The Devil Thumbs a Ride and Other Unforgettable Movies

Rating:
Summary: Writing about movies for the sheer joy of it.
Review: Barry Gifford clearly knows and loves his noir. This book is comprised of columns Gifford wrote -- I forget the publication they originally appeared in -- recounting the plots of noir cinema, both from the '50s and from more recent times, in a stripped-down prose any hardboiled novelist would be proud of. These aren't reviews so much as praising bits of imitation -- Gifford seems to be challenging himself to write the perfect synopses of the movies he recounts, with a language that truly captures the feel of the genre. Minimalist meditations on crime films. You won't learn much about the movies Gifford writes about from this book (other than the stories) but if you've seen them and love them, you'll enjoy reading his prose, and if you haven't, you might get motivated to hunt them down. I forget the films he lists, exactly -- Nick Ray's excellent IN A LONELY PLACE is in there, but that's not pure noir by a longshot. David Lynch fans might note that the book also includes a critical piece on BLUE VELVET that puts the film down as "academic pornography" and sick stuff, and further lays down the putdown of calling it "phlegm noir." This is particularly funny in that Lynch ended up adapting Gifford's subsequent WILD AT HEART, and that the two collaborated together on LOST HIGHWAY... a film which I suspect contains buried references to Gifford's writing about Lynch here -- when Robert Blake (as that demon-figure) and Robert Loggia (as the pornographer) are squaring off and one of them, I forget which, says "No one makes ugly like we do..." Lynch and Gifford's alter-egos? Anyhow, it's a fun book...