Category Archives: 1970s American crime films

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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Night Moves

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

One of the things I like best about the Christmas/New Year period is it’s a good chance to catch up on my movie viewing. This holiday season I re-watched the neo-noir, Night Moves. Made in 1973, but not released until 1975, Night Moves belongs to a period of US film making that is probably my favourite. It’s a complex, meandering and multi-layered film that perfectly captures the moral and political ambiguity of the time. I wanted to review Night Moves for this site but discovered a recent post on the same topic that does it much better than I ever could by a friend called Dean Brandum.

Dean’s the man behind a terrific web site called Technicolor Yawn (for overseas readers that’s Australian slang for throwing up), which chronicles the history of Melbourne’s now vanished grindhouse cinema scene in the seventies and early eighties. He’s a great guy and what he doesn’t know about cinema is not worth knowing. The following review appeared on his site in mid-December. Enjoy.

BTW, I’ll be interviewing Dean about Melbourne’s forgotten grindhouse cinema scene on Pulp Curry sometime in the next few weeks.

“I remember Bobby (Kennedy) when he got shot, the newsreels made it look like everything was happening under water” – Paula (Jennifer Warren) in Night Moves 

It’s that certain visual aesthetic; let’s call it “muted Cannon with a chance of showers” that veneers so many Los Angeles set film noir of the early 1970s, differentiating it from the monochrome 40s-50s and the swimming pool enhanced glare of the 1960s.… Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, Crime film, Gene Hackman, Neo Noir

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Killing Them Softly

Posted on November 19, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 3 Comments

Last week I finally watched Killing Them Softly, a film I’ve wanted to see for ages. Living in Australia, it’s not often I get one up on my American readers in terms of seeing a major release movie before they do. But for some reason, Killing Them Softly is not out yet in the States.

So, for those of you who are going to have to hang on a little longer to watch it, let me assure you, it is well worth the wait.

For Australian readers, all I can say is get thee to a cinema now and see this film.

Killing Them Softly is based on the novel Cogan’s Trade by George V Higgins. It’s the story of an enforcer cum hit man who is brought in to investigate a robbery of a mob protected card game.

Higgins was also the author of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which was made into one of the best, if not the best, heist movie ever made (and which I reviewed on this site here in 2010).

It’s hard to exaggerate just how influencial the movie version of The Friends of Eddie Coyle is. Released in 1973, it is a no frills depiction of desperate men doing whatever they have to do to stay one step ahead of each other and the law.… Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, Crime fiction, Crime film, George V Higgins, Robert Mitchum

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Prime Cut

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 12 Comments

Want to talk about a movie that broke the mould when it was made?

Let’s talk about Prime Cut.

Starring Lee Marvin, Gene Hackman and Sissy Spacek, this 1972 film is eighty-eight minutes of pulp weirdness – part exploitation flick, part brutal, hard-boiled, crime story.

Prime Cut was directed by Michael Ritchie, who did no other work of any consequence (with the possible exception of The Candidate, also made in 1972), and written by another relative unknown, Robert Dillon.

Marvin plays Nick Devlin, a tough as nails enforcer who is hired to go to Kansas City and retrieve half a million dollars owed to the Chicago mob by a slaughterhouse Kingpin called Mary Ann (Hackman).

Driving all night, Devlin and his men arrive at Mary Ann’s ranch in the middle of a livestock auction. The slaughterhouse is a legitimate business as well as being a front for a white slavery racket. Groups of well-dressed men wander around the inside of a giant barn, bidding on drugged, naked women, Mary Ann’s ‘livestock’, who have been sourced from orphanages and bus stops.

One of the girls, Poppy (Spacek), manages to ask for help through her drug haze. Marvin takes her ‘on credit’ and leaves, after getting Mary Ann’s agreement to meet him next day and hand over the money.… Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, Crime film, Gene Hackman, Lee Marvin

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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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