5 Lesser-Known Neo-Noir Films of the 1970s

 Neo-noir films became extraordinarily popular in the 1970s, as the elements of alienation, moral ambiguity, corruption, and extreme pessimism in the classic noir films found new traction in the post-Vietnam/Watergate era. New elements of conspiracy theories, nihilism, and more explicit violence and perversity moved to the forefront. 

 

Most of the best films of the era are widely-known: The Friends of Eddie Coyle, The Long Goodbye, The Conversation, Chinatown, Klute, The Taking of Pelham 123, and more. Here, I’ve chosen five much lesser-known films that may be of interest to genre fans. So if you’re a die-hard fan looking for something you may have missed, or if you’re new to the genre and want to find a jumping-in point, let’s take a spoiler-free deep dive into crime and existential suffering, neo-noir style.

 

 

Night Moves (1975)

 

Arthur Penn’s somber, cynical, strongly emotional film isn’t nearly as well-known as it deserves to be today, and that’s a crime. Gene Hackman plays Harry Moseby, an ex-football player turned reluctant private investigator in Los Angeles. Moseby suffers from the kind of existential angst that Viktor Frankl wrote of, a man who finds that the ultimate horror of life in an existential vacuum isn’t violent crisis or hysterical breakdown, but eternal boredom… a boredom that can seem worse than death. At the start of the film, he jokes self-consciously about his past as a pro ball player, declines joining a P.I. firm because he refuses to be part of an “information collection machine,” and finds his taken-for-granted marriage unravelling. 

 

The mystery Harry stumbles into involves a missing person’s case: the sixteen year-old daughter, Delly (a young Melanie Griffith), of an aging small-time movie star. After tracking down leads in and around film sets, he follows a thread to the Florida Keys and Penn shifts the tone from Hollywood Boulevard to Key Largo. He finds her hunkered down with her biological father and a mysterious dolphin-feeding woman named Paula (Jennifer Warren).  In locating Delly and returning her to her mother, Harry uncovers family dynamics as perverse as anything you’ll find in a Faulkner novel: sex, incest, drug abuse, neglect, apathy, and a sociopathic absence of empathy. Penn nods to noir’s history of linking Hollywood and social power to corruption and moral degradation, but pushes things to near Manson-family extremes that only get worse as the film continues. 

 

The MacGuffin-like crime at the heart of the film is stunningly simple and suggested in an early scene involving the lucrative business of selling indigenous artifacts, but Penn obfuscates much of it by providing few answers as to motivation and delving into the perversity of a group of characters who care nothing for each other except what they can get out of them. This is perhaps the most transactional movie of the era regarding human relationships, which is a devastating indictment of mid-‘70s America.

 

Penn riffs off several noir classics. Harry Moseby’s name eerily echoes Harry Morgan, the cynical boatman/smuggler who finally takes a stand in To Have and Have Not. The film’s conclusion plays off both the cornfield scene in North by Northwest and the maritime conclusion of Key Largo. While each of those films provided a moment of life-changing catharsis for the hero, Penn allows for no such romanticism here. Even the deadpan attempts at hard-boiled flirting between Hackman and Warren fall flat, leaving the characters without a language outside of surface-level back-and-forth dialogue. Harry tries to find an antidote to his fundamental lack of meaning by acting out the role of a noir private eye only to find a killing superficiality that has run its course.

 

The fundamental scene that gets to the core of Harry’s fractured sense of identity centers around a portable chess board he carries with him. Harry, ever alienated, never plays chess against another person, but endlessly replays famous matches from the past. When Warren asks him about it he responds that he’s replaying a 1922 match where Black had an easy mate that he completely missed:

"Black had a mate, but he didn't see it. Three little night moves, but he didn't see it. He played something else, and he lost. He must have regretted it every day of his life. As a matter of fact I do regret it, and I wasn't even born yet.

 

Warren’s response, “Well, that’s no excuse,” is one of the many lines in the film that seem like a banter throwaway but carries a much deeper meaning unknown to the characters. Harry is out of excuses, out of answers, and even out of the right questions to ask. At the film’s conclusion, he’s literally going in circles on an open sea completely indifferent to his fate. Night Moves, for me, is the best neo-noir film of the era to combine a merciless cynicism with a profoundly emotional sense of loss. There’s really no other movie I can compare it to.

 

 

 

 Mikey and Nicky (1976)

 

Writer/director Elaine May’s stripped-down noir character study had a disastrous production history (more on that later), but stands as a remarkable Philly neo-noir. May boils the elements of a street-level crime thriller down to what would normally be the final 20 minutes of a more conventional film, leaving us with the final, desperate run of a pair of bottom-of-the-barrel crooks. 

 

John Cassavetes play Nicky, a small-time hood who stole from the mob and is convinced there’s a hit out on him. Peter Falk plays Mikey, his kinda/sorta friend, whom he calls in desperation for help. Nicky opens the film in a full-blown paranoia, holed up in a seedy hotel drinking himself into a perforated ulcer. When Nicky shows up, the film simply follows them for a few hours in and out of dive bars, all-night diners, and seedy apartments as they stumble blindly through a back-alley Philadelphia gorgeously shot in contrasts of light and shadow, trying to stay one step ahead of the contract killer (Ned Beatty) always lurking a few steps behind. 

 

And speaking of Beatty, this is one of the ‘70s films that showcase how much he could get out of a small supporting performance. He plays the hit man as an inept, harried businessman desperately in need of making a “sale.” His frustration is deepened by a plot twist that I won’t reveal here, but adds so much to the nihilistic outlook of the film.

 

And when I say plot twist I’m not quite accurate, as the film has no real plot to speak of, which is the point. Mikey and Nicky isn’t so much a genre deconstruction as it is a full dismissal of the centrality of the mystery to crime films. It’s the Waiting for Godot of noir. Mikey and Nicky are thorough shits as characters: crass, narcissistic, abusive, and bigoted. Yet Falk and Cassavetes inhabit them so fully as characters that you can’t help being sucked into their stories and the verbal and body language they use to tell them.  This is method acting on steroids, and the result is mesmerizing. Much of the dialogue was improvised, yet strikes as painfully, unflatteringly honest. May shot almost a million and a half feet of film, allowing the actors to experiment for hours at a time on a single scene.

 

And that directorial extravagance is what led Paramount to pull final cut from May and edit a disastrous version that they dumped in a few theaters and left to die. Critics and audiences loathed the film until over a decade later when May was able to assemble a director’s cut that played to acclaim on the festival circuit. Much later, Criterion released a new director’s cut on dvd that gives an idea of what ‘70s audiences missed out on. Be wary if streaming to find the May cut and not the incomprehensible theatrical version. 

 

 

The Late Show (1977)

 

Robert Benton’s The Late Show is hardly a lost film, but has certainly been overshadowed by other neo-noir films of the ‘70s. Both love letter to the classic noir thrillers and a meditation on aging generational values as well as aging people, the film finds humor in quirkiness and a playful confrontation of Eisenhower-era masculinity and 1970’s encounter-movement sensibilities and crass hipster commercialism. It also has the honor of being the only noir film to begin with a case of a kidnapped cat.

 

Opening with a lingering shot of an Underwood typewriter while a muted trumpet plays a slow jazz riff, the film adheres to a loving reproduction of noir aesthetics while playing out as a funeral dirge to the destructive heart of hard-boiled ethos. 

 

Art Carney plays Ira Wells, an elderly private eye with a lame leg, a hearing aid, and a severe ulcer who rents a room in a shabby LA home, eking out a living handling small cases with the same tough-talking attitude of decades past. He meets Margo (Lily Tomlin), an eccentric young free-spirit whose hobbies include being a talent agent, aspiring dressmaker, pot dealer, yoga-practitioner, and cat-lover. When she approaches Ira to get him to take the case of her stolen cat at the funeral of his recently murdered friend, Ira rudely rebuffs her. Eventually Ira realizes that the catnapping and his friend’s murder are linked, and the film heads down a clash-of-generations rabbit hole worthy of a Chandler plot.

 

The pure joy of this film comes from watching Carney and Tomlin give incredible performances, riffing off each other like improv jazz musicians. While the character-out-of time trope provides wonderful laughs, it’s the way Carney and Tomlin grow in their mutual understanding of each other and the vulnerability they show that gives the film a real heart. Carney’s Ira is never simply played for laughs and Tomlin’s Margo is no stereotypical oddball. Benton has the courage to allow the performers to bring depth and respect to their roles, which makes the sentimental core of the film come across as authentic rather than schmaltzy. 

 

Even the hilarity of a high-speed chase involving Margo's VW microbus, the hapless commodity-worshipping crooks (one of whom refuses to jump in a pool when prodded at gunpoint because it will ruin his cashmere jacket), and the whacky missing cat plotline give way to the relationship between Ira and Margo as it evolves from mutual disregard to grudging respect to something far deeper.

 

Without spoiling anything, at the conclusion Margo tells Ira she plans to get a P.I. license and team up with him. He responds:

 

“That’s just what this town’s been waiting for. A broken down old private eye with a bum leg and a hearing aid, and a fruitcake like you.”

 

Speaking for myself, yeah… that’s exactly what I’ve been waiting for.

 

 

The Grissom Gang (1971)

 

Robert Aldrich had already directed the film noir classic Kiss Me Deadly and Gothic favorites Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte before The Grissom Gang, a strangely fascinating blend of neo-noir period crime and twisted Southern Gothic sensibilities. Critics vomited a deluge of bile on the film during its initial release for its over-the-top, sweaty sexuality, graphic violence, and layers of depravity… the very things that later critics and audiences would praise it for.

 

Aldrich takes no prisoners in this depression-era tale of a Missouri heiress (Kim Darby) who is kidnapped by her boyfriend and his cohorts, only to be doubly kidnapped by the infamous Grissom Gang, who kill her initial captors and keep her as an object of ransom. The Grissom Gang are repugnant, animalistic, and amoral. Darby’s Barbara Blandish (note the symbolism in the surname) is cold, calculating, and ruthless. What would have been a simple gangster shoot ‘em up in other hands becomes a deeply psychosexual power play between the haves and the have-nots in Aldrich’s hands. 

 

Much of the film takes places in confined spaces: filthy barns, rooms with walled-up windows, a literal cage. The camera angles and lighting are mildly disorienting, and the atmosphere so thick you can almost smell the sweat, grime, and desperation from the characters. Tommy gun bullets fly, dynamite explodes, people are tortured, hacked, and slashed. This is neo-noir meets Grand Guignol.  In a hallmark of ‘70s neo-noir cynicism, everyone in this film is morally bankrupt. No heroes, no victims, only people trying to use each other for their own purposes. To call it dark is a serious understatement. This one’s hard to find, but definitely worth the effort in tracking it down.

 

 

 

 

The Domino Principle (1977)

 

Hollywood jumped on the conspiracy thriller bandwagon before the ink was dry on Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate articles. Most of these paranoid thrillers are well-known: The Conversation, Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, Marathon Man, All the Presidents Men. So why draw attention to Stanley Kramer’s much-maligned political neo-noir The Domino Principle? To be honest, there’s a powerful, personal nostalgic draw for me. 

 

I read the novel in high school and tracked down a vhs copy at a time when I was obsessed with Gene Hackman’s ‘70s crime film performances. But beyond that, the film has an incredible cast including Hackman, Mickey Rooney, Eli Wallach, Candace Bergen, and Richard Widmark. It is also so decidedly bizarre in its delving into a conspiracy so convoluted that even the characters don’t seem to know what’s really at stake. In a way, it’s the ultimate conspiracy film as it attempts to push the already crowded subgenre to its logical conclusion: conspiracy theories thrive on producing more questions than can be possibly be answered, and every unanswerable question further drives the conspiracy.

 

The film starts with a bizarre pre-title montage of newsreel footage of social chaos as a Kafkaesque voice-over tells the audience that they have been manipulated into coming to the theater to see the movie, that free-will is a fiction propagated by a nebulous power structure that stands above governments. It’s meta as hell at a time before meta became fashionable.

 

The plot, so to speak, is only there to drive confusion: Hackman plays a Vietnam veteran imprisoned for murder who is offered a chance out of the slammer if he takes part in a mysterious assassination. A seriously convoluted subplot to smuggle him and his cell mate (Rooney) out of prison leads to a series of clandestine meetings with mysterious establishment men (WIdmark, Wallach, And Edward Albert) that also involve his wife (Bergen). 

 

The performances are excellent as the conspiracy becomes more unfathomable and the disparate plans to carry it out ever more byzantine. In a way, it's the ultimate conspiracy movie because the conspiracy has taken on a life of its own and is self-replicating like a virus (sound familiar these days, anyone?).

 

Audiences and critics at the time had no idea what to make of The Domino Principle other than to dismiss it as a mess. Today’s viewers may find more of interest in our conspiracy-driven time. Even though I won’t give Kramer credit for deliberately being ahead of his time, I will say that sometimes by nothing more than coincidence, a film can seem more fascinating and relevant  when the current social context fits an older film rather than vice versa. 

Horror Films for the Exhausted

I’m tired. All of my friends are tired, too. Not just the kind of tired brought on by sleepless nights or working too much or chasing one thing or another too far and too fast. This is the New Tired. We’ve become accustomed to so many “News” this year: the New Normal, New Social Interactions, New Dining, New Schooling . . . New Realities, so to speak. This is the New Tired.

 

Upheaval of what collectively many of us have internalized, for better and worse, as “normal” has not so much been upended as set afire. So much of this has been, as Sam Cooke sang, a long time coming. The secondary effects of the coronavirus pandemic have brought to the surface so many social inequities and just damned plain structures of oppression and degradation at a critical intensity not seen in my lifetime . . . and I ain’t exactly a youngster. 

 

That’s the good, and it’s damned important to recognize and seize the good amidst the social and cultural chaos, because all of this tinder was set ablaze by a viral pandemic that forced all of us out of our own comfort/noncomfort zones. Ignoring, turning a blind eye, and minimizing/rationalizing are no longer convenient defense mechanisms for anyone with even a modicum of conscience.

 

Here’s where horror comes in.  To paraphrase Jack Halberstam, horror draws power from the tension between fear and desire, and the resulting vertiginous excess of meaning creates a screen upon which viewers can project their own anxieties in a meaningful way. With that in mind, here are some films I’ve revisited recently because they provide an antidote, of sorts, to the kind of existential exhaustion of which I’ve been speaking. Think of them as Rejuvenation Horror:

A DARK SONG: 

Anger is an acid that can do more to harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything upon which it is poured—Mark Twain

Liam Gavin’s A Dark Song is ultimately a film about resentment and how the all-consuming desire for revenge completely blocks the passage through grief to acceptance, threatening to consume the resenter in the process. Catherine Walker plays Sophia, a woman consumed by grief for her son, who has been murdered by supposed satanic cult members. She enlists an occultist, Joseph,  to lead her through an arcane ritual supposedly to allow her to speak one final time to her dead son, but despite the occultist’s warnings, she hides a deeper motive.

 

Harboring an obsession for revenge, she really desires the eternal damnation and punishment of her son’s killers. This all-consuming thirst for revenge perverts the ritual as her own demands for vengeance push her grief and memories of her son to the background. The tortures she suffers in her quest, ranging from extreme physical and psychological suffering to sexual exploitation at the hands of Joseph, can best be summed up in the old saying that resentment is like one person taking poison and expecting the other to die.

 

But Gavin’s film ends with a transcendent move towards redemption, when she ultimately chooses the sufferings of forgiveness over the selfish desires of revenge. A Dark Song is a visually arresting, philosophical, and highly moral film with an ending that rings like a single, sonorant note from a brass bell.

SEA FEVER:

There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.

            -Viktor Frankl

Nesasa Hardimn’s first feature film benefitted from the pure serendipity of delving into themes that hit our collective unconscious in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Filmed long before the phrase Covid-19 became common parlance, Sea Fever tells the story of an introverted marine scientist who finds herself at the center of a very local controversy over infection control and the need for self-sacrifice for the good of others.

 

Connie Nielsen’s Siobhan is the most reluctant of heroes, and for that, she is all the more stellar. Withdrawn and socially-awkward, Siobhan secures a research position on an Irish fishing vessel, the symbolically-named Nianh Cinn Oir, to do field research. When the boat dredges up something Lovecraftian, things turn rapidly towards infection horror and the Lovecraftian fear of encountering unknown entities. 

 

As the fear of contagion butts up against the economic realities of struggling to survive in a brutal economy, Siobhan becomes the lone voice of science and reason in a very real debate over the rights of the individual and the greater rights of humanity. Perhaps most impressive is that her rational, science-based arguments are framed within a larger framework of Kantian ethics as the film follows her trajectory from an alienated and socially distant woman to someone forced by a cosmic contagion to embrace humanity in a sacrificial moment of unity.

 

What is perhaps most striking about this film is the absence of stereotypes. The fishing crew have genuine concerns about their survival in an economic system rigged against them, while Siobhan represents the person with the thankless task of reminding them of what true sacrifice for the greater good means. Visually stunning and steeped in Irish folk mythology, Sea Fever is ultimately uplifting in that it celebrates someone who makes the hardest of choices for the better of all.

GIRL ON THE THIRD FLOOR:

“If we want masculinity to be different, we must

confront and tackle the baseline instead of longing for exceptions.”

                                                                    ― Vivek Shraya

I have to admit, I was so pleasantly surprised by Travis Stevens’ Girl on the Third Floor. The initial promotion and fan hype surrounding the film made it seem like a Bruce Campbell/Evil Dead type horror film (which I also love), but I was stunningly impressed by how deeply the film delved into a devasting exposure of toxic masculinity and cyclical patterns of abuse. 

 

CM Punk plays an alcoholic husband and expectant father who has taken on the task of renovating a house with a sordid local history as the new home for himself and his expectant wife. Punk plays “King Don” Koch, a man trying desperately to reconstruct his life after being targeted by the government for defrauding his clients out of their savings. 

 

Don throws everything he has into building a new home for his sham of a family, but the house resists him at every turn. The house, a rambling Victorian home, was the former site of a notorious brothel with a Gothic history of sexual violence and exploitation.  As Don tries to “remake” the home, every violent hammer thrust and act of demolition opens traumatic wounds that expose the culture of sexual violence long hidden by the town.

 

Stevens loads his film with allegorical meaning from the outset. “King Don” is the quintessential His Majesty the Baby of Freud’s essay on narcissism. As the ultimate “King Baby,” Don is locked into an infantile masculine narcissism that keeps him dependent on the service of others to meet his perceived needs. 

 

And narcissism has its price to pay. Don literally hammers away at his new home while facetiming his wife Liz (Trieste Kelly Dunn) during the preparation stage . . . in between watching porn on his phone. He violates the house in the most graphic of manners, often thrusting his fingers into holes he has violently opened. A mysterious woman appears and seems to seduce Don. And the house fights back.

 

 Other reviews of the film have already noted the repeated amounts of semen-like fluid leaking from the orifices of the house, and they are spot-on. This house represents the whole of a hypermasculine repository of semen and violence in the most visceral way. As one character in the town reflects, the house seems to draw upon the character of the people who live in it.

 

When Liz arrives at the house, the real horror of toxic masculinity hits its climax as the gender politics of the film reverse trajectory from negative critique to positive reclamation. Dunn represents a very different type of Final Girl, one we could use more of these days. This is a film to dissect in its minutia, as there is so much here to look at, but to go further would be to spoil it. Suffice it to say that the more of the surface you peel away, the deeper the critique will follow.

AFTER MIDNIGHT:

The existential vacuum manifest itself mainly in a state of boredom.

            -Victor Frankl

 

Jeremy Gardner and Christian Stella’s After Midnight is a solid example of what highly-talented people can do with a tiny budget. This film is honest, heartfelt, and probing in its depiction of Hank (Gardner) and Amy (Brea Grant), a couple trapped in the restricting ideology of idealized love. Amy mysteriously leaves town without notice, leaving Hank with nothing but questions, recriminations, a lot of alcohol . . . and an unseen monster intent on breaking into his home each night.

 

More on the monster later, because this film is really about a couple negotiating a serious relational crisis amidst the relative anonymity of small-town life. Hank owns a bar, likes to hunt, and does little else. His quotidian life is as predictable and repetitive as can be. Hank has become comfortably uncomfortable in his life in the existential vacuum.

 

Amy, however, yearns to break out of the vacuum, no longer able to tolerate a life filled with regrets, unfulfilled hopes, and meaninglessness. Unlike Hank, she rebels against the repetitive emptiness of existence and tries to carve her own meaning as an antidote to the suffocating dread of life in the existential vacuum.

 

As you have probably picked up by now, Victor Frankl’s form of existential psychology is hugely influential on my approach to film criticism.  Frankl introduced the concept of the existential vacuum in his 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning. This vacuum represents a dilemma brought about by the crumbling of traditions that once promised meaning in life in the fading wake of animal instincts. As Frankl wrote: “No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people tell him what to do (totalitarianism).”

 

The film stays largely with Hank as he spends his days running his bar and barricading his home against the nightly attacks of the monster. With a sole exception, his friends- who are more acquaintances than true friends- don’t believe in the monster and try to rationalize what they interpret as his breakdown following Amy’s exit from his life.  Gardener is brilliant in his restrained performance as a man grappling with what seems to be an absurd situation while also subtly conveying the true trauma of the seeming end of his relationship with Amy.

 

When Amy suddenly reappears, the film presents one of the most emotionally honest scenes between a couple in recent memory. In a remarkable one-shot scene, Amy and Hank sit in chairs at the front door of their house, awaiting the monster’s arrival. Rather than a cheap payoff where the monster appears as they sit vigil, Amy and Hank have a real conversation about their relationship, about desires and insecurities and fears. It’s the most brutally real conversation about what it means to be ina relationship, not just individuals trying to havea relationship, I’ve ever seen in a horror film. 

 

As for the monster, I don’t want to spoil things, so let me just say that I believe it represents the elephant in the room of their relationship, the representation of the monstrosity of an idealized representation of true love- a love abstracted from the realities of human needs, conflict, desires, compromise, and the general messiness of real relationships. 

 

When the monster does shockingly appear . . . well, all I’ll say is that Hank makes the right choice and kills the part of him that kept him from accessing his full humanity.

 

After Midnight is the best, most honest love story I’ve ever seen in a horror film. Watch it, if for no other reason, than to say yes to life despite all the negativity that commands you to say no.

The Horror of Being Social

Ever felt the horror of being in a social situation that suddenly took a turn for the worst? Felt uncomfortable by an offensive comment made in the assumption of like-minded thinking? Tried to be polite in the face of creepily insistent and unwanted attention? If so, then you may relate to the claustrophobic and intensely philosophical small films usually lumped under the genre category of mumblegore.

This is, to say the least, a challenging topic to tackle with any depth in a blog. To talk about the sub-sub genre mumbleGore requires an exploration of mumbleCore, the somewhat larger genre from which it was birthed. But trying to go in-depth about mumblecore filmmaking is to dive headfirst down the rabbit hole of guerilla film, low-budget auteur stylistics, post-mumblecore trajectories, and end up all the way back to the French New Wave. 

Whew! Time to take a breath and skim over some things before getting down to the meat of the subject. Mumblecore, as many of you film junkies already know, refers to an overall attitude towards filmmaking that started with a group of young directors from the East Coast who emphasized dialogue and character over plot and action, eschewed detailed screenplays and storyboarding, and relied heavily on improvisation by largely non-professional actors. Naturalism was the main theme, the dialogue often overlapping and heavily conversational in a group setting. The fact that many of the directors associated with the genre’s genesis outright rejected the term as restrictive and reductive only stirs an already overbubbling pot.

Mumblegore (note the g), more specifically, refers to a handful of directors, many of whom come from the West Coast, who applied the basic elements of mumblecore films to horror and film noir themes.  The result has been a watershed of wonderful, creative, intelligent films that explore the horror of apathy, helplessness, alienation, and self-surrender . . . symptoms of what Viktor Frankl called the existential vacuum.

A particular theme in the films coalesces around awkward outsiders and highly awkward social situations. The horror of the personal sets the stage for the larger horrors (whether supernatural or psychotically human) that slowly take over the narrative. These are films for everyone who has ever felt not-quite a part-of, those who never had the feeling of fitting in, of being smooth and articulate in all situations. In short, a genre for all but the most narcissistic among us to relate to. These films reach us in our most personal inner spaces and wrench us in a Kafkaesque sense of absurdity and quiet horror.

I’ve put tight restrictions on myself here, only picking five films that I hope you enjoy. 

Blue Ruin

It took much inner wrestling to come up with one film from Jeremy Saulnier for this list. Green Roomwas astounding for its punk ethos and aesthetics as it told a gripping tale of a punk band who witnesses a crime at a Nazi club where they are billed. Hold the Dark, Saulnier’s latest film makes use of the themes of violence, revenge, and trauma common to his body of work, but adds a mythic quality to the gritty realism of his first two films. But ultimately, I decided on Blue Ruin, an earlier film that is lacking a single wrong note in its painful depiction of the old adage that resentment is like drinking poison and hoping that the other person dies.

Blue Ruin tells the story of Dwight (Macon Blair), a homeless man who gets word that the man who murdered his parents when he was a child is about to be released from prison. The news shakes him out of his isolated existence living in his car on the beach and prompts him to take revenge on the man who sent him spiraling into a life utterly ruled by untreated trauma. What would, in other hands, be a conventional revenge-thriller, becomes something very different in Saulnier’s film. There is violence, make no mistake about that.  But Saulnier goes far deeper in examining the prison-house of masculinity in our culture, the cyclical nature of violence, and the impossibility of exacting a satisfying revenge.  Plans unravel, assumptions pile up and blow back on characters, and the bonds of family that supposedly bind us together end up imprisoning us unless broken and ethically refashioned.  This may well be the bleakest film I’ve seen that ends on the very real hope for transcendence and redemption. 

 The Invitation

 Karyn Kasuma’s film is perhaps the ultimate in West Coast “encounter moment” horror. A man gets a dinner invitation to his ex-wive’s stylishly modern California home and fatefully decides to come, bringing his new girlfriend with him.  To say anything more about the film would be a travesty, as the less you know, the better. All I will say is that Kasuma has an incredible talent for finding malevolence in the smallest of details… a glass of wine, a dropped phone call, a torturously endless confession in an awkward situation. This is the one film on my list where I say go in blind, if you can. Skip the trailer, skip the reviews, and get right to the movie. Suffice it to say that this is by far the most engrossing film about a supremely uncomfortably social situation I’ve ever seen.

But allow me to linger over the non-essential details.  Logan Marshall-Green’s performance as Will is simply spectacular. Playing a man tortured by a horribly tragic event in the past, he is every bit the man consumed by a grief he cannot escape. Emayatzy Corinealdi, as Kira, Will's girlfriend, finds the perfect touch of incredulity and decisiveness as the horror plays out.  So much of the film’s deep structure of economics, race, and cultural division are so deftly touched on that they are almost invisible, ghostly reminders that haunt the privileged dinner party like … well, the unquiet, dead hand of history. 

 Cheap Thrills

E.L. Katz’s Cheap Trills is a visceral and cerebral trip through Hell, laced with subtle commentary on economics and the void separating the haves from the have-nots. The set-up is simple, but steeped in pathos. 

Pat Healy plays Craig, a family man with a wife and toddler son who wakes from pleasant dreams to the living nightmare of his life. He’s so far behind on the rent that he finds an eviction notice taped to his front door, then arrives for work and is let go due to the downward spiraling economy.  Too ashamed to return home, he stops at a bar to drown the sense that his life is controlled by forces that he can’t even comprehend. There he runs into Vince (Ethan Embry), and old high school friend whose life has taken a different turn. Vince is a leg-breaker for a local loan shark. The two old friends share a drink together, and Craig finally opens up about the secrets he’s been keeping. From that moment, events spiral into a descending nightmare of self-exploitation and betrayal.

The two characters represent opposite strains of masculinity in the early 21^stcentury: Craig, the struggling (and failing) writer forced to do oil changes at a local garage, a living death of paycheck to paycheck that can’t even begin to support his family.  Vince is a man of violence who forces those in debt to pay up with his fists, while his nameless boss takes most of the profits without getting his own hands dirty. Vince hides his intelligence and compassion behind a wall of violence; Craig hides his pride by keeping secrets, hoping for a miracle to pull him out of his crisis. 

The miracle comes in the form of a wealthy couple (Sara Paxton and David Koechner) slumming it in the dive bar. They invite Craig and Vince over for a drink, and then the games begin.  

And games they are. What starts out as a simple series of bets orchestrated by Koechner ($50 for whoever downs his shot first, $100 for whoever can get the woman at the bar to slap him in the face) soon turns darker, then completely black (think “how much money would it take to sever a part of your body with a meat cleaver?”).  Koechner and Paxton get their kicks from making wagers with the working poor to do dangerous, embarrassing, and increasingly humiliating things.  And as the wagers escalate in severity and financial payoff, Craig and Vince find out just how far they’ll go to crawl out of their financial holes.

The violence in the film is underscored by the subtextual friendship between Vince and Craig, but the most important relationship always comes back to money.  A wonderful allegory of the haves and the have-nots, on class warfare (the wealthy keeping the workers fighting amongst each other to shore up their economic structure of power), and ultimately on friendship and family. The film may be called Cheap Thrills, but the thrills come at a high price, indeed.

You’re Next

 Adam Wingard’s You’re Next is probably the best-known film on this list, having caused a major splash upon its release. The film took the festival circuit by storm and became a minor crossover hit, deservedly so. 

Set in the isolated vacation mansion of a very large and very wealthy family, the film sets off as a “this is your life in Hell” version of a family reunion. Unspoken resentments and tensions simmer from the get-go and quickly boil over at a tense dinner scene that is interrupted by an explosion of violence from outsiders intent on killing everyone in the house. The group of assailants, all wearing odd and disturbing animal masks, seem to have no motive other than to kill for the sake of killing.

As chaos break out and panic rules the day in the house, secrets are slowly revealed to show how no one is really who they seem to be, and the ultimate threat is not from the outside, but from within.

In case you haven’t seen this one, I won’t reveal more. Suffice it to say that the twists in this story are original and well-structured. Wingard has a knack for underscoring the violence in his films with a quirky sense of humor that rides the line between torture-horror and black comedy without tipping fully one way or the other. This matches the film’s subtext of greed, privilege, and the arrogance of economic self-confidence, resulting in a gripping thriller with direct parallels to class and gender games in contemporary American culture. For God’s sake, watch this film if you haven’t seen it yet!

The Innkeepers

Ti West, another enfant terrible in the mumblegore ensamble, is best known for his wonderful 2009 House of the Devil, followed that film with my personal favorite in his portfolio. The eerie, touching, and definitively quirky The Inkeepers.

A less-than-fashionable Boston hotel on the last day before closing for the season is the setting for one of the best ghost stories in years.  The hotel, now only housing two guests and staffed by two workers (Pat Healy and Sara Paxton of Cheap Thrills again), has a reputation of being haunted by the ghost of a 19^thcentury bride who hung herself in one of the rooms after being jilted at the altar.  Legend has it that the owners hid her body in the basement to avoid scandal, and her spirit remains trapped in the building.  Paxton and Healy are amateur (very, very amateur) ghost hunters convinced that if they capture her ghost on video, their ghost hunting website will become famous.

Although the ghost story is marvelously (and terrifyingly) played out, what struck me most about the film were the honest, engrossing, and so deeply real performances by Healy and Paxton. Their relationship is complex and loaded with subtle shadings of their repressed feelings, self-doubts, and general sense of not having a place in the world around them. In fact, if this were a straight indie drama without the ghost story, I would have been equally engrossed.

But ghosts are more than just spirits of the dead. A ghost can also be a paradoxical metaphor for both something that is present when it should be (or is wished to be) absent and absent when it should be present.  Memories, feelings, desires, and all of the things that make up that heady Freudian stew we call the unconscious have a way of returning when ignored or repressed. It’s at that intersection of the real and metaphorical ghosts where this film shines. It also lingers in the mind, like a ghost itself, to haunt the viewer. 

Sociologist Avery Gordon wrote that to study social life, we must confront it's ghostly aspects. Paxton's character in this film is haunted long before the first conventional "ghost" show up, haunted by a crippling sense of apathy and lack of identity, of a fundamental alienation so profound that her fate at the film's conclusion is as honest as it is tragic.

Whatever term you prefer: mumblegore, art-house horror, elevated horror . . . check out these films and others of the same kind. Confronting the feelings generated by life in the existential vacuum is the first step towards constructing meaning in the void. Something we all need more of these days.

Robicheaux in Review

Robicheaux in Review

James Lee Burke’s existentially driven former New Orleans homicide cop and current Iberia Parish deputy Dave Robicheaux is one of the most compelling lost souls in American fiction.  An alcoholic suffering from PTSD from both his experiences in Vietnam and his penchant for violence as a police officer in and around New Orleans, Robicheaux is the quintessential self-made Job for modern times.  

In Robicheaux, Dave Robicheaux finds himself once again lost in a land of ghosts, recently widowed as a man with a history of drunk driving had caused his third wife’s death at a lonely intersection in New Iberia.  Coming out of an alcoholic blackout after a relapse, Robicheaux learns that he may have beaten the man to death with his bare hands, but has no memory of what happened. He finds himself it the Kafkaesque position of assisting in the investigating a murder that he honestly doesn’t know if he, in fact, committed. At one point in the novel, Robicheaux projects his own alcoholic self-loathing onto the New Orleans area as a whole:

“If anyone tells you he’s from New Orleans and doesn’t drink, he’s probably not from New Orleans. Louisiana is not a state; it’s an outdoor mental asylum in which millions of people stay bombed most of their lives. That’s not an exaggeration. Cirrhosis is a family heirloom.” 

The mystery that follows, blending old-school drug running, charismatic Southern figures, and the bloody legacy of the American South is a corker, but what reigns supreme in the novel is the twisted ways in which the historical become one with the personal.  

Burke populates the novel with characters familiar to Robicheaux’s world: the beaten down and abused, the local mobster, the drunks, the corrupt cops, the rising politician with skeletons in his closet, the itinerant psychopathic killer, and those who just want to scratch out a living without arousing the interest of the predators who wait, like hungry sharks, to clamp their jaws around those who speak out of turn. Familiar characters Helen Soileau and Clete Purcell reveal new depths to their humanity as they fret over their friend’s potential crack-up while struggling with their own demons.

 But perhaps out of this collection of the damned, the most rapacious villain to emerge in the novel is the past itself. It plays such a central role in the novel, that perhaps I should write it as The Past, granting it the fully-realized personification that it attains in the narrative. The Past, for Burke, is both the personal and the social, and following how he intertwines the two into a New Southern Gothic sensibility is one of the most rewarding features of his writing. Burke goes beyond the Christ-haunted South to blend it with the racial Gothic, political noir, and a Nightmare Alley-like vision of alcoholism and descents into madness. 

But, as with all great novels that eclipse their genre, this book goes far deeper than the mundane treatment of plot and resolution to meditate deeply on the fleeting possibility of redemption, the strength of true friendship, and in the possibility…  a daily possibility if so chosen… of redemption for all seemingly lost souls. Consider the two following quotes that highlight the novel’s ironic tension between violence and redemption as embodied by Robicheaux:

“How do you handle it when your anger brims over the edge of the pot? You use the shortened version of the Serenity Prayer, which is “Fuck it.” Like Voltaire’s Candide tending his own garden or the British infantry going up the Khyber Pass one bloody foot at a time, you do your job, and you grin and walk through the cannon smoke, and you just keep saying fuck it. You also have faith in your own convictions and never let the naysayers and those who are masters at inculcating self-doubt hold sway in your life. “Fuck it” is not profanity. “Fuck it” is a sonnet.”

. . .

“Mortality is not kind, and do not let anyone tell you it is. If there is such a thing as wisdom, and I have serious doubts about its presence in my own life, it lies in the acceptance of the human condition and perhaps the knowledge that those who have passed on are still with us, out there in the mist, showing us the way, sometimes uttering a word of caution from the shadows, sometimes visiting us in our sleep, as bright as a candle burning inside a basement that has no windows.”

Burke’s vision of America in the twenty-first century is as accurate and uncompromising as it could be.  We are a nation who has never learned Faulkner’s dictum that the problem with the past is that it even isn’t the past yet.  We continue to pay for our sins because we have never come to terms with them. 

Dave Robicheaux stands as a character who doesn’t always deserve our sympathy, but because so, he represents a truly American figure… one who understands his function in an already-scripted role, yet rebels against that role when it counts. By far the most existentially deep of the twenty-one novels through which Burke has developed the Robicheaux character, this book reaches an apotheosis to which few authors can wish to ascend.  The best way I could describe the book is to ask you to imagine a word-processing cocktail shaker into which has been poured All the King’s Men, The Lost Weekend,Intruder in the Dust, and a liberal sprinkling of Flannery O’Conner’s short stories. Shake well, pour over ice, add simple syrup and a mint sprig, and enjoy.

Horror and History: Christopher Buehlman's Those Across the River

I was about to write that if William Faulkner ever wrote a horror novel, it would be very similar to Those Across the River… then I remember that Faulner did write horror novels, of sorts: Sanctuary certainly qualifies, as potentially does Absolam, Absolam. So perhaps easy, pretentious comparisons aren't fair to Buehlman, who has written a Southern Gothic of tremendous quality and originality.

The book's narrator, a WWI veteran haunted by his experiences in the trenches, has inherited a plantation estate in rural Georgia in 1935. A former history professor who found himself unemployed and unemployable in his field after an adulterous affair with the wife of a colleague, Frank Nichols moves in with the idea of writing a history of his ancestor who owned the plantation, a murderous slave holder so vile that he refused to free his slaves after the Civil War and was killed by them in retaliation. But writing this history requires him to journey to the plantain ruins, located in a dark stretch of woods across the river… a journey he is advised not to take by the town folk who offer a monthly ritual sacrifice of livestock to whoever--or whatever--lives there.

Nichols finds himself in a hellish version of Benedetto Croce's famous claim that all history is contemporary history as his compulsion to uncover the truth about his nefarious ancestor merges with his drive to work through his own inner darkness. The past is very much alive in this novel... and it has teeth.
I hemmed and hawed about whether to write about what lies across the river, as the book has no true twist, but rather gradually builds to the answer to the mystery, and the more well-versed in classic monster lore the reader is, the quicker she or he will figure out what lies in wait there.

I really can't convey how fully engaged I was while reading this book, having just read a string of so-so horror novels that muted my palate. Reading Buehlman's novel was like eating a delicious hot and spicy curry after dining on nothing but gruel for a month. His prose is exquisite, his character development astounding, and his ability to convey a perfect sense of time and place is to be envied.

Perhaps what most impressed me about this book is the vivid representation of a small Georgia town in the Great Depression, small details in characterization and landscape that bring the book whole and breathing to life. This is no simple pulp horror tale… it is a work of profound insight into the nature of trauma, the hold the land has on those who make their living off of it, and the power of history to haunt the present in powerful and tragic ways. Above all, it is a story of duty and relationship. The final lines of this wonderful novel have haunted me more than any in recent memory. I just can't recommend this book highly enough, so read it!

 Aside from the classic mirepoix of Chandler/Cain/Hammet in the stew pot of literary influences on film noir, plenty of other writers were stirred into the mix.  Some, of course, wrote hard-boiled detective fiction, but philosophers, American Modernists, and others found themselves added for spice and depth. Moving from the more to less obvious, here are a few who found themselves, intentionally or otherwise, influencing the genre.

Ernest Hemingway

No discussion of film noir would be complete without bringing up “The Killers,” both the Hemingway short story and the Robert Siodmak film.  Hemingway’s brutal, minimalist dialogue is like a Master Class on tough-guy banter and mounting tension.  The entire short story is interpolated practically word-for-word into the opening scene of the film, which stands as a monumental example of characters bantering around the edges of a topic without making direct threats.  Later scenes in films such as the chilling coin flip in No Country for Old Menowe a debt to Hemingway’s penchant for creating exchanges of dialogue in which the true meaning is buried beneath the absurdity of small talk and misdirection.

William Faulkner

Faulkner is best known to film noir as being screenwriter for MGM, contributing to the noir classics To Have and Have Notand The Big Sleep.  But in his novels and stories prior to his signing on as a $500 a week gun-for-hire studio writer had a deep influence on the dialogue and underlying fatalistic philosophy of film noir.  1931’s Sanctuary, perhaps his most directly influential novel, is the story of Popeye, one of the most terrifying villains in the literature of the time and tragic femme fatale Temple Drake as they consort with moonshiners, sex-slave traders, privileged college kids, prostitutes, gangsters, and Old South gentry.  

The themes of debauchery, sexual violence and perversion, and revenge masquerading as justice are played out in a jarring stream of consciousness that underscores the existential crisis of searching for meaning and unity in a world that is fractured, indifferent, and absurd.  As Albert Camus wrote of the world inhabited by Faulkner’s characters, they came from “a land empty of men who rode out of it not to engage a mortal enemy as they believed but to batter themselves to pieces against a force with which they were unequipped by both heredity and inclination to cope and of which those whom they charged and counter-charged were not champions as much as victims too.”  

Dorothy Parker

Not a name that generally pops up in discussions of film noir. Parker had a penchant for sharp rejoinders delivered with an acid tongue that influenced the development of the femme fatale character as it evolved in the films.  The femme fatale, in the best of the noir films, was far more complex than may appear at first glance.  She negotiated a violent and uncaring world of petty and desperate violent men, balancing the unstable power dynamics of violence, sex relations, and class, creating a fast-talking and shrewd counterpoint to the masculine world of petty crime and possessiveness. 

Some of Parker’s best quips could have been delivered by femme fatales in any number of films: 

“It’s a small apartment; I’ve barely enough room to lay my hat and a few friends.”

“You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think”

“The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”

“I like to have a martini, Two at the very most. After three I’m under the table, after four I’m under my host.”

“I require three things in a man: he must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.”

“Look at him. A rhinestone in the rough.”

Chester Himes

Himes had more of an influence on the neo and race noir films that emerged in the decades that followed the era of classic noir, but his tough-talking and uncompromisingly violent novels in the decade following WW II sent out tendrils that spread over time. 1945’s If He Hollers Let Him Go brought a gritty and grisly realism to the protest novels of the day, blending the rage of living in a perversely racist society with the existential vacuum of a seemingly meaningless existence in an absurd social system. The novel’s main character, Bob Jones, sees his idealistic dreams of a new life free from racial and class oppression systematically demolished by the pervasive racism of the post-war U.S, leaving only with impotent desires for violence and rageful destruction.

His later crime novels, filmed in the early neo-noir period, included Cotton Comes to Harlem, Come Back, Charleston Blue, and A Rage in Harlem. These films helped develop detectives Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones as well as criminals Goldy, Big Kathy, and Easy Money into icons in African American noir films.

Sigmund Freud

Any discussion of noir without reference to Freud would be incomplete … in a very Freudian way. Film noir’s undercurrents of repressed sexuality (think Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death), impotence (Edward G. Robinson wearing his domineering wife’s apron in Scarlett Street), mother and father complexes (Martha Vickers in The Big Sleep), and the uncanny backdrop of urban decay and crumbling social foundations are firmly rooted in Freud’s writing.  

Perhaps his long essay “The Uncanny” had the most profound influence on noir, with its explanation of repetition compulsion, the return of the repressed, and hopeless faith in the omnipotence of thought.  Everything in noir is uncanny, the familiar, yet hauntingly unfamiliar: Dutch angles and plays of shadow and light that alter landscapes, con men and psychopathic killers, childish faith in the gun, the elusive big score, and crosses and double crosses that leave viewers with a vision of the world as a space devoid of governing rules and master narratives.

Albert Camus

…and speaking of the absurdity of existence and the absence of master narratives leads us back to Camus, one of the most influential existential philosophers of the noir and post-noir era.  And yes, you knew we would have to circle back to the French, eventually, right? After all, French critics were the first to observe that a coherent movement in cinema that Nino Frank first named film noir back in 1946, long before American critics took up the term. 

Perhaps the existential absurdism Camus lays out in his 1942 essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” is the best starting point for the philosophical underpinnings of film noir, from its visual look to its substantive narrative. The question of suicide as a reaction to the dizzying meaningless of life provides the starting point from which Camus asserts that, “When he rebels, a man identifies himself with other men and so surpasses himself, and from this point of view human solidarity is metaphysical. But for the moment we are only talking of the kind of solidarity that is born in chains.”

Solidarity born in chains could well be a good summation of the predicament in which film noir characters most often find themselves. Rebelling against social codes, against a rigged system, against gender, class, and racial oppression gives protagonists a code by which they can function in attempting to live a life without compromise, even if that code only provides death as an alternative to submission.