Film Noir Primer

Get out the fedoras and trench coats

To help you get into the mood for these upcoming Noir games, we decided to provide you with this backgrounder on the genre. So read on, visit the video store, sit back and enjoy these wickedly fun looks at the depth of human greed and avarice.

Why Noir?
In midst of a recent revival typified by L.A. Confidential, Film Noir traces its roots to World War II, when Hollywood began churning out a series of movies rife with corruption and double crosses. The French dubbed them Film Noir for black film, but they could have just as easily chosen "film grips," for no other type of film plumbs the gray in life better. Film noir acknowledges life's vicissitudes without reducing everything to black and white or sanitizing away the rough edges. It ain't Disney.

These films operate from the precept that villains don't necessarily wear black and good guys don't automatically prevail. Sometimes your best pal will stab you in the back or play you the sucker--just as surely as heroes come with their own set of flaws and weaknesses.

Out of the Past
The classic Film Noir stars Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum as a world-weary private detective with a less than saintly past and weakness for deadly dames (a.k.a. femme fatales) played by Barbara Stanwyck, Rita Hayworth or Lizabeth Scott--a ringer for Kathleen Turner in the 1981 neo-Noir Body Heat. It's black and white and filled with seedy characters running down rain-slicked streets. The guys wear trench coats and fedoras. Dialogue penned by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler or even William Faulkner tends to be hard-boiled and taut. Witness these exchanges from the 1947 Robert Mitchum classic, Out of the Past:

"You're like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another," Mitchum's reformed private eye tells double-crossing Jane Greer at one point, only to be later reminded by his former lover, "You can't make deals with a dead man, Jeff."

Greer also appears in the 1984 remake, Against All Odds, but neither Jeff Bridges or Rachel Ward ignite the way the original duo did, making the movie better known for Phil Collins's title song than anything else. Critics disagree about which film started the original wave--as critics are want to do--splitting between The Maltese Falcon in 1941 and Double Indemnity released three years later. No matter which way you slice it, John Huston's adaptation of the Hammett novel about the quest for the mythical black bird is top notch, with Bogart starting out practically jovial as Sam Spade--you guessed it--a private eye.

When his partner is murdered, Spade turns a little less upbeat. Although ethically challenged--he was fooling around with partner Archer's wife--he does have a code to follow. When your partner is killed, he tells deceptively demure Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), you find the killer. Huston went on to direct two more noir classics, Key Largo (1948) and The Asphalt Jungle with Sterling Hayden in 1950, while Film Noir king Bogart played yet another "shamus" in Howard Hawks' stellar 1946 adaptation of Chandler's The Big Sleep. Here again he's a detective, this time hired to keep an aging millionaire's wayward daughter out of trouble, a task easier said than done. The Big Sleep is also notable for the presence of Bogart's love Bacall as the gambling happy older sister.

Double Indemnity features Stanwyck, one of the best femme fatales of the period, as a double crossing young wife who talks an admiring insurance agent into killing her husband. Directed by Billy Wilder, the movie's good, suffering only in its casting of Fred MacMurray as the willing accomplice. MacMurray's no Bogart and will forever be known as avuncular My Three Sons widower Steve Douglas to the Nick at Nite crowd. (Bonus Nick at Nite tip: That's Beaver's dad, actor Hugh Beaumont, as Alan Ladd's mild mannered Navy pal in The Blue Dahlia, a 1946 noir co-starring Veronica Lake.)

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