Film noir as a style combined elements of the hardboiled fiction of the day with German Expressionistic techniques imported by those directors. Those that have earned high marks are listed below. In classical noir, the majority of hardboiled heroes are white males and the majority of women are portrayed as damaged or duplicitous.
Woods the Charlotte Justice series. All are worth seeking out. James M. Double Indemnity is generally considered the gold standard of film noir, helping to establish the template for future entries in the category.
At the time of release, the film was a box office hit and was nominated for seven Oscars including Best Picture, Director, Actress and Screenplay. Filming locations: Filmed entirely on the Warner Bros. Studios backlot. Hughes novel of the same name. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me. Shot through with a heavy dose of Cold War paranoia, the nihilistic classic also serves as a fascinating time capsule of s LA, with locations ranging from Malibu to Bunker Hill.
Cynicism and pessimism from the Great Depression were ingrained in the American psyche. Then came WWII, which sent many men to the frontlines while many women took up the jobs in their absence. After the war, there was a period uncertainty. Men returned from the battlefield with trauma, and the world lost quite a bit of innocence. Upon their return, the theory goes, men found women had shifted their role substantially.
Housewives had become workers themselves so there was a perceived disruption to the gender roles that had been in place for decades. In response to this insecurity, film noir gives us tales of men being taken advantage of by powerful and sometimes sinister women.
The truth is that many of the iconic film noir movies that Hollywood produced in the '40s were based on novels written in the '30s. So, it can be argued that WWII had nothing to do with the source material but that it might explain the popularity of the films made later. What characterizes cynicism in cinema? Is it dialogue dripping with sarcasm and mordancy? Or is it simply the high contrast lighting in each scene. Notice the bleak feel of all three of these classic film noirs.
Starring Humphrey Bogart, this mystery noir made a lasting impact with its spectacular cinematography and menacing use of shadows. Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, and Vincent Price star in this noir classic that boasts incredible acting and a staple of the genre. An Academy Award nominee for best original screenplay , this murder mystery noir features the popular pairing of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.
It is one of many noirs echoing the disillusionment of wartime. According to many critics, film noir ended with the release of one of Orson Welles' best movies , Touch of Evil. It seems like almost anything David Lynch does echoes noir.
Mulholland Drive's look and feel was surely influenced by film noir. Noir has a touch of a madness in each scene. The stark lighting and heavy use of flashbacks all capture the headiness of the era, and the frequent murderous plots only heighten the pessimism.
The acting duo of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake was first teamed in the superb early noir thriller This Gun For Hire with the tagline: "He's dynamite with a gun or a girl".
From the novel A Gun For Sale by renowned British novelist Graham Greene, the moody noir featured Ladd in a star-making role his first lead role as a ruthless, cat-loving, vengeful, unsmiling San Francisco professional hit-man named Raven working for a peppermint-candy loving fat man Willard Gates Laird Cregar and his wheelchair-bound Nitro Chemicals executive Alvin Brewster Tully Marshall - both double-crossers who were selling secrets to foreign agents the Japanese. Ladd was paired with popular wartime pinup star Lake as nightclub showgirl singer Ellen Graham, his hostage and unbeknownst to him working as a federal agent.
Another Dashiell Hammett book of political corruption and murder was adapted for Stuart Heisler's The Glass Key for Paramount Studios - again with the duo of Ladd and Lake, and noted as one of the best Hammett adaptations. Ladd starred as Ed Beaumont, a right-hand man and political aide attempting to save his employer Brian Donlevy from a murder frame-up, while Lake played the seductive fiancee of the boss. The film was noted for the vicious beating given to Ladd by a crime lord thug William Bendix.
The popular noir couple were brought together again in George Marshall's post-war crime thriller The Blue Dahlia , with an Oscar-nominated screenplay by Raymond Chandler the only work he ever wrote directly for the screen.
Alan Ladd portrayed returning war veteran Johnny Morrison who discovered that his wife Helen Doris Dowling was unfaithful during his absence.
When she turned up dead and he became the prime suspect, he was aided in the case by the mysterious Joyce Harwood Lake - the seductive ex-wife of his wife's former lover. Orson Welles' films have significant noir features, such as in his expressionistically-filmed Citizen Kane , with subjective camera angles, dark shadowing and deep focus, and low-angled shots from talented cinematographer Gregg Toland.
Welles' third film for RKO, the war-time mystery Journey Into Fear , was one in which he acted and co-directed uncredited - it was set in the exotic locale of Istanbul. The film's story was inspired by Eric Ambler's spy thriller about the flight of an American arms engineer Joseph Cotten on a Black Sea tramp steamer where he was threatened by Nazi agents intent on killing him. Its final sequence in a San Francisco "hall of mirrors" fun-house was symbolic and reflective of the shattered relationships between the characters, exemplified by a wounded O'Hara's last words: "Maybe I'll live so long that I'll forget her.
Maybe I'll die trying. Welles' Mexican border-town B-movie classic Touch of Evil is generally considered the last film in the classic cycle of film noirs. The film also featured a comeback appearance by cigar-smoking bordello madam Marlene Dietrich, and a breathtaking opening credits sequence filmed in a single-take. Later, Welles' expressionistic noir and psychological drama The Trial was an adaptation of Franz Kafka's classic novel, with Anthony Perkins as Joseph K - a man condemned for an unnamed crime in an unknown country.
Early classic non-detective film noirs included Fritz Lang's steamy and fatalistic Scarlet Street - one of the moodiest, blackest thrillers ever made, about a mild-mannered painter's Edward G. Robinson unpunished and unsuspected murder of an amoral femme fatale Joan Bennett after she had led him to commit embezzlement, impersonated him in order to sell his paintings, and had been deceitful and cruel to him - causing him in a fit of anger to murder her with an ice-pick.
Director Abraham Polonsky's expressionistic, politically-subversive Force of Evil starred John Garfield as a corrupt mob attorney. British director Carol Reed's tense tale of treachery set in post-war Vienna, The Third Man , with the memorable character of black market racketeer Harry Lime Orson Welles , ended with a climactic shootout in the city's noirish underground sewer.
And the nightmarishly-dark, rapid-paced and definitive D. All rights reserved. Filmsite: written by Tim Dirks. Search for:. Facebook Twitter Email.
Primary Characteristics and Conventions of Film Noir: Themes and Styles The primary moods of classic film noir were melancholy, alienation, bleakness, disillusionment, disenchantment, pessimism, ambiguity, moral corruption, evil, guilt, desperation and paranoia.
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