Brazilian crime cinema, Philip Kerr, Australian noir film & other cultural pre-occupations

The following five things have been pre-occupying me since my last newsletter.

Brazilian crime cinema of the 1960s and 1970s

Melbourne Cinematheque recently showed a three week program of Brazilian crime cinema from the 1960s and 1970s. You can check out the full program of this, for the most part, extremely hard to see group of films here. The highlights for me included Roberto Farias’s excellent 1962 heist gone wrong film, Assault on a Pay Train, which I mentioned in the wrap of international noir in my last newsletter, and Gerson Tavares’s Before, the Summer (1968), a dreamy French New Wave influenced tale in which a hit and run killing becomes the defining point in a middle class couple’s disintegrating marriage.

But the film that really blew me away was Antonio Carlos da Fontoura's The Devil Queen (1974). Apparently based on a real life character, it centres on a vicious femme Queen drug lord who must fend off a challenge to her rule of Rio de Janeiro’s criminal underworld. The frenetic action is accompanied by a wonderful cast of characters, a stunning colour palette and aesthetic & a great everyday soundtrack of Afro Brazilian music. The Devil Queen is one of the most vibrant crime films I have seen for a long time. It has recently been restored and has started appearing on the international festival circuit, so if you do get a chance to catch it do not under any circumstances pass up the opportunity.

Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series

I find it strange how a fictional character can come in and out of your life. I absolutely adored the first three books featuring Philip Kerr’s character of Bernie Gunther, March Violets (1989), The Pale Criminal (1990), and A German Requiem (1991). A former Berlin homicide detective turned PI, Gunther plied his trade amid the rise of Nazis and, in the last of the three books, in Berlin in the immediate aftermath of the war. Not only did I find them near perfect pieces of crime fiction, I loved how they explored one of my favourite noir tropes: what exactly does it mean to investigate a serious crime and bring the perpetrators for justice, when one is operating in a milieu of civil strife and the notion of the law is largely ignored or, at the very least, heavily malleable.

For reasons I am not clear about, there was a 15 year gap between A German Requiem and the next Bernie Gunther novel, The One from the Other in 2006. Ages ago I read a couple of the ‘later’ Gunther books – to be honest I can’t remember which ones - and found them disappointing. I was particularly put off by how much they had bloated in size and narrative complexity compared the lean, economical nature of the first three. Anyway, I recently found a copy of the last instalment in the series, Metropolis, published in 2019, one year after Kerr’s death, in a thrift store and, on a whim, picked it up and gave it a read. Set entirely in 1930s Berlin, I liked it a lot. Then I found a copy of the second in the later series, A Quiet Flame (2008) and have just finished it. This one moves between Gunther’s time as a homicide cop in early 1930s Berlin and post war Argentina, where he indirectly takes a case from Evita Perón that throws him into the midst of the country’s large expatriate Nazi community. The Argentinian section, which forms the bulk of the novel, also explores some frankly horrific real life events in the South American nation that I had no previous knowledge of. I still think that Metropolis and A Quiet Flame are too long and would have benefited from a slightly more streamlined plot and a tougher edit, but they have won me over to the series. I am not entirely sure what has changed, but whatever the case, I just bought The One from the Other and am committed to reading all the others over time.

New noir fiction

There are two new noir novels currently on my radar, both by Australian writers. The first, I Am Already Dead, is by Perth-based writer, David Whish Wilson and published by Fremantle Press (you can buy it here). The book features a trainee private investigator called Lee Southern, a sort of spin off character from Whish-Wilson’s long running Frank Swann series. Those of you who followed my Pulp Curry website will have seen a fair few posts on Whish-Wilson, who I maintain is one of, if not the most, underrated crime writer working in Australia today.

The second book, Iain Ryan’s The Strip, is due out in December through Ultimo Press (you can pre-order it here). The Strip takes place in 1980s Queensland, arguably the epicentre of Australian sleaze and police corruption in the last century, and sees two cops investigating a murder that, of course, leads them deep into the state’s dark underbelly. Full disclosure, I read an early draft of the book and think it is Ryan’s best work to date.

Noirvember continues

Noirvember is really no different in terms of my film viewing than any other month of the year but, whatever. You can keep track of what I have been viewing on my Letterboxd account. In terms of viewing suggestions, in addition to the list of 10 non-American film noirs I provided in my last newsletter, you might like to check out this 2021 list of 10 underappreciated American noirs of the late 1950s and 1960s I penned for the CrimeReads site. I find it interesting that so many of the films made during this time remain unknown and underappreciated relative to the classic film noir period, generally regarded as beginning with John Huston’s 1941 classic The Maltese Falcon and ending in 1958, and the body of American crime cinema known as neo noir, which took off in the early 1970s. And this list was an attempt to capture what I think are some of the best from that in between period.

I am often asked for recommendations in terms of Australian noir cinema, and this would be my top 10:

Wake In Fright (1971)

Money Movers (1978)

Stir (1980)

Heatwave (1982)

Shame (1987)

Kiss or Kill (1997)

The Boys (1998)

Chopper (2000)

The Square (2008)

Animal Kingdom (2010)

Dark Winds

I really enjoyed the first series (there are two) of Dark Winds. It follows Leaphorn and Chee, two Navajo police officers in the 1970s American Southwest, investigating a double murder case in the aftermath of a bloody heist. Based on the very successful series of books by Tony Hillerman, which I have to confess I’ve never read, the first season includes plotlines involving the armed wing of the American Indian rights movement that developed in the 1970s and Indigenous spirituality and magic. It would be going to too far to suggest Dark Winds is horror, but it does interweave supernatural or occult themes into the crime narrative in a way that is not over the top and, as such, quite effective.