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Film noir (/ n w ɑːr /; French: [film nwaʁ]) is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylized Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and motivations. The 1940s and 1950s are generally regarded as the "classic period" of American film noir.
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Because the 1940s and 1950s are universally regarded as the "classic period" of American film noir, films released prior to 1940 are listed under the caption "Precursors / early noir-like films". Films released after 1959 should generally only be listed in the list of neo-noir titles .
- Plot
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- Historical Background
- Analysis and Interpretation
- Reception
- Accolades
- Subsequent Works
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In 1937, a woman identifying herself as "Evelyn Mulwray" hires private investigator J. J. "Jake" Gittes to trail her husband Hollis, whom she suspects of infidelity. Hollis is chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Powerand refuses to build a new dam on the grounds of safety. Gittes photographs Hollis in the company of a young wo...
Background
In 1971, producer Robert Evans offered Towne $175,000 to write a screenplay for The Great Gatsby (1974), but Towne felt he could not better the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. Instead, Towne asked Evans for $25,000 to write his own story, Chinatown, to which Evans agreed. Towne had originally hoped to also direct Chinatown, but realized that by taking Evans' money, he would lose control of the project's future and his role as a director. Chinatown is set in 1937 and portrays the manipulation of a...
Origins
The character of Hollis Mulwray was inspired by and loosely based on Irish immigrant William Mulholland (1855–1935) according to Mulholland's granddaughter. Mulholland was the superintendent and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, who oversaw the construction of the 230-mile (370-km) aqueduct that carries water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles. Mulholland was considered by many to be the man who made Los Angeles possible by building the Los Angeles Aqueduct in...
Script
According to Robert Towne, both Carey McWilliams's Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946) and a West magazine article called "Raymond Chandler's L.A." inspired his original screenplay. In a letter to McWilliams, Towne wrote that Southern California Country"really changed my life. It taught me to look at the place where I was born, and convinced me to write about it". Towne wrote the screenplay with Jack Nicholson in mind.He took the title (and the exchange "What did you do...
In his 2004 film essay and documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, film scholar Thom Andersen lays out the complex relationship between Chinatown's script and its historical background:
In a 1975 issue of Film Quarterly, Wayne D. McGinnis compared Chinatown to Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. He suggested that a "wasteland motif predominates in both works", in which a character (Noah Cross in Chinatown and Oedipus in Oedipus Rex) uses "a plague on a city" to get into public power and then harbor corruption. McGinnis wrote that both works...
Box office
The film earned $29 million at the North American box office.
Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, Chinatown holds an approval rating of 98% based on 142 reviews, with an average rating of 9.40/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "As bruised and cynical as the decade that produced it, this noir classic benefits from Robert Towne's brilliant screenplay, director Roman Polanski's steady hand, and wonderful performances from Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway". Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 92 out of 100, based on 23 critics, indicating "uni...
Other honors
1. 2010 – Best film of all time, The Guardian 2. 2012 - In the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made, Chinatownwas 78th among critics and 91st among directors. 3. 2015 - The film ranked 12th on BBC's "100 Greatest American Films" list, voted on by film critics from around the world. American Film Instituterecognition 1. 1998 – AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies– Ranked 19th 2. 2001 – AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills– Ranked 16th 3. 2003 – AFI's 100 Years...1...
A sequel film, The Two Jakes, was released in 1990, again starring Nicholson, who also directed, with Robert Towne returning to write the screenplay. It was not met with the same financial or critical success as the first film. A prequel television series by David Fincher and Towne for Netflixabout Gittes starting his agency was reported to be in t...
Towne's screenplay has become legendary among critics and filmmakers, often cited as one of the best examples of the craft, though Polanski decided on the fatal final scene. While it has been reported that Towne envisioned a happy ending, he has denied these claims and said simply that he initially found Polanski's ending to be excessively melodram...
Easton, Michael (1998) Chinatown (B.F.I. Film Classics series). Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-85170-532-4.Standiford, Les (2016). Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles. New York: Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 9780062251459.Thomson, David (2004). The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. New York, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-375-40016-8.Towne, Robert (1997). Chinatown and the Last Detail: 2 Screenplays. New York: Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-3401-7.Chinatownessay by James Verniere in the National Film Registry site.Chinatown essay by Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry, A&C Black, 2010 ISBN 0826429777, pages 706-707Chinatown at AllMovieChinatown at the American Film Institute Catalogfilm noir , (French: “dark film”) Film genre that offers dark or fatalistic interpretations of reality. The term is applied to U.S. films of the late 1940s and early ’50s that often portrayed a seamy or criminal underworld and cynical characters.
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May 20, 2024 · film noir, style of filmmaking characterized by such elements as cynical heroes, stark lighting effects, frequent use of flashbacks, intricate plots, and an underlying existentialist philosophy. The genre was prevalent mostly in American crime dramas of the post- World War II era.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Jun 27, 2021 · Film noir is a stylized genre of film marked by pessimism, fatalism, and cynicism. The term was originally used in France after WWII, to describe American thriller or detective films in the 1940s and 50s. Though, Hollywood’s film noir stretches back to the 1920s.
May 16, 2023 · Film noir is a type of film style originating in the 1940s and 1950s that dealt with the dark side of the human psyche. Over and over, characters are destroyed or killed due to greed, revenge,...
