Sylvie's been lucky to find a padman who can joke with her (calling for the doctor to look at the cut, cackling and such), and still push everything to 11. For me as her husband this is just wonderful to see. Joy has to feed the tears, and when you get in training all the better.
This is a shift we've brought to most of Sylvie's sparring. She not only is going without gloves (for head safety) she's taken off the shinguards 50% of the rounds. This is the old school way of developing feel and timing, and as Yodkhunpon says confidence in space. My own thought is that invites you to set up closer in the pocket and not rely on distance for defense, which is more in the Golden Age style. We've come to see over the years, where you set up has a huge impact on fights and what determines them. You do not want to set up where your opponent is most comfortable. No-shinguardless sparring changes your set up inclination in a very good way, at least in terms of trad fighting in Thailand.
source with some links out to more information on, and examples of sparring without shinguards. This is something Naksaknoi uses in his teaching as well.
The brutality of this scene and a few other Bendix scenes really shift The Glass Key to a different, much darker place. Much of the film skates along in a fast shifting mystery and political story, but Bendix he derisively treating Ladd like a "dame" that likes to be beat up (already a hard stereotype of the time) just pushes it. Later in the film he'll call Ladd his "little rubber ball" which he likes to bounce off of walls. It's just an uncommon intensity, and the way that Ladd just takes it quietly mirrors the seemingly passive (but also revealed as highly manipulative) way that he orchestrates events. He's almost a femme fatale in the position he female-like plays in the story, but yet played with great, controlled masculinity. Ladd's performance, with his wry smile and (seeming) shifting loyalties, his plotting at the margins, is incredibly memorable, and sits nicely next to his quite laconic hitman performance in This Gun For Hire (1942), from the same year.
There are more limiting conceptions of what make Film Noir "Film Noir" - a genre that really didn't even exist when it was being made, and only has been constructed in retrospect - which leave The Seventh Victim outside of "Noir". For me, it is not only Film Noir, its an incredible example of one of its most powerful lineages, the path to paranoia and the sense that "something is not right in the world" combined with emotive cinematography employing darkness, that came out of 1930s American Horror and its linkage with German Expressionism. This film is so Noir for me.
A few criteria of Noir that I've been assembling from diverse articles and academic takes, nearly all of these apply:
Night scenes, shadows, fatalism, paranoia, death, angst, crime, femme fatales, detectives, existential crisis, self-destructive compulsion, alienation, feminine betrayal, sexual thrills cost, fated endings, universe of moral ambiguity, good intentions produce bad results, low-key lighting, claustrophobic framing, shadows and reflections, unbalanced composition, great depth of field
The film in subject matter is actually quite dark, darker than any perhaps in how it deals with persistent suicidal thoughts (so trigger warning applies). It no doubt influenced Rosemary's Baby (probably the book), as it is a tale of New York City Satanists, and the malfeasant effect on a woman. I imagine that it also influenced at least some of David Lynch's Lost Highway, and probably Vertigo as well.
It trades in several significant Noir themes like the doubled female character, the rotten (commercial) core of the big city. It has at least THREE detectives. And several femme fatales. The paranoia grows incredibly acute towards the end, to almost D.O.A. level. And we get the whole ambiguously positioned may-be-evil "psychoanalyst" figure, the exploration of mental illness and the Unconscious.
It really is spectacular in how it reveals several core aspects of Film Noir, things that animate many other films of Noir, but not to this level.
Thank you to the redditor who recommended it. I've long thought of watching it because of Val Lewton and the films of Jacques Tourneur, such as Cat People (1942) which I also count as very Noir. I stayed away frankly because I suspected it would fall outside of Film Noir, but at least for me it definitely doesn't. It instead reveals Film Noir in very important, meaningful ways. The threads found in this film and films like these are what were pulled forward and woven into the crime films that would come, that we often consider more typical of Film Noir, the darkness, fatedness and paranoia.
It's also on a certain level very upsetting, in that it dives down into the torment of a proposed "femme fatale" a character who in another film would be much more of a "figure", a catalyst in plot, someone who everyone notices, and is unforgettable. Here instead, we get inside her tortured self, how she is controlled by outside forces and manipulated to bad ends. It really is proto-Vertigo (which some count as the end of Noir, the beginning of Neo-Noir...though I don't).
Back to back (clipped together here) these scene are just incredible in how they mirror each other, female and male, in Nicholas Ray's Noir. Ryan is such a presence in this film, and the first half or so is some of the very best Urban Noir moral corruption cinema you'll see. While watching it I kept saying to myself: Geez, Ray really knows how to make a movie! (In a Lonely Place, Johnny Guitar, etc.) Then the entire film takes a huge tonal shift, going to the small town country-side (Noir loves to morally contrast the corrupt City and small town or Nature) to track down a murderer on the run, as Ryan's troubled heart meets up with the blind Ida Lupino. The first half of the film is 10/10 Noir. The rest I'm less decided about, but the more it sits with me the better I like it. A great moral tale, investigating the Noir-ridden angry man's heart.
Karuhat - who you can find at Samart Payakaroon's gym in Bangkok - we call The Time Lord between ourselves, because of the way he can bend time, with delays, gestures, balanced rhythm changes, all within the pocket. Today Sylvie went over to spend an hour with him, as we've tried to do more of despite living 2 hrs away in Pattaya, and today he introduced work on this inner knee game, basically warding off internal knees with floating checks and counter rhythm knees, that also can turn into pivots. Key is paying attention to the stalls, the twitches and the body shapes he is giving (open side tracking is important in trad Muay Thai). It really is beautiful work that very few on pads can do because he's posing puzzles in time, over and over to be solved, things fairly unique to his surreal style. Here he's on pads with it. Then he will pick up gloves and lightly spar it, still using his body as a pad, giving shapes and delays to solve. Loved sitting there and watching it evolve for the hour.
I know there are borderline Noirs which some would exclude - Hitchcock's Vertigo, Rear Window and French Noirs, early genre like Cat People, or color Noirs - but I'm developing my own sense and theoretical definition of Noir and these definitely fall into it. I'd love to hear other films that you love that sync with these, especial considering my top 8 or so. My favs list is constantly shifting, as is my refining idea of Noir itself, so I'd love to add some challengers. I love a good femme fatale and strong cinematography. Hopefully in a few months my Top 20 will have some new additions, and some of these very good Noirs will be squeezed out.
Mitchum looks great in this, a definite Western Noir entry. These are some clips from the film. It's one of the blackest shot Westerners I've seen. It is also an interesting version of a Film Noir Western because aesthetically its very strong Noir, but in terms of story it feels like the whole thing could be shot straight Hollywood Western style. It made me think to myself: What is all this Noir darkness bringing to the story, which largely is one of cattle ranchers vs settlers with some government shenanigans/rip-off going on. It has a Noir star in Mitchum, and all that beautiful black, but the story itself doesn't feel very dark or corrupt. It lacks some of that edge that makes the Noir world what it is. Other Western Noirs like Johnny Guitar or My Darling Clementine have a moral darkness lurking around with all those shadows, a fatedness. Here, the Noir doesn't really take hold, which opens up interesting side questions about just "What is Noir?" There is deception in the film, lots of moral wrestling and side-taking, but it doesn't grab that Noir sweet-tooth somehow.
I wonder what others think.
We've wanted to film with the great Saencherng Pinsinchai, one of the most feared Golden Age fighters. It wasn't until recently that his health had improved to the point where a session like this could be filmed, and it was great to finally look into his Diamond Guard, pressuring style. There is not a lot of video of his fights preserved (you can see the few that remain here), so it was doubly important to get into his Muay Khao philosophy. Nobody I've seen really fought like him. 10 minutes of the work we did.
I really didn't expect Hangover Square to be this good. I was watching it for Linda Darnell who I loved in Fallen Angel, but it was Laird Cregar who owned the film soaring, and did the impossible, got me rooting against the femme fatale. (Actually, Darnell wasn't very good doing over-the-top manipulative in this film, at all, which surprised me, but Cregar more than made up for it.) A talented composer who blacks out when he hears certain sonic notes and does murdery things he can't recall. Dark, romantic, beautifully shot, a crescendo of an ending that makes me shocked that this film isn't more famous. The title (from a novel) doesn't do it many favors, its a beautiful Noir of a tortured artistic soul.
Thank you to redditors on the sub who recently recommended it, and him. I was pretty surprised when I saw him on the screen here, because I had just watched This Gun for Hire (1942) the night before, not knowing him at all.
He died at 31 from dieting complications, attempting to lose weight to get to leading man size, 2 months before the film's release, a scandal of implied homosexuality had rose up when a male friend of his was murdered the year before. He brings great pathos to the screen, some of it surely derived from his strained life.
wikipedia
>"Cregar, who had ambitions of being a leading man and was worried that he would always be cast as a villain, refused the role and was put on suspension. Glenn Langan was announced as his replacement.^([4]) However, Cregar realized that he could use his romantic scenes with Linda Darnell and Faye Marlowe to his advantage in order to change his public image into a more romantic one. He thus accepted the role, but began a radical crash diet to give his character more physical appeal.
>The film had to be shot entirely in sequence so as to be consistent with Cregar's real-life weight loss.^([5]) This frustrated director Brahm, who frequently clashed with Cregar. As a musician, Cregar was eager to perform the musical pieces on his own; however, Brahm insisted that he mime the piano playing. Cregar used amphetamines to aid his rapid weight loss, which led to erratic behavior.**^([)^(citation needed)^(]) Brahm lost patience with Cregar and forced the entire cast and crew to sign a document stating that they were on Brahm's side in order to humiliate Cregar into submission.**^([)^(citation needed)^(]) When filming ended, Cregar told Brahm: "Well, I think we've worked together long enough to know we never want to work together again."
Thoughts on the origin of Noir slang "No soap." like nothin' doing, or no dice. read here
an excerpt:
As with most slang expressions, where it comes from is uncertain. In the past, the experts have pointed to the much older use of soap to refer to money, a term that was first recorded in a slang dictionary in 1859 but which had a long run right down into the 1920s, overlapping with no soap. This overlap, I suspect, led etymologists to infer a connection between the two and it’s not implausible. It might well have been that a person who said “No soap!” meant something like “No, I haven’t any money” or “No, I won’t give you a loan”.
But other letters home from First World War navy recruits, coupled with newspaper articles from the period about naval slang, suggest a more mundane source. Recruits often complained they weren’t being supplied with soap, a need that was at times met by the Red Cross in the comfort kits they supplied. Soap was in short supply in the US at the time — as it was throughout Europe — because its raw materials of gelatine and fat were being diverted to make explosives. It seems likely that no soap, at first a rueful complaint, became for recruits a saying that meant — as early references confirmed — “you’re out of luck”. The slightly broader senses naturally followed.
btw, a great early Noir. So many top performances, all around, even side characters are memorable. One can also feel how much the film had later influence. Stylistic future elements of Neo-Noir's Blade Runner (1982) and Meville's Le Samouraï (1967) abound.
clips from the Muay Thai Library project, giving the feel of the instruction & philosophy of 5 different hands heavy fighters from Thailand's Golden past. Two of my Top 5 favorite fighters among these, Wangchannoi and Samson, but you got to love all of them.
This is a somewhat important scene in Road House, though you have to know the set up. She's come to a small town from Chicago, and everyone expects her to be talentless because its a backwoods, she must be down on her luck. The owner who is smitten is thought to be vastly overpaying her. She's got toughness, she's been through it. When this scene comes the whole film shifts, because her aura comes out. I don't know if that's Ida actually singing, but her performance of the song just ripples through, and begins the effect of the rest of the storyline, two men fighting for her affections. You can feel from this point forward why the two men fall for her, she has so much world-weariness, but also sultry-ness and intelligence, both can't resist her. Ida's performance in the film is unexpectedly brilliant and subtle, above everyone else's, so suitable to the story, as its all about her being in this small one-hotel town, surrounded by the unsophisticated.
The film hardly reads as a Noir, except for the set-up, until the final act. It's played as a straight melodrama love story and then courthouse film for most of it. Then it goes quite dark and unhinged and shot in a compelling, dark Universe way, fulfilling its Noir promise.
I'd like to watch the movie. It's from one of these 10:
Ladies in Retirement (1941) Gaslight (1944) The Suspect (1944) Experiment Perilous (1944) Hangover Square (1945) Dragonwyck (1946) Ivy (1947) Moss Rose (1947) Corridor of Mirrors (1948) The Woman in White (1948) So Evil My Love (1948) Blanche Fury (1948) Madeleine (1950) So Long At the Fair (1950)
the clip from this beautiful compilation edit of Noir, recently posted on this sub, which I can't stop thinking about, because it accurately captures the very idea of film as a language, as a genre as a language.
I've seen a number of their tribute edits, and for some reason this one smashes it more than any other (it's the chosen music, but more). You can see the whole playlist of the Noir tributes here.
- from Bradley McLean's Deleuze, Guattari and the Machine in Early Christianity: Schizoanalysis, Affect and Multiplicity
an additional connotative shift if we move from assemblage to arrangement is that assemblage holds something of a static picture, it is a bit more spatial, while arrangement keeps a notion of a line of trajectory. The difference between assembling musical notes or instruments, and arranging them, or seeing them as assembled or arranged. There is a kind of lean, perhaps. I like how McLean thinks about joinery and joining.
(in vid some plot spoilers, as the whole thing is a heist) - clipping out a few beautiful scenes from Jule's Dassin's Noir Rififi. I know some like to segment off everything outside of America as not-Noir, or noir-adjacent or only noir-influenced, but watching this last night - it really is a masterpiece, not only of the heist genre (like Asphalt Jungle, 1950), but also in how it builds a true doomed Noir Universe, without simply "quoting" it. Much recommended. The question of what is Noir is interesting and complex (and I don't begrudge the boundaries others may want to put on it), but there is pretty good evidence that American Noir had French Poetic Realism influence (from Paris in the1930s), that came along with its emigree German directors and technicians, and because American Noir by the 1950s was itself "quoting" itself somewhat stylistically already (despite the genre not even being "discovered" or invented yet), this film reads as just straight up Film Noir as much as any mid-1950s film. [Edit in: commenter points out, it was directed by the blacklisted American director Dassin, making the French/American hybrid more sure.] It sheds many of the Poetic Realism differences from Film Noir. It's powerful. Expertly crafted and performed. Without cliche it has the femme fatales and the night club world, the villainous big boss, the doomed cadre of fellows who share the moral code of the streets, has detective themes, the tale of urban ruin or corruption. And, a great deal of the film just is beautifully constructed visually. Much of the film is organized around a heist, patiently unfolding, but its really like all great Noirs about the characters, in the halo of an aging criminal, his dignity amid a deadend world.
Also, the final scenes are spectacular, as the film shifts toward the coming French New Wave in style, beckoning towards the future, a new generation, both in terms of story telling, but at the level of cinema itself, making the film all the more special.
from not-a-Noir The Major and The Minor (1942), Billy Wilder. Noir star Veronica Lake already had taken over.
Some clipped out city photography from The Glass Wall, with Gloria Grahame, who is great in it. A film for our times. Focused on the immigrate population of NY and the poor that fall through the cracks of the booming economy, following a concentration camp immigrant who stowed away without proper papers, and is on the run in New York city as a dragnet of forces try to deport him. He's desperately looking for the American solider whose life he saved who could vouch for him and allow him to legally stay. Great, great city photography and urban story telling, a kind of relentless D.O.A. building paranoia that really culminates in a white knuckle, and very politically-minded ending, (in the Hollywood shadow of the House Un-American Activities Committee). I also suspect that the film had some influence on The Brutalist (2024).
Sylvie's been training at the new Mavinn gym in Pattaya since it opened maybe 2-3 months ago. She also has been close to Arjan Gimyu for many years now, the 84 year old legend of the sport who was 2x Coach of the year and kru to nak muay legends like Kaensak Sor. Ploenjit and Lakhin Wassantasit and an incredible number of others. Because they are close Arjan Gimyu comes to the gym sometimes just to look at all the training, and also give Sylvie advice from the side where he sits, especially when a card is coming up. In the past she's taken care of him, going with him on hospital visits and such, helped him, they text fairly regularly and he's really connected with her, likes to train her when healthy, always gives support when she fights. In any case, there's a relationship there and he's somewhat followed her over, setting the situation, Heading home at night from watching fights not too long ago he got hit by a motorist while at a stoplight on his motorbike, and broke his leg for the second time this year (he's still wearing a cast in this video from today, he hopes it comes off soon). For some pure-from-the-heart reason of respect he also really has been incredibly embraced by Mavinn gym, from the first day he came to visit, and every time he irregularly comes he is treated with an attentive embracing gentleness by all the krus and the Thai fighters. One trainer was shocked, he hadn't seen him since he was 10-12 years old, when Arjan trained him. He's a very well known name in the annals of Thailand Muay Thai, but most everyone in the gym only met him a few months ago, and they don't see him a lot. Well, long-story-short, when he broke his leg riding his motorbike, sitting at a stop light, Mavinn gym spontaneously and without a second thought decided to give him a much more stable 3 wheel like-new motorbike so he can get around locally much better, and safer. It replaces his damaged trusty old bike. Their gift was perfection. He doesn't have to balance the bike with his feet, he won't fall over on it. They gave it to him today (the video). It's hard to describe just how stubborn Arjan Gimyu is. It's impossible to get him to settle down for long. He doesn't live that far from the gym, he likes to go to Amazon and drink a coffee and eat a tuna sandwich, and he likes to be around training fighters. For decades he used to drive to Pattaya from Bangkok where he lived, on a little motorbike, on the side roads, something he had to stop doing more than a handful of years ago. He loves the freedom of a motorbike, its important to him, but he is more limited now. He's always is moving around. He doesn't like to stay put. He's irrepressible, the very thing that made him a force in the Muay Thai world as a trainer (he even trained famed Orachunnoi Hor.Mahachai in the 1970s). This gift and all the spontaneous kindness from team Mavinn and the owner just blew Sylvie away. This isn't like a gym taking care of one of their own, one of their group, he isn't a trainer there. He visits and they are very happy to see him each time. She talks about this in her Instagram post (original posting of the video). You can read her thoughts there. He practiced driving the tri-bike around the parking lot during most of training today, and then Mavinn sent two krus on motorbikes to escort him home to make sure he's safe. It's this stuff that matters in the history of the sport, and its really something to see so much kindness directed to an older man who has given so much to Muay Thai, really for most of his life (his last fight was at Rajadamnern stadium 40 years ago at the age of 44). Sure there is plenty to constructively criticize about traditional Muay Thai in Thailand, but this also is what Muay Thai is about, the community of those that make Muay Thai what it is, and the respect and care it inspires.
Well, after all that pre-slander, Supergirl (2026) was actually enjoyable, maybe with low expectations playing a role? Several good to even excellent marks on it (especially if you grade it on an All Comic Book films curve). Believable character arc, if John Wick can be about a dog, so can this film, villain lame but the whole world design held together in a kind of post-Apo, Mad Max way, with quirk and color, nailed humor, to the laugh aloud point a few times (both lines and gags), she was great, kid sidekick better than most, Aquaman doing a "what the hell" character, & yeah again Dog Love, lots of disempowered scenes to show character. Overall, good. and oh, ironized the masculinist trench-coat/duster, made it her own thing, and cribbed healthily from Alita: Battle Angel at times, which is quite alright in my book (also an underrated film). We go into films with expectations per genre (I really wish bot season and various outrage culture wouldn't twist things so much, half the things being talked about now are because 10 people got pseudo-pissed about the translation of a Greek epic), and dialing back my low expectations to "normal", let me just enjoy something light, made the film more than decent fare. It didn't feel like a Netflix show, it felt like a film. I will admit that Milly Alcock even got me enjoying House of The Dragon after dropping Game of Thrones like a ton of bricks (after the Red Wedding episode), the spin off of a show I found needlessly interminable, so she began with credit in the bank, but she did understand the assignment and pulled the character off with what felt like individual actor touch, which often isn't the case. Also, wholesome vibes in message, suitable for a Superman universe thing.
It's such a strange time. Our cinema seems characterized by Superhero films, which alone seem to express some kind of (ideological) ethos of empowerment, while at the same time giving us relief from the constant bickering over reality. They seem like our sort of World War 2 movies during a time of war, and this is one of them. While this genre has become so overchurned, threatening to pass into a quite dilapidated state of unremarkable-ness, feeling more and more AI written (and even acted) - there have been some bad ones - this one had some "punk" in it...some. It seems like the whole world is bent on bended knee to the "Things I thought a lot about when I was 12" of men. It felt a little Tank Girl-ish, I guess. We live in a Nerd's Universe since the 1980s Weird Science and so many others got us going down that road. How do we even express ourselves, and find ourselves expressed - the role of cinema - in that weird science of culture where we are all forever teens.