Details, credits, errata: This week Sam and Alissa talk about The Maltese Falcon, one of Sam’s favorite films, with our terrific guest Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times. It’s a great flick we recommend highly do you—one of the all-time great movies ever made by any standard, and a great introduction to film noir. The movie is available to stream on HBO Max and also to rent or buy through various outlets but Sam hates the degraded quality you get with streaming and recommends the Warner Archive blu-ray that came out a couple of years ago, which has very nice blacks and no noticeable artifacts on the print.
Jamelle, Sam and Alissa talk a bit about developing a Noir Syllabus; here’s everything the three of us mentioned, plus a couple of others added in to fill in some gaps by Sam after the fact:
Laura (1944, Otto Preminger)
Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder)
Murder, My Sweet (1944, Edward Dmytryk)
The Big Sleep (1946, Howard Hawks)
T-Men (1947, Anthony Mann)
Out of the Past (1947, Jacques Tourneur)
The Lady From Shanghai (1947, Orson Welles)
Blood on the Moon (1948, Robert Wise)
Key Largo (1948, John Huston)
Raw Deal (1948, Anthony Mann)
Stray Dog (1949, Akira Kurosawa)
DOA (1949, Rudolph Maté)
The Asphalt Jungle (1950, John Huston)
The Third Man (1950, Carol Reed)
In a Lonely Place (1950, Nicholas Ray)
The Big Heat (1953, Fritz Lang)
Drive a Crooked Road (1954, Richard Quine)
Killer’s Kiss (1955, Stanley Kubrick)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955, Robert Aldrich)
Rififi (1955, Jules Dassin)
Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton)
The Killing (1956, Stanley Kubrick)
Sweet Smell of Success (1957, Alexander Mackendrick)
Extra Credit: Raw Deal, Miami Vice
Sam said that The Killing is only about 65 minutes long; he was thinking of Killer’s Kiss, which is 67 minutes. The Killing isn’t a huge time commitment, either, at 85 minutes.
Our episode art is Stanley Kubrick’s 1949 photo “Commuters in Train Station, Chicago,” a beautiful picture made freely available by the Library of Congress through Wikimedia.
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Maltese Falcon is copyright 1941 Warner Bros. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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Episode 12: Noir 101