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4.08 AVERAGE
4.08 AVERAGE
She had the face of a madonna and a heart made of dollar bills!
Amazing. Great dialogue and tons of action. And it never feels ridiculous even when the characters do something as contrived as literally staring into the abyss. Up there with the best of Jim Thompson, easily.
Amazing. Great dialogue and tons of action. And it never feels ridiculous even when the characters do something as contrived as literally staring into the abyss. Up there with the best of Jim Thompson, easily.
Strong stylistically but marred by excessive references to sex.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content
Among the greatest of hopeless hardboiled noirs ever written.
Pitiless and gripping.
Dead beat dread that suffocates.
Almost intolerable suspense featuring two losers who can't keep themselves from tickling Fate's low hanging fruit.
To quote my favorite Bob Dylan lines: "Waiting to find out what price/You have to pay to get out of/Going through all these things twice".
The absolute utmost noir fiction has to offer.
Pitiless and gripping.
Dead beat dread that suffocates.
Almost intolerable suspense featuring two losers who can't keep themselves from tickling Fate's low hanging fruit.
To quote my favorite Bob Dylan lines: "Waiting to find out what price/You have to pay to get out of/Going through all these things twice".
The absolute utmost noir fiction has to offer.
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
I feel like every noir I've ever read has fallen into one of two categories: 1) a private detective accepts a job that ends up being way more complicated than he bargained for, or 2) a man-woman duo in a love-hate relationship commit a crime, get away with it for a little bit, and then ultimately pay a tragic price. This was an archetypical example of the latter.
Our protagonist is a WWII vet-turned-escaped convict on the run from the FBI. He hires a call girl for a night and realizes she just might be wild and desperate and jaded enough to help him run a heist he'd been planning with another guy while he was in jail, so they skip town together and start getting to work. Their dynamic was extremely hot and cold, ranging from extended evenings of lovemaking to scenes where I genuinely thought one of them would betray or even kill the other. Definitely a lot of strong emotions flaring between these two people that would be awful for each other in real life but make for interesting fictional characters.
The ending was sufficiently tragic for my tastes, but I can't help but feel like I'll forget the bulk of this story in short order. While I didn't dislike them, I didn't really connect with these characters in a meaningful way and they also didn't strike me as all that different at the end from who they were at the beginning. But maybe the fact that they <i>didn't</i> go through any development and remained awful people was an intentional flaw on its own. I don't know, but it was a pretty middle of the road entry for the genre for me.
Our protagonist is a WWII vet-turned-escaped convict on the run from the FBI. He hires a call girl for a night and realizes she just might be wild and desperate and jaded enough to help him run a heist he'd been planning with another guy while he was in jail, so they skip town together and start getting to work. Their dynamic was extremely hot and cold, ranging from extended evenings of lovemaking to scenes where I genuinely thought one of them would betray or even kill the other. Definitely a lot of strong emotions flaring between these two people that would be awful for each other in real life but make for interesting fictional characters.
The ending was sufficiently tragic for my tastes, but I can't help but feel like I'll forget the bulk of this story in short order. While I didn't dislike them, I didn't really connect with these characters in a meaningful way and they also didn't strike me as all that different at the end from who they were at the beginning. But maybe the fact that they <i>didn't</i> go through any development and remained awful people was an intentional flaw on its own. I don't know, but it was a pretty middle of the road entry for the genre for me.
adventurous
dark
tense
medium-paced
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
What a read..
Haunting... just brilliantly, sinisterly, terrifyingly haunting!
Just a pure render of madness and horror. It paints the abyss real with all the abject clarity of actually being in it. I can never shake the picture of Virginia screaming while staring straight down into that hell hole out of my head. And Tim's deranged helplessness.. Black wings has your angel indeed man. Like she portented of anyone falling in, Virginia must have pulverised herself to inexistence just from the sheer insanity that had gripped her before she ever found her way to the bottom. It wasn't the volts from the chair that did it in the end, just the ones from her brain.
Haunting... just brilliantly, sinisterly, terrifyingly haunting!
Just a pure render of madness and horror. It paints the abyss real with all the abject clarity of actually being in it. I can never shake the picture of
fun.
Album Rec: Chinatown (Soundtrack) by Jerry Goldsmith
Album Rec: Chinatown (Soundtrack) by Jerry Goldsmith
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes