No actor is more associated with the genre of film noir or better suited to interpret its tropes than Humphrey Bogart. His filmography covers a wide range from comedy to westerns, but noir was his specialty. Playing shrewd, playful characters with strict moral codes inhabiting a corrupt world, Bogart appeared in more than twenty noir […]
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Touch Of Noir: Nicolas Winding Refn’s ‘Drive’, A Film Worthy Of The Label Noir
Ahead of next week’s release of Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest film Only God Forgives, which reunites him with Drive star Ryan Gosling, it is only fitting to explore the deep film noir roots of the intensely stylish, highly acclaimed Drive. It’s not surprising that Refn won the prize for Best Director at Cannes with this […]
Touch Of Noir: Fritz Lang’s Noir Nightmares ‘Scarlet Street’ and ‘The Woman In The Window’
Film noir was born from the evocative shadow play of German Expressionism. As one of the greats of Expressionist cinema, it is only fitting that after fleeing the Nazis Fritz Lang would reinvent himself by making highly stylized noir films in Hollywood. Fritz Lang is best remembered for his classics Metropolis and M, but […]
Touch of Noir: The Caged Drifter in ‘Le Samouraï’
Born out of Jean-Pierre Melville’s love of 1930s Hollywood crime dramas, Le Samouraï (1967) is unquestionably one of the best homages to film noir. The film itself is a cross between classic film noir and Japanese yakuza samurai films, melding the principled noir anti-hero and the honor-bound, wandering warrior samurai figure into a rumination […]
Touch Of Noir: Stanley Kubrick’s Genre Changing Edgy Crime Noir ‘The Killing’
Stanley Kubrick is best known for his films 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Lolita (1962), The Shining (1980) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), but he always considered his first mature feature film to be the elaborate film noir heist The Killing (1956). Clearly overshadowed by his later works, The Killing is generally viewed as a […]
