Brendan Frye: “Your muscle seemed plenty cool putting his fist in my head. I want him out.”
The Pin: “Looky, soldier…”
Brendan Frye: “The ape blows or I clam.”

Fast and clever dialogue is one of the best things about hard boiled noir films of the past.  Tough guys didn’t need to be big and buff; all they needed was a quick tongue to get them out of the stickiest of situations.  Very few films are able to recreate this today.

Brendan Frye (in a sticky situation): “Throw one at me if you want, hash head. I’ve got all five senses and I slept last night, that puts me six up on the lot of you.” (more…)

Picture a quaint Victorian house in the Hollywood Hills overlooking Los Angeles.  A modest insurance salesman shows up at the door, it is opened by a maid.  There is a beautiful woman at the top of the stairs; the sultry Mrs. Dietrichson, dressed in nothing more than a towel.  She gets dressed after the salesman tells her their car insurance doesn’t have them “fully covered.”

The following conversation takes place:

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The fast, witty, and flirtatious dialogue in this scene gives us light into how a man could possibly get seduced into what was to come.  This is of course, the big murder/insurance scam from Billy Wilder’s classic 1944 film Double Indemnity.

There was a time when dark crime films were popular both with mainstream Hollywood films and B-grade productions. McCarthyism, Hollywood censorship, and World War II among other things all played a role in the shaping and growing popularity of what became known as the classic period of America’s film noir (1940’s-1950’s). (more…)