Interesting. It would not have occurred to me to call this noir. Dark, certainly, but not noir.
Inception
Fight Club
most of the good ones have already been named anyway, so we’re in to bending territory, I suppose
…but, yeah… Chinatown
Icewind Dale might be film noir.
The Nice Guys (and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) are made from a checklist of noir elements, so I think they count while still being comedies. The jokes often clash with the darkness of the stories they tell. Winter’s Bone also qualifies and is one of the better movies in list.
The implication of this is that whether or not a later film is “noir” is fuzzy, unless they explicitly reference the classic period of the genre.
But I would never have considered
to be noir.
Look at the tone of the films (both have dark palettes, Fight Club especially: it’s a black film); consider the lead female characters, overall arc…
shrug
Both have ‘femme fatales’ holding strong influences over the male lead.
You have Mal jumping from a window ledge and Maria saying “Oh my god, your face”
I defer to our host:
Yeah there’s no shortage of debate about what a noir is. Is Nightcrawler specifically noir, or just a dark movie? (But then are Ace in the Hole and Sunset Boulavard not noir as well?)
There’s also a major distinction between hard-boiled and noir which people often gloss over. A movie can be hard-boiled and not noir (His Girl Friday), or noir but not specifically hard-boiled (e.g. I dunno Sicario.) This is important because Chandler and most of his offshoots/derivatives are hard-boiled but not, at their heart, noir. (No really, Marlowe is based on a freaking parfait gentil knight, not a doomed soul who causes his own destruction.)
To me noir requires dark city streets, preferably raining. Certainly a femme fatale helps, though not an absolutely requirement. There is usually a fall-guy involved. Usually some gaslighting or at least a double-cross at some point.
I know that’s not a universal definition by any means, but the concept of “country noir” just doesn’t work for me.
I liked this infographic that the BFI put out a few years back, though it explicitly excludes modern noir:
Oh that is extremely cool. Love it.
That is nice, and does a better job of explaining what I was saying than I did.
Film noir is a descriptive term used by critics, and as far as I can tell few (or none) of the classic noirs were intentionally made to fit the label. So any movie can be noir if it reminds you of classic Hollywood dark movies. The discussion page for Wikipedia’s film noir article is as expected an endless back-and-forth over what noir is and what movies qualify. No point in arguing, but I’m to do so anyway.
Very little rain in the classic noir canon. Old Hollywood preferred setting movies in California, and if possible indoors.
You could make a good argument that the run of erotic thrillers kicked off by Body heat were neo-noirs.
Anyway, earlier than 2007, but since I can’t see them mentioned, Carl Franklin had a real good run before he got stuck in television directing. Devil in a Blue Dress of course, but also check out One False Move and Out of Time.
Very little rain. Lots of wet streets in exterior shots. That’s because cinematographers loved the way they looked on screen, reflecting light in night scenes.
This convention is still widely used even today. Just a couple days ago I was watching a show in Netflix with a scene set in a parking lot where the pavement was drenched. That might not be remarkable - except it was a completely enclosed underground parking lot …
That’s a good one. Guess you could lump that in with Winter’s Bone and maybe the Ozark series as a kind of Arkansas Noir theme.
Yeah, my understanding is that’s standard practice when filming pavement at night–though if you notice it without specifically looking for it, it means they probably went a bit overboard.
My wife and I are huge Film Noir aficianados. Always looking for one that we missed.
Of course, in the older Noirs, if the Main Character had committed any kind of major crime, especially murder, no matter how much he did to make up for it, he had to die in the last scene, on the stairs of some building, in the rain, with the Good Girl holding his head and crying, after he dies in a heroic shootout.
Thanks for the suggestions! I love Out of Time, but I haven’t seen the others.
Devil with a Blue Dress is terrific and should have spawned a fullblown Easy Rawlins franchise. As good as Denzel Washington is, Don Cheadle totally upstages him as the sidekick. It’s actually playing in a 35mm print near me this weekend in a Carl Franklin festival. I would love to see it in that format but 1) toddler 2) pandemic.