Reviews

Jules Dassin ("Rififi"/"Naked City") directs this hard-hitting but outdated crime drama concerned about prison conditions. Its social commentary seems more like a mixture of bleeding heart liberal talk and Hollywood's melodramatic interpretation about prison life than a true questioning of the prison system, though its concerns for prisoners' rights might at the time have seemed relevant-- modern society is now concerned with the rising crime rate and questioning how to get tougher with the inmates. Brute Force is based on a story by Robert Patterson; the screenplay is by Richard Brooks.

Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn) is a sadist on a power trip, clubbing prisoners for information to the strains of Wagner. He takes pleasure in torturing prisoners and in having a network of stoolies, suggesting that society commends his actions to get order by any means possible. Munsey's ambition is to become warden, replacing the inept old-timer Barnes. The politician prison big boss McCollum warns that if there's any more trouble from the prisoners he will replace the warden, which prompts Munsey to secretly work against the warden.

Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster) is a prison leader who was sent to solitary because a shiv was planted on him by a stoolie named Wilson, on orders from Muncey. When Joe gets out the inmates execute a plan to eliminate the stoolie, as the men start a diversionary fight in the machine shop and then Wilson is forced by blow-torches to his death in a large steam press.

Flashbacks of the inmates on the outside are used in an attempt to show the reason for their imprisonment and to introduce some female interest, unfortunately this ruins the fast-paced rhythm of the claustrophobic film.

Joe and his cellmates plan to escape. When the top-dog prisoner Gallagher (Charles Bickford) realizes he won't get parole, he joins in the breakout. Gallagher's men cause a diversion in the prison yard, while Joe and his men plan their escape through a mine. The breakout turns bloody, as the guards are ready for them because one of Joe's cellmates is a stoolie. The sympathetic Dr. Walters (Art Smith), the frustrated alcoholic prison doctor, says after the bloodbath "Nobody ever escapes." Which is the allegorical message the film draws, comparing the brutality of war to the prison. Munsey is viewed as a fascist, who has the support of the top prison officials. The inmates are seen as helpless captives, subject to the whims of how Munsey interprets the law. This prison film speaks for all such prisons and the sense of hopelessness that prevails behind bars. It is only the violent actions that seem to give the men some hope to be free again. The point hammered home is that the prison system reflects the values of society, as Dassin castigates society for creating and then turning a blind eye toward the brutality and insensitivity of a prison system that offers no chance for rehabilitation.

his Gun For Hire has been described as 'one of the most important early films noir', and one that 'helps to establish a number of conventions of the genre'. (1) The film's enduring significance lies in its influence on a particular subset of classic and post-classic noir films featuring the figure of the lone assassin. Directed by Frank Tuttle, himself something of a Paramount Studios gun for hire, the film's exploration of the last days of a solitary, embittered hit-man reverberates through everything from Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (France, 1968) to more recent meditations on the form - Luc Besson's The Professional (USA, 1994) and Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog (USA, 1999).

Scriptwriters Albert Matz and W.R.Burnett adapted Graham Greene's A Gun For Sale (1936) to the American screen, transposing the original story of a London hit-man to the emblematic noir territory of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Greene's Phillip Raven is 'dark and thin and made for destruction...a screwed-up figure' with a 'repulsive' hare-lip, who is contracted by a wealthy industrialist to kill a socialist minister. (2) In the Paramount scenario, Alan Ladd plays the considerably less disfigured Raven, hired to dispense with a blackmailing industrial chemist in the employ of chemical tycoon, Alvin Brewster (Tully Marshall).

Matz and Burnett embellished Greene's left-leaning political thriller with some definitively American elements, not the least of which was the incorporation of prevailing American propagandist sentiments. Mid-shooting schedule, this inter-war production was thus able to graft an overt anti-Japanese discourse onto Greene's narrative of political intrigue. Tellingly, the American script also transforms Greene's wealthy industrialist Sir Marcus into a monstrous figure of capitalist corruption. Brewster ('King Chlorine'), a desiccated, wheelchair-bound tyrant, has been read as a thinly veiled portrait of Henry Ford. (3) On a more minor note, Matz and Burnett give Raven's brutal existence a new and thoroughly contemporary Freudian motivation - he kills to avenge his own abuse at the hands of a unforgiving aunt.

This Gun for Hire unfolds with workmanlike efficiency. Raven is established as a reprehensible killer. His Spartan way of life and implacable approach to the business of killing are amusingly contrasted with effete executive and nightclub owner Willard Gates (Laird Cregar). Gates' corpulent figure and abhorrence of violence make him an unlikely middle man in the criminal hierarchy that extends from Raven to Brewster. Gates' decadent tastes ('leg shows' and chocolate mints!) and affected manner are played up by Cregar with camp relish. His craven, thuggish sidekick Tommy completes the vaudevillian effect.

Where Raven's name signifies his dark, predatory attributes, his nemesis Lieutenant Michael Crane (Robert Preston) bears an appropriately innocuous avian-inspired moniker. Crane's cop is a colourless character whose half-hearted pursuit of Raven and dreary attempts at romance only serve to foreground the genuine frisson developing between his quarry and his girl. Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake) is a thoroughly overdetermined femme fatale who is by turns, Crane's devoted fiancée, a nightclub singer and employee of Gates, a US secret agent and Raven's accomplice and 'friend'. She and Raven become increasingly entangled in the Nitro Chemicals political and criminal racket. They share a risqué night together as 'strangers on a train' and establish a rapport on the run that arguably counteracts the film's final, unconvincing and over-emphatic clinch between Graham and Crane.

True to the spirit of the dangerously seductive noir femme, Graham ultimately betrays all the men she comes in contact with­all of course in the service of the collective good of the country. Given that her character is forced to bear the considerable weight of the script's heavy-handed patriotism, Lake's performance has historically been damned with faint praise. She is nevertheless, a luminous presence in the film.

If the protagonists in This Gun For Hire are typical of noir, Tuttle takes his time consolidating the film's formal credentials. Early scenes are characterised by a certain prosaic quality. The mise en scène is decidedly non-noirish, with fussy interiors and indifferent, low-contrast lighting. Action consistently takes place in daylight and locations are seemingly benign ­ Raven's hotel, a cosy cafe, the busy street. But as the narrative unfolds and Raven becomes embroiled in the unforeseen political repercussions of the 'hit', the lighting regimes and locations shift accordingly. Raven becomes hunted rather than hunter and increasingly inhabits the seedy nightclubs, train stations and oppressive urban locations that constitute the natural habitat of the beleaguered noir protagonist.

Whether The Maltese Falcon is the first Film Noir or not is open to debate, but it's easy to see why it is generally given the honor. All the parts are there: The hard-boiled story by Dashiell Hammett, the anti-hero detective, the collection of distinctive criminals, the less than honorable police, the femme fatale, the mystery that leads to greater mystery, the deep shadows, the unusual camera angles–particularly from the floor shooting up–the witty dialog, and the dark, uncompromising ending. Add in that it is a truly great film, and it's an excellent place to mark the beginning of a genre.

The black bird of the title is the prize the story revolves around–but this is no Macguffin, as Hichcock labeled the item that everyone wants but is of no real importance. The uranium dust in Notorious is the perfect example of a McGuffin–if it had been a powerful poison or plans for putting together a fourth Reich, the story wouldn't have changed; all that mattered in that film was that there was something the bad-guys shouldn't have. But any change to the falcon (as was done in the 1936 version, called Satan Met a Lady, where the bird was replaced by a horn) would change the film. The black bird is more than just a prize. It is, as Spade says, the stuff that dreams are made of. It is mythic. It elevates the quest of the characters from just a desire for cash to something grander. It's something just a bit beyond reality. And that's what good Noir is. The Noir world is much like ours, except the dialog is wittier, the girls are prettier, the shadows are deeper, the sins are darker, and the prize, be it treasure or the truth of human nature, is more magnificent. You don't get more magnificent than the Maltese falcon.

Film Noir (literally 'black film') was a term created by French film scribes who noticed how 'dark', downbeat and black the textures and themes of many American crime and detective movies finally released in France following the WWII. (Films they hadn't been able to see under German occupation.) These B&W flicks initially came into vogue in the '40s, became more popular in the post-war era (especially as B-films, played behind more conventional cinema from Hollywood) and lasted up until the classic "Golden Age" to about 1960 -- or maybe 1958 -- as "Touch of Evil" is usually cited (by film professors) as the end of the classic noir period.

It's interesting to note that film noir is not a genre, but rather a mood, style, point-of-view, or tone of a film. This tone can be blended with other genre's to form a most satisfying effect (most recently, the film "Brick" exploited noir conventions in High School setting!).

Caper films, with its intricate plotting and criminal-characters existing on the periphery of society are some of the most significant examples of famous noir works. Most feature a "tone of pessimism, and darkness" and mainly share the form's visual style. But their main focus usually lies in the way they detail the strategies of the crime, that typically end up in fatal outcome, suggesting that there is a moral order to the universe, and that bad guys should not succeed.

Crime Capers fall into several categories. In recent times, we've seen the jazzy stuff produced by Guy Richie and Soderbergh. In the 70s, we saw the existential masterpieces by Melville. In the eighties, we've seen caper films that were really romantic comedies at heart. Indeed, the fusion of capers has made its way into many a sub-categories heading.

The same can be probably said for thrillers, although less fusions exist with classic thrillers. This category usually sticks to increasingly tense dramatic situation and if anything, veers into the realm of action films. Note that both "Fatal Attraction and "Basic Instinct" feature action set pieces that could easily be cut into a Bruckheimer film.

JTTEOTN is not a caper film, a thriller, an actioner or even a straight noir -- its all those things, and none of them.

"Journey to the End of the Night" suffers (wrongly) from being a not "instantly categorizable" work (not in the marketing sense, but in the processing sense; i.e, how our brains orient to story: who am I supposed to root for? Brendan Fraser? No. Scott Glenn? No. Mos Def, yes, finally, but not wholeheartedly, because even the saintly Wemba is a drug runner who undertakes his mission solely out of greed). Its these types of transgressions that play against the contemporary mores, and a viewer's desire to enjoin and identity (within the first ten minutes) with a hero. Still and all, I would argue, that it is precisely this break with convention that has such an a lasting effect on the viewer. And makes JTTEOTN a most powerful post-modern noir.

The long silent street of film noir, a street where it is always night, and where the songs are always sad. That street is usually a dingy urban alley or a dank sidestreet, but in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, it was a deceptively quiet suburban avenue. "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself necessarily mean," wrote novelist Raymond Chandler, and as a screenwriter, he joined Wilder in sending one Walter Neff, insurance investigator, down the crookedest of these dead end lanes of the spirit.

The streets of Los Angeles are busier and deadlier than they were in Chandler's heyday. Yet Chandler's disquieting, existential take on the City of Angels transcends fashions in both transportation and crime. Those mean streets remain mean, and mementos of Double Indemnity can still be seen all over the city. The Hollywood Bowl where Walter and Lola Dietrichson meet; Walter's apartment at the Château Marmont; the Glendale train station where the "perfect crime" begins... And the "death house" of Double Indemnity, where Phyllis and Walter meet, plot murder, and where their strange love finally reaches its apocalypse, still stands, secluded and quiet, high in the Hollywood Hills, at 6301 Quebec Street, in Los Angeles. Exteriors were shot there, and sets were modeled after the inside of the house. The house seems to rear up in the summer twilight, remembering the night fifty years ago when a cruel woman brought her husband out to a big LaSalle sedan idling in the garage, with a killer in the back seat. The house's silent, stuccoed cloisters look gloomily down on Quebec Street, while Walter Neff's disembodied footfalls echo off the asphalt.

For Thief, Michael Mann loosely based his screenplay on the book "The Home Invaders" by Frank Hohimer. He consulted with many professional thieves and came up with a story that rivals Rififi as a quintessential heist film. This was Mann's first feature film, and it is a dark and gritty contemporary noir, full of the staples of the genre: irrefutable past, untenable situations, irreversible fate. There are a few other firsts tied to this film. The score, by electronica mavens Tangerine Dream, set a standard for film scores to follow, with their sleek, throbbing beats and incessant thematic melodies running just below the surface of each scene. Also, this was Dennis Farina's (Snatch, Get Shorty) film debut; he was still a Chicago police detective at the time. This was also the film which debuted the talents of both Jim Belushi and Robert Prosky (The Natural). If you look quick, you'll see another Mann favorite, William Petersen (C.S.I., Manhunter) in a scene as the Katz & Jammer bartender.

As the expert professional safecracker specializing in high-profile diamond jobs, James Caan is tough and straightforward, and an example of perfect casting. You sense before knowing that Frank spent many years in prison. When he lays out his very concrete picture of what he wants out of life - the nice home, a wife, and kids - for Jessie, we believe him. This is key for many of Mann's films; believability of character. Caan isn't just some hood; he's a human being with wants and desires as real as yours or mine..

His crew is his family, and that includes Okla (Willie Nelson - Wag The Dog), Barry (Jim Belushi - Made Men, TV's According To Jim), and Nick (Nick Nickeas). They work together like clockwork, as witnessed in the heist scenes. They share secrets none of the friends or families know, an act which serves to bring them towards a closeness few couples ever share. Frank has invested fairly well, putting his money into several businesses, including a used car lot and a nightclub (Chicago's famous The Green Mill).

As Jessie, Tuesday Weld's character seems carved from her role in Who'll Stop The Rain, or perhaps is an extension of that role. She was involved with a man who bought drugs from the Colombians, and when a deal went bad and he was killed she found herself on the streets of Bogota. Now, living a quiet, unassuming life of drudgery in Chicago, she has convinced herself she is happy. When Frank comes along she resists involvement, until he spells out his plan for a new life with family and freedom. Unfortunately, she does not know what she is getting herself into, even though Caan is being as honest with her has he can.

If Michael Mann's storytelling approach seems a bit cool, it is an approach intended to be as distinctive and effective as any Forties or Fifties noir, and Caan's performance ranks among his very best, making Thief a crime movie worth viewing.

The great swan song of the film noir period. An audacious and super-stylized noir that paints a world seething in corruption and violence. The incredible opening tracking shot is legendary (thanks to Russell Metty's camera-work) as the camera shows us a bomb being planted on a car and the car's route through town. The camera dips and swoops through the squalid streets as Mexican detective Charlton Heston (!) and his wife Janet Leigh walk across the border--until the bomb explodes and a man is killed. Touch of Evil gives us a grimy, inhospitable world filled with psychotic biker gangs, lesbian tough girls, mentally-disturbed motel managers, and racketeers with kindly names (Uncle Joe). You'll find Marlene Dietrich, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Joseph Cotton in bit roles, while Orson Welles himself plays the fat, corrupt police detective, Quinlan, who routinely plants evidence. A stunning conclusion to the film noir era.

Among the very few noirs not made in the United States, Night and the City was directed by Jules Dassin, exiled from America during the anti-communist crusades of the '40s. Working in England, he created this fatalistic tale of a small time hood, Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark), who bucks the crime bosses by devising a scheme of his own to get rich quick as a sports promoter, but his plans go awry and Harry Fabian takes off running, through darkened alleys and warehouses, through seedy nightclubs and cluttered backrooms. Harry runs and runs, trying to escape an inevitable, inexorable fate.

Of all the films made in the category of Noir, this film is among the very, very highest...

In the world of film noir, heroes didn't just fall, they often got their noses ground in the dirt, as with Stanton Carlisle (Tyrone Power), a small-carnival operator who gradually loses control of the carnival and begins his fall, to where we ultimately find him playing the geek in the sideshow and biting the heads off of live chickens. Based on a screenplay by Jules Furthman and photographed by Lee Garmes, Nightmare Alley is a harrowing, disturbing portrait of a man's fall to the depths of degradation, and it's all the more shocking with pretty boy Power in the lead.

After a recent rival screening in Ohio, I overheard one audience member complaining to another, "Why aren't there more films made like this in Hollywood??? If they are going to remake crap, remake great stuff too!"

Few movies are more dark and more bleak than Detour. Tom Neal plays a hitchhiker who thumbs a ride with a businessman who complains about this last passenger, a wild woman who scratched him. After the driver mysteriously dies, Neal panics, throws the body into the desert and drives off. But in the world of film noir, you can never escape from your actions. In this case, he picks up a hitchhiker, a nasty-tempered red head (Ann Savage), who instantly recognizes the car. Filmed on a minuscule budget by the great B-movie director Edgar G. Ulmer, Detour is a bleak and claustrophobic thriller that plays out as a cynical, minimalist drama with touches of existentialist angst.

Edward Elmer's finest performance as an actor. I wish there were more like it.

We all know how creative French filmmaker Luc Besson can be. His offbeat sensibilities can be seen in his tense crime dramas La Femme Nikita and The Professional, as well as his wildly imaginative sci-fi cult favorite The Fifth Element. But he's been taking a break from making his own films, producing and apparently writing children's books instead. Arthur and the Invisibles is his first directorial effort since the 1999 movie The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, and while it definitely taps into Besson's fanciful notions--which is probably even more evident in the novels--it doesn't necessarily translate as well to the big screen. Invisibles' animation is lush and there's a lot to look at, but it's almost too busy, while the tepid yet convoluted story drones on. Invisibles is definitely not adult-friendly.

Gone are the days when every new ITV drama came equipped with the words 'starring Martin Kemp', so the title of this new film applies as much to him as it does the pair of conmen reunited for the greatest job of their lives. Kemp is Will Spencer, working alongside his old partner, master of disguise Tom Marks (Red Dwarf's Chris Barrie) and his spectacularly incompetent son, Travis (Stefan Booth). Their ace in the hole, however, is Will's niece Fiona (Joanna Taylor), who works at the British Space Centre, where they've just developed a space buggy that could help solve planet's energy and ecological problems. This group of misfits and insiders plan to put themselves at the centre of Britain's major scientific breakthrough. Only Dennis Waterman as Jarvis - the Inspector Clouseau of Scotland Yard - can stop them.

Back In Business is the kind of gentle family caper movie that used to be a staple of British cinema back in the days of the Boulting Brothers and Ealing Studios. Sadly, though, this has neither the wit nor insight into the social fabric of those golden movies. Instead we get an anodyne adventure that limps along with a bunch of performances that would be better suited to Sunday evening TV comedy dramas than the big screen. It may be a while before Martin Kemp can give up the sofa adverts...

The film is set in the titular capital of Mali, home to a beautiful young singer, Mele (Aissa Maiga), and her husband, Chaka (Tiecoura Traore), who are in the process of splitting up. But while they function as Bamako's nucleus, the warring couple disappear for huge swathes of the film, making way, improbably, for a court room set up in Chaka and Mele's garden.

The court, it transpires, pits the people of Bamako against such international institutions as the International Monetary Fund and the Word Bank, who are charged with bringing Africa to its knees with national debt. To back up their case, the people fall back on a raft of statistics, such as the 50 million African children who are slated to die in the next five years. Meanwhile normal life goes on in Bamako in the shape of women dyeing fabric and Mele and Chaka's embittered squabbling.

Esoteric as it sounds, Bamako brings Africa's plight to life by dint not just of the film's witnesses but some stunning cinematography and an engaging, understated approach that vilifies the West yet never rants and raves.

Just about every actor gets at least one big moment to cry. That's a given in a story of this nature, and some of them are better than others. Mackie's stoic attempt to take punches in an injured shoulder is full of passion, but Fox's random breakdown is, well, just like a flashback from Lost. He is better on the field, showing us a side to his personality we haven't seen yet. Strathairn seems the most sympathetic as the pained authority figure making tough decisions. Mara (Brokeback Mountain) looks so innocent you just want to hold her hand and stroke her hair every time she wells up. Aside from that, there's also a lot of personality in the film. McConaughey leads the team with a gleam in his eye and a smirk on his lips, but it never comes across as insensitive. He's hip, so of course he's the one who can lead them out of tragedy. And as an ensemble film, the cast comes together as a community, in which a single tragedy can affect them all, and a single victory can give them hope.

n fact the most disquieting aspect of the film is that it was shot between 2003 and 2005, meaning that, however bad daily life seemed then, things have grown far worse since the camera was switched off. Director James Longley would no doubt concur but, cleverly, he never makes his own views explicit, preferring to let the images speak for themselves.

And speak they do, whether it's the first section of the film in which 11-year-old Sunni boy Mohammed is forced to choose between work and education or, better still, a up-close look at the Shiite political/religious group run by Moqtada al-Sadr.

The third strain of the film retreats from the extremes of the first two parts – by way of emphasising that these are ordinary folk unfortunate enough to live in extraordinary times – and focuses on rural Kurdish families and, in particular, fathers and sons.

Throughout, it's shot so brilliantly that it feels less like a documentary than a superior drama. Best of all, though, is Longley's compassionate depiction of people to whom, crucially, we can all relate.

n fact the most disquieting aspect of the film is that it was shot between 2003 and 2005, meaning that, however bad daily life seemed then, things have grown far worse since the camera was switched off. Director James Longley would no doubt concur but, cleverly, he never makes his own views explicit, preferring to let the images speak for themselves.

And speak they do, whether it's the first section of the film in which 11-year-old Sunni boy Mohammed is forced to choose between work and education or, better still, a up-close look at the Shiite political/religious group run by Moqtada al-Sadr.

The third strain of the film retreats from the extremes of the first two parts – by way of emphasising that these are ordinary folk unfortunate enough to live in extraordinary times – and focuses on rural Kurdish families and, in particular, fathers and sons.

Throughout, it's shot so brilliantly that it feels less like a documentary than a superior drama. Best of all, though, is Longley's compassionate depiction of people to whom, crucially, we can all relate.

An examination of the whole nature vs nurture argument, the answer to which it wisely shies away from, Suburban Mayhem is a thrilling, stimulating film that will excite debate everywhere it's shown. Teenagers have always been demonised, of course, but never more so than now, surely, when they are blamed for everything from rising crime figures to the impact on our planet of global warming. Certainly the heroine of Paul Goldman's film, Katrina, is a creature beloved of the tabloids; a 19-year-old femme fatale in a mini-skirt and black leather boots whose mobile is tucked, teasingly, into her cleavage.

Indeed the star's creator, writer Alice Bell, constructed Katrina from numerous court hearings and newspaper tales, all of which could have produced a parody of a contemporary teenager. Thankfully, it did not. Rather, New Zealand actress Emily Barclay brings Katrina vividly to life, as her story unfolds in flashback, punctuated by interviews with those who have crossed her path along the way, from her father's one-time girlfriend, Dianne (Genevieve Lemon), to ex-friend, Lilya (Mia Wasikowska).

Climates, by Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, is about as personal as it gets. Ceylan wrote, directed, edited and stars as Isa, a middle-aged professor chewing over his crumbling relationship with his much younger girlfriend Bahar (played, wouldn't you know it, by his real wife Ebru Ceylan). What begins as a dinner table row while on holiday with friends escalates on the beach, where they agree to split, and then reaches a poisonous, and almost terminal, climax, when a bike ride nearly leads to a fatal accident.

That, however, is about as action-packed as it gets. Climates unfolds through body language and gestures with little by way of dialogue or events. It looks as beautiful as a painting and moves about as fast, with Bahar's relocation to the mountains of East Turkey sparking Isa into life (of sorts) as he decides to follow her in a doomed bid to rekindle the affair. It's a self-conscious and thoroughly art-house exercise that will probably delight the minuscule audience for which it is intended.

The Illusionist is also a bit sluggish, sort of like a complicated magic trick building to its climatic conclusion. It starts at the turn of the century, when mysterious stage magician Eisenheim (Edward Norton) arrives in Vienna and begins performing his astounding illusions. He arouses not only the curiosity of the people, who believe he has otherworldly powers, but of the ruthless Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell), an unsavory fellow who'd like to prove the man a fraud, especially after he witnesses a budding attraction between his beautiful fiancé, Sophie von Teschen (Jessica Biel), and the magician. What Leopold doesn't know is that Eisenheim and Sophie were once childhood sweethearts—and now that they've reunited, a dormant and forbidden love affair has been rekindled. Now it's up to Vienna's shrewd Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti) to uncover the truth, charged by Leopold to intensify his efforts to expose Eisenheim. With Uhl doggedly pursuing the man behind the magician, Eisenheim prepares to execute his greatest illusion yet.