Noirvember is a grand time to rewatch some of my favorite film noir movies, like The Third Man, DOA and Woman on the Run, as well as unearth some other diamonds in the rough, like Cover Up, with its punchy tagline: It Takes More than a Kiss to Cover Up a Killing.
To jump-start our Noirvember, Claudia and I rewatched The Third Man, which recently got a 75th anniversary release. The film benefits from a stellar cast (Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles), a sturdy script from Graham Greene and a cinematic setting. Most film noir flicks were shot on studio lots. This movie was shot in Vienna after the ravages of World War II, which means that the moral and societal decay of noir finds its perfect reflection in a bombed-out, rubble-strewn city, while the downward mobility of the genre’s anti-hero leads to a climactic chase scene through the city’s sewers.
One of the original covers for this film noir classic.
This is the cover of the 75th anniversary release of a genuine film noir gem.
For all these reasons, plus the stillborn love story and the infamous Ferris wheel scene where Welles improvised much of the mordant dialogue about the differences between the Italian Renaissance and Swiss neutrality, The Third Man remains number one with a bullet and a chaser of sewer sludge on my top 10 list of film noir treasures.
There are full versions of the movie and many other film noir classics on a variety of Youtube channels, to make sure it’s Noirvember all year long.
Jim Algie’s many books are available on Amazon available but the most noirish of them is The Phantom Lover.
Stories like ‘Life and Death Sentences,” based on the real life of Thailand’s last machine-gun executioner, are steeped in film noir and dipped in true crime.
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