Before you start talking about the books, could you define film noir for me?
film noir is a genre that in its time had no other definition than “police film”. all those who were doing film noir, like robert mitchum and similar big stars and directors of that time, would not have called what they were working on film noir. they were doing police movies and dramas. therefore, the title ‘film noir’ defines the moment when we began to take this type of film seriously and it was given a French nickname because that nation was the first to give it serious academic attention.
You are reading: Books on film noir
“The title ‘film noir’ defines the moment when we began to take this type of film seriously.”
The films were largely made in the defining 1940s, and are infused with all the imagery we know so well: crisp black-and-white photography, the gleaming rain-swept streets, the femme fatale with marcel wave smoking in a bar, and the hero who will end badly if he is seduced by her. It’s interesting that film noir has so many fans, because it’s not a progressive genre when it comes to women. either they’re the repository of everything good and they stay home, or they’re the dangerously attractive femme fatale and the hero ends up dead after having sex with them.
American cinema: directors and directions 1929-1968.
This is the book that started the appreciation of film noir. is a hugely influential book that introduced the “author” theory to English writing. sarris made us take key directors seriously, as well as the genre itself. the French had already been serious about popular genres for years, but this was the book that set the tactile paper on fire here.
sarris is a writer you’ll meet if you have any love or appreciation for film. the book will inspire you, and you’ll also throw it across the room, because, along with the great enthusiasm and famous pecking order of directors, it has some notable blind spots. There are directors like Hitchcock, of course, who are canonized, but Sarris dismisses filmmakers who are now held in high esteem, like Stanley Kubrick, who made one of the greatest noir films, Murder. But the book does take the genre seriously and suggests that we can view these films in the same way as “arthouse” directors like Fellini and Bergman, who were automatically taken seriously. it was an incredibly influential book. people like me almost started writing movie reviews because of this book.
do you agree with him about stanley kubrick?
Not at all, and I spend most of my time disagreeing with him when I read the book. andrew sarris was talking about people like otto preminger, who was basically considered a studio director, but for sarris the director is the absolute king and this is now a controversial topic. If you watch Otto Premier’s wonderful film Laura, the script and the acting are of paramount importance. so there had to be a fix. things needed to calm down, but sarris got the ball rolling with this book.
your next pick is the rough guide to film noir.
More ambitious than most other entries in the field, this volume features more sections, including informative sidebars. The interesting thing about film noir is that, while it’s a quintessentially American form, it wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for German Expressionism, a theme addressed here.
“While it is a quintessentially American form, film noir would not exist were it not for German Expressionism.”
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so a director like fritz lang comes from germany, having made movies like metropolis, and he’s definitely an important director. in america he thought he was making cheap crime movies but now we see that this is not true. We now appreciate that Ministry of Fear, set in Britain, is one of the great black films, and German Expressionism was a huge influence on the whole form. Another expatriate was Robert Siodmak. These two great German directors came to America and gave film noir a visual style. Hitchcock, of course, was English, so the look and style of film noir was mostly defined by foreigners like these. The Rough Guide to Film Noir looks at all of those elements, including cinematographers (one of the sections I worked on in this book).
Who is the best director of photography in film noir?
john highton. he’s a genius who made the work of directors like anthony mann look even better. the classic image of men in trench coats and cropped hats against rainy, smoky streets.
Who’s making film noir now? And is that another word for thriller?
not. it is more often the innocent man gone astray. the subject was made as recently as body heat, and many times since. The great modern film noir is Polanski’s Chinatown. People flocked to see this widescreen color film, which is, however, a transformed film noir, with its sun-baked Las Vegas landscapes. and of course the dark knight and batman begins look like that. Gotham City is basically a film noir landscape. so the rough guide takes movies like this in a way the other books don’t. the others focus primarily on the 1940s.
Next on the list is Carlos Clarens’ crime film.
carlos clarens is one of the most insightful writers in cinema. with great skill, he puts things in context, politically. So we talk about movies in the context of, say, the Roosevelt New Deal, and how such things are reflected in the movies of James Cagney and Edward G Robinson. Clarens coverage reaches into the 1960s and beyond; he identifies the fact that the ones set in the 1930s, bonnie and clyde for example, are really about the 1960s. one could argue that it is a film black in sensibility, even though it is in bright color. Of course, it ends with the bloody deaths of the hero and heroine, a standard ending for a film noir.
what movies does it include?
The cover features Bogart in High Sierra, a film noir classic. Do you know the essay ‘the mobster as a tragic hero’? It is a famous American essay by Robert Warshow, an incredibly influential essay. He points out that the gangster is the modern tragic hero, who has to have his moment of fame, like Macbeth, and at one point he is at the top of the tree but has a tragic flaw that will destroy him.
On the back cover is The Godfather, a great modern noir film. In many ways, Coppola’s film shows the development of the theme because it is more ambiguous. We knew exactly how we were supposed to feel about gangsters in the ’40s, but we’re not quite sure how to feel about Al Pacino, so in the modern age movies have become more ambiguous.
i’m pretty sure how i feel about al pacino. But that is another matter. Why do we like gangsters?
We like them because they show us that they are winners. every time we try to achieve something there is always someone in our way, or someone who should have promoted us, should have seen how good we are. there are jobs we should have gotten that we didn’t get. someone else got them. the gangster just smashes through all the trash, violently, and settles down.
but all movies are pretty moral. although, ironically, scarface, one of the great modern noir films, has become so iconic that the young people who admire him fail to see that he is a tragically flawed person who dies a violent death. to them he is just a hero. he has an enviable lifestyle, he lives in a mansion, he snorts cocaine through his nose and his girlfriend is michelle pfeiffer in a low-cut dress. maybe we always enjoy the gangster at the top, but realize there’s a price to be paid.
100 film noir films.
Notably academic, as you might expect from bfi publishing, but it differs from the others in this selection in that it takes into account the fact that film noir as a genre has influenced films from France, Japan, Germany, Mexico and India, so the inclusion of films other than the classics is appreciated, showing how diverse the influence is.
what are the best black movies?
I think you’d have to say the big dream, the maltese falcon, double compensation, the postman always rings twice. in many of these films we find the slightly gullible hero seduced into committing murder. fred macmurray should have seen barbara stanwyck’s ankle bracelet in the supermarket – it clearly gave her away as a dangerous sexual force. I think that is the aspect of them that is not very liberated. Even in body heat, Kathleen Turner is just a modern version of Barbara Stanwyck who wears less underwear.
“Each of these books will make you quickly realize that you should be seeing double compensation and that the postman always rings twice.”
the difference is that the first films only gave a hint of what was happening in the bedroom: the big dream does it very cleverly. There’s that famous conversation between Bogart and Bacall about horseback riding, where she says it depends on who’s in the saddle. The audience got the metaphor, but in the moment of body heat we have to see William Hurt and Kathleen Turner having sex. that’s a problem, because by hinting at sexual passion, as the 1940s movies did, you could make it more powerful. on the other hand, modern film noir is more specifically about sexual frenzy.
film noir: the encyclopedia.
An engaging book that demands a lot of effort and has massive and ambitious coverage. this is an a-z encyclopedia and is probably the most useful in terms of tracking down more obscure items. this is a book that is very up to date with many modern noir movies. It has some amazing entries, and as a shopping list of movies you might want to see, it’s up there with the best.
but how do you know which ones to look at? rate them?
Well, each of these books will quickly make you realize that you should be seeing double compensation and the postman always rings twice. That said, much of the fun lies in the fact that there are so many of them. Many noir movies are now on DVD and you can easily locate them. once you meet the directors and stars whose names are a guarantee of quality – anthony mann, fritz lang, cagney, mitchum, etc. – you really can’t go wrong.
I like the elevator for the echafaud.
Louis Malle and the French nouvelle vague directors took film noir very seriously. Malle asked Miles Davis, who was living in Paris at the time, to come over and improvise the soundtrack for that one, so he’s got that beautiful smoky jazz score. Miles Davis just saw the movie and improvised while he watched it. and again you have the tragic hero…
I love the premise. of committing a crime and being trapped in an elevator. a story with a moral.
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