November is a good time for noir cinema, and the 90s were full of great and underseen gems; Flickering Myth’s Tom Jolliffe presents a selection of ten you need to see…
Dark tales with morally obtuse protagonists, criminal plots, dripping in shadowy aesthetics and neglected corners of the towns or cities they’re set. Film noir has been a cinematic staple since the original boom of the 30s.
Neo-noir was a second movement coming from the late 60s onward, where the tropes of the genre were paid homage to and occasionally subverted for good measure. It’s a sub-genre that still creeps into many a modern movie, but in the 90s there was something of a brief resurrection for the genre, among the growing preoccupation with blockbuster cinema.
As such, a few great films took their time to get the recognition they deserved, with some still being ever so slightly unheralded. Here are ten must-see 90s noirs for Noirvember.
The Limey
Steven Soderbergh has often courted a cult appreciation with films like Sex, Lies and Videotape and Out of Sight. His major dalliance with big, mainstream appeal was with the Ocean’s Eleven reboot trilogy.
Alongside the late Terence Stamp, he also made one of the last great gangster geezer thrillers of the 90s with this brilliant melding of classic American neo-noir gangster film, with the British gangster flick, which saw Stamp as the titular cockney heading off to the States, fresh out of prison and searching for the person who killed his daughter.
Very much shades of Get Carter, but a slightly more extravagant locale for tough-as-nails revenge than 1970s Newcastle. Stamp is in excellent form, too.
Red Rock West
A sorely underseen neo-noir starring Nicolas Cage and Dennis Hopper, both at the top of their game. Red Rock West has so many classic noir tropes, with Cage getting mistaken for a hitman and caught up in a plot by a local Sheriff to murder his wife.
Cage tries repeatedly, with little success, to escape the small town, only to get pulled back, and once hitman Hopper (in maniacally good form) comes into play, the stakes get even higher. Director John Dahl, never quite lived up to his back-to-back double Noir-whammy, with this and The Last Seduction. That said, he has transitioned into top-tier TV work.
One False Move
A film which no one ever seems to have heard of, yet one which is highly regarded by those who have (and is on Criterion), is One False Move. Much like Bill Paxton’s other noir-starrer, A Simple Plan, it might be said that his legacy as a supporting artist was stronger than as a lead, but with some seriously stellar leading roles, that would be unfair.
One False Move is in the Fargo/No Country/Coen’s mould. Carl Franklin’s thriller sees a group of LAPD cops team up with an Arkansas police chief (Bill Paxton) to apprehend fugitive drug dealers (led by Billy Bob Thornton).
As you’d expect from the genre, things perpetually escalate, and finite violence ensues. Paxton and Thornton (who also co-wrote the screenplay) are excellent, and Franklin keeps the tension cranked up. A few years later, he added the excellent Devil in a Blue Dress to his noir repertoire as well.
King of New York
Abel Ferrara’s grimy, almost noir-fairy tale of a doomed ascent to the heights of criminality brings a brilliant performance out of Christopher Walken and features Laurence Fishburne in scene-stealing form.
It’s a product of its time that still manages to feel fresh rather than dated, capturing grim and dank underbellies and punctuated by bursts of brutal, bloody violence. The all-star cast is great. It’s probably Ferrera’s most well-travelled film, bar maybe Bad Lieutenant, but he’s always been an underground auteur.
Deep Cover
Speaking of Fishburne, a couple of years after blazing through scenes for Abel Ferrara, he took centre stage in Bill Duke’s essential, and still undervalued, Deep Cover. It’s a visually assured, powerful and tense descent into deep cover for undercover operative, Russell Stevens (Fishburne).
His propensity to break rules makes him an ideal candidate to infiltrate drug Kingpin, David Jason. No, not the beloved Del Boy/Granville, but a suave dealer played by Jeff Goldblum. Great soundtrack, great visuals and top performances. It is an essential film, showcasing Duke’s (a well-known character actor) gifts as a director. Criterion got the memo and released a dazzling edition, but more cinephiles need to stick this on their watchlist.
Croupier
No stranger to noir-drenched tales, Mike Hodges (Get Carter) made an impressive comeback with Croupier, having spent much of the 80s and 90s in something of a run of misfortune. His Mickey Rourke starrer, A Prayer for the Dying wasn’t well received and nor was Black Rainbow, due to some studio politics. The latter (with an amazing Rosanna Arquette) has subsequently been nicely remastered and duly reappraised, having been met with tumbleweeds on release.
Croupier proved a reminder of his skills, whilst also a stylish and enthralling platform for Clive Owen to make his presence on cinema felt. The film was well received in the UK and at least travelled well enough that Owen’s cold and aloof charisma gained some attention (later cast as a hitman in The Bourne Identity). It’s a cool film, laden in a smog of cigarette smoke and the garish lights of the casino where the titular croupier surveilles the clientele and gets caught up in a heist plot.
Cop Land
When Sly Stallone found himself in a career slump midway through the 90s, something had to give. Either his high spectacle, yet generic action films had to hit bigger with audiences, or he needed a shift in focus. Additionally, critics by this point were harsh on Sly, perhaps forgetting his halcyonic days of Rocky and First Blood where he had proved himself an excellent actor.
He did try to play more introspective and interesting characters, but every character from Cliffhanger, Assassins, The Specialist and Daylight were much of a muchness, and the writing wasn’t strong enough to pull anything earth-shattering from Sly. Additionally, he found himself overshadowed by antagonists like Antonio Banderas, Wesley Snipes and more.
In steps James Mangold and Cop Land, on a comparatively low budget and stacked with acting powerhouses. Stallone was introspective once more, but as Sheriff Heflin (replete with a beer gut), Sly was given some subtlety to work with. This time, rather than his thunder being stolen, Stallone traded blows and matched the likes of Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro, with able support from Robert Patrick and Ray Liotta, too. It was Stallone’s best film of the decade, alongside the increasingly prescient and routinely reappraised Demolition Man.
Hard Eight
Paul Thomas Anderson unleashed One Battle After Another upon audiences this year, a film so confidently brilliant that he’ll likely be a difficult man to beat at Oscar time. It all began for P.T.A. with Hard Eight, a cracking little neo-noir gem that mines a wonderful performance from Philip Baker Hall as a hard-boiled, slightly beleaguered old gambler who takes a protege (John C Reilly) under his wing.
Like many debuts, it shows Anderson brimming with ideas and energy and like the most gifted of directors, a remarkably evident assurance already on display. Not too many auteurs make their bow, gifted with such a powerhouse cast (including Gwyneth Paltrow, Samuel L. Jackson and Philip Seymour Hoffman). With a tight script in tow for them, he couldn’t really go wrong.
U Turn
For whatever reason, some directors hit a lull where even a good film slips under the radar or gets forgotten about a little too quickly. U Turn is one such film. Oliver Stone had done big sprawling opuses like JFK, and courted controversy with Natural Born Killers. U Turn felt inconsequential by comparison, but it’s a pretty excellent noir.
It does share a lot of similarities with Red Rock West, with Sean Penn playing a drifter who pitches up in a small town only to find his escape blocked at every turn and a host of catastrophes thrust in his way (including propositions of spousal murder put his way). It veers off and does its own thing with Stone’s inimitable style and also has an absolutely stacked cast. It’s not as tight as Red Rock West, but it does make a pretty great double-bill partner with the Cage starrer.
Payback
Recently Shane Black, a regular purveyor of neo-noir cinema, returned to the genre with Play Dirty, another adaptation from the popular Parker books by Donald E. Westlake (centred around the titular anti-hero. We’ve seen Lee Marvin, Jason Statham and Mark Wahlberg as Parker, among others.
In 1999, Mel Gibson also put on his best hard-boiled crime attire to play the role in Payback. A film set with behind-the-scenes issues has resulted in an original theatrical cut and a subsequent director’s cut (Brian Helgeland). Though the difference here is that Parker was renamed as Porter in the film version. As for the respective merits of both cuts, the director’s cart is marginally better. It’s a dark and gritty revenge film featuring Gibson in good form, a cast of erstwhile ne’er-do-wells and a delightfully deranged Lucy Liu. Point Blank aside, it’s probably the best adaptation of Westlake’s Parker series.
SEE ALSO: 10 Essential Noir Films for Noirvember
What’s your favourite 90s noir? Let us know on our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
Tom Jolliffe
