"Your Friends and Neighbors" is a 2025 Apple TV+ series, categorized as a neo-noir drama, starring Jon Hamm as a disgraced hedge fund manager who resorts to robbing his wealthy neighbors in the affluent Vestment Village. He discovers that the secrets hidden within these seemingly perfect lives are more dangerous than he anticipated. The show features a cool noir aesthetic, with a jaded voiceover that provides commentary on the unfolding events. The series adopts a noir aesthetic, drawing inspiration from classic 1940s noir films, complete with a detached and cynical voiceover, according to the show's creator, Jonathan Tropper. In the prologue, Coop trips and stumbles into a pool (referencing Sunset Boulevard), saying: "I know what you're thinking: the pool is a metaphor. I wasn't the kind of guy who woke up on the floor of someone else's house covering the dead guy's blood before falling into the pool, but here we are. And at that moment, I couldn't help but catch a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eyes of the swirling hot mess of my life, and wonder how the hell everything could go so wrong so fast." Source: movieweb.com
In
Pitfall (André De Toth, 1948), John Forbes’s (Dick Powell) angst results from his disillusionment with postwar society and discontentment with the apathy in 1950s’ American suburbia. “You are John Forbes, Average American, backbone of the country,” his wife emphatically states to his exhausted husband. In "Pitfall" Powell reinvents his screen persona playing a distinctly disreputable businessman who puts his career, his family and eventually his own life on the line after getting a midlife sweet tooth for Lizabeth Scott. De Toth said: “Life is often a betrayal. And sometimes you betray yourself too. Let’s have the guts to admit it. There isn’t anybody here who didn’t play dirty sometime, somewhere in his life.” Miss Scott burnished her noir chops as a loan out from Hal Wallis who had her under contact.
It is one of her favorite pictures and arguably the best performance of her film career. Lizabeth Scott had very positive recollections about 'Pitfall': "The whole experience of making
Pitfall was delicious! Dick Powell was so gracious and kind. His attitude inspired me. He was a pleasure to work with. People asks me who is the greatest talent in Hollywood. And I say Dick Powell! I love him. He's just like a big, woolly bear. And June Allyson is very nice. I think of them as the perfect family. I met them in a Hedda Hopper's party, and Dick Powell complained to Hedda "it doesn't matter how many times I tell June I love her, it's never enough!"
When Lizabett Scott was loaned for
Pitfall (1948), she was guaranteed a minimum of $75,000. Although
Pitfall now ranks as classic noir (Bertrand Tavernier considers it one of the genre's masterpieces), producer Hal B. Wallis could not have known that in 1948; he simply believed that Lizabeth appearing opposite Dick Powell, who showed his macho side in
Murder, My Sweet (1944) and
Cornered (1945), was right for a story about a woman who ensnares a respectable married man in a web of deception and murder, from which he emerges repentant but not exactly on the best of terms with his sexless wife (Jane Wyatt).
Pitfall (1948), directed by Andre de Toth, is a caustic examination of the American dream, chiefly because its subject is the post-war nuclear family, amidst factories such as Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica. —"Lizabeth Scott: Noir's Quicksilver Anti-Heroine" by Anastasia Lin (2010)
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