Because there must have been some influence from film criticism and I really don't know enough about that? The term "film noir" itself was first applied to a grouping of American movies in an essay written by Nino Frank in 1946, encompassing John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Otto Preminger's Laura (1944), Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet (1944), Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), and Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944). To me, that looks like two hardboiled adaptations (one Hammett, one Chandler), one stealth feminist suspense story (Vera Caspary), one bad romance (James M. Cain, who didn't like being labeled as a writer and especially didn't think that what he wrote was "tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called"), and one hilarious black-comedy nightmare (based apparently on a novel by J.H. Wallis about which I know nothing; the ending was Lang's get-out-of-jail card with the PCA, but it's the rare case where I think the results were great). As a cross-section of the genre available in 1946, or at least available to a French critic in 1946, it's a little weird but not terrible. Two private eyes, one policeman, one no-good who gets an opportunity, one ordinary citizen whose life falls down the rabbit hole. Sympathetic women as well as dangerous ones and not just the good girls who need to be saved, either. I have no idea how Frank saw any of these stories or characters, of course, but the point is that it's not just detectives and gun molls as far as the eye can see. The seminal survey of the genre was Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton's Panorama du film noir américain 1941–1953 (1955) and that also must have included more than hardboiled noir; I haven't read it either, or any of the succeeding criticism of the '70's. So I'm absolutely in agreement that the availability of models can make a huge difference to the popular image of a genre—I'd seen some non-mainstream noirs before last November and I have still been radically revising my impressions in the last ten months—but there's also the process by which films are canonized or excluded or contested and I have very little idea of how any of that went down, except that every time bookelfe quotes something else by Foster Hirsch, I disagree with him more.
no subject
Because there must have been some influence from film criticism and I really don't know enough about that? The term "film noir" itself was first applied to a grouping of American movies in an essay written by Nino Frank in 1946, encompassing John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Otto Preminger's Laura (1944), Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet (1944), Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), and Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944). To me, that looks like two hardboiled adaptations (one Hammett, one Chandler), one stealth feminist suspense story (Vera Caspary), one bad romance (James M. Cain, who didn't like being labeled as a writer and especially didn't think that what he wrote was "tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called"), and one hilarious black-comedy nightmare (based apparently on a novel by J.H. Wallis about which I know nothing; the ending was Lang's get-out-of-jail card with the PCA, but it's the rare case where I think the results were great). As a cross-section of the genre available in 1946, or at least available to a French critic in 1946, it's a little weird but not terrible. Two private eyes, one policeman, one no-good who gets an opportunity, one ordinary citizen whose life falls down the rabbit hole. Sympathetic women as well as dangerous ones and not just the good girls who need to be saved, either. I have no idea how Frank saw any of these stories or characters, of course, but the point is that it's not just detectives and gun molls as far as the eye can see. The seminal survey of the genre was Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton's Panorama du film noir américain 1941–1953 (1955) and that also must have included more than hardboiled noir; I haven't read it either, or any of the succeeding criticism of the '70's. So I'm absolutely in agreement that the availability of models can make a huge difference to the popular image of a genre—I'd seen some non-mainstream noirs before last November and I have still been radically revising my impressions in the last ten months—but there's also the process by which films are canonized or excluded or contested and I have very little idea of how any of that went down, except that every time