By Andrew Spicer
Movie noir―literally "black cinema"―is the label normally given to a bunch of black and white American movies, usually crime thrillers, made among 1940 and 1959. this day there's huge dispute approximately what are the shared beneficial properties that classify a noir movie, and hence which movies could be integrated during this type. those difficulties are partially brought on simply because movie noir is a retrospective label that was once no longer utilized in the Nineteen Forties or Nineteen Fifties by way of the movie as a creation class and for that reason its lifestyles and lines can't be tested via connection with exchange documents.
The Historical Dictionary of movie Noir is a entire advisor that levels from 1940 to give day neo-noir. It contains a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, a filmography, and over four hundred cross-referenced dictionary entries on each point of movie noir and neo-noir, together with key motion pictures, team of workers (actors, cinematographers, composers, administrators, manufacturers, set designers, and writers), subject matters, matters, affects, visible sort, cycles of movies (e.g. amnesiac noirs), the illustration of the town and gender, other kinds (comics/graphic novels, tv, and videogames), and noir's presence in international cinema. it really is a vital reference paintings for all these attracted to this crucial cultural phenomenon.
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Extra resources for Historical Dictionary of Film Noir (Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts)
Anything of an exception used to be The 3rd guy (1949), with an unique screenplay by way of Graham Greene, a world coproduction set in wartorn Vienna. within the Nineteen Fifties, British noirs tended to be nearly solely secondfeature crime motion pictures. The impact of yank noir was once more advantageous, together with using imported moment department American leads in addition to 32 • BRITISH movie NOIR the presence of yankee administrators, significantly Cy Endfield and Joseph Losey, fleeing the blacklist. motion pictures equivalent to The Flanagan Boy (U. S. identify undesirable Blonde, 1953), Marilyn (U. S. name Roadhouse lady, 1953), a remake of James M. Cain’s The Postman consistently jewelry two times, and Impulse (1955) intentionally copied American versions. although, such a lot British noirs retained an emphasis on usual humans, no longer a indifferent underworld, and melded the speed and motion of yank motion pictures with the depiction of resonantly British milieux. this can be exemplified within the motion pictures of Ken Hughes, together with vast Boy (1952), the home around the Lake (U. S. name warmth Wave, 1954), and The mind computer (1955), during which Maxwell Reed performed a brain-damaged, psychopathic gangster relocating via an evocative underworld of sleazy tenements and seedy Soho nightclubs. Hughes’s The lengthy Haul (1957), during which Victor Mature battles it out between difficult British truck drivers, used to be commonplace of the remodeled visible kind, a bleak, chilling realism shot in a chilly, demanding, naturalistic lighting fixtures that corresponded to the brutal violence of the motion. different examples contain Seth Holt’s Nowhere to move (1958) and 3 movies starring Stanley Baker: Endfield’s Hell Drivers (1957), Losey’s The felony (U. S. name Concrete Jungle, 1960), and Val Guest’s Hell Is a urban (1960). The final used to be set in Manchester, normal of a British “New Wave” impulse to discover provincial towns: Liverpool in Violent Playground (1958), past This position (U. S. name net of proof, 1959), and within the Wake of a Stranger (1959), and Newcastle in Payroll (U. S. name I Promised to Pay, 1961). there has been a prolific sequence of hour-long updates of Edgar Wallace’s fiction (1960–64) that minimized the macabre components in prefer of a brusque realism, as in Alan Bridges’s Act of homicide (1964) and John Moxey’s Face of a Stranger (1964). After the death of the assisting function and the alternative of black-and-white through colour, British noir went into abeyance till a cycle of American-funded crime movies emerged starting with The unusual Affair (1968), the 1st movie to confess that the police will be except admirable. P. C. unusual (Michael York), whose tale is advised in flashback after his arrest and conviction, will get stuck up in a altering London pervaded through medicines and pornography and the place police should be bribed or bend the foundations. Sidney Lumet’s The Offence (1972), starring Sean Connery, used to be a fair extra anxious examine the fashionable policeman. Villain (1971), Sitting objective (1972), Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972), and, chiefly, Mike Hodges’s Get Carter (1971) all in favour of BRITISH movie NOIR • 33 criminals who, following the trial of the infamous Kray twins, have been depicted as simply as ruthless, sadistic, and psychopathically violent as their American opposite numbers.