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Film Noir

Encyclopedia : F : FI : FIL : Film Noir

This still from The Big Combo (1955) demonstrates the visual style of film noir at its most extreme. John Alton, the film's cinematographer, created many of the iconic images of film noir.
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This still from The Big Combo (1955) demonstrates the visual style of film noir at its most extreme. John Alton, the film's cinematographer, created many of the iconic images of film noir.

Film noir is a cinematic mode primarily associated with Hollywood crime dramas that set their protagonists in a corrupt and unsympathetic world. Film noir's characteristic low-key black-and-white visual style has roots in German Expressionist cinematography, while many of its prototypical stories and much of its attitude derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Depression. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as stretching from the early 1940s to the late 1950s.

The term film noir (French for "black film"), first applied to Hollywood movies by French critic Nino Frank in 1946, was unknown to most of the American filmmakers and actors while they were creating the classic film noirs. The canon of film noir was defined in retrospect by film historians and critics; many of those involved in the making of film noir later professed to be unaware at the time of having created a distinctive type of film.

Contents

Noir—What is it?

"We'd be oversimplifying things in calling film noir oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel...." This is the first of many attempts to define film noir made by the French critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton in their 1955 book Panorama du film noir américain 1941–1953 (A Panorama of American Film Noir), the original and seminal extended treatment of the subject. They take pains to point out that not each film noir embodies all five attributes in equal measure—this one is more dreamlike, while this other is particularly brutal. Yet, despite the authors' caveats (and repeated efforts at alternative definitions), in five decades it has hardly been bettered as a concise description of the noir mode as perceived by a plurality of critics. The preliminary warning is also well advised: attempts, no matter how lengthy, to define this field whose roots, outgrowths, and very nature are inveterately diverse tend to result not just in the sort of generalizing that comes with all acts of definition, but simplicity over and beyond.

Film noirs embrace a variety of genres, from the gangster film to the police procedural to the so-called social problem picture, and evidence a variety of visual approaches, from meat-and-potatoes Hollywood mainstream to outré. While many critics refer to film noir as a genre itself, others argue that it can be no such thing. Though noir is often associated with an urban setting, for example, many classic noirs take place largely in small towns, suburbia, rural areas, or on the open road, so setting can not be its genre determinant, as with the Western. Similarly, while the private eye and the femme fatale are character types conventionally identified with noir, the majority of film noirs feature neither, so there is no character basis for genre designation as with the gangster film. Nor does it rely on anything as evident as the monstrous or supernatural (viz., the horror film), the speculative (viz., the sci-fi film), or the song-and-dance routine (viz., the musical). A more analogous case is that of the screwball comedy, widely accepted by film historians as constituting a "genre"—the screwball is defined not by a fundamental attribute, but by a general disposition and a group of elements, some (but rarely and perhaps never all) of which are found in each of the genre's films. However, because of the diversity of noir (much greater than that of the screwball comedy), certain scholars in the field, such as film historian Thomas Schatz, treat it as not a genre but a "style." Alain Silver, the most widely published American critic specializing in film noir studies, refers to it as a "cycle" and a "phenomenon," even as he argues that it has—like certain genres—a consistent set of visual and thematic codes. Other critics treat film noir as a "mood," a "movement," or a "series," or simply address a chosen set of movies from the "period." There is no consensus on the matter.

The prehistory of noir

Film noir has sources not only in cinema but other artistic mediums as well. The low-key lighting schemes commonly linked with the classic mode are in the tradition of chiaroscuro and tenebrism, techniques using high contrasts of light and dark developed by 15th- and 16th-century painters associated with Mannerism and the Baroque. Film noir's aesthetics are deeply influenced by German Expressionism, a cinematic movement of the 1910s and 1920s closely related to contemporaneous developments in theater, photography, painting, scultpture, and architecture. Opportunities offered by the booming Hollywood film industry and, later, the threat of growing Nazi power led to the emigration of many important film artists working in Germany who had either been directly involved in the Expressionist movement or studied with its practitioners. Directors such as Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, and Michael Curtiz brought dramatic lighting techniques and a psychologically expressive approach to mise-en-scène with them to Hollywood, where they would make some of the most famous of classic noirs. Lang's 1931 masterwork, the German M, is among the first major crime films of the sound era to join a characteristically noirish visual style with a noir-type plot, one in which the protagonist is a criminal (as are his most successful pursuers). M was also the occasion for the first star performance by Peter Lorre, who would go on to act in several formative American noirs of the classic era.

By 1931, Curtiz had already been in Hollywood for half a decade, making as many as six films a year. Movies of his such as 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932) and Private Detective 62 (1933) are among the early Hollywood sound films arguably classifiable as noir. Giving Expressionist-affiliated moviemakers particularly free stylistic rein were Universal horror pictures such as Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932)—the former photographed and the latter directed by the Berlin-trained Karl Freund—and The Black Cat (1934), directed by Austrian émigré Edgar G. Ulmer; the Universal horror that comes closest to noir, both in story and sensibility, however, is The Invisible Man (1933), directed by Englishman James Whale and shot by American Carl Laemmle Jr. Directing in Hollywood at the same time was the Vienna-born but largely American-raised Josef von Sternberg, whose films such as Shanghai Express (1932) and The Devil Is a Woman (1935), with their hothouse eroticism and baroque visual style, specifically anticipate central elements of classic noir. The commercial and critical success of Sternberg's silent Underworld in 1927 was largely responsible for spurring a trend of Hollywood gangster films. Popular movies in the genre such as Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932) demonstrated that there was an audience for crime dramas with morally reprehensible protagonists.

An important, and possibly influential, cinematic antecedent to classic noir was 1930s French poetic realism, with its romantic, fatalistic attitude and celebration of doomed heroes; an acknowledged influence on certain trends in noir was 1940s Italian neorealism, with its emphasis on quasi-documentary authenticity. (The Warner Bros. drama I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang [1932] presciently combines these sensibilities.) A group of films from the middle of the classic noir period, including The Naked City (1948), directed by Jules Dassin, and Panic in the Streets (1950), directed by Elia Kazan, adopted the neorealist approach of on-location photography with nonprofessional extras. A few movies now considered noir strove to depict comparatively ordinary protagonists with unspectacular lives in a manner occasionally evocative of neorealism—the most famous example is The Lost Weekend (1945), directed by Billy Wilder, yet another Vienna-born, Berlin-trained American auteur. (In turn, one of the primary influences on neorealism was the 1930 German film Menschen am Sonntag, codirected and cowritten by Siodmak, cowritten by Wilder, and codirected and produced by Ulmer.) Among those movies not themselves considered film noirs, perhaps none had a greater effect on the development of the genre than America's own Citizen Kane (1941), the landmark motion picture directed by Orson Welles. Its Sternbergian visual intricacy and complex narrative structure driven by voiceover narration can be seen reflected in dozens of classic film noirs.

\"The Simple Art of Murder\"

The primary literary influence on film noir was the hardboiled school of American detective and crime fiction, led in its early years by such writers as 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 era, a story of Hammett's was the source for the gangster melodrama City Streets (1931), directed by Rouben Mamoulian and photographed by Lee Garmes, who worked regularly with Sternberg. Wedding a style and story both with many noir characteristics, released the month before Lang's M, City Streets has a claim to being the first major film noir.

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; the Cain approach has come to be identified with a subset of the hardboiled genre dubbed "noir fiction." For much of the 1940s, one of the most prolific and successful authors of this often downbeat brand of suspense tale was Cornell Woolrich (sometimes using the pseudonyms George Hopley or William Irish). No writer's published work provided the basis for more film noirs of the classic period than Woolrich's: thirteen in all, including Black Angel (1946), Deadline at Dawn (1946), and Fear in the Night (1947).

A crucial literary source for film noir, now often overlooked, was W. R. Burnett, whose first novel to be published was Little Caesar, in 1929. It would be turned into the hit for Warner Bros. in 1931; the following year, Burnett was hired to write dialogue for Scarface, while Beast of the City was adapted from one of his stories. Some critics regard these latter two movies as film noirs, despite their early date. Burnett's characteristic narrative approach fell somewhere between that of the quintessential hardboiled writers and their noir fiction compatriots—his protagonists were often heroic in their way, a way just happening to be that of the gangster. During the classic era, his work, either as author or screenwriter, was the basis for seven movies now widely regarded as film noirs, including three of the most famous: High Sierra (1941), This Gun for Hire (1942), and The Asphalt Jungle (1950).

The classic period

One of the quintessential film noirs, Out of the Past (1947) features many of the genre's hallmarks: a cynical private detective as the protagonist, a sexy femme fatale, multiple flashbacks with voiceover narration, dramatic chiaroscuro black-and-white photography, and a fatalistic mood leavened with provocative banter. The film stars Robert Mitchum, one of the foremost male icons of film noir.
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One of the quintessential film noirs, Out of the Past (1947) features many of the genre's hallmarks: a cynical private detective as the protagonist, a sexy femme fatale, multiple flashbacks with voiceover narration, dramatic chiaroscuro black-and-white photography, and a fatalistic mood leavened with provocative banter. The film stars Robert Mitchum, one of the foremost male icons of film noir.

The 1940s and 1950s are generally regarded as the "classic period" of American film noir. The movie most commonly cited as the first "true" film noir is Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). While City Streets and other pre-WWII crime melodramas such as Fury (1936) and You Only Live Once (1937), both directed by Fritz Lang, are considered full-fledged noir by some critics, most categorize them as "proto-noir" or in similar terms. Many claim that there is a significant distinction between the noirs of the classic period's two decades—other than the relative disappearance of the private eye as a lead character there is no consensus on how that distinction manifests, but it often comes down to a view that the noirs of the 1950s tend to be more "extreme" in one way or another. Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958) is often cited as the last film in the classic period. Some scholars believe film noir never really ended, but continued to transform even as the characteristic noir visual style began to seem dated and changing production conditions led Hollywood in different directions—in this view, later films in the noir tradition are seen as part of a continuity with classic noir. A majority of critics, however, regard comparable movies made outside the classic era to be something other than genuine film noirs. They regard true film noir as belonging to a temporally and geographically limited cycle or period, and consider subsequent films that try to evoke the classics as something different because the creators are conscious of a noir "style" in a way that the original makers of film noir perhaps were not.

Most of the film noirs of the classic period were low-budget features without major stars (B-movies either literally or in spirit), in which writers, directors, cinematographers, and other craftsmen, some of them blacklisted, found themselves relatively free from the typical big-picture constraints. While enforcement of the Production Code ensured that no movie character could literally get away with murder, at the B level of noir especially, one could come awful close. Thematically, film noirs as a group were most exceptional for the relative frequency with which they centered on women of questionable virtue—a focus very rare in Hollywood films after the mid-1930s and the end of the pre-Code era. The signal movie in this vein was Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder; setting the mold was Barbara Stanwyck's unforgettable femme fatale, Phyllis Dietrichson—an apparent nod to Marlene Dietrich, who had built her extraordinary career playing such characters for Sternberg. An A-level feature all the way, the movie's commercial success and seven Oscar nominations made it probably the most influential of the early noirs; in particular, it led to a spate of what later became known as "bad girl movies." Conventional A films, however dramatic, were ultimately expected to convey positive, reassuring messages; in terms of style, invisible camerawork and editing techniques, flattering soft lighting schemes, and deluxely trimmed sets were the rule. Film noir turned all this on its head, creating bleak, sophisticated dramas tinged with nihilism, mistrust, paranoia, and cynicism, in settings that were frequently either real-life urban or budget-saving minimalist, with often strikingly expressionist lighting and unsettling techniques such as wildly skewed camera angles and convoluted flashbacks. The noir style gradually influenced the mainstream—even beyond Hollywood.

Notable American film noirs of the classic period

(with directors and significant noir performers—supporting players in italics)

1940–1949

1950–1958

For an expanded list of films considered "noir," see List of film noir

Directors and the business of noir

While the inceptive Stranger on the Third Floor was an RKO B-picture, directed by a virtual unknown, the preceding list of films—based primarily on enduring fame—leans heavily toward A-list productions by name-brand directors such as Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Huston (who debuted as a director with The Maltese Falcon). Otto Preminger's success with Laura made his name (he honored the debt by making two other classic noirs with Dana Andrews, Fallen Angel [1945] and Where the Sidewalk Ends [1950]) and In a Lonely Place did something similar for Nicholas Ray's career (his other noirs include his debut, They Live By Night [1948], and On Dangerous Ground [1951]). Orson Welles had notorious problems with financing, but his three film noirs were reasonably well budgeted: The Lady from Shanghai received full A-level backing, while both The Stranger (his most conventional film) and Touch of Evil (an unmistakably personal work) were funded at levels lower but still commensurate with a headlining release; many of Fritz Lang's noirs (which include a pair of films with Edward G. Robinson, The Woman in the Window [1945] and the wickedly entertaining Scarlet Street [1945]) were produced with similar midrange budgets. Raoul Walsh never had much name recognition during his half-century as a working director, but his three classic noirs (The Enforcer [1951], starrring Humphrey Bogart, completes the set) are all no less than midrange in budget and major in quality. In addition to the aforementioned, other directors associated with top-of-the-bill Hollywood film noirs include Edward Dmytryk (Murder, My Sweet; Crossfire [1947]), Henry Hathaway (The Dark Corner [1946], Kiss of Death [1947]), and John Farrow (The Big Clock [1948], His Kind of Woman [1951]).

Again, however, the vast majority of Hollywood films now considered classic noir were B-movies—some produced by the major studios to run on the bottom of double bills, below their own A-list movies; some by the smaller, so-called Poverty Row studios, from the relatively well-off Monogram/Allied Artists (which occasionally splurged on particular films in an effort to emulate the majors' A productions) to shakier ventures such as Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC); and some by independent, often actor-owned, companies contracting with one of the larger outfits for distribution. Robert Wise (cited above, also Born to Kill [1947]) and Anthony Mann (T-Men [1947], Raw Deal [1948]) each made a series of impressive B-films, many of them noirs, before graduating to steady work on big-budget productions. Jacques Tourneur had made over thirty Hollywood Bs (most completely forgotten now) before directing the A-budget Out of the Past, considered by some critics the greatest of classic noirs. Directors like Samuel Fuller (cited above, also Underworld U.S.A. [1961]), Joseph H. Lewis (Gun Crazy [1949], The Big Combo [1955]), and Phil Karlson (Kansas City Confidential [1952], The Brothers Rico [1957]) carved out substantial ouevres largely at the B-movie level. In 1945, Edgar G. Ulmer made one of the all-time noir cult classics, Detour, at PRC. The B-movie also provided an opportunity for accomplished noir actress Ida Lupino to become the sole female director in Hollywood during the late 1940s and much of the 1950s—her best-known film is The Hitch-Hiker (1953), which she also produced through her company The Filmakers, and which was distributed by RKO. It is one of the seven classic film noirs produced outside of the major studios that have been chosen to date for the United States National Film Registry; the others are Detour, Gun Crazy, D.O.A., Kiss Me Deadly, Sweet Smell of Success (the preceding four distributed by United Artists, the "studio without a studio"), and Force of Evil (1948; dist. MGM), directed by Abraham Polonsky and starring John Garfield, both of whom would be blacklisted in the 1950s. Independent production usually meant restricted circumstances, but not always—Sweet Smell of Success, for instance, despite the original plans of the production team, was clearly not made on the cheap, though like many other cherished A-budget noirs it might be said to have a B-movie soul.

Perhaps no director better displayed that spirit than the German-born Robert Siodmak, who had already made a score of films before his 1940 arrival in Hollywood. Working mostly on A features, he made eight movies now regarded as classic film noirs (a figure matched only by Lang and Mann). In addition to The Killers, Burt Lancaster's first film, Siodmak's other important contributions to the genre include 1944's Phantom Lady (a top-of-the-line B and Woolrich adaptation), the ironically titled Christmas Holiday (1944), and Cry of the City (1948). Criss Cross (1949), with Lancaster again the lead, exemplifies how Siodmak brought the virtues of the B-movie to the A noir. In addition to the relatively looser constraints on character and message at lower budgets, the nature of B production lent itself to the noir style for directly economic reasons: dim lighting not only saved on electrical costs but helped cloak cheap sets (mist and smoke also served the cause); night shooting was often compelled by hurried production schedules; plots with obscure motivations and intriguingly elliptical transitions were sometimes the consequence of scripts written in haste, not every scene of which was there always time or money to shoot. In Criss Cross, Siodmak achieves all these effects with purpose, wrapping them around Yvonne De Carlo, playing the most understandable of femme fatales, Dan Duryea, in one of his deliciously charismatic villain roles, and Lancaster—already an established star—as an ordinary joe turned armed robber, a romantic obsessive on a one-way ride to ruin.

Film noir outside the United States

Some critics regard classic film noir as a cycle exclusive to the United States; e.g., Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward: "With the Western, film noir shares the distinction of being an indigenous American form...a wholly American film style." Others, however, regard noir as an international phenomenon. Even before the beginning of the generally acccepted classic period, there were movies made far from Hollywood that can be seen in retrospect as film noirs, for example, the French production Pépé le Moko (1937), directed by Jules Duvivier.

During the classic period, there were many films produced outside the United States, particularly in France, that share elements of style, theme, and sensibility with American film noirs and may themselves be included in the genre's canon. In certain cases, the interrelationship with Hollywood noir is obvious: American-born director Jules Dassin moved to France in the early 1950s as a result of the Hollywood blacklist, and made one of the most famous French film noirs, Rififi (1955). Other well-known French films often classified as noir include Quai des Orfèvres (1947) and Les Diaboliques (1955), both directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot; Casque d'or (1952) and Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), both directed by Jacques Becker; and Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958), directed by Louis Malle. French director Jean-Pierre Melville is widely recognized for his tragic, minimalist film noirs—Quand tu liras cette lettre (1953) and Bob le flambeur (1955), from the classic period, were followed by Le Doulos (1962), Le Samouraï (1967), and Le Cercle rouge (1970).

A number of thrillers produced in Great Britain durring the classic period are also frequently referred to as film noirs, including Brighton Rock (1947), directed by John Boulting; They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), directed by Alberto Cavalcanti; The Small Back Room (1949), directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; and Cast a Dark Shadow (1955), directed by Lewis Gilbert. Before leaving for France, Jules Dassin had been obliged by political pressure to shoot his last English-language film of the classic noir period in Great Britain: Night and the City (1950), though it was conceived in the United States and was not only directed by an American but also stars an American actor (Richard Widmark), is technically a UK production, financed by 20th Century-Fox's British subsidiary. The most famous of classic British noirs is director Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), like Brighton Rock based on a Graham Greene novel. Set in Vienna immediately after World War II, it stars Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles, both prominent American actors who starred in U.S. film noirs; despite being a completely British production, the movie is sometimes discussed as if it is a classic Hollywood noir.

Elsewhere, Italian director Luchino Visconti adapted Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice as Ossessione (1943), regarded both as one of the great noirs and a seminal film in the development of neorealism. (This was not even the first screen version of Cain's novel, having been preceded by the French Le Dernier tournant in 1939.) In Japan, the celebrated Akira Kurosawa directed several movies recognizable as film noirs, including Drunken Angel (1948), Stray Dog (1949), and High and Low (1963).

Among the first major neo-noir films—the term often applied to movies that consciously refer back to the classic noir tradition—was the French Tirez sur la pianiste (1960), directed by François Truffaut from a novel by one of the gloomiest of American noir fiction writers, David Goodis. Noir crime films and melodramas have been produced in many countries in the post-classic area, some of them quintessentially self-aware neo-noirs, others simply sharing a version of the hardboiled sensibility associated with classic noir. Notable examples include Il Conformista (1969; Italy), The Castle of Sand (1974; Japan), Der Amerikanische Freund (1977; Germany), The Element of Crime (1984; Denmark), As Tears Go By (1988; Hong Kong), Insomnia (1997; Norway), Croupier (1998; UK), and Blind Shaft (2003; China).

Neo-noir and echoes of the classic mode

The 1960s and 1970s

While it is hard to draw a line between some of the noir films of the early 1960s such as Blast of Silence (1961) and Cape Fear (1962) and the noirs of the late 1950s, new trends emerged in the post-classic era. The Manchurian Candidate (1962), directed by John Frankenheimer, Shock Corridor (1962), directed by Samuel Fuller, and Brainstorm (1965), directed by experienced noir character actor William Conrad, all treat the theme of mental dispossession within stylistic and tonal frameworks derived from classic film noir. In a different vein, filmmakers such as Arthur Penn (Mickey One [1964], clearly drawing inspiration from Truffaut's Tirez sur la pianiste and other French New Wave films), John Boorman (Point Blank [1967], similarly caught up, though in the Nouvelle vague's deeper waters), and Alan J. Pakula (Klute [1971]) directed movies that knowingly related themselves to the original film noirs, inviting audiences in on the game. Conscious acknowledgment of the classic era's conventions, as historical archetypes to be revived, rejected, or reimagined, is what puts the "neo" in neo-noir, according to many critics. Though several late classic noirs, Kiss Me Deadly in particular, were entirely self-knowing and post-traditional in conception, none that were top- or midbudgeted (like Aldrich's masterpiece) tipped its hand in a way noticeable to most audiences of the time. The first broadly popular crime drama of an unmistakabe neo-noir nature was not a movie, but the TV series Peter Gunn (1958–61), created by Blake Edwards. A manifest affiliation with noir traditions—which, by its nature, allows for different sorts of commentary on them to be inferred—can also provide the basis for explicit critiques of those traditions. The first major film to work this angle (that might be thought of as the most "neo" of "neo") was French director Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (Breathless; 1960), which pays its literal respects to Bogart and his crime films while brandishing a bold new style for a new day. In 1973, director Robert Altman, who had worked on Peter Gunn, flipped off noir piety with The Long Goodbye. Based on the novel by Raymond Chandler, it features one of Bogart's most famous characters, but in iconoclastic fashion: Philip Marlowe, the prototypical hardboiled detective, is replayed as a hapless misfit, almost laughably out of touch with contemporary mores and morality. Where Altman's subversion of the film noir mythos was so irreverent as to anger many contemporary critics, around the same time Woody Allen was paying affectionate, at points idolatrous homage to the classic mode with Play It Again, Sam (1972).

The most acclaimed of the neo-noirs of the era was director Roman Polanski's 1974 Chinatown. Written by Robert Towne, it is set in 1930s Los Angeles, an accustomed noir locale nudged back some few years in a way that makes the pivotal loss of innocence in the story even crueler. Where Polanski and Towne raised noir to a black apogee by turning rearward, director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader brought the noir attitude crashing into the present day with Taxi Driver (1976), a cackling, bloody-minded gloss on bicentennial America. In 1978, Walter Hill wrote and directed the The Driver, a chase movie as might have been imagined by Jean-Pierre Melville in an especially abstract mood. Hill was already a central figure in 1970s noir of a more straightforward manner, having written the script for director Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972), adapting a novel by pulp master Jim Thompson, as well as for two tough private eye films: an original screenplay for Hickey & Boggs (1972) and an adaptation of a novel by Ross Macdonald, the leading literary descendant of Hammett and Chandler, for The Drowning Pool (1975). Some of the strongest 1970s noirs, in fact, were unwinking remakes of the classics, "neo" mostly be default: Altman's heartbreaking Thieves Like Us (1973), based on the same source as Ray's They Live by Night, and the last worthy noir starring Mitchum, ' (1975), the Chandler tale made classically as Murder, My Sweet. Detective series, prevalent on American television during the period, updated the hardboiled tradition in different ways, but the show that came closest to capturing a classic noir tone was a horror crossover touched with shaggy, Long Goodbye–style humor: ' (1974–75), featuring a Chicago newspaper reporter investigating strange, usually supernatural occurrences.

The 1980s through the present

The turn of the decade brought Scorsese's black-and-white Raging Bull (cowritten by Schrader); an acknowledged masterpiece—often voted the greatest film of the 1980s in critics' polls—it is also a retreat, telling a story of boxing and corruption that recalls in both theme and visual ambience noir dramas such as Body and Soul (1947) and Champion (1949). From 1981, the popular Body Heat, written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, invokes a different set of classic noir elements, this time in a humid, erotically charged Florida setting; its success confirmed the commercial viability of neo-noir, at a time when the major Hollywood studios were becoming increasingly risk averse. In the years since, the big-budget auteur to work most frequently in a neo-noir mode has been Michael Mann, with the films Thief (1981), Heat (1995), and Collateral (2004), and the 1980s TV series Miami Vice and Crime Story. Mann's output exemplifies a primary strain of neo-noir, in which classic themes and tropes are revisited in a contemporary setting with an up-to-date visual style and rock- or hip hop–based musical soundtrack. Like Chinatown, its more complex predecessor, Curtis Hanson's Oscar-winning L.A. Confidential (1997), based on the James Ellroy novel, demonstrates an opposite tendency—the deliberately retro film noir; its tale of corrupt cops and femme fatales is seemingly lifted straight from a movie of 1953, the year in which it is set.

Working generally with much smaller budgets, brothers Joel and Ethan Coen have created one of the most substantial film ouevres influenced by classic noir, with movies such as Blood Simple (1984), Fargo (1996), considered by some a supreme work in the neo-noir mode, and The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), featuring a scene apparently staged to mirror the one from Out of the Past pictured above. The Coens cross noir with other generic lines in the gangster drama Miller's Crossing (1990)—loosely based on the Dashiell Hammett novels Red Harvest and The Glass Key—and the comedy The Big Lebowski (1998), a tribute to Chandler and an homage to Altman's version of The Long Goodbye. Perhaps no contemporary films better reflect the classic noir A-movie-with-a-B-movie-soul tradition than those of director-writer Quentin Tarantino; neo-noirs of his such as Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) display—similar to the work of the New Wave directors and the Coens—a relentlessly self-reflexive, sometimes tongue-in-cheek sensibility. Other movies from the era readily identifiable as neo-noir (some retro, some more au courant) include director John Dahl's Red Rock West (1992) and The Last Seduction (1993); three adaptations of novels by Jim Thompson—After Dark, My Sweet (1990), The Grifters (1990), and the remake of The Getaway (1994); and many more, including The Hot Spot (1990), Miami Blues (1990), and The Usual Suspects (1995). On television, the series Moonlighting (1985–89) paid homage to classic noir while demonstrating an unusual appreciation of the sense of humor often found in the original cycle. Between 1983 and 1989, Mickey Spillane's hardboiled private eye Mike Hammer was played with wry gusto by Stacy Keach in a series and several stand-alone TV movies (an unsuccessful revival followed in 1997–98). The British miniseries The Singing Detective (1986), written by Dennis Potter, tells the story of a mystery writer named Philip Marlow; widely considered one of the finest neo-noirs in any medium, some critics cite it as the greatest television production of all time.

Among the leading Hollywood directors of noir during the current decade has been the British-born Christopher Nolan, with the fantastically twisted Memento (2000), the remake of Insomnia (2002), and Batman Begins (2005), his dark-toned take on the superhero. Some of the more recent examples of neo-noir include the films The Cooler (2003) and The Ice Harvest (2005) and the video game series Max Payne. In 2005, Shane Black directed Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), basing his screenplay in part on a crime novel by Brett Halliday, who published his first stories back in the 1920s. The film plays with an awareness not only of classic noir but also of neo-noir conventions, making it perhaps a seminal neo²-noir. Director Sean Penn's The Pledge (2001), though adapted from a very self-reflexive novel by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, plays noir comparatively straight, to devastating effect. The most commercially successful of recent neo-noirs is Sin City (2005), directed by Robert Rodriguez in extravagantly stylized black and white with the odd bit of color. The film is based on a series of comic books created by Frank Miller (credited as the movie's codirector), which are in turn openly indebted to the works of Spillane and other pulp mystery authors. Similarly, graphic novels provide the basis for Road to Perdition (2002), directed by Sam Mendes, and A History of Violence (2005), directed by David Cronenberg; the latter, according to many critics, is the neo-noir of the decade. Some have identified in the TV series Veronica Mars (2004–curr.) and movie Brick (2005) an emerging trend referred to as "teen noir," in which adolescents assume adult roles on behalf of imperiled friends or paramours. Veronica Mars—titular character of a show that is both a youth-oriented and arguably feminist twist on film noir—is a mature, skeptical teenager who works as a P.I. for her father's business and solves felonies in her spare time.

Psycho-noir

The work of David Lynch—particularly Blue Velvet (1986), Lost Highway (1996), Mulholland Drive (2001), and the Twin Peaks cycle, both TV series (1990–91) and movie, Fire Walk With Me (1992)—shows the influence of film noir filtered through a uniquely individualistic vision. Featuring delusionary or sociopathic protagonists (or, in the case of Blue Velvet, a scene-devouring antagonist; in the Twin Peaks cycle, bizarro spasms at every turn), Lynch's most characteristic work has come to be grouped with others sharing similarly skewed centers of interest as "psycho-noir." Two of the earliest examples after Blue Velvet are literary adaptations directed by David Cronenberg, Naked Lunch (1991) and Crash (1996). Director David Fincher followed the noir science fiction of Alien³ (1992) and the immensely successful neo-noir Se7en (1995) with a film that earns much greater regard today than it did on original release, the psycho-noir Fight Club (1999). Nolan's Memento, as well as his debut feature, the British Following (1998), may both be classified as psycho-noir. During the new millennium, Park Chan-wook of South Korea has been the most prominent director to work regularly in a psycho-noir mode—a current of noir that can be traced back through Taxi Driver, through Brainstorm, through White Heat, all the way to Stranger on the Third Floor and further still, to Fritz Lang's original M.

Sci-fi noir

In the post-classic era, the most significant trend in noir crossovers has involved science fiction. The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972) centers on an implacable investigator and an amnesiac named Welles. Soylent Green (1973), the first major example, portrays a dystopian, near-future world via a self-evidently noir detection plot; starring Charlton Heston (the lead in Touch of Evil), it also features classic noir standbys Joseph Cotten, Edward G. Robinson, and Whit Bissell. The movie was directed by Richard Fleischer, who two decades before had directed several strong B noirs, including Armored Car Robbery (1950) and The Narrow Margin (1952). The cynical and stylish perspective of classic film noir had a formative effect on the cyberpunk genre of science fiction that emerged in the early 1980s; the movie most directly influential on cyberpunk was Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott, which pays clear and evocative homage to the classic noir mode (Scott would subsequently direct the poignant noir crime melodrama Someone to Watch Over Me [1987]). Later examples of cyberpunk or similarly "sci-fi noir" films include the aforementioned Alien³, Gattaca (1997), Dark City (1998), The Thirteenth Floor (1999), and Minority Report (2002). The animated Japanese film Ghost in the Shell (1995) and its sequel, (2004), may also be considered sci-fi noir.

Film noir parodies

Film noir has been parodied many times, in many manners. In 1945, Danny Kaye starred in what appears to be the first intentional film noir parody, Wonder Man. That same year, Deanna Durbin was the singing lead in the comedic noir Lady on a Train, which makes fun of Woolrich-brand wistful miserablism. Bob Hope inaugurated the private-eye noir parody with My Favorite Brunette (1947), playing a baby photographer who is mistaken for an ironfisted detective. The Big Steal (1949), directed by Don Siegel, and His Kind of Woman, both of which benefit from the services of a slyly self-aware Robert Mitchum, are clear examples of the classic film noir parodying itself. The "Girl Hunt" ballet in Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon (1953) is a ten-minute distillation of—and play on—noir in dance. Carl Reiner's "cut and paste" noir farce, the black-and-white Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982), is the best known of the obviously comedic latter-day parodies. The Lady from Sockholm (2005) is a noir spoof with an all sock puppet cast, exploiting the classic elements of the genre with punny humor.

Noir parodies come in darker tones as well. Murder by Contract (1958), directed by Irving Lerner, is an eighty-one-minute-long deadpan joke on noir, with a denouement as bleak as any of the movies it kids—an ultra-low-budget Columbia Pictures production, it may qualify as the first intentional example of what is now called a neo-noir film; it certainly seems to have been a source of inspiration for Melville's acclaimed Le Samouraï. Taxi Driver, one of the quintessential 1970s neo-noirs, caustically deconstructs the "dark" crime film, taking it to an absurd extreme and then offering a conclusion that manages to mock every possible anticipated ending—triumphant, tragic, artfully ambivalent—while being each, all at once. Flirting with splatter status even more brazenly, the Coens' Blood Simple is both an exacting pastiche and an outrageous exaggeration of classic noir. The Woman Chaser (1999), based on a novel by Charles Willeford, sends up not just the noir mode but the entire Hollywood filmmaking process, with seemingly each shot staged as the visual equivalent of a Marlowe wisecrack—funny, but it smarts.

In other mediums, TV series such as Sledge Hammer! (1986–88), cartoons such as Garfield's Babes and Bullets (1989), and comic strip characters such as Tracer Bullet of Calvin and Hobbes have parodied both film noir and the kindred hardboiled tradition—one of the sources from which film noir sprang and which it now overshadows.

Noir—So what is it?

The history of film noir criticism has seen fundamental questions become matters of controversy unusually intense for such a field. Where aesthetic debates tend to concentrate on the quality and meaning of specific artworks and the intentions and influences of their creators, in film noir, the debates are regularly much broader. Four large questions may be identified, two of them addressed at the beginning of this article:

A third question applies at a more specific level, but is sweeping: This article refers to movies from the classic period as "film noir" if there is a critical consensus supporting that designation. That consensus is almost never complete and is in many cases provisional: The Lost Weekend and The Night of the Hunter, for instance, were seldom considered as film noirs a quarter-century ago; today, a growing number of critics refer to Suspicion (1941), directed by Hitchcock, and Casablanca (1942), directed by Curtiz, as film noirs. Outside of the classic period, consensus is much rarer—movies are considered as noir herein if a substantial number of critics have discussed them as such. In order to decide which films are noir (and which are not), many critics refer to a set of elements they see as marking examples of the mode. This leads to a fourth major point of controversy in the field, one that overlaps with all those noted above: For instance, some critics insist that a film noir, to be authentic, must have a bleak conclusion (e.g., Criss Cross or D.O.A.), but many acknowledged classics of the genre have clearly happy endings (e.g., Stranger on the Third Floor, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and The Dark Corner), while the tone of many other noirs is ambivalent, in a variety of ways. The ambition of this section, then, can be no more than modest: it is an attempt to survey those characteristics most often cited by critics as representative of classic film noirs. As diverse as that set of movies is, the diversity of films from outside the classic period that have been discussed as noir is so great that any similar survey would be impractical; however, those classic noir identifying marks often referenced in neo-noirs—however frequently or seldom they actually appeared in the original films—are noted.

Characteristics of classic film noir

Visual style

Film noirs tended to use dramatic shadows, stark contrast, low-key lighting, and black-and-white film, typically resulting in a 10:1 ratio of dark to light, rather than the more typical 3:1 ratio. A number of film noirs were shot on location in cities, and night-for-night shooting was common. Shadows of Venetian blinds, dramatically cast upon an actor's face as he or she looks out a window, are an iconic visual in film noir, and have now become a cliché. While black-and-white cinematography is considered by many to be one of the essential attributes of classic noir, color films such as Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Niagara (1953), Slightly Scarlet, and Vertigo (1958) are regarded as noir by varying numbers of critics.

Film noir is also known for its use of Dutch angles, low-angle shots, and wide-angle lenses. Other devices of disorientation relatively common in film noir include shots of people in reflected in one or more mirrors, shots through curved or frosted glass or other distorting objects (such as during the strangulation scene in Strangers on a Train), and special effects sequences of a sometimes bizarre nature.

Structure and narrational devices

Film noirs tend to have unusually convoluted story lines, frequently involving flashbacks, flashforwards, and other techniques that interrupt and sometimes obscure the narrative sequence. Voiceover narration—most characteristically by the protagonist, less frequently by a secondary character or by an unseen, omniscient narrator—is sometimes used as a structuring device. Both flashbacks and voiceover narration are today often used in movies looking to quickly establish their neo-noir intentions. Relative to other Hollywood films, film noirs are seen as more likely to feature the protagonist in virtually every scene. Bold experiments in cinematic storytelling were sometimes attempted in noir: Lady in the Lake, for example, is shot entirely from the point of view of protagonist Philip Marlowe; the face of star (and director) Robert Montgomery is seen only in mirrors.

Plots, characters, and settings

Film noirs tend to revolve around heroes who are more flawed and morally questionable than the norm. Crime, usually murder, is an element of most film noirs, often sparked by jealousy, corruption, or greed. Most film noirs contain certain archetypal characters (such as hardboiled detectives, femmes fatales, corrupt policemen, jealous husbands, insurance investigators, or down-and-out writers), and follow archetypal storylines (often centering on activities such as heists, con games, and adulterous affairs). The protagonists of film noirs are often fall guys of one sort or another. False suspicions and accusations of crime are frequent plot elements, as are betrayals and double-crosses. As can be observed in many movies of an overtly neo-noir nature, the private eye and the femme fatale are the character types with which film noir has come to be most identified, but a minority of movies now regarded as classic noir feature either.

Film noir is often associated with an urban setting, and a few cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, in particular—are the location of many of the classic films. Bars, lounges, nightclubs, and gambling dens are often the scene of action.

Attitude, morality, and tone

Film noir is most often described as essentially pessimistic. The noir stories that are seen as most characteristic tell of people trapped in unwanted situations (which, in general, they did not cause but are responsible for exacerbating), striving against random, uncaring fate, and frequently doomed. They are seen as depicting a world that is inherently corrupt. Film noir has been associated by many critics with the political landscape of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s—in particular, with a sense of social anxiety and alienation that is said to have followed World War II and later with the Red Scare.

The morals of film noir tend to be ambiguous and relative, rather than focusing on simple "black and white" decisions. Characters may adhere to an absolute moral goal, but are more than willing to let the "ends justify the means." For example, in The Stranger, the investigator is so obsessed with tracking down a Nazi war criminal that he places other people in mortal danger to accomplish his goal.

The tone of film noir is generally regarded as downbeat; at the same time, definitive film noirs such as The Big Sleep and The Lady from Shanghai are famed for their hardboiled repartee, frequently filled with sexual innuendo and self-reflexive humor.

References and further reading

External links

 

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