American Neonoir in Melbourne

In his “Guide to Neonoir,” Adam Nayman writes: “Where film noir gained potency from its distorted yet crystalline reflections of a starkly stratified, economically depressed society—a world of detours down nightmare alleys at nightfall—neonoir applied a carefully filigreed lens of nostalgia, aligning it with the returns to western and gangster-movie forms that served as the foundations of the New Hollywood. The eagerness with which writers seized upon and venerated movies like Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974)—one a melancholically modernized Raymond Chandler adaptation, the other a sadistic riff on the author’s knight-errant narratives in which the windmills prove un-tiltable—had as much to do with retrospectively elevating their directors’ underlying inspirations as acknowledging their state-of-the-art craft and state-of-the-union cynicism.”

Opening the series, The Long Goodbye stars Elliott Gould as detective Philip Marlowe, whose “often jazzy and insular line readings rarely communicate a sense of control or superior knowledge—and are almost never heard by anyone but us, him, and maybe his cat,” notes Adrian Danks at Senses of Cinema. The screening will be followed by Dirty Harry (1971), starring Clint Eastwood and his big gun. “It would be stupid to deny that Dirty Harry is a stunningly well-made genre piece, and it certainly turns an audience on,” wrote Pauline Kael. Director Don Siegel is “an accomplished exciter; once considered a liberal, he has now put his skills to work in a remarkably single-minded attack on liberal values, with each prejudicial detail in place. Dirty Harry is a kind of hardhat The Fountainhead.”

Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971), starring Jane Fonda as a call girl who suspects—with good reason—that she may be in danger and Donald Sutherland as the cop who aims to protect her, “undercuts every expectation it sets up,” writes Mark Harris. “It’s a cop movie that isn’t about the cop; a modern western that almost never leaves the canyons, hideaways, and saloons of Manhattan; a whodunit that, with defiant indifference, gives away the ‘who’ after forty minutes; and a thriller that, although menace seems to choke every frame, contains almost no violence at all.”

Kent Jones has picked up on a similar bait-and-switch going on in Peter Yates’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), starring Robert Mitchum, one of the great faces of true-blue noir, as a low-level gunrunner. “In the miserable economy of power in Boston's rumpled gray underworld,” writes Jones, “Eddie and his ‘friends’ are all expendable, and the ones left standing play every side against the middle, their white-knuckle terror carefully concealed under several layers of nonchalance and resignation. There’s not a punch thrown, and only two fatal shots are fired, but this seemingly artless film leaves a deeper impression of dog-eat-dog brutality than many of the blood-soaked extravaganzas that preceded it and have come in its wake.”

Writing for the Guardian last year, Scott Tobias declared that “there has been no greater original screenplay in the last fifty years than the one Robert Towne wrote for Chinatown,” a film that remains “part of a great continuum of California noir—informed by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett on one end and followed by work like L.A. Confidential and Inherent Vice on the other—where crimes of passion are often rooted to municipal rot.” The series will wrap with Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers (1970), “the anti–Bonnie and Clyde true-crime tabloid shocker,” as Gary Giddens describes it. “Here you will find no glitz, sex appeal, fiddle music, or Aesopian moral about the dehumanization of violence. Instead, you will be treated to a display of irate humor and voyeuristic mischief as two sociopaths and their deluded victims live and die by the axiom ‘He (or she) who cons last cons best.’”