Category Archives: Crime film

Eight reasons to love Kiss Me Deadly

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 8 Comments

KissIt’s a tough call, but one of my favourite films noirs is Robert Aldrich’s 1955 movie, Kiss Me Deadly. I’ve seen it at least fives times, most recently a couple of nights ago, and still find things about it to appreciate I hadn’t noticed previously.

Shot in just three weeks with a group of largely no-name actors, Kiss Me Deadly is very loosely based on a Mickey Spillane novel of the same name. Most Pulp Curry readers are probably familiar with the plot, so I won’t go into it here. If you’re reading this and you’re not, all I can say is go and watch it – right now.

It’s one of the last of the classic era noirs and a great piece of pulp cinema. Here are 8 things I love about it.

1. The opening

On a deserted stretch of highway, tough guy private investigator Mike Hammer almost runs over a near hysterical woman standing in the middle of the road. Reluctantly, he gives her lift. The credits roll in reverse above the sound of the woman, Christina, sobbing and Nat ‘King’ Cole singing Rather Have Blue Eyes.

No sooner does she recovered her composure than she proceeds to psychoanalyse Hammer with a devastating accuracy that’s worth reprinting in full:

Christina: You’re angry with me, aren’t you?… Read more

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Posted in Albert Dekker, Crime film, Film Noir, Robert Aldrich

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Italian noir trilogy: Calibre 9, The Italian Connection, The Boss

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Although Italian cinema has produced some fantastic crime films, it never really took to noir. The exceptions are three movies by little known director Fernando Di Leo, Milano Calibre 9 (Calibre 9), La Mala Ordina (The Italian Connection) and Il Boss (The Boss).

Connected more by similar themes and actors than plot, they nonetheless form a rough trilogy of films combining fast paced story telling and gritty violence with a highly political analysis of the changing nature of organised crime and the dissolution of the Italian working class.

The most overtly noir of the three films, Calibre 9 (1972) centres on low-level mafia foot soldier, Ugo Piazzo (Gastrone Mochin, a well known Italian comic actor at the time). Released after three years in jail, Ugo is braced by Rocco (Mario Adorf), a clownish but lethal mob associate working for a Milanese crime boss known as The Americano.

Still smarting from losing $300,000 several years earlier (a breath taking series of scenes in the film’s first few minutes), The Americano thinks Ugo took the money and stashed it away while he was in jail. So does everyone else, including the cops, his friends and his ambitious stripper girlfriend (Euro-crime regular, Barbara Bouchet).

Ugo denies the allegation.… Read more

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Posted in Crime film, Eurocrime, Fernando Di Leo, Film Noir, Poliziotteschi, Richard Conte, Woody Strode

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Sterling Hayden’s crime wave

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 6 Comments

One thing I love about the canon of movies known as film noir is how I’m always finding something new. Sure, there are the classics and masterpieces everyone talks about. But every now and again you unearth a gem you didn’t know would be so good.

Like, for example, the 1954 Andre de Toth noir, Crime Wave, which I watched last night.

A trio of escaped cons knock over a gas station, killing a cop in the process. A full scale police manhunt ensures complete with what then must have seemed like the full array of hi-tech police gadgetry.

One of the cons is wounded during the hold up and left to fend for him self. The other two need a place to hide. They visit the home of another ex-con Steve Lacey and his pretty young wife, Ellen.

Steve wants to go straight, but the escaped cons have other ideas. The gas station is the latest of a string of chump change robberies they’ve pulled up and down the Californian coast. They need a major score to get enough money to get out of town for good.

They plan to rob a bank and want Steve as their wheelman. The ex-cons team up with other criminals, one of who takes Ellen hostage, to ensure Steve’s cooperation.… Read more

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Posted in Andre De Toth, Crime film, Film Noir, Sterling Hayden

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Report back from the Korean Film Festival in Australia

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

I’ve been meaning to report back for a while now on the Korean Film Festival in Australia, which recently took place in Melbourne and Sydney (and to thank the organisers for the media pass – thanks).

The two films I managed to catch in the Melbourne program where LEE Joeng-beom’s The Man From Nowhere and Jang Hun’s Secret Reunion, the number one and two box office hits in South Korea respectively in 2010.

I would have made it three films, but for some reason Ryoo Seung-wan’s The Unjust only played in the Sydney part of the program.

That a film like The Man From Nowhere did so well with South Korean audiences fascinates me. It’s a standard revenge flick, but it also contains a pretty staggering body count and a sub plot in which children are kidnapped to work in an illegal drug laboratory and then harvested for their organs when they can’t perform their duties any longer (that said what would a South Korean audience make of the popularity of Animal Kingdom, one of the highest grossing Australian made films in 2010?).

A solitary pawnshop owner, Won Bin (played by Cha Tae-sik) gets sucked into bloody feud between two rival gangs of drug traffickers, when the junkie mother of a little girl he has befriended in his apartment building leaves stolen heroin in a camera she pawns to him.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction and film from South Korea, Crime film

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Split Image: James Woods and how to do sleaze redux

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

It’s taken a while, but last night I concluded my James Woods festival by finally watching the 1982 film Split Image.

I won’t say what I had to do to track down a copy of this little known gem. Let’s just say it wasn’t easy. But it was worth it.

Split Image, in which Woods plays a cult deprogrammer, confirms the central thesis of my previous post on this actor, that no one does sleaze as good as Woods, especially at the height of his career in the greed is good eighties.

Split Image occupies an interesting position in the Woods oeuvre, sandwiched between Fast Walking earlier the same year (Woods as a sleazy prison guard who gets mixed up in a neo-Nazi plot to murder a radical black nationalist) and Videodrome in 1983 (Woods as sleazy soft porn cable TV producer).

The plot is relatively simple. Danny Stetson (Michael O’Keefe) is a talented but highly-strung aspiring Olympic gymnast, from a loving but over achieving family, presided over by patriarch Kevin Stetson (Brian Dennehy).

He meets fresh-faced cult devotee Rebecca (Karen Allen, who played  the love interest in two Indiana Jones films) and is sucked into visiting Homeland, an alternative community run by Kirkander (Peter Fonda). It doesn’t take long before Danny has been renamed Joshua and chanting “make it perfect” with the rest of them.… Read more

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Posted in 1980s American crime films, Crime film, James Woods

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