The Bleak Western

We often find that Westerns, modern or traditional, have elements of darkness

and pessimism found in the Noir thriller especially, as with some of these, if the storyline is that of revenge.

                                                               Django

                                                     
                                                   Comanche Station

Border Incident

                                               Great Northfield Minnesota Raid

Ox Bow Incident

Wild Bunch

                                                         The Outrage

       True Grit    (2010)

The Last Picture Show

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

No Country for Old Men

High Plains Drifter

Major Dundee

                                                        The Shootist

Thunderheart

                                                          Junior Bonner

Hud

Unforgiven

Eagle's Wing

Once Upon a Time in the West

                                                Bad Day at Black Rock

Pocket Money

                                                         Matewan

                                                   One-eyed Jacks

Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Dirty Neon

Neon is 100 years old. Invented in France and first used in America around 1923 by a Los Angeles Packard car dealership. As Chris Black says on his  Available in any colour  blog ... 'Where would Hardboiled or Noir be without it ?'

ALF'S BBQ Drinks Sandwiches

     The sign was done in blue lights and kind of hung like a ghost there in the dripping trees. It swung and you could hear it creak. Just the sign and nothing else.

The Red Scarf

Gil Brewer

1958

Didn't Have Anything Going

            One dog was black as a panther and another was white with brown ticking like flung paint. There was another white, a female and smaller than the rest with a half-black face and a black spot in a shape that reminded Joe of Louisiana, south of Baton Rouge. And there was the dark silken brindle, in red silks with a white number one stitched on the sides. Joe would have paid to watch that brindle just walk, but he was down to his last twenty dollars and it was not entertainment he sought. He had to turn that twenty into something more so he was back looking at the red fawn. It was stuck in his head, somehow, that such a ramshackle dog would win the race because he didn't have anything going for him but to win. He was due. It was such thinking that lead Joe to his present state.

David Williams
Maybe in West Memphis I'll Find My Joy

from The Soundcheck & the Fury blog

More on www.davidwwilliams.blogspot.com

Gothic Noir

                         illustration by Melissa Downing                                                                          

The only film directed by Englishman Charles Laughton, Night of the Hunter is also the only one to be described as an expressionistic Gothic Noir fairytale. Based on the book by Davis Grubb it has possibly Mitchum's best ever performance as tatooed preacher Harry Powell. Shot by Stanley Cortez who did the likes of Magnificent Ambersons and Shock Corridor it's haunting to say the least.

Some More Bukowski

       I know what a park bench is and the landlord's knock. There are only two things wrong with money; too much or too little.

Charles Bukowski

             painting by Scott Guion
        
        I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why i wasn't dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren't thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.

Bukowski
Women
1978

More Bukowski

   I was sentimental about many things : .........the long nights of drinking and smoking, talking, the arguments, being told you snore, reading a newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because she's now married to a dentist with an I.Q of 95, racetracks, parks, your drinking, her dancing.................

Charles Bukowski

Women 1978

                    If you get married they think you're finished and if you are without a woman they think you are incomplete

Charles Bukowski

Odds Against Tommorow

                                         
          The debate will always be whether this great 1959 movie by Robert Wise who also gave us The Set Up is the last Classic Noir or first of the Post Noir cycle.

https://wolfmanscultfilmclub.wordpress.com/2018/08/22/odds-against-tomorrow-1959-messed-up-men-plan-a-bank-job-with-jazz/