Going to the Dark Side

Noir has always seemed frightening and I tend to classify it with ghost stories.

A problem or mystery to be solved, being able to differentiate between fact and fantasy are central to both. Both play on one's nerves.

Edward G Robinson was in some of the best examples in film and "Some Like It Hot" could be a good topic for analysis
as it is a humourous example, within the tradition and using all the tricks of light, mistaken identity and subterfuge.

Since it was probably the most popular genre when I was a child I have seen most of the classics and when the technology changed to colour
I found that noir lacked impact of. "Sunset Boulevard" in colour would have been very strange and the cinematography was so crisp
and the play of light and shadow would have been spoiled by the confusion of colour.

"The Lady Killers" with Alec Guinness has scenes of true horror which show noir at its most
grotesque.

I have never watched a David Lynch film and the voyeuristic nature of the genre is what makes it my least favourite idea of
a trip to the cinema.

I would never think of reading Raymond Chandler and, while some friends think I'm missing a treat, I have too high an
opinion of real people to get bogged down in crime writing in general.

Noir focuses on the external appearances of characters to give clues to their
inner psychology. This artistic device is usually writ large which means one can read many of the books within the genre
while almost half asleep. They are usually not demanding and success is ensured when the writer manages to play with the
reader's expectations and make a twist in the plot that is unexpected. The women in traditional noir, the "femme fatale" are not the sort one invites round for afternoon
tea. I don't have much time for the "deadlier than the male" assessment they are usually just as materialistic
as the male protagonists.

The gritty nature of descriptions of bodily functions and abuse that increasingly characterises newcomers to the writing camp indicate that true
noir likes to shock and disturb, just like ghost stories.

If this sounds negative, the clothes that characters wear is what I most like about noir.

For me, noir is film.

I think I would only willingly read a book in the genre if abducted by the thugs in "The Maltese Falcon"
and the knuckledusters were produced.

That said, Daymon Runyon is worth reading by anybody studying the subject.
Noir (or was up to recently) an urban genre, possible only in the anonymity of the teeming city masses.

Noir in the country, as in "North by North West" always seems to be comic rather than

Perhaps clambering round on Mount Rushton is culturally significant to some. It is one of those films
that plays one one's fear of heights. Somehow it doesn't seem be be as convincing as the Hitchcock version of "The Thirty Nine Steps" made in 1935, which
seems to be better placed in the "Horror" section as a genuinely noir film always has inbuilt security nets that allow
for a realistic

There have been so many revolutions in modern times that films like "Chinatown" which heralded a belated resucitation in the 1970s invited a torrent of
critical analysis and I lost interest and stopped going to the cinema.



Give me "Bridget Jones's Diary" any day in which the "femme fatale" is able to play the field without slaying everone
in her path...


And in an answer just posed


It's a genre that goes back to Seneca and to the revenge plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods but the seeds of what became a publishing and cinematographic phenemenon since Poe and Dickens has reached epidemic proportions by now.

What most characterises "noir"?

Fog. "Bleak House" is a noir book by that estimation.