Film Noir DVDs Commentary on Slate
by Andre Soares
Via Slate Magazine: Stanley Crouch’s take on film noir DVD releases, "Noir America: Cynics, sluts, heists, and murder most foul."
"A number of its most influential directors were European Jews like Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, and Billy Wilder, all of whom had escaped the Nazis. The enthusiastic support of the Third Reich by the German people had convinced such artists that conformity always had to be questioned, ridiculed, and perhaps resisted. Another assumption was that corruption hid behind images of a gilded civilization, high-class refinement, uplift, and thorough social improvement. So, in one sense, Adolf Hitler was a major player in forming the sensibility of film noir. That Austrian boy whom Chaplin accused of having made off with his mustache had done it again but, as usual, not in the way the paperhanger intended.
"With the recently released two-disc DVD of 1944’s Double Indemnity and the three volumes of The Film Noir Classic Collection, one gets the essentials of the style and all of the information necessary to recognize the "school" that the French saw long before Americans did. Barbara Stanwyck, Claire Trevor, Jane Greer, and Peggy Cummins are each but separately the brilliant stars of Double Indemnity; Murder, My Sweet; Out of the Past; and Gun Crazy. They are the essential film noir amalgamations of Eve, Salome, and Carmen: there to bring men down through the pulsating syncopations of their glistening orifices. After but one night with any of them, men were not only willing to bay at the moon of homicide but snap at it with a determination that pushes a full circle of murder into the air."
Near the end of the article, Stanley Crouch makes an illuminating comparison between Raymond Chandler’s actual Philip Marlowe — as he’s found in the pulp novels — and Marlowe’s sanitized film versions. Too bad Crouch fails to mention the relationship between the American film noir of the 1940s and the French film noir of the 1930s. Long before Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and Robert Ryan, there was Jean Gabin in La Bête humaine and Le Jour se lève.
Now, "pulsating syncopations" of "glistening orifices"? What the heck…
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Ann Sheridan Biographer Ray Hagen Discusses the 1940s Warner Bros. Star
Ann Sheridan: Warner Bros. Star of the 1940s
Saverio Costanzo Discusses IN MEMORIA DI ME
THE DEATH OF KEVIN CARTER and KORDAVISION Academy Screening
TOTAL DENIAL (2006) by Milena Kaneva: Film Review
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