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Category Archives: Heist films
Register for on-line NoirCon 2022
Those of you who have been following my site for a while now may have seen me post about NoirCon previously. A celebration of all things noir in film, literature, art and anything else you care to mention, NoirCon was previously held as a face-to-face gathering in Philadelphia, but has been cancelled for the last few years, due to Covid and other problems.
Well, now it is back, this year as an online gathering.
NoirCon will take place Friday-Saturday, October 21-23, EST. Virtual NoirCon 2022 will be held on the Accelevents platform. An all-access pass covering the entire conference is $36. Registration includes access to the Accelevents platform for 30 days after the event, so attendees can re-watch events or catch up on panels they missed.
NoirCon is hands down the best literary/arts festival I have attended. The exact program is not live yet but whatever the fevered mind of NoirCon organiser Lou Boxer has dreamt up in terms of a program, I have no doubt it’ll be good, including new events and events that would have been held in previous cancelled versions of the program. So if you have any interest in noir at all and are able to make the time zone work for you, you should definitely register at this link.… Read more
Posted in 1960s American crime films, 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films, 1990s American crime films, Asian noir, Australian noir, Crime fiction, Crime film, David Goodis, Femme fatale, Film Noir, French cinema, Heist films, Neo Noir, Noir Con, Noir fiction, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp paperback cover art, Tart noir, Tartan Noir, True crime
Tagged Halley Sutton, Lou Boxer, Nikki Dolson, noir art, Noir Con 2022, noir fiction, noir film, NoirCon, Richie Narvaez, Scott Adlerberg
10 underappreciated American neo-noirs of the early 1970s
The domestic blowback of the Vietnam War. The sleaze and corruption of Watergate. The incipient rollback of the counterculture and many gains of the 1960s. Economic recession. The upheaval and uncertainty in the 1970s may have been tough on America’s collective psyche, but it resulted in some incredibly good crime cinema, particularly prior to Jaws in 1975, which helped to usher in the culture of the cinematic blockbuster.
And while I will happily admit to being a due paying member of the First-half-of-the-1970s-was-a-great-period-of-American-crime-cinema-fan-club, it does strike me that we tend to focus on the same handful of films from this period over and over. Yes, The French Connection and Shaft (1971), The Godfather (1972), The Friends of Eddie Coyle and The Long Goodbye (1973), and Chinatown (1974), are all masterful neo noirs that in some way enlarged the culture’s notion of what crime cinema could be.
But the wellspring of American neo noir on the screen in the first half of the decade runs very deep, and it pays major viewing dividends to explore it more widely. My latest piece for the US site CrimeReads looks at ten underappreciated neo noirs from the first half of the seventies that are worth your time. You can read the piece in full on the CrimeReads site via this link.… Read more
Posted in 1960s American crime films, 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films, Anthony Zerbe, Blaxsploitation, Cinema culture, Crime film, Heist films, John Frankenheimer, Neo Noir, Noir fiction, Paul Newman, Robert Stone, Stuart Rosenberg, Yaphet Kotto
Tagged 1970s American crime films, Busting (1974), Harry in Your Pocket (1973), Neo Noir, Report to the Commissioner (1975), Save the Tiger (1973), The Day of the Wolves (1971), The Laughing Policeman (1973), The Nickel Ride (1974), Top of the Heap (1972), Wanda (1970), WUSA (1970)
Ten underappreciated American noirs of the late 1950s and 1960s
While preparing for a recent appearance on a podcast episode about John Boorman’s 1967 film, Point Blank, I thought a lot about American noir cinema of the very late 1950s and the 1960s. I find it interesting that so many of the films made during this time remain unknown and underappreciated relative to the classic film noir period, generally regarded as beginning with John Huston’s 1941 classic The Maltese Falcon and ending in 1958, and the body of American crime cinema known as neo noir, which took off in the early 1970s. My latest piece for the US site CrimeReads is on this strange, partly forgotten period of American noir cinema that came between classic film noir & 1970s neo-noir, and 10 great underrated/unknown films that were released during it. You can read it in full on the CrimeReads site here.… Read more
Posted in 1960s American crime films, 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films, Crime film, Film Noir, Heist films, Neo Noir
Tagged 1960s noir, American noir cinema, City of Fear (1959), Johnny Cool (1963), late noir, Mickey One (1965), noir cinema, Private Property (1960), Seconds (1966), The Boston Strangler (1968), The Detective (1968), Uptight (1969), Who Killed Teddy Bear? (1965)
Projection Booth podcast #546: Point Blank (1967)
It was a great pleasure to be able to perform co-hosting on the Projection Booth podcast for the second time in as many months, this time alongside my friend Jedidiah Ayres, on an episode about one of my favourite crime films, John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967). In addition to the film and how it figured in the careers of Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson and Boorman, we talked about its place in 1960s American crime cinema, the film’s take on violence, and how it related to it literary source material the character of the hardboiled master thief Parker who appeared in the books of Richard Stark aka Donald Westlake. We also spent a fair bit of time talking about other cinematic adaptations of Parker, particularly Brian Helgeland’s 1999 film Payback – which was based on the same 1962 Parker book as Point Blank, The Hunter – and Payback’s various versions. It is a great episode and you can listen to it in full at the Projection Booth site via this link.… Read more
Posted in 1960s American crime films, 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films, Angie Dickinson, Crime fiction, Crime film, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Heist films, Lee Marvin, Neo Noir
Tagged 1960s American crime cinema, Angie Dickinson, Brian Helgeland, John Boorman, Lee Marvin, Payback (1999), Payback Straight Up (2006), Point Blank (1967), The Projection Booth podcast
Fifty years later, Get Carter is still the iconic British gangster film

When you get a moment, my latest for the CrimeReads site is on 50 years of Get Carter, how the Michael Caine revenge flick attained cult status and changed the face of British crime cinema. I don’t think Get Carter is the best British gangster film ever made but it is certainly the most influential. You can read my piece in full at this site via this link.… Read more
Posted in British crime cinema, British pulp fiction, Crime film, Heist films, Michael Caine, Neo Noir, Noir fiction, Richard Burton, Stanley Baker, Ted Lewis
Tagged British gangster cinema, crime films set in northern England, Get Carter (1971), Jack's Return Home, Michael Caine, Mike Hodges, Ted Lewis