What is film noir? What are the theories of film noir? What defines film noir? What are the main elements of film noir? What is film noir history?
The origins of the film noir movement are complex, but a summary is not beyond the scope of a few thoughts, expressible on one web page. Yes, the answers lie within a byzantine can of worms, man-splained over and over again by legions of writers who fight on Facebook about which is the first film noir, and whether any of many various and obscure films are noir or not.
This page will sketch out what the origins of film noir were, what film noir is, and why those who like it, love it.
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Sterling Hayden in Crime Wave (1953) |
THE CONNOSSIEUR'S CHOICE?
For those who enjoy the movies and come to love cinema and its history, the film noir style is the apogee of the form, the style upon which all connoisseurs will eventually set their hearts.
If you were a wine lover, you may have started enjoying the drink, and then idly researching a few more things about wine's production, and what what makes a great wine great.
Eventually, you would have moved from drinking and discussing your favourite supermarket plonk to far dizzier heights — talking about the 2019 Schrader Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon Oakville Double Diamond, or the Château Talbot St.-Julien, or the Antinori Toscana Tignanello.
In short you would have become a cognoscente.
It is the same for cinema, if you catch the bug. You may well have started with superhero movies and formed your love of cinema by watching some seventies classics — but when it comes down to becoming a gourmet and an epicure — you will be neck deep in film noir and discussing the merits of Kiss of Death (1947) — as a mere example.
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Kiss of Death (1947) |
Film noir from the Golden Age is not only the most informative and interesting of all cinema's multitudinous offerings, but it is the richest and deepest in meaning. Film noir from the Golden Age contains some of the most fun and culturally expressive cinema any of us will ever see. It was a time when the cinematic craft was being perfected at a faster rate than ever, and its great moments will never be re-captured or seen again.
Not everybody agrees when Hollywood's Golden Age was but the dates you'll see most quoted on Internet searches place it between 1927 and 1969.
This is wide timespan, which covers many different periods and styles. 1927 marks the advent of talking pictures, and although there are some well known films from the early 1930s, movies as we recognise them — with incidental music — complex plots — and technically advanced crane and dolly camera work — did not entirely take off until the end of the decade — a time also when colour film became a more common sight.
At the other end of this timescale, the 1960s were not the most creative and productive for Hollywood, certainly not compared to the decades that followed and preceded it. There is a super late film noir period of outré and experimental and even times-they-are-a-changing noir, although the tone in the 1950s could barely more severe, when compared to the soft-edged fantastic 40s.
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Outré film noir Shack Out On 101 (1955) |
For dating the classic film noir period there is no agreement at all, so each theorist and specialist will have a different view.
However — broadly speaking the 1940s and 1950s are generally regarded as the "classic period" of American film noir — and so the purposes of this blog, we have placed our classic film noir period between two super-famous films that everybody has heard of — two films that have got a lot to say about film noir — even if neither of these are film noir themselves.
This period then might be said to range broadly between Citizen Kane (1940) and Psycho (1960) — by Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock respectively.
These are directors who both have a seat on the film noir board — although in some respects they both worked outside all traditions and were almost genres unto themselves — even though both of them made classic film noir at various times
Thus at the high point of the Golden Age of Hollywood — sits film noir. It's interesting that many of the films you will have been told were the greatest of all time come from the early part of this era — Gone with the Wind (1939), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Citizen Kane (1940) and Casablanca (1939) all spring to mind — and all made in that early period and within a few years of each other.
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Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death (1947) |
GENRE AND STYLE
In discussing film noir, it's important to appreciate the difference between genre and style in motion pictures, books and artistic works in general. Whereas genre is largely about audience expectations and classification of films and books, style is more to do with the way the films and books are made or presented, and will include modes of expressions, mood and themes, among other factors.
Examples of popular literary genres include science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, musical, romance, literary fiction, mystery, thriller, westerns and horror. New genres are being developed all the time.
Let us take the genres of the western and the musical. It is expected that a western movie will be set typically on the American frontier between the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the closing of the frontier in 1890, and feature cowboys, and outlaws, and other individuals pertinent to the era — such as settlers, cattle rustlers and so on.
It would be difficult to conceive of a western that did not have the these elements.
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The Racket (1951) |
Similarly it is expected that a musical will have songs and musical numbers in it, and it would be difficult to conceive of a musical that did not have songs in it.
It's of course possible that genres can meet and mix. Oklahoma (1955) and Paint Your Wagon (1969) are both examples of films that are both westerns and musicals.
Taking a film like Outland (1981) which is a remake (after a fashion) of the great western High Noon (1952). This is still a science fiction film, because it features many of the expected attributes of that genre — such as its futuristic setting, including spaceships and space travel.
A film like No Country for Old Men (2007) is normatively placed in the genre 'Neo-Western' because of its story and setting, and the fact that it is contemporary and not set in the Old West. However many will also cite it is being a neo-noir! But this is not complicated.
Film noir was in its heyday very much a style of filmmaking, as opposed to a genre — and it's for that reason that
THE LITERARY BACKGROUND
The primary home-grown cultural source of many of the narratives and tropes that became central to film noir was the hardboiled detective fiction which became popular during the 1920s and 1930s.
Writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler created tough and cynical detectives who worked in a corrupt and violent world, and became embroiled in sometimes complex stories that often involved dangerous women who used their sexuality to manipulate men — the origins of the famous film noir femme fatale.
One famous source of material and mood was the author W. R. Burnett, whose first novel to be published was Little Caesar, in 1929. It was turned into a hit for Warner Bros. in 1931 and the following year, Burnett was hired to write dialogue for Scarface, while The Beast of the City (1932) was adapted from one of his stories.
Interestingly, despite the incredibly early date, Dennis L. White in the essay "Beast of the City (1932)", in Silver and Ward, Film Noir: An Encyclopaedic Reference, pp. 16–17. (1980) describes this movie as a film noir — and depending on your tolerance for this particular critic — and film noir critics have little tolerance for each other — this must be one of the earliest occasions that a movie is described as a film noir.
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The Asphalt Jungle (1950) |
During the classic era, Burnett's work, either as author or screenwriter, was the basis for many films now widely regarded as films noir, including three of the most famous: High Sierra (1941), This Gun for Hire (1942), and The Asphalt Jungle (1950).
Other influential writers included Dashiell Hammett (whose first novel, Red Harvest, was published in 1929) and James M. Cain (whose The Postman Always Rings Twice appeared five years later), and popularized in pulp magazines such as Black Mask.
The classic film noirs The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Glass Key (1942) were based on novels by Hammett. Cain's novels provided the basis for Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and Slightly Scarlet (1956), adapted from Love's Lovely Counterfeit).
A decade before the classic film noir era, a story by Hammett was the source for the gangster melodrama City Streets (1931), directed by Rouben Mamoulian and photographed by Lee Garmes.
Released the month before Lang's M (1931), City Streets has a claim to being the first major film noir, as both its style and story had many noir characteristics — a claim made by Ballinger and Graydon in The Rough Guide to Film Noir (2007).
Raymond Chandler, who debuted as a novelist with The Big Sleep in 1939, soon became the most famous author of the hardboiled school. Not only were Chandler's novels turned into major noirs—Murder, My Sweet (1944; adapted from Farewell, My Lovely), The Big Sleep (1946), and Lady in the Lake (1947)—he was an important screenwriter in the genre as well, producing the scripts for Double Indemnity, The Blue Dahlia (1946), and Strangers on a Train (1951). Where Chandler, like Hammett, centered most of his novels and stories on the character of the private eye, Cain featured less heroic protagonists and focused more on psychological exposition than on crime solving.
Audrey Totter in Lady in the Lake (1947) |
PSYCHOLOGY AND ANALYSIS
Paranoia and psychology were explored in film noir thrillers, more than in any other artistic of cultural expression of the 1940s. It was almost as if film noir existed to give expression to these feelings and social manifestations. And film noir would not be what it was without them.
As well as telling crime stories of gangsters and police procedural, film noir amply reflected the fears felt by post-War II American society. This was also when psychoanalysis was first becoming popularly known as a method of treating mental conditions.
The depiction of psychoanalysis and psychological mental illness was especially pronounced in American film noir crime films.
As it evolved, film noir brought a subjective, psychological point of view of psychopathy and other mental conditions directly to film-goers, and did so influenced by expressionism, surrealism, and documentary and poetic realism.
Blind Alley, Spellbound, The Lost Weekend, Behind Locked Doors, and Whirlpool are great examples because they show psychoanalysts and protagonists fighting mental instability.
Many of those who suffer either psychopathy at one extreme and PTSD on the other are also engaged in criminal activity and some movies follow them right into psychiatric wards or insane asylums.
Although not universal to the style, film noir often focused on a central character's conflicted inner life. Flawed, weakened and psychologically tormented film noir heroes and antiheroes fought against dreams and nightmares and haunting surreal visions, highly stylised and subjectively expressed, were common across the style
During World War 2 itself, European émigré directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Otto Preminger were among many who built a new dark and psychological type of American noir films.
Film noir and noir style gothic thrillers including paranoid woman pictures used psychology to work around screen censorship, and so employed psychological narrative techniques while also often directly referencing the rise of psychology as a new-fangled pesudo-scicne making waves in American culture at the time.
In fact, Hitchcock and Wilder served in psychological warfare units during World War II, working on propaganda films including documentaries depicting horrific atrocities of the Holocaust as Allies liberated Nazi concentration camps. Wilder's family perished in the Holocaust as he shot the definitive film noir Double Indemnity during the war. Wilder's Double Indemnity narrative is structured as told from a doomed antihero's psychological point of view. He is so haunted and guilty after murdering his femme fatale lover's husband that he cannot hear his own footsteps as he walks on a dark night and feels he is already a dead man. Fate is a lingering presence in his mind.
Sheri Chenin Bieson, Psychology in American Film Noir and Hitchcock's Gothic Thrillers
IF YOU KNOW YOUR HISTORY
If you know the history of the 1930s, both in Europe and in the States, you will see it reflected in film noir, along with social and even scientific trends. One thing for example that is manifest in film noir in the 1940s and 1950s, is that a more paranoid state of mind began to infiltrate American lives.
In the 1940s people became aware of crime on a new scale, for a start, as inspired by the knowledge we gained of organized crime in the US, and on another level altogether, via the political crimes of the Nazis and other fascist groups in Europe.
This paranoia was real and it became embedded and hot-wired in every man woman and child, through the growth of Freudian imagery and analysis, something the movies were able to express perfectly.
The results cannot be denied, and however we define it, there sprang up around 1940 a strain of movies that later critics could identify as belonging to that wonderful category we now call film noir.
Some folks argue that politics and the movies should be kept as far apart as possible. Yet it seems likely that what was euphemistically called 'the union question' had some influence on the origins of film noir. The euphemistic aspect of the phrase 'the union question' is very definitely the word question, for which read problem.
Man in a maze of mirrors? C'est arrive Film Noir. |
Some Links To The Best Film Noir Themes:
- Amnesia Noir
- Psychoanalysis
- Boxing
- Returning Veterans
- Femmes Fatales
- Paranoid Women
- Female Seeker Heroes
- Corporate Crime
- Documentary Style
- Journalism and Media
- Heist Noir
- Fantasy
A work in progress, last tackled this page July 2024
In 1934, when novelist Upton Sinclair stood as a Democrat for the post of Governor of California, he was not only planning to expand relief programmes, but also planning to nationalise the film industry, a policy which led him to be dubbed as a 'Bolshevik beast'. Back home in Germany, the Nazis too were planning to nationalise the film industry, and in 1933, offered the job of its leadership to Fritz Lang, even though he was of partial Jewish origin.
Unions, and the right to form them, were a key question in 1930s politics, and in the mid 1930s, the movie moguls were in on the act of discrediting these ideas, using the incredible powers of their new medium.
One newsreel, for example, pictured an ugly and poverty stricken mob as the announcer explained that crowds were waiting at the borders of California, set to rush in at the event of a Sinclair victory, but virtually no newspaper that reported on this picked up on the fact that the mob pictured was footage from another story. It sounds a little familiar; politicians whipping up a bit of xenophobic fervour around the US borders.
There was a certain irony to this presentation of fiction as fact (early example of fake news?) because when it came to the HUAC hearings of 1947, a common claim was that those under investigation had been using Hollywood to spread Communist propaganda. While Communists might have wanted to use the movies to spread their message, there is no way they could have ever been able to do so, so tightly controlled and observed were the productions.
One of the best examples of this mish-mash of truth and fiction serving as propaganda came in 1951 with the film I Was a Communist for the FBI in which religious hatred and class antagonism are used to confuse working and middle class people.
When the Screen Actors Guild was founded in 1933, it was done so with good intentions, and with a view to improving on many of the working conditions actors suffered in the 1920s. And it so happened that throughout the 1930s there was a growing interest in labour issues, and this affected Hollywood too.
The Guild’s aim
was to deal with any potential and actual exploitation of actors in Hollywood who were being forced into
oppressive contracts with the major movie studios that did not include
restrictions on work hours or minimum rest periods, and sometimes had clauses
that automatically renewed at the studios' discretion.
Many high-profile actors refused to join the SAG however. This
changed when the producers made an agreement not to bid competitively for
talent, and in 1937, it took only three weeks for SAG membership to go from
around 80 members to more than 4,000.
The 1930s saw a surge in the popularity of crime films, the
hero of which was often a loner against society. This figure became the central character of
film noir — but also became the central character in the HUAC hearings
beginning in 1947.
In October 1947, many people working in Hollywood were summoned to appear
before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), which was
investigating Communist influence in the Hollywood labour unions. That also included Walt Disney, whose interesting testimony is linked above. Ten of those
summoned, dubbed the "Hollywood Ten", refused to cooperate and were
charged with contempt of Congress and sentenced to prison.
Several members of the SAG, led by Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye, and Gene Kelly formed
the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA) and flew to Washington, DC, in late
October 1947 to show support for the Hollywood Ten.
Several of the CFA's members, including
Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, and John Garfield later recanted, saying they had
been "duped", not realising that some of the Ten were really in actual fact real life bona fide communists. We still see today that actors don't always make the most reliable witnesses when it comes to politics, and that they are easily swayed by agents, public opinion and any threat to their bankability.
Instead, according to an FBI memorandum in 1947:
"T-10 advised Special Agent [name deleted] that he has been made a member of a committee headed by Mayer, the purpose of which is allegedly is to 'purge' the motion-picture industry of Communist party members, which committee was an outgrowth of the Thomas committee hearings in Washington and subsequent meetings . . . He felt that lacking a definite stand on the part of the government, it would be very difficult for any committee of motion-picture people to conduct any type of cleansing of their own household".
And so it
appears that the climate of fear which is so well portrayed in many of the film
noir movies of the 1940s represents a reality as opposed to merely an
entertainment — and the trouble with these type of things is that people begin to wonder when it will end. Politics was already in the movies, like it or not by 1947, as in that year, the Screen Actors Guild voted to force its
officers to take a "non-communist" pledge. Easily done, but for non-Communists and Communist sympathisers alike, the question must have remained as to what was coming next.
On November 25 (the day after the full House approved the
ten citations for contempt) in what has become known as the Waldorf Statement,
Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA),
issued a press release:
"We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods."
None of those blacklisted were proven to advocate the overthrowing of the government — most of them simply had Marxist or socialist views. The
Waldorf Statement still marked the beginning of the Hollywood blacklist that saw
hundreds of people prevented from working in the film industry.
During the
height of what is now referred to as McCarthyism, the Screen Writers Guild gave
the studios the right to omit from the screen the name of any individual who
had failed to clear his name before Congress. At a 1997 ceremony marking the
50th anniversary of the Blacklist, the Guild's president made this statement:
Only our sister union, Actors Equity Association, had the courage to stand behind its members and help them continue their creative lives in the theater. ... Unfortunately, there are no credits to restore, nor any other belated recognition that we can offer our members who were blacklisted. They could not work under assumed names or employ surrogates to front for them. An actor's work and his or her identity are inseparable. Screen Actors Guild's participation in tonight's event must stand as our testament to all those who suffered that, in the future, we will strongly support our members and work with them to assure their rights as defined and guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.
— Richard Masur, Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist
Upton Sinclair at WIKIPEDIA
Suburban Lounge with Dead Body in The Woman in the Window (1945) |
Often, women in film noir feature as prizes or desirable objects, and then there are the film noirs which have the women as the hero, as typified in the sub-genre that has at times in the past been called 'the wifelet seeker hero'.
All that phrase means is that as in Phantom Lady (1944), and Destination Murder (1950), the woman takes the lead as the detective, usually solving a crime on behalf of an innocent and weakened male.
Often to do this, the wifelet seeker hero has to plumb the depths of the criminal world, which is generally no place for a nice girl like her, visiting low bars in the case of Phantom Lady, or taking a demeaning job as a cigarette girl in Destination Murder.
In The Woman in the Window, as in Pitfall (1948) we have another key female film noir role, which is that of the object of desire. In both films, in fact, the men in question threaten the safety of their married suburban life, pursuing obsessions based only on the image of a certain woman.
In The Woman in the Window by Fritz lang, Edward G. Robinson becomes involved with a woman whose portrait has mesmerised him. In the subversive world of noir, you see, both men and women tend to seek sexual satisfaction outside of marriage, but film noir doesn't tend to show normal adulterous activity either. Looking at Pitfall, The Woman in the Window and THE FILE ON THELMA JORDON (1950), we see that love affairs in film noir are concerned with the complete destruction of marriage bonds, either through murder or a symbolic mutual catastrophe, as in DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944).
In this manner, film noir clearly states its beliefs concerning the traditional marriage bonds so beloved of every conservative administration, which is that the expression of sexuality and the sanctity of marriage are at complete odds. While most film noir presents men as the chief protagonists, there are some very strong roles for women in these films, and this is often coupled with an amazingly undermining message, that romantic love is an impossibility. The sterility of the family setting is often seen in noir, then, as the impossible locus of the slavery of not just men, but women too.
The family is of course, in critical and feminist terms, a place of oppression for women, creating generic wives, daughters and mothers, and its is only in the film noir of the 1940s and 1950s that this is displayed.
Comparing women in film noir to women's roles in every other style of film of the era, this is a significant factor in identifying and celebrating true film noir. Even the femme fatale perverts this image and it is credit to the makers of the films of the period, that they demonstrated this, and better still, got away with it.
Comparing women in film noir to women's roles in every other style of film of the era, this is a significant factor in identifying and celebrating true film noir. Even the femme fatale perverts this image and it is credit to the makers of the films of the period, that they demonstrated this, and better still, got away with it.
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OUT OF THE PAST - but not every woman in film noir is a so-called 'femme fatale' |
IMAGE ATTRIBUTION: "OutOfThePastMitchumGreer" by Original uploader was DCGeist at en.wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia; transferred to Commons by User:Common Good using CommonsHelper. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
If there is one thing we adore about film noir, it's the snappy dialogue.
Nobody has ever been to recreate it in any other form other than pastiche, but it is one of the overlooked hallmarks of the canon, much enjoyed and a fine art in its day.
How did these writers come up with it? There was a certain skill to this, mostly gleaned from the hard-boiled thrillers of the day, and much influenced by the immense class and power for imagery that Raymond Chandler brought to bear.
Nobody has ever been to recreate it in any other form other than pastiche, but it is one of the overlooked hallmarks of the canon, much enjoyed and a fine art in its day.
How did these writers come up with it? There was a certain skill to this, mostly gleaned from the hard-boiled thrillers of the day, and much influenced by the immense class and power for imagery that Raymond Chandler brought to bear.
Here I'd like to focus on a few of the stand-out lines from Murder My Sweet (1944), which is the alternative title for the book Farewell My Lovely (1940), which inspired much of the tough talking and clever patter that came to be the verbal essence of noir.
Marlowe in fact indulges in some of the best banter in the whole noir canon, with exchanges such as these ranking among the best ever:
Lt. Randall: Let's get it on the record... from the beginning.
Philip Marlowe: With Malloy, then. Oh, it was about seven o'clock. Anyway it was dark.
Lt. Randall: What were you doing at the office that late?
Philip Marlowe: I'm a homing pigeon. I always come back to the stinking coop, no matter how late it is. I'd been out peeking under old Sunday sections for a barber named Dominick whose wife wanted him back - I forget why. Only reason I took the job was because my bank account was trying to crawl under a duck.
Marlowe's wisecracking is famous, and it is always interesting to compare and contrast the Marlowe styles of both Dick Powell and Humphrey Bogart, who played the detective in The Big Sleep in 1946.
DICK POWELL AS THE WISECRACKIN PHILIP MARLOWE |
Here is some typical Marlowe from Murder My Sweet, delivered by Dick Powell:
Now this is beginning to make sense, in a screwy sort of a way. I get dragged in and get money shoved at me. I get pushed out and get money shoved at me. Everybody pushes me in, everybody pushes me out. Nobody wants me to DO anything. Okay, put a check in the mail. I cost a lot not to do anything. I get restless. Throw in a trip to Mexico.
And how about:
He was doubled up on his face in that bag-of-old-clothes position that always means the same thing: he had been killed by an amateur. Or, by somebody who wanted it to look like an amateur job. Nobody else would hit a man that many times with a sap.
That's the hard-boiled, hard- ass attitude of noir for you, because these films have teeth, and between 1940 and the end of the 1950s, they bared them
For a quick rundown on some other classics, before we get going on this and find the best, the weirdest, the hardest and the most colorfully suggestive lines in film noir, check out this page called FILM NOIR QUOTES "devoted to words of misery, depression, melancholy, alienation, bleakness, disillusionment, despair, desperation, cynicism, pessimism, ambiguity, moral corruption, evil, guilt, desperation, paranoia, and existentialism."
Yep. That about sez it all, bub.
Noir isn't a genre, at least it wasn't in the 1940s and 1950s.
No studio exec had to hear a pitch that began with the lines:
"This is a film noir about ..."
Film noir is more of a style, or a mood. And it refers to the fact that certain films of the 40s or 50s started exhibiting these strange styles and tones.
Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982) |
These remain the markers of noir, and they cut through every genre.
But those two words. Comedy and noir. They don't automatically segue.
Certainly, there is a well defined place in the movies for what is known as dark comedy, but in terms of comedy and film noir, that is not what we are talking about.
Most film noir of the era is either a crime film, or a melodrama, but police procedurals, women in peril and other types of film adopted noir styles. There are even film noir westerns, and colour film noirs, but there are not so many film noir comedies.
The only comedy that comes to mind in fact is Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, but it is a spoof of noir, not noir itself.
Of the few period film noir comedies, probably the most obvious Beat The Devil. It's one of two noirs also that directly reference the most defining global thought of the era: The A-Bomb. The other one is Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Beat The Devil sounds like it is going to be great. Look at this cast: Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida, Jennifer Jones, Peter Lorre, and Robert Morley. On top of that it is directed by John Houston.
For the film, which most people see for curiosty value, illy (Humphrey Bogart) and Maria Dannreuther (Gina Lollobrigida) are
among a number of travelers stranded in Italy en route to Africa.
While
the Dannreuthers seem like an average couple, they have the same goal as
Mrs. Gwendolen Chelm (Jennifer Jones) and some of their other shifty
companions - to lay claim to property that is supposedly rich with
uranium.
It isn't a great success as a movie, and this may be one of the reasons it remains out of copyright, and freely watchable on YouTube, for those with sufficient inquisitiveness.
Beat The Devil (1953) |
Other films which might contend to be in this collection might include Some Like It Hot (1959), which is certainly by a director, Billy Wilder, known to have contributed to the film noir style, and the juty shall remain out on other good crime comedies from that period, which include:
- Arsenic and Old Lace
- Ball of Fire
- Whisky Galore!
- Larceny, Inc.
- Lady on a Train
- The Lady in Question
- Black Magic
- The Thin Man films
Finally, my general criteria for a film noir comedy might be one-such noir which has a happy ending, and that would include an ending in which the guilty party does not die, but is allowed to reflect instead.
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Bob le Flambeur (1956) |
Such would be the case with Bob le Flambeur (1956), which is certainly a film noir comedy. All agree to this fact because if this were a full on full fledged fully operational standard issue bog and mob standard noir, Bob would die in the end. Instead, sure, he doesn't get away with his crime.
But we're allowed so much light relief nonetheless, as Bob is not only pursued by a policeman who really cares for his well-being (weird) but the cops stuff the stolen money in the police car, while Bob raises a sanguine eyebrow, not bothered at the inevitably short prison sentence he faces. And all this despite the drama beforehand, including the death of the young accomplice.
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Bob's last gamble LOL |
You see it so often in film noir — the story of the man who seeks escape from the dull routine of family life, or something as banal as plagues Walter Neff in Double Indemnity (1944) — his role in the corporate machine.
It afflicts Edward G. Robinson in Woman in the Window (1945) and Wendell Corey in The File on Thelma Jordon (1950) — but it's so common, that a list of all the 'men-gone-off-the-rails movies' of the 1940s and 1950s would take pages to itemise.
It afflicts Edward G. Robinson in Woman in the Window (1945) and Wendell Corey in The File on Thelma Jordon (1950) — but it's so common, that a list of all the 'men-gone-off-the-rails movies' of the 1940s and 1950s would take pages to itemise.
Generally, this isn't good news for women in these films, as they are seen as sexual commodities, or held up as a dangerous means of escape from the dull routine of life. But even that statement begs more questions. Is life such a dull routine, and if it is, then is that why we are going to the movies in the first place?
Why is there no escapism to be found within the family, or if there is, why is the family seen as being of secondary worth to the sexual satisfaction that can be obtained outside of marriage?
Why is there no escapism to be found within the family, or if there is, why is the family seen as being of secondary worth to the sexual satisfaction that can be obtained outside of marriage?
This is one reason why film noir was so very much of its time, and why film noir reflects a certain post-war mood. Not only did the world experience a strange bonding during the mutual struggle of war, but the period after the war produced troubles of a more pernicious sort, troubles that couldn't be sorted out with military might.
The troubles I'm talking about a pertinent to peacetime economy — the threat of unemployment — a more stagnant economy and a disillusionment as people began to look in earnest for the values that so many had lost their lives defending.
This is where film noir offers its critique in moods and feelings, as it presents a complexity of trouble, and the trouble often erupts from within suburbia, where the dominant myths of prosperity and morality are supposed to reside, and be upheld.
This is where film noir offers its critique in moods and feelings, as it presents a complexity of trouble, and the trouble often erupts from within suburbia, where the dominant myths of prosperity and morality are supposed to reside, and be upheld.
It is this feeling of being lost in a world of imposed values that we can read into film noir, and often into the roles women play in noir. In film noir, the women are never possessed by the men in the end, even though they act as desirable objects of danger, drama and violence, all motifs that are easily represented in war. Instead, the women of film noir are proof that deep down, the whole noir style shows a struggle to assert the values that so many people believed they had fought for.
John Payne as the returning veteran in The Crooked Way (1949) |
Examples are legion, but if you want to see the troubled veteran at his best, have a look at John Payne in The Crooked Way (1949), as he tries and struggles to find his way in a post-war world that he doesn't recognise. The Crooked Way in fact uses amnesia as a perfect metaphor, because the war has literally made him forget himself, his morality and he has to question every person and every value, to try and establish who he is, or whom he might be.
Crazed End Notes To Think Upon
The major forces that gave rise to film noir in America and in Britain are: (1) cataclysmic events of the twentieth century, (2) crime and the underworld, (3) the roman noir (novels, stories and plays that were made into films noirs), (4) films of the 1920s and 1930s that were precursors or prototypes of film noir , (5) a group of filmmakers who possessed the stylistic and experiential sensibilities that were expressed as film noir.