noir

Who Killed Teddy Bear? (1965)

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Who Killed Teddy Bear? is a 1965 neo-noir about a woman named Norah Dain who receives threatening phone calls from an unknown stalker, whose attentions escalate. You might not know that the identity of the stalker is meant to be unknown if you read virtually any synopsis, including the one that appears when you select the film on just about any streaming service where it is housed, or on the Google search results landing page. I’m telling you this now so you can avert your eyes as much as possible in navigating to watch this one, which I (mostly) recommend. 

Norah (Juliet Prowse, who was involved with both Elvis and Frank Sinatra at the same time in 1962!) has a small life, but it’s her own. She works at a discotheque as a DJ under the watchful eye of the world-weary but rapier-witted Marian (Elaine Stritch). It’s a job that occasionally means that drunken men try to get handsy with her, but it’s the kind of classy joint with not only waiters like Larry (Sal Mineo) but also hulking doormen like Carlo (Dan Travanty) to take care of men who get a little too familiar. On one such night, Carlo tosses a man into the alley, but gets slashed by the man when he turns his back, forcing Carlo, Marian, and Norah to go to the station to provide statements. There, Norah meets Lt. Dave Madden (Jan Murray), who appears to become interested when he overhears about the heavy-breather who keeps calling her at all hours. She continues to get these calls, and, until the midpoint, we are kept in suspense about who keeps making them. Could it be that the supposedly mute Carlo was being overprotective of Norah the night he was hurt, because he has his own interest? Could it be the slasher himself, who escaped into the night? Perhaps it’s soft-spoken Larry, who checks in on Norah whenever men pester her. It might even be Lt. Madden himself, who seems to become over-invested in Norah’s situation very quickly, and who is seen performing such odd behavior as listening to recordings of the calls. 

For the first half, the identity of the lecherous caller is hidden behind a series of interesting, noir visuals: a hand that seeks and finds a pack of cigarettes, only to find them empty and crush the package in a rage; gaussy shots of the man’s body as the camera’s focus renders his white-knuckle grip on the telephone in the foreground in stark relief; the corner of a mouth peeking around the jet black phone receiver, twisted in a leering grin. Although the implied sexual violence is palpable, there’s also something strangely erotic about the way that the film’s eye lingers on the killer’s muscular frame. Like a Grindr photo, he’s a torso without a face, and the way that he’s often almost-but-not-quite touching himself makes this feel like an under-the-radar muscleman flick. Both he and Norah are presented in states of undress, but in her case, the image is impersonal and detached, as we see her through Madden’s eyes as she changes, while the images of the killer’s body are intimate, almost first person, with no room for us to create a level of rhetorical distance between ourselves and the image. There’s something about it that reminds me of Dead Calm, where Billy Zane’s killer character is obviously dangerous and unstable, but also undeniably sexy, both in the text and the metatext. 

The film takes its title from a question asked by Larry’s sister Edie (Margot Bennett), a developmentally disabled young woman who he looks after. Her childlike innocence is framed as a foil to the worldly knowledge of Madden’s daughter, Pam (Diane Moore), who is younger but has learned too much about how the world and its dangers operate, both as the result of losing her mother to a random act of violence and from being too aware of her father’s work as he obsesses over criminal deviance. The men are likewise foils to one another, and although I won’t say who the killer is (or even if it’s one of these two), Madden is by far the more menacing to Norah. He’s hard-boiled and has a chip on his shoulder, and although that’s not an uncommon thing for a police character for this era and this genre, he’s boorish and pushy to the modern viewer. Despite the fact that his behavior ties this film to a certain place and time, there are many elements, especially in the cinematography, that feel very modern. There are multiple scenes in which Norah is followed around the city that are clearly shot from a moving car, which could easily be a normal tracking shot but because of its handheld-like camera movement, it creates a sense of unease as the audience is put in the point of view of her stalker, unless she isn’t being stalked at all. The scene in which the killer, in an attempt to purge himself of his sexual urges, wanders the streets of the city and stares into the windows of erotic bookstores is fantastic (as long as your brain hasn’t been completely broken by that Kath & Kim gay panic scene, which resembles this sequence). Where the film feels the most dated, however, is in its ending. Yes, Norah’s stalker does eventually get her alone and forces himself upon her, and it’s very distressing, before he meets his end at the hands of the police; this was, after all, the final year of the Hayes Code, so he must. But as a late-60s noir piece, there’s a lot to enjoy here, especially since this one often seems to end up on various free, ad-supported streaming services. It’s an oddball, but worth finding. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Johnny Handsome (1989)

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I just finished reading the deceptively dense travel guide San Francisco Noir by essayist Nathaniel Rich, which doubles as both a guided tour of San Francisco’s many character-defining landmarks and a critical history of “the city in film noir from 1940 to the present.”  There are so many noirs set in San Francisco that Rich is able to map out all of the city’s disparate moods & neighborhoods by cataloging how they’ve been portrayed onscreen in that one specific genre, frequently stopping the tour for incisive, short-form reviews of the dozens of noirs set in and around The Bay.  As a movie nerd, the book was a great way to familiarize myself with a city I love to visit but never get to stay long enough to feel submerged below its touristy surface.  As a New Orleanian, it made me jealous.  Besides the impracticality of its distance from Los Angeles, why is it that so few classic noirs were set in New Orleans compared to the seemingly infinite noirs of San Francisco?  Reading through Rich’s illustrated history of his port city’s deep well of art, music, crime, sex, and scandal, I couldn’t shake the feeling that all of the hallmarks that made San Francisco such a perfect setting for noir are echoed in my own city’s alluringly sordid history.  And yet I can only name a few classic noir titles I’ve seen set on New Orleans streets: New Orleans Uncensored, Swamp Women, and Panic in the Streets.  That’s a relatively puny list when compared to such formidable San Francisco noir titles as The Maltese Falcon, The Lady from Shanghai, Out of the Past, and Vertigo.

It turns out I’m not the only person convinced of New Orleans’s hospitality to noir moods & tropes, as I found Roger Ebert entertaining the same thought in his 1989 review of the Walter Hill neo-noir Johnny Handsome.  Ebert wrote, “Johnny Handsome comes out of the film noir atmosphere of the 1940s, out of movies with dark streets and bitter laughter, with characters who live in cold-water flats and treat saloons as their living rooms.  It is set in New Orleans, a city with a film noir soul, and it stars Mickey Rourke as a weary loser who has just about given up on himself.”  Struck by Ebert’s assessment of New Orleans’s “film noir soul,” I dug into his other contemporary reviews of New Orleans-set thrillers starring the leads of Johnny Handsome.  The results were mostly silly, including a thumbs-down dismissal of Hard Target (featuring Johnny Handsome villain Lance Henriksen) as being “not very smart and not very original” and a positive review of Angel Heart (also starring Mickey Rourke) that describes the West Bank neighborhood of Algiers as a “town across from New Orleans that makes the fleshpots of Bourbon Street look like Disneyland.”  Sure, Roger.  I’m glad I kept digging, though, because his 1987 review of the neo-noir erotic thriller The Big Easy (which shares a star with Johnny Handsome‘s secondary villain, Ellen Barkin), captures the city’s “film noir soul” perfectly in the paragraph, “The movie takes place in New Orleans, that most mysterious of American cities, a city where you can have the feeling you never will really know what goes down on those shadowy passages into those green and humid courtyards so guarded from the street.”  That’s some good poetry.

As you can likely tell by my stalling to discuss this film directly by recapping the works of more talented & prestigious film critics, Johnny Dangerously is not especially interesting, at least not when compared to the rest of its era’s New Orleans crime pictures.  It’s not as scuzzy as Angel Heart, nor as steamy as The Big Easy, nor as deliriously over-the-top as Hard Target.  Its one claim to novelty among the other 80s New Orleans crime thrillers starring its central trio of volatile performers is that it’s the most faithful to the genre’s classic noir roots.  Johnny Handsome evokes the drunken, downtrodden storytelling logic of vintage crime story paperbacks, ones written decades before its actual 1970s source material.  Walter Hill reportedly dragged his feet on adapting that novel for years despite multiple offers, but his eventual decision to move its setting from New Jersey to New Orleans and to frame it within a traditionalist noir sensibility makes perfect sense for the material.  The results just aren’t particularly exciting.  Johnny Handsome is bookended by two heists: an early one in which Rourke’s titular disfigured anti-hero is abandoned by his gangster cohorts (Barkin & Henriksen) while looting a French Quarter jewelry store, and a climactic one in which he pays them back by trapping them in a doomed robbery of a shipyard construction site.  Both sequences are fantastic, but there’s a lot of dead air between, which Hill mostly fills with achingly sincere melodrama about a supposedly reformed criminal who can’t seem to get out of the game.  It’s the same level of heightened pastiche he brought to his 50s greaser throwback Streets of Fire, but something about it feels weirdly subdued & unenthused this go-round.

There are actually two old-school genre tributes at play in Johnny Handsome, both of which are signaled to the audience in black & white flashback.  While the film’s classic noir tropes are introduced in an early flashback washed in an aged sepia tone, its simultaneous echo of German Expressionist horror is presented in a starker Xerox contrast.  We’re told that Johnny Handsome was born with a monstrous, mutated face, even though he honestly doesn’t look too out of place in the context of The French Quarter – a circus without tents.  His disfigurement is important to the plot, though, so much so that Hill allowed Rourke to mumble his lines under heavy prosthetics to achieve the effect.  After getting busted during the first botched heist and before plotting to launch the second, Rourke finds himself imprisoned in Angola, where a kind mad scientist (Forest Whitaker) offers to lessen his sentence if he agrees to experimental facial reconstruction surgery.  The surgery goes so well that Rourke is able to insert himself into his old, leather-clad cohorts’ lives incognito, luring them into participating in their own demise with the second heist.  That sci-fi aspect of the plot has a distinct Hands of Orlac feel to it, which was also echoed in contemporary thrillers like Scalpel & Body Parts to much greater effect.  At least Johnny Handsome switches up the formula by combining its German Expressionist patina with classic noir tropes.  It’s a unique genre hybrid, even if subtly played, and it all comes together beautifully by the time the semi-reformed Rourke’s new girlfriend is practically screeching at his old frenemies, “No! No, don’t cut up Johnny’s beautiful face!”

All of the classic New Orleans noirs I’ve seen are fairly mediocre pictures.  Most of the San Francisco noirs covered in Nathaniel Rich’s book are mediocre too, which is true of most movie genres and of all art everywhere.  By the erotic thriller boom of the 1980s (which was essentially just neo-noir with an emphasis on video store sleaze), the movie industry had caught up with New Orleans’s noir potential and set some pretty great crime thrillers here: The Big Easy, Angel Heart, Tightrope, Cat People, Down By Law, etc.  Johnny Dangerously is far from the best example of that wave of locally set 80s thrillers, but it’s the one that best evokes the city’s classic-period noir past that never was.  I enjoyed the movie less as a sincere, in-the-moment thriller than I appreciated it as a what-could’ve-been simulation of what New Orleans’s “film noir soul” might’ve looked like if given the same amount of screentime as San Francisco noir in the genre’s heyday. 

-Brandon Ledet

U Turn (1997)

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I never had much interest in Oliver Stone as a filmmaker, but I have plenty lingering fascination with Jennifer Lopez as an actor.  Besides her career-making role portraying pop idol Selena in an eponymous biopic and her music video performances of her own dance club hits, Lopez is most often thought of as a romcom actor – the kind of beautiful but relatable sweetheart archetype usually played by Julia Roberts & Sandra Bullock.  Maybe I’ve just happened to see one too many TV broadcasts of titles like The Wedding Planner, Monster-in-Law, and Maid in Manhattan, but I always feel like Lopez’s filmography as an actor is culturally misremembered for being lighter & breezier than it actually is.  Early in her career, Lopez worked on some fairly daring, hard-edged thrillers, most notably Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, Tarsem’s The Cell, and Stone’s sunlit neo-noir U Turn.  Maybe the wide cultural revulsion towards her gangster hangout comedy Gigli (which admittedly deserves the scorn) made Lopez a lot more careful in choosing daring, divisive projects.  Or maybe Hollywood producers foolishly overlooked her enduring sex appeal as she aged, redistributing her early sex-symbol thriller roles to the next hungry twentysomething down the line and, in the case of Hustlers, roping her in as their mentor.  I don’t have a firm handle on how or why Jennifer Lopez slowly softened the overall tone of her filmography, but I do know that it was exciting to pick up a DVD copy of 1997’s U Turn at a local thrift store, my ambivalence towards its director be damned.  It felt like a lost dispatch from JLo’s grittier, thrillier past, one that thankfully did not repeat the intensely sour notes of my recent, ill-advised thrift store purchase of Gigli.

The overbearing Oliver Stoneness of U Turn is impossible to ignore.  Stone shoots its American desert setting with the same hyperactive, multimedia style that he pushed past its limits in Natural Born Killers, violently alternating between handheld music video angles, flashes of black & white film grain, and the drunken fish-eye perspective of a 1990s breakfast cereal commercial.  Fortunately, it’s an improved revision of that distinctive NBK excess, slowing down and spacing out each stylistic flourish so that the intentionally bumpy ride isn’t so unintentionally shrill.  Sean Penn stars opposite JLo as the doomed lovers on this particular crime spree, except the spree is a nonstarter and the romance is a con job.  While smuggling a duffel bag stuffed with overdue loan money to the impatient Vegas gangsters he owes, Penn blows his muscle car engine in rural Arizona, forcing the self-described big city “slimy bastard” to spend a sunburnt eternity with small-town hicks he openly despises.  Juaquin Phoenix, Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Voight, Claire Danes, and Powers Booth put in over-the-top caricature performances as the local lunatics who torment Penn as the universe at large seemingly conspires to block his exit.  Only Jennifer Lopez & Nick Nolte matter much to the narrative, though, playing Penn’s femme fatale seductress and her abusive, “slimy bastard” husband.  Both spouses attempt to seduce Penn into killing each other for a cut of the insurance money, but only one is nuclear-hot enough to win him over to her side.  Penn & Lopez’s murderous “romance” is mostly a nonstop back & forth of double-triple-quadruple crossings as they repeatedly backstab each other in their selfish attempts to escape their respective prisons: Penn’s small-town purgatory and Lopez’s abusive marriage.  It’s basically Oliver Stone’s 90s-era update to the classic Poverty Row noir Detour, which Stone makes glaringly obvious by including multiple shots of “DETOUR” road signs framed from zany music video angles.

There’s a lot of poorly aged, Oliver Stoney bullshit to wade through here, from the long list of shitheel contributors (Penn chief among them) to their casual cross-racial casting, to the post-Tarantino antihero crassness of the “slimy bastard” gangsters at the forefront.  I was most bothered by the lengthy, onscreen depictions of misogynist violence that Lopez suffers, both because it’s frustratingly common to what young Hollywood actress are offered (before they become chipper romcom darlings) and because it feels sleazily, unforgivably eroticized.  A more thematically focused, purposeful version of U Turn would only allow bad things to happen to Penn, since its sense of cosmic menace is built entirely on his impossible, Exterminating Angel style mission to speed away from rural Arizona.  Lopez makes the most of her role as the horned-up victim turned manipulative seductress, but it’s all in service of a tired misogynist trope.  Luckily, Stone makes up for the scatterbrained, unfocused themes of his writing (alongside screenwriter & source material novelist John Ridley) in the scatterbrained, unfocused visuals of his direction.  He shoots roadside buzzards from the low angles & wide lenses of a Beastie Boys video.  He shamelessly lifts Spike Lee’s signature double-dolly shot, scores the small-towners’ grotesque bullying of Penn with cartoonish mouth-harp boings, and just generally bounces around the desert sand with nothing but expensive camera equipment and a prankster’s spirit guiding the way.  As nastily blackhearted as U Turn can be, its visual style is buoyantly playful and excitingly volatile, somehow smoothing out the jagged annoyance of Natural Born Killers into something genuinely entertaining.  It’s both a major red-flag indicator of why Jennifer Lopez might have abandoned her early collaborations with high-style auteurs and a nostalgia stoker for the more exciting, challenging work she was doing in that era. 

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #180: Gentlemen Prefer Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) to Blonde (2022)

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Welcome to Episode #180 of The Swampflix Podcast.  For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss the classic films and lasting legacy of Marilyn Monroe, from her beloved comedies like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) to her post-modern post mortem Blonde (2022).

00:00 Welcome

2:00 Krewe Divine
3:30 Divine Trash (1998)
4:36 Attachment (2023)
8:35 SexWorld (1978)
12:15 Bijou (1972)
15:58 The Red Shoes (1948)
18:10 A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
20:35 Chan is Missing (1982)
21:51 Caravaggio (1986)

26:04 Blonde (2022)
44:30 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
58:56 Some Like It Hot (1959)
1:16:23 Niagara (1953)
12:25:25 Don’t Bother to Knock (1952)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Podcast Crew

Lost Highway (1997)

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how noir antiheroes are mostly just sad sack losers who make their own shit luck by feeling sorry for themselves, by which I mean I recently rewatched Edward G. Ulmer’s Detour.  Noir always looks different after watching Detour.  The Poverty Row production values look dreamlike & otherworldly instead of limited & cheap; the femmes fatales seem more deliberately, deliciously vicious in their misandry; and, most glaringly, the tough-guy alcoholics at the genre’s center start looking like whiny babies instead of macho lone wolves. Apparently, David Lynch sees the genre through those same grubby Detour lenses.  At the very least, his 1990s neo-noir Lost Highway turns the interchangeability of the genre’s drunken mopes into a kind of existential crisis. A Lynchian nightmare, if you will.  He tells two loosely connected noir stories about two unremarkable, pouty men, then gradually makes it clear they’re just same story repeated.  They’re all the same story, with the same miserable sad sacks circling the same drains.

Bill Pullman stars as a mopey saxophonist frustrated by his loosening grip on his straying LA hipster girlfriend (not unlike the down-and-out pianist who loses his girlfriend to her own Hollywood starlet ambitions in Detour).  Until he doesn’t.  Pullman disappears after the first act, inexplicably transforming into a young-dumb-and-full-of-cum teen mechanic played by Balthazar Getty, who quickly gets into his own girlfriend troubles when he falls for a gangster’s moll.  With Lost Highway, Lynch twists himself in knots trying to make the James from Twin Peaks archetype genuinely compelling in a second draft . . . and he eventually gets there, even if the slack-jawed, leather-jacketed drip needs a little supernatural help from a legit movie star like Pullman to pull it off.  Of course, neither of these parallel losers are as compelling as the femmes fatales that get them in lethal, cosmic trouble—both played by Patricia Arquette—but then again they never are. 

Because this is a David Lynch film, I’m zapping some of its magic just by “explaining” what happens and how it relates to larger genre filmmaking traditions.  So much of Lost Highway is composed of hypnotizing highway lines, Skinimarinkian hallways, and UFO-landing strobe lights that reducing it to a loose collection of noir tropes is somewhat insulting and very much beside the point.  Still, you don’t really need to hear that Lynch uses red velvet drapes to mark the boundary between reality & the dream world, or that the dream-logic procession of the plot(s) defies rational explanation; you’ve seen a David Lynch movie, you get it.  The only vivid deviations from his go-to formula are the temporal markers of when it was made: a Trent Reznor-supervised soundtrack, a Marilyn Manson cameo in a stag night porno, a mid-film spoof of road safety PSAs, etc.  On that front, real-life monster Robert Blake might outshine Arquette as the film’s MVP, dressed in the usual ghoulish make-up as one of Lynch’s trademark specters of Death, except this time armed with a menacing camcorder that updates the usual formula with some weirdo 90s video art.  It’s all very eerie, off-putting, frustrating, and strangely compelling, which is to say that it is a David Lynch film.

I do find it helpful to have some kind of a contextual anchor to help appreciate Lynch’s work.  I don’t want to be the guy who “maps out” the identity shifts, time loops, and dreamworld symbolism of Lost Highway as if it were a puzzle to be solved, but I also find very little enjoyment in the late-career formlessness of projects like Inland Empire and Twin Peaks: The Return, so it helps to seek a little guiding structure under the heavy layers of nightmare logic.  It’s the Philistine position to take, but I truly believe Lynch was at his best in his early career, when his most far-out, for-their-own-sake impulses were still somewhat tempered by Hollywood storytelling conventions.  With Wild at Heart and Lost Highway in the 90s, there was still just enough recognizable genre structure beneath Lynch’s loopy surface aesthetics that he hadn’t yet completely lost me. Hell, I’d even rank Wild at Heart high among his very best.  He was already pushing his subliminal anti-logic to its late-career extremes, but I detect enough familiar noir DNA in Lost Highway‘s bones to not feel totally abandoned.  And a lot of that has to do with how mopey & ineffectual its two parallel leads are at center stage, and how much fun Patricia Arquette has crushing them under her heels (when she’s not getting crushed herself by even more vicious bullies further up the Hollywood food chain).

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #179: A Detour into 1940s Noir

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Welcome to Episode #179 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of 1940s noir classics, starting with Edgar G. Ulmer’s Poverty Row cheapie Detour (1945).

00:00 Welcome

01:04 Infinity Pool (2023)
06:12 Liz: The Elizabeth Taylor Story (1995)
08:53 The Big Chill (1983)
13:51 Deep End (1970)
19:10 The 4th Man (1983)

26:23 Detour (1945)
46:44 The Letter (1940)
1:07:45 Laura (1944)
1:17:25 The Lady from Shanghai (1947)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Podcast Crew

Decision to Broker

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There are two new high-profile, Korean-set detective dramas currently making the rounds, directed by Park Chan-wook and Hirokazu Kore-Eda.  Anyone familiar with the beloved auteurs’ past work would expect their latest films to be incomparable outside some light genre overlap and a shared national setting. They’d be right. Broker and Decision to Leave are tonally & narratively distinct enough that I’m likely doing them a disservice by lumping them together here, but as a pair I do think they indicate an interesting, mirrored career shift for their respective auteurs.  I know Park Chan-wook as an over-the-top sensationalist, one who pushes the boundaries of good taste & genre tropes within the confines of finely tuned, exquisitely staged chamber dramas.  By contrast, I know Hirokazu Kore-Eda as a restrained, observational dramatist who finds grand emotion & political importance in small, subtle gestures.  What makes their dual 2022 detective stories interesting as a pair is the way the two directors are both reaching towards a middle ground between those extremes.  Decision to Leave finds the usually more prankish Park working on his best behavior, while Broker finds Kore-Eda shaking up his typically underplayed docu-dramas with some more traditional, genre-minded payoffs.

That’s not to say that either director has compromised their personal stylistic touches or thematic obsessions.  In its broadest strokes, Broker is a very similar movie to Kore-Eda’s previous film, Shoplifters, which in turn was a more accessible version of his earlier triumph Nobody Knows.  A story about an illegal, D.I.Y. adoption agency who broker the sale of babies to families outside the foster system, Broker clearly continues Kore-Eda’s auteurist fascination with how unconventional parentage takes shape below the poverty line.  It just perks up that story with more entertainment-minded genre tropes and a more pronounced, devious sense of humor than I remember seeing in his previous work.  This is basically Shoplifters as a road trip movie where detectives are on the makeshift family’s tail, staking them out so they can be busted at the point of sale.  It’s a subtle introduction of accessible genre entertainment into Kore-Eda’s usual low-key dramas, a shift was seemingly influenced by the international success of Parasite – given it’s the Japanese director’s first film set in Korea, he anchors it to the charisma of Bong muse Song Kang-ho (as the lead broker), and he borrows its opening image from Parasite‘s iconic flood sequence.  Whatever the inspiration, Broker manages to feel much livelier that Kore-eda’s past work without sacrificing any of his usual emotional or political heft.

Unlike with Kore-Eda, I’m not sure that “measured restraint” is the first quality I look for in a Park Chan-wook film, but it does make Decision to Leave an interesting addition to his oeuvre.  You would expect his throwback crime story about an insomniac detective who falls disastrously in love with a femme fatale he suspects to be a murderer would land closer to Basic Instinct than to Hitchcock, but it seems he already got those erotic thriller indulgences out of his system with The Handmaiden.  It’s not any less thrilling than the lewder, more explosive payoffs of The Handmaiden, though.  There’s an exciting tension in watching Park push his more perverse impulses just below the surface of this traditionalist noir . . . for about an hour; then he starts more openly playing around with the detective-suspect eroticism of the genre.  Park holds himself together just long enough to tell the full classic Hollywood version of this detective story, then he stretches it a half-hour past its breaking point to search for the kinkier aspects of the detective-murderess dynamic.  It’s a relatively tame movie by his standards, but there are scenes where he lingers on the femme fatale displaying her domestic abuse wounds as an act of flirtation or becoming visibly aroused by her assigned-detective using brutal force against other perps.  It’s almost like watching Hitchcock make the subversively kinky Vertigo after he made the more explicitly perverse Frenzy, pulling back instead of leaning into his darkest impulses.

Maybe there’s an indication that these two distinct, disparate directors are gradually meeting in the middle – one softening their perversion stories’ sharpest edges and the other spicing up their intimate family dramas with some crime-world thrills.  More likely, they just happen to be pushing themselves to try new things instead of remaking the same picture over and over again, something that should be an auteur’s biggest fear.  Even if they both fully committed to these new directions in their work, it would take dozens of films for them to meet on common ground.  I just find it interesting that these deviations from their respective personal norms both happened to take the shape of detective stories set in the same country, released at the same time of year.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #166: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) & Remakes

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Welcome to Episode #166 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of movie remakes, starting with the 1981 erotic thriller version of the classic noir The Postman Always Rings Twice.

00:00 Welcome

01:31 Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022)
07:17 Menace II Society (1993)
12:45 Mad God (2022)
18:25 Gigli (2003)

25:25 The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981)
47:05 Scarface (1983)
1:05:00 Father of the Bride (2022)
1:28:00 The Blob (1988)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: Diabolique (1955)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss H.G. Clouzot’s widely influential horror-noir Diabolique (1955).

00:00 Welcome

01:58 The Matrix Resurrections (2021)
03:50 The Blair Witch Project (1999)
07:55 Firestarter (1984)
12:32 The Dark and the Wicked (2020)
14:25 Candyman (2021)
16:50 RRR (2022)
21:00 Blood Simple (1984)
25:37 Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
32:00 Men (2022)
40:11 Turning Red (2022)
43:35 Petite Maman (2022)
44:45 Vortex (2022)

49:10 Diabolique (1955)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Reminiscence (2021)

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I watched Reminiscence on the Friday night before Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana, knocking out our power & internet service for weeks.  In any other context, the film might have landed as low-key escapist entertainment, but that particular weekend afforded it an eerie magnetic pull on my attention.  A sci-fi noir starring Hugh Jackman & Rebecca Ferguson as its incongruously gorgeous leads, Reminiscence splits its time between near-future Miami & New Orleans.  Both fictionalized versions of those cities are decorated with constant street flooding, like a modernized urban version of Vienna.  It’s like a Gulf South remake of Chinatown where there’s too much water instead of too little, a stomach-turning preview of what Climate Change will inevitably do to my beloved home city, likely within my lifetime. 

Maybe I wouldn’t have watched Reminiscence in the lead-up to a hurricane had I known about that submerged urban setting, but I’m glad I did.  It’s a surprisingly solid movie, especially considering its ice-cold reception in theaters.  Jackman stars as the owner & operator of a machine that tricks the human brain into reliving & re-experiencing memory in full sensory detail.  It was created as an interrogation tactic for police investigations, but over time became a commercial form of therapy for post-apocalypse urbanites, then a form of dwelling-on-the-past addiction.  His business gets by okay until he is hired by a mysterious femme fatale (Ferguson), who hires him to help remember where she lost her keys . . . which of course leads him to becoming entangled in a larger, lethal political conspiracy.  Luckily his partner in time (Thandiwe Newton) has his back, since he’s in way over his head, especially once he falls in love with his mysterious client . . . or at least his selective memory of her.

The biggest hurdle for most audiences to enjoy Reminiscence is going to be its shamelessness in collecting every possible trope of classic noir in its modern action sci-fi shell.  You pretty much know exactly where the film is going at all times, even if its scrambled timeline & false-memory rug-pulls confuses the path it takes to get there.  Beyond that predictability, its broad-strokes noir homage overextends itself to the point of parody in Jackman’s constant, overbearing narration, where he gruffly whispers things like “Time is no longer a one-way stream.  Memory is the boat that sails against the current,” and “Memories are just beads on the necklace of time.”  I’m going to choose to believe that the film knows how funny & outdated these overwritten turns of phrase are, the same way that a lot of classic noir could be darkly hilarious & absurdly wordy in its own day.  I half-expected Jackman to complain, “Of all the memory joints in all of Sunken City, this dame walks into mine”, but that sadly never came to be.  I wonder if the film might’ve been more immediately popular if its humor was more readily recognizable & self-aware, but I’m glad it plays it straight.  It’s funnier that way, intentional or not.

If Reminiscence feels overly familiar, it’s not necessarily because it’s paying homage to vintage 1930s noir; it’s because its exact style of homage was already hammered to death in big-budget sci-fi of the late 1990s.  Titles like Strange Days, Dark City, The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and Gattaca have already tread this exact ground before, although maybe not with as much (suspiciously clear) water flooding their urban settings.  And even all of those movies owe a recognizable debt to Blade Runner‘s visionary estimation of sci-fi noir in the 1980s, putting yet another been-there-seen-that barrier between this genre-mashup and its 1930s source of inspiration.  Luckily, genre movies don’t have to be The First or The Best to be worthwhile; they just have to be memorably entertaining on their own terms.  I can pretty confidently say I’ll remember the experience of watching Reminiscence for a long time coming, if not only because the hurricane flooding that hit Louisiana that weekend echoed a lot of the imagery of the submerged New Orleans onscreen.

-Brandon Ledet