![]() ![]() ![]() But these same writers managed to embed profound moral ideas in their screenplays. Many great Hollywood writers were blacklisted and could only find work by writing apparently shallow cop dramas or crime thrillers. Studios originally shied away from noir, then reluctantly embraced it one they realized that there was a market for it. Noir films also had the advantage of being relatively cheap to produce. The postwar years, and the Cold War that immediately followed, were characterized by feelings of paranoia, dread, and insecurity. ![]() With the world in chaos, the only safe refuge seemed to be a detached, cynical view of things, as a sort of protective shield. Nobody really knew how to cope with the vastly changed landscape that war and social turbulence had created. The war changed everything, turning conventional morality on its head. The genre can be traced to the feelings of disillusionment and dislocation that upset American society after the Second World War. There are a great number of them, but some of the best examples are The Spanish Prisoner, The Usual Suspects, Cutter’s Way, Sexy Beast, Road To Perdition, The Pledge, Oldboy, Only God Forgives, La Femme Nikita, Memento…the list goes on and on. After the 1950s petered out, the art form was put into hibernation in the 1960s and 1970s, only to reappear in the cynical 1990s in the form of “neo-noir.” Neo-noir is still going strong today. The Maltese Falcon, film scholars tell us, is generally considered to be the first film of the genre. The “classical period” of film noir straddles the years from 1941 to about 1960. There are hundreds of noir films, and these are just a taste. If you’re interested in the genre, you need to check out a few of these classics. To see what I mean, see any of the following films: Chinatown, After Dark My Sweet, The Long Goodbye, The Maltese Falcon, The Conversation, Croupier, Memento, The Third Man, Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, Le Samourai, Out of the Past, Vertigo. The impossibility of escaping one’s character or fateĪ universe of moral ambiguity, where good often loses to evilīad results usually come from good intentions Self-destructive actions are a compulsive necessityįeminine betrayal in one form or another is more or less inevitable What is its message? What impression lingers on the viewer’s brain? All noir films deal with at least a few of the following themes:Įxistential crises torment the main character What matters is the overall “spirit” of the film. It needs a certain darkness, a certain heaviness. A proper noir film has to have a certain thematic spirit to it. While these types of movies can incorporate noir themes in them, they are not really noir films per se. It is often confused with the action genre, the thriller genre, and the crime drama. But when you see it, you recognize it for what it is. Film noir is a cinematic genre that was created in America, and has been copied elsewhere extensively around the world.īut what is film noir? It’s difficult to define precisely. It’s often said that jazz is the only truly unique American art form. It was a hard-bitten, cynical genre, dealing with themes that movies had not dealt with before. In the 1940s and 1950s, a new genre of film began to filter out of Hollywood. Robert Mitchum and Jane Grier in Out of the Past ![]()
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