Crime Jazz: How Miles Davis, Count Basie & Duke Ellington Created Soundtracks for Noir Films & TV

in Film, Music, Television | February 23rd, 2014

When we think of film noir, we tend to think of a mood best set by a look: shad­ow and light (most­ly shad­ow), grim but visu­al­ly rich weath­er, near-depop­u­lat­ed urban streets. You’ll see plen­ty of that pulled off at the height of the craft in the movies that make up “noir­chae­ol­o­gist” Eddie Muller’s list of 25 noir pic­tures that will endure, which we fea­tured last week. But what will you hear? Though no one com­po­si­tion­al style dom­i­nat­ed the sound­tracks of films noirs, you’ll cer­tain­ly hear more than a few sol­id pieces of crime jazz. Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing, writ­ing about Rhi­no’s epony­mous com­pi­la­tion album, defines this musi­cal genre as “jazzy theme music from 1950s TV shows and movies in which very bad peo­ple do very bad things.” She links to PopCult’s col­lec­tion of clas­sic crime jazz sound­track album cov­ers, from The Third Man to Cha­rade (the best Hitch­cock film, of course, that Hitch­cock nev­er made), to The Man With the Gold­en Arm, all as evoca­tive as the music itself.

“Pre­vi­ous­ly, movie music meant sweep­ing orches­tral themes or tra­di­tion­al Broad­way-style musi­cals,” says PopCult. “But with the grow­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of bebop and hard bop as the sound of urban cool, stu­dios began latch­ing onto the now beat as a way to make their movies seem grit­ty or ‘street.’ ”

At Jazz.com, Alan Kurtz writes about the spread of crime jazz from straight-up film noir to all sorts of pro­duc­tions hav­ing to do with life out­side the law: “In movies and TV, jazz accom­pa­nied the entire sor­did range of police-blot­ter behav­ior, from gam­bling, pros­ti­tu­tion and drug addic­tion to theft, assault, mur­der and cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment.” Get your­self in the spir­it of all those mid­cen­tu­ry degen­era­cies and more with the tracks fea­tured here, all of which will take you straight to an ear­li­er kind of mean street: the theme from The M Squad, “two min­utes of may­hem by Count Basie and his mob of heav­ies”; Miles Davis’ “Au Bar du Petit Bac,” impro­vised by Davis and his Parisian band against Louis Malle’s Ele­va­tor to the Gal­lows; and Ray Antho­ny’s “Peter Gunn Theme,” a “quick­ie cov­er” that “beat Hen­ry Mancini’s orig­i­nal to the punch.”

And final­ly we have Duke Elling­ton’s score for Anato­my of a Mur­der, direct­ed by Otto Pre­minger in 1959.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30 Free Noir Films

1959: The Year that Changed Jazz

The Nazis’ 10 Con­trol-Freak Rules for Jazz Per­form­ers: A Strange List from World War II

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, lit­er­a­ture, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Face­book page.

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The Roving Typist: A Short Film About a New York Writer Who Types Short Stories for Strangers

in Creativity, Film, Writing | February 21st, 2014

C.D. Her­melin, a lit­er­ary agency asso­ciate with a degree in Cre­ative Writ­ing, is the self-pro­claimed Rov­ing Typ­ist. It’s an apt title for one who achieved fame and for­tune — okay, rent mon­ey — by appear­ing in var­i­ous pub­lic spaces around New York City, type­writer in lap. Direc­tor Mark Cer­sosi­mo’s short film, above, intro­duces him as a mild-man­nered, slight­ly awk­ward soul. Engag­ing with strangers lured by the sign taped to his type­writer case is where Her­melin comes into his own.

The sign promis­es “sto­ries while you wait,” a con­cept that recalls the “Poems on Demand” author and writ­ing guru, Natal­ie Gold­berg, who com­posed poems to raise funds for the Min­neso­ta Zen Cen­ter. (Her­melin got his idea — and per­mis­sion to imple­ment it — from a guy he saw doing some­thing sim­i­lar in San Fran­cis­co.)

He’s open to requests, and pay­ment is left to the dis­cre­tion of the recip­i­ent. He seems to take extra care when his cus­tomer is a child.

A harm­less enough pur­suit in an era where sub­way musi­cians and car­i­ca­tur­ists lin­ing the path to the Cen­tral Park Zoo hus­tle hard­er than ‘90s-era shell game artistes.

It’s rea­son­able to assume that inno­cent­ly blun­der­ing onto a cel­lo play­er’s turf is the worst trou­ble a guy like Her­melin’s like­ly to stir up.

Instead, he became the tar­get of a mass cyber­bul­ly­ing cam­paign, after a stranger post­ed a pho­to of him and his type­writer parked on the High Line on a swel­ter­ing day in 2012. Cue an avalanche of hip­ster-hat­ing Red­dit com­ments, in addi­tion to a meme at his expense.

Rather than suc­cumb to the vast neg­a­tive out­pour­ing, the Rov­ing Typ­ist con­front­ed the sit­u­a­tion head on, pub­lish­ing his side of the sto­ry in The Awl:

Orig­i­nal­ly, it felt sil­ly label­ing my ven­ture a “cause” while I defend­ed myself to an anony­mous horde—but now it feels any­thing but. The expe­ri­ence of being labeled and then cast aside made me real­ize that what many peo­ple call “hip­ster­ism” or, what they per­ceive as a slav­ish devo­tion to irony, are often in fact just forms of extreme, rad­i­cal sin­cer­i­ty. I think of Brook­lyn-based “hip­ster” brand Mast Broth­ers Choco­late, which uses an old-fash­ioned schooner to retrieve their cacao beans, because the ener­gy is clean­er, because they think that’s how it should be done. I think of the legions of Etsy-type hand­made artist shops, of peo­ple who couldn’t make mon­ey in their pro­fes­sion, so found a way to make mon­ey with their art.

Sub­ject a whim­si­cal project to the forge, and it just might become a voca­tion.

Be sure to check out the bonus out­take “I Was  A Hat­ed Hip­ster Meme” and don’t fret if your trav­els won’t take you near New York City any­time soon. Her­melin and his type­writer are spend­ing the win­ter indoors, ful­fill­ing the pub­lic’s on-demand sto­ries via mail order.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Rees Presents a Primer on the Arti­sanal Craft of Pen­cil Sharp­en­ing

Humans of New York: Street Pho­tog­ra­phy as a Cel­e­bra­tion of Life

What Hap­pens When Every­day Peo­ple Get a Chance to Con­duct a World-Class Orches­tra in NYC

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the long run­ning zine, The East Vil­lage Inky. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Watch Behind-the-Scenes Footage of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket

in Film | February 20th, 2014

Vivian Kubrick, daugh­ter of the late, great film­mak­er, shot a behind-the-scenes movie about the mak­ing of The Shin­ing (1980) at the ten­der age of 17. For Full Met­al Jack­et (1987) – Stan­ley Kubrick’s next movie — Vivian not only com­posed the score under the pseu­do­nym Abi­gail Mead but she also shot 18 hours of footage for anoth­er planned doc­u­men­tary. That movie nev­er came to pass and most like­ly nev­er will; Vivian broke off all con­tact with her fam­i­ly in the late ‘90s.

Yet frag­ments of the behind-the-scenes footage have found their way into a cou­ple of doc­u­men­taries – Stan­ley Kubrick: A Life in Pic­tures, direct­ed by Kubrick’s long time pro­duc­er and broth­er-in-law Jan Har­lan and in Jon Ronson’s Stan­ley Kubrick’s Box­es. (Ron­son actu­al­ly dis­cov­ered the footage in a sta­ble house on the Kubrick estate.)

Some­one has help­ful­ly strung togeth­er the footage into a sin­gle video. See above. One of the first things that strike you is just how weird the shoot was. Though the film cli­max­es dur­ing the bat­tle of Hue in trop­i­cal Viet­nam, Kubrick is seen on set bark­ing orders in a win­ter coat. That’s because the movie was shot in Eng­land. An aban­doned gas works fac­to­ry near Lon­don, of all places, served as the war torn city.

Kubrick’s famed per­fec­tion­ism shines through in the video. He labors to get just the right spac­ing between lime-cov­ered actors play­ing corpses in an open grave and he tells his actors just how many groin pulls to do dur­ing the famous “this is my rifle, this is my gun” sequence. “It should be three shakes. This is…my…gun. In time to the thing.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Anno­tat­ed Copy of Stephen King’s The Shin­ing

The Mak­ing of Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing (As Told by Those Who Helped Him Make It)

Room 237: New Doc­u­men­tary Explores Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing and Those It Obsess­es

Rare 1960s Audio: Stan­ley Kubrick’s Big Inter­view with The New York­er

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

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Roger Ebert Lists the 10 Essential Characteristics of Noir Films

in Film | February 20th, 2014

A Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion list of Roger Ebert’s 141 “Great Movies” includes only two films noir—The Third Man and The Killing—yet the late great crit­ic had quite a lot to say about the genre. In an inter­view with radio show To the Best of Our Knowl­edge, for exam­ple, Ebert described noir films as teach­ing their char­ac­ters a les­son: “that they’re weak­er than they thought they were and they’re capa­ble of evil that they didn’t think they could com­mit.” His deeply philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sion will draw you into the nihilis­tic abyss at the heart of noir. And yet many of his reviews of such films com­ment as much on sur­faces as depths. For all their psy­cho­log­i­cal bru­tal­i­ty, noir films were noth­ing if not styl­ish.

Ebert’s enthu­si­as­tic review of 2005 neo-noir Sin City, for exam­ple, calls it a movie “not about nar­ra­tive but about style… a com­ic book brought to life and pumped with steroids.” Ten years ear­li­er, he wrote on the noir explo­sion of the mid-90s: “Not since its hey­day (rough­ly from 1940 to 1955) has film noir been more pop­u­lar than it is right now.” Ebert’s exam­ples are such hyper-styl­ized films as Pulp Fic­tion, Exot­i­ca, Sev­en, and even Bat­man For­ev­er, all of which ges­ture toward clas­si­cal noir loca­tions and cos­tum­ing fetish­es. And in our post yes­ter­day on 25 time­less noir films, we quot­ed from anoth­er 1995 Ebert piece. This time he writes on clas­sic noir char­ac­ter­is­tics, and brings togeth­er much of his think­ing on the grim themes and louche styl­is­tic man­ner­isms of the genre. Below, we have Ebert’s ten essen­tial com­ments, slight­ly abridged, on what “Film noir is…”

1. A French term mean­ing “black film,” or film of the night.
2. A movie which at no time mis­leads you into think­ing there is going to be a hap­py end­ing.
3. Loca­tions that reek of the night, of shad­ows, of alleys, of the back doors of fan­cy places, of apart­ment build­ings with a high turnover rate, of taxi dri­vers and bar­tenders who have seen it all.
4. Cig­a­rettes. Every­body in film noir is always smok­ing, as if to say, “On top of every­thing else, I’ve been assigned to get through three packs today.”
5. Women who would just as soon kill you as love you, and vice ver­sa.
6. For women: low neck­lines, flop­py hats, mas­cara, lip­stick, dress­ing rooms, boudoirs… high heels, red dress­es, elbow length gloves, mix­ing drinks […]
7. For men: fedo­ras, suits and ties, shab­by res­i­den­tial hotels with a neon sign blink­ing through the win­dow, buy­ing your­self a drink out of the office bot­tle, cars with run­ning boards, all-night din­ers […]
8. Movies either shot in black and white, or feel­ing like they were.
9. Rela­tion­ships in which love is only the final flop card in the pok­er game of death.
10. The most Amer­i­can film genre, because no soci­ety could have cre­at­ed a world so filled with doom, fate, fear and betray­al, unless it were essen­tial­ly naive and opti­mistic.

Be sure to see Ebert’s full piece here. Ebert loved all things noir, includ­ing com­ic book films like Sin City and Bat­man Begins. One of his favorite neo-noirs was Leav­ing Las Vegas (per­haps in part due to his own acknowl­edged alco­holism). But as he avers in his radio inter­view and in book The Great Movies, per­haps his favorite clas­sic noir film was Detour, “a movie so filled with imper­fec­tions that it would not earn the direc­tor a pass­ing grade in film school.” All the same, he writes, the film “lives on, haunt­ing and creepy, an embod­i­ment of the guilty soul of film noir.” Watch Edgar G. Ulmer’s “ham-hand­ed” yet unfor­get­table 1945 Detour above and learn more about the film in this pre­vi­ous post from Col­in Mar­shall.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

25 Noir Films That Will Stand the Test of Time: A List by “Noir­chael­o­gist” Eddie Muller

The Third Man: Film Noir Clas­sic on YouTube

Roger Ebert Talks Mov­ing­ly About Los­ing and Re-Find­ing His Voice (TED 2011)

The Two Roger Eberts: Emphat­ic Crit­ic on TV; Inci­sive Review­er in Print

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Who Directed the Psycho Shower Scene?: Hitchcock’s Film & Saul Bass’ Storyboards Side by Side

in Film | February 19th, 2014

The show­er scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psy­cho (1960) is eas­i­ly one the most viewed, ana­lyzed and parsed lengths of film in cin­e­ma his­to­ry. Con­struct­ed from over 70 shots, the scene shows Mar­i­on Crane (Janet Leigh) – the sup­posed pro­tag­o­nist of the movie – meet­ing a gory end at the hands of a cross-dress­ing Nor­man Bates 30 min­utes into the movie. Hitchcock’s quick edit­ing and his sub­jec­tive cam­era work bril­liant­ly evokes all the scene’s nudi­ty and trans­gres­sive vio­lence with­out actu­al­ly show­ing much of either. The scene freaked out audi­ences when it came out and 54 years lat­er, it still has the pow­er to shock. Crit­ic David Thom­son called it “legit­i­mate­ly among the most vio­lent scenes ever shot for an Amer­i­can film.”

Psy­cho went a long way toward cement­ing Hitchcock’s stand­ing as a cin­e­mat­ic auteur. So in 1970, sem­i­nal graph­ic design­er Saul Bass, who did the title sequence for the movie, made waves when he claimed that he direct­ed the show­er scene. His proof is his sto­ry­board, which shows a sequence of images that are sim­i­lar — though not exact­ly the same — as what end­ed up in the movie. Vashi Nedo­man­sky help­ful­ly placed Bass’s sto­ry­board along­side the actu­al movie. See above.

As you might notice, that eerie motif of the show­er head is not to be found on the sto­ry­boards. Oth­er images – the knife-wield­ing mur­der­er in sil­hou­ette, the blood spi­ral­ing down the drain, the cur­tain get­ting pulled from the rod – look like they came straight from Bass. And some have argued that the scene sim­ply looks more like Bass’s pre­vi­ous work than Hitchcock’s.

Oth­ers, includ­ing many of the peo­ple who were actu­al­ly on set, insist that Hitch­cock was at the helm. Janet Leigh — who, of course, was there for the dura­tion of the scene’s sev­en day shoot, scream­ing her head off – has been unequiv­o­cal about her thoughts on the mat­ter:

Saul Bass was there for the shoot­ing, but he nev­er direct­ed me. Absolute­ly not. Saul Bass is bril­liant, but he could­n’t have done the draw­ings had Mr. Hitch­cock not dis­cussed with him what he want­ed to get. And you could­n’t have filmed the draw­ings. Why does there always have to be con­tro­ver­sy?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rules for Watch­ing Psy­cho (1960)

Hitch­cock (Antho­ny Hop­kins) Pitch­es Janet Leigh (Scar­lett Johans­son) on the Famous Show­er Scene

A Brief Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Saul Bass’ Cel­e­brat­ed Title Designs

Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

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Scenes from Star Wars, The Godfather, Scarface and Other Classic Movies Adapted Into Ottoman-Style Paintings

in Art, Film | February 19th, 2014

STARWARS

Every now and again, we like to bring you a reimag­in­ing of an old clas­sic. Some time ago, for exam­ple, we post­ed about a rein­ven­tion of Star Wars: A New Hope, shot by scores of ardent fans, and spliced togeth­er from 15-sec­ond frag­ments. Today, we’re writ­ing about anoth­er project that grew out of a twist on Star Wars, called Clas­sic Movies in Minia­ture Style. Murat Pal­ta, a Turk­ish illus­tra­tor, decid­ed to com­bine a west­ern film with the intri­cate two-dimen­sion­al motifs found in Ottoman minia­ture paint­ings, and got the sur­re­al result that you see above. Pay par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to Han Solo’s smug grin, and Darth Vad­er dal­ly­ing to smell the ros­es.

With Ottoman Star Wars hav­ing gar­nered high marks from his pro­fes­sors, and hav­ing enjoyed the project, Pal­ta decid­ed to keep with his theme and illus­trate oth­er icon­ic movies in the same style. Here are a cou­ple of oth­er movie posters he’s pro­duced since:

SCARFACE

GODFATHER-1

As you prob­a­bly guessed, the first depicts the final moments of Scar­face (1983), where a coked-out Tony Mon­tana rains bul­lets on a team of assas­sins who have infil­trat­ed his lav­ish com­pound. In the sec­ond, a com­pendi­um of God­fa­ther scenes, a regal Don Cor­leone lis­tens to sup­pli­cants, as Jack Woltz, in the bot­tom left-hand cor­ner, finds his prized stallion’s sev­ered head in his bed. While the con­cept is clever, what real­ly stands out in Palta’s illus­tra­tions is the lev­el of detail, from Brando’s sour facial expres­sion, to Tony Montana’s fez. The remain­der of the posters on his web­site, which include The Shin­ing, Alien, and a ter­rif­ic ver­sion of A Clock­work Orange, are no less impres­sive.

For more of Murat Palta’s Ottoman movie posters, vis­it his page at Behance.net.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writ­ing at the Huff­in­g­ton Post.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Star Wars as Silent Film

Star Wars is a Remix

Star Wars Retold with Paper Ani­ma­tion

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25 Noir Films That Will Stand the Test of Time: A List by “Noirchaelogist” Eddie Muller

in Film | February 19th, 2014

Film noir received its name in 1946 when French crit­ic Nino Frank expressed his fas­ci­na­tion with dark Hol­ly­wood melo­dra­mas of the time. But noir as a genre only took shape ret­ro­spec­tive­ly, and the bit­ter argu­ments over what it is con­tin­ue to the present. I’ve always thought of film noir as the off­spring of Ger­man Expres­sion­ism, pulp fic­tion, and the hard-boiled crime nov­els of Ray­mond Chan­dler. Its characters—dangerous seduc­tress­es and “fall­en” women, cyn­i­cal detec­tives, sadis­tic vil­lains and amoral deviants of all kinds—are exag­ger­at­ed out­law mir­rors of the era’s vir­tu­ous every­man pro­tag­o­nists. Most noirs seem express­ly cre­at­ed to defy the Hays Code’s strong sug­ges­tion that “the sym­pa­thy of the audi­ence shall nev­er be thrown to the side of crime, wrong­do­ing, evil or sin.”

Alain Sil­ver, edi­tor of the Film Noir Read­er, dates “the clas­sic era of film noir” to “a fif­teen year span from You Only Live Once (1937) to Where Dan­ger Lives (1952).” But films as ear­ly as Fritz Lang’s 1931 M are dis­cussed in noir terms, and the aes­thet­ic per­sists, if only in homage or par­o­dy, as in the obvi­ous noir take-off Sin City. Roger Ebert con­cise­ly defined the genre in a short list of ten essen­tial fea­tures. Despite its French name and styl­is­ti­cal­ly Ger­man ori­gins, Ebert called it “the most Amer­i­can film genre, because no soci­ety could have cre­at­ed a world so filled with doom, fate, fear and betray­al, unless it were essen­tial­ly naive and opti­mistic.”

What­ev­er the genre’s bound­aries, I think it’s safe to say that film noir’s his­to­ry rests in good hands. The Film Noir Foun­da­tion has ded­i­cat­ed itself to “res­cu­ing and restor­ing America’s Film Noir Her­itage”; Film Noir Stud­ies aims to be a crit­i­cal resource for stu­dents, schol­ars, and fans alike. And per­haps best of all, we have Eddie Muller—self-described “word­slinger, impre­sario, noirchaelogist”—on the case. A very noir-ish char­ac­ter him­self, Muller, a sea­soned San Fran­cis­co reporter, barfly, box­ing enthu­si­ast, and adult film his­to­ri­an, defines film noir as “the flip side of the all-Amer­i­can suc­cess sto­ry.”

It’s about peo­ple who real­ize that fol­low­ing the pro­gram will nev­er get them what they crave. So they cross the line, com­mit a crime and reap the con­se­quences. Or, they’re tales about seem­ing­ly inno­cent peo­ple tor­tured by para­noia and ass-kicked by Fate. Either way, they depict a world that’s mer­ci­less and unfor­giv­ing. 

On his site, Muller has com­piled a list of “25 noir films that will stand the test of time.” His picks range from acknowl­edged clas­sics like Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty and Sun­set Boule­vard to less­er-known pic­tures like Raw Deal. Below, I’ve list­ed his favorites in the reverse order he prefers. Call­ing his list “End­less Night,” Muller asks us to “take this with a grain of salt” and to “con­sid­er the list­ing a sort of car­ni­val barom­e­ter, rang­ing from INFATUATED to PASSIONATE.”

25. Raw Deal (Eagle-Lion, 1948) — Avail­able on YouTube
24. City that Nev­er Sleeps (Repub­lic, 1952)
23. Touch of Evil (Uni­ver­sal, 1958)
22. Scar­let Street (Uni­ver­sal, 1945) — Avail­able on Open Cul­ture or watch above
21. Detour (PRC, 1945) — Avail­able on Open Cul­ture
20. Tomor­row is Anoth­er Day (Warn­er Bros., 1951)
19. The Prowler (Unit­ed Artists, 1950)
18. Gun Crazy (Unit­ed Artists, 1950)
17. Act of Vio­lence (MGM, 1949)
16. Odds Against Tomor­row (Unit­ed Artists, 1959)
15. The Killing (Unit­ed Artists, 1956)
14. They Live By Night (RKO, 1949)
13. Thieves’ High­way (20th Cen­tu­ry-Fox, 1949)
12. Sweet Smell of Suc­cess (Unit­ed Artists, 1958)
11. The Killers (Uni­ver­sal, 1946)
10. Moon­rise (Repub­lic, 1948) — Avail­able on YouTube
9.  Out of the Past (RKO, 1947)
8.  Night and the City (20th Cen­tu­ry-Fox, 1950)
7.  Night­mare Alley (20th Cen­tu­ry-Fox, 1947)
6.  The Mal­tese Fal­con (Warn­er Bros., 1941)
5.  Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty (Para­mount, 1944)
4.  The Asphalt Jun­gle (MGM, 1950)
3.  Sun­set Boule­vard (Para­mount, 1950)
2.  Criss Cross (Uni­ver­sal, 1949)
1.  In a Lone­ly Place (Colum­bia, 1950)

See Muller’s orig­i­nal arti­cle for his price­less com­men­tary on each film. And if his list piques your inter­est, be sure to vis­it our con­sid­er­able col­lec­tion of free online film noir clas­sics, all oth­er­wise found in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Fritz Lang’s Cen­sored Noir Film, Scar­let Street, Star­ring the Great Edward G. Robin­son (1945)

Detour: The Cheap, Rushed Piece of 1940s Film Noir Nobody Ever For­gets

Watch D.O.A., Rudolph Maté’s “Inno­v­a­tive and Down­right Twist­ed” Noir Film (1950)

The Third Man: Film Noir Clas­sic on YouTube

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Art of Restoring Classic Films: Criterion Shows You How It Refreshed Two Hitchcock Movies

in Film, Technology | February 19th, 2014

Why have cinephiles, from the era of Laserdiscs through that of DVDs and now Blu-rays, so con­sis­tent­ly respect­ed The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion? Speak­ing as one such cinephile, I could point to a num­ber of fac­tors: their cura­to­r­i­al bent toward impor­tant films, their pro­duc­tion of rich sup­ple­men­tary fea­tures, their always impres­sive pieces of cov­er art. But Cri­te­ri­on has become increas­ing­ly known for the con­sid­er­able work they put in not at the end of the process, when they pack­age a clas­sic or poten­tial­ly clas­sic motion pic­ture for max­i­mum aes­thet­ic and intel­lec­tu­al appeal (and your pur­chase), but at the begin­ning, when they track down the actu­al cel­lu­loid film in the first place, often aged or dam­aged, and engage in the often painstak­ing task of return­ing it to the prime of visu­al and son­ic life.

In the short Giz­mo­do video at the top, Cri­te­ri­on direc­tor Lee Kline and his team talk about the work they did to restore Alfred Hitch­cock­’s 1940 For­eign Cor­re­spon­dent, which includ­ed acquir­ing the neg­a­tive from the Library of Con­gress, scan­ning the whole thing at high res­o­lu­tion over two days to a week, doing the research nec­es­sary to fig­ure out how the film “should have looked,” clean up scratch­es and film dam­age, and fil­ter out the clicks and pops on the sound­track. (And yes, we get some insight into its “snazzy” cov­er design as well.) The Kline-nar­rat­ed video just above offers a demon­stra­tion of Cri­te­ri­on’s restora­tion process on anoth­er piece of clas­sic Hitch­cock, the first, 1934-made ver­sion of The Man Who Knew Too Much, a pic­ture with no known neg­a­tive still in exis­tence. A for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge, but if we film geeks entrust that job to any­one, we entrust it to Cri­te­ri­on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

21 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

The Restora­tion of a Mas­ter­piece, as Nar­rat­ed by Mar­tin Scors­ese

Watch The Plea­sure Gar­den, Alfred Hitchcock’s Very First Fea­ture Film (1925)

Alfred Hitch­cock Presents Some of the First Words Ever Spo­ken on Film …. and They’re Saucy Ones (1929)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, lit­er­a­ture, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Face­book page.

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