The Genre With No Name
by Joe Carducci
Provisional vids The Blind Lead (shown above) and What About Me
refract noir sensibilities for current day audiences...
THIS PAGE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY PICPAL.COM THE PICTURE PALACE
Provisional vids The Blind Lead (shown above) and What About Me
refract noir sensibilities for current day audiences...
"A new realism was being seen in other film genres after the war as well. Much of this has come to be called noir, but what is taken to be noir is often just traditional B-movie toughness amplified for an audience changed by the war. Films considered compromised noir (hopeful endings) or noir-influenced are often films of other pre-existing styles altogether. (Remember that noir in practice is a marketing revision used to peddle black and white film catalogs and as such splashes all over distributor's warehouses.) The despair of films that might properly be called noir was a product of Europeans in exile due to the war, and what passed for highbrow Hollywood. The Europeans had good reason to be glum. American intellectuals, including here the Hollywood left, were uneasy because WWII and the cold war that followed had put a premium on the physical skills of those classes beneath them, and made socialism anathema.
"America before the war was primarily sub-middle class and these were who won that war, and this is why their new film heroes, though rough-hewn and weighted with their pasts, did not despair and did not often die in the final reel.
"Noir's romanticism was based in tawdry, anti-heroic sub-tragic failure. The post-war heroic film's romanticism was based in costly, even tragic, success. As America had won the war after a series of just such tragic successes, one can say that the latter genre was more rooted in American reality. American audiences were certainly far more interested in heroic cinema than were critics and aesthetes; this is simple class dynamic. Critics, as writers, tend to glorify any author's appropriation of rectitude, even from his own characters. It is the author's prerogative and its exercise, not the work which interests them. If Charles Bronson failed and then died in squalor in his films they'd be considered modern noir and be much studied, though less well attended."
