Motel Matches

Boys everywhere fumbling with the catches

I struck lucky with motel matches

Falling for you without a second look

Falling out of your open pocketbook

Giving you away like motel matches

I wake with the siren in an emergency

Though your mind is full of love

In your eyes there is a vacancy

And you know what i'll do

When the light outside changes from red to blue

Motel Matches
(Costello)
Elvis Costello
1980

image reblogged from
brown dress with the dots

Nicholas Musuraca

Stranger on the Third Floor

Cat People

The Hitch-Hiker

Out of the Past

The Bribe

Blue Gardenia

Spiral Staircase

Deadline at Dawn

Fallen Sparrow

Classic Fragments8- Finding Marty

              The Coens first Blood Simple in 1984, as is the case with Tarantino and Reservoir Dogs, is still their best.

Where Did Everyone go ?

       But nothing lasts forever
       And the deepest well runs dry
       Just 'cause i've stopped rolling sevens
       Doesn't mean i have to cry

       I'll take that nightcap
       One more won't show
       Where oh where oh where
       Did everyone go ?


Where Did Everyone Go ?
(David/ Van Heusen)
Nat King Cole
1963

image 
Robert Ryan in
The Set Up
from a girl and a gun

Olivier Bonhomme

All illustrations 
Olivier Bonhomme

The Long Embrace

        I had become obsessed with Raymond Chandler. Chandler had once said that great writing, whatever else it does, nags at the minds of subsequent writers who find it difficult sometimes to explain just why they are so haunted by a particular work or author. I could not deny that i had become haunted by Chandler, nor could i really explain exactly why.

The Long Embrace
Judith Freeman
2008

image
Los Angeles 1957
via We had faces then

Films Soleil

Missing Person

Delusion

Way of the Gun

Plein Soleil

After Dark My Sweet

Blood Simple

Hickey and Boggs

The Getaway

Poster Nosignalnoise.com

Drive Fast

           All the best songs were leaving songs, it seemed to Ivy, or hurting songs. There were lots of good ones of those. Life was hard and life hurt and you had to drive fast and drive far, Ivy thought, to get clear of it. When the rains came and the world ended you'd have to float hard and paddle fast. There was no end to it. A hearse, she thought, was nothing but one more getaway car.

Excerpt from
A Work in Digress
David Williams 2012

from The Soundcheck and the Fury
www.davidwilliams.bogspot.co.uk

image Joel D Levinson
from Hotparade

Empty Noir

        The emptiness of the closet was like a face grinning at him. And then he saw another slip of paper, also hooked to a hanger. He took it off and read it in a hissing whisper. It was only three words, the middle word her favourite verb.

David Goodis

Woman Ascends the Stairs

                Naruse's 1960 Noirish drama set in Tokyo's Ginza district contains everything from shrewd business to abandonment in the haunts of the city's businessmen with the unusual rebel figure of a mature madam. 

A Losing Game

     Played out by the band
     Love is a losing hand
     More than i could stand
     Love is a losing hand
   
     Over futile odds
     And laughed at by the gods
     And now the final frame
     Love is a losing game


Love is a Losing Game
(Winehouse)
Amy Winehouse

illustration
Michael Johnson

Harry Stradling

Tension

Picture of Dorian Gray

Johnny Guitar

Streetcar Named Desire

Suspicion

A Face in the Crowd

Escape

reblogged from
this isn't happiness

Just the Other Side of Nowhere

         I've come from the other side of nowhere
         To this big time lonesome town
         They gotta lotta ice an' snow here
         Half as cold as all the people i've found
         Every way i try to go here
         Seems to bring me down
         I seen about enough to know where i belong

Just the Other Side of Nowhere
(Kristofferson)
Kris Kristofferson
1970

illustration Yulia Blucher

Classic Fragments7 - Kill, Kill Sequence

                    The iconic Kill, Kill sequence of paranoia felt by the character holed up in the Peekskill Hotel on the town's main drag in 1947's The Unsuspected shot by Woody Bredell.

Death Will Tremble

            We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us.

Charles Bukowski

image Martine Barrat
re-blogged from
Midnight Martinis

Black Book

       Also known as Reign of Terror  this is a costume Noir shot by John Alton for director Anthony Mann in 1949 and using the betrayal theme during Revolution in France as a Hardboiled take on history.