70s Neo Noir, Ranked

[seattleblue]

First time I think I have ever even looked over here. I expended enormous attention for several years recently on film noir. I was dissatisfied with all publicly available lists and made my own. I have all the decades mapped out but here's a slice, the 70s (which was a tremendous time for neo noir).

I had to make rules because there are so many noir-ish blends. My rules are pretty basic for this list. Film has to end with doom or at least ambiguity. If it all works out, that's not the spirit of noir to be ranked amid the ones on the list (LA Confidential from the 90s is an example of a really well done happy ending noir). Also I am looking for regular people not gangsters, assassins or superheroes.

1. Chinatown (1974)
2. The Long Goodbye (1973)
3. The Conversation (1974)
4. Night Moves (1975)
5. Taxi Driver (1976)
6. The Parallax View (1974)
7. Days of Heaven (1978)
8. Get Carter (1971)
9. Badlands (1973)
10. Across 110th Street (1972)
11. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)
12. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1978) there are two versions of different lengths and cuts, one was 1976
13. The American Friend (1977)
14. The French Connection (1971)
15. Report to the Commissioner (1975)
16. Max and the Junkman (1971)
17. Klute (1971)
18. The Late Show (1977)
19. Straight Time (1978)

[Robert Mitchum does perhaps the finest acting of his career at the end of The Yakuza (1974) which would have come in at #15 but in the end I feel like the ending had more redemption than doom]

[MikoTython]

Superb list. I'll quibble, though, on The Yakuza - a thorough-going noir. Everyone that matters to him is dead, or forever after estranged, more-or-less directly as a result of his personal drama - all he has left is a ritual offering to his bereaved BIL. Pretty bleak.

Mitchum (or Fonda) are probably my all-time favorite actors.

[seattleblue]

Superb list. I'll quibble, though, on The Yakuza - a thorough-going noir. Everyone that matters to him is dead, or forever after estranged, more-or-less directly as a result of his personal drama - all he has left is a ritual offering to his bereaved BIL. Pretty bleak.

Mitchum (or Fonda) are probably my all-time favorite actors.

Definitely a noir. I am saying the ending of the definite noir that it is, is redemptive, thus disqualifying it from the criteria I used to make the list. I came to this decision after having the Yakuza on my all time top 100 list of everything combined not after the first viewing, but then after the second third and fourth viewings it was still there. But after the fifth viewing (these were spaced out over 2+ years) and some discussion following that viewing I had to conclude it was a redemptive ending. Same thing that excluded some truly excellent noirs. On Dangerous Ground was my most painful leave-off of the entire project. Manhunter. a few more. The Night of the Hunter.

Wouldn't you agree Ken is redeemed and through the dramatic act Mitchum is redeemed? Let's assume I 100% agree with all of what you said about it being bleak. I had it on my list in the 80s for over a year.

Oh and I really appreciate the compliment, thank you!. I put an obscene amount of time into combing this list for reranking and combing out biases. I want it to be the best list anyone has made, and force someone to make a list that's better. It's not all of noir, it's "Doombiguity Noir" which is a term I coined to differentiate the happy ending noirs (which is a betrayal of the substance of noir in a world of so many noirs that were able to supply a doombiguity ending). Also I think assassins are doomed for gettin' in the assassin game which unfortunately excludes my two favorite assassin noirs which are Blast of Silence (1961) and Le Samourai (1967)

[Clark Kimble]

In mid-October 1974 I had just broken up with my First Great Love of three wonderful years. I was very naive, and absolutely shattered. My first date with another girl, Catherine, was to the old Stadium Cinema downtown for a double-bill of "The Parallax View" and "Chinatown". I saw myself as Jake Gittes --- and the older, wealthy, powerful, unethical sleazebag who took my woman as Noah Cross.

"The Parallax View" wised me up to politics and power.

"Chinatown"--- I later visited nearly every location from the movie --- wised me up to real life. Sometimes the bad guy wins because you're playing by the rules...which he just laughs at as he takes whatever --- and whomever --- he wants.

[Clark Kimble]

Film noir is my favorite film genre, which may explain why, as a kid growing up in Walnut Park, my favorite TV series was David Janssen's "The Fugitive"...a melding of "Les Miserables" with the Dr. Sam Sheppard murder case in atmospheric, moody black & white every Tuesday night. When the show's fourth and final season went to color, it lost a lot.

The series was great training for Turner Classic Movies of my future.

Film noir buffs will enjoy the Siskel & Ebert special show "Hail, Hail Black & White". https://youtu.be/WhdVVBnyvlM?si=kLaRLUDhEmEhBH8i

[seattleblue]

Film noir is my favorite film genre, which may explain why, as a kid growing up in Walnut Park, my favorite TV series was David Janssen's "The Fugitive"...a melding of "Les Miserables" with the Dr. Sam Sheppard murder case in atmospheric, moody black & white every Tuesday night. When the show's fourth and final season went to color, it lost a lot.

The series was great training for Turner Classic Movies of my future.

Film noir buffs will enjoy the Siskel & Ebert special show "Hail, Hail Black & White". https://youtu.be/WhdVVBnyvlM?si=kLaRLUDhEmEhBH8i

Thank you for the link! Loved that show back in the day, loved Roger Ebert and genuinely mourned him. Ebert is right about how the distillation of a scene is enhanced by black and white, because it elevates the impression of the structure and action. Whereas color makes things more concrete to that scene, those specific individuals. When it's black and white it acts more like a template of human experience.

I do think that after the color era was upon us, going back to then make black and white films is generally not really organic, with some exception.

The old school chiaroscuro black and white look in noir films is a huge part of the appeal, but when color came along directors had to use their palettes to achieve new effects. In particular with film noir, because it's so dependent on a heightened sensory stimulation to make audiences palatably swallow all the human damage, this stylization has to underscore the material. I would point specifically to golden hour as the new black and white once the concept of noir itself became self aware and knew it was a distinct style. I would argue that the single best doom noir of each of the 70s (Chinatown), 80s (Cutter's Way) and 90s (The Limey) all relish in this golden light because noir is about characters in liminal spaces making consequential decisions and that's just what golden hour represents. When you see an Out of the Past and notice the light between Mitchum and Greer (or other examples), that is what the black and white rendering is saying about their characters IMO. For me, the single greatest golden hour use in neo noir is Days of Heaven, what an absolute masterpiece that is.

[Clark Kimble]

Those are terrific references to how movie theaters had to compete with home television for viewers.

In the 1940s, before TVs were common, neighborhood theaters were like community social and news centers as well as entertainment, with Defense Department-bleached newsreels keeping us cheering on the war effort.

Once TV started slowly creeping in, movie theaters then became the one cool spot to spend several hours on hot, steamy summer days after school let out, with so few homes air-conditioned.

The large postwar families with their new cars found drive-in theaters a great bargain, dressing the kids in pajamas to fall asleep in the backseat during weekend triple-features.

Then, with people getting into their favorite regular TV series, Hollywood used VistaVision and Panavision, with far more light and color in movies to keep theater-going active before color TVs became common.

In 1967, all 3 TV networks demanded all of their fall series be filmed in color, so, with the huge population of young boomers changing public tastes and rebelling as teens and college radicals protesting Vietnam, theaters screened movies with language and nudity you could not show on home TV.

When mid-70s VCRs and Blockbuster Video*** rentals and 1980s R-rated movies on premium cable threatened the theater industry, studios locked down exclusive distribution rights of their films, not permitting premium cable (HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, et al) screenings or VCR rentals until theatrical runs were exhausted.

With the advent of streaming, studios quit fighting and endorsed the enemy, taking much smaller cuts of movies screened at home hundreds of thousands of times and reducing the theatrical-to-streaming window.

*** St. Louisans from this time will recall mom 'n pop video stores like Movies To Go, all of which got targeted by self-appointed City Moral Guardian Circuit Attorney George Peach, who closed them even if adult video rentals were segregated in an age-restricted room. Not long after, the finger-wagging hypocrite was revealed to have been using an airport hotel to meet prosti-tootsies under the pseudonym "Larry Johnson" and paying them with City funds. So, the failure of George Peach to lariat his johnson cost him his powerful St. Louis City law-enforcement post.

[MikoTython]

Film noir is my favorite film genre, which may explain why, as a kid growing up in Walnut Park, my favorite TV series was David Janssen's "The Fugitive"...a melding of "Les Miserables" with the Dr. Sam Sheppard murder case in atmospheric, moody black & white every Tuesday night. When the show's fourth and final season went to color, it lost a lot.

The series was great training for Turner Classic Movies of my future.

Film noir buffs will enjoy the Siskel & Ebert special show "Hail, Hail Black & White". https://youtu.be/WhdVVBnyvlM?si=kLaRLUDhEmEhBH8i

Seems like we might have discussed this before, but in any case, an irony of 'The Fugitive' is that Dr. Sheppard, upon whom the show was very loosely adapted, very likely did kill his wife.

A great, rather elegantly wrought, crime retrospective site, tells the tale :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT_ZRq4nRs4