FILM NOIR INFORMATION SHEET
Dark rooms with light slicing through Venetian blinds, alleys cluttered with garbage, abandoned warehouses where dust hangs in the air, rain-covered streets with water still running in the gutters, dark detective offices overlooking busy streets. This is the stuff of film noir, a perfect blend of form and content, where the desperation and hopelessness of the situations is reflected in the visual style. A style which drenches the world in shadows with only occasional bursts of sunlight. Film noir is occasionally acerbic, usually cynical, and often enthralling. It gave us characters trying to elude some mysterious past that continues to haunt them, hunting them down with a fatalism that taunts and teases before delivering the final, definitive blow. The society they live in is dark and paranoid.
Unlike other forms of cinema, film noir has no conventions that it can truly call its own. Unlike the western, with cattle drives, lonely towns on the prairie, homesteading farmers, Winchester rifles, and Colt 45s, the film noir borrows its paraphernalia from other forms, usually from the crime and detective genres, but often overlapping into thrillers, horror, and even science fiction. What separates the film noir as a genre is its mood, style, plot lines and characterisation.
Visual Style
As the name suggests, film noir is dark. The phrase film noir was coined by French film scholars years after the films were produced. The visual style is full of shafts of light that temporarily illuminate small chunks of an otherwise shadow filled world. Noir characters operate at night, on the fringes of society.
Narratives
Noir is the expression of the seedy underbelly of American society in which wives plot to kill their husbands, men are wrongfully accused and there are no heroes and happy endings. Often the hero is flawed and desperate, at the mercy of fate and the woman who crosses his path. He finds himself embroiled in a situation that drags him down against his will to his destruction. Noir borrowed plot and narrative from many fiction genres, but most notably the detective genre pioneered by Dashiel Hammet and Raymond Chandler. Noir was also an expression of a post war society which feared communists, foreigners, and, significantly, women made independent by their contribution to the war effort.
The Femme Fatale
The females are the instrument of destruction, spider women and femme fatales who seduce the men into a life that will be their undoing. The femme fatale would play a crucial role in film noir, whether in the guise of Jane Greer in Out of the Past, Rita Hayworth in Lady From Shanghai, Veronica Lake in The Blue Dahlia, Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street, Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy, Gloria Grahame in Human Desire, Lizbeth Scott in Dead Reckoning, Ava Gardner in The Killers, or Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. These women were black widows who slowly drew in the heroes with come-hither looks and breathless voices. Communicating a danger of sex, the femme fatale knew how to use men to get what she wanted, whether it was just a little murder between lovers (as in Double Indemnity) or a wild, on-the-run lifestyle (as in Gun Crazy). The femme fatale was always there to help pull the hero down. In the case of Mildred Pierce, we even get a femme fatale in the form of a daughter who threatens to destroy her mother's life.
The male characters are on to a lose-lose situation, hunted down by fate and usually destroyed.
The Cursed Hero
Heroes in the film noir world would forever struggle to survive. Some of the heroes learned to play by the rules of film noir and survived by exposing corruption, such as Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep and Dick Powell in Murder, My Sweet. But more often than not, they were the saps destroyed by love (Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity and Edward G Robinson in Scarlet Street), a past transgression (Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past), or overly ambitious goals (Richard Widmark in Night and the City and Sterling Hayden in The Killing).
The Influence of Noir on Hollywood and Beyond
Noir cinema has been much copied since the advent of colour and recent examples of the genre such as Body Heat (a re-make of Double Indemnity), LA Confidential, Chinatown, The Long Goodbye, Devil in a Blue Dress, The Getaway, Blade Runner, have all paid homage to the style of the film noir of the Forties. They deal with similar themes, characters and visual codes that have now become a staple part of our cinematic language. Noir has also been spoofed by Steve Martin in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, an d Woody Allen in Shadows and Fog, as well as countless others.
The Great Directors of the Noir Genre
Many of the great directors of the film noir came from Europe, like Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Jacques Tourneau, Otto Preminger, Edward Dmytryk, Jules Dassin, and Charles Vidor. These directors were able to see America with fresh eyes. Also, many had been involved in German Expressionist Cinema (Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Metropolis), which used dark themes and high contrast of light and shadow similar to techniques used in film noir. The directors worked closely with the classic pulp fiction writers of America to produce themes of despair, paranoia, fate and seediness in 1940s America.
A Select Filmography of Noir Cinema
The Maltese Falcon (John Houston, 1941) / Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) / Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945)
Murder My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1945)
Released in the UK as Farewell My Lovely / The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946)
Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) / Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)
The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946) / Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947)
Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneau, 1947)
Released in the UK as Build My Gallows High / Key Largo (John Houston, 1948)
Gun Crazy (Joseph H Lewis, 1949) / The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
The Asphalt Jungle (John Houston, 1950) / Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951)
Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955)
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Gloria GibsonRevised September 2014