crimeonfilm.com
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The Pygmalion Complex in Film Noir: Benevolent Tyrants Who Create Their Ideal Women
In noir, dark characters who aim to control the vulnerable are easy to spot. Blackmailers, femmes fatale and hardened criminals exert their grip on others in unsubtle ways. But sometimes the aggressor arrives with a smile and a bouquet of roses. He may present a polished image, but his intentions are always unsavory. In “Pygmalion,”…
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In noir, life insurance appeals to profit-minded killers
Few noir plots are as coldly logical as insurance murder. Unlike inheritance killings, which require wealth, insurance turns death into an accessible commodity. It democratizes murder. Movie gangsters who kill often say it’s strictly business, nothing personal. But with insurance fraudsters, it’s typically a family affair, and it’s always deeply personal. Here are some noirs…
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Pure noir exposes crime films’ darkest, most pessimistic core
Noir comes in a number of hybrid varieties, including gangster films, heists, police procedurals and private detective stories. But some noirs don’t use standard crime film types as their foundation. Pure noirs, told from the point of view of characters who are neither career criminals nor law enforcers, plainly reveal the genre’s darkest tenets: that…
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Skepticism takes a holiday: When noir became public relations
Noir traditionally thrives on moral instability. Criminals, police, politicians and ordinary citizens occupy the same compromised terrain, where motives blur and institutions rarely deserve trust.But a parallel strain of postwar crime films moved in the opposite direction. Documentary-style procedurals borrowed noir’s visual tension while stripping away its skepticism, replacing ambiguity with institutional certainty and turning…
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Noir mirrors: A broken world reflected in shattered glass
In the often disjointed world of film noir, a mirror is seldom just a mirror. Those silvery reflective surfaces can suggest a lot of things: paranoia, dual personalities and narcissism, to name just a few. They also distort reality. Facing mirrors may reflect the image of a figure into infinity, suggesting a splintered, dissociated personality.…
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The simple art of robbery: Four noirs about loot — and gangs that will do anything to get it
Heist movies all have the same story at heart. A gang goes after a big score and the crooks use teamwork to get the loot. But tensions mount and plans of a clean getaway implode. The four heist movies below all have the same cash-grab backbone, but the details of each range from the simple…
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‘Gun Crazy’ has a classic robbery scene … but we never see the actual holdup
You couldn’t call “Gun Crazy” a romance, exactly, although it’s the story of a young couple who meet cute, fall in love — and share a passion for firearms. We meet Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins), a carnival sharpshooter dressed in a cowgirl outfit, performing in a sideshow. In the audience is Bart Tare (John…
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Crime tourists, Part II: Americans clash with the underworld in foreign lands
DeForest Kelley, Cameron Mitchell, Robert Ryan, (unidentified), Robert Stack, ‘House of Bamboo’ (1955). We’ve already talked about films with Americans overseas acting badly. It seems that whenever a region is beset by war, a pack of jackals descends on the still twitching carcass of civilization to devour whatever meat is left on its bones. In…
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Crime tourists, Part I: Yanks behaving badly in foreign lands
Orson Welles, ‘The Third Man’ (1949). By Paul Parcellin Film noir loves morally sketchy locales — the kind of places where law and order is on life support and police can be manipulated like a vending machine. Like America’s Wild West, post-war Europe and Asia’s rubble strewn roadways were a magnet for drifters, bootleggers, grifters…
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New York noir: 20 films that explore the big city’s dark corners
John Garfield, Thomas Gomez, ‘Force of Evil’ (1948). It might not come as news to you that noirs set in New York City look a lot different from the ones taking place in Los Angeles. The City of Angels is a sun bleached sprawl of low buildings between the ocean and desert. New York is…