With the release of Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, film noir is a style of filmmaking that seems appropriate to discuss at the moment. Films that are cold, shadowy, cynical and pessimistic don’t sit well with the (mostly) glorious late-summer weather we’ve been enjoying over the past few weeks. The wider world, though, seems to be in the midst of a period of perpetual gloom and unrest. Military tensions and conflicts on a global scale combined with continued economic unrest and domestic violence committed by police against citizens (in America especially) in fact add up to reflect the original conditions that led to the film noir movement quite well.
Film noir was borne out of a sense of fatalism and despair in the wake of World War II and the Great Depression. It had begun to creep in just before the United States entered the conflict in the form of darker crime films, but with studios largely charged by the Roosevelt administration to produce positive propaganda work, film noir didn’t come into its own until the late 1940s, though several precursors, such as The Maltese Falcon, were released earlier in the decade. Audiences flocked to see the films that spoke so effectively to what they were feeling – masculinity crises, major social changes, a postwar consumerist explosion, for example – and directors and writers relished the opportunity to test the limits of the Hays Code that dictated what could and couldn’t be shown and said in Hollywood.
Stylistically, film noir is a hodge-podge of elements from the German Expressionist efforts of the 1920s (especially in terms of its cinematography), 1940s Italian neo-realism and hard-boiled pulp fiction from the pens of writers like James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler. Its tropes are well-known and have been picked over more than enough times for them not to need examination here – any casual noir fan knows about weak-willed men and femmes fatale, black humour, chiaroscuro lighting, voiceover narration, crime and cops, convoluted plots. Classic Forties examples of the genre, some of which will be discussed later, include Gilda, Double Indemnity (penned by Chandler from Cain’s short story), The Big Sleep (adapted from Chandler’s story about quintessential private eye Philip Marlowe) and The Postman Only Rings Twice, before the Fifties arrived with Kiss Me Deadly, Touch Of Evil and The Big Heat. Stars like Robert Mitchum, Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, the recently late, great Lauren Bacall, Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth are inextricably linked with the genre, while the likes of Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks and Fritz Lang produced some of their best work under the noir banner.
Eventually, colour movies came in, social attitudes became less cynical and the world moved on, but noir’s influence is still felt. Pure noirs produced since the style’s classic age have included Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and Brian Helgeland’s LA Confidential, while Blade Runner, Blue Velvet and The Usual Suspects are just three of the films that display noir tropes. This week, audiences will be flocking to see Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, a movie filled with deadly women, hard-boiled dialogue, a monochrome look and an intertwining series of tales about loose morals and itchy trigger fingers that boasts the style of noir but doesn’t quite get to grips with its substance. Noir survives, often in a diluted form, but we still revisit it when we have the opportunity. Perhaps it’s because the humanity is never represented as honestly and imperfectly as it is in noir. What man can watch Fred MacMurray fall under the spell of Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and not think about a woman he might commit murder for under the right circumstances? Noir taps into our inherent anxieties and insecurities and feeds our darker desires, like greed and lust. With noir, we don’t have to shrink from the light because we’re safe in the shadows, and we can deal with whatever comes at us there.
What is noir? It’s a style, and a mood that is going to keep returning and colouring and exposing our perception of the world and of ourselves as long as corruption, crime, terror and paranoia run rampant and unchecked throughout the globe. It will continue to manifest in cinema, and in every other form of art, and we will continue to stare into its dark eyes and wonder about ourselves.
Seven noirs to watch today
Double Indemnity
From the moment that Barbara Stanwyck enters, ankle bracelet first, Fred MacMurray and the audience are hooked on a intoxicating cocktail of seduction, murder and innuendo-filled dialogue that makes Double Indemnity the archetypal film noir. Drink it all in – there is no better pure noir, certainly not from the style’s classic period, to be found anywhere.The Big Sleep
The plot of The Big Sleep was so notoriously complicated that, when asked who had killed a chauffeur, even source novel author Raymond Chandler didn’t know. The teaming of real-life couple Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall gives the film an irresistible crackle of romantic chemistry (to the point that scenes specifically featuring the two of them were added to the film after it was finished) even as the bodies pile up around them.The Third Man
Noir was not confined to the back alleys and bars of America – many fine movies, such as The Third Man, were created outside of the Hollywood studio system. Set in post-war Vienna and featuring a screenplay by novelist Graham Greene, this British noir predominantly features a pulp fiction writer (Joseph Cotten) looking for his friend, played by Orson Welles, who is widely believed to be dead. Of course, he turns up, and the plot swerves off on a new tangent. The exhausted cynicism of a city devastated by war is masterfully observed, and every aspect of the film is flawless.Out Of The Past
With twists and double-crosses galore, Out Of The Past is, perhaps, slightly underrated compared to the other films on this list, but no less effective – in it, Jane Greer is the definition of a femme fatale, twisting both Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas around her little finger so many times it’s a wonder they don’t snap long before they do. Mitchum is superb as the former private eye trying and failing to leave his old life behind, and Douglas offers a very early indicator (in only his second screen role) of his own talent as Mitchum’s gangster nemesis.Chinatown
Noir is often bleak, but it’s seldom as bleak as it is in Chinatown. To say any more would be to give too much away, but a plot that might have seemed ridiculous is given credibility by the towering performances of Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston. What starts off as a ho-hum private-eye-investigates-possible-affair film quickly becomes, in the tradition of hardboiled crime fiction, much more, and what results is one of the best films of any genre, let alone crime or noir.LA Confidential
Adapted from the novel of the same name by James Ellroy, the finest of our contemporary noir authors, LA Confidential was by no means a surefire hit – its biggest stars were Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito, with two of the three protagonists played by then-unknowns Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce. The spirit of the film right from DeVito’s stunning, scene-setting opening monologue is dirty, sordid and violent, and like all the best noirs you need to keep your brain switched on to follow the plot.Brick
You’ll be hearing a lot about Rian Johnson (assuming you haven’t already seen this film, The Brothers Bloom or last year’s Looper) because he’s been tapped to write and direct Episodes VIII and IX of the Star Wars franchise, but he burst onto the scene with this cool, original noir set in a modern-day California high school. Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brick was filmed on a shoestring budget, but proves that, with ingenuity and an outstanding script, the spirit of noir continues to burn, like one cigarette and Scotch too many, in the hearts of directors around the world.See the full blog here
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