"In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb."- Dennis Lehane
Films from the 40s and 50s are not so much a blind spot for me as a period of intense selectivity that is gradually loosened up. Frank Capra released his best work in It's A Wonderful Life. A 26 year old Orson Welles released a box office bomb called Citizen Kane. Val Lewton brought subtelty and shadow to the horror genre. Hitchcock was going strong, cranking out Rebecca, Shadow of A Doubt, Notorious, and Rope. Billy Wilder had probably the strongest streak of quality films of anyone in that period, starting in 1944 with Double Indemnity and ending in 1960 with The Apartment. Kubrick was just getting started- releasing back to back classics in The Killing and Paths of Glory.
Yet if there was a film movement that began and ended in that period, it's the film noir. Neo-noirs like Chinatown, Blood Simple and LA Confidential picked up the baton and ran with it in later periods. But for now we are going to discuss the classics.
It's not so much a genre than a style that is an anti myth to what came before. During the Depression, Hollywood sold the idea of eternal optimism. Things will be alright. After World War II had passed, it exploded the myth and showed us just how bad it could really get. The world is a nasty, ugly place.
Stretching back to borrow elements from German expressionism, the style of film noir is steeped in shadow. It's a movement about the diagonal line. The weird angle that the camera is framing a subject. Nothing is quite what it seems. Robert Krasker's duth camera angles in Third Man suggest something off.
The protagonist is often a private eye but we also see them as screenwriters, hitmen or convicts. Dubbed by pulp novelist Raymond Chandler as "The Knight In Dirty Armor", they are forced from one bad situation to the next, bumping into colorful characters along the way to their eventual downfall.
Or to sum it up as James Ellroy would:
"Here's what film noir is to me: it's a righteous generically American film movement that went from 1945 to 1958 and exposited one great theme and that is- you're fucked. You have just met a woman and are inches away from the greatest sex of your life but within six weeks of meeting the woman you will be framed for a crime you did not commit and you will end up in the gas chamber. And as they strap you in and you're about to breathe the cyanide fumes, you'll be grateful for a few weeks you had with her and grateful for your own death."
We are now in the month of November. The purgatory between October and December. The ghoulish goblins are behind you and the jolly jingles are ahead. So hang up your trenchcoat and fedora. Put your gun on the desk next to the freshly poured glass of whiskey. And tune in to these ten noirs from the seedy underbelly of America.
10. The Killing (1956)
Sterling Hayden is an actor who I always love when he shows up on screen. Lucky for us, he is the lead here. The Killing can be considered Kubrick's first great film. Being an avid chess player, he knew where everything needed to be and what everyone needed to do. Like a chess player's mind, the plot unfolds in a "If he does this, I do that" type fashion.
9. Detour (1945)
Everything is stipped down to its bare essentials here. It's filled with B- actors and shot by a B- director. Ebert sums it up nicely: "Detour is a movie so filled with imperfections that it would not earn the director a passing grade in film school. This movie from Hollywood's poverty row, shot in six days, filled with technical errors and ham-fisted narrative should have faded from memory soon after its release in 1945. And yet it lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir."
It's the kind of movie that, if it were a book, would be hiding amongst the other 50 cent pulp paperbacks of its day. Waiting to be found.
8. Nightmare Alley (1947)
Based on the William Lindsey Gresham book of the same name, Nightmare Alley is a movie that ventures into a cynicism that would even give the most hardened noir a run for its money. Tyrone Power is an amoral carnival huckster using everyone he meets as he cuts a path to the top.
7. Pickup On South Street (1953)
Sam Fuller's films are punches to the mouth. He doesn't know how to tell a story another way. Fuller brings the element of social realism to the noir. Richard Widmark's performance here is bested only by his turn in Night and the City.
6. Out of the Past (1947)
Jacques Tourneur honed his chops with Val Lewon on films like Cat People and I Walked With A Zombie. Thus, the looming terror here is the past that continues to haunt Robert Mitchum's devil-may-care protagonist. Fate is the star of all of these pictures and it is here in all of its doom-laden glory.
5. Double Indemnity (1944)
Proof that Wilder is the best screenwriter to emerge from the classic Hollywood system. If I wanted to show a film noir to someone who has never seen once, I'd show them Double Indemnity. All the visual motifs and thematic concerns come together in one film. The man (Fred MacMurray) and the woman (Barbara Stanwyck) take turns tempting each other; neither would act alone. Both are attracted not so much by the crime as by the thrill of committing it with the other person.
4. In A Lonely Place (1950)
Released in the same year as Sunset Boulevard, both films bring Hollywood's post-war darkness to its logical conclusion. Only in this film, Ray films Hollywood not from its rotten core, but from its dessicated, metaphorical outskirts.
3. The Third Man (1949)
When I think of Welles, I don't think of Kane. I don't think of the 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds. I think of Harry Lime coming out of the shadows. Harry Lime in the underground tunnels is one of those scenes that run through my head when people bring up classic movies of this era. Not to mention Robert Krasker's camerawork and that score.
2. Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
"I love this dirty town."
The one central plot point to film noir is the investigation of a crime. Keeping this in mind, McKendrick's film can hardly be considered one. A crime isn't introduced until the last 25 minutes of the picture. By doing this, it is able to redefine what a film noir is. Crime doesn't necessarily have to be murder. The daily acts of cruelty that have become a way of life for the two main characters is the crime Sweet Smell consists of. It added even more shade of grey.
The film itself is an example of everything coming together: Alexander McKendrick's direction, Clifford Odet's script, James Wong Howe's cinematography and career best performances from Lancaster and Curtis.
1. Sunset Boulevard (1950)
An interesting piece of screenwriting advice I once heard is that you want to tell a story that going forward seems continually surprising and going backward seems pretty inevitable you ended up there.
Sunset Boulevard is a nightmare narrated by a dead man. A washed up silent film star desperate clings to the fatal delusion of holding onto the way things were. It isn't until we confront reality with honesty are we ever truly rewarded.
Like the best movies, anytime I watch it, it takes me over completely. I'm in that house with Joe Gillis. The mood of this film drips from every frame that by the time you've finished it, you'd think vines were wrapping around your house.
Honorable mention
Laura (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Gun Crazy (1950), Night and the City (1950), The Big Heat (1953), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Touch of Evil (1958)
