TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. et is an Argentine horror film called El Vampiro Negro (1953)

[Re: “Edward L. Cahn’s Cage of Evil (1960), with Ronald Foster and Patricia Blair.”]

By Grand Rapids Anonymous
sunday, october 23, 2022 at 1:48:00 a.m. edt

It HAD to be obscure—and a 1960 flick, as well. Not too many good “films noir” being made at that point, I don’t believe—correct me, if I’m wrong. In fact, I’ll ask: Were there ANY classic films noir AFTER 1959?

--GRA


By N.S.
sunday, october 23, 2022 at 4:04:00 a.m. edt

Correct, GRA.

There were some good crime pictures made after 1960, but they either weren’t called “films noir,” or they were called “neo-noir.”

Stories of crime and punishment have always been a staple of fiction and non-fiction alike.

(Heck, hardly anyone referred to crime pictures as “films noir.” That was something pretentious French critics came up with, which impressed studio head Dore Schary. The Gerries called them “Krimis”—“crime stories,” and Robert Mitchum, who had no patience with pretense—simply called them “B-pictures.”)

The only example that might have been called “neo-noir” that comes to mind was John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), starring Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. That’s where I finally learned why Hollywood types thought Dickinson was so hot.

Note, however, that while I saw Point Blank on TCM, it was not on Red Eddie Muller’s show. That was part of a day-long crime picture feature, which showed, consecutively, The French Connection (1971), the greatest cop picture ever; Point Blank (1967); and Warning Shot (also 1967).

I suspect that somebody at TCM has been intervening, showing classic crime pictures (like The Roaring Twenties the Tuesday before last), to compensate for the crap Red Eddie typically broadcasts.


By David in TN
friday, october 28, 2022 at 5:37:00 p.m. edt

Speaking of the crap Red Eddie typically broadcasts, TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. et is an Argentine horror film called El Vampiro Negro (1953).

David in TN: The English translation is The Black Vampire, a “reworking” of Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Eddie Muller was very enthusiastic about it in his outro last week. He patted himself on the back for “rescuing” a supposed classic.

N.S.: Red Eddie fully embraces gutter culture.

Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s M was the last picture they made together, before their divorce, which is why it was the last Top 100 masterpiece either had anything to do with. He was a Jew, though his real religion was opportunism, while she became an ardent Nazi. One recalls that Hannah Arendt was a German Jew, but that the love of her life was her philosophy professor, the fanatical Nazi, Martin Heidegger.

(Lang made, to my knowledge, one masterpiece in Hollywood, The Big Heat (1953), starring Glenn Ford, with Gloria Grahame and Lee Marvin, based on a Sydney Boehm screenplay, which was itself based on a Saturday Evening Post serial by William P. McGivern.)