Noir?

I’ve set myself the task of writing a review of all ten films in the DVD set, The Ultimate Film Noir Collection.
Click here


For anyone contemplating buying it, it’s excellent value, despite some dodgy transfer quality at time and an absence of commentaries or extras. Also, if you’re like me you won’t have heard of half of the films in the collection, but that is probably the main attraction, because they so rarely turn up on TV.

The ten films are listed on the link, by the way.

Before I get down to the individual films, I want to ponder on this term ‘film noir’, which I don’t like. For a start, it is a merely a phrase invented by French critics retrospectively to label crime films that shared a cinematic style and a few common themes. Second, it is prodigally over-used, usually to give some critical class to cheap (though hardly cheerful) B-movies.

I’ve seen Orson Welles’ Macbeth described as ‘noirish’ and read message board discussions arguing the toss about whether Leave Her to Heaven is a noir film. And is there any review of Chinatown which doesn’t describe it as ‘modern noir’ or ‘hommage to noir’. All of which begs the question I posed above.

Now a critical label doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It has to be based on certain definable criteria which are genuinely shared by a number of films, intentionally or otherwise. I would say that there is a consensus that a ‘film noir’ should have these three elements:

Style: monochrome; shadows, bars of light through blinds; expressionistic camera angles; flashbacks; narration, etc.
Theme: Life’s a bitch, and then the hero dies. ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods – they kill us for their sport.’
Elements: the femme fatale; the hero’s fatal flaw; crime; violence; corruption; the contrast between the fruits of crime and the poverty of honesty, etc.

Off hand I can’t think of many films that fit even those rather loose criteria, but the following are usually cited as leading examples:

Out of the Past (aka Build My Gallows High), although it has a lot of light and outdoor locations.
Double Indemnity
High Sierra – no femme, but a chienne fatale.
Detour – archetypal, with the added advantage of being a real Poverty Row product.
The Killers (1946).
Scarlet Street
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (only joking).

I would dispute that the following are ‘noir’:

The Maltese Falcon and all the Chandler/Marlowe films. They may have the style, but they don’t have the content.
White Heat – the lead is psychotic, not a tragic hero.
He Walked by Night – police procedural.

I suppose what I’m saying is that if you try and define ‘noir’ you end up with a definition so narrow that it excludes most films, or so wide that it becomes meaningless. I am certainly saying that such labels are unnecessary and a recipe for critical laziness.

And who cares? If a film is good, why does it matter how we label it? After all, I won’t accept Treasure of the Sierra Madre or North-West Passage as Westerns, but that doesn’t stop them being great films.

Update

I haven't posted for a while. It's not that I've nothing to say, more that I've got too much. I plan to write a review of all 'The Ultimate Film Noir Collection', which I've been watching since Christmas. This means watching them all twice. And writing reviews is not as easy as I thought, not if you're going to be fair to the film.

I've also been wasting a lot of time trying to get links to work. I want to do that highlighting of text, which hides a link, but I'm getting all this HTML stuff round my neck.

My new wide-screen TV is driving me mad. I never know when I've got the right ratio. It seems these old films have to be watched with a black band on each side, unless you want to cut off the top of people's heads or stretch them sideways. Then you feel you're missing out. Odd, because I always wanted black lines showing when I was watching wide-screen on the old TV.

I've almost finished the novel on which The Last King of Scotland was based. I'll have to write something on that. It will fit in with earlier stuff on adaptation (which I haven't forgotten).

I saw a good old B-movie yesterday - Terror in a Texas Town. Silly title for an excellent film. Something else on the list.

Getting sorted

Today I get my desk organised, sort all those bits of paper with notes on them, bring my database of videos and DVDs up to date, renew my library books, send out my Christmas cards and buy my Christmas presents.

I need to review this blog too, because I have got various series on the go and am getting a bit confused.

I've got the adaptation series. Story to screen. I've done why adapt and what is adapted. Next, I plan to do the refining process between the first treatment through the screenplay to the shooting script. After that I shall look at the changes that can occur during filming. And finally, the post -production alterations that might be deemed necessary.

Then I have my list of criteria for lists. Put like that it sounds a bit daft, which it no doubt is. Anyway, coming up are canonical, prejudice, snobbery, familiarity, sentimentality, the herd-like mentality, cultishness, genre, star, iconoclasm, politics, innovation. It's going to keep me busy all year.

I also want to do more reviews. I plan to post comments on IMdb - http://www.imdb.com/

and link them here. I want to do The Wild Bunch, the Searchers, High Noon, and The Getaway. If they all seem too obvious, I also have in mind Hell Drivers, Ride Lonesome, Three Godfathers and Written on the Wind. I have already sumbitted my thoughts on Stan (the TV play) and Twelve o'clock High.

I suppose I should write about films I don't like. Perhaps life is too short. On the other hand something needs to be said against over-praised works like The Graduate, Rio Bravo, Klute, The Italian Job, Ben-Hur, Titanic, Gladiator, If, The Wicker Man, Easy Rider and Star Wars in its entirety. Now there's a good series.

John Walsh did it, why not me?

I might one day. That is, write an autobiography of my formative years through the films I saw.

He called his Are you talking to me? I shall call mine I wouldn't have it any other way, or maybe It ain't like it used to be (but it'll do). Here's a few notes.

Early childhood

Well, this is back to ole Davy, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.

This Disney film was probably the first Western I ever saw. Except, it wasn't a Western. I'm a bit purist about what I call a Western, and this film is ante-bellum, and therefore too early. Civil War films aren't Westerns either, nor are modern-day films like Hud. I reccognise, of course, that Hud draws on the genre and could have been placed a 100 years earlier in time. I don't really approve of comedy Westerns either, and certainly not musicals.

So why do I break my own rule and call it a Western? Simply because it has a hero who has the Westerner's morality. By 'morality' I mean an outlook on life and way of behaving. Crockett, like Shane or Ethan Edwards, is a loner, an individualist, more concerned with doing what he thinks is right than in conforming. Thus, he has a family, and while he does not neglect them, he's rarely there; he loses them anyway. He joins the army, but for his own reasons, and as a scout or hunter, which makes him semi-detached from the organisation. He respects his enemies, the Creeks, and is not racist. As a politician, he is a maverick and behaves quixotically in rebelling against the President, thereby sacrificing his career.

He was always dissatisfied, constantly on the moving, constantly moving towards an unreachable frontier, physically and intellectually.

I do not know what the real Crockett was like, but no matter. The screen character was a role model, and so were the classic Western heroes who followed, flaws and all. I am not saying that I consciously tried to imitate them in some childish, playful way, but that their take on life gradually seeped into my sub-conscious. And I expect there was always something in my character that responded to their dislike of joining, their questioning, their self-reliance.

There is obviously a strong streak of selfishness in this. It is libertarian, but not always liberal. It can be male chauvinist, if not outright misogynist. It is obviously anti-socialist, but sometimes it can be anti-social also.

But films in the fifties were moral. Heroes did 'the right thing', without needing the law or God to tell them what it was. Life was complicated, a series of choices and mistakes, compromises and conflicts.

In the film we did not see Davey die, just as we did not see Butch and Sundance die fifteen years later. The reason for this wasn't just that this was a film aimed at children and that his death might upset us. It was also pointing out the immediate translation of the man into myth. There's no need for a hope of heaven when a life itself can be celebrated forever on earth.

Pre-adolescence

I decided early that the name 'Walt Disney' on a film was a guarantee of entertainment and, being a completist, I probably carried on going to see anything with that hallmark long after I could use my age as an excuse. It's easy to be snobbish about Disney and forget that he produced Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and The Great Locomotive Chase. I still remember Tonka and The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca, films which I have never had the opportunity to see again in 45 years. So they must have had something.

Girls didn't feature at this stage. Certainly not in real life and in films they merely delayed the action and generally got in the way. But there was the occasional crush. I shiver with shame now to confess that I had a crush on Hayley Mills and once crept furtively into a cinema to see Pollyanna. I didn't like films with children and I certainly didn't like girls but this one I watched. I even ordered the book and read it.

Actually Pollyanna is not a bad film. Disney again. Efficiently made - I guess it was Robert Stevenson - with an excellent cast, including Wyman, Menjou, Moorehead and Malden. But at the time the only attraction was the safely sexless Hayley.

Adolescence

It may have been the sixties, but I certainly wasn't swinging. In fact I'm not sure many people were, apart from the ones who always had, the aristocrats, the entertainers, the celebrities, etc. I spent the years collecting weekly pop charts and collating them into annual league tables, struggling at school and overcoming a stammer. I did that, by the way, by prefixing difficult dentals with a silent vowel - eg '(er)destination'. By the time I was sixteen I was chairman of the debating society, which proves that it worked.

I was missing out on the cinema. It was years later before I caught up with the British kitchen sink films, or later Hitchcock. I did see Lawrence and Zhivago, but I wasn't a fan, let alone a movie buff at this stage.

Girls, however, were a problem, not one helped by the constant enquiries of adults as to whether or not I was 'courting'. It was the usual angst of a shy teenager and I retreated into religion. If I ask myself now why someone who already considered himself an individualist outsider should sacrifice his reason to a set of unprovable doctrines, I can only reply that I was seduced by a need for certainty. I went through a left-wing socialist stage at the same time.

In both cases I was, however, an extremist. That meant I could still feel different and rebellious. My religion was evangelical, which meant I could condemn Catholics as superstitious, Anglicans as woolly, and the rest of the world as doomed sinners. Great fun!

When I deigned to think about women, my taste showed no signs of improving. The only physical fight I ever got into at school was over the relative merits of Cilla Black and Dionne Warwick. Yes, I was Cilla's champion. For Christ's sake!

Then one day, on TV, I saw Kathy Kirby. At that moment I grew up. Soon I was mourning the death of Marilyn Monroe and singing 'Boo, Boo, Bi-doo' with tears in my eyes. I was going to see Hammer films, especially if they starred Ingrid Pitt. I remember Karen Steele in Corman movies. I rediscovered Shirley Anne Field and Shirley Eaton and Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore (in my innocence I didn't get it).

The first girl I ever invited out -to the pictures of course - was nothing like those goddesses, but she was a couple of years older than I, and therefore reasonably well-developed. Zulu was the chosen film, one of my all-time favourites, so much so that I think I could turn the sound down and quote the dialogue from memory. The loneliness of command, the heroism of the soldiers, the war chant of the Zulus, the competitive singing in return of Men of Harlech, image piled upon image as body is piled upon body. Wonderful stuff. I'm glad the bitch stood me up, because it meant I could watch the film uninterrupted by adolescent fumbling