Film noir - Wikipedia. Film noir (; French pronunciation: . Hollywood's classical film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1. Itunes Movies For Ipod The Wall (2017).

Film noir of this era is associated with a low- key, black- and- white visual style that has roots in German Expressionistcinematography. Many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic noir derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Great Depression. The term film noir, French for . Before the notion was widely adopted in the 1. Whether film noir qualifies as a distinct genre is a matter of ongoing debate among scholars.

Film noir encompasses a range of plots: the central figure may be a private investigator (The Big Sleep), a plainclothes policeman (The Big Heat), an aging boxer (The Set- Up), a hapless grifter (Night and the City), a law- abiding citizen lured into a life of crime (Gun Crazy), or simply a victim of circumstance (D. O. A.). Although film noir was originally associated with American productions, films now so described have been made around the world. Many pictures released from the 1. Some refer to such latter- day works as neo- noir. If the same private eye gets seduced by the geezer’s wife, kills the old coot for her, gets double- crossed by his lover and ends up shot to death by his old partner from the police force – I can say with complete assurance: you are wallowing in NOIR. Similarly, while the private eye and the femme fatale are character types conventionally identified with noir, the majority of film noirs feature neither; so there is no character basis for genre designation as with the gangster film.

Nor does film noir rely on anything as evident as the monstrous or supernatural elements of the horror film, the speculative leaps of the science fiction film, or the song- and- dance routines of the musical. The opportunities offered by the booming Hollywood film industry and then the threat of Nazism, led to the emigration of many film artists working in Germany who had been involved in the Expressionist movement or studied with its practitioners. Movies of his such as 2. Years in Sing Sing (1. Private Detective 6. Hollywood sound films arguably classifiable as noir—scholar Marc Vernet offers the latter as evidence that dating the initiation of film noir to 1.

Edeson later photographed The Maltese Falcon (1. Films of his such as Shanghai Express (1.

The Devil Is a Woman (1. The commercial and critical success of Sternberg's silent Underworld (1.

Hollywood gangster films. Its visual intricacy and complex, voiceover narrative structure are echoed in dozens of classic films noir. The Lost Weekend (1. Billy Wilder, another Vienna- born, Berlin- trained American auteur, tells the story of an alcoholic in a manner evocative of neorealism.

This semidocumentary approach characterized a substantial number of noirs in the late 1. Along with neorealism, the style had an American precedent cited by Dassin, in director Henry Hathaway's The House on 9.

Happy New Year, damsels and villains! As for Kathyrne's first of the year image, I wonder if those lasers will burn thru one of the wires first, or both at once. Happy Birthday, Hitchcock: His 25 Best Films, Ranked. Gary Tooze runs and owns DVDBeaver located HERE. Share this Rating. Title: The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun (2015) 5.5 /10. Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site?

Street (1. 94. 5), which demonstrated the parallel influence of the cinematic newsreel. Cain (whose The Postman Always Rings Twice appeared five years later), and popularized in pulp magazines such as Black Mask. The classic film noirs The Maltese Falcon (1. The Glass Key (1.

Hammett; Cain's novels provided the basis for Double Indemnity (1. Mildred Pierce (1. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1. Slightly Scarlet (1. Love's Lovely Counterfeit).

A decade before the classic era, a story by Hammett was the source for the gangster melodrama City Streets (1. Rouben Mamoulian and photographed by Lee Garmes, who worked regularly with Sternberg. Wedding a style and story both with many noir characteristics, released the month before Lang's M, City Streets has a claim to being the first major film noir. Not only were Chandler's novels turned into major noirs—Murder, My Sweet (1. Farewell, My Lovely), The Big Sleep (1. Lady in the Lake (1.

Double Indemnity, The Blue Dahlia (1. Strangers on a Train (1. Where Chandler, like Hammett, centered most of his novels and stories on the character of the private eye, Cain featured less heroic protagonists and focused more on psychological exposition than on crime solving. No writer's published work provided the basis for more films noir of the classic period than Woolrich's: thirteen in all, including Black Angel (1.

Deadline at Dawn (1. Fear in the Night (1.

Burnett, whose first novel to be published was Little Caesar, in 1. It was turned into a hit for Warner Bros.

At least one important reference work identifies the latter as a film noir despite its early date. During the classic era, his work, either as author or screenwriter, was the basis for seven films now widely regarded as films noir, including three of the most famous: High Sierra (1. Ipod Lost In The Sun (2015) 2010. This Gun for Hire (1.

The Asphalt Jungle (1. While City Streets and other pre- WWII crime melodramas such as Fury (1. You Only Live Once (1. Fritz Lang, are categorized as full- fledged noir in Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward's film noir encyclopedia, other critics tend to describe them as . He later played secondary roles in several other formative American noirs.

Though modestly budgeted, at the high end of the B movie scale, Stranger on the Third Floor still lost its studio, RKO, $5. It's a film too arty for average audiences, and too humdrum for others.

From January through December deep shadows, clutching hands, exploding revolvers, sadistic villains and heroines tormented with deeply rooted diseases of the mind flashed across the screen in a panting display of psychoneurosis, unsublimated sex and murder most foul. Donald Marshman, Life (August 2.

In this production context, writers, directors, cinematographers, and other craftsmen were relatively free from typical big- picture constraints. There was more visual experimentation than in Hollywood filmmaking as a whole: the Expressionism now closely associated with noir and the semi- documentary style that later emerged represent two very different tendencies. Narrative structures sometimes involved convoluted flashbacks uncommon in non- noir commercial productions.

In terms of content, enforcement of the Production Code ensured that no film character could literally get away with murder or be seen sharing a bed with anyone but a spouse; within those bounds, however, many films now identified as noir feature plot elements and dialogue that were very risqu. The signal film in this vein was Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder; setting the mold was Barbara Stanwyck's unforgettable femme fatale, Phyllis Dietrichson—an apparent nod to Marlene Dietrich, who had built her extraordinary career playing such characters for Sternberg. An A- level feature all the way, the film's commercial success and seven Oscar nominations made it probably the most influential of the early noirs. The iconic noir counterpart to the femme fatale, the private eye, came to the fore in films such as The Maltese Falcon (1. Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, and Murder, My Sweet (1. Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe. Other seminal noir sleuths served larger institutions, such as Dana Andrews' police detective in Laura (1.

Edmond O'Brien's insurance investigator in The Killers, and Edward G. Robinson's government agent in The Stranger (1. The prevalence of the private eye as a lead character declined in film noir of the 1. As described by Paul Schrader, . Hammer overturns the underworld in search of the 'great whatsit' . They regard true film noir as belonging to a temporally and geographically limited cycle or period, treating subsequent films that evoke the classics as fundamentally different due to general shifts in filmmaking style and latter- day awareness of noir as a historical source for allusion. Debuting as a director with The Maltese Falcon (1.

John Huston followed with Key Largo (1. The Asphalt Jungle (1. Opinion is divided on the noir status of several Alfred Hitchcock thrillers from the era; at least four qualify by consensus: Shadow of a Doubt (1.

Entertainment News - Los Angeles Times. Katie Walsh. The name.