Tag: crime film
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Post-War Noir: Damaged Vets Strain to Re-enter Civilian Life
American films noir changed a lot after the end of World War II. The standard setups — a guy, a girl, a gun, a pile of cash, gave way to new storylines and different kinds of characters. We began to see G.I.s returning home from the war with debilitating physical and psychological wounds that made…
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Knockout Punch Noir: The Raw-Boned Fight Game
You’d be hard pressed to find a sport more noir-like than professional boxing. It’s got all of the elements of noir rolled into a savage athletic competition whose object is to knock an opponent unconscious and perhaps spill his blood. Boxing brings with it the stench of mobsters, illegal gambling, fixed fights, disabling violence and…
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Femmes Fatale Are Deceptively Charming, and Dangerous
Sure, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), the husband liquidating murderess of “Double Indemnity” (1944) might be your go-to gal whenever the term “femme fatale” is mentioned. She’s as coolly detached and methodical as a hangman, and wily enough to nudge her fall-guy, insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), into killing her husband, and she even makes…
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Ripped From the Headlines III: True Crime that Inspired Noir
It only takes a couple of desperate, determined outsiders with a gun to start a crime wave. At times, a single perpetrator can do the work of two — or more. That’s what happens in several of the films based on true stories that make up this, the third and final part of the True…
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Ripped From the Headlines II: True Crime that Inspired Noir
As you’ve probably gathered by now, the 1940s and ’50s saw a bumper crop of sensational tales ready-made for the screen. It was an era when Hollywood greedily harvested stories from news tabloids’ front pages. In the last post, we looked at noirs that were inspired by true crime stories, and here’s a second helping…
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Ripped From the Headlines: True Crime Inspired Film Noir
It’s no wonder that Hollywood in the 1940s and ’50s scooped up lurid true crime stories and made hard-hitting, gritty dramas out of them. Following the war, the public’s appetite for rough textured tales could not be surpassed. Cold, savage murders that bled off the front page of tabloid scandal sheets was the stuff that…
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Meet the Press: Bullies, Brutes and News Hounds of Noir
Warning: Spoilers ahead When we see a disheveled, groggy Richard Conte breaking into his own office in the middle of the night, desperate to record a story on the company’s Dictaphone machine, you know you’re watching noir. The scene could be set in almost any kind of office but it feels most at home in…
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Danger Lurks in the Shadows of Noir-Tinged ‘Cat People’
Director Jacque Tourneur said “The less you see, the more you believe” and his film, “Cat People” (1942), proves his theory. It shows how a movie can spark an audience’s imagination when it lets them hear threatening sounds from things that lurk just off screen. We get a palpable sense of phantom-like predators that hide…
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‘Double Indemnity’: Two On a Conveyor Belt Toward Doom
In “Double Indemnity” (1944), housewife Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) seduces insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and gets him to kill her husband. She’s after a big payout from a policy that Neff sold him under false pretenses. It’s a classic noir — maybe THE classic noir. The story’s got all the right stuff —…
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A Second Chance to Erase a Deadly Error
Sometimes we could all use a do-over, and that’s certainly the case with Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) who’s just capped off her year by turning her husband, Barney (Louis Hayward), into a corpse. But then something supernatural happens. Come midnight New Year’s Eve she finds herself not in the new year but repeating the previous…