Tag: film noir
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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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He Directed Gripping Noirs … But You May Not Recognize His Name
Everything seemed to come together for Phil Karlson in the 1950s. It was an era in which his talent, energy and unique sensibilities were made to order for a public with an insatiable appetite for raw, gritty crime films. It was in that period that he directed some of the decade’s most essential noirs. Prior…
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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…
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‘Dementia’: A Feverish, Tortured Night on Skid Row
“Dementia” (1955) has many of film noir’s hallmarks: a dingy hotel room with a well-worn electric sign outside that nervously flashes off and on, shady characters prowling skid row’s streets and a posh-looking fat man who glides around town in the back seat of his limo. And of course tobacco smoke, deep, dark shadows and…
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One Step Beyond: Film Noir and the Supernatural
We can all daydream of possessing special powers, because who wouldn’t want greater insight into their life and extraordinary abilities to manipulate the hands of fate? But if there’s one thing that speculative fiction teaches us is that supernatural powers — mind reading, communicating with the dead and other such phenomena — all come with…
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Jazz Mania: Film Noir, Bebop and the Devil’s Music
You might be surprised to learn that jazz didn’t show up in film noir right away even though by the 1940s swing was part of the popular music landscape and bebop was well on its way to becoming a solid American art form. But you wouldn’t know it by watching “The Maltese Falcon” and other…