Film Noir

There's a lot that could be said about film noir, most of which has been said better before by someone else. The quick skinny is noir is guided by principals, taken from its heyday post world war 2 and my interpretation of them is below. They serve as guiding principals to making the show, and equally important to selling what it's about to broadcasters.

Characters in noir demonstrate darker human psychologies: obsessions, addictions, sexual perversion, lonliness, desperation, lust and you can keep adding to it in your own time somewhere dark.

Generally speaking there are no heros. Stories unfolded with mostly 'decent ordinary people' getting way over their head into something they shouldn't (sometimes via a femme fatalle, sometimes not) and once in over their head, they know their demise isn't far off but, and this is the cruncher and what makes noir so addictive, they can't do anything to stop themselves plummeting to a tragic ending, even though they are usually aware that said bad ending is heading their way.

At the end of Scarlett Street poor Edward G. Robinson walks Central Park in the cold telling cops to lock him up, these cops laugh at him, not knowing he killed his lover after he found out she was cheating on him and propelled by a series of incidents where fate itself seemed to work against him, he left normal life, lost everything he had including, eventually, his mind.

I'm not suggesting you watch Scarlett Street, but its up there and its an excellent inspiration for camera angles and lighting.



The lead's name is Chris Cross. Brilliant. Cheese maybe, but brilliant.

That's another aspect of noir - its not high art, although Burns (arguably a neo-noir-est) brings it up to high art - but it grew out of the hard boiler thrillers written in the twenties and thirties when America was in a time of great transition, when the country was stripping back the wallpaper and finding everything wasn't rosy.

One of the reasons noir was so successful and had its heyday post world war 2 was because of the need for a more relaxed morality, to see characters and people as they really were. War had been tough. Noir in many ways,  though tragic, offered a place were the audience could watch and remind themselves that the only judge of a man, is the man himself, and that we are all prone to make mistakes.

Nice noir resource charting the history and key films: http://filmsnoir.net/