Tag: film noir
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Cable Guys: The Elevator Operators of Noir
We don’t see many elevator operators in our daily lives, but in noir they’re as common as neon signs and clouds of Chesterfield smoke. Elevator operators in film noir work in posh skyscrapers and skid row fleabags. They’re anonymous functionaries battling monotony and are nearly invisible extensions of the machinery they operate. Or they can…
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What Really Makes a Film Noir? The Noir Rorschach Test
Let’s be clear: film noir isn’t a genre. Westerns, war movies and horror films are all genre pictures with motifs that signal the kind of film you’re watching. But noir isn’t as easy to spot. There are noir cliches — shadows cast by venetian blinds, voice-over narrations by weary, defeated perps and fall guys, and…
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The Suburban Jungle: When Noir Bled Out of the City
Many American films noir of the early 1940s were anchored to big cities — Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York. So were a number of returning World War II GIs. As veterans reentered civilian life and began migrating away from urban centers to newly developing byways of suburbia, noir followed. Away from shadowy alleyways and…
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‘Scarlet Street’ at 80: Flirtations with a femme fatale can often lead to trouble — and sometimes murder
At her service. Joan Bennett, Edward G. Robinson, ‘Scarlet Street’ (1945). Contains spoilers When “Scarlet Street” premiered 80 years ago this month it was not uniformly praised by critics, and several cities outright banned it due to its dark content. The film hinted at such taboo topics as sex out of wedlock and prostitution, and…
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A cunning serial killer is on the loose and police are baffled
Song Kang-ho, ‘Memories of Murder’ (2003).Searching for clues and coming up empty. ‘Memories of Murder’ (2003) Bodies are popping up with terrifying regularity in a small South Korean city and the local police force has few clues to go on. Young women are being raped and strangled, their bodies abandoned in little traveled spots, and…
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‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’: A Tinseltown Allegory that Ends Unhappily Ever After
Michael Sarrazin, Jane Fonda, ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’ Harrowing Tale of Dance Marathons and the Depression-Era Downtrodden. But Those Marathons Remind Us of Something Else — the Studio System at its Most Heartless Contains spoilers By Paul Parcellin “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” is a noir tragedy about exploitation of the desperate and beleaguered…
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Mark Stevens: his quartet of searing films noir still light up screens today
Lucille Ball, Mark Stevens, ‘The Dark Corner’ (1946). By Paul Parcellin Mark Stevens made a string of taut crime dramas in the 1940s and ’50s that still resonate today. He acted in dozens of films, from westerns, war pictures to musicals and comedies, and directed two of his self-produced noirs as well as some hardboiled…
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Imposter noir: 51 films about swapping, losing and faking identities
Olivia de Havilland, ‘The Dark Mirror’ (1946). “There is only one plot – things are not what they seem.” — Jim Thompson Let’s say you’re a character in a film noir. It’s likely that someone who you’re rubbing elbows with is not who they say they are. For that matter, you may not be who…
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‘Pale Flower’: Gambling dens, yakuza and a mysterious woman who lives on the edge
“Pale Flower” It’s clear from the start that Masahiro Shinoda’s “Pale Flower” isn’t your typical yakuza picture — the kind that’s simmered in the Japanese underworld’s intricate codes of conduct, with a lead character who agonizes over prickly themes such as honor and loyalty. “Pale Flower” covers the same slice of society as other yakuza…
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‘The Killers’: A much loved noir that’s the spitting image of another American classic
“The Killers” (1946) Some say “The Killers” is the “Citizen Kane” of noir, but how can that be? One is a beloved noir, the story behind a brutal murder of a washed up prizefighter. The other, a fictional biography of a media tycoon, loosely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst. It’s like comparing…