Category Archives: 1980s American crime films

M Emmet Walsh and Blood Simple

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

Walsh“Well Ma’am if I see him, I’ll sure give him the message.” 

The late Roger Ebert called it the “Stanton-Walsh Rule”. Any movie “featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M.Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can’t be altogether bad”.

I’ve always liked Walsh as a character actor. But it was only when I recently re-watched the Cohen Bother’s Blood Simple after many year, that I realised just how on the money Ebert was.

Walsh plays a seedy PI called Loren Visser. Visser hired by a rich Texan bar owner, Julian (Dan Hedaya), to kill his wife, Abby (a very young Francis McDormand), who is cheating with one of Julian’s employees, Ray (John Getz).

If you haven’t seen Blood Simple, it won’t spoil your viewing pleasure too much if I tell you Visser kills Julian, tries to frame Abbey for the murder, and all manner of hell is unleashed.

On one level, Blood Simple comes across as a fairly standard small town film noir. Characters chase their own shadows and do very bad things in an effort to extract themselves from an increasingly fraught and dangerous situation.

What really raises it about the pack of similar films is the Cohen brother’s signature brand of dark weirdness, which managers to be both restrained and shocking. … Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films, Film Noir, James Woods, M Emmet Walsh

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The heist always goes wrong, part 1: ten of the best heist movies ever made

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 34 Comments

asphalt01I love a good heist film.

I love the genius and intricacy of their plots and the variations they come in, whether it be the all star team assembled for a job or the desperate ex-cons trying for one last score.

But most of all I love them because of the golden rule of all good heist films – for whatever reason, the heist always goes wrong.

What do you need for a good heist?

You need a plan for actual heist itself, the getaway, and moving, storing and fencing whatever it is you’ve stolen. The more complicated the plan, the more likely it is that something will go wrong.

You need a crew of people; one man or woman alone cannot do a heist. This introduces the human element and all the problems that come with it, the greed, suspicions, jealousies and uncertainties.

I’ve been thinking for a while now about what my top ten-heist films would be and the following list, in no particular order, is it.

The robbery itself is almost immaterial to how I rate a good heist film. What I like is the context and atmosphere in which the heist takes place and inevitable problems that arise after it’s been pulled off. And the darker and more broken things get, the better the film is in my book.… Read more

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Posted in 1960s American crime films, 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films, Angie Dickinson, Charles Durning, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Ernest Borgnine, Film Noir, French cinema, Gene Hackman, Heist films, James Caan, Jim Brown, Peter Boyle, Peter Yates, Robert Mitchum, Sidney Lumet, Stanley Baker, Sterling Hayden, Yaphet Kotto

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Wallace Stroby on the best 5 crime films you’ve never seen

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 15 Comments

Today I’m honoured to have New York crime writer Wallace Stroby guest post on his top 5 crime films you’ve never seen. 

For those of your not familiar with Wallace’s work, he is the author of five hardboiled works of crime fiction, including his most recent two featuring the female professional criminal, Crissa Stone, Cold Shot to the Heart and Kings of Midnight. I haven’t got around to Kings of Midnight yet, but I have read Cold Shot to the Heart and it’s terrific. 

In addition to being a great writer, Wallace is also a keen student of popular culture, particularly as it relates to crime fiction and film. I particularly like the way Wallace publicises and shares the more obscure gems of crime fiction and film. You can check out his books here and his ruminations on popular culture at his blog, Live at the Heartbreak Lounge.

Awhile back, I had the opportunity to guest blog about my picks for  ‘The Five Best Crime Novels You’ve Never Read’.  My thanks to Andrew Nette and Pulp Curry for agreeing to host this companion piece.

I’ve left out films I’ve written about at length in the past, such as Seven Ups,  The Outfit, Rolling Thunder and Across 110th Street. … Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films, Wallace Stroby

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Hunger and other films about doing time

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 10 Comments

I haven’t spent a lot of time in prisons and don’t want to. But I won’t deny they make tremendous story settings.

This was brought home to me again over the weekend after watching Hunger, Steve McQueen’s 2008 depiction of the final months in the life of IRA militant Bobby Sands. Sands and 9 other IRA inmates staved themselves to death in 1981 in protest against the Thatcher government’s insistence of treating them as common criminals rather than political prisoners.

I recently reviewed Adrian McKinty’s book The Cold Cold Ground, which dealt with a Catholic cop in a Protestant neighbourhood trying to solve a murder against the backdrop of the civil unrest unleashed by the hunger strikes.

Hunger is about what happened inside the walls of the Maze Prison. It’s a visceral, blistering film, all the more so because it’s made with incredible slight of hand.

It opens with the arresting image of a pair of bloody knuckles being soaked in water. These belong to one of the prison guards and were acquired administering incredibly savage beatings to IRA prisoners in response to their “blanket and dirty protests” in which the prisoners refused to wash and smeared shit over the walls of their prison cells. The guard is subsequently murdered in the aged care home where his mother lives, one of 16 guards killed by paramilitaries in retaliation for the treatment of the prisoners.… Read more

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Posted in 1960s American crime films, 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films, Adrian McKinty, Australian crime film, Bryan Brown, Burt Lancaster, Film Noir, James Woods, Michael Fassbender, Stuart Rosenberg

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Drive

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 4 Comments

After months of anticipation I finally got to see Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive on the weekend.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a really good crime movie at a mainstream multiplex cinema. Maybe Ben Affleck’s The Town, although it went down hill fast whenever it tried to move away from the heist theme and get into the characters.

Drive is not perfect, hell what film is, but it was damn close in my view, certainly up there with the best contemporary crime films I’ve seen.

The movie is very loosely based on the 2005 book of the same name by James Sallis. Ryan Gosling plays ‘Driver’. By day he works as a stuntman and fixes cars in a garage owned by his mentor, Shannon (Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad fame, although he will forever be associated in my mind as the father from Malcolm in the Middle, which for me is what makes him come across as so bent).

Driver’s expertise at what he does is established in the film’s first ten minutes, a fantastic high-speed chase thought the streets of LA scene during which he eludes a police dragnet.

His credo is simple:

“If I drive for you, you get your money. That’s a guarantee. Tell me where we start, where we’re going and where we’re going afterwards, I give you five minutes when you get there.… Read more

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Posted in 1980s American crime films, Crime film, Film Noir

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