A list of wonderfully grimy feeling films that often inspire long, cold showers after watching.
If you have any other suggestions, please let me know!
EDIT: I submitted a top ten selection of this list to Kermode and Mayo's podcast on BBC Radio 5 Live and it somehow featured on their July 17, 2020 episode: twitter.com/wittertainment/status/1283001804050124800
LIST CRITERIA:
- Must feature a character/characters who are frequently seen to be sweating so profusely you can practically smell them. More often than not, these characters inexplicably insist on wearing uncomfortably tight shirts (replete with vast damp stains) or thick jackets. Key perspirators include: Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, M. Emmet Walsh in Blood Simple and Dennis Quaid in D.O.A..
- Many examples take place indoors or inside cramped vehicles. In most cases, the air-con is faulty or non-existent. See: 12 Angry Men, Phase IV, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
- Obviously porno denotes a different kind of sweat, so I'm not including those films.
- Some key texts (of course excluding B & W films) have a brownish, yellow, green visual palette that goes some way to accentuate the sweaty griminess. For best examples, see: Barton Fink, Naked Lunch, The Dark Backward.
- Discounting sports films such as the Rocky franchise (1976-2006) or Personal Best (1982); while people do sweat a lot in these films, they just don't possess that grimy atmosphere I'm thinking about here.
- The same goes for more 'polished' fare like Transformers (2007) or something comparable; such films may feature some sweaties, but I always get the feeling the actors have been made to look sweatier than they actually are, and that just doesn't cut it.
- Importantly, I believe there is a difference between a film that feels merely hot, especially in a dry sense (see: Paris, Texas [1984] or Bone Tomahawk [2015]), and the films on this list wherein it feels as if the celluloid itself was soaked in clammy gunk.