insanely good film noir. seems of apace with Ace in the Hole, Gun Crazy, or Detour. the latter two are low-budget B movies, which is an incredible style that feels like the product of a much more vibrant culture than the comparable tier of films produced today. Ace in the Hole was a much bigger film, of course, by an auteur and with a big star; but they’re all three much more rooted in proletarian reality than most high profile film noir. the classics like Maltese Falcon, Sunset Blvd, Pickup on South Street, In a Lonely Place, etc are all very epic, semi-melodramatic, distinctly hollywood films…but an undercurrent to those films was a much more authentic cinema, hollowed out of all pretension. in a similar manner to the stories and characters depicted in the likes of The Set-Up, these films come out of a working tradition of film practise.