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Post by london777 on Jun 28, 2017 15:51:54 GMT
MILDRED PIERCE THE MALTESE FALCON BTW, I've heard it tell that TMF was the first American Film noir. Is that true? What do you mean first AMERICAN film noir? Like most film genres noir (despite the french tag) is a creation of America. You are right. The word "American" is redundant here as the first Film Noir would be American by definition. Perhaps snsurone had at the back of her mind the fact that most of the ingredients that made up Film Noir were European in origin (as were most of the principal Noir directors but that is a different issue), like German Expressionist direction and camerawork, French ambivalent characterization, the English tradition of crime writing (especially James Hadley Chase and Raymond Chandler, who was a British citizen during his formative years) and the new craze for European psychology, especially Freud. Some earlier European films are sometimes loosely called Noirs (though not by me) but this is only back-projection. Had America not come up with the (reasonably well defined) Film Noir recipe, no-one would think of labeling them in that way. They would have remained as melodramas, murder mysteries, or whatever. Many are for sure, but they disappear from view like any other poor films. But there are others which are excellent, and inferior only to perhaps the best three or four American noir movies. They are not "imitations", but European film-makers continuing to work in their own ways but strongly influenced by American noir, just as American noir was a continuation of American movie-making but strongly influenced by European ingredients such as those cited above. |
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