1967 – 1997

NEO NOIR

UMBERTO MONTIROLI/© DE LAURENTIIS ENTERTAINMENT GROUP, COURTESY PHOTOFEST

The voyeuristic tendencies of Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) get the better of him in Blue Velvet.

Back in Black

How the pulp traditions of the past inspired a bold new cinematic future

ORLANDO SUERO/© PARAMOUNT PICTURES, COURTESY PHOTOFEST

Two generations of noir genius. From left to right, director Roman Polanski, director-actor John Huston, and star Jack Nicholson behind the scenes of the revolutionary Chinatown. Huston had directed The Maltese Falcon, the original detective film noir.

In 1958, the failure of Touch of Evil brought Orson Welles’s Hollywood directing career to an end, taking film noir into the cinematic dustbin along with it. Angling to compete with television, movie houses were suddenly filled with Cinerama and Cinemascope spectacles, which were inimical to the paranoid, claustrophobic vibe that had defined noir. (There were exceptions, of course—Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Rear Window come to mind—but they mostly proved the rule.)

Noir was hardly dead, though. While audiences flocked to the likes of The Sound of Music, American living rooms were alive with the sound of Dragnet’s narrator intoning: “The story you are about to see is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.” Beginning in the late ’50s, noir resurfaced in such gritty, ostensibly realistic TV shows as the revamped Dragnet, Peter Gunn, and The Fugitive.

However, the genre began making a cinematic comeback in the late ’60s, arguably spurred by Bonnie and Clyde, which broke all the mainstream rules with its dry mix of comedy and violence, the apotheosis of which was its grisly, unprecedentedly realistic climactic killing of the pair. (The film was something of an updating of the 1950 noir classic Gun Crazy.)

But the seminal neo noir, a breakthrough film that almost single-handedly revitalized the genre even as it faithfully paid tribute to its progenitors, was Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). Often called the greatest crime movie ever made (and Robert Towne’s script the greatest screenplay ever written), Chinatown harked back to the fiction of Raymond Chandler while proving that—as with so many films in the decades that followed—everything old could be new again.

Other influences on neo noir included, of course, the Vietnam War, the rise of international terrorism, Wall Street corruption, and AIDS. And women’s rights advocates were often seen as, well, “feminists fatales” by so-called red-blooded American males who were not keen to change their ways. In short, the ’70s and ’80s created an environment in which an antihero like Clint Eastwood’s morally questionable Dirty Harry could tell punks to make his day—and Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, the taxi driver from hell, could ask, “You talkin’ to me?”