“Film Noir”, a label used primarily to describe post World War ll crime drama movies , were mostly in black & white. They’re famous for their evocative, often lurid, pulpy titles, (“Dead Reckoning”, “I Wake Up Screaming”, “Detour”) the snappy dialogue, the scrappy, tough guys in trench coats, (Bogart, Robinson, Ladd) and the dangerous, smart, tough women in wedgies (Joan Crawford, Gloria Graham, Barbara Stanwyck).
These broody “who dunnits” are experiencing a resurgence in popularity (along with the coats and the shoes) and are soooo entertaining. The men are menacing, the women are manipulative and both are inclined to make some bad choices.
Small, independent movie theaters around the country plan double bill weekends for these clever little gems. There are also DVD box sets featuring the films of major directors of the era – Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang and Samuel Fuller. The most famous of the group, Billy Wilder’s, “Double Indemnity” (’44) and Otto Preminger’s, “Laura” (’44) show up on PBS every few years.
According to a recent PBS piece, on “German Hollywood”, the dialogue and subject matter of “Noir” might come from American crime writers, like Dashiel Hammet and Raymond Chandler, but the shadowy mood lighting, the scenes shot at night on rain slicked streets were influenced by the German expressionist movement of the 20’s (Pabst, Murnau) and was also colored by the melancholy of those who just escaped Hitler’s net: Peter Lorre, Marlene Dietrich, Paul Henreid, Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt, Fritz Lang and Michael Curtiz (he directed “Casablanca”, 1942. Most of the extras were refugees – that impassioned “La Marseillaise” gets me everytime.)
There was a great piece in last year’s Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair magazine. It included back ground on these thrillers with lots of pictures and some snippets of great dialogue: “Out of The Past”, ‘47 – “Is there a way to win?”, the femme fatale asks and Robert Mitchum replies, “No, but there is a way to lose more slowly”.
(Love it! Goes great with popcorn.)
