Discovering the Joy of Noir Classics

 My fiancé and I both have a soft spot for physical media, and his family knows this. It was still a very pleasant surprise though when on Christmas morning I opened a set of classic noir films on DVD. I. I know I may come off as a cinephile snob when I say this, but I absolutely adore movies from the 30s-40s. One of the very first sets of DVDs I got myself was a collection of the Universal Monster movies. I am a vampire nerd, and Revenge of the Mummy is my favorite ride of all time at Universal Studios, so that set was a no-brainer. It is with them that I learned just how much I adore those older movies. It never fails to make me giggle a little bit at the Mummy “walking out of frame” in the original Mummy film – it's very clearly just someone pulling some prop cloth back and forth.  

I knew because of my love for the Universal classics, that I was going to get a kick out of these DVDs. There is one specific actress, Veronica Lake, who I can not get enough of. The casts are all incredible, and they do such a wonderful job keeping me hooked despite the stories being almost a century old! 

I was particularly amused by Double Indemnity not only because of it’s thrilling story, but because I recognized the plot from a Carol Burnette Show episode “Double Calamity.” Because, of course I would recognize a movie made in the 40s based on an episode in a show from the 70s.   

The most recent of the films that I watched was Blue Dahlia which  follows the story of a man returning from the war, only to be accused of the murder of his – objectively awful – wife. The story throws you off in so many directions, giving you several different suspects with all feasible motive, except for the main character and his alibi who were half an hour away! Of course, the police don’t know that, so I was literally on the edge of my seat! 

I still have five more movies to get through, and I’m very excited! I typically like to do something that keeps my hands busy, such as cross stitching or sketching, so that way I don’t fall into the doomscrolling trap. So the question of the day is, what will I do while I watch The Killers?