We all know UK Reb is a film buff and has some pretty good recommendations all round
We also know he has a penchant for cowboy movies and especially John Wayne
He has done a great job on correcting those of us who were a little less than enthusiastic about the Duke.
He has also done a great job of pointing out some new classics such as "St George's Day" which is a great British East end cockney crime movie.
So can we now pick his brain for a run down on the best and most important Noir movies
Touch of Evil is supposed to be one of the greatest and I have certainly enjoyed it.
So Reb please could you give us the low down on this genre.
What to watch what to avoid what's available and is The Big Lebowski noir or not?
American film noir (black or bleak movies) were influenced by German Expressionist film and the German filmmakers who fled to America to escape Hitler's Nazism. Film directors such as F.W.Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak and Billy Wilder to name just a few. Their films were always steeped in expressionism, realism, fatalism and psychological melodrama and always filmed in stark deepening monochromatic shadows.
Following WWII and the rise in popularity in the US of "hard boiled" crime/detective stories that appeared in hundreds of pulp novels and mainstream magazines American directors began to adapt them into cheaply made noir thrillers usually playing as the second feature in a movie programme. Borrowing heavily from the German expressionism genre the ingredients of a noir film consisted of bad luck, bad decisions, a femme fatale, corruption and betrayal. The key motivators were always greed, fear, hatred and revenge which inevitably culminated in an explosive and violent conclusion.
A significant ancillary effect of the rise of noir is that Hollywood felt encouraged to continually push against the strict limits of the Production Code censorship. Many famed noir moments are vividly remembered for their (at the time) unprecedented brutality: the wheelchair bound woman who is pushed down a flight of stairs by a giggling Richard Widmark in
Kiss of Death; Gloria Grahame's face splashed with scalding coffee by a brutish Lee Marvin in
The Big Heat; the ghastly beating administered to Alan Ladd in
The Glass Key and the cold blooded killing of Burt Lancaster's character in
The Killers. Noir pulses with uncountable comparable moments. WWII had inured audiences to violence, and the Production Code had no choice but to allow the boundaries of what was permissible onscreen to be dramatically expanded. Truth being film noir is an affirmation of modernity, and a precursor of the content and tone of movies made today.
Naturally as with all movies, a lot of what determines one's definition of film noir is subjective but if you wanted to view what I consider classic American noir try these in no particular order and all available on DVD:
Double Indemnity (1944)
Out of the Past (1947)
The Asphalt Jungle (1947)
and my favourite
The Killers (1946)
Without boring the rest of the Froggers here's a link to a review of
The Killers I wrote for a film magazine awhile back.
http://www.stack.net.au/bobj-features.php?goto=368&exclusive=Bob-Js-Classic-Corner-THE-KILLERS-1946
