The Live-Action "Snow White"!

Welcome back!

I hope everyone had a pleasant and refreshing holiday break. As you will no doubt remember, we have been spending the past few months exploring what I called Post-Depression Tragedy... by which I meant the "dark cinema" of the years that followed the Great Depression.

As you may have figured out by now, this was an era when Hollywood was more than willing to get down and dirty, with the sex; with the violence; with the cha-cha-cha (always under the watchful eye of the censors, of course).

But "noir" (whereof I am speaking) is notoriously hard to pin down - probably because it was never actually a genre. It was a consequence of a specific moment in history, and the convergence of a number of cultural threads that all came together in post-war Hollywood to create something distinctive, albeit difficult to define.

Who's the Femme-est Fatale of all...?

As we enter the "Spring season" I want to turn my attention to films that aren't quite noir. When a word is as fuzzy as this, it's sometimes easier to define it by looking at what it isn't.

With that in mind, I'm going to spend the next couple of months exploring films that are not noir... exactly.

We can call them Noir-Adjacent... or "Near Dark".

And I think we should begin with the live-action Snow White.

For the benefit of those of you out there who are immune to such things, Walt Disney's Snow White was released in 1937 (based on a typically grisly Grimm Brothers fairy tale) and is widely regarded today as cinema's first animated feature film.

Snow White was to become the gold standard for generations to come. It established the archetype of the "Disney Princess", it made dwarves adorable and it established the "cutesy-wootsy" school of song-writing that was to become a Disney hallmark (and the bane of parents everywhere).

It was inevitable that emotions would be running high when Disney released a live-action remake of their beloved classic, and the situation was not helped by the fact that their new film managed to charge headfirst into the most volatile, shark-infested region of the Culture Wars in which we are all currently living.

Who knows what future generations are going to make of this particular moment in history, but I for one would not be surprised if the 2025 Snow White winds up sitting on a shelf next to Song of the South in the Walt Disney archives.

As of this writing, the new live-action Snow White is on course to become one of the most hated films of the 21st Century, with an IMDB rating even lower than Cuties (which was inaccurately accused of promoting paedophilia, just to put things in perspective).

So what, you may ask, does this new Snow White have to do with noir?

The answer is nothing, as far as I know, which is why I have no intention of showing it. I'm going to be screening Ball of Fire this Thursday.

Ball of Fire is the other live-action adaptation of the "Snow White" story. No cartoons were harmed in the making of this movie. It tells the story of "Sugarpuss O' Shea" (Barbara Stanwyck) a ganger's moll-cum-Showgirl-cum-"lady of the night" who needs a place to hide from the District Attorney until the heat blows over.

She finds herself a temporary haven with a group of elderly professors who have been holed up for years writing a new encyclopaedia. 

Screenwriter Billy Wilder has stated very openly that the story was meant to be his version of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves".

But this cannot be stressed too strongly: Billy Wilder is not Walt Disney.

Every single object in the entire universe is either a Duck, or Not a Duck.

The difference is usually obvious.

Ball of Fire was released in 1941, and has many of the ingredients of a Film Noir. Don't forget it was Billy Wilder who directed Double Indemnity just a few years later.

Here, Barbara Stanwyck, plays what feels an awful lot like a femme fatale.

Her gangster friends include none other then Dan Duryea (the "King of Noir" as you may recall)...

And even Elisha Cook Jr. makes an appearance, as he is wont to do in more noirs than one can comfortably count.

But you aren't going to find Ball of Fire on anyone's list of classic noirs.

True, it features an upright, forthright, law-abiding young man who falls for the wrong girl and finds himself drawn into a world of gangsters and sex. 

But, well... this just isn't "dark cinema".

For one thing, Ball of Fire is directed by Howard Hawks, who famously had no interest in "bad guys". He never wastes screen-time on characters whose ethics he doesn't respect. He also likes strong women with (ahem) experience, so Sugarpuss' bona-fides don't make her a vixen or a floozy or a hussy... they make her the hero.

If this Snow White wants her Prince to, um... come? then by golly she's going to do something about it.

Make no mistake: Ball of Fire is not noir. But... you can see it from here.

We will screen Ball of Fire at 7.30 on Thursday, the 8th of May at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

Not every live-action Snow White needs to ignite a full-blown Culture War!