If it lacks the gravitas of Welles' debut, it compensates by revealing a director entirely freed from the burden of prestige, indulging instead in excess, sleaze, formal genius, and creative destruction. It is a masterclass in cinematic rule-breaking that turns every aesthetic choice into a moral judgment.
Classic Film Noir exposes the myths by which we fulfil our desires and lays flat the means by which we created the audiovisual dispositif — sex — murder — and the suburban dream — 1940 to 1960 — FEATURING: amnesia, paranoid women, lousy husbands, red scare and HUAC, boxing, drifter narratives, crooked cops, home invasion noir, docu-style noir, returning veterans, #KEFAUVER! cowboy noir, vacuum cleaners in film noir, outré noir, espionage noir — and more.
Touch of Evil (1958)
Storm Fear (1955)
As dramatic set-ups and frequently visited tropes go, the home invasion is as stable a staple as one might wish for, and was perfect for film noir.
There are many examples of home invasion film noirs, from Suddenly (1954), in which Frank Sinatra plays an assassin intent on killing the US President; all the way back to the slightly more conventional The Petrified Forest (1936).
Probably the most famous example of this style of story from the classic film noir period is Key Largo (1948) ― and many of these movies contain the same set-up ― gangsters on the run take over a family home or similar residence, thus creating perfect conditions to explore the inevitable culture clash that crime inspired in the bourgeois imagination.
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