Tag: Marilyn Monroe
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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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‘Moguls’: How the Schenck Brothers Helped Invent Hollywood While Building an Empire of Their Own
Book Review: ‘Moguls’ (2024), by Michael Benson and Craig Singer, Citadel Press The Schenck brothers, Joseph and Nicholas, stood among the most powerful executives of the 20th Century’s movie industry and played a key role in shaping the Hollywood that we know today. Yet their names are hardly hardly household words. With their engrossing new…
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Noir Must Be Shot in Black and White, Right? Guess Again
I can already hear the howls of protest over the idea that film noir can be in color, so those who insist that color is verboten in noir will probably want to sit this one out. We all know that noir is usually shot on black and white film, but the luscious hues of those…
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Is It or Isn’t It? Does “Clash by Night” Make the Cut as Noir?
“Clash by Night” has the look and feel of noir, but not everyone thinks of it that way. It stars Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Ryan, two giants of the shadowy crime dramas of the 1940s and ‘50s that define those dark films. Some might say they make the perfect brooding noir couple. If that’s not…