Rapture, The Sniper, John Wainwright et al.

In the midst of life I find my hands full with work. So, here's only a quick update:

Michael Tolkin: Rapture: challenging film about religious hystery, seems quite underrated and somewhat ahead of its time ****
Edward Dmytryk: The Sniper: also ahead of its time in its depiction of a sexually frustrated serial killer, who kills young women with his rifle, but slightly muddled by some naïvety and too many policemen on screen! ***½
Robert Altman: McCabe and Mrs. Miller: has yet to be seen properly on big screen, but still convincing in its depiction of a frontier town, probably one of the very few really realistic westerns there are ****

I've also been reading - amidst the Finnish war stuff and some Tolkien (work-related both) - police and other crime novels by British John Wainwright, whose books are quite good, despite Wainwright's tendency to overwrite his rants about the slums and the people therein. Will get back to them later on.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Private Hell 36

Don Siegel was once one of the Hollywood's best paid directors, but his star seems to be fading. Does anyone anymore remember any other film by him than Dirty Harry? Yet he directed some thirty films, some very good (Charley Varrick, Hell Is for Heroes, The Killers, Flaming Star, The Beguiled, The Shootist and others), some quite good, all quite capable. 

Private Hell 36 (1954) is one of his lesser-known films, yet it's a very capable, at times a very good film noir with cynical characters and a downbeat ending. It was produced by Ida Lupino's and Collier Young's indie outfit called Filmakers (no Filmmakers!) and Siegel was brought in at a late date. Collier Young scripted the film originally for his wife, Lupino, but Lupino had already divorced Young and married Howard Duff, who plays the other lead in the film. The other lead is Steve Cochran, who's very good at playing a sleazy cop who wants to get some extra money and start all over with Lupino with whom he's fallen in love. 

Some of the scenes last too long (something that mars also Siegel's The Killers), but all in all this is a pretty effective low-key drama. I'd hope there was more action, as Siegel really knows how to edit fight and chase scenes. I'm not complaining, though. There's also some naivety in the outcome, especially Howard Duff gets out a bit too nicely. 

Comes highly recommended by me, even though this is no means perfect. 

I saw the film at the Finnish Film Archive's screening. Before the film, the film critic Tapani Maskula offered a half-hour lecture on how he met Siegel in Finland in the late seventies (you know, Telefon was filmed partly in Finland) and discussed Siegel's fifties' films. Siegel told for example that while filming Private Hell 36 the lead actors were often suffering from hangover. There's a scene with Ida Lupino in which she's sitting on a bumper of a truck. Lupino had said to Siegel that he'd better shoot the scene quick, since she's about to throw up. And you can see it in the scene. It works miracles. Lupino has never looked so vulnerable, tired, bored and broken. 

More Overlooked Films here.

Bibliographic puzzle: Ronald Wills/Hans Vogel: What Comes Next?

I've dealt in my research with some bibliographic problems before, but this one is a real puzzle. I don't even know where to start.

Okay, there's a paperback published in Finnish in 1955 called Hän ei tullut kotiin. It translates back as "He Never Came Home" or some such. It's a private eye novel about kidnapping of rich kids. Now, there's no book under this title (or actually there almost is, but it's not this one). The Finnish translation is credited as by Ronald Wills. There really was a writer called Ronald Wills. His real name was Ronald Wills Thomas. He lived from 1910 to 1969 (or possibly 1955) and wrote crime novels starting from 1950, ending in the early sixties. He used pseudonyms, such as Jeff Bogar (a house name) and James Cadell.

As Ronald Wills he published four crime novels in the early fifties, but they all seem to have something to do with fishes and fishing, and this here novel doesn't, so it's not any of them. What is it then?

The Finnish translation - at least my copy doesn't - doesn't give away the original title, but the bibliography of crime fiction published in Finnish and the Finnish National Library database both say it's What Comes Next? Now, that is a real novel, published in 1953 by the paperback house Scion. It was published under the house pseudonym Hans Vogel. And sure enough, the Finnish book has Hans Vogel as the hero. (Can you think of a more un-American name for a private eye?) But this isn't over yet. The British pulp and paperback scholar Steve Holland says in his blog that What Comes Next? features one Scud Keddell as the hero. And "He Never Came Home" doesn't have anyone called Scud Keddell. (And furthermore What Comes Next? isn't supposed to be written by Ronald Wills. Actually Ronald Wills doesn't seem to have written anything under the Hans Vogel house name.)

So, what gives here? Is this written by someone else entirely than Ronald Wills? Is this something entirely else written under a pseudonym by Ronald Wills, but published in Finland for some reason under his real name? Anything written as by Jeff Bogar doesn't even remotely sound like the book at hand. Or is this something that's been published only in Finland? As you might remember, while doing my first book, Pulpografia (on American crime paperbackers), I found out there were some dozen American books that were never published in the US, but published in Finland and/or Scandinavia.

different book published as by Hans Vogel

What's the book about? Oh, that's a different issue altogether. The book is a sorry mess, but somehow intriguing. Hans Vogel is a private eye working for the FBI (which, by the way, is spelled as FIB in the Finnish book), he handles very special cases. Now, there's a gang kidnapping small children of rich families and Vogel is hired to investigate the matter. He uses some strange methods that don't seem very professional. We never believe that this is a real private eye. Also we never believe this really takes place in the US, which is quite common for the early British crime paperbacks.

There are some truly odd moments throughout the book. Hans Vogel is for example tortured by boiling his feet in hot water. His skin peels off, but somehow he manages to still walk and drive a car. Okay, he admits he feels pain. There's also an odd perversion for talking about Nathaniel Hawthorne all the time - or actually "Nat", as Hans Vogel calls him. In the end Hans Vogel gets the kidnappers with the help of some 13-year old kids who are out playing Wild West with real-looking guns. The book is filled with erotic scenes, but nothing happens in them, they are just Vogel's descriptions of good-looking ladies in erotic costumes, such as silky night gowns. And this is what drove writers and publishers to jail?!

This is in no way a good crime novel, let alone a good novel, but there's something fascinating about the badness and weirdness of it. But the main thing here is the bibliographic puzzle. Can anyone help? I'd really love to solve this, but I don't know where else to look.

Basil Copper's Mike Faraday

In my on-going research into British pulp and paperback crime writing, I read the two novels by Basil Copper translated in Finnish. Both have Copper's private eye Mike Faraday as the hero, and both are pretty basic old-fashioned hardboiled private eye stuff.

Flip Side (1980, translated as Kuoleman kääntöpuoli/"The Flip-Side of Death") puts Faraday delve into the international jewel trade. Snow Job (1986, Älä huoli huomisesta/"Don't Worry About Tomorrow", meaningless title if there ever was one) has Faraday look into the drug trade, even though he doesn't know that from the start. Copper knows his business: in the end Faraday is investigating another case than he's originally hired to investigate. He runs into corpses and beautiful, but deceitful ladies, heavies with guns in their hands, all that stuff that's been known since Black Mask and Dime Detective made the cliches popular. The books were entertaining enough and Copper keeps the story moving, but there's still one problem: I've almost forgotten what happened in them.

Basil Copper also wrote some high-regarded horror stuff which I haven't read. He also wrote the Solar Pons stories after August Derleth died. I think I've read some of Derleth's Solar Pons stories, but none of the Copper ones.

The books in the picture above. The right one has the cover illo by Kari T. Leppänen, who's best known for his work in the Phantom magazine for the Swedish publisher. It's quite nicely done, but it's also pretty static for a hardboiled private eye novel.

Väinö Linna: The Unknown Soldier (1954)

Due to a book project I've been working on, I started to read Väinö Linna's classic war novel Tuntematon sotilas/The Unknown Soldier for the first time in my life. I'd earlier avoided the novel, mainly because I've always been a bit irritated at the notion of books one has to read for reasons larger than life (i.e. patriotism or the Fatherland or some such nonsense), but I was very glad to note I liked the book, was even thrilled by it.

The Unknown Soldier tells about the so called Continuation War in which Finland and the Soviet Union fought against each other. The war started in 1941 and ended in 1944. One of the biggest questions in Finnish history is whether Finland fought alongside Nazi Germany or whether it had its own war with the Soviets. The book is one of those realistic war novels, with the eye sight fixed on the everyday of the battling soldiers, their camaraderie, their fears, frustrations, hopes and anger. There are no heroes in this novel. The war is ugly, chaotic and violent. No one knows why they're fighting - only the higher officers have some idea and even that is filled with stupid notions of Greater Finland.

The Unknown Soldier has dated somewhat and we've had more realistic war novels since, but what keeps the book fresh is that it's polyphonic. There's not a single truth in the novel, there are only multiple narrators (or, actually, narratees) that present their variations of the situation. Linna writes warmly and empathetically of each and everyone of them, even the most obnoxious officers. And his battle scenes are quite good. He really captures the chaotic essence of war - well, as well he should, since he was himself at the war.

The book is available in English. The English translation came out from Putnam in the US and Collins in the UK in 1957, and I believe it was the same translation. For some reason or another, the translator's name isn't mentioned anywhere in the book. The translation is abridged (the reports on how heavily differ), and it's also clumsy with the Finnish idioms (which the book is full of). It's a miracle the translation should be so bad, since it's reported to be the work of one Alex Matson, a Finnish literary essayist, who spent many years in the 1920s living abroad and travelling the world seas. (Thanks for this tip to Ossi Kokko!)

However, it's the only English translation, and it's been used repeatedly even by Väinö Linna's Finnish publisher, WSOY (see the photo above for their edition). They've published several editions of the English translation - still with no translator's name attached. Seems like you could manage to buy the book via Amazon.

There's also the Ace edition from 1958, which is seemingly scarce (see above). The cover illustration is made by someone famous, but I forget who. The illustration was used in Finland in some entirely other paperback, but I forget even that one!

Edit: there's a small news item from 2012 saying that Penguin has bought the rights for Linna's novel and they are putting the new translation out in the near future. Liesl Yamaguchi is the translator.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Ravenous

I remember Ravenous being shown in Finland at some film festival in 1999 or 2000, but it was deemed X-rated and the distributor backed down. The film was never shown commercially in Finnish theaters, it was only released in VHS with five minutes of gore cut away, and then in 2005 in television. I don't know whether the TV version was intact. I watched the old VHS I'd bought at some point, but failed to watch until now. It was released as Erämaa syö miestä ("The Desert Eats Up the Man" or some such nonsense).

Ravenous follows the story of Alferd Packer (I believe it's supposed to be written that way) and the pack he was leading into the wild that gets lost and has to resort to cannibalism. Ravenous takes the storyline a step further developing it into a serial killer story, with lots of satiric overtones and black humour.

And at times it works very well. The first half of the story is intriguing, but then it gets bogged down by some implausible plot twists. They keep the story moving, however. The ending is a bit over-the-top, but there's still some funny stuff in there. The feel for human flesh never goes away.

I realize I haven't seen the film in its full gory, but it still comes recommended by me. There's one interesting point still: the film was directed by Antonia Bird. There aren't that many female directors out there making westerns, let alone gory horror westerns. Bird was however only appointed director of Ravenous after the original director took off. Her earlier film Priest was excellent, however. I see she died last year. Did Ravenous destroy her career? She never made another feature film. (Then again she did films for TV, and I was told she herself said she preferred working for television.)

Also of merit is also the soundtrack by Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn (of the Blur fame). It's often contradictory to the image we see on the screen, but that makes an interesting effect.

And oh, here's my review (amongst others) of an earlier film based on the same Alferd Packer incident. Ravenous is 1,000,000 times better.

More Overlooked Movies here (whenever Todd gets the chance).

Malcolm MacKay: The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter

It's always very welcome when a new noir author gets translated in Finnish. Malcolm MacKay's short novel The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter came pretty quickly out in here: it was published originally in 2013 and the translation came out just in the beginning of this year (under the title Lewis Winterin on kuoltava).

MacKay's book is about a hired killer, Calum McLean, who's almost autistically meticulous in his methods. The book is also about his target, a small-time drug dealer whose name is given out in the title. He leads a boring life with a younger woman who still wants to party and drink all night. There's lots of intriguing melancholy here. 

The first half of the book is quite good. MacKay writes short, somewhat repetitive sentences, and their rhythm grabs you. But then after the target's been hit, the novel bogs down for some reason or another, even though there's a surprise twist and an open ending that comes as a bit of a shock. I can recommend the book, though it wasn't totally satisfactory. 

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The Reflecting Skin

I remember being very impressed by Philip Ridley's first feature film The Reflecting Skin back in the early nineties. And I wasn't the only one. The film was being shown at cinema clubs all over again and everyone loved it.

But then it vanished. There has been no proper DVD publication, and at least the Finnish VHS publication is pretty scarce. In Finnish television it's been shown twice, last in 1998. So it was no wonder there was quite a lot of people at the Film Archive screening of the film last Monday.

The film is still hauntingly beautiful, terrifyingly funny, tragically sad, absurdly real, full of grief, fear and laughter. It's a morbid film, but it's still full of warmth towards the people in it. Lots of these weird genre hybrids are devoid of feelings, but The Reflecting Skin is about real people and their real feelings, even though they are all pretty sick and weird. There was one young dude in the audience saying the film seems more like a curiosity, something no one's ever heard of, but then again he was two when the film came out. I'd like to ask him what he thought of the film after he'd seen it.

More Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog.

Nicolas Winding Refn: Valhalla Rising

I never blogged about Only God Forgives, even though I liked it to a certain extent. It was very exciting and interesting and extremely well done and beautiful in all its gore, though I never knew what Nicolas Winding Refn was talking about in his film.

Same goes for his viking epic Valhalla Rising (if you can call a film that has only some dozen people in it an epic). It's not as well made as Only God Forgives - he was clearly given a bigger budget for his OGF after the popular Drive. Valhalla Rising is just as baffling as OGF. It's something Jim Jarmusch might make out of an unproduced Robert Bresson script collaborating with Antonin Artaud. Very strange and impenetrable, but still somehow fascinating. But not as fascinating as I'd hoped it to be. Three stars out of five - or maybe three and a half.

Akiva Goldsman: Winter's Tale

Akiva Goldsman: The Winter's Tale: uneasy mix of whimsical fantasy, some scary and not-so-scary devil horror and sentimental coffee table book "wisdom". I haven't read Mark Helprin's 1,000-page novel, but seems like lots has been cut down in the film, which makes the bad parts show up.

Stephen Graham Jones: The Last Final Girl

Here's a book I really wanted to like, but didn't for some reason or another get in. I understood Jones's idea of a metafictional book that takes place inside a film or a TV show, but this just didn't grab my interest the way I thought it would. I'll give it another try later, and I'm definitely interested in Jones's output which seems to mix noiry edginess with ultra-violent horror. Sounds definitely my kind of stuff.

Michael Koryta: The Ridge

Recently read: Michael Koryta's horror novel The Ridge. I'd read earlier one of Koryta's PI novels featuring Lincoln Perry and liked it a great deal (read the review here) and I grabbed this from the book store's sale. The Ridge is an entertaining horror novel with an interesting and an original premise - at least I haven't seen it used much. And there are some interesting locations, such as a shelter for big felines and a lighthouse nowhere near the sea. As in Koryta's PI novels, the mystery is rooted in the old times, where things were crueler than they are now. There's some truly fascinating stuff behind the lighthouse an old man has built for himself.

Koryta also writes in a clear and easy prose that's not overtly sentimental. There's an edge of noiriness in his words sentencens. The Ridge comes off as a quiet novel about the futile efforts of man. His people and the ending of the book are sad, as befits the horror genre.  

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Stanley Kubrick's Fear and Desire (1953) and an assortement of other strange films

Fear and Desire

We had another film festival at the cabin with some friends of mine. (Here and here are posts on the earlier festivals.)

One of the most interesting films we watched was the first feature film by Stanley Kubrick, Fear and Desire (1953) that Kubrick himself had put a ban on, so it hasn't been legally been available for decades. It's recently been released on DVD and is easily available. None of my friends had seen it, so it was all new to all of us.

It's a war film set somewhere in an unknown war, so it's heavily symbolic and abstract to the edge of being almost meaningless. Fear and Desire was written by a playwright, Howard Sackler (who also wrote Kubrick's second film, Killer's Kiss), so it's no wonder it resembles an absurdist play a lot. At times it gets bogged down by hilariously "deep" dialogue and monologue, but the first half-hour is actually quite good. Kubrick - who himself shot and edited the film - edits quirkily, against the rules, using quick flashes of people's faces and pieces of action. Kubrick was at least in the beginning of his career a noir director and there's a strong noir feel also in this little war film. It's an intriguing film, well worth a watch.

Other films with snappy mini-reviews and starrings:

The ass of the Machine Gun Woman

Ernesto Díaz Espinoza: Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman (Chile 2012): sounded great, but proved amateurish and boring. *½

Lucio Fulci: Beyond (Italy 1981): confusing and dead-serious zombie flick. **

Willard Huyck: Howard the Duck (USA 1986): absolute bore-fest, with people (and the duck) just shouting, running and jumping all the time. *

Kaarlo Kortelainen: Makkarakalakeittoa, sano Tympee Huttunen/Sausage fish soup, said the Grumpy Huttunen (Finland 1988): one of the worst films ever, only video-released calamity shot somewhere at a deserted cabin and in near-by woods. Very hilarious. * or *****

Veikko Itkonen: Mullin mallin/Topsy-turvy (Finland 1961): nonsensical and incoherent musical comedy made near the end of the Finnish studio system. Probably one of these: * or ****

Adam McKay: Anchorman (USA 2004): I'd never seen anything by Will Ferrell, but even though this was mildly funny, I don't feel an urgent need to watch more of his films. **

Robert Culp: Hickey & Boggs (USA 1972): pretty hard to follow without subtitles, but still great early seventies' crime flick, without any of the genre trappings. ****

Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel: Leviathan (USA 2012): experimental documentary of a fishing ship somewhere in the Atlantic, quite hypnotic at times, but don't go looking for a content. ***½

Tobe Hooper: Lifeforce (USA 1985): interesting movie about space vampires, but even though the main monster is one of the most beautiful women in the history of cinema, suffers from too much length and uninteresting lead actors. **½

Andrzej Zulawski: The Third Part of the Night (Poland 1971): very interesting allegory on Communist Poland, with lots of grotesque and surrealistic imagery thrown in. ***½

Fred Cavaye: Point Blank (France 2010): capable and snappy thriller. ***

Kinji Fukasaku: Message from Space (Japan 1978): a hapless Star Wars clone should've been more hilarious than it really was. **

Albert Band: Zoltan, Hound of Dracula (USA 1978): I didn't watch this myself, but from what I gathered is either * or *****

Ismo Sajakorpi: Merkitty/Branded (Finland 1984): early Finnish horror TV movie, not bad, but somewhat dated. ***

Steve Carver: Lone Wolf McQuade (USA 1983): hilariously serious Chuck Norris vehicle, quite entertaining if you're willing to forget it's very stupid and clichéd. **½

More Overlooked Movies coming in at a blog near you!

The 2000th blog post of Pulpetti

I've been thinking a lot lately of what I should be writing here now that I have reached the 2,000th post line. I've been unaware of whether I should just do a regular blog post (I have several things coming up) or whether I should do a long special post – and if that, what should it be? One subject I thought of was the history of this blog – but is anyone interested? My 1000th post was a long article on H. A. DeRosso. (For some reason many people have read this minuscule write-up on my 1900th post.)

There hasn't been much going on here at Pulpetti. I've been lazy for the past two or three years. At first I used to write one or even two posts per day! I can't grasp where I found all that time, still working my ass off writing books and newspaper articles and reviews of books and films and what not. I don't seem to be able to find that time even now when I seem to have less work at my hands than, say, five years ago. And some three years ago I decided I should concentrate more on my Finnish blog (here at Julkaisemattomia, meaning The Unpublished, the name I've been trying to get rid of). Hey, I'm a Finnish writer after all! My readers are Finnish, so why promote in English?

But then again I've made some friends with Pulpetti: Kevin Wignall, Todd Mason (acquaintance also from several Yahoo groups - and yet another thing I don't have time for anymore!), Bruce Grossman, James Reasoner, Bill Crider... Pulpetti was also elemental when I started editing the crime paperback series for the Arktinen Banaani publisher some years ago. The series didn't last long, but the books are still out there, here's hoping someone will find them and become a writer and write the goddamnedest book in the annals of the Finnish literature. And there's also this point: I really want to write about this pulpy and sleazy hardboiled stuff, I'm not sure if there's enough interest with Finnish readers to warrant a whole blog in Finnish. (I sometimes get the feeling that even though there's much love for, say, James Ellroy or Charles Willeford in Finland, there's not much interest for new writers in this genre we so affectedly call noir. Maybe that's the case everywhere.)

I've been working on a book that will be called "Pulpografia Britannica", focusing on the British crime fiction published in Finnish in cheap paperbacks or pamphlets. I haven't written about those books as much as one would hope, and I have a hard time explaining why that is. (One explanation is that I haven't really read all the books I'm covering, some I've just sampled or browsed through.) There are some writers I'd really like to cover (Angus Ross, for example), but at the same time I've been reading lots of other books, for example the new Finnish translation of James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer which I painstakingly tackled through for a review. (I don't think I'll be reading the other books in the Leatherstocking series, though there will be new translations for all of them.) At the time I'm tackling through the collection of Bruno Schulz's weird surrealistic stories, again for a review. I should be writing about them as well in here. Why don't I? It is at times pretty hard to write something substantial about a book or a film in a language that's not your own. Try it someday! I don't know how people like Nabokov or Conrad did it. (Well, they were idiosyncratic and not easy writers, Conrad being even clumsy.)

I didn't mean this to get so wordy and, well, pathetic? Suffice to say that even though I've been thinking about quitting Pulpetti, I'm sure I'll keep on posting stuff about books and films and stuff.

When I posted the above-mentioned 1900th post, Jerry House (whose blog I should be reading more) said I should send a cake to every reader of Pulpetti, when I reach the 2000 limit. So here's cake to everyone out there!

John Grant's massive encyclopedia of film noir

One of my Christmas presents was this huge film noir encyclopedia by film historian John Grant. I asked for it on purpose, because I had a hunch I'd enjoy the book.

And I most certainly did. Grant's book commands respect. He covers 3,500 films, both classic films noirs of the Golden Age of Hollywood and later neo-noirs of the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's. He also includes lots of forgotten gems no one's ever heard of and has a feel for the Asian films as well. Grant knows his stuff and writes well. He has also nice things to say about some underrated films.

There are some problems with the book, though. The main thing for any reader is that it doesn't have a proper index. Some actors and directors are indexed, but it's a frustrating collection of only the most famous names. The point of this kind of book is the info on less-known films and directors, although Grant gives nice mini-essays also on well-known films, such as Citizen Kane. The info on the films is at times a bit thin, sometimes Grant provides only a short synopsis. And I happen to have a habit of skipping synopses and going straight to the review or the analysis part.

Grant also includes films I have a hard time to accept as noirs, mainly from the eighties and nineties, such as Ridley Scott's Black Rain, Gregory Hoblit's Primal Fear and Alan J. Pakula's Presumed Innocent. Are these noirs?

It's of course possible to say that it's better to give too much information than too little of it. Grant also includes films that are only fringe noirs, such as British suspense fillers from the fourties. It's unlikely they are full of sound and fury and despair that describes some of their Hollywood counterparts. But it seems Grant allows for many kind of definitions of film noir, even contradictory. He discusses these definitions in the foreword, giving out examples and thematic similarities, but still seems like his definition is too wide. I'm not really complaining, mind you, it's interesting to read also about those films.

I could find some films that Grant hasn't mentioned. What about Stark Fear from 1963? Radio On from 1979? I also checked - rather painstakingly because of the absent index - all the films based on the books and screenplays by Jean-Patrick Manchette. There's only one mentioned!

There are also some glaring omissions of foreign films noirs. It's understandable of course, when there's only scarce or no information on them easily available. Then again there are lots of non-Hollywood films Grant mentions I've never heard of (and likely will never see) from, say, Spain or Greece. Grant mentions some Finnish films as well, but he has only some three films by Aki Kaurismäki and one (half-Estonian) by Ilkka Järvi-Laturi. All of them are neonoirs from the eighties and nineties, while there were lots of studio-era films noirs made in Finland. Here are some of the classic Finnish films noirs for you:

Teuvo Tulio: Rikollinen nainen (The Criminal Woman); Sellaisena kuin sinä minut halusit (The Way You Wanted Me); Rakkauden risti (The Cross of Love) (all sleazy melodramas)
T. J. Särkkä: Kuu on vaarallinen (The Moon is Dangerous,  pure James M. Cainish stuff about a wild woman charming an older guy)
Roland af Hällström: Pohjoisen pikajuna (The Express Train to North, suspense in a train)
Edvin Laine: Musta rakkaus (Black Love - hey, even the title is purest noir!)
Matti Kassila: Varsovan laulu (The Warszaw Song; about smuggling); Tulipunainen kyyhkynen (The Crimson Dove, psychological suspense)
Veikko Itkonen: Silmät hämärässä (The Eyes in the Mist, one of the purest films noirs in Finnish cinema)
Aarne Tarkas: Olemme kaikki syyllisiä (We're All Guilty, what could be more noir than that?); Hän varasti elämän (He Stole a Life, marvelous Psycho pastiche, made already in the early sixties, absurd and darkly funny)

There are lots of others, but these came off top of my head. There are also many humorous crime films that because of the time they were done and the black-and-white photography are mentioned as films noirs, but I'm not sure whether they qualify. Some of the films mentioned above will be screened at the Festival of Finnish Cinema later in the coming spring, I'll write more about them then (as I did last year about Finnish westerns, see here and here).

As Grant also has lots of neonoirs in the book, here's also a list of Finnish neonoirs:

Pauli Pentti: Pimeys odottaa (The Darkness Waits); Macbeth (b&w rendering of the Shakespeare play)
Pekka Hyytiäinen: MP - minä pelkään (IA – I'm Afraid, uneasy but very hypnotic mixture of experimental dystopian film and some very personal horror; Hyytiäinen's other indie-produced films might also qualify, but they are very hard to come by)
Veikko Aaltonen: Tuhlaajapoika (A Prodigal Son, sleazy scumbag noir with S&M undertones); Rakkaudella, Maire (With Love, Maire, very stylish piece of Hitchcockian noir)
Petri Kotwica: Musta jää (Black Ice, family noir)
Ville Mäkelä: Lain ulkopuolella (Outside the Law, a vigilante film)
Taavi Kassila: Petos (Betrayal, a nice piece of epoque noir)
Mika Kaurismäki: Condition Red (Aki's brother's film filmed somewhere in Texas)
Visa Mäkinen: Yön saalistajat (The Predators of the Night,
sleazy hardboiled crime film from the only proper exploitation director-producer of the Finnish film history)

(Too many links to provide here, sorry - Google them or check them at IMDb!)

All in all, John Grant's book comes highly, highly recommended by me.

What did I say about noir in Hollywood in the 2010s?

Remember what I said about new noir films in Hollywood? See my post on Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners here.

I stumbled on a post at Hardboiled Wonderland listing the best crime films of the last year. Seems there are more noir or at least noirish crime films out there than I first realized. I hated The Counselor, but Jedidiah Ayres writes interestingly on other films he mentions. (Of course not all the films are Hollywood, but nevertheless.)

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Heathers (1988)

I finally saw this cult classic from the late eighties. Watched it from an old VHS, and over at Facebook a friend said that it's a film that just has to be watched from VHS.

There is indeed certain charm that only low-budget 80's flicks have. But that aside, this is a neat quirky little film that has lots going for it: young Winona Ryder and Christian Slater with their snarling accents, taut script by Daniel Waters (I believe he won the Edgar for the script) and funny late eighties' costumes. The story about two high school lovers who start killing their school mates is twisted and funny. Slater's behaviour is never really explained, which is a good thing, since it might've been awkward. There are also some implausibilities as comes to the behaviour of Winona Ryder's character and her behaviour. The ending with Ryder starting to befriend the high school fatso didn't feel right, even though I can see why they did it that way.

Nevertheless, this is a fun film that hasn't dated badly. (More Overlooked Films here.)

Denis Villeneuve: Prisoners

I just saw this in a movie theater (a press screening) and I was totally overwhelmed! What a movie!

The story about two missing kids and their families going through a heart-breaking and violent tragedy might play out sentimental and simplistic, but Denis Villeneuve, in his first Hollywood outing, keeps things both fragile and rough at the same time. You can feel the tension in the pictures, in the actors' movements, in the saddening Pennsylvania milieu the film takes place in... Although there are some things that were done less or more slackly, I'll give this five stars out of five.

It must've started out with Winter's Bone. There have been lots of recent interesting and touching films that have crimes in them, but are not crime films per se: Place Beyond the Pines, Paperboy, Mud, Take Shelter, End of Watch... There are also Andrew Dominik's admirable Killing Them Softly and William Friedkin's sick but funny Killer Joe, not to mention Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive and Only God Forgives and Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers.

Noir thrives in Hollywood.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Year of the Dragon

I watched Michael Cimino's 1985 film from an old VHS cassette, afterwards I threw the cassette away. Why? Because I want to get rid of my old cassettes - of course only those that can be replaced. But seems like everything is replaceable nowadays. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not.

I'd seen Cimino's film earlier - some 20 years ago, or even longer ago - and it hadn't made much of an impact on me. The same thing happened also at this time. One might blame the fact that I watched the movie from a worn cassette with possibly a wrong picture ratio. But still I find I wasn't very intrigued with Cimino's script and his characters. I'm not sure if I ever want to try to see this on big screen.

Even though there might be much to like in the film for someone who likes his crime fiction heroes despicable. Mickey Rourke is not bad in Year of the Dragon, but he's overdone with his fedora and long overcoat. His motivations are not very satisfactorily explained and he almost comes off as the hero, even though he's shown to be a bully and racist. This is a very contradictory film at its heart.

There are many great scenes in the film (such as Chinese drug lord John Lone's visit to Thailand, also the shootout near the end is expertly done), but there's also the stacked-on ending, which is really unfitting. And then there's the scene in which Rourke almost attacks a woman after which the said woman starts kissing Rourke... You'd think they wouldn't have done these things in this way in 1985, but hey, what do you know?

More Overlooked Films here. (Seems like only later on.)

Unused Finnish cover for Jason Starr's Fake ID

Can't believe I haven't posted this earlier.

Remember when I used to edit the noir paperback series for a Finnish publisher, with books by Duane Swierczynski, Christa Faust, Scott Phillips and others? Well, the story didn't end well, since the line was canceled after six books. The format was changed into hardcover, but that didn't help.

I'd already translated Jason Starr's excellent Fake ID over years ago and it was scheduled to come up next in the series, in hardcover. Ossi Hiekkala made this very nice cover illustration to go with it, but the book never came out, due to many reasons. I can't really tell you how sorry I'm for this.