Egyptian noir, noisy Parker, quiet Melville

Some question and observations from my recent spate of crime-movie viewing:

• 
  When did movies become music videos? Elevator to the Gallows used a small-group Miles Davis soundtrack to enhance the story mood. Logan Lucky, decades later and an ocean away, on the other hand, acts as if its viewers are incapable of processing, feeling, or thinking anything without a song to tell them what to do. And, if its opening scene, as offered on movie theater web sites, is characteristic of the movie as a whole, Baby Driver is even worse.
• The above made me grateful for those considerable stretches of Le Cercle Rouge and Un Flic where Jean-Pierre Melville let ambient sound tell the story.
• Melville (or his sound engineers) used sound more subtly than did John Boorman (or his sound engineers) in the roughly contemporaneous Point Blank, based on The Hunter, Richard Stark's first novel featuring the affectless heistman Parker.  The overamplified footsteps of Lee Marvin in the latter film are overkill, one of that movie's few, er, missteps. Le Cercle Rouge and Un Flic came near the end of Melville's career, while Point Blank was one of Boorman's earliest efforts. Could maturity have been responsible for Melville's resistance to gimmickry?
• Point Blank is at or near the top of nearly everybody's best Parker adaptations, and it deserves to be there. But Boorman and Lee Marvin's Walker is not Stark's Parker. He's very much more rattled, conflicted, closer to being sucked up into the chaos of his time that Parker ever was. Perhaps that's because Stark's novel appeared in 1962, Boorman's movie in neurotic, psychedelic 1967.

• Melville's movies look even better than they sound. Particularly in Un Flic, Melville's visual aesthetics (or his cinematographer's) are much like what I try to do in my own photography.
• Logan Lucky has a distinctive look, too, thanks mostly to the cast, whose stolid, care-worn expressions are an eloquent counterpart to the glitzy commercialism of Charlotte Motor Speedway, site of the movie's central heist. The director, Stephen Soderbergh, knew what he wanted from his cast, and his cast knew how to deliver. Kudos to all.
• The Nile Hilton Incident is the first noir(ish) movie I can recall set in Egypt. It has sex and it has police corruption, both familiar ingredients of American crime writing, but its time and place (Egypt, the "Arab Spring" in 2011) lend a sharper edge to the latter. The movie makes me want to look up Z and The Battle of Algiers.

• The movie's protagonist, a relatively upright Cairo police officer named Noredin Mostafa, gets comically exasperated in an Internet shop, a scene that filled me with nostalgia for interesting experiences I'd had at public Internet cafes and shops in Tunisia, Croatia, and Germany. (My favorite was the Tunisian bloke who was about to get married and who, when I ran into him as I updated my blog at a Tunis Internet store, was browsing photos of prospective Russian brides. Or maybe it was the manager of the Internet shop in Split with whom I discussed Caetano Veloso and who confided that his dream was to see Neil Young in concert.) 

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Detectives Beyond Borders talks movies on The Projection Booth

I'm a guest on Episode 243 of Mike White and Rob St. Mary's Projection Booth podcast, discussing Jean-Pierre Melville's splendid and seminal 1967 gangster movie Le Samouraï, starring Alain Delon, and Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai.

The show is just as much fun as Mystery Science Theater 3000 but with more insight and fewer robots, and you can download it or listen to is at the Projection Booth website. When you're done, go back and listen to earlier episodes. I especially like Mike and Rob's discussion of The Limey.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Noir Con 2008, Part II — No boundaries?

OK, maybe some boundaries, though no one at NoirCon 2008 seemed to be able to figure out precisely what noir is and isn't. Happily, no one seemed to worry much about this, and the confusion gave rise to some pregnant thoughts on Day Two, Year Two of this fine Philadelphia crime-fiction convention.

And why should I worry about what is international crime fiction and what isn't at a conference with a French name ("Noir") devoted to an American art form that honored an Irish author (Ken Bruen) and a publisher (Dennis McMillan) whose offerings have included seminal Dutch and Australian crime writers?

Highlights from Day Two:

1) Jason Starr's observation toward the end of his Friday panel discussion with Ken Bruen that "The French have a much wider definition of noir" than do Americans. Could he have meant that the French critics who coined the term as applied to film and fiction in the middle of the last century emphasized atmosphere more than today's writers do?

I recall a television interview with the director Jean-Pierre Melville and the star Alain Delon included as a DVD extra with one of Melville's movies. In today's terms, Delon was a laughable parody of cool, literally staring into space and blowing smoke while Melville talked about the movie. From the viewpoint of, say, any time after maybe the early '70s, that looks more kitsch than noir.

Maybe he meant that French writers have taken noir in directions more political than American crime writers have explored (Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean-Claude Izzo, Didier Daeninckx)?

2) Bruen's declaration during the same discussion that, after having written a few "straight" novels, "I really wanted to write a crime novel, but I wanted to see if I could write it the way the American hard-boiled school writes."

3) The award for the publisher Dennis McMillan, whose offerings have included books from Janwillem van de Wetering, Robert van Gulik and Arthur W. Upfield.

4) News from Akashic Books that another novel from Juan de Recacoechea, author of American Visa, is being translated into English as we speak.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008