![]() Sparks fly and together they scheme to murder her husband and collect a large insurance payoff using the ‘double indemnity’ clause in his life insurance. Smooth insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) meets femme-fatale Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) when he calls to renew her husband’s automobile insurance. Cain’s novel into one of the best early Noirs. His investigations drag him into a byzantine plot that sees him pitted against a sinister fat man (Sydney Greenstreet), an effete European (Peter Lorre), a doped up gunman (Elisha Cook Jr.), and his client (Mary Astor) a treacherous women whose loyalties turn on a dime – all of whom are after a mysterious black statuette in the shape of a bird, and rumoured to be encrusted with gold and jewels…ĭirector Billy Wilder and writer Raymond Chandler adapted James M. When Bogart’s partner is murdered while tailing someone at the request of a beautiful client he sets out to find the killer, even though he was sleeping with his partners wife. John Huston’s classic adaptation of Dasheill Hammett’s hard-boiled novel (using large chunks of the novels dialogue) with Bogart as Hammett’s definitive private eye, the cynical Sam Spade. Films from this period on are referred to as ‘Neo-Noir’ and, while some are merely an affected stylism, enough original ‘Noir’ runs through them to satisfy purists. It made a resurgence in the 1970’s, and an even stronger one in the 1990’s. While the style dropped out of favour after the late 1950’s, its elements were present in several standout films of the 1960’s from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to Point Blank (1967). Noir protagonists were typically anti-heroes: crooked cops, down and out private eyes, war veterans, petty criminals, gamblers and killers while the women were often unloving, mysterious, duplicitous and manipulative – but always gorgeous. Due to this style, the best Noirs are in Black and White – with key European directors such as Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, and Jacques Tourneur. However, while the view was American, the ‘feel’ was distinctly European with shadowy expressionistic lighting, stark and skewered camera angles, jarring editing and deep shadows. According to Borde and Chaumeton, the ‘Noir’ cycle officially begins with John Houston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) and ends with Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) – though the style can be traced back as far as Fritz Lang’s M (1931), and forward to films like Memento (2000).Ĭharacterised by fear, mistrust, bleakness, paranoia, fatalism, disillusionment, existential plots and confessional voiceovers, they provided a distinctly pessimistic view of post-war America. The following year, French critic Nino Frank wrote the earliest essays identifying a new departure in American film making, the ‘Film Noir’- though the term itself did not come into ‘official’ use until the publication of Raymond Borde & Etienne Chaumeton’s study ‘ Panarama du film noir americain’ in 1955, and wasn’t widely adopted in America until the 1970’s. Following the end of World War Two, French publishing house Gallimard started publishing translations of American crime novels through its Série noire imprint: including authors such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M.
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