns to her apartment to see sketches of her by the painting’s artist. An unexpected entrance by a mysterious and violent man end in the stranger’s death and to avoid professional ruin and unwanted questions the professor and the subject conspire to dump the body and never see each other again to hide any association with the killing. Naturally right from the start things unravel and both characters find themselves racing to stay ahead of bot the law and criminal elements.

The Woman in the Window is a tight, taunt noir that I watched on one of Roku’s free streaming channels dedicated to noir movies. The acting was top notch, the tension built wonderfully as the professor’s ignorance of police procedures and his friend’s ability as district attorney closed the nose around the pair. And yet I cannot truly recommend this movie. In the final minutes the script falls apart, perhaps in a bid to avoid trouble with the MPAA Production code and left me with an utterly unsatisfying resolution to the what had been a thrilling experience. I cannot tell you what the final ending is without massive spoilers and it may work for you but be warned it cheats.

A French noir produced right after the war in 1946 Panique is film about suspicion and mob injustice. Michel Simon plays Monsieur Hire, an aloof reclusive man who lives in a hotel where the residents of the neighborhood dislike him for the solitary and unfriendly manner. Life in the neighborhood is upended when as a carnival is setting up a woman is found murdered in a nearby field. The murderer, Capoulade, played by  Max Dalban, and his girlfriend, Alice, played by Viviane Romance, a woman Monsieur Hire had become infatuated with, manipulate the neighborhood’s distrust of Hire, attempting to place the blame for the murder on him.

Panique, though it never mentions or deals with the war or France’s occupation under Nazi rule, is seen by many as a statement about the behavior of people during the war. The fact that Hire is Jewish gives credence to this interpretation as mob mentality and the neighborhood rumor filled imaginations turn violent against a man whose only crime is being socially different.

With a brief running time of 91 minutes the film doesn’t waste footage with needlessly complex backstory or set-ups. The mystery of the murderer’s identity is for the audience quickly dispatched allowing the story of Hire, Alice, and the mob to progress without undue burdens.

Filmed in black-and-white by cinematographer Nicholas Hayer, Panique doesn’t not draw on the heritage of German expressionism like most classical noir films, but rather presents the movie’s subjects in stark realism rather then with exaggerated and stylized photography. The film was based on a novel and remade as Monsieur Hire in 1989.

An enjoyable excursion into noir from the country that coined the genre’s name, Panique is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

In now way am I proposing a final definitive definition of Noir fiction and what sets a story in that particular sub-genre but I do think I may have stumbled across one of the lines that separates noir  from its close elder cousin detective fiction.

Detective fiction, in general, derives from a European tradition of the intellectual puzzle solver that reveals the killers identity in a dramatic drawing room monologue. In the United States, a rougher culture, this transformed into the genre of hard boiled, where the detective still uncovered the killer’s identity, but through the course of resolving the mystery the protagonist usually faced more serious danger to his life and was often less than a stellar individual himself. Noir  also often dealt with detectives and a crime that needed resolving but as often as not the protagonists of noir  fiction were the criminals themselves and in the cases where the protagonists weren’t the perpetrators they often were as morally compromised as the characters the challenged.

Dividing the genre between hard-boiled and noir is difficult thing but I think it can be done with the concept of moral order and which characters are responsible for restoring the moral order.

In a murder mystery the moral order has been destroyed by the immoral killing of a character and it is restored when the killer is revealed and brought to justice. In this situation the detective is the agency that restores the moral order, it is the detective intelligence and devotion to that moral order that propels the characters, (Side note it is interesting that in Murder on the Orient Express  Poirot does not bring the killers to justice because it is determine that the murder itself is an expression of the moral order. In others words, ‘He had it comin’.’)

Noir  particularly that films made in the classic period of the 19640s and 1950s also restored the moral order by the time the credits appeared on the screen what set them apart was how the moral order was restored.

In noir  films the moral order isn’t restored by way of an intelligent and morally upright character but usually because the seeds of their own destruction sowed by the characters themselves fruited with the final justice. Consider how Keyes was unable to reveal the murders in Double Indemnity but instead Walter and Phyllis bring about their own destruction. The moral order is restored, after all the production code insisted upon that, but the restoration had little to nothing to do with the integrity of the upstanding characters.

Perhaps an interesting boundary case is the classic The Maltese Falcon.Sam unravels the mystery and turns Brigid over t the police, restoring the moral order, she will pay the price for her crimes, as will al the other criminals, but there is the lingering question of why does Sam do this? In the final scene between the lovers he gives lots of potential answers, when your partner is murdered you need to do something about it, maybe he loves her maybe he doesn’t, and of course if he doesn’t he could never trust her and not turning her over puts him, at the risk of ending up like Thursby. Pick an answer and you change the moral calculus. Is Sam doing the right thing because you honor your partner? Then this is more like detective fiction. Is he just looking out for himself? The moral tone gets darker with that outlook. Neither the novel nor the film provides any definitive answer to Sam and his motivation leaving it to our interpretation.

So one test, and only one test of many, for is something noir or not ask how does the moral order get restored and you’ll have a leg up on answering the question.

Last night my sweetie-wife and I watched an older British film of Amazon Prime, Circus of Fear. From 1966 and starring Christopher Lee and Leo Genn, who struck both of us as a low-rent James Mason, the movie is far less about horror than it is about crime.

After a daring daylight armored car robbery, are they all daring, which ends in the unintentional murder of a guard, Scotland Yard Inspector Elliott, (Genn), chases down leads until he’s confronted with a rogue’s gallery of suspects at a circus that is wintering over. With every character seeming harboring a deep and dangerous secret and a masked foreign lion tamer, (Lee) Elliott’s task of discovering the murderer and recovering the stolen 250,000 British pounds becomes much more difficult.

Comprised of studios shoots, tired stock footage of an actual circus, and emaciated elephants, Circus of Fear  can hardly be called a good movie. There were times, particularly with the repeated shots of a gloved hand throwing knives with lethal precision as character were eliminated from the story, that I was reminded of the Italian Giallo genre of lurid and sensation exploitative movies but sadly we were not watching one of those and whatever charm this movie had quickly faded.

The cast included Klaus Kinski as a mostly unnamed and looming threat over the proceedings but his part was rather small and did not provide enough screen time for ample amusement. Repeated uses of crash zooms and abrupt cuts failed to provoke any real sense of shock or dread and for the most part what you can say about this movie is that it was shot in focus and without absurd cuts covering poor editing choices. This is suitable for Riff Tracks ofrMST3K should they ever get around to it.