One of my pet peeves are film critics who assign the origins of film noir to “McCarthyism and fear of the A-bomb.” You see this stuff all the time (people have even written whole books with this theme) and it is simply wrong. First, “Fifties paranoia and...
Wow, a post on James Bond and I get 4-5 times the usual number of hits. Maybe what the Internet needs is yet another James Bond blog. No, I think I’ll keep doing film noir. A couple of posts back I referenced that any mystery-thriller with...
This post wraps up Chinatown, a private Detective movie and a true noir. One of the reasons that Chinatown is a true noir is the ending. I initially, Chinatown was supposed to have a happy ending. As originally written by Robert Towne, Evelyn Mulwray would kill...
One of the great neo-noirs—heck, one of the great movies of any genre—is “Chinatown” (1974) directed by Roman Polanski from a script by Robert Towne. The protagonist of “Chinatown” is J.J. (Jake) Gittes (Jack Nicholson), a private detective. The film is set in Los Angeles in...
“Kiss Me Deadly” is Noir So, “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Big Sleep.” Aren’t noir there any private investigator films that are? After all, the world-weary gumshoe is supposed to be the mainstay of film noir. Robert Aldrich’s “Kiss Me Deadly” is most definitely noir. “Kiss Me...
Why The Big Sleep is Not Noir A few weeks ago I wrote a post about why “The Maltese Falcon” is not noir. Another detective film often confused for noir is “The Big Sleep.” The Big Sleep, starring Bogart and Bacall and directed by Howard...
The Maltese Falcon is not film noir. The term “film noir” gets bandied about today to a point where the term is almost meaningless. Nowadays, every crime thriller with a flawed hero is “film noir.” But that’s a post for another day. Today, why The...
Noir films were popular in the Fifties and then basically disappeared in the Sixties. What happened? TV. Many of the themes and motifs of film noir were appropriated by television. Noir strongly influenced popular Sixties TV shows such as “Naked City,” “Peter Gunn,” “The Fugitive,” “The Twilight Zone,”...
German Expressionism played the major role in the look of Hollywood’s noir films of the Forties and Fifties. The look of noir--rain-slicked streets, urban landscapes, and shadowy rooms and corridors--was straight out of the German Expressionist films of the Twenties. Also, straight out of those...
The theme of The Killers is that lying just beneath normal, orderly, respectable society is another world--chaotic, evil, and corrupt. Nick Adams is introduced to this nether world and realizes how easy it would be to be sucked down into it and never be able...