Ego and the Emotions

        "Not by well-oiled, soulless machines, but by men, the best and most efficient of whom suffered from unpredictable aberrations of the ego and the emotions.”

— W. R. Burnett (1899-1982), The Asphalt Jungle, 1949.

On Noir Set #53

Chinatown

Clash By Night

Union City

Asphalt Jungle

Little Drummer Girl (2018)

One Way Street

Collateral

Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

A Prophet

Third Man

Sweet Smell of Success

Road to Perdition

Secret Beyond the Door

Shadows of the Jukebox #11

Touch of Evil

Last Stop in Yuma County

Asphalt Jungle

Desire and Hell at Sunset Motel

Plunder Road

Natural Born Killers

Dark Passage

Twin Peaks

Hell Drivers

Lone Star

99 River Street

Let Him Have It

Postman Always Rings Twice (1947)

The Grifters

Strangely More Seductive

        Noir is premised on the audience's need to see failure risked, courted, and sometimes won ; the American dream becomes a nightmare, one strangely more seductive and euphoric than the optimism it repudiates ....... Noir provided losing with a mystique.

Ann Douglas
Vanity Fair
2007

image
Noir City publications

Even Bad Luck is Some Kind of Luck #130

Angel Heart

Ace in the Hole

Vertigo

Asphalt Jungle

Body Heat

The Big Combo

Babylon Berlin

To Have and Have Not

Cercle Rouge

Sweet Smell of Success

Chinatown

Seventh Victim

Slam Dance

The Set Up

They Shoot Horses Don't They

Naked City

The Conformist

Ministry of Fear

Se7en

Devil in a Blue Dress

Mildred Pierce (1945)

Illustrious Corpses

Killing of a Chinese Bookie

Le Trou

Last Seduction

The Hitch-Hiker

Postman Always Rings Twice (1981)

Reservoir Dogs

Night of the Hunter

Le Samourai