Cleveland City: The Screenplay

Each time I watch The Third Man I discover something new. This past weekend, while catching the third act of this classic Noir, I came across two new observations:           1. Scorsese paid homage to a key post-funeral scene by replicating the same scene in The Departed (more on that in a upcoming blog)           2. The physical and visual intensity of our protagonist running around and then trying to get out of the post-war Vienna sewer while he's being chased by military police is a beautiful metaphor for many of our favorite Noir characters: even if they are not in the sewer itself, their moral compass certainly is. Orson Welles, as Harry Lime, who waters down medicine that then kills the very children whose mothers survived the bombs, is both monster and charmer. Charming monsters are the scariest. Because they live their lives keeping one foot in the sewer while the other (to parap...

"We're not computers, Sebastian, we're physical." - Rutger Hauer, Blade Rutger I write this blog every Sunday night. As I transition out of the weekend and prepare for the week ahead, seems like whatever time of day I sit down to write this, the news hits. And this entire season the news has been hitting hard. We all know what happened today. And regarding that, I don't have any words. I've been thinking a lot about what's happening right now and I've come to the conclusion that, once again, we are living in Noir Times. In The Film Experience , the authors point out, "Like the ending in Chinatown , many of the variations in these crime film formulas may be the product of changing times. With the Great Depression, Prohibition and urban crowding and unrest, the crime film of the 1930s acted out social instabilities through the marginal success of a marginal detective, like Sam Spade and others. In the 1970s, after the government corrupti...

"(Film Noir is) a movie which at no time misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending." - Roger Ebert It all started with the alleys of Cleveland. Living in downtown Cleveland, back when it was the uncool thing to do, to bypass traffic patterns, you often took shortcuts. Alleys are the very best shortcuts and so much of noir is anchored in alleys and shadows because the characters in film noir at a critical and often desperate time of their lives took a shortcut. And they've been paying for it ever since. Urban alleys, especially of those Midwest metropolises that cultivated during the industrial revolution, are dark and narrow and creepy. They typically house garbage dumpsters, building back doors and shady parking spots for even shadier cars. Sometimes there's rats, often used as cinema symbolism to signify a betrayer. The combination of alleys (short cuts) and rats (betrayers) and absence of light (darkness) creates an atmosphere of clau...