27 November-December 2025
Hello, dear readers!
This started off as a Facebook post late on Thanksgiving night; note that I have edited it a bit.
Hi folks,
Tomorrow, in lieu of doing any shopping whatsoever on Black Friday, I invite you to join me instead for Noir Friday.
I’m planning to have a noir film marathon starting roughly at noon Eastern time. I am not going to try to post an exact schedule for each movie tonight. I’ll post comments tomorrow to update people on when I’m watching each movie.
I’m going to attempt to watch the following films:
Double Indemnity (1944, directed by Billy Wilder)
The Lost Weekend (1945, directed by Billy Wilder)
The Lady from Shanghai (1948, directed by Orson Welles)
Too Late for Tears (1949, directed by Byron Haskin)
Human Desire (1954, directed by Fritz Lang)
Note that although I have seen a number of noir films, I have not seen these!
Some of these are considered among the finest films noir from the classic era, and some aren’t! (We can discuss…).
I reserve the right to bail out on any of these if they are boring or seem bad, move on to the next one, take breaks, etc.
I chose these five because they are all mentioned in Film Noir, by Alain Silver and James Ursini, edited by Paul Duncan, from Taschen, in chapter 2: “The Perfect Crime.” That chapter is centered around Double Indemnity, but mentions these other films as well. It also mentions another famous Wilder film, Hollywood Boulevard, and I’d love to see that one, too, but I don’t think I want to try watching six films in one day!
Now, here’s the cool part: if you want to watch too, all of these can all be played directly from the Internet Archive pages below. It’s free and there’s no registration required. You can either watch them using the video player right on each page using the links below, or you can scroll down and find a downloadable file to save. If you Internet connection isn’t fast enough to stream the video without hiccups, try downloading it and then opening the downloaded file with whatever video player you have — I recommend using the free player VLC, if you can download and install it.
Personally I’ll be playing these using a little mini-PC running Ubuntu Linux, with the Firefox web browser, driving an LG monitor and ampifier with stereo speakers, and using my laptop to write comments. But do it however it works for you. I recommend you pop out the video into a floating window so you can have Facebook and the movie visible at the same time.
There is a higher-quality .mkv file of The Lost Weekend available for download from the page. If you have high-speed Internet and a lot of storage space, you can download this file from the link on the page and play it with the VLC application.
Here’s the same list, with links:
Double Indemnity
The Lost Weekend
The Lady from Shanghai
Too Late for Tears
Human Desire
The image quality of these films vary. Some are wonderfully well-restored, while others look or sound a bit rough. I found them all quite watchable, though.
I am not quite sure how I’m going to do this yet. I might start a Facebook Live, but it won’t really be possible for you to watch “in sync” that way. So more likely I’ll just make snarky comments and indicate the time stamp I’m at in each film periodically, or something like that.
Note again that I have edited these comments.
Having coffee and cigarettes for breakfast to prepare myself. Smoking’s bad for you, so I’m just chewing up a few American Spirits. (Actually having a latte and leftover pie.).
OK! Kids may interrupt, but the plan is to start Double Indemnity at noon. It’s a distracting environment, with kids yelling or stimming. Unfortunately there are no subtitles, so I may have to replay scenes to try to hear the dialogue. I’ll have a plot summary page from Wikipedia open in a tab in case I lose track. I also have Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, Third Edition, which has plot summaries. In case my attention wanders, I have a book of Calculus practice problems to work on.
From the Film Noir book:
“Phyllis Dietrichson seduces and insurance agent, Walter Neff, into devising a brilliant scheme to murder her husband and collect on his accident insurance policy. But after the crime is committed, Neff’s passion for Phyllis sours. Further, the deceitful Phyllis has used Neff for her own purposes. There is even some doubt as to whether the policy will be paid. The. cunning Barton Keyes, chief claims investigator and Neff’s best friend, is suspicious of the circumstances of the apparent accident. Neff plans to kill Phyllis, hoping to pin her death as well as the original crime on her lover, Zachette, the supposed boyfriend of her stepdaughter Lola, after Lola informs Neff of Phyllis’s past. But Phyllis is one jump ahead of Neff and they shoot each other, with Phyllis proclaiming at the last moment that she loves Neff. The mortally wounded Neff dictates a confession at his insurance office, where he is found by Keyes. Claiming he will escape to Mexico, Neff collapses before reaching the elevator.”
One of my sources says that Barbara Stanwyck borrowed Lana Turner’s wig from The Postman Always Rings Twice, but I think Postman was filmed later, so that doesn’t quite make sense. They do have the same impossibly-blonde hair, though!
The film is full of hilarious lines, like “How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?”
Here’s the full script.
OK! Even with distractions, Double Indemnity is a freaking great film. It’s so beautifully shot, it moves along like a speedinng train, and the dialogue is so darkly funny! Really, a stone-cold classic. It is certainly in the running for the best noir film ever made. I’m taking a little break and I’ll start The Lost Weekend about 2pm Eastern.
Starting The Lost Weekend — in 1080p, the .mkv file looks gorgeous, even with some visible compression artifacts.
Ray Milland is fantastic, and deserved his Academy Award for Best Actor for this film. The music in this film is quite interesting — he keeps hearing the “siren song” of alcohol calling him, represented by a theremin. The dialogue has a more realistic style and is a lot less sarcastic than in Double Indemnity.
OK, we finished The Lost Weekend. It’s pretty great, although it is a little bit melodramatic by modern standards, and a bit too much like a public-service announcement for my taste. The handling of an alcoholic character was progressive for its time, but I’m not convinced the ending is realistic, in that it has an optimistic prognosis for the protagonist. We’ve seen him fail numerous times at quitting drinking, and we’ve seen that he is severely addicted, hallucinating heavily from delerium tremens every time he attempts to quit. But we’re led to believe that he has finally hit rock bottom and can now finally just quit. In fact at this point he would probably need extreme medical intervention to even be able to quit without dying. But “isn’t it pretty to think so?”
There was a satire of The Lost Weekend on the Jack Benny radio program.
I’m going to take a longer break now and start The Lady from Shanghai about 5pm Eastern.
This film is a bit unusual. Welles plays a young sailor, Michael O’Hara, with a checkered past and an unconvincing Irish accent, who is invited by a wealthy blonde woman, Elsa (Rita Hayworth, wow!) to join her and her older husband Arthur Bannister on their yacht as they sail from New York City to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. Elsa tries to seduce O’Hara, and Bannister’s associate George Grisby tries to rope him into a plot to fake his own death.
The editing of the film is a bit disjoint and there are some confusing cuts, suggesting that scenes were lost or could not be completed — typical for a Welles film, unfortunately, as he often had trouble getting enough funding to complete his films. At one point Hayworth sings a song (or at least lip-syncs to a song). The use of music seems to constantly run counter to the mood the film is trying to create, suggesting the director and producers were working at cross purposes. All the dialogue seems dubbed, and not that convincingly dubbed. This gets especially strange in the Chinatown sequence at the end when Hayworth starts speaking Chinese. The studio demanded extensive reshoots, and this pushed the film even further over budget. Much of Welles’ work was edited out of the final cut, and the cut scenes are now presumed lost forever.
Despite all this difficulty, there are many gorgeous and masterful scenes. One of the film’s most lasting contributions is its closing shootout in a hall of mirrors. Many, many films up to and including John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017) have used tense shootouts in halls of mirrors since. The Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) has scenes heavily inspired by the end of The Lady from Shanghai. It’s amazing, but only a few minutes long — apparently it was much longer before the brutal cuts were imposed on the film. It’s truly tragic that so much of this film appears to be lost forever.
/ I’d say it’s absolutely worth watching, and a significant and historic film, but I just found myself wishing I had been able to see the film Welles really intended to make, instead of the one that the studio released. There is a restored 4K version, although unfortunately it is exactly the same butchered cut of the film. I may get a copy at some point and re-watch this one.
So, we watched most of Too Late for Tears. This one seemed to be moving along pretty well, but the fairly tight plot then got looser and looser and the story started bringing in more characters that seemed completely superfluous, I started having a hard time following it, then I laid down and took a nap. I’m not entirely sure if the movie isn’t great, or I just hit my films-per-day limit.
In a few minutes, Grace will join me and we’ll watch the last film, Human Desire (1954), directed by Fritz Lang.
Apparently humans desire trains! Trains! And more trains!
Between the dramatic music and the train yard sound effects, the overall sound design of this film is especially good.
One especially unusual aspect of the soundtrack is that whenever there’s a scene of sexual tension between Glenn Ford (Jeff) and Gloria Grahame (Vicki), we hear train sounds outside her house, and the speed and intensity of the train sounds act as a kind of gauge to indicate how hot things are getting between them!
There are a lot of great Fritz Lang noir shots in this film — a lot of beautiful and dramatic chiaroscuro lighting (through window blinds, etc.) and cigarette smoke. The camera following men in hats with their collars upturned, from just above shoulder height, is practically a Fritz Lang signature shot.
OK! We finished Human Desire just past midnight — it’s quite good like most of the Fritz Lang films I’ve seen, including The Blue Gardenia – and that’s the last noir film I planned to watch today. I’m more awake and Grace is back so before we go on to bed, we’re going back to watch the rest of Too Late for Tears and see if it’s a dull film or I was just tired.
Aaand we have finished Too Late for Tears (1949). I must have been dozing off, because watching the rest of the film again, it made more sense. I had thought the two women were sisters, not sisters-in-law, which makes their motives and behavior make more sense. The character Jane is a great noir villain!
So, all five of these films are actually quite good, although I definitely would rate Double Indemnity as the best of this batch. Maybe I’ll do this kind of noir film marathon again sometime… maybe next year! But for now I’m all all noir’ed out. Goodnight!
I started a second list of noir films I want to watch, based on the second chapter of Film Noir, by Alain Silver and James Ursini, edited by Paul Duncan, from Taschen, in chapter 3: “The Fatalistic Nightmare.” That chapter centers around Detour and how it is an example of a common trope in noir films: the inescapabity of cruel fate. I’ve already seen Detour, so I decided to watch some of the other films mentioned in the chapter.
On December 23rd I watched Phantom Lady (1944), directed by Robert Siodmak, with cinematography by Woody Bredell. The real standout is Ella Raines, who with her widow’s peak and slightly asymmetrical features didn’t reach the fame level of better-known Hollywood “bombshells,” but she is gorgeous and fantastic in this film. The second “star” of the film is the cinematography, especially in a set piece in a basement jam session, which channels German Expressionism, but in many other scenes as well. Bredell later worked on Lady on a Train and The Killers. The third star is Elisha Cook Jr., who plays an unhinged jazz drummer.
The film opens with a man dressed up for an evening out on the town walking into a bar and ordering a drink. A well-dressed older woman is playing a song on the jukebox. She agrees to go to a show with the man, but she insists that they not learn each other’s names or anything about each other. At the show, during the musical introduction, the drummer ogles the man’s companion and tries to catch her eye, but she remains completely oblivious. The show featuring a Spanish singer wearing a fancy feathered hat, which, to the singer’s shock and dismay, is identical to the one worn by the man’s taciturn companion. After the show, the two part, and the man returns to his fancy apartment, to find three grim men in cheap, rumpled suits who, for several long minutes, refuse to answer any of his questions. When the man tries to go into into the bedroom to check on his wife, the men block him, until one of the men finally speaks, and lets him in. He finds his wife in bed, strangled to death with his own necktie. And only then do we learn why the man had gone out to a bar alone that evening.
It’s about as great an intriguing an opening as one might hope for. Overall, I wouldn’t say the film quite rises to true greatness, but it does have several great scenes and an engaging, relatively simple story. A lot of noir films feature inescapable fate, but sometimes the innocent doomed hero and heroine do manage to escape and the guilty parties get what’s coming to them. That gives this film a happy ending, which makes it a bit of an oddity among classic noir films.
You can watch it for free via Internet Archive, or download it and watch it later. Here’s the link.
Late last night, Grace and I watched Scarlet Street, directed by the great Fritz Lang. The film is set in 1934, during Great Depression, and stars Edward G. Robinson as Christopher Cross, a timid and introverted bank cashier getting on in years. As the film opens, he is at a restaurant for a fancy testimonial dinner, receiving a gold watch for 25 years of dedicated service to his employer. After his dinner he is on his way to the subway station to ride home, and sees Dan Duryea as Johnny Prince, a young fancy-dressing criminal, slapping Joan Bennett as Katherine “Kitty” March. Chris intervenes and knocks down the younger man, who escapes when Chris runs to fetch a policeman. What Chris doesn’t realize is that Johnny is not a random mugger; he is Kitty’s partner (and partner in crime).
Chris is drawn to Kitty, finding her attractive; she is also drawn to him, but for more sinister reasons. They have a conversation in a bar in which they both manage to completely deceive each other: she does so deliberately, leaving Chris to believe she is an actress, not a broke model and occasional prostitute and con artist, while he accidentally leaves her believing that he is a wealthy and famous painter. In reality, he dabbles in painting on weekends, hiding in his bathroom to work on his canvasses, and listens to his abusive wife complain that she can’t stand the smell of paint.
This mutual deception sets into motion the plot, in which Kitty and Johnny gradually scam Chris out of his money, his employer’s money, his paintings, and even the credit for creating them. Chris, a depressive with no apparent self-esteem whatsoever, seems to acquiesce to this process, until the night that Kitty takes things a bit too far and tells him what she really thinks of him.
Grace and I both found this film quite fascinating. In particular, I was intrigued by the way that Chris’s paintings reflected his understanding of the places and characters in the film. An untrained painter, he freely admits that his work “lacks perspective” (as does the character), and that he doesn’t know how to draw; he says to Kitty “nobody ever taught me how to draw, so I just put a line around what I feel when I look at things… it’s like falling in love, I guess.”
It’s significant that when Chris meets Kitty, she is wearing a clear plastic raincoat, so he’s looking at this shiny surface, not the woman underneath. Kitty later quotes these words in an unnerving, disparaging impression of Chris. His feelings towards, or at least towards the “line around” Kitty are put on full display late in the film when he paints her, as an expressionless queen on a throne, eyes staring straight ahead, hands folded in her lap, completely unengaged with her surroundings. It reveals so much about his feelings towards her, but yet he doesn’t seem to be able to understand what his unconscious clearly knows and is trying to tell him; that Kitty is completely indifferent to him, and he will drive himself mad if he keeps trying to keep up with her ever-increasing demands.
You can watch it for free on the Internet Archive here.
As always, this content is available for your use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Thanks for reading!