Back in the 1940s and '50s, Hollywood got a little dark—and I mean that literally. Enter the age of film noir, where every alley was suspicious, every cigarette was dramatic, and every romance was basically a death wish wrapped in a trench coat.
These gritty gems were pulled straight from hard-boiled fiction and shot in glorious black and white, because color would’ve just ruined the mood. The men? Tough as nails, perpetually squinting through cigarette smoke, and never seen without a fedora. The women? Oh, they were trouble—femme fatales with killer looks and even deadlier intentions. If you fell in love, you were probably doomed. But hey, at least it looked stylish.
Roger Ebert once called noir “the most American film genre,” and honestly, he wasn’t wrong. It’s got crime, cynicism, and a whole lot of sass.
There are 60 Free Film Noir Movies available at openculture.com Most of them are less well known - such as The Big Combo. Directed by Joseph Lewis, this film is today considered a noir classic. Critics like to focus on the cinematography of John Alton, a noir icon. (1955). Or try The Hitch-Hiker — The first noir film made by a woman noir director, Ida Lupino. (1953).
Are you ready to dive into the shadows? Don’t blame me if you start narrating your life in a gravelly voice and acting like Sam Spade or Marlowe.
The final trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon -
a Martin Scorsese picture - in theaters on October 20.
At the turn of the 20th century, oil brought a fortune to the Osage Nation, who became some of the richest people in the world overnight. The wealth of these Native Americans immediately attracted white interlopers, who manipulated, extorted, and stole as much Osage money as they could before resorting to murder.
Based on a true story and told through the improbable romance of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), “Killers of the Flower Moon” is an epic western crime saga, where real love crosses paths with unspeakable betrayal. Also starring Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, Tantoo Cardinal, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, and Jillian Dion.
Directed by Academy Award winner Martin Scorsese from a screenplay by Eric Roth and Scorsese, based on David Grann’s best-selling book.
ON THE BOOK: In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off.
The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered.
As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.
Anna Burkhart was killed in May, and Grann uses the symbol of the flower-killing moon to represent what happened to the Osage at the hands of whites: like the smaller flowers, their resources are stolen and they die.
Get to Know Your Rabbit is a 1972 American comedy film written by Jordan Crittenden and directed by Brian De Palma. It stars Tommy Smothers, Orson Welles, John Astin, Katherine Ross and a gaggle of other recognizable players of the period.
It is a strange film that certainly never received much attention. I read about it years ago and was finally able to see it on a big screen in college.
Smothers and Welles
Corporate executive Donald Beeman (Smothers) is fed up with corporate America where he has been successful. He has a beautiful girlfriend and a great apartment - but something is missing.
He quite impulsively quits his job and decides to hit the road as a very unlikely tap-dancing magician. He has been studying with Mr. Delasandro (Welles). Delasandro is impressed by Donald's sincere desire to learn but tells him it is very important to "get to know your rabbit" which is bestowed upon him when he graduates the program.
His former boss Mr. Turnbull (Astin) is determined to convince him to return to his office job, but Donald won't go back. When Turnbull shows up out of work and seemingly lost and homeless, Donald feels bad, and as he heads out on the road he makes Turnbull his manager so that he will have something to do.
Most of the film is about his adventures on the road where he is actually successful as a magician. He meets at one nightclub Katherine Ross' character, billed only as "Terrific-looking girl" (which I wholeheartedly endorsed when I first saw the film). He loves his act and volunteers to come on stage for his escape sack trick. The trick fails but they end up wrapped up together and despite her date's objections and chase, they escape to Donald's hotel, where they talk all night and then make love.
On a postcard to Turnbull, Donald writes that is is finally "living life at gut level." This inspires who has regained his business attitude to put out an ad for Tap Dancing Magician, Inc., "a seventeen-day drop-out plan for tired executives."
SPOILER ALERT (but not really) The company becomes a huge success going global. When Donald returns he finds himself in charge and the icon for many execs who have taken the magician course (no longer offered by Delasandro) and taken their 17-day escape from the corporate rat race.
Donald finds himself feeling the same way he did when he originally quit his job. Can he escape again?
Tommy Smothers was known as half of The Smothers Brothers musical duo and as co-host of their own TV variety show. Orson Welles was a filmmaker who couldn't get funding to make the films he wanted to make despite having made Citizen Kane and a few other great and now classic films. He was also an avid magician. John Astin will always be remembered as Gomez, the patriarch of TV's The Addams Family. Katherine Ross had already made The Graduate and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The last scene of the film shows Ross sitting in the back seat of a bus, a reference to the final shot of The Graduate.
Director Brian De Palma had made the 1968 underground comedy Greetings and Hi, Mom! which were both successful little films and well-reviewed. Get to Know Your Rabbit was a third comedy for him and it was considered to be absurdist satire. Crittenden's screenplay is filled with oddball characters and bizarre situations. But satire is tough and not everyone gets it.
Tommy Smothers was not confident in De Palma's direction but that may have been more about his own limited acting experience. According to De Palma, Smothers so disliked the film that he disappeared for several shooting days and refused to return for retakes.
Warner Brothers was not satisfied with De Palma's cut of the film. It was taken from him and recut with additional footage by Peter Nelson (credited onscreen as executive producer). Despite that, the studio still held onto the film for several years and when it was released it had very little promotion and quickly disappeared from theaters. De Palma refused to work for a major studio again for several years and then turned, quite successfully, to themes of suspense and obsession starting with his film Sisters.
The film was certainly not an Oscar contender but it was the 1973 Nominee for a WGA Award for Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen for Jordan Crittenden.
It is an uneven, odd, perhaps cult, film, but I like it. It shows up sometimes on the TCM channel and is also available on Amazon Prime but I recently rewatched it on YouTube (see link below).
Some people really get into a film. Remember that "fan" comes from "fanatic." Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining is one of those films.
It is based on the 1977 novel of the same name by Stephen King. Fans of the film had come up with a lot of theories about aspects of the film, and in 2012 a film about the film was released. That documentary is Room 237 directed by Rodney Ascher.
The documentary addresses interpretations about the meanings of the film and includes footage from The Shining and other Kubrick films. Of course, there are interviews with Kubrick enthusiasts.
The doc's title refers to a room in the haunted hotel featured in The Shining, which a character is warned never to enter.
The film is very subjective, but a film that is almost 40 years old and continues to inspire debate, speculation, and mystery as it moves through a cinematic maze full of detours and dead ends.
Kubrick theorists had been theorizing before The Shining. There has long been a rumor that after directing 2001: A Space Odyssey, NASA had Kubrick direct the footage NASA used for the Apollo 11 Moon landing. The conspiracy theorists believed that there is evidence in the moon landing footage of front projection and other things that prove it was a fake Moon landing. In The Shining, the character Danny wears an Apollo 11 sweater. And 237 isn't just a room but also a reference to the mean distance of the Earth to the Moon.
In an October 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, Stephen King said that he had seen the film and that he "watched about half of it and got impatient with it and turned it off." King, who has often said he didn't like Kubrick's adaptation of his novel, also didn't like the documentary. He had no patience for the "academic bullshit" from academics in the documentary who he thought were "reaching for things that weren't there."
I don't find the theories convincing (and I'm not a big fan of that particular Kubrick fan), but I do find the documentary itself an interesting look at how people really get into a movie.
Though it wasn't my era, I could identify with this coming of age story and the film as Film meant a lot to me when it came out in 1971.
The story centers on Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) and his friend Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges)and the cast includes Cybill Shepherd in her film debut, Ben Johnson, Eileen Brennan, Ellen Burstyn, Cloris Leachman, Clu Gulager, Randy Quaid and John Hillerman.
It was one of the first films to have used a contemporary popular music soundtrack, and for aesthetic and technical reasons it was shot in black and white, which was unusual for that time. But it feels right.
The film was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and four nominations for acting: Ben Johnson and Jeff Bridges for Best Supporting Actor, and Ellen Burstyn and Cloris Leachman for Best Supporting Actress. It won two: Johnson and Leachman.
I have never read the book the film is based upon. The Last Picture Show (1966) was written by Larry McMurtry. He is the author of 29 novels.
I suspect he is best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. That book was a television miniseries. That was a format that foreshadowed the limited series that are now common on places like Netflix. I loved that series and it sent me to the book. Of course, the novel and TV film are totally different experiences. In this case, both were good ones.
So, I should go back after almost 50 years and read the book of The Last Picture Show. I guess like a lot of people, I'm always a bit afraid to read a book after seeing the film version, or see the film when I have loved the book version. I don't want one to ruin the other. Most times that is what happens. It is great when one complements the other.
One of those complementary occurrences is the novel and film of The World According to Garp. I love the book. I love the movie.
Seeing The Last Picture Show film the year I graduated high school and started college made it mean a lot more. I'm not sure what this old man will think about the story now. I suppose I may identify more with Sam and the older characters and it will be a new story.
There is just too much on television (a word that seems outdated now). I can't keep up. I would rather watch a movie than a TV show, but my wife prefers 30 and 60 minute doses of content.
With Amazon and Netflix and others providing even more content, I feel like I need some content curation help. Yes, I do make lists of things I want to watch. I joke about the fact that my Netflix queue has about 400 films. there is no way I can die yet. Too much to watch.
I read that Netflix actually has fewer movies than a few years ago, but if so I haven't noticed a lack. You may know that these services not only add but remove content every month. One way I filter is looking at Thrillist's lists of their takes on the best shows and movies and the best documentaries and the newest content each month.
But if you're on the Netflix site itself, you might not know how many categories and genres they use. Of course, there is Comedy, Action, Kids and such but there are actually thousands of sub-genres.
You can find digital Venn diagrams of overlapping categories to get things like Campy Crime Comedies or Suspenseful Movies starring Michael Caine.
I found the website whatsonnetflix.com that lists Netflix code numbers. If you add the numerical code to the end of Netflix's URL, you'll see all the shows and movies currently available in that category. It seems that these codes also change regularly, because some of them work and some don't. I'm looking now at the DVD section of Netflix (which is sure to disappear soon) where I can find Quirky-Comedies-Movies-TV and Independent Satires, and my beloved Film Noir.
Netflix and other providers have gotten a lot better at providing their own sophisticated search. For example, the screenshot below shows a dropdown menu of Classic subgenres.
A new one for me is Let the Right One In (Swedish: Låt den rätte komma in) from 2008. Directed by Tomas Alfredson’s and based on John Ajvide Linqvist’s novel of the same name, it was the first serious Swedish vampire film.
My wife was the vampire fan (Anne Rice novels and all that) not me, but I really liked this film. (My wife did not. She thought it was too gory.)
It is the odd genre of horror-romance (if such a genre exists). It is set in a a suburb of Stockholm. A lonely and slight Oskar meets another 12-year-old girl named Eli. She turns out to be a vampire. The setting is cold. Ali is cold to the touch, but becomes Oskar's friend and protector from the bullies at his school.
It is also a tale of adolescence angst and isolation. The filmmaker is not much concerned with all the trappings of vampire conventions that are apparently part of the novel. Eli does only come out at night, can be killed by sunlight, needs fresh blood, and has super-strength so that she can leap like flying and kill adults.
I also watched the American remake which is very, very close cinematically to the original with some variations on the story (perhaps from the novel). The remake is titled Let Me In. It was released in is a 2010 and is an American-British production. It was written and directed by Matt Reeves and starring Kodi Smit-McPhee, Chloë Grace Moretz, Elias Koteas, and Richard Jenkins. The setting is a snowy Los Alamos, New Mexico in the early 1980s.
The remake is probably more graphic than the original but not as much as many modern horror films. The frail boy (Owen in this version) connects with Abby and will become her companion now that Thomas (who seemed like father but was not) is dead. She will protect him. He will grow older. She will not.
Why let me in or let the right one in? The idea seems to be that a vampire can't enter a home without permission from the owner. That's not vampire tradition, but times change even if vampires don't change.
Matt Reeves is known for a number of films including Cloverfield, Point Break and two of the new Planet of the Apes films. The film generally got good reviews, though some critics felt it was so similar to the original that it didn't get need to be made. I saw the same kinds of reviews for the American remake of the Steig Larson trilogy about the The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. There's room in the world for both versions, but do watch the Swedish originals.
Who was Orson Welles? He was an actor and director on radio, the stage, and in films. He became a celebrity, a favorite of TV talk shows. He became known as a troublemaker on sets. He was difficult, so no one would give him money to make films. He acted in poor films, did commercials, and narrated things in order to pay the bills. He was a magician. By his own admission, like all actors, he was a charlatan.
A charlatan is hardly a compliment to lay upon oneself. They are a swindler, someone practicing quackery, deception, a confidence trick, usually to get money but also to achieve fame. Welles did all that to make films.
The word is French. Once, a charlatan was a seller of medicines who might have used music and magic to attract a crowd. Not unlike filmmakers.
Welles' radio drama, The War of the Worlds, was certainly a grand deception that worked so well that it got him the chance to make Citizen Kane at the age of 23. That would be the only film of which Welles had full creative control
His much less-known film, F for Fake, is certainly a charlatan at work. The subject is fakery, art, and authorship. It was his final directorial project. In it, Welles tells the story of the notorious art forger Elmyr de Hory and also the story of a hoax-biographer, Philip Irving.
I think for Welles, this film was not quite a documentary. It was intentionally fiction, a fact about fictions, and filled with film tricks.
It was also self-referential. Francois Truffaut said that he believed Welles made the film as a “reposte” because of the controversy created by the overrated film critic Pauline Kael, who wrote that Welles had not written a single line of Citizen Kane. This was later shown to be untrue.
The Film Institute at Montclair State University held an event on "Welles at 100" in 2015 and has posted a few short videos about Welles.
One topic discussed then was how the charlatan side of Welles emerged.
In the video below, Welles shares his views on cinema and movie-making with French film school students. He applauds actors as the most important element. He praises the French for allowing for a director to be the true author of a film, but he is no fan of the director being the most important person on the set. He compares them to orchestra conductors and stage directors - in both cases the orchestra and acting company can perform quite well without a director once the pre-work has been done. Prepare and then get out of the way.
Like Herman Melville with Moby Dick (Welles would have been a great Ahab. Instead, he only played Father Mapple. See more about that here.) Welles will always be best known for Citizen Kane.
When I taught film courses and showed that film I was careful not to say it was "the greatest film ever made." It gets that title sometimes and it certainly is great, but a) I hate best-of, and greatest lists of anything, and b) that's the worst intro you could give to students about any film.
It was a critical success and a box office disappointment. The latter is due to William Randolph Hearst's newspaper empire boycott and outright attempts to kill the film. Yes, the film is largely based on Hearst, but that is hardly the point of the film.
Welles wanted his first film to be about people who are "larger than life," He was thinking Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli scale. One of his influences was supposedly Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan'' which is a novel supposedly also based on Hearst's life. Welles' ex-wife Virginia was part of Hearst's social circle and Hearst was a friend of his father.
Welles claimed that he took from Bible the idea of using different points of view on the man and "witnesses" testifying, sometimes contradicting, about Kane's character.'
In Citizen Welles, a biography by Frank Brady, I loved reading about young Orson as a film apprentice screening John Ford's Stagecoach forty times, trying to learn cinematic techniques.
Not unlike others, from Napoleon to Bob Dylan, Orson Welles was a very good con artist who proved adept at self-promotion and self-invention.
The magician in him said that "everything in this world was phony, worked with mirrors.''
That was true of his best and worst work.
Welles' film work made me think more about the technical aspects and possibilities of cinema. He also made me think about how we perceive the world in the light and shadows of a flickering projector and outside in the sunlight, shadows, and moonlight, where things often don't appear as they are in what we call reality.
Reconstruction shows a small, feathery coelurosaur. The resin-coated branch nearby could snag part of its tail and become amber. Image: Chung-tat Cheung
I saw lots of news stories recently about the discovery of dinosaur feathers in a piece of amber. The finding has helped provide significant insight into dinosaurs' feather structure and evolution, which can't be determined from fossil evidence.
But my favorite part of the story is that this was not a case of scientist digging out in the field and carefully unearthing specimens in a place thought to be once occupied by dinosaurs. A scientist chanced upon the specimen while shopping in an amber market in Myitkyina, Myanmar.
Microscan of the specimen
Lida Xing found the amber and bought it. She realized it was an important find and is the lead author of the paper on the specimen. She is a lecturer at the China University of Geosciences in Beijing.
The dinosaur tail could have ended up as a keepsake or piece of jewelry.
Researchers use CT scanning and microscopic observations and were able
to see the feathers and also found that hemoglobin, a protein in red
blood cells that carries oxygen.
The theory that dinosaurs are crelated to birds is not new. The scientific consensus is that birds are a group of theropod dinosaurs that evolved during the Mesozoic Era. A close relationship between birds and dinosaurs was first proposed in the nineteenth century after the discovery of the primitive bird Archaeopteryx in Germany.
Jurassic Park amber
Many of us remember amber as the source of dinosaur DNA in the first Jurassic Park movie. Amber preserves tiny snapshots of ancient ecosystems. They preserve things that fossils do not contain, such as three-dimensional arrangements and labile tissues.
In the film, blood inside a mosquito found in amber is used to get dinosaur DNA which is spliced with frog DNA to start the dinosaur cloning process.
But that's a movie, and I read that entomologists say that the particular mosquito used in the film is ironically the only species that doesn't suck blood at all.
The release of the Dark Shadows film with Johnny Depp this month has brought attention back to the campy TV original Gothic suspense series.
It ran from 1966-1971. I don't think I ever watched more than a few scenes in those days, but I do recall girls I went to school with being big fans. It was on in the late afternoon, so they could run home to catch an episode in those days of no VCRs or ways of recording, time-shifting or on-demand.
This gothic soap opera aired weekdays on the ABC television network, and actually started without any supernatural elements. It was unprecedented in daytime television when ghosts were introduced about six months after it began.
The series went more viral when vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) appeared a year into its run. Eventually, it had werewolves, zombies, man-made monsters, witches, warlocks, time travel, and a parallel universe.
Part of the camp fun was that it was low budget (often compared in that way to the British series Doctor Who). There was a small company of actors and they each played many roles and some characters were eventually played by more than one actor.
There have been compilations and bootlegs available over the years since it went off the air and it definitely has a cult following. It must have a following to warrant a release (re release, it seems) of a complete boxed set that contains every episode. That's 1225 episodes on 131 discs!
Yes, it has some extras too - interviews with the stars and creative members, but Dark Shadows: The Complete Original Series will cost in the range of $400-$600. Apparently, it had been released before in various box sets that were $60.00 per set and there were 32 sets to purchase - so, to the fan, I guess this is a bargain!
We also forget that so many shows from the early days of television through the 1960s were not recorded or archived that they are gone. For example, the first episode of Dark Shadows to feature Barnabas from 1967 was an old kinescope. Those were films that were shot off a TV screen to retain a copy. (Sounds like what would become "pirating." Kinescopes are usually grainy and rough looking. The new release has a better copy of that episode that was restored.
Director Tim Burton and Johnny depp are both big fans of the original. Depp was obsessed as a child with wanting to be Barnabas Collins and collaborated with Burton on the film inwhich he finally gets to be Barnabas. The film has gotten mixed reviews (5.4 of 10 on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes)
Stanley Kubrick's films were landmark events - majestic, memorable and richly researched. But, as the years went by, the time between films grew longer and longer, and less and less was seen of the director. What on earth was he doing? Two years after his death, Jon Ronson was invited to the Kubrick estate and let loose among the fabled archive. He was looking for a solution to the mystery - this is what he found...
The doc's title refers to a room in the haunted hotel featured in The Shining, which a character is warned never to enter.
In The Shining, the character Danny wears an Apollo 11 sweater. And 237 isn't just a room but also a reference to the mean distance of the Earth to the Moon.
's film 
, a biography by Frank Brady, I loved reading about young Orson as a film apprentice screening John Ford's Stagecoach forty times, trying to learn cinematic techniques.
's films were landmark events - majestic, memorable and richly researched. But, as the years went by, the time between films grew longer and longer, and less and less was seen of the director. What on earth was he doing? Two years after his death, Jon Ronson was invited to the Kubrick estate and let loose among the fabled archive. He was looking for a solution to the mystery - this is what he found...