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Hard boiled movies

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I’ve developed a bit of a thing for alternative / hard boiled movies from the 60s and 70s – I’m talking “Bullet”, “Point Blank”, “Dirty Dozen”, Dirty Harry of course, early De Niro, “Two Lane Blacktop”…can’t wait for my fresh print of “Bonnie and Clyde” and a twofer of the French Connections to arrive tomorrow. Your faves in this genre? What should I seek out? And why (avoiding list thread complaints…)?

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  3. Badlands….just about Martin Sheen’s best film.
    Based on true events (as always), the distinctive soundtrack was used recently in a twee supermarket ad.

    Given the subject matter….underage Bonnie and psycho Clyde types on a murder spree, I’m guessing the ad agency haven’t seen it.

  8. The Taking of Pelham 123.

    The original with Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw.

    Why? Because WM and RS. And it’s another early 70’s Noo Yoik movie. showing the city in its pre ’80’s clean up grot.

    Also, Serpico

  13. I enjoyed Altman’s long and meandering The Long Goodbye. A lot of the pleasure was that Elliot Gould was so very far from Bogart and that Altman took considerable liberties with the book.

    Another must is Don Siegal’s Charley Varrick from 1973 with Walter Matthau in the title role.

    A top notch thriller about a small town heist that goes horribly wrong when Charley and his gang steal money from the Mob.. Siegel was a master of hard-boiled.

  14. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) is an absolute stunner. Thought provoking and gritty. Comes with some amazing (CGI-free) stunts and chase scenes too.
    Have you ever seen any late Melville films? Ice cool brilliance in french.
    Le Samorai (1967) is what I’d suggest. If you like that then you might want to give The Red Circle (1970) a try.

  15. I’d also heartily add Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) , (Cassavettes most accessible film imho, but still a Cassavettes film…so consider yourself warned 😉
    and judging from the list in your OP, McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971)

  17. A yay for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Terrific film. If Jeff Bridges were not one of the best actors ever, it would be a high point in anyone else’s career.
    Meanwhile, on topic. howsabout the original Night of the Living Dead. (And I don’t mean the tinted version either. B&W!!!!)

  19. I endorse many of the selections above especially The Long Goodbye and The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
    But my top tip for you is Night Moves, which starred Gene Hackman and was directed by Arthur Penn.
    Hackman is a private detective, but unlike so many PIs in so many films,he’s not the smartest.

  20. This thread is a shameless exercise in nostalgia! All those films that I saw at the Rayners Lane Odeon.

    Next up: Across 110th Street. Best remembered today because Tarantino nicked the stupendous Bobby Womack theme tune for Jackie Brown. Nice work Quentin!!

    • It also has in a fairly brief role Antonio Fargas, who was better known as Huggy Bear in Starsky and Hutch.
      One thing I never understood with S&H was that the mobbed up guys never realised Huggy Bear was a supergrass. Can’t solve the crime ? Go to HB. He tips them off. Bad guys end up behind bars. Time and again. In Across 110th Street Mr F suffers the fate that should have befallen HB. I won’t say how in the interest of avoiding too many spoilers.

  21. One I should have included there and, to the best of my memory Tigs, Gene Hackman isn’t in it but Walter Matthau is. That’s the brilliant Charley Varrick. (edit, I see Kaisfatdad has already mentioned it, but I didn’t notice it beneath the YouTube box.)
    A heist goes too well. Far too well and Charley and his compadres are pursued by ruthless Joe Don Baker.
    Unlike Gene Hackman’s character Charley is smart. People underestimate just how smart he is.
    I believe the film had an alternative title with one word added – Kill Charley Varrick.

  23. If “The Long Good Friday” is in, then “Get Carter” is as well.

    Crossing back over the Atlantic, “L.A. Confidential”, “Se7en” and “The Usual Suspects” are contenders.
    If we carry on across the Pacific to Australia, “The Proposition” is a contender.

  25. They may belong more on the joky side, like Our Man Flint, but I’ve always been fond of Sinatra’s two late 60s Tony Rome movies, Tony Rome and Lady in Cement. The Detective from the same period is pretty gritty and worth a look too.

  26. I hope you’ve chosen the DVD set of French Connection, rather than the Blu Ray, as it’s one of the rare occasions where the Blu Ray picture is worse than the DVD. If it is the Blu Ray just watch closely at the scene early on when Santa Claus is in pursuit of somebody (hope that’s not too much of a spoiler!). The red suit bleeds all over the place. I took my copy back to the shop and stuck with the DVD.

    Two more films you might want to consider are Blow Out and Three Days of the Condor. Great films.

  27. …And Justice For All

    It’s got Al Pacino, John Forsythe, Jack Warden, Jeffrey Tambor and lots more, and of course it’s brilliant. And often forgotten. So do yourself a favour!!!

  29. How about some Peckinpah?

    The Getaway and Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia are pretty hard boiled

    There were some great Westerns with a 70s culture influence around that time, Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid for example, The Outlaw Josey Wales as well

  30. You cannot get much more hardboiled than Prime Cut from 1972.

    Mob enforcer Lee Marvin from Chicago is sent down to sort out a “beef” with vicious local crime boss Gene Hackman who owns a Kansas City slaughterhouse.

    • I agree, it’s the perfect hard boiled movie. Not so easy to find on DVD – it’s a dodgy looking foreign language import on Amazon, though I had a TV sourced VHS of it so I know it by heart though sometimes you find there had been cuts in the TV version so I want to get a pukka copy.

  35. I second the Conversation, mentioned above (brilliant film).

    Going slightly tangential (it’s a horror, but it’s set in grimy early 70s London) Deathline is worth a punt. Donald Pleasance as a copper investigating some odd deaths at Russell Square tube station. It uses the eeriness of the tube (see also “An American Werewolf in London”) to great effect.

    • Death Line aka Raw Meat is one of Edgar Wright’s favourite horror movies according to IMDB.

      Donald Pleasance is also in John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, playing the very un-presidential President. Got to add that to our list. Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken was as hard-boiled as they come.

    • Relocating Martin Beck to Frisco seems so very odd, particularly so in these days of Nordic Noir.

      But it does remind me of a hard-boiled Swedish thriller also featuring Inspector Beck: Bo Widerberg’s The Man on the Roof from 1976. Thomas Hellberg as the sarcastic and well-hard Gunnvar Larsson was obviously a great inspiration to Michael Persbrandt when he took the role for the Beck TV series.

      It’s a top notch movie!

      • Now we’re talking. Carl-Gustaf Lindstedt is great as Beck.

        I also enjoy some of the Gösta Ekman movies, but The Man On The Roof is the best Beck movie.

        • I was thinking about other Swedish hardboiled stuff from the 70s.

          Thriller: A Cruel Picture, a violent revenge drama which Tarantino is keen about, probably fits the bill. It is classic drive-in stuff on a par with Russ Meyer. Gratuitous nudity, gratuitous violence, gratuitous mooses, gratuitous smörgåsbord…. They just pile it all on.

  37. Just finished No Country For Old Men. Saw it in the cinema when it came out, haven’t seen it since. Really good. Not typical Coen. Based on a novel by Carmac McCarthy. He doesn’t do happy.

  38. If we’re talking car chases, “The Seven-Ups” from 1973 is a good film with an astounding car chase.
    Also fitting the bill (except it’s from the eighties), the John Frankenheimer-directed, Elmore Leonard-scripted, and like The Seven-Ups also starring Roy Schneider “52 Pick-Up” is worth 2 hours of your time – one of the better films from the Cannon stable.

    • Elmore Leonard and Raymond Chandler always deliver the goods. I do like my hardboiled with a smidgeon of humour. A protagonist who delivers as many snappy one liners as punches.

      We have had Lee Marvin, Gene Hackman and Clint Eastwood but what about the ladies of hardboiled? Pam Grier, Jane Fonda, Helen MIrren, Maggie Smith …….?

  39. Watched ‘ Goodfellas’ on Netflix with my 15 year old last night (she enjoyed it a lot).
    Was surprised & delighted to see a cameo from a young Isiah Whitlock Jr. (Clay Davis from The Wire) who checks out Henry’s health at the hospital as his frantic coke-fuelled frenzy approaches its peak. And he doesn’t say ‘Sheeeeit!’ once.

  40. There is a movie, just out of your nominated era, that I think fits the bill – namely Cutter’s Way, which came out in early 1982. It was one of the first, if not the first, films I saw after moving to London.
    It starred Jeff Bridges and John Heard.
    Heard played a disabled Vietnam veteran (the Cutter of the title) who gets involved in a murder investigation.

  41. Heros…..a film starring “fonz” Henry Winkler should also fit the bill.
    Essentially a road movie with a twist, Vietnam vet tries to recruit his old war buddies in a hokey business venture.
    Shot in 1977, the first film to address the problems suffered by Vietnam veterans.

    Happy days it ain’t.

    • If you like that one, you might also enjoy 1973’s Scarecrow, another road movie starring Al Pacino and (surprise!) Gene Hackman as two down-and-outers with big ideas and high hopes that may or may not be realised.

  42. One of my favourite genres. Some more suggestions. I’ll stick to 70s and 80s:

    70s:

    The Killer Elite
    Farewell My Lovely
    The Late Show
    Hardcore
    The Outfit
    Rolling Thunder
    Marathon Man
    Hustle
    Freebie and The Bean
    The Yakuza
    The Driver

    80s:

    To Live and Die in LA
    Manhunter
    The Hit
    Miami Blues
    Sharky’s Machine
    Fort Apache, The Bronx
    Blue Velvet
    House of Games
    The Killer
    Blood Simple
    Thief
    The Long Good Friday

  43. This has morphed into my favourite thrillers of the 70s but what the hell. Many are mentioned somewhere above.

    Charley Varrick is indeed great..can’t go wrong with Walter Matthau and the incomparable Joe Don Baker
    Three Days of the Condor
    Parallax View
    Freebie and The Bean
    Sorcerer
    The Offence
    Serpico
    Hickey & Boggs
    Hustle – Burt Reynolds is excellent in this

    George C Scott was in a couple of forgotten fairly hard boiled thrillers of the early 1970s – The New Centurions and The Last Run. Also he is also extraordinary in The Hospital from 1971 which was written by Paddy Chayefsky who also wrote Network mentioned by Twang above.

  44. Several more names are starting to recur. Scriptwriter and director, Paul Schrader, and then the mighty Walter Hill.

    Hill’s The Warriors from 1979 is a loose re-telling of the Odyssey, set amidst the rival gangs of New York. All done with great flair and a marvelous ability to tell a story.

  45. Sorry chaps – Freebie and the Bean hard-boiled?
    It was a supposed to be a comedy and it wasn’t particularly funny. I certainly didn’t find it thrilling. More like a blancmange rather than hard-boiled.

  46. Can I nominate Gumshoe, 1971 Brit detective set in Liverpool starring Albert Finney, Frank Finlay & Billie Whitelaw…its hard to find but if you can its well worth it….like a hidden gem

  47. Bloody hell, I just watched “Bonnie and Clyde” and wouldya believe it, Gene Hackman’s in it. The rule holds. There’s a cameo from Gene Wilder I’d forgotten, too.

    I had”Network” last night. OK, so two nights of Faye Dunaway, but I’m taking one for the team here.

    • Avoid The Thomas Crown Affair from the same period then. Definitely not hard boiled (more like a two minute egg) and contains Faye Dunaway.
      Risible plot that has the “bonus” of the original version of Windmills Of Your Mind recited by Noel Harrison.

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