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Film noir was a term coined by French film critics to describe the dark, often brooding, doom-laden films that emerged from Hollywood after World War II. Themes of alienation, obsession, fatalism and paranoia were typically characteristic of many of these films. Even the film's lead character, the so called anti-hero protagonist, was flawed and often not immune from the infection of crime nor could our hapless hero easily escape the sinister clutches of the sexually-charged femme fatale, whose sole preoccupation in most noir films was to lead the central character to his predestined doom. Rooted in the liturgy of Greek tragedies and reminiscent of the shadowy subject composition of most early crime stories, dark themes like fatalism loomed over many noir films, particularly films like Double Indemnity. Although the film's main character, insurance salesman Walter Neff, has serious reservations about going through with a wildly concocted murder scheme for money- it soon becomes apparent Neff, as the film's unwitting victim, feels defenseless against the power of fate: "Those fates I was talking about had only been stalling me off. Now they had thrown the switch. The gears had meshed. The time for thinking had all run out..." And so Neff, obsessed with sex and money, goes on to commit the infamous murder... Similarly, Tom Neal would echo the same sentiment in the 1945 noir film Detour- "That's life. Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you." These tragic, dark crime stories, outfitted in the accouterment of sparkling dialogue, became the essence of what the French referred to as film noir. |
In the Noir world, the city was a breeding ground for crime and decadence. Decaying tenements littered back alleyways; shadows were pregnant with menacing figures; sexy vixens could not to be trusted; neon signs blared the red of temptation through the dingy blinds of cheap motel windows; and streets were wetly stained with a corruption, not even the police could wash away.
The film noir period began with John Huston's Maltese Falcon in 1941 and ended with Orson Wells' Touch of Evil in 1958. Here are ten of the best from that period:
1). Double Indemnity (1944): Arguably one of the best movies ever made from the noir period. Raymond Chandler's and Billy Wilder's screen adaptation of the popular James Cain novel, sizzles at ever turn. Icy-blooded, blonde bombshell Barbara Stanwyck (Phillis Dietrichson) practically invented the whole notion of the Femme Fatale.
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2). Out of the Past (1947): One of the best dialogue-driven movies ever made. With a similarly disjointed chronological time-line like its predecessor, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past bristles with intelligence. French director, Jacques Tourneur, created the quintessential film noir masterpiece. Moody, somber, brooding, and show-cased in the shadows and dim lighting, typically characteristic of the cinematography of film noir, Out of the Past has emerged as one of the finest examples of the creativity that flourished in Hollywood during noir's baroque period of the 1940's.
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