While we're thanking people, let's nod to Ed Brubaker for the neo-noir round-up in the latest issue of Criminal. (Come to think of it, Matt Fraction had a piece of that, too.) I hadn't realized this was out on DVD until I read his glowing review:
Two years ago, a couple of films sent me on a neo-noir kick. I wanted to see all the antecedents for The Limey and several of the movies excerpted in Los Angeles Plays Itself. The gaping absence in my viewing was Point Blank, not yet out on DVD--I must have missed it by a couple months. Brubaker and company have finally shown me the light. The DVD is worth a rental just for the commentary track, which has director John Boorman talking with Steven Soderbergh, who cheerfully admits he's been ripping off Point Blank for most of his career.
Ideally I should have watched this two years ago, right between Charley Varrick and Vanishing Point (not a neo-noir, but still the most seventies movie ever made). I may not have quite the same craving for stories of taciturn loners out for revenge anymore (Terence Stamp is still my favorite, by the way), but at least half of my interest in Point Blank was for its use of architecture and that still holds up. Boorman puts the hideous late-modernist design of Los Angeles to great use, creating a spatial atmosphere as relentlessly inhuman as his characters. The interiors are no less repellent, an overdecorated world of mirrored walls and wet bars; Point Blank comes from a 1967 where there's no Vietnam, no Sergeant Pepper's, and San Francisco has an Alcatraz but no Haight-Ashbury. It's what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if Elvis had won the war: Graceland uber alles. Point Blank is the dying fantasy of a decadent postwar culture--dead, but it doesn't know it yet.
So thank you, Ed Brubaker. This concludes our latest installment of Things I Should Have Read or Seen a Long Fucking Time Ago Theatre.
I walked out of The Limey fully intending to investigate its antecedents, but I never got very far. Point Blank and Get Carter were about as far as I ever got. Any suggestions for other movies?
Posted by: Tim | April 11, 2007 at 01:13 AM
Point Blank and Get Carter are the closest to The Limey's spirit. Charley Varrick is just plain good neo-noir, if you can stomach the thought of Walter Matthau, Ladies' Man. (And worse: Joe Don Baker, Ladies' Man.) Vanishing Point is directly referenced in the car chase scene--Barry Newman plays Terry Valentine's security chief--(by the way, did some guy named Terry Valentine steal Soderbergh's girlfriend?)--and, of course, it is The Most 70s Movie Ever Made.
Actually, I recommend going to a comic store and picking up the fifth issue of Criminal, which has a text piece loaded with good recommendations. (For some reason Chinatown isn't on anyone's list--too respectable?--but that's well worth watching too.) You should probably pick up the previous four issues, too, since Criminal is a decent modern noir in its own right.
And if you haven't watched The Limey on DVD, you absolutely must, for the commentary-track scuffles between Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs.
Strangely, I've never seen Poor Cow, the movie Soderbergh raided for clips of Wilson's earlier life, but it's more of a love story, not a neo-noir, and The Limey isn't actually a sequel--Stamp's character has a different name.
Enjoy your viewing! My neo-noir watching lately has moved off on an international tangent--Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (overrated, I think) and Masaki Kobayashi's Hara Kiri (cannot be rated highly enough).
Posted by: Marc | April 11, 2007 at 11:54 AM
Matthau and Baker, ladies men? Repellent. . .but intriguing. I appreciate the recommendations, and I'm definitely going to get a copy of Criminal. Thanks!
Posted by: Tim | April 12, 2007 at 01:56 PM
My pleasure!
Posted by: Marc | April 13, 2007 at 11:46 AM
And thank you Marc Singer (and Marc Singer, because he doesn't get enough props these days) for reminding me that I never did get around to watching "The Limey".
And curse my local Blockbuster to B-movie hell for carrying only carrying the "Point Blank" starring Mickey Rourke. Oh, the humanity...
Posted by: David Oakes | April 19, 2007 at 05:25 PM