If you’re a purveyor of lists and, now that we all read online, who isn’t, you’ve come to appreciate succinct summaries, pithy passages and brief bits.
Now the trick is to have something in those few words to inform, entertain or pique your interest.
Lee Server accomplishes all of those things with the list of film noir movies he offered in The Big Book of Noir, a 1998 volume Server co-edited along with Ed Gorman and Martin Greenberg.
Lee Server
Big Book serves up essays on all manner of noir, far too little on the TV and radio side, but fascinating, nevertheless.
Among the entries is a list of 100 films that Server offers up for your inspection.
The author of several books about Hollywood cinema and pulp fiction, Server died in 2021 at the age of 68.
Here are just a few of his selections from Server’s Black List. For the full 100, get the book.
Asphalt Jungle (1950). Huston’s masterpiece, perhaps the great film about professional criminals.
Big Sleep (1946). An elegant thriller full of the behavioral charms of Hawks’s comedies; dark when it has to be but this Chandler adaptation has as much in common with The Thin Man series as it does with the Maltese Falcon.
Cape Fear (1962). Robert Mitchum as the most frighteningly believable of great movie villains. Poor Gregory Peck makes a weak case for the side of “Good.”
Crime Wave (1953). Shot in less than two weeks by Andre de Toth, the film is dynamically staged, fast and furious. Sterling Hayden as the toothpick-chewing cop gives another great performance. Could he be the echt noir star after all?
Criss Cross (1949). By all odds noir’s hottest-to-trot couple, Burt Lancaster and Yvonne De Carlo, reduce even an armored-car robbery to its aphrodisiacal properties. Robert Siodmak, the most committed of noir stylists, directs every scene like it was his last.
Dark Passage (1947). David Goodis’s first crime novel becomes a glossy vehicle for Bogart and Bacall. Prison breaks, mean streets, penthouse apartments, plastic surgery, moonlit South America, the kitchen sink. With the famous “subjective camera” first half hour.
Detour (1945). Denying reality, Edgar Ulmer shoots this no-budget PRC quickie like he’s Fritz Lang at UFA, results: a masterpiece. The boxed-in production only intensifies the sense of doom in a claustrophobic road movie. Award for Least Likely Murder Weapon: the wrong end of a phone cord.
Les Diaboliques (1955). Henri-Georges Clouzot beats Hitchcock’s Psycho by five years with this similarly tricked-up, sleazy and erotic thriller.
Gun Crazy (1949). L’amour fou as represented by two of Hollywood’s more forgettable also-rans (John Dall, Cathy O’Donnell) elevated to mythic status by Joseph H. Lewis’s wild, intense direction. The one-take bank robbery scene is, of course, legendary.
His Kind of Woman (1951). A dark, conventional, tough Mitchum actioner subverted by an amiable Beat the Devil-like hipster comedy. Some people hate it, some of us think it’s a one-off masterpiece. Key scene: Bob irons his money.
The Killers (1946). Fractured storytelling becomes a staple of forties film noir with this dark, complex crime drama that takes over both the flashback structure and the elaborate, expressionist visuals of Citizen Kane.
The Killing (1956). With one eye on The Asphalt Jungle, Stanley Kubrick hires Jim Thompson to adapt this racetrack robbery by another paperback pro, Lionel White. Awkward around the edges, but greatly entertaining, with a marvelously fatalistic Sterling Hayden and that ponderously ironic but very satisfying ending.
Night of the Following Day (1968). Hubert Cornfield’s Frenchified adaptation of Lionel White’s The Snatchers is like J.P. Melville meets the Actors Studio. Though bordering on unintentional parody, it’s great fun, especially Brando versus Boone.
Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Magnificent, nuanced Hitchcock classic of a killer coming home to his small town, Teresa Wright is sublime.
Touch of Evil (1958). Orson Welles’s phantasmagoric tribute to a genre he helped invent.