220 Films of Ale: Classic Film Noir
Top 33 films are ranked, the rest chronologically listed; always in progress. Something about my methodology and thoughts on noir, and why for me the "classic" period dates from 1937-64 for this particular area in film:
I am generally for a more "open" interpretation of noir than some critics and other viewers - in part because even the so-called or self-described experts don't even agree on what it is, when it existed, where it existed, whether it's still with us, etc. And many of the critics and academics out there who have become important names in the ongoing rediscovery and reassessment of noir make some restrictions but not others, e.g. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, whose fine descriptive catalog Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style makes it's biases obvious - it is VERY strict in defining noir as exclusively American (The Third Man, absolutely definitional to noir for many if not most of us, is absent) but also argue that it existed as far back as the 1920s (a couple of Sternberg films) and that a film like Dirty Harry - to me a cop-thriller with an antihero who doesn't express the unease and vulnerability that a noir protagonist has - qualifies. Color is a big argument; even some of those writers who can accept it in the modern era can't tolerate it before 1960 - Vertigo isn't noir to them even though Chinatown is.
Style? Genre? I'm increasingly using the words "tone" or "mood" myself. Noir is invariably pessimistic - and even when the films have "happy" endings, as they usually do during the classic era because of production code requirements, there's always the sense that disaster was averted only by the luckiest of chances. So chance - or rather, determinism, comes into play, and nowhere more than in the work of two of the greatest directors ever to specialize in these films, Lang and Hitchcock, both moody and paranoid men whose works are suffused with Catholic guilt and distrust in institutions like the government and the police. Crime seems to be a defining issue and it's true that noir films are almost always crime-centric or have a crime at their hearts, but I can buy the argument that crime isn't absolutely necessary - sometimes it's old, repressed, unpleasant memories brought to the fore that cause a protagonist to spin into the noir labyrinth or trap - The Red House is a particularly good example.
My own feeling is that noir developed out of the earliest of crime films - Feuillade's serials of the 1910s and some of Griffith's shorts in the same period, especially The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), then Lang's early German crime films, the Mabuse films, Spione and M, the late silent-early sound American gangster cycle, the aforementioned Sternberg films, and various French crime films of the 30s. Most of these don't really feel like "true" noir to me, however great many of them are; I think it's the onset of the worldwide depression and the rise of fascism that really sets the stage for noir, with a particular kind of unease that they brought that is different from the post-WWI mood generally, and to me the earliest films that work purely as an example of the genre/style/mood are Duvivier's Pépé le Moko and Michael Curtiz' Marked Woman from 1937. As noir's beginnings stem from (at least) three countries, and as it's visual style(s), and it's focus on fate and the dark side of capitalism is hardly unique to America, I've never felt it correct to consider it an American style in particular - though it was certainly much more common, and typical of American cinema than that of any other country in this period. There are a number of other films from the USA, France and the UK before the war that qualify pretty well also, but it's really 1940-41 where things get going, and of course there's a huge upswing in production of these kinds of films after the war, and we also start to see the noir movement take hold elsewhere, particularly Mexico and Japan while still in the 40s, and then in many other countries in the 50s.
As to the end-point of classic noir, I understand why a lot of people pick 1958 - the year of Touch of Evil, which everybody agrees is noir, and one of the greatest at that; Vertigo, which I think most people would admit to the pantheon if only it were not in color (and maybe not starring James Stewart, not a "noir actor" in many eyes); and Elevator to the Gallows and Cairo Station (probably the first great noir from the Arab world, certainly the earliest that's well-known). Many writers like nice clean start-and-stop, nice round single years so they can say "it began with The Maltese Falcon and ended with...' They like being able to say that this era in film coincided with other eras in other arts or in politics or whatever. I think this is rather silly myself but regardless of that, I can see the point, and certainly films were changing, and the American crime films that would come out at the end of the 50s and into the 60s tend to be "lighter" (the spy movie begins here) and more often in color. But I personally think that even into the early 60s the first wave of noir still holds; films like Odds Against Tomorrow (1959, Blast of Silence (1961) and High and Low (1963). For me it's Godard's Alphaville (1965) that heralds the second wave of noir, and from this period on noir is almost universally self-aware, and most of it is in color.
I am generally for a more "open" interpretation of noir than some critics and other viewers - in part because even the so-called or self-described experts don't even agree on what it is, when it existed, where it existed, whether it's still with us, etc. And many of the critics and academics out there who have become important names in the ongoing rediscovery and reassessment of noir make some restrictions but not others, e.g. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, whose fine descriptive catalog Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style makes it's biases obvious - it is VERY strict in defining noir as exclusively American (The Third Man, absolutely definitional to noir for many if not most of us, is absent) but also argue that it existed as far back as the 1920s (a couple of Sternberg films) and that a film like Dirty Harry - to me a cop-thriller with an antihero who doesn't express the unease and vulnerability that a noir protagonist has - qualifies. Color is a big argument; even some of those writers who can accept it in the modern era can't tolerate it before 1960 - Vertigo isn't noir to them even though Chinatown is.
Style? Genre? I'm increasingly using the words "tone" or "mood" myself. Noir is invariably pessimistic - and even when the films have "happy" endings, as they usually do during the classic era because of production code requirements, there's always the sense that disaster was averted only by the luckiest of chances. So chance - or rather, determinism, comes into play, and nowhere more than in the work of two of the greatest directors ever to specialize in these films, Lang and Hitchcock, both moody and paranoid men whose works are suffused with Catholic guilt and distrust in institutions like the government and the police. Crime seems to be a defining issue and it's true that noir films are almost always crime-centric or have a crime at their hearts, but I can buy the argument that crime isn't absolutely necessary - sometimes it's old, repressed, unpleasant memories brought to the fore that cause a protagonist to spin into the noir labyrinth or trap - The Red House is a particularly good example.
My own feeling is that noir developed out of the earliest of crime films - Feuillade's serials of the 1910s and some of Griffith's shorts in the same period, especially The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), then Lang's early German crime films, the Mabuse films, Spione and M, the late silent-early sound American gangster cycle, the aforementioned Sternberg films, and various French crime films of the 30s. Most of these don't really feel like "true" noir to me, however great many of them are; I think it's the onset of the worldwide depression and the rise of fascism that really sets the stage for noir, with a particular kind of unease that they brought that is different from the post-WWI mood generally, and to me the earliest films that work purely as an example of the genre/style/mood are Duvivier's Pépé le Moko and Michael Curtiz' Marked Woman from 1937. As noir's beginnings stem from (at least) three countries, and as it's visual style(s), and it's focus on fate and the dark side of capitalism is hardly unique to America, I've never felt it correct to consider it an American style in particular - though it was certainly much more common, and typical of American cinema than that of any other country in this period. There are a number of other films from the USA, France and the UK before the war that qualify pretty well also, but it's really 1940-41 where things get going, and of course there's a huge upswing in production of these kinds of films after the war, and we also start to see the noir movement take hold elsewhere, particularly Mexico and Japan while still in the 40s, and then in many other countries in the 50s.
As to the end-point of classic noir, I understand why a lot of people pick 1958 - the year of Touch of Evil, which everybody agrees is noir, and one of the greatest at that; Vertigo, which I think most people would admit to the pantheon if only it were not in color (and maybe not starring James Stewart, not a "noir actor" in many eyes); and Elevator to the Gallows and Cairo Station (probably the first great noir from the Arab world, certainly the earliest that's well-known). Many writers like nice clean start-and-stop, nice round single years so they can say "it began with The Maltese Falcon and ended with...' They like being able to say that this era in film coincided with other eras in other arts or in politics or whatever. I think this is rather silly myself but regardless of that, I can see the point, and certainly films were changing, and the American crime films that would come out at the end of the 50s and into the 60s tend to be "lighter" (the spy movie begins here) and more often in color. But I personally think that even into the early 60s the first wave of noir still holds; films like Odds Against Tomorrow (1959, Blast of Silence (1961) and High and Low (1963). For me it's Godard's Alphaville (1965) that heralds the second wave of noir, and from this period on noir is almost universally self-aware, and most of it is in color.
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