Other Books by Roger Ebert
An Illini Century: One Hundred Years of Campus Life
A Kiss Is Still a Kiss
Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook
Behind the Phantom’s Mask
Roger Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary
Roger Ebert’s Movie Home Companion (annually 1986–1993)
Roger Ebert’s Video Companion (annually 1994–1998)
Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook (annually 1999–2007, 2009–2012)
Questions for the Movie Answer Man
Roger Ebert’s Book of Film: From Tolstoy to Tarantino, the Finest Writing from a Century of Film
Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary
I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie
The Great Movies
The Great Movies II
Your Movie Sucks
Roger Ebert’s Four-Star Reviews 1967–2007
Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert
Scorsese by Ebert
Life Itself: A Memoir
A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length
With Daniel Curley
The Perfect London Walk
With Gene Siskel
The Future of the Movies: Interviews with Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas
DVD Commentary Tracks
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
Citizen Kane
Dark City
Casablanca
Crumb
Floating Weeds
Other Ebert’s Essentials
33 Movies to Restore Your Faith in Humanity
25 Movies to Mend a Broken Heart
25 Great French Films
27 Movies from the Dark Side copyright © 2012 by Roger Ebert. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.
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All the reviews in this book originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times.
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Contents
Introduction
Key to Symbols
Ace in the Hole
After Dark, My Sweet
The Big Heat
The Big Sleep
Blood Simple (15th Anniversary)
Bob le Flambeur
Body Heat
Chinatown
Detour
Double Indemnity
In a Lonely Place
L.A. Confidential
Laura
Le Samourai
The Long Goodbye
The Maltese Falcon
The Night of the Hunter
Notorious
Out of the Past
Pale Flower
Peeping Tom
Red Rock West
Strangers on a Train
Sunset Boulevard
The Third Man
Touch of Evil
Touchez Pas au Grisbi
Introduction
The three great Hollywood genres are the western, the musical, and film noir. But hold on a moment. Why does one of the quintessentially American genres have a name in French? “When we were making them,” Robert Mitchum once told me, “we just called them B movies.” We were speaking at a tribute at the Virginia Festival of American Film, after a screening of Out of the Past, one of the noir classics included in this little collection.
American crime films of the 1930s and 1940s create great enthusiasm among French movies, and especially that generation of critics who created the auteur theory. One way of describing that theory: the director, not the writer, is the true author of a film, and its quality can be found in its visual strategies more than its words. Out of the Past is a perfectly ordinary pulp story, but it evokes a world in its images. Because of their work in a disreputable genre, such heroes were crowned as Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, John Huston, Otto Preminger, and Billy Wilder.
One of the pleasures of a noir film is the world it summons, usually in black and white, often indicated by images surrounded by shadows, tilt shots, and tough talk. Film noir, I wrote in a review once, often involves the way light falls on wet pavement stones, and how a neon sign glows in a darkened doorway. It is about the attitudes that men strike when they feel in control of a situation, and the way their shoulders slump when someone else takes power. It is about smoking. It is about cleavage. It is about the look on a man’s face when someone is about to deliberately break his arm, and he knows it. And about the look on a woman’s face when she is waiting for a man she thinks she loves, and he is late, and she fears it is because he is dead.
It is also about lonely furnished rooms, and rain, and standing in the window at night looking out into the street, and signaling for someone across a crowded nightclub floor, and about saxophones, which are the instrument of the night. It is about the flat, masked expressions on the faces of bodyguards, and about the face of a man who is consumed by anger. And it is about kissing, and about the look in a woman’s eyes when she is about to kiss a man for the first time. And it is about high heels, and cleavage. I believe I already mentioned cleavage. Some images recur more naturally than others.
After people see enough movies, they begin to notice that in night scenes it always seems to have just rained–even in usually dry places. That is the result of early noir cinematographers who found that many scenes were set at night, and pavement at night was extraordinarily hard to photograph. They found, however, if streets were wet down with fire hoses before filming, they would reflect street lamps, headlights, and shop windows, and the result would be beautiful, not murky. Two other things they loved were hats and cigarettes. Hats, on both women and men, introduced angles and shadows into an ordinary close-up. And curling cigarette smoke introduced movement into a static shot.
Sometimes a film can literally be built from such elements and the audience will forgive almost anything else. I draw your attention to Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour, which in some senses is the worst film on this list. I think my review adequately explains its shortcomings. It was a product of Hollywood’s so-called Poverty Row, low-rent studios specializing in quickie exploitation. The peculiar fascination of Detour is that it works despite its shortcomings–and maybe even because of them, because it is so bluntly what it is, unsoftened by style. At its center is the extraordinary power of Ann Savage’s performance; women in noir were routinely allowed to be more interesting, more independent, than in other genres. And although Tom Neal is a mediocre actor playing a loser, those are the qualities needed here. Otherwise, it is all lonely bars, phone booths, empty highways, bleak hotel rooms, fate . . . and noir.
Noir at its heart is a cynical genre. People are weak. They get trapped by their weaknesses. It is about sin and not virtue. Look at the demonstration of that in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, which along with his Ace in the Hole and Sunset Boulevard is among the greatest of noirs. For an example of noir cinematography at its greatest–the nights, the shadows, the tilt shots–consider Carol Reed’s The Third Man.
The French, feeling they had discovered noir and done Americans the favor of pointing it out, were quick to make their own films in the genre, and their masters are included here: Jacques Becker with Touchez Pas au Grisbi and Le Samourai, and Bob le Flambeur, by Jean-Pierre Melville. And the Japanese have a richness of noir, of which I especially recommend Pale Flower, by Masahiro Shinoda. In such relatively recent films you can see how noir retains its fascination for filmmakers and audiences. For example, After Dark, My Sweet, by James Foley; Blood Simple, by the Coen brothers; and Red Rock West, by John Dahl.