The Words (2012): review: 6/10

New York: How an ambitious writer wrote his first successful book: a fable.

The themes of this book are ambition  theft, anger,  deception, guilt and shame, and at times it conveys these well, especially in themes featuring Irons.

 However, there is something  overly polished about this film, that makes it less enjoyable and spontaneous than one might desire (in other words, there is an excellent budget film noir lurking inside this somewhere).

 Perhaps this  lack of life is partly due to the obvious New York setting, and perhaps it is also to do with the absence of real passion between the couple at the centre of the film- this largely the fault of the bland wife who reminded me of the models used in mail order catalogues to sell hosiery.

The Big Heat (1953): review: 5/10

A police detective investigates the unlikely suicide of a colleague, to find himself under atack from a consortium of well-placed ne'r-do-wells.

The film lacks the sense of delight needed to animate it's darkness. The women aren't alluring poison flowers, the hero is one-dimensional, and the photography lacks the adventurousness of Lang's other films. The sets look cheap too.

Nor has it that necessary sense of threat, of pressure: everything shunts along rather formulaically (if one can ignore the many odd decisons taken by the hero, such as his decision to leave bis wife and child at home immediately after recieving a threatening phone call there) and though the film is certainly watchable, it isn't one of the great noirs.

The Third Man (1949): review: 10/10

Just after the war an Amercan  writer of Westerns goes to occupied Vienna to take from emploment from his old friend Harry Lime, a racketeer.

The themes of friendship, evil, love, and loss are pursued though Graham Greene's witty script- the film wears its messages lightly, it's seriousness countered by playful aesthetic effects of lighting, music and an almost insoucient acting style.

Kiss Me Deadly (1955): review: 7.5/10

A private investigator picks up a hitchiker, leading to all kinds of mischief.

Violent, long, diverting noir with a confusing plot and great photography.

Double Indemnity (1944): review: 9/10

"I was thinking about the dame upstairs and how she'd looked at me and I wanted to see her again- close"

In LA, an insurance salesman and married female client fall for each other: they concoct a scheme to make some money from his firm and get rid of her husband at the same time.

Magnificently acted throughout, with splendid cinematography, shot through with laconic wit.

Corner of an office block, UDSC

*

Corner of an office block, UDSC, oil on card, 10 x 12 cm  - available

I might perhaps add as a caption, like Lichtenstein, with a phrase from a pop song, because the style is remisiscent of cartoons.

Of the cartoonists easily my favourite is Tintin, specifically the Tintin of the Calculus Affair period, with its sonbre colours and Noir atmosphere of menace.

*

Story in Two Parts - Part One - where I Follow a Man.

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I follow him. Actually, it is not really a decision, it is just something I do, I don’t know why. He walks along the main road: a dirty orange bus and people standing looking at shops, the ambling pace of mid-morning shoppers. There is a small market selling vegetables. I wonder for a moment how much these people earn, they exchange such tiny sums. 

 We go through a vast covered market, like a railway station, where meat is sold. Huge carcasses hang from racks above, ruby dark: there are ranks of pigs heads in the fridges below, then vast glass ice boxes of pigs knuckles, tails and ears, strangely white, arranged along a concrete corridor beneath the high glass roof. Men with ruddy faces and blood smeared smocks wield giant cleavers, hacking at corpses or standing shouting, “pigs’ trotters, fresh pigs’ trotters”, or “leg of lamb, leg of lamb” as I follow the man, a silhouette among many. 

 Presently we leave, walking down a narrow street where the buildings are decorated with ornate copulas and domes though the street level is dirty and spoiled.  I pursue the man through a park; a small park like a square in the way that the buildings, stony, solemn, press round it. The grass is soft under my shoes: I’m silent. I watch; he stops and fumbles in her pocket for something taking out a handkerchief, but as he does so I see something fall to the lawn. But he doesn’t notice: he walks on, not picking it up, blowing his nose, and then replacing the handkerchief in his pocket. I follow him to where he once stood, easily finding there between the blades of grass: a brass Yale key, a door key. 

 We leave the park, I am about 100 metres behind him. He walks along a narrow road up to a block: it is a tenement and the front door pushes pen without a key. I can see him mount the stairs, the darkness of the interior, and the way the deep gloss paint dark red gleams from the light which passes through from the block back door, and I smell the sharp smell of disinfectant. I hear his steps on the heavy stair, ascending. Then he arrives at his flat, I presume. 

I don’t follow him upstairs but it seems that he is not the floor above but the third floor, the penultimate floor. So I wait there in the lobby just before the back door where a bicycle old and dusty stands. I hear the footsteps, as they descend. And I wait until I hear them leave the building. I rise and mount the stairs myself. There are two flats on each floor. I reach the second. But which door? The first door is newly painted, the surface dark red, and gleaming. The second is black and dirty. I chose the second, I do not know why. 

 I insert the key. I turn it: it does not turn easily. I turn the key harder, my thumb pressing against the brass of the key: the lock clicks open, I enter.

*