Hey Ninja55, great stuff -- I lunched at Musso's today! Crab Louie and flannel cakes, natch.
Gsj, I'm with everyone else in the
Holy Crap! department. Let me know when you get that copy of "The Outsider" if I don't git it first!
As for noir pictures, alla those mentioned are great (including, I'm certain, those I've not seen). I will say though I don't pay mind to critical acclaim or great acting and such, thus, sooooo, my all-timer has to be
There aren't a lot of female serial killers, and fewer
movies about them, much less movies made fifty years ago...
that are shot entirely on Bunker Hill. I've got a gaggle of screen grabs of this picture and intend to put them up here when I get around to it...
My second-fave LA noir, modern tho it may be, has to be
Barton Fink. (Two things made me move to Los Angeles in 1993: seeing
Barton Fink in '91, and watching The Riots on TV in '92.) One might argue that
Lebowski (another Coen outing) is also a great uniquely LA noir picture: that's pretty correct. But if we're playing loose with genre description, I'd say
Ed Wood is tangential but important to the canon.
But back to Original Noir, what we have so far is awesome, I especially dig
KMD,
Criss Cross,
Cry Danger, and
Act of Violence, but that's just me. Lots of shots of Old LA after all. I could probably tell you about each'f those shots, but precious little 'bout each film's diegetic structure.
I would add the Joseph Losey remake of
M. Gsj's photo-essay on it a few pages back cemented its place in LA noir history without question.
Also
Hollow Triumph, AKA
The Scar. First of all, I've watched it ten times, and I can't get over how effing weird it is. Secondly, between 23:00 and 26:00 there are these amazing shots of the
Barclay neon lit up, and the
Hotel Belmont, and then they ride Angels Flight?! -- it's an orgasm of greatness.
Given as I abjure "craft" and "talent," what other films noir do I think should be on the LA list?
TISCTSLaBMUZ, of course. (Scroll down to the tail end of
this post.) And the universally reviled
Ask the Dust, for whom I'll perennially pennant-wave, because it's so...
awesome.