More On Noir and Two Additional Silents You Should See

Chronicles ^ | January 09, 2015 | Ray Olson

[Pelham]

By:Ray Olson | January 09, 2015

One responder to my previous post, “Notes on noir”, asked why so many movies are called film noir when, by my lights, they’re not. The simple, somewhat cheeky answer is “brand creep”: film noir is a bankable label for a crime movie, so it’s come to be liberally applied. More to the point is that professional film critics by and large don’t use as restrictive a definition of noir—viz., that the form tells stories “about little guys and gals getting a raw deal in a world that never gives them an even chance”—as mine, preferring film-stylistic rather than literary-dramatic criteria to establish what’s noir. They’re perfectly entitled to do so, of course, though the characteristics of cinematography, acting, dialogue, and music so important to them I like to think of not as essentials but as “highly welcome complements.”

Very similar stylistic elements figure in many movies made during the heyday of noir in the 1940’s and ’50’s. Moreover, those elements are used to conjure the Weltanschauung of noir. The collaborations of director Sam Wood and production designer William Cameron Menzies (who coined his own job title on Gone with the Wind) look more noir than the vast preponderance of the real McCoy. But would anyone be comfortable calling the romantic comedy, The Devil and Miss Jones (1941); the small-town exposé, Kings Row (1943); and the profile of baseball great Lou Gehrig, Pride of the Yankees (1943), film noir?

Still, to pick a glorious f’r-instance, the devastating last shot of Pride is as cosmically fatalistic as any in the whole corpus of the definitively noir director-cinematographer team of Anthony Mann and John Alton. Gehrig has just said his famous farewell speech (“. . . today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of

[Joe 6-pack]

“Angel Heart” would certainly qualify for that list...

[lonevoice]

Here’s a thread you might enjoy

[Pelham]

“Angel Heart would certainly qualify for that list.”

Another excellent choice.

[Pelham]

I’m good with that.