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ilm noir is uniquely American. But far too little light has been shed on film noir's dark, ironic little secret: the distinct European connections attached to this “uniquely American” film movement.
Discovered and named by two French film critics in 1946, film noir (lit., “black film”) refers to the dark look and mood of an American film style largely influenced or created by German and Austrian directors. In the process of unconciously fashioning what we now call film noir, Hollywood borrowed heavily from the expressionist film techniques and lighting used by German directors in the 1920s. F.W. Murnau, G.W. Pabst, and Robert Wiene all created films during the silent era in Germany using cinematic elements that would later characterize film noir in Hollywood. Many others, such as the Austrian cameraman Karl Freund, came directly out of the German Weimar cinema to Hollywood. German and Austrian film stars, including Peter Lorre, Marlene Dietrich, Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt, and others, have literally played vital roles in film noir. In the 1940s Austrian filmmakers such as Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity 1944), Otto Preminger (Laura 1944), Fritz Lang (The Big Heat 1953), and Hungarian Michael Curtiz (Casablanca 1942), as well as American directors John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, 1941) and Howard Hawks (The Big Sleep, 1946), among others, painted their urban underworld landscapes and characters with a black-and-white palette accented with a bare-lightbulb contrast between light and shadow. In film noir, events often occur in the dark of night, and the characters also tend to have their dark side. Despite many variations, most film noir heroes/villains are paranoid loners headed for some dark destiny, but who nevertheless manage to exchange a few snappy lines of dialog with the inevitable femme fatale along the way. — The sassy, strong-willed, independent woman is often cited as another characteristic of film noir. Wimpy women are out.
The classic period for film noir runs from 1940 to 1959. Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958), with Marlene Dietrich is one the last of the true noir films from the “Golden Age” of noir. Some later films, usually classified as “neo-noir,” can be considered to be in the film noir tradition. (But they are in color—an obvious violation of classic noir criteria.) Films in the neo-noir category include Peter Yates' Bullitt (1968), Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971), and Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974). Even more recent films, such as Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat (1981) or Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) have been termed film noir, future noir, or neo-noir — either because of their gloomy look and feel, or because the stories/characters display certain film noir traits.
“Read my future.” - “You haven't got any.”
- Exchange between Orson Welles and Marlene Dietrich (as a gypsy
fortune teller) in TOUCH OF EVIL (1958)
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KEY INGREDIENTS
IN FILM NOIR
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To qualify as "true" noir, a film must contain most or all of the following:
• Dark, shadowy, contrasty images filmed in black and white (a la German Expressionism)—often at night and usually in a gritty urban setting
• Required: Hard-boiled, cynical, disillusioned characters—who are nevertheless usually likable
• A male protagonist facing a moral dilemma and/or some kind of threat
• An alluring, sassy, independent and usually dangerous woman (who often suffers for independence)
• Often: A crime or detective story (Cain, Chandler, Hammett)
• Flashbacks—a wavering past and present, inextricably linked
• A voice-over narration (probably why I dislike the narrator-less director's cut of "Blade Runner")
• Crisp, often witty dialog, sprinkled with great one-liners
• Often: A German, Austrian or Austro-Hungarian director of the German school (Curtiz, Lang, Maté, Preminger, Siodmak, Ulmer, Wilder, et al)
• A healthy dose of paranoia or, at the very least, a strong sense of insecurity, betrayal, or being trapped
• Angst, American style
• Required for “pure“ film noir: NO happy ending. A happy ending turns a film noir into a film gris or a melodrama done in noir style.
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And just what are the traits of film noir? Film historians and critics have trouble agreeing on precisely what film noir is. Is it a genre, a movement, or a style? Some say all three. Others claim it is definitely not a genre. Purists claim that “true” film noir can't be in color, which would exclude almost all of the neo-noir films from the 1960s to the present. Extreme definitions limit the film noir canon to fewer than ten films, while other listings include hundreds. (See a noir list later in this article.) Observers tend to define film noir in three different ways: (1) a genre similar to westerns, comedies, or horror; (2) a film movement tied to an historical period, generally 1940-1959 (some end the period in the mid-1950s); or (3) a cinematic visual style with a unique look.
As Jeanine Basinger remarked in her book, American Cinema: One Hundred Years of Filmmaking, the film noir movement came about naturally and was not molded by the film industry itself. Ironically, although noir was most definitely a product of the Hollywood studio system, no one in Hollywood intentionally set out to create what we now call film noir. “As far as Hollywood was concerned, film noir did not exist.” (Basinger) The term “film noir” was not even invented until many of the noir classics had already been produced. It was only with the perspective of time that anyone, including its creators, recognized that something called film noir had been born.
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What factors, then, came together to create film noir? Film historians name several sources. Some see the cynical, fatalistic elements of film noir arising out of the dismal turmoil of World War II and the no-nonsense era it produced. The French coiners of the term “film noir” proclaimed 1941's The Maltese Falcon as the seminal film noir work, but the origins of film noir go back to the twenties (German Expressionism) and thirties (French cinema, Italian Neo-Realism, and American detective novels). The gritty, hard-boiled American crime novels of the 1930s by James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, et al (“roman noir” or black/dark novel) often served as the basis for noir's narrative screenplays in the 1940s. (Chandler even worked with writer/director Billy Wilder on the script for Double Indemnity, based on Chandler's novel, Farewell, My Lovely. - See the Double Indemnity book.) Somehow, the combination of the historical period, American and European filmmakers and performers working in the Hollywood studio system, German film tradition, the relaxation of Production Code censorship, as well as an American literary genre all came together to produce a uniquely American cinematic art form.
Next, film noir and neo-noir...
2 > Film noir 2
Copyright © 1997-2005 Hyde Flippo
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