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theseatheseatheopensea invited me to make one, so here is a list of a
hundred films noirs. It is non-completist. It is non-proscriptive. I had intended it to start with proto-noir and end with neo-noir, but it turned out I had far more than a hundred noirs of the classically defined period to winnow down from and any number of solid citizens and weird little ornaments had already been left by the side of the meme. Like all of the other lists, it will be different tomorrow. Anything on this one that I haven't written about, rest assured that I want to. I would, however, need to sleep more than an hour, which is how the last couple of nights have been going.
no subject
*SHAKES GROGGER*
graduate school.
I never think of it from a perspective of noir, but that's mostly because I was introduced to it as one of three cinematic representations of the diabolical in the last unit of Andrew Swensen's COML 127a "Night, Death, and the Devil: The Fantastic and the Grotesque." Its absence from this list is a factor of too many other competitors. Reed's Odd Man Out (1947) and The Man Between (1953) also missed the cut. I'm not sure if The Fallen Idol (1948) counts as noir, but if I ever made a strictly British list where I had more latitude, I'd try to sneak it on there.
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... I know far less about noir as a genre than you do, but The Third Man feels too... world-historical? As in, noir theoretically deals in archetypes and abstractions, but they're archetypes and abstractions that theoretically anyone could step into, the Small-Time Crook Down On His Luck, the (eternally questionable, it doesn't work like that in the movies actually but) Femme Fatale. Whereas I'm not saying one should use The Third Man as an allegorical representation of the behavior of various of the Great Powers just post-war, because one really shouldn't, but the important thing is that one could. Even when noir goes possibly-allegorical, it's allegory for smaller things: citizens of a town or country, not the town or country itself. Noir is about people on a human level. Which is also a major reason Pasolini's Mamma Roma is not noir, although content-wise it could appear to be at thirty paces.
And a lot of the horror of The Third Man is the way that the world-historical tramples, smashes, doesn't even notice the human level, but people have to go on being human after all that anyway. In noir, people have generally had some time to go on being human, and are looking at what that has turned them into.
... does that sound right to you? I have no qualifications for this, just vibes.
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It really isn't that I was taught to think of it as another kind of movie and therefore can't change the classification. I watch movies all the time which are presented to me one way and about which I disagree. I could even turn around and use the supernatural aura of The Third Man to argue for its inclusion in the noir canon, since any number of films which I definitely consider noir have that quality where if the weirdness broke surface it would actually start to make sense—for a variety of reasons including it not actually being a real argument I wouldn't, but the film itself did cross my mind for this list because it is traditionally filed as a noir and I like it (although not more than The Fallen Idol, for which I would rather stretch the definition and which still got left out). I can even understand why it gets the categorization: it contains many of the narrative and stylistic tropes, including my own criterion of the shape-shifting world; it's not being confused with a noir just because it has a well-photographed crime in it. I like your point about the world-historical angle, but there's also an element which just clicked in thinking of it in constellation with films outside its director's catalogue, because I realized from my own description that it has something of the same feel for me as Ministry of Fear (1944), in which case the commonality is not Carol Reed or Fritz Lang but Graham Greene, who is clearly interested in shape-shifting, in nightmare, in existentialism, in complicity, all prime noir territory which he seems to investigate in slightly different directions and toward slightly different ends than film noir. I noticed it with the otherwise trashable 1958 film of The Quiet American, whose half-in, half-out of noir ambience lends a veneer of ambiguity to its morally simpleminded proceedings and was not grafted on by the DP (Robert Krasker, of The Third Man) when the same tone can be found in the prose of the novel, admittedly there lined up with the emotional-political action. tl;dr I do not think I would fight anyone who classifies The Third Man as film noir whereas I fully believe that anyone who does the same with Chicago Calling (1951) just hasn't seen enough non-melodramas in black and white, but it feels to me more than it intersects with the mode rather than really employing it. We should watch Brighton Rock (1948), considered one of the canonical British noirs. I'd like to know if it would look that way to us.