Ghosts don't even try to haunt me
Rabbit, rabbit! I am having some trouble with December: it doesn't feel that we had a year since the last one, except that too many things have happened. My Klimt calender this month features Rose von Rosthorn-Friedmann, who does look like a winter dusk.
Having been reminded by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selkie that I had not seen it since the Cambrian radiation of late 2015, I rewatched The Maltese Falcon (1941). I have decided the best thing about Elisha Cook Jr. in the part of Wilmer is that he actually is rather pretty and so very terrible at any of his ostensible duties, from escorting a guest without losing his guns to searching a freighter without setting fire to it. One can easily imagine his place in Cairo's catalogue of grievances against Gutman's mishandling of the treasure hunt: involve the adventuress if you must, bring in the private investigator if you're sure he can be bought, but couldn't you have left the psycho himbo at home? I am charmed that in 1934 Theatre Arts Monthly set Cook after Hepburn in their "Roster of New Faces" and declared, "The theatre will be poorer if a newly-signed film contract takes him from the stage." I regret to inform the theater that I personally appreciate its pocket being picked.
I don't even remember the chain of thought that led to me realizing that last year I outlived Alan Turing and this year it was Walter Headlam. ("Congratulations?" offeredspatch.) Time, man.
Hestia settled as movie cat during the second half of They Drive by Night (1940).
Having been reminded by
selkie that I had not seen it since the Cambrian radiation of late 2015, I rewatched The Maltese Falcon (1941). I have decided the best thing about Elisha Cook Jr. in the part of Wilmer is that he actually is rather pretty and so very terrible at any of his ostensible duties, from escorting a guest without losing his guns to searching a freighter without setting fire to it. One can easily imagine his place in Cairo's catalogue of grievances against Gutman's mishandling of the treasure hunt: involve the adventuress if you must, bring in the private investigator if you're sure he can be bought, but couldn't you have left the psycho himbo at home? I am charmed that in 1934 Theatre Arts Monthly set Cook after Hepburn in their "Roster of New Faces" and declared, "The theatre will be poorer if a newly-signed film contract takes him from the stage." I regret to inform the theater that I personally appreciate its pocket being picked.
I don't even remember the chain of thought that led to me realizing that last year I outlived Alan Turing and this year it was Walter Headlam. ("Congratulations?" offered
spatch.) Time, man.Hestia settled as movie cat during the second half of They Drive by Night (1940).
no subject
What struck me was how closely it comes across as noir to a modern viewer, despite being such an early example that's helping create genre in the first place. It sits in the center of the emerging genre in a way that it near contemporaries, say, Laura or High Sierra don't.
Not entirely, of course. The opening music for the introductory city montage is way more cheerful than anyone would use once the formula had been codified.
no subject
Nice! What occasioned it in your case?
What struck me was how closely it comes across as noir to a modern viewer, despite being such an early example that's helping create genre in the first place. It sits in the center of the emerging genre in a way that it near contemporaries, say, Laura or High Sierra don't.
Yes on its immediate noir-ness, but then I want to argue with what that means. The Maltese Falcon is a lot like The Big Sleep (1946) for me, where without in any way disputing their centrality to the genre, I am fascinated by all the things they don't share with the majority of it—most noirs are not hard-boiled private investigations with labyrinthine plots unless actually adapted from novels by Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler or really imitating their style, and the shape-shifting, nightmare quality that is so vital to film noir rather than any other kind of crime film or drama from the era is almost entirely missing from these two despite all of their narrative loop-the-loops and layers of obfuscation. It's more present in The Big Sleep just because of the fog of the plot, where even the side quests have side quests and characters keep flickering in and out of the action like faulty explanations, but Marlowe doesn't seem terribly fazed by it, possibly because so many of his cases have this problem. It really only enters The Maltese Falcon when Sam Spade runs up against the limits of his own amorality: "I don't care who loves who, I won't play the sap for you!" But I agree that they are both noirs and not just because they got in on the ground floor and one of the things that interests me about the genre is its ability to contain these sort of seminal outliers, which feels appropriate anyway for how liminal stuff tends to get in noir.
Not entirely, of course. The opening music for the introductory city montage is way more cheerful than anyone would use once the formula had been codified.
That isn't true, though! There's an entire class of noirs that start with cheerful, unassuming normalcy in order to pitch their protagonists all the further off into the existential hinterlands. In some ways I think of them as the most defining kind of noir: one minute a regular life, the next minute all bearings lost. From that perspective, The Maltese Falcon is noir by the book. The day starts with an ordinary, domestic commission and all of a sudden there are bodies hitting the floor.
no subject
I'll definitely being looking out for "shape-shifting nightmare quality" as I watch more of these films.
Interesting that even the music that I found jaunty and unexpected is typically of some noir.
Perhaps there is a useful distinction to be made between what is essential to a genre as a film making practice (or clear to some someone who has enthusiastic, informed and wide ranging appreciation genre) and the distilled popular conception of noir.
In the same way that some people who don't follow the SF broadly sometimes mistakenly assume that all science fiction stories have to involve a novel techological conceit (based on "hard science" not on social sciences.)
I suspect if I told a random person on the street that something, say a Bugs Bunny cartoon, was a noir pastiche, or a novel was a fantasy/noir mashup, or that a video game was noir themed, they'd expect "hard boiled investigation" even if this isn't really central to noir.
no subject
I hope not, in either direction! I disagree with established film critics, too.
I'll definitely being looking out for "shape-shifting nightmare quality" as I watch more of these films.
It ended up being the thing my definition of noir coalesced around and it's held up as a litmus even as I've seen more examples both of film noir and just film. It has to knock the props out from under the certainties of its world, even if the Production Code requires them to be replaced by the end.
Interesting that even the music that I found jaunty and unexpected is typically of some noir.
Some of them even end with it! In some cases it's even deserved.
Perhaps there is a useful distinction to be made between what is essential to a genre as a film making practice (or clear to some someone who has enthusiastic, informed and wide ranging appreciation genre) and the distilled popular conception of noir.
I think very much so; it's one of the first things I became interested in/annoyed by. The actual noirs of the '40's and '50's are infinitely more interesting to me than their pop-cultural reception, which I agree really got hung up in the Venetian blinds.