Noir Movie

Today, Robert Aldrich is best known for the 1967 ensemble war film The Dirty Dozen. It’s easily his most ambitious film in terms of wrangling a broad audience. But the reason that the director was able to land that gig was in part due to his earlier successes – and probably specifically because of Kiss Me Deadly.

In any survey course dedicated to American noir stuff, Aldrich’s flick is invariably mentioned for a variety of reasons: it’s artistic bent, the plot and what it attempts to encompass as well as that miffed ending that’s been debated for just about thirty years now. But whatever the reason for Kiss Me Deadly remaining within the realm of interesting filmic discussion, it’s just an entertaining hour and forty minutes.

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Though I’m sure I’ll be making some fans angry by saying this, The Spirit could have been a decent film—had it included simple concepts such as emotion, dialogue, that sort of thing. Instead, it simply rang of annoyances rather than style.

Rather than a moody, affecting crime drama, what viewers experience is a series of long, repetitive scenes featuring a hero who isn’t very heroic. For a mask-wearing casa nova, The Spirit himself seems much more a doofy klutz than sexual sleuth. Instead of witty, hard-edged dialogue what comes out of his mouth is forced generic gumshoe drivel, and though we’re told that the ladies fawn over his red-tie wearing bod, we’re pretty much left wondering why.

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Perhaps no genre has a more distinct and inspiring style than the grim, expressionistic Noir. While the genre had its heyday in the 30's and 40's, Noir has never really gone away. Since the late 1960's there have been countless attempts to duplicate, pay homage to, or outright revive the genre. Some of these are great films, some are merely fun. But for every Chinatown there are a dozen other movies that missed the mark.

Romeo is Bleeding

The early 90's saw films becoming ever more entrenched in postmodern irony. While the likes of Quentin Tarantino were churning out the new grit with cool humor, a few projects tried to turn the era into something darker and more oppressive. That's where terminally uncool movies like Peter Medak's Romeo is Bleeding come in. While Romeo is little more than a hackneyed script backed by an indifferent directorial style, it could just as easily be seen as star Gary Oldman's career in microcosm.

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It was 1941 and the term Film Noir as applicable to film had yet to be coined but this dimly lit, visually deliberate, character study starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor as the definitive Private Eye/Femme Fatale duo, laid quite a blueprint for such things. So perfect was the pitch and so evocative it was of all things that would soon become Noir, that in 1955 while writing Panorama du Film Noir Américain, the seminal treatise of the sub-genre, that authors Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton dubbed it the original Film Noir. This was not by any means the first adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's calculating detective novel, but as many have said, Noir is not to be looked upon as a genre per se, but as a style.

And what style we see here. Humphrey Bogart is quite possibly the most cool-as-ice he has ever been as detective Sam Spade, which by all accounts is saying quite a bit.

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