By: Paul Duncan and Jurgen Muller (Eds)
Pub Taschen
Price £ 34.99
Pages 688
From “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920) to “Killing Them Softly” (2012) the book under review skillfully traces the history of a category of films that has once again begun to evoke interest among moviegoers and critics: Film Noir. This was an immensely creative epoch in film history. It seemed to bring out the best in everyone; directors, cameramen, screen writer and actors. It is oddly both one of the Hollywood’s best period and least known. Film noir is more than a subject (crime and punishment) or a theme (the underside of American Life). It is, above all, a style.
“Film noir”, French for “dark movie” where “dark” meant “sinister” and “dreadful” as well as “shadowy”, was very powerfully portrayed by Raymond Chandler when he said: “The streets were dark with something more than night”. The phrase “Film Noir” however, was coined in 1946 by critic Nino Frank and it was later popularized by French critics, particularly Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, in their 1955 book, “A Panorama of American Film Noir”.
This genre of movies remains one of the most enduring legacies of 1940 and 1950s as it explored a shadowy side of American Life that teemed with double-crossing, unsavoury characters during a period of tremendous prosperity and optimism. The narrative conventions of films noir was low-key lighting, rich in shadows, voice-over narrators, violent protagonists and femmes fatales. Most of the films noir of the classic period were similarly low and modestly budgeted features without major stars – B movies either literally or in spirit and they were used as the supporting feature on double bill programs. They were closer in tone and mood to German Expressionism or Italian Neorealism, cinematic styles that occurred at specific moment in film history.
Be that as it may, films noir depict an America that had lost its innocence during World War II reflecting the growing pessimism of the war years and their aftermath. A million disillusioned soldiers returned home with a harsher view of life consumed with cynicism and the uneasy awareness of the dark forces engendered by a world being consumed by greed and corruption. Little wonder that these films began to proliferate during the early 1940s.
The action of the film noir is invariably played out within the urban milieu: dark streets; dingy rooming-houses and office blocks; bars and night clubs; precinct stations and luxury penthouses. A recurrent motif of the form is the gangster being shot down in the street. It embraces a wide range from gangster films to the police procedural to the gothic romance to the social problem picture; and an equally wide range of plots: the central figure maybe a private eye (The Big Sleep), a plain clothes policeman (The Big Heat) an aging boxer (The set-up), a hapless grafter (Night and the City), a law-abiding citizen lured into a life of crime (Gun Crazy) or simple a victim of circumstance (D.O.A.). Swiftly, the range established itself as the American Movie form – despite its distinctly French nomenclature. Of course, they soon came to be made around the world.
Films noir also changed audience expectations concerning heroes; it was rather a movement that gave birth to the Hollywood antihero, one of the earliest examples of which was Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade in John Huston’s version of the Maltese Falcon (1941), High Sierra (1941), and The Big sleep (1946). Spade was the quintessential hero of the film noir who takes for granted that the world is corrupt and permeated with evil-doers.
The time span of classic from noir is often said to stretch from The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Touch of Evil (1958). The makers of the great 40s and 50s noir movies – Double Indemnity, Laura, Detour, The Postman Always Rings twice, D.O.A., Kiss Me Deadly, The Killing and Vertigo – did not conceive of them as a single genre of “film Noir”. Instead, these movies were known by a variety of different labels, including “crime stories”, “suspense picture”, “psychological thriller” and “Melodramas”. But whatever categorization we may attempt, the spirit of Film Noir has never fully died. There have been occasional (often darkly nostalgic) re-creations of the style of movie making in 1970s and 1980s, the greatest of them all, Chinatown appeared in 1974; then, of course came the Godfather films.
This book is unique study of film noir with a list of 1000 films noirs and neo-noir. It is the most comprehensive, in-depth film reference available in a single volume. One is almost tempted to add that it contains everything you always wanted to know about Films Noir. It’s as much an art book as it is a movie book; with 688 pages of painstaking text and striking colour and black-and-white illustrations crisply reproduced in a handsome design and a page-size of 28 cm x 23 cm (giving a page surface area of 644 sq cm!) it’s a book that is almost as huge as its subject!
Rafique Baghdadi
9967808108
rafiquebaghdadi@gmail.com
