Film noir is is my favourite silver screen genre.
These downbeat stories of ordinary lives gone hopelessly astray crackle with hard-boiled dialogue.
They're set in modern urban wastelands, usually at night, in claustrophobic rooms where the actors are framed in tight shots that create a mood of entrapment.
Films like Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon reflected America’s postwar mood. The classic period only lasted from 1941 until the mid-1950s, but their visual style continues to influence movies today.
I’ve seen every A-list film noir multiple times, and most of the B-movies, too. I’ve wanted to do a podcast conversation about these silver screen gems since I started Personal Landscapes.
Who better to speak to than the film historian who wrote the definitive study?
Foster Hirsch is the author of 16 books on film and theatre, including Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties, and Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen. He is a professor of film at Brooklyn College, and a frequent host and moderator at repertory cinemas and film festivals.
You can read more about him on his website.
We spoke about film noir’s roots in hard-boiled fiction, how German Expressionism shaped its aesthetic, and what was happening in 1950s Hollywood as film noir — and the studio system — came to an end.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:
We also mentioned:
Hard boiled writers: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich
Fritz Lang: Scarlet Street
Billy Wilder: Double Indemnity; Sunset Boulevard
French Crime Films: Rififi; Bob le Flambeur; Elevator to the Gallows
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