The Illusion of Depth

Please note that this week's film has been rated  18  in the UK. Funny thing about "Dark Cinema". It doesn't stay dark forever. Film Noir was the result of a specific set of elements that happened to coalesce in the post-war years: the influx of European film-makers trying to adjust to the American system; the highly restrictive Hollywood production codes; the appetite of a war-weary audience for complex stories with a little meat, etc. etc. If you pull too hard on any one of those threads, the whole "noir" tapestry can unravel, and that's more or less what happened as the 1940s gave way to the 1950s. Time passed. Society changed. The Government began cracking down on "subversive" elements in the film industry, the Baby Boom led to a drastically different movie-going demographic, and there was an explicit push to undo many of the social freedoms that women had enjoyed during the war years. (Remember all those juicy femmes fatale of the 1940...

Please note that this week's film has been rated    15   in the UK. One of the hallmarks of the "noir" film style has to be its stark and very distinctive black-and-white cinematography. Black and white was by no means unique to film noir, but there were few other film styles of the era that made such constructive use of the contrast between light and shadow. A lot of this was of course a legacy of the German Expressionist style, which had exerted an outsized influence on many of the film-makers who found themselves in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s. Shadows in noir are not just a side-effect of room lighting; they are almost characters unto themselves, advancing the story, establishing the dynamics between characters and giving noir its distinctive flavour. This is what Expressionism means. The images themselves are telling the story. Black and White. But Not Necessarily in That Order. When talking about noir (or about any aspect of cinema from this particular era in Am...

Last week I screened Anthony Mann's low-budget Raw Deal, one of the noir-est of noirs of the 1940s, and a mini expressionist masterpiece of shadow and psycho-drama. It tells the story of an escaped convict who makes an ill-fated break for freedom in the company of his devoted girlfriend and another woman who gets dragged along as a semi-hostage. This week's film was released six years later and stars Edward G. Robinson as... an escaped convict who makes an ill-fated break for freedom in the company of his devoted girlfriend and another woman who gets dragged along as a semi-hostage. The two films may have a very similar premise, but that's more or less where the resemblance ends, and the contrast between Raw Deal and Black Tuesday provides a stark insight into just how much had changed in the American zeitgeist during those intervening years. In Raw Deal , Joe (Dennis O'Keefe) is presented as a sympathetic character. We are never told exactly what he had done to wind ...

I'm sure many of you will have noticed by now that our last several films have featured stories about Law Enforcement officers working tirelessly (and often over -zealously) to keep us safe from everything dangerous, nefarious or just plain bad . You may or may not be happy to hear that our next film is very much a return to the older style of noir. When we reconvened after the Easter break, I had said I wanted to showcase films that were "almost, but not quite" Noir . I described them as " Noir-Adjacent " or Near Dark . But Noir is a very difficult term to define, partly because it was never meant to be a genre . When trying to establish what Noir is , it sometimes helps to examine what it isn't . Films like Appointment With Danger and even Union Station were starting to feel distinctly removed from the more unambiguous noir of the preceding decade. If anyone doesn't believe me, you have only to watch Raw Deal and you'll see what I mean. Full dis...