http://www2.timesdispatch.com/rtd/entertainment/people/article/S-NOIR14_20100310-185404/329544/
Passaic might be best -- it is a town with an underbelly. I wrote about "Porno in Passaic" here at PMD, and I think it was one of my best posts ever:
http://patrickmurthasdiary.blogspot.com/2009/05/porno-in-passaic.html
Passaic Noir -- I can see it now!
How about a neo-noir thriller filmed entirely with mannequins?
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/44192
http://www.themannequinmovie.com/
This sounds reminiscent of The Twilight Zone episode "The After Hours," and perhaps of Gerard Damiano's 1976 puppet porno film Let My Puppets Come (no, I am not making that up).
Don Malcolm at The Blackboard posted an interesting story from The Daily Mirror blog at the Los Angeles Times about the tragic life of actress Gail Russell, dead at 36 of alcoholism:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2007/07/gail-russell.html
Positively Hollywood Babylon!
And really, it's gotten no better; doesn't it seem that every couple of months there is another lurid celebrity death? Corey Haim, Brittany Murphy, Casey Johnson, Michael Jackson, Brad Renfro, Heath Ledger, Anna Nicole Smith....It goes on, and no cautionary tales ever seem to stop it. And for every death, there are any number of near-misses and ruined careers; I read an article a couple of weeks ago about Wes Bentley, a rising star at the time of American Beauty, who hit the skids because of heroin addiction and is trying to make a comeback. These days, the hot trend is prescription drug abuse; there is surely a neo-noir to be made about a nefarious Dr. Feelgood.
Another contributor at The Blackboard mentioned a while back that the color lobby cards for film noirs often reveal that the protagonists are wearing light blue suits. Sure enough:
http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/2010/03/art-of-cinema-436.html
I like it when internal references in black-and-white films help me figure out the colors of the menswear; a line of dialogue in The More the Merrier lets us know that Joel McCrea is wearing a gray button-down shirt with his double-breasted suit (button-downs and double-breasteds are not supposed to mix, but I now consider that I have license).
Watching The More the Merrier on TCM the other night of course got me thinking about Joel McCrea, one of my favorite actors, and while noodling on the Internet I came across this pertinent article on "Sex and Joel McCrea":
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/50/mccrea.php
He really did have sex appeal to burn, and was very effective in scenes that he played in close physical; proximity to his female co-stars, as in The More the Merrier and The Palm Beach Story. I like the story about Anita Loos fainting when she saw McCrea on a beach!
Samuel Wilson at Mondo 70: A Wild World of Cinema discusses a lesser-known quasi-noir, The Glass Wall (1953). The image captures look great:
http://mondo70.blogspot.com/2010/03/glass-wall-1953.html
Among notables born on this date are scientist Albert Einstein, publisher Sylvia Beach, photographer Diane Arbus, French philosopher Raymond Aron, painters Adolph Gottlieb and Ferdinand Hodler (Switzerland), composer Georg Philipp Telemann, film directors Bertrand Blier and Wolfgang Petersen, playwright Horton Foote, novelists Algernon Blackwood and John Wain, pop music guru Quincy Jones, Estonian poet Kristjan Jaak Peterson, and actors Michael Caine, Rita Tushingham, and Bonar Colleano. Colleano, born in New York City to an Australian circus family, was an up-and-coming actor in post-war British films, including Brit-noirs, but died in 1958 when he James Deanishly crashed his sportscar. He passed on eight days before I was born -- I could be the reincarnation of Bonar Colleano! As Pig-Pen said when Charlie Brown suggested that he carried the dust of ancient civilizations, "Sort of makes you want to treat me with more respect!"
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