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
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.