A look back at the unique genre of film noir, featuring a collection of trailers from classic films and commentary from filmmakers and experts, plus condensed versions of two excellent films from the 1940s, DETOUR and D.O.A. more...
Film-Noir from Fritz Lang! A middle-aged bank cashier dreams of being a painter. He is married to a shrew who belittles his dreams. He falls for a sexy young woman without realizing she's actually a prostitute. She and her scheming pimp/boyfriend conspire more...
Franchot Tone plays Assistant District Attorney Howard Malloy, a man with a mission to avenge the brutal slaying of his friend, who discovered that a group of supposed patriots were really members of a fascist hate group. Now he's determined to expose the more...
Al Roberts' life takes an unexpected and unpleasant turn when he decides to hitchhike to the West Coast in pursuit of his girlfriend Sue. When the driver who gave him a ride turns up dead, Al decides that the police wouldn't believe him innocent and decid more...
Vince Grayson (DeForest Kelley) is a young bank teller who awakens from a terrible nightmare, in which he and an unknown woman murder a man in a mirrored room. At first thinking it was just a dream, Grayson discovers he has bruises and other physical more...
A prostitute decides to make a break from her lifestyle and travels to a small town, where she meets the sheriff and has a tryst with him, causing him to order her out of town. In stead, the woman decides to get a legitimate lifestyle and ends up working more...
A serial killer, played by Peter Lorre, preys on children; the police of Berlin exert so much energy on finding him that the work of the criminal underworld is impeded. The crime gangs therefore decide to find the killer themselves, and more...
Orson Wells stars as Harry Lime and Joseph Cotten plays his childhood friend, Holly Martins, in this all-time classic thriller scripted by Graham Greene and directed by Carol Reed. Martins search for Lime through the seedy underworld of postwar Vienna and more...
Ten days before 9/11... Irene (Juliette Binoche), a French secret service operative, is on a mission to help Elliot (Nick Nolte), a rogue CIA agent who has disappeared with top secret intelligence about the immediate future of the world. When a Paris more...
Captain Holling (Noah Beery) is stripped of his command just prior to his ship's departure after an apparent nervous breakdown. When First Mate Downey (Boothe Howard) assumes command, he discovers that the ship will be navigated by a remote-control device more...
Newsman Kent Murdock (Lew Ayres) has a reputation for scooping his competition. Meg Archer (Gail Patrick) is a feisty young woman out to seek justice for those who wronged her father. When an expensive criminal attorney dies on the job, a newspaper photog more...
A city is gripped with terror as a string of horrifying murders have occurred and the authorities are desperate to bring the killings to an end. At a boarding house run by a kind family resides a reclusive young man, who the daughter of the boarding house more...
Frank Bigelow, a mild-mannered accountant, goes to San Francisco for a week's fun prior to getting married. After a night on the town, he wakes up with more than just a hangover; doctors tell him he's been given a poison for which there is no antidote and more...
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About Film Noir
In the 1970s, notable films like CHINATOWN, THE CONVERSATION and TAXI DRIVER awakened attention to
an unusually intriguing style in American Cinema, a style that comprises some of our most exciting,
most intrinsically "cinemati" movies. Yet it is style that at the same time is one of the hardest
to label or pin down. It defies the easy characterization of the Western, the Whodunit, the Musical
or the Comedy. It is called "Film Noir."
In 1946, after American films had been absent from European screens for five years, astute French
critics of the "Cahiers di Cinema," noticed a discernible new style in American movies, one which
had roots in the early Depression. They coined the term "film noir," the black film, to denote
these murky dramas framed in the intrigue of neon lights glistening on dark, wet streets. It is a
world of strong women and forceful men, of adventurers and opportunists, of independent moralists
and amoralists, of public and private eyes, of middle-class dropouts and misunderstood mobsters,
of good and evil, and more evil. It might be called the dramatic equivalent of black comedy.
This is the cinema of people tough enough to handle a society readjusting after war and social
trauma. It is the cinema of directors like Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Mick ray,
Elia Kazan, Sam Fuller, Joseph Lewis and John Huston. The heroes, heroines and villains are
legendary screen presences like Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, Joan Crawford, Barbara
Stanwyck, Orson Welles, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum and John Garfield. To list the names
themselves almost defines the genre.
Film noir is defined, not by the story itself, but by the look and psychological tone, making
it an unusually visceral, almost palpable kind of film. Since most of these films were made
as "B-Movies" designed to fill out the bottom half of double features, the studios gave their
directors the freedom that can give way to startling creative moments. And that's precisely
what happened.
