Watch: Maltese Falcon; Detour; The Set Up; DOA; Touch of Evil; Double Indemnity

Read: A Panorama of American Film Noir by Borde and Chaumeton

Party people and you film buffs,

Why, you ask, will we discuss this. It's so old and hokey. Old is hokey. Talk about politics and ipods and cutting edge technology.

I respond with a quick slap to the face.

This is one of the greatest eras in American Film. It began in 1941 with an epic movie and an epic leading actor: The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart. It came at a time when the United States was starving and weak from the Great Depression. Teeth bared and sharp and gritting hard from pain. The party of the 1920's was over and the hangover was here, hard, those who had become drunk from the excess now hated the world with a headache as big as Europe.



Color film had just been introduced and musicals capitalized on the goodness of it all to try to keep people in love with the saccharine. At the same time, many film directors and cinematographers from Europe were fleeing to the United States, the only nation not involved in World War II at the time. Therein began a harsh reaction that sent movies reeling away from the imagined prosperity and glee. Things weren't about smiles and happy feet anymore. People were poor. Damnit. People were hungry. Imagine you need to feed your family and you see store owners pouring good milk into the sewers, tossing produce into the trash, because they'd rather get rid of their stock and lose the money than give it away.

Films like the Maltese Falcon began to slap these musical films silly, essentially saying, "wake up. Why the hell are you dancing? You look like a fool with those tapping shoes."

Then, the morose of it all shifted films into the extreme and birthed Film Noir. With the Maltese Falcon, one saw a story line where the happy ending dissolved into an ending where no one came out clean. The good guys got beat. The bad guys wound up losing what they were after. Even in terms of character, the 'good guy' didn't even exist. The protagonist you followed on screen was often a crooked and lusty private investigator or a man who's trying to get away from his life and cheat on his girl every chance he got.

Take a look at Bogart's face. This is you're protagonist now.



The effect of these films and this kind of character acting was so profound that people on the street seriously thought that Bogart was a real tough guy like the characters he played on screen. Lucky for him, he was a real tough guy and he kicked serious ass. But I digress.

One can even attribute Film Noir to the advancement of the female character, which would soon be complimented by the 'Rosie the Riveter' campaign that promoted female independence and the image of the working woman, while the men were either enlisted or got drafted to fight in Europe and the Pacific soon after Pearl Harbor.

In Film Noir specifically, the damsel in distress and the innocent, fervently valued woman archetypes were replaced by the sly and foxy and ultimately corrupted. The woman who had her own plans and a gun to get her way. Unlike the singing dancing and melodramatic, this woman lied, had sexual hunger, was selfish and vicious just like the men. To the extreme, she was like this all the damned time.



Needless to say, all the leading ladies today can attribute the depth and complexity of their roles to this movement in film and storytelling. The men too, who the hell would want to keep singing and dancing and forgetting that across the middle part of America dust storms killed vast acres of crops and destroyed the farming economy? People were hungry. Damnit.

Film Noir also incorporated the best in film effects and in the best way--being poor. The bulk of films in this genre were produced by B-rated companies and therefore budgets were low. No color for these films. No expensive backdrops and special effects. They did it the hard way. The hard core way, through the use of dynamic camera angles and use of lighting. The most notable of techniques was Chiaroscuro--the use of shadows to create dynamic effects so to result in visual tension. Thank Film Noir for the image of the menacing shadow crawling up the wall. It began with shadowy figures of men and women running around in their dark dark world with so many secrets and guns that have fired too many bullets.