Post by london777 on Dec 1, 2017 18:30:30 GMT
This is my attempt to subvert spiderwort's thread "City landscapes in films".
Please suggest movies that show what lies below street level: tunnels, sewers, underground railways, etc. Coal- and other mines are disqualified as are escape tunnels from camps and prisons. The movies must show urban underground structures.
I think the most famous, and maybe the best, of such movies is The Third Man (1949) Carol Reed, which moves into the sewer system of Vienna for its climax. But such is the noir quality of the movie that many of the above-ground scenes which occupy most of the film have a subterranean feel too.
The Third Man
Almost equally celebrated outside the anglophone sphere is the great war movie Kanal (1957) Andrzej Wajda, in which the Polish resistance fighters have to descend into the Warsaw sewer system to continue their fight for most of the film. This was Wajda's breakthrough movie. The first part of the Resistance trilogy, A Generation (1955) had been largely ignored outside Poland. The third part was Ashes and Diamonds (1958).
One of the supporting actors in Kanal was Vladek Sheybal, who in real life had fought in the Resistance and twice escaped from Nazi concentration camps. He is probably the only actor in the film well known in the West, where he had a long career playing miscellaneous, and usually sinister or weird, continentals. Curiously, he had no Polish ancestry whatsoever.
Kanal (1957)
A year before The Third Man appeared He Walked by Night (1948) Alfred Werker (and Anthony Mann - uncredited). In many ways a Film Noir, but an early example of the subversion of true noir by the use of a documentary depiction of police procedures and a sanctimonious narrator eulogizing authority (in this case the LA Police force which is the nearest the film has to a hero). Richard Baseheart plays a distinctive protagonist, but not really a noir one. He is not morally conflicted, he has no choices to make, but is simply an opaque nutcase with no appeals to our sympathies which even the worst noir anti-heroes can achieve.
What concerns us here is the climactic chase through the sewer system. The final scenes are so strikingly similar to those of the Third Man that I think Reed must have copied the earlier movie.
He Walked by Night (1948)
Next a more personal choice. A TV series that caused quite a stir in the UK. Quatermass and the Pit (1958) about a mysterious capsule dug up on a post-war re-building site, with keys scenes filmed in the local Underground railway station. It suffers from the limited BBC budget of the time, with flimsy sets and C-list actors, but its theme was enormously influential on the development of sci-fi cinema (as well as being a forerunner to the Dr Who series which often recycled its themes).
Quatermass and the Pit (TV, 1958)
Finally another bump for Kontroll (2003) directed by Hungarian/American Nimród Antal. Almost all the action takes place within the Budapest metro system, both the public areas and staff-only. It is a parable, but not a preachy one. Part social observation, part psychological therapy, lots of very black humor, and tiptoeing on the edges of both horror and whimsy, but never falling in. Untimately moving and life-affirming.
Kontroll (2003)
Daylight (1996) Rob Cohen : Sylvester Stallone leads survivors to safety when a New York (road?)tunnel collapses. Predictably awful movie but a useful compendium of clichés.
Please suggest movies that show what lies below street level: tunnels, sewers, underground railways, etc. Coal- and other mines are disqualified as are escape tunnels from camps and prisons. The movies must show urban underground structures.
I think the most famous, and maybe the best, of such movies is The Third Man (1949) Carol Reed, which moves into the sewer system of Vienna for its climax. But such is the noir quality of the movie that many of the above-ground scenes which occupy most of the film have a subterranean feel too.
The Third Man
Almost equally celebrated outside the anglophone sphere is the great war movie Kanal (1957) Andrzej Wajda, in which the Polish resistance fighters have to descend into the Warsaw sewer system to continue their fight for most of the film. This was Wajda's breakthrough movie. The first part of the Resistance trilogy, A Generation (1955) had been largely ignored outside Poland. The third part was Ashes and Diamonds (1958).
One of the supporting actors in Kanal was Vladek Sheybal, who in real life had fought in the Resistance and twice escaped from Nazi concentration camps. He is probably the only actor in the film well known in the West, where he had a long career playing miscellaneous, and usually sinister or weird, continentals. Curiously, he had no Polish ancestry whatsoever.
Kanal (1957)
A year before The Third Man appeared He Walked by Night (1948) Alfred Werker (and Anthony Mann - uncredited). In many ways a Film Noir, but an early example of the subversion of true noir by the use of a documentary depiction of police procedures and a sanctimonious narrator eulogizing authority (in this case the LA Police force which is the nearest the film has to a hero). Richard Baseheart plays a distinctive protagonist, but not really a noir one. He is not morally conflicted, he has no choices to make, but is simply an opaque nutcase with no appeals to our sympathies which even the worst noir anti-heroes can achieve.
What concerns us here is the climactic chase through the sewer system. The final scenes are so strikingly similar to those of the Third Man that I think Reed must have copied the earlier movie.
He Walked by Night (1948)
Next a more personal choice. A TV series that caused quite a stir in the UK. Quatermass and the Pit (1958) about a mysterious capsule dug up on a post-war re-building site, with keys scenes filmed in the local Underground railway station. It suffers from the limited BBC budget of the time, with flimsy sets and C-list actors, but its theme was enormously influential on the development of sci-fi cinema (as well as being a forerunner to the Dr Who series which often recycled its themes).
Quatermass and the Pit (TV, 1958)
Finally another bump for Kontroll (2003) directed by Hungarian/American Nimród Antal. Almost all the action takes place within the Budapest metro system, both the public areas and staff-only. It is a parable, but not a preachy one. Part social observation, part psychological therapy, lots of very black humor, and tiptoeing on the edges of both horror and whimsy, but never falling in. Untimately moving and life-affirming.
Kontroll (2003)
Daylight (1996) Rob Cohen : Sylvester Stallone leads survivors to safety when a New York (road?)tunnel collapses. Predictably awful movie but a useful compendium of clichés.
mg
