Gangsters And Grifters: Know Your Favorite Betes Noire

I've seen lots of stories online these days about film noir, and that may mean that there's an uptick in noir interest among movie fans.

The question is: What exactly is a film noir, and how do you know if the movie you're watching is one?

Here are a few of my own guidelines to ponder. If the film you're watching ...

Was shot sometime between 1941 and 1958

Is in black and white

Features a hero who has a dark past, or gets involved in shady dealings

Makes ample use of shadows, and has an overall dark tone, both thematically and in cinematic terms

Has scenes in a roadhouse where the hero drinks black coffee and chain smokes unfiltered cigarettes

The hero merely says "Rye," and the bartender pours him whiskey, neat

A blond "femme fatale" lures the hero into a scheme that results in a battle to the death

There's a fair amount of gun play, and someone inevitably ends up dead.

Characters often speak in fragmented sentences, and trade wisecracks

Stars Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Richard Widmark, Barbara Stanwyck and the like

... then, you might be watching a film noir.

Films noir shouldn't be confused with gangster films, which are a slightly different genre that uses organized crime as its focal point.

In a noir, the hero may have dealings with organized crime, but is essentially a lone wolf. Gangster films tend to focus on the dark side of the American dream. Gangsters essentially share many of the same values of home, family and prosperity, as do honest citizens. But their means of achieving their goals are what leads to their defeat.

Typically, gangsters build a crime empire the way an entrepreneur would set up a legitimate business. They rise to the top because they are more efficient, and more ruthless, than their competitors.

Their downfall inevitably comes when they stray from their Horatio Alger-like roots. It's usually pride before the fall. In the end their empire collapses, and the head gangster dies along with it.

In noir, the hero isn't an entrepreneur. He's an alienated loner, sometimes in an existential crisis and desperate to break whatever shackles are holding him down. Sometimes he's living a more or less balanced life, and is unaware of the dissatisfaction gnawing within him.

When he meets the femme fatale, everything changes. As a couple, their credo is, "Let's be bad together." There's something about the chemistry between the two that leads to crimes each wouldn't have committed alone.

Needless to say, it often doesn't turn out well for the hero. But then again, you wouldn't expect it to.

I Was A Punching Bag For The Mob

This may not constitute a trend, but I've noted a similarity between Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), at right, the hapless meth dealer in "Breaking Bad," and Georgie (Frank Santorelli), below, the put-upon bartender at the Badda-Bing strip club in "The Sopranos."

Both characters regularly take vicious beatings as a consequence of their employment, and that's something to ponder this Labor Day weekend.

Jessie has most recently had his face rearranged by drug enforcement agent Hank Schrader (Dean Norris) and regularly gets beaten stupid by every hood on the block.

Meanwhile, his partner in crime and former high school chemistry teacher Walt White (Bryan Cranston) goes unscathed.

Bartender Georgie, however, suffers mostly at the hands of his employer, mob boss Tony Soprano and occasionally others in the gang when the mood strikes.

Tony has beaten Georgie with an ice bucket, a telephone receiver and a singing novelty fish, while Ralph "Ralphie" Cifaretto, (Joe Pantoliano) nearly took out Georgie's eye with a chain and padlock he swung like a mace.

Let's all stand and offer a round of muted golf-applause in honor of these two fine gentlemen who regularly take one for the team.

'The Guard' Offers Laughs, Gasps In Equal Share

"The Guard" IS an above-average film, by the way. I noted previously that it opened this past weekend in limited release.

This self-proclaimed "fish-out-of-water" story -- there's a funny moment when one character identifies the activities taking place in the film as just that -- is, on the surface at least, "In The Heat of the Night" transported to Ireland. Don Cheedle is the black American FBI agent swimming with a foreign school of fish.

The source of his dislocation isn't racial prejudice -- this is 2011, after all, and not "In The Heat of the Night"'s Deep South of 1967. Cheedle's FBI agent Wendell Everett is a visitor in a land where everyone, not just the criminals, speaks in code, and it's one he's not familiar with. His Gaelic partner in crime fighting, Sgt. Gerry Boyle (Brendon Gleeson) is a small-town constable with a taste for sly, ironic wit. At first, Everett can't decide whether Boyle is brilliant or an oafish idiot.

Boyle is a bit weary of his life's work, policing petty crime and surveying auto accident scenes. Meanwhile, he's preoccupied with his mother, who is suffering from an unnamed illness that will soon end her days. As a country lawman, he's unprepared for the goings on when big-time gangsters come to his village (or is he?).

Much of the action sequences are appropriately brutal -- it's clear that these bad guys are not to be toyed with. But overall, the comical interplay between Gleeson and Cheedle is too disarming to call "The Guard" a hard-boiled crime story.

The film sets up the story's groundwork at a leisurely pace. But once it takes off we're hooked. By the end, the story almost magically elevates Gleeson's Sgt. Boyle to mythic proportions, although there's only the barest hint of magical realism in this film.

The ending pays homage to numerous films of the gangster genre, and without going into detail you'll recognize the climax if you're familiar with bad-guy films of the 1930s. Even if you aren't, this one stands on its own.

--Paul Parcellin

Eye Of The Storm: Film Hurls Fury Into Your Living Room

For East Coasters, the best crime movie for a stormy viewing: "Key Largo." Bogart, Bacall, Edward G. Robinson, revenge, revolvers and rum. All stuck in a Florida hurricane.

Kick on the generator, put the disc in the machine, turn down the lights and let the atmosphere wash over you.

Gleeson, Cheedle Crime Comedy Gets Thumbs Up

Critics say the crime film to see is "The Guard," opening this weekend in limited release. View trailer. It got a stunning 96 Percent Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Word of mouth has been strong. Check it out at the cinemaplex in your 'hood.

See Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle in a behind-the-scenes featurette from "The Guard."

Bomb Shelter Days: Remembering Atomic Hell Fire

Raise your hand if you recollect your parents setting up a bomb shelter in the basement around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

When the big one drops, they reasoned, we'll go live downstairs next to the oil burner and eat cold canned beans for a couple of weeks. First big rainstorm will wash away all the sneezing powder and we'll start again.

Those, my friend, were the days.

With the recent DVD re-release of "Kiss Me Deadly," the noir of the H-bomb age, I got to thinking about the good old days of nuclear holocaust paranoia, and how it's not such a big deal anymore.

In "Kiss Me Deadly," Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer, the private detective hero of Mickey Spillane's novels, is on the trail of a suitcase full of hot nuclear soup. He's not quite sure what it is, but he knows it packs a bad-ass wallop.

KMD would make a good double feature with "Pickup On South Street," with Richard Widmark as a pickpocket who unknowingly harvests some national security secrets from a mark's handbag. The government wants to get the microfilm back before the Communists do -- remember when they used to worry us? Now they lend us money and manufacture everything we own.

Both films are terrific in their own way. Robert Aldrich, who directed "Kiss Me Deadly," and Samuel Fuller, director of "Pickup On South Street" both effectively convey the tensions that existed in those times. Hammer resorts to bullying tactics to get to the bottom of the nuclear "whatsit" he's after. And he must, because the future of the planet is at stake.

Fuller puts the Commies in the hot seat. They will stop at nothing to get nuclear secrets. American G-Men have all the scruples, and are observant of the Constitution, no matter how difficult that makes their job.

Need I say that all of this seems quaint now?

These days, people with backpacks full of explosives are the ones who worry us. And as for atomic weapons, they seem about as modern and threatening as a cap and ball pistol in a firefight.

But if the unthinkable should happen and the H-bomb once again becomes the focal point of Western paranoia, I'm hedging my bets. Just look for me downstairs ... I'll be in the bomb shelter.

Get 'Ruthless' Via Online Streaming, Or Get Gone

The New York Times will report in its Sunday edition that Edgar G. Ulmer's "Ruthless"(1948), is available to stream from Netflix in its full 105 minute version, rather than the 88-minute public domain cut that's been the only version available for years.
Ulmer is also known for classic noirs "Detour" (1945) and "The Black Cat" (1934).
Check out Dave Kehr's column in the Sunday Times. It's quite humorous. He likens Netflix's "recommendations for you" in its online streaming setup to a "surly, underpaid" video store clerk from 1985, who insists you watch movies you have no interest in.
We've all been there.