The first in my ten-part Film Noir Marathon. This week Peter Lorre comes out of the shadows in Fritz Lang's M, from 1931.
For those not "in the know", I've decided to start on a 10-movie Film Noir Marathon since my knowledge of the genre is a bit lacking. I'll be viewing one film a week and posting a review, each Thursday, for the next nine weeks. The first film up is M by director Fritz Lang. It was made in 1931 (one of the first Film Noirs) and was Fritz Lang's first movie with sound. It also made a star of Peter Lorre, who in M portrays a murderer of children eluding the police and the underground world of crooks angry about the bad publicity he is bringing them. Below is my review and following it is a finalized list of the next nine films.…
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26 - Gordon Hauptfleisch
Scott--Sometimes plots take a back seat and it doesn't matter. Such may be the case with the Thin Man movies, but it was especially true with The Big Sleep. You probably know this already, but at one point during the filming of it, the director Howard Hawks and the screenwriters (which included William Faulkner) couldn't determine who killed one particular minor character in a scene. So they consulted Raymond Chandler, and even though he had written the original novel, he didn't know either. They all figured it didn't matter anyway, that people wouldn't notice.
And indeed, the greatness of Big Sleep for me at least, lies with the characters, the atmosphere, and especially the lines ("She was trying to sit on my lap, and I was standing up at the time"). Trying to figure out the convoluted plot almost gets in the way of all that.
27 - Scott Butki
Excellent point. Normally I'm bothered by plots that don't make sense but there are exceptions and you named a perfect one. Another one for me was Memento - I wasn't sure who did what and indeed there are various examples of what might be happening.But there are enough other things that were great about the movie to make up for it.