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13-11-2008 13:37
The film received seven Academy Award nominations including Best Actress for Barbarb Stanwyck, Best Picture and Best Director.
It's the first entry for legendary actor Humphrey Bogart in John Huston's 1941 picture The Maltese Falcon, a film in which he received true super stardom and was a last-minute substitution for George Raft.
Hard-drinking private eye Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) sleuths the backyard of San Francisco in search of an elusive black bird statuette while evading the setups of three disparate miscreants: the duplicitous Brigid, the perfumed Mr. Cairo, and the scheming Fat Man.
The Maltese Falcon was released to both critical and commercial acclaim and it's reputation as a classic of this genre has grown ever since. It went on to be nominated for three Oscars including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor for Sydney Greenstreet and Best Adapted Screenplay from John Huston.
In 1989, The Maltese Falcon was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Released in 1950 and directed by Billy Wilder Sunset Boulevard is often regarded as the best Hollywood movie about Hollywood. Narrated in flashbacks by the now-deceased scribe, the film unwinds the series of events that left him lying face down in a pool. Unable to sell his most recent chef-d'oeuvre, and in hock up to his eyeballs, Joe stashes his car in the driveway of what appears to be an abandoned mansion on Sunset Boulevard while trying to elude some persistent repo men.
Closer inspection reveals the decrepit property to be inhabited by grandiose former silent movie goddess Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), and her zombie-like manservant Max (Erich von Stroheim). Upon hearing that he's a writer, the lonely but still wealthy woman offers to pay him generously to stay at the house and work on her "comeback" script on the life of Salome.
Although spooked by the people and the surroundings, in desperate straits, Joe takes the job, little suspecting the madness of the netherworld he's entered. Wilder's merciless portrait of the dangers of a profession that trades in fantasy cagily couples the cynical amorality of the never-was with the near-psychotic narcissism of the has-been to reveal the vacuity of wealth and the transience of fame.
Starring William Holden and Gloria Swanson the film opened to great critical acclaim was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won three including Best Writing, Story and Screenplay for Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and D.M. Marshman Jr.
Film noir The Big Sleep, which was directed by Hawks, and was the second pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in 1946, and the second film by Bogart to appear in our little stroll down film noir lane.
Private Eye Philip Marlowe (Bogart) is hired by wealthy socialite Vivian Sternwood to look into the trouble cased by her younger sister Carmen. He follows a trail of murder, pornography, nightclub rogues and the spoiled rich.
Since its release in 1946 The Big Sleep has become a cinematic classic cementing Bacall and Bogart as an on-screen acting force. In 1997, the U.S. Library of Congress deemed this film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and preserved to the National Film Registry.
Out of the Past is the last film in our look at some of the best film noir pictures released in 1947 and starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas.
Mitchum stars as existential antihero Jeff Markham, a retired private detective with a shady past who is hoping for a fresh start with a new name, a new love, and a new job running a small gas station in a rural California town.
But Jeff's past comes back to haunt him in the guise of menacing gangster Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas, in only his second big screen role), who had hired Markham to track down his double-crossing moll, Kathie (Jane Greer, in definitive femme-fatale mode), after she had shot him and absconded with $40,000 of his money.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw
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