Our full thread from 2021 combined here...with possibly more work done on it afterwards (no promises). Full list will be provided in a separate post...

Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine
Posted by Don Malcolm on 11/6/2021, 12:13 pm
Edited by Don Malcolm on 11/6/2021, 12:16 pm
https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/the-100-best-noirs-of-all-time/?utm_source=PMNTNL&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=211106

Posting this from my phone so I won’t lose the link before I can look at the list on my computer & discover just how screwy it is...lots of American neo-noir on it, not sure about foreign noir (but not expecting much).

Re: Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine)
Posted by ChiBob on 11/7/2021, 3:24 pm, in reply to "Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine)"

After looking at that list I've decided that I hate film noir lists. Woman In The Window, numero uno? Lol. I'll stop there.

OK, Bob, we know you're a curmudgeon! :-)

Re: Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine)
Posted by Dan in the MWUser icon on 11/7/2021, 3:29 pm, in reply to "Re: Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine)"

I was also stunned to find "Woman in the Window" ranked as Number One.

It's a kluge-y list... [Re: Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine)]
Posted by Don MalcolmUser icon on 11/7/2021, 3:40 pm, in reply to "Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine)"
Edited by Don Malcolm on 11/7/2021, 3:40 pm

By kluge-y I mean that the number of films in "classic" and "neo" categories count up into too-convenient "round numbers" (see table)...



That's 60 for the "classic" (up through the 50s) and 40 for the "neo" (the 60s to the present).

For those who read the article, you'll know that the Top 2 picks are wacky and are quite probably the result of a writers' committee trying hard to be different from the pack that would pick DOUBLE INDEMNITY and OUT OF THE PAST (which rank #3 and #7 on this list respectively).

For those who haven't read the article, you know that I'm giving you nothing more and suggest that just to keep in practice with Top 100 lists (whether good, bad, or surreal) you take a bit of time to peruse it...you'll engage your neck muscles a good bit because you'll be shaking your head the whole time you're reading it!

Re: Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine)
Posted by CarlUser icon on 11/8/2021, 12:35 pm, in reply to "Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine)"
Edited by Carl on 11/8/2021, 12:38 pm

As ridiculous as Woman In The Window is making No. 1, Scarlet Street doesn't make the top 100 at all, despite the fact it has the same director, much of the same cast and a similar story ... plus the fact that if you held a poll on the favorite of the two, Scarlet Street might win. A good number of folks consider it the better film, and I'd rate them a tossup. So if you really want to piss people off and be cutting edge, you rate Window No. 1 and Scarlet No. 2, or Scarlet No. 1 with Woman In The Window No. 2.

The 100 is just too all-inclusive. Classic noir and neo-noir alone is problematic enough for just 100 choices, but then you throw in French titles and open a whole new large can of worms. There are bound to be silly omissions in all categories. A bone is thrown to Japanese noir with one selection. Britnoir is not well represented. One gothic/period noir all that I saw. No westerns. You'd think it was anti-Hitchcock but then The Wrong Man gets in there. Too much Coen brothers, for sure.

I'm with Bob and Dan. The more of these lists I read, the goofier they seem to get. I see that in music lists as well. There are some good choices and it's a rather fascinating mix but the list itself is simply too slipshod to take seriously.
I'm waiting for the list that ranks The Two Jakes ahead of Chinatown.

Re: Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine)
Posted by Livius on 11/8/2021, 11:44 pm, in reply to "Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine)"

I'm someone who likes lists in general. I like making them and I like perusing the choices of others, sometimes to nod approvingly when tastes coincide, and sometimes to have the opposite reaction. I find them fun.

It's worth remembering what lists are for. Aside from offering some mild entertainment in themselves, they serve to get people talking and thinking and they also are a means of introducing the less knowledgeable to genres/styles they are unfamiliar with. So I think that list linked to is actually quite a good one. Not only has it provoked comment and reactions here regarding placement and so on, but the fact is there's not really a bad movie on it and the mix of old and new offers a way in for many who might be deterred by a less catholic approach.

Colin

Re: Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine)
Posted by Don MalcolmUser icon on 11/9/2021, 5:35 am, in reply to "Re: Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine)"

Thanks, Colin. I like lists, too, for the same reason—they often provoke discussion, which should have the leeway to veer between criticism and praise. And I agree with you that as a guide to films that are worth viewing (absent any other claim for its efficacy or definitiveness), it’s a good list.

As a list that purports to precisely place “the best of the best,” however, it clearly possesses many shortcomings, and I think our effort as aficionados who have been engaged in these efforts for much longer than the Paste Magazine committee is to look for the specific strengths and weaknesses in such evaluative efforts.

I wonder if we would get more use out of this list if we were to separate it into two sections, one for classic noir and one for neo-noir, a process that may well have been the initial process taken by the list compilers. While I agree that the top two choices are odd ones in the context of what we know about the shifting consensus in critical circles (WOMAN IN THE WINDOW and BIG SLEEP strike me as belonging to an approach to noir that reigned in the 1980s and has mostly been supplanted in the intervening years), I think we might still get something more useful from the list if we bifurcate it.

I’ll come back shortly and do that in a subsequent post...

Top 25 Comparisons [was: Re: Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine)]
Posted by Don MalcolmUser icon on 11/9/2021, 10:18 am, in reply to "Re: Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine)"

Let's start with a direct comparison of the old Noir Top 25 list (from 2005) with the Top 25 films on Paste's Top 100 list that are from 1959 or earlier (the "classic noir era"). I've left in any foreign films that qualify in terms of the timeframe.

I've ordered these into tiers of five, as it makes for an interesting way to break up the list and get a sense of different levels (even if that might be attenuated by the Paste crew's desire to be more "au courant" and place selected foreign noirs from the classic era into their list as talismans of their particular brand of cinephilia). The numbers in parentheses display the film's rank in the Top 25 poll. Here you are:

Woman in the Window (82), The Big Sleep (11), Double Indemnity (3), Touch of Evil (8), The Third Man (51)
Out of the Past (1), Kiss Me Deadly (15), Laura (26), Sunset Blvd. (25), The Maltese Falcon (7)
Night of the Hunter (80), Gilda (31), Elevator to the Gallows (N/A), Ace in the Hole (29), They Live By Night (53)
Raw Deal (16), Thieves' Highway (127), The Killers (5), The Lady From Shanghai (65), Drunken Angel (N/A)
In A Lonely Place (12), The Killing (10), The Big Heat (20), The Wrong Man (107), The Postman Always Rings Twice (23)

The titles in bold--DOUBLE INDEMNITY, THE MALTESE FALCON, RAW DEAL, and POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE--are the only four films that wound up in the same tier as they occupy in the original Top 25 poll.

Thirteen of the 25 films shown here are part of the old Top 25 list. So you won't have to pick them out, here they are in a list with the Top 25 rank, then the Paste "adjusted" rank (recalibrated into a list solely for pre-1960 films):

The Big Sleep, 11, 2
Double Indemnity, 3, 3
Touch of Evil, 8, 4
Out of the Past, 1, 6
Kiss Me Deadly, 15, 7

Sunset Blvd., 25, 9
The Maltese Falcon, 7, 10
Raw Deal, 16, 16
The Killers, 5, 18
In A Lonely Place, 12, 21

The Killing 10, 22
The Big Heat, 20, 23
Postman Always Rings Twice, 23, 25

Here are the other 35 films from the classic era that appeared on Paste's list, cross-referenced to the Top 25 poll. They are again shown in tiers:

Mildred Pierce (28), Night and the City (14), The Set-Up (19), Criss Cross (2), Crime Wave (58)
Murder My Sweet (24), Nightmare Alley (13), Odd Man Out (N/A), Pickup on South Street (35), White Heat (40)
The Hitch-Hiker (N/A), Martha Ivers (27), The Blue Dahlia (138), Sorry Wrong Number (137), Journey Into Fear (N/A)
Clash By Night (155), Gun Crazy (6), The Verdict (N/A), Sweet Smell of Success (48), T-Men (36)
Angels With Dirty Faces (N/A), Force of Evil (60), Try and Get Me (37), Key Largo (50), Detour (17)

D.O.A. (9), Lady in the Lake (N/A), The Prowler (110), The Asphalt Jungle (4), Tension (178)
Obsession [UK](N/A), Gaslight (N/A), Kiss of Death (55), The Naked City (166), Angel Face (148)

Films from the Top 25 list that are totally missing from the Paste list of 60 classic noirs:

The Narrow Margin, 19, N/A
Scarlet Street, 21, N/A
Born to Kill, 22, N/A

So a total of 22 of our old Top 25 list are present on the list:

13 in the Top 25
7 in Paste's reconfigured 26-50 slots
2 in Paste's reconfigured 51-60 slots

I was surprised to discover that THE HITCH-HIKER, ODD MAN OUT, and GASLIGHT did not receive any votes in our old poll. That info had eluded me for more than 15 years. We can probably attribute ODD MAN OUT to the general reluctance of voters to include non-US films in the 2005 voting; and the absence of GASLIGHT is almost certainly due to the fact that voters were clearly more in thrall to the "hard-boiled paradigm" in '05 than is the case now. But Dan H. will be discouraged to discover that NOTORIOUS, which ranked at #61 in our poll, is nowhere to be found fifteen years later on the Paste poll. My theory: THE WRONG MAN has been "chatted up" a lot in recent years, and it's part of a popular sub-type that has more resonance than was the case previously; thus in a poll constricted further by the need to allot 40% of the slots to neo-noir, NOTORIOUS got left on the cutting room floor.

Re: Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine)
Posted by Mike Kuhns on 11/9/2021, 9:23 pm, in reply to "Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine)"
I'm sure most people, including me, would quarrel with the order of ranking, but any list of 100 movies that includes 99 which I have in my collection can't be all bad. I don't have OBSESSION (1949) and don't know if it's available in a decent DVD or Blu Ray release. I purchased BLUE VELVET on Blu Ray just because it had good reviews, but I wouldn't really recommend it and wouldn't include it on any "best" list.

1946 NOTY voting results reprint [was: Re: Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine)]
Posted by Don Malcolm on 11/9/2021, 4:40 pm, in reply to "Top 25 Comparisons [was: Re: Yet another Top 100 list (Paste magazine)]"

The Brattle list reminded me that we did get through a number of polls that went deeper into evaluating noirs on a year-of-release basis. This was the Noir of the Year (NOTY) project, which stopped around 1950 due to a series of personal issues that cropped up on the board at that time.

The results for 1946 were completed, however, and show us a full list of the films released in that year that could have made up the Brattle's festival lineup. While it's a bit much to ask the Brattle to acquire and screen all 25 films from the list, it's instructive to see what was included--and what got omitted.

Films that are included in the Brattle series are shown in bold type:

Film, Avg.
THE KILLERS, 24.4
The Big Sleep, 24.2
The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers, 20.8
The Dark Corner, 20.6
Gilda, 20.3
The Postman Always Rings Twice, 20.3
Black Angel, 19.6
Notorious, 17.8
Somewhere In The Night, 17.5
The Blue Dahlia, 16.8
The Chase, 16.0
The Stranger, 15.8
Nobody Lives Forever, 14.2
Nocturne, 13.3
Night Editor, 12.4
Decoy, 11.9
Deadline At Dawn, 11.6
Crack-Up, 11.5
The Dark Mirror, 11.0
The Locket, 11.0
The Spiral Staircase, 10.1
Humoresque, 9.3
Shock, 7.9
So Dark The Night, 7.5
Strange Impersonation, 7.5
Panique (WI), 0.6

THE VERDICT and GREEN FOR DANGER didn't make the initial cut to be among the 25 films eligible for voting.

You can make a really good festival out of the 11 films from the 1946 list not included that ranked the highest:

THE KILLERS
MARTHA IVERS
THE DARK CORNER
SOMEWHERE IN THE NIGHT
THE CHASE
NOBODY LIVES FOREVER
NOCTURNE
NIGHT EDITOR
DECOY
DEADLINE AT DAWN
CRACK-UP

And we shouldn't turn up our noses at THE DARK MIRROR, HUMORESQUE or THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE, either.

Our voting for the films at the bottom of the list reminds us of just how concerted an effort amongst a certain cadre of writers/critics has been undertaken to elevate the standing of SO DARK THE NIGHT. This was a fine list, and while I might knock THE BIG SLEEP down a few notches, the NOTY project was turning out excellent results before it had its plug pulled. (Note the position of NOTORIOUS on this list--probably still somewhat low, but by this time the voters were more on board with the idea that it belonged in the noir category.)