Death warmed up

It's been some years since I watched it last but A Perfect Murder is still good. Better, in fact. As I noted in my earlier not a review because no one is paying me for this and why am I doing it, the story is based on Frederick Knott's Dial M For Murder which Knott adapted for Alfred Hitchcock's film in 1954. I think that makes it noir. Barry Gifford had words to say about the noir label to Zach Vasquez:

I think the term noir has really been overused and abused. You know, it's great when Eddie Muller, who's a friend of mine, does a Noir Alley series for TCM, he really understands the concept and knows what he's doing with it. But, you know, at the time, I really think that they—publishers and filmmakers—tried to slap this noir label on things that had nothing to do with noir. All of a sudden, noir turned into a two-syllable word in the United States. It's only one syllable in French, right? So, the thing is, it just got abused, and it's still being abused. But that's none of my business.

The rest of that excellent interview is here. Like most people, I picked up Barry Gifford's books after Wild At Heart but I didn't start reading them until my then-publisher gave me The Sinaloa Story, which blew my mind. That book made me a devotee. My favourite Barry Gifford novel is Port Tropique. It's short: every line is a banquet.