"Sunset Boulevard is the ultimate film noir for me. It has this incredibly unpleasant main character, who is played with a lot of charm by William Holden, and he thinks he’s really smart, and it turns out that he’s kind of in over his head. I love the environment. I love the way the story is told in flashbacks. I love the sense of Los Angeles. I love the humor in it — it’s a really funny movie — and it’s just one of those iconic things that, if you know the movie, you run into it once a month in some way, especially living in L.A. It’s got great lines in it. There’s incredible dialogue, incredible visual moments. Surprises. It’s a horror movie and a comedy at the same time; it’s all over the place in terms of genre. When I first saw it, I just couldn’t believe that it was a big Hollywood movie made by a studio because it’s so peculiar."

"Like many of these, this movie qualifies for me partly because it was an unexpected thrill when I first saw it in the early seventies. I’m neither much a Tony Curtis nor a Burt Lancaster fan, and I’d never heard of Alexander Mackendrick (he made half his relatively few films, including The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers, in the UK; a later, strong U.S. job was A High Wind in Jamaica). Sweet Smell of Success, again, too, is quasi-noir. It’s a black-and-white, urban, small film about people’s bad luck and bad character, set in the Broadway cubicles and show-biz restaurants of New York’s sleazy show-world underbelly. Despite my prior relative indifference to the actors in it, they’re perfectly cast—against their standard types—in this, and do terrific jobs, and the script, by the highly skilled and literate Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, is spectacular. James Wong Howe shot the cold-ass thing."

"Oh, oh, Night of the Hunter. That’s just a film that… It was actually recommended to me by Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson’s wife. I think it’s her favorite film of all time. I’d never really seen anything like it because it’s kind of a film noir set in the South. The story, it’s about a family who are terrorized by a con-man. Robert Mitchum was an incredible actor — the original Cape Fear is another incredible performance by him — but it’s such a slimy performance in this film. He’s such a great manipulator and tells tall tales. And it’s famous because he’s got these tattoos on his knuckles of “love” and “hate” and it actually is a conduit for a really great story that he repeats throughout the film. The cinematography’s incredible; it’s just like all blacks and whites and hard shadows and lots of silhouettes along the river. It’s just a stunning, a stunning film! It’s really good. Talking about these movies makes me want to see these movies again. [laughing] They’re so good!"

"Jules Dassin’s gangster film about a robbery and its consequences is a French classic, noir before the word was in use to describe a certain kind of filmmaking. A word is in order here: I was educated in Switzerland, in an era when French-speaking people expected to see French films, so when we were allowed to go to the local cinema at Rolle or Gstaad, we mostly saw French films. British films, except for The Third Man, which is very “European” in tone, seldom played; still less big Hollywood ones. Rififi was a stunner, and an eye-opener, teaching us that French gangsters were a lot more interesting and attractive than our own mobsters, but just as tough, if not tougher. “Julie” Dassin was an American who moved to France, but he captured a whole, pungent slice of French life, and for months everyone at my school (le Rosey) went around trying to sound like Jean Servais, and to talk with a cigarette glued to their lips. Whole scenes from it still play in my fantasies."

"Noir, of course, typically displays shadows, rain, urban darkness, blunt seediness, and the realization that since not just at the end but at the center of things are death and other hopeless mysteries, human striving is meaningless. There’s something soothing about realizing that all is futile. It’s liberating. Kiss Me Deadly might be the most cynical and fatalistic noir of them all. It happens to take place in sunny LA, but it’s certainly got the seediness too, including fantastic location shooting in long-gone slums. It’s one of those flicks that’s too good to be true. You’re stopped alone at a motel somewhere in the desert late at night, dead tired, but you can’t sleep, so you switch on the TV . . . and there’s a near-teenage Cloris Leachman running towards you, moaning and sobbing in the darkness, too blonde and naked to believe. But there she is. What a world. Ralph Meeker speeds up in a Jaguar! Nat King Cole warbles on the radio. Cloris is named after Christina Rossetti! It’s 1955. She’s a bitter feminist escapee from a mental asylum. And it just gets better, all the way till after the last second. Along with the action, corruption, sadism, and sex (when the blonde in her car, who happens to be behind Mike Hammer when he parks in a driveway, is immediately compelled to press herself against him and kiss him, framed with bulging taillights protruding from the fin of the forward auto, somehow it's sexier than the porniest pornography), the photography/mise-en-scène would make this movie immortal alone. It’s the kind of movie that makes me laugh at the notion of “art” photography. A few thousand frames from this one film would make a better life’s work in photography than any artist has yet created. Cindy Sherman has a right to a living like everyone else, but, Jesus . . . Nicholas Raymondo (“Very Smart. Very Bright. Very Sad.”) was “sad . . . for the way the world is,” but as Christina tells us: if you should forget me for a while And afterwards remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile It’s actually misquoted in the movie, but it’s still probably the nicest thing that’s happened to Christina Rossetti in a hundred years . . ."