A study of Film Noir

After a wonderful sweet and relaxing sugar-filled Christmas-Movie-Marathon the decision in our movie crazy household was made to balance the sweetness with some darker tones: January will be dedicated to Film noir!

Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray in “Double Indemnity” – 1944, Billy Wilder, Paramount

For once I made the effort to actually look up the definition of ‘Film noir’ and was surprised to find that it wasn’t “movies shot in black and white where the male lead is a detective and the woman is a bombshell with a somewhat unclear past”.  No – according to the dictionary says Film noir is “a style or genre of cinematographic film marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace. The term was originally applied (by a group of French critics) to American thriller or detective films made in the period 1944–54 and to the work of directors such as Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Billy Wilder”. But apparently there is  some confusion about the time frame because Wikipedia says it’s for films made between early 1940s to late 1950s. And if you look at newer movies like “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” or “Black Daliah” it is clear that this definition seems very loose. I never liked definitions anyways – I am convinced they were created to torture students and the only things my brain was ever able to remember were cast lists and movie summaries but not necessarily the stages of osmosis.

So here is my definition of Film noir (granted I only started watching them): the leads are usually in a state of melancholy, ruthless  in regards to the law and someone in the proximity (or either of them) have bodies hidden in the cellar. And if they aren’t hidden in the cellar they need solving because either (or both) of the leads are somehow related to the untimely death.

So we started with “Double Indemnity”, “Rebecca”, “The Thin Man” (outside of the official definition of Film Noir but I don’t care), “Touch of Evil”, “Leave her to Heaven” and “The Maltese Falcon”. The goal is to discuss those and other movies over the next few weeks and see why those movies that by now are nearly 80 years old still hold up and make us yearn for those glorious years where even lowest of lowlifes looked impeccable and polished and the guy never got the girl and the girls ruled the world.