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Oct 11, 2020 · In the stiflingly reactionary cultural atmosphere of postwar America, most filmmakers didn’t talk much about class. But there was one significant exception: film noir was the most class-conscious genre of motion picture America has ever produced.
Dec 22, 2021 · So many of the prestige musicals, biopics and social-problems films of the era have flatlined and faded over time, but the tough, hard-bitten noirs never seem to lose their edge.
- ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’
- ‘Act of Violence’
- ‘Crossfire’
- ‘Kansas City Confidential’
- ‘Human Desire’
- ‘In A Lonely Place’
- ‘The Chase’
- ‘High Wall’
- ‘Thieves' Highway’
"The Best Years of Our Lives" won seven regular Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for wounded WWII vet Harold Russell. The movie follows returning veterans as they struggle to adapt to civilian life after the war. It's not a noir at all, but more of a socially conscious "message picture." Unlike a lot of those movies, "Best Y...
Van Heflin plays a veteran who's living the life of a war hero back home after surviving incarceration in a Nazi-run concentration camp. Unfortunately for him, he's got a wartime secret, and a fellow veteran played by Robert Ryan shows up to hold him accountable for his sins. "I love "Act of Violence,'" Muller said. "It's an almost perfect movie th...
"Crossfire" was a critical sensation and became the first B movie to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Robert Ryan (also nominated for Best Supporting Actor) is a demobilized soldier who tries to pin an anti-Semitic murder on another veteran. "And I like 'Crossfire' just because of the way it uses the genre in a very interesting way," Muller s...
"Kansas City Confidential" is a classic heist-gone-wrong movie with John Payne as a veteran who is a delivery truck driver who gets used as a distraction in an armored car robbery without his knowledge. Things get very dicey for him. "And then you get a genre picture like 'Kansas City Confidential' where they're interrogating John Payne and say, 'Y...
World War II Marine veteran Glenn Ford stars as a returning Korean War vet who's working as a train engineer when he gets caught up in a bleak love triangle that has him falling in love with the classic film noir bombshell, Gloria Grahame. She wants him to kill her husband, played by Broderick Crawford. "Take 'Human Desire,' the Fritz Lang movie," ...
Humphrey Bogart is a down-on-his-luck screenwriter with a bad temper. He hasn't had a hit movie since he saw combat in World War II. Things start looking up when he falls in love with a neighbor (Gloria Grahame, again), but his life becomes unraveled when he's accused of murder and the woman he loves can't decide if he did it. "Or take 'In a Lonely...
In "The Chase," Robert Cummings plays a homelessveteran drifter who gets a job as a mobster's chauffeur when he returns the gangster's lost wallet. He falls in love with the boss' wife, always a recipe for disaster. "And there's 'The Chase,' where Robert Cummings plays a war veteran who is suffering the effects of the malaria he contracted in the S...
Robert Taylor plays a WWII vet suffering from a traumatic brain injury. After he catches his wife in the arms of another man, she turns up dead and he seems the most likely killer. He goes to a mental hospital and tries to work out what really happened. "'There's 'High Wall' with Robert Taylor," Muller said. "He's a veteran who got brain damage in ...
Richard Conte plays a G.I. who returns home after the war to find that his father lost his legs and was forced to sell the truck he used to haul produce to market. He takes a job with the guy who bought the truck, swearing to avenge his family's honor. Unfortunately, our veteran hero has no idea what's really going on in the brutal, corrupt fruit b...
Aug 22, 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
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.
Jul 23, 2014 · These early noir films created a psychological atmosphere that in many ways marked a response to an increasingly realistic and understandable anxiety—about war, shortages, changing gender roles...
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Sep 8, 2023 · Everything you need to know about film noir, including when it was created, what tropes are used and modern examples of noir movies.
