Its the holidays and life tends to get too sweet. The cloying music and the red Starbucks cups. The candy cane and the cloying cheer. If all this is seriously threatening your normal sense of dread and you need to urgently restore your faith in human folly then you need to look no further than these 5 gems from days past. Just what you need to gear up for the new year.
1. Murder, My Sweet (1944)
Incredibly complex and convoluted, Murder, my Sweet is the best adaptation of Raymond Chandler's briliant dark work. It features detective Marlowe (also, seen in another brilliant film The Big Sleep) wisecracking his way through a world so murky it will make your life seem crystal clear even across those gift wraps.
2. Touch of Evil (1958)
Modern police corruption just isn't cutting it for you? This 60-year old might just do the job for you. Watch Orson Welles direct himself in this masterpiece that holds its own against his other larger masterpiece, Citizen Kane. Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh star in this mesmerizing tale of corruption at the Mexican border. Miss it, only if you have no desire left to be moved by the moving image.
3. Detour (1945)
67-minutes of masterful intrigue shot in about 28 days will make you wonder how can so much go wrong so quickly. It is hard to believe how films like this could even be made. Seems like the noir films of the 40s and 50s were full of European sense of dread and existential chaos perhaps perpetrated by the wars and the ensuing murkiness of human intentions. Speaking of murky intentions - watch Ann Savage play what might be the most striking female lead you'll ever see. This detour will take you straight past the plastic Christmas trees.
4. Night of the Hunter (1955)
Want to see a fearsome Robert Mitchum terrorize two kids to reveal a stash from a bank heist gone wrong? Want to watch some of the most unnerving, iconic cinematography? Want to watch a slow descent into hell as a man of the cloth lets his true colors rip through? There is nothing subtle here. This is a hysterical tale of haunting quality, of a dream gone terribly nightmarish. And no Santa in sight.
5. Sweet smell of Success (1957)
I long for intriguing tales of moral vacuum specially in the guise of social contracts and am rarely shaken by choices people make in pursuit of power and fame. However, this film shook me to the core. Maybe I watched it when I was much too young. Maybe you still are. So, watch Burt Lancaster play JJ Hunsecker, the most powerful newspaper columnist in New York with molten blue steel for blood and samurai steel for a tongue, out to sabotage his own sister's romance by recruiting a sleazy reporter. After all, sweet success in New York is surely thicker than blood, even your own.
and if even these won't send you into deep doldrums then here is a special bonus credit.
Ace in the Hole (1951)
What would you do if you were in a deadbeat town trying to be a journalist again? Would you write your way to stardom using the blood of a another man trapped in a cave under a collapsed coal mine? Why, of course! That's what makes it Media! About time they made it a four-letter-word. Watch Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder's (of all people) take on the horrors of early mass media and our appetite for titivation. To borrow from an old Indian proverb, everyone's hands are black in a coal mine - and we all live in a very large coal mine.