A Stroll Among Shadows: A fan’s thumb nail guide to film noir

The last thing that I want to write for this blog post is a paraphrase of the Wiki page about film noir, so for our purposes here, I’m going to talk about my experience with film noir and give an overview of what it is, some of the history, stars, directors, archetypes, and mostly talk about my favorites in the genre.

So just what is film noir anyway? The word noir gets thrown around a lot in modern movie geek-speak, but doesn’t seem to have a hard and fast definition. How does one separate a film noir from a run of the mill crime film? I’ve heard movies referred to as modern noir or neo-noir; I even referred to A Dame to Kill For as a comic noir in my review. Believe it or not, “what is film noir” really isn’t an easy question to answer.

Film noir is a style of film within a genre of crime-thrillers. It has a look and feel to it that other crime movies, even some covering the same subject matter or having the some plot, don’t have. For example, Ocean’s 11 or The Italian Job both are heist films.  In each of them, a group gets together to pull off a big job. But those films have a total different feel then the noir heist films that I’ll talk about in a moment.

To try to pin it down further, one can say the for the most part film noir—true film noir—is a sub-genre of crime films from 1940 to about 1960. These movies are all in black and white, with cinematography showing heavy shadows and a lot of depth of field.  Crime narratives cover rather seedy subject matters, such as murder, adultery, robbery, fraud, betrayals, and corruption. The players in these stories aren’t happy-go-lucky heroes. Most of the protagonists are pick-pockets, hooligans, corrupt cops, amoral private eyes, bank robbers, on and on.  I’ve read one author that believed the genre started with Double Indemnity in 1949 and ended with Odds Against Tomorrow in 1959. Who am I to really argue with experts? However, for what I want to talk about here, I’d prefer to cast a wider net.

Fred MacMurry in Double Indemnity

Film noir is the descendant of two different lines that collided on the screen. The narrative lineage comes from the pulp novels of the 1930’s. Many of the noir films of the 40’s and 50’s are adaptations of these books. Two examples of this are The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain and The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler. At the time of production, these pulps novels were not considered great literature. They were basically dime store novels that could be read at lunch or on the trains to and from work, and were often left on the train car seat when the reader was finished.

The 30’s also saw the rise of movies that were in a sense prototypes of film noir.  I’m talking, of course, about the first arrival of gangster movies. These were crimes films that were more or less “ripped from the headlines” films. Similar to Law & Order today, the gangster movies of the 30’s are based on the explosion of real crime during the prohibition era. Movies like Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932) chronicled very American rise and fall stories. Half a world away, a very dark proto-noir film, M (1931) with Peter Lorre as a compulsive child murderer, was also produced.  (It should come as no surprise that the director of that film, Fritz Lang, would go on to become one of the big name directors of the film noir era.)

The rest of the noir lineage, I would argue, comes from the silent movies era. For instance, the German expressionist films of the 20’s and 30’s such as, Nosferatu in 1922 and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1920 were clear predecessors of the noir genre. Another example, a little later on, were the sound films of the 30’s in America. Nineteen thirty-one’s Frankenstein, with its long depth of focus and deep long shadows, mimics the German expressionists. The demarcation of light and dark are very clear.

Defining film noir is really up to the definer. Like I have said, the term has become rather ubiquitous and has almost been stretched to the point that it doesn’t have much meaning. However, after cutting away some of the triteness, a set of defining attributes emerges that will allows the film fanatic to spot a film noir.

1. Time. Noir movies were all pretty much made from the 1940 to about 1960. The historical elements of the culture and politics, and the technology of the time is something that was unique for the era. It really can’t be replicated.
2. Style. There is a signature style to these films that sets them apart from the other films of the time. Now, to be fair, There are many directors all with their own style, (Billy Wilde has a much different look that Howard Hawkes) and sometime directors will have different styles from film to film (The Asphalt Jungle looks very different from the Maltese Falcon but both were directed by John Huston). That being said I think it can be boiled down to three basics:

• Black & White. It’s really in the name: noir means black. I could wax philosophic about the symbolism of black and white in such films, however, I think there really just wasn’t a color film for the time period that could match the type of shots that are in the black and white films
• Depth. There is something inherent in black and white movies allows shots that could not be seen in color. In most of these films there are many long, deep shots that contrast subjects near the camera and at the same time capture the far away with stunning composition.
• Shadows. The contrast between light and dark is something inherent to black and white films, however, not all of them are created equally. This is true of noirs also. Within these films the shadows play the part of the landscape of the film. This is something akin to how John Ford used Monument Valley in his films.

1. Mood. Noir films are considerably more pessimistic than many of the other films of the time. The mood of the films, and, by extension, the characters, are often desperate, greedy, apathetic, and lost. Unlike a Shakespearian ending in which all the good people marry each other and all the bad ones die, the waters of noir are muddier. At the end of many noir films it is hard to find a protagonist that is left happy. Everyone has lost something. There is a feeling that some kind of cosmic justice has been served, but it is rarely satisfying.
2. Crime.  Of all the ingredients that make up a film noir, this is the most important in my opinion. Without some kind of morally reprehensible action the film isn’t truly noir. This action could be murder, kidnapping, stealing, illegal gambling, and so on. Without the element of crime there is no noir.

I think this makes a good check list for anyone searching for true noir style movies. This is not to say that finding noir films is any great task, as many of them are labeled as such. But my hope is that this essay will clear up any confusion that may have come from the “noir” moniker being throw around too excessively.

(In part two, the films of film noir.)

– by Joseph De Paul