FILM NOIR

10 Shades of Noir
Film Noir: An Introduction


Dark rooms with light slicing through venetian blinds, alleys cluttered with garbage, abandoned warehouses where dust hangs in the air, rain-slickened streets with water still running in the gutters, dark detective offices overlooking busy streets: this is the stuff of film noir--that most magnificent of film forms--a perfect blend of form and content, where the desperation and hopelessness of the situations is reflected in the visual style, which drenches the world in shadows and only occasional bursts of sunlight. Film noir, occasionally acerbic, usually cynical, and often enthralling, gave us characters trying to elude some mysterious past that continues to haunt them, hunting them down with a fatalism that taunts and teases before delivering the final, definitive blow.


Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) gets squeezed in Kiss Me Deadly.
















  Unlike other forms of cinema, the film noir has no paraphernalia that it can truly call its own. Unlike the western, with cattle drives, lonely towns on the prairie, homesteading farmers, Winchester rifles, and Colt 45s, the film noir borrows its paraphernalia from other forms, usually from the crime and detective genres, but often overlapping into thrillers, horror, and even science fiction (as in the great "what's it" box from Kiss Me Deadly). The visual style echoes German expressionism, painting shafts of light that temporarily illuminate small chunks of an ominous and overbearing universe that limits a person's chances to slim and none. For as Paul Schrader said in his influential "Notes on Film Noir" essay, "No character can speak authoritatively from a space which is continually being cut into ribbons of light."

Out of the Past, for example, is one of the archetypal noirs, giving us a protagonist who has tried to escape his past (he betrayed a partner by running away with his girlfriend), but fate won't let him escape. He inhabits a world that constantly pulls people back into a morass of existence that is bound to suffocate them. Jeff (played by Robert Mitchum) is a seemingly good guy, but one bad turn has made his life a hell that he can never completely escape. Kirk Douglas plays the racketeer who needs to use Jeff and he does so by planting one of the great femmes fatales, Jane Greer, within Jeff's easy reach. And she consumes him.


Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past.

The femme fatale would play a crucial role in the film noir, whether in the guise of Jane Greer in Out of the Past, Rita Hayworth in Lady From Shanghai, Veronica Lake in The Blue Dahlia, Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street, Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy, Gloria Grahame in Human Desire, Lizbeth Scott in Dead Reckoning, Ava Gardner in The Killers, or Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. These women were black widows who slowly drew in the heroes with come-hither looks and breathless voices. Communicating a danger of sex that is worthy of the '90s AIDS epidemic, the femme fatale knew how to use men to get whatever she wanted, whether it was just a little murder between lovers (as in Double Indemnity) or a wild, on-the-run lifestyle (as in Gun Crazy). The femme fatale was always there to help pull the hero down. And in the case of Mildred Pierce, we even get a femme fatale in the form of a daughter who threatens to destroy her mother's life.

Heroes in the film noir world would forever struggle to survive. Some of the heroes learned to play by the rules of film noir and survived by exposing corruption, such as Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep and Dick Powell in Murder, My Sweet. But more often than not, they were the saps destroyed by love (Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity and Edward G. Robinson in Scarlet Street), a past transgression (Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past), or overly ambitious goals (Richard Widmark in Night and the City and Sterling Hayden in The Killing).


Sterling Hayden and his gang in The Killing.

Titles like Pitfall, Nightmare, Kiss of Death, and Edge of Doom describe what you'll find in film noir. And titles like Night and the City, Side Street, Hell's Island and The Asphalt Jungle convey the terrain. But maybe it's titles such as The Big Heat and The Big Sleep that most simply convey the film noir essence--an overpowering force that can't be avoided.

Film noir first appeared in the early '40s in movies such as Stranger on the Third Floor (often cited as the first full-fledged noir) and This Gun For Hire. While soldiers went to war, film noir exposed a darker side of life, balancing the optimism of Hollywood musicals and comedies by supplying seedy, two-bit criminals and doom-laden atmospheres. While Hollywood strove to help keep public morale high, film noir gave us a peek into the alleys and backrooms of a world filled with corruption. And film noir remained an important form in Hollywood until the late '50s. Films such as Touch of Evil (1958) closed out the cycle. By then, the crime and detective genres were playing out their dramas in bright lights, with movies such as The Lineup containing noir elements but not the iconography of darkened streets and chiaroscuro lighting. (Post-'50s noirs such as Farewell, My Lovely and Body Heat are nostalgia first and noirs second.)

In this issue's "In Focus," we give you a look at 10 different film noir classics. These are some of the essential noirs, movies that we strongly recommend, movies that all movie buffs should be familiar with. We invite you to test out the links below and witness the various shades of noir. In addition, Alain Silver reveals the truth about the ending of noir classic Kiss Me Deadly.


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Film Noir (literally 'black film or cinema') was coined by French film critics who noticed the trend of how dark and black the looks and themes were of many American crime and detective films released in France following the war. It is a style of American films that first evolved in the 1940s, became prominent in the post-war era, and lasted in a classic period until about 1960.

Film noir is a distinct branch, sub-genre or offshoot of the crime/gangster sagas from the 1930s (i.e., Little Caesar (1930), Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932)), but different in tone and characterization. The criminal, violence or greed elements in film noir are a metaphoric symptom of society's evils, with a strong undercurrent of moral conflict. Strictly speaking, however, film noir is not a genre, but rather the mood, style or tone of a film.

The themes of noir, derived from sources in Europe, were imported to Hollywood by emigre film-makers. (Noirs were rooted in German Expressionism of the 1920s and 1930s, such as in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) or Fritz Lang's M (1931), and in the French sound films of the 30s.) Classic film noir developed during and after World War II, taking advantage of the post-war ambience of anxiety, pessimism, and suspicion. So-called post-noirs (modern, tech-noirs or neo-noirs) appeared after the classic period with a revival of the themes of classic noir.

Primary Characteristics and Conventions of Film Noir:

The primary moods of classic film noir are melancholy, alienation, bleakness, disillusionment, disenchantment, pessimism, ambiguity, moral corruption, evil, guilt and paranoia. Heroes (or anti-heroes), corrupt characters and villains include down-and-out, hard-boiled detectives or private eyes, cops, gangsters, government agents, crooks, war veterans, petty criminals, and murderers. These protagonists are often morally-ambiguous low lifes from the dark and gloomy underworld of violent crime and corruption. Distinctively, they are cynical, tarnished, obsessive (sexual or otherwise), brooding, menacing, sinister, sardonic, disillusioned, frightened and insecure loners (usually men), struggling to survive and ultimately losing.

The females in film noir are either of two types - dutiful, reliable, trustworthy and loving women; or femme fatales - mysterious, duplicitous, double-crossing, gorgeous, unloving, predatory, tough-sweet, unreliable, irresponsible, manipulative and desperate women. Usually, the male protagonist in film noir has to inevitably choose (or have the fateful choice made for him) between the women - and invariably he picks the femme fatale who destructively goads him into committing murder or some other crime of passion.

Film noir films (mostly shot in gloomy grays, blacks and whites) show the dark and inhumane side of human nature with cynicism and doomed love, and they emphasize the brutal, unhealthy, seamy, shadowy, dark and sadistic sides of the human experience. An oppressive atmosphere of menace, pessimism, anxiety, suspicion that anything can go wrong, dingy realism, futility, fatalism, defeat and entrapment are stylized characteristics of film noir. The protagonists in film noir are normally driven by their past or by human weakness to repeat former mistakes.

Film noir is marked by expressionistic lighting, disorienting visual schemes and skewed camera angles, circling cigarette smoke, existential sensibilities, and unbalanced compositions. Settings are often interiors with low-key lighting, venetian-blinded windows, and dark and gloomy appearances. Exteriors are often urban night scenes with deep shadows, wet asphalt, rain-slicked or mean streets, flashing neon lights, and low key lighting. Story locations are often in murky and dark streets, dimly-lit apartments and hotel rooms of big cities. [Often-times, war-time scarcities were the reason for the reduced budgets and shadowy, stark sets of B-pictures and film noirs.]

Narratives are frequently complex and convoluted, typically told with flashbacks (or a series of flashbacks), and/or reflective voice-over narration. Amnesia suffered by the protagonist is a common plot device. Revelations regarding the hero are made to explain/justify the hero's own cynical perspective on life.

The earliest film noirs were detective thrillers, with plots and themes often taken from adaptations of literary works - preferably from best-selling, hard-boiled, pulp novels and crime fiction by Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain or Dashiell Hammett. Very often, a film noir story was developed around a male character [e.g., Robert Mitchum, Fred MacMurray, or Humphrey Bogart] who encountered a beautiful but promiscuous and seductive femme fatale [e.g., Mary Astor, Veronica Lake, Barbara Stanwyck, or Lana Turner] who used her feminine wiles and sexuality to manipulate him into becoming the fall guy - often following a murder. After a double-cross, she was frequently destroyed as well, often at the cost of the hero's life.

The First Film Noirs:

One of the first detective films to use the shadowy, nihilistic noir style in a definitive way was the privotal work of novice director John Huston in the mystery classic  The Maltese Falcon (1941) from a book by Dashiell Hammett. It was famous for Humphrey Bogart's cool, laconic private eye hero Sam Spade in pursuit of crooks greedy for a jewel-encrusted statue, and Mary Astor as the femme fatale. The acting duo of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake was first teamed in This Gun For Hire (1942) with Alan Ladd in a star-making role as a ruthless, cat-loving killer named Raven. Another Hammett book of corruption was adapted for Stuart Heisler's The Glass Key (1942) for Paramount Studios - again with Ladd and Lake. The noir couple were brought together again in George Marshall's crime thriller The Blue Dahlia (1946), with an Oscar-nominated screenplay by Raymond Chandler (the only work he ever wrote directly for the screen).

Orson Welles' films have significant noir features, such as in his expressionistic  Citizen Kane (1941), the complex The Lady from Shanghai (1948) - with a love triangle between Welles, a manipulative Rita Hayworth - the blonde-haired femme fatale, and her husband, and the border-town B-movie classic  Touch of Evil (1958).

Early classic non-detective film noirs include Fritz Lang's steamy and fatalistic Scarlet Street (1945) - 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 - and murder, director Abraham Polonsky's expressionistic, politically-subversive Force of Evil (1948) with John Garfield as a corrupt mob attorney, British director Carol Reed's tense tale of treachery  The Third Man (1949) with a climactic shootout in a noirish underground sewer, and the nightmarishly-dark and definitive D.O.A. (1949) from cinematographer/director Rudolph Mate - with the flashback story of a lethally-poisoned and doomed protagonist (Edmond O'Brien) who announces in the opening: "I want to report a murder - mine."

Noirs with Chandler's Philip Marlowe:

Raymond Chandler's gumshoe Philip Marlowe was often portrayed by different actors:

Dick Powell in Edward Dmytryk's twisting story of intrigue Murder, My Sweet (1944) (aka Farewell, My Lovely, the book's title) as a down-and-out PI searching for an ex-con's missing lover
Humphrey Bogart in the confusing, classic Howard Hawks who-dun-it  The Big Sleep (1946) involving blackmail, pornography, and murder
director/star Robert Montgomery in Lady in the Lake (1946) - experimentally filmed from the protagonist's first-person point of view
Elliott Gould in Robert Altman's spoof The Long Goodbye (1973) (based upon Chandler's 1953 novel) set in modern-day Los Angeles, in which the lone, unconventional sleuth investigates the murder of a friend's wife
Robert Mitchum in director Dick Richards' Farewell, My Lovely (1975) - a remake of Murder, My Sweet (1944) and The Falcon Takes Over (1942), with Charlotte Rampling as the seductive Helen Grayle/Velma
Robert Mitchum again as Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1978) - a remake of Howard Hawks' 1946 film, with Candy Clark and Sarah Miles as the two Sternwood daughters, and Oliver Reed as corrupt gangster Eddie Mars
Romance Film Noirs with Great Femme Fatales:

Twisted, shocking melodramatic film noirs featuring deadly femme fatales on a path of romance and self-destruction (romance noirs) with the men in their lives include the following:

Fritz Lang's second American film You Only Live Once (1937) with a framed-for-murder, doomed ex-convict Henry Fonda in flight to the border with loser wife Sylvia Sidney and child
William Wyler's The Letter (1940) with Bette Davis as a murdering wife whose professed innocence is compromised by a damning letter
Billy Wilder's (and Raymond Chandler's) adaptation of James M. Cain's novel  Double Indemnity (1944) with a persuasive Barbara Stanwyck who convinces insurance agent/lover Fred MacMurray to murder her husband so they can share 'double indemnity' insurance proceeds
Fritz Lang's tense The Woman in the Window (1944) in which a law-abiding college professor (Edward G. Robinson) is embroiled in a crime when he unintentionally commits a murder and suddenly finds himself on the run from blackmail with a beautiful, strange model (Joan Bennett)
Michael Curtiz' melodramatic, mother-daughter noir classic Mildred Pierce (1945) with Joan Crawford as a suspected murderess who covers up for her beloved but venomous daughter (Ann Blyth)
the psychological, melodramatic noir Leave Her to Heaven (1945) with a menacing, father-fixated, unstable femme fatale (Gene Tierney) who will stop at nothing (drowning murder of her stepson, and a deliberate miscarriage to kill her unborn child when she deliberately falls down stairs) to hold onto the man she loves
Edgar G. Ulmer's gritty, cheaply-made cultish crime film Detour (1945) about a cynical and fatalistic, identity-stealing hitchhiker (Tom Neal) who accidentally kills the film's blackmailing femme fatale con (Ann Savage)
Tay Garnett's stylish and moody The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), from James M. Cain's novel, with Lana Turner as the libidinous, restless platinum blonde wife stuck in a roadside diner who convinces her illicit lover John Garfield to murder her husband
in Lewis Milestone's The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), Barbara Stanwyck's murderous past may be revealed by her alcoholic, unrespected husband Kirk Douglas
Rita Hayworth's gave a sultry performance as the black glove-stripping Gilda (1946) in Charles Vidor's classic - portraying the sexy wife of a casino owner (George Macready) who becomes involved with her husband's abusive croupier (Glenn Ford)
Robert Siodmak's adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's tale of a twisting double-cross, The Killers (1946), with Burt Lancaster (as the doomed "Swede") and the stunning Ava Gardner as the manipulative vixen Kitty Collins
in director John Cromwell's Dead Reckoning (1947), an on-the-run WWII veteran's alluring Southern girlfriend (Lizabeth Scott) threatens military buddy Humphrey Bogart
director Jacques Tourneur's quintessential film noir  Out of the Past (1947) featured Robert Mitchum playing the doomed, double-crossed private eye who falls for the icy femme fatale (Jane Greer) he is trailing for gangster Kirk Douglas [remade as Against All Odds (1984)]
Nicholas Ray's doomed lover film They Live By Night (1949) with Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell as fugitive, misfit criminals on the run [remade as Thieves Like Us (1974)]
Joseph H. Lewis' tabloid romantic/crime B movie melodrama Gun Crazy (1949) - another amour fou 'Bonnie and Clyde' tale with two disturbed and doomed, gun-loving, sharpshooting lovers (John Dall and Peggy Cummins)
Otto Preminger's Angel Face (1953) with Jean Simmons as a psychotic 'angel of death' who talks chauffeur Robert Mitchum into a murder scheme


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Tech-Noirs:

Tech-noirs are modern day noirs set in futuristic settings. Ridley Scott's sci-fi thriller  Blade Runner (1982) set its film noirish story in a decaying, tech-noir LA society of the future, with Harrison Ford as a 'blade-running' detective intent on killing androids. Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (1995), a Millenium-New Year's Eve story, featured a hustler (Ralph Fiennes) who sold sexy and violent digital content fed directly into the brain. And Alex Proyas' sci-fi, labyrinthine tech-noir Dark City (1998) was also set in a futuristic, post-modern, and dark urban locale.

GAIA

Cool...GUUD work BJ....sesikit bertambah jugakler maklumat tentang NOIR kat kepala minda aku nih....

scenes from
The Maltese falcon (1941)
Double Indemnity (1944)
The Killers (1946)

GAIA

agak2...Jeffrey Zain dan Nora Zain leh dianggap sebagai noir ker ?

Originally posted by GAIA at 28-10-2003 04:48 PM:
agak2...Jeffrey Zain dan Nora Zain leh dianggap sebagai noir ker ?

jeffrey zain dan nora zain lebih kapada ala james Bond

bukan film noir

fly_in_d_sky

trasa cam bj nih peminat filem ...
Fly pun tak cam nih ...
kalau filem lama2 tuh .. jarang tgk ... kecuali berunsur musikal n dancing ...
tu ok ler ...

saya minat all kind of films
all genres

The Glass Key (1942) Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd make the screen crackle in Dashiell Hammett's tale of intrigue. See it Wednesday,

Key Largo (1948) Bogie, Bacall, and Lionel Barrymore have to deal with Edward G. Robinson and his toughs (including Thomas Gomez!) in this John Huston classic.

fly_in_d_sky

hmm .. rupanyer minat semua jenis filem ...
scene gambar yg bj paste tu agak menarik ..
maner dpt??

leh terangkan jln cite kedua-dua scene yg bj paste tuh?

Lionel Barrymore .. ada kene mengena ngan Drew Barrymore??

Originally posted by fly_in_d_sky at 29-10-2003 08:18 PM:
hmm .. rupanyer minat semua jenis filem ...
scene gambar yg bj paste tu agak menarik ..
maner dpt??

leh terangkan jln cite kedua-dua scene yg bj paste tuh?

Lionel Barrymore .. ada kene meng ...

drew barrymore adalah Grandniece kpd Lionel

Originally posted by fly_in_d_sky at 29-10-2003 08:18 PM:
hmm .. rupanyer minat semua jenis filem ...
scene gambar yg bj paste tu agak menarik ..
maner dpt??

leh terangkan jln cite kedua-dua scene yg bj paste tuh?

Lionel Barrymore .. ada kene meng ...

www.martinsfimnoir.com

Originally posted by fly_in_d_sky at 29-10-2003 08:18 PM:
hmm .. rupanyer minat semua jenis filem ...
scene gambar yg bj paste tu agak menarik ..
maner dpt??

leh terangkan jln cite kedua-dua scene yg bj paste tuh?

Lionel Barrymore .. ada kene meng ...

Key Largo
This film stars Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Lionel Barrymore and Claire Trevor as a group of people who are taken hostage by a pack of criminals at a hotel in the Florida Keys as a hurricane ravages on. But the hurricane is nothing compared to the human drama unfolding inside the hotel. Edward G. Robinson stars as the leader of the criminal group. Be sure to see this film. If you like that Bogie/Bacall magic, see "To Have and Have Not". Edward G. Robinson fans are encouraged to see him in "Double Indemn

Originally posted by fly_in_d_sky at 29-10-2003 08:18 PM:
hmm .. rupanyer minat semua jenis filem ...
scene gambar yg bj paste tu agak menarik ..
maner dpt??

leh terangkan jln cite kedua-dua scene yg bj paste tuh?

Lionel Barrymore .. ada kene meng ...

The glass key
A classic murder mystery, based on the the Dashiell Hammet novel and said to be the inspiration for Kurosawa's Yojimbo. When a corrupt politician is accused of murder, his assistant hunts the real killer, avoiding amorous advances from his boss' fiancee and attacks from gangsters along the way. Ladd and Lake make this a better version than the 1935 film of the same name

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