The Flim Noir Bar
By Mike Marino

Belly up to the Film Noir Bar, it's all about low lighting, low angles, dirty angels in the wee small hours of a Tom Waits murderous night of drinking piano's and getting short changed under a street lamp with the coal jet black evening ablaze with bullets of passion fired in anger and danger. It's Sam Spade coming alive and three dimensional as Mike Hammer puts the hammer down through the words on the pages of a pulp fiction novel. It's Double Indemity time, time to open the mail and pay the price as the Postman only rings twice. The falcon flies over Malta as the Fat Man waddles from the Blue Parrot bar to Ricks Cafe Americain just in time for Elisha Cook, Jr. to fire a warning shot over Ray Millands head as he races to the phone...leafing through the yellow pages to find how to dial M for murder while wearing Joan Crawfords straight jacket while the sunsets over the boulevard and a dead monkey and a writer float in a mansion pool of blood, but William ain't beholden to no one and is holden on for dear life while a desperate abnormal Desmond waits for her normal Norma close up and to give her fingerprints to the police and not her handprints for posterity to Graumans.

The Princess is cumming with Bob as a nonchalant Milland arranges a strangulation of triangulation proportions involving a letter of the alphabet I bet....it's better that way Ray...do it...but don't forget, the whole key to this particular murder is hidden on the stairs and not the stars. It involves a dubious character, a letter with planted prints, a pair of nylon hose and as an accomplise after the fact, Alexander Graham Bell, for whom the phone rings? It rings for thee after you say grace who then races to Monaco to meet her prince before she expends the entire alphabet foolishly.

The film noir shadows fall tall on the floor and the wall...garishly elongated...contrast magnified in black and white as color will not do when suspense is due. Add a hypodermic needle filled with sleaze, and greed and film noir festers like a cancerous noir sore. Money, sex, adultery! Choose one from column A or jump into bed with all three...what the hell a romp with a foursome for foreplay, but don't forget to take a gun or a gat as it is called in Noirese and blast away. The Sex is Free...the bullets cost a nickle each but well worth it for the big payoff of an insurance policy of cripple who falls off a train or a man with a telescopic lens looking across to his heinous neighbor from his rear window while someone else with someone else plays charades while suffering from vertigo.

The noir angles of noir angels is shot from the groin up to give a sense of surrealism in black and white with near 21 mm vision but not quite 50. Somewhere in between lies the shot, along with the plot...not plodding along but at a rampant rate and speed to the finishline of mystery solved by some amateur sleuth who is slicker than we thought against a villian who is sicker than we thought.

Soon the police take the faded star away in the backseat of a police car...no red carpet..no bouquets..just handcuffs, three hots and a cot. Laura goes to heaven, someone keeps dialing the wrong number, and the line is always busy when you try to dial M for murder...but the line is always busy so you may as well put the falcon on the shelf and along with your other friend Jake head on down to the Film Noir Bar near the opium den alley in Chinatown. Charles Bukowski is Waiting with Tom..both have a gun hidden...and damned if those pianos are drinkin while Lauren Bacall sings a song after her big sleep...and then the lights go dim...and it's last call for alcohol..at the Film Noir Bar...and the dark night...the coal jet black night light flickers...it's time to reload as the film fades to black...at the Film Noir Bar