Podcasts are now available for the two interview shows I did earlier this year for “Talk Art Radio” on WSOU, the campus radio station at Seton Hall University in South Orange, NJ, not far from Manhattan. I wrote about doing the first show in a post last April called “On the Radio – Movies, Zombies & “Homecoming.” About two months after that program, Mark Svenvold and I did another one; this time the focus was on film noir. Both can be heard via free iTunes downloads at the following site:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/wsou-talk-art-radio/id542463190?mt=10

Under the Description heading look for “Noir: A Style or Genre?” (released 8/23/14) and “Monsters and Me” (released 7/5/14). Both are just under 30 minutes each.

I think they both come off pretty well. It actually sounds like I know what I’m talking about. Mark is also great at keeping the conversation moving forward with a minimum (I hope) of stammering and/or dead air on my part. I was disappointed that our discussion of Joe Dante’s great Homecoming episode on Showtime’s series Masters of Horror wasn’t included, but we talked well beyond the 30 minutes allowed for the shows, so something had to go (see the blog post indicated above for more about Homecoming).

The second show really should be called Film Noir: Then & Now, since we spent a lot of time talking about how the classic noir films of the 1940s & 50s have influenced the “neo-noir” films that came after. Classic noirs include Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Edward Dmytryk’s Murder My Sweet (1944), Edgar Ulmer’s Detour (1945), Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947), Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), to name but a very few. It’s a long list.

Key neo-noirs include J. Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear (1962), Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), ), Carl Franklin’s One False Move (1992), and Curtis Hansen’s L.A. Confidential (1997). Again, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Noir is an incredibly fluid, flexible category. While noirs typically tend to have urban settings and involve some sort of criminal activity, there have been science fiction noirs (Blade Runner – 1982) and even Western noirs (Ramrod – 1947). Noirish elements turn up almost everywhere these days in films and television. It’s basically endless.

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I could go on and on but I’m sure most of you already know this stuff, so I’ll let the podcasts speak for themselves. I’ve enjoyed doing these shows and I hope you enjoy hearing them. Mark and I intend to do more of them.

A special thanks to Ben Rader at WSOU, who engineers these epic broadcasts.– Ted Hicks