Film noir has yet to die, and when it does, it will likely be shot four times in the belly, writhing and wincing as it hits asphalt and exhales one last melodramatic breath. Sirens will wail in the foggy, shadow-slashed night, while the cold world shrugs.
That’s a splendid noir exit, sure, but it’s based on the stupendous fallacy that noir will, in fact, expire. It won’t. It can’t. It’s alive and well, being seduced by femme fatales, muttering brittle tough talk. It’s brooding in the dark, nursing nihilism and learning everything the hard way. Perhaps it wants to die, but just its luck, it’s not going to happen.
In only the past year or so, a battery of latter-day noirs – tough, canny crime tales dyed in dark shades of moral ambiguity – have filled the big screen with bleak irony and unreconstructed fatalism: “Miami Vice,” “Brick,” “Derailed,” “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” “The Ice Harvest,” “Sin City,” to name a few.
And more are coming this fall: the Brazilian noir “Lower City” plumbs the dangerous thick of a love triangle. In “Crank,” a hit man who’s been poisoned has 24 hours to take revenge on those who injected him (sounding like vintage noir “D.O.A.”).
Brian De Palma’s “The Black Dahlia,” with Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johansson, brings James Ellroy’s scuzzy true-crime novel to life, and death. Martin Scor-
sese remakes the South Korean undercover cop drama “Infernal Affairs” with blood and big names – Jack Nicholson, Leonardo Di Caprio, Matt Damon – in “The Departed.”
“Zen Noir” is a comical and philosophical spoof of familiar noir tropes. In “Killshot,” Diane Lane is targeted by hit man Mickey Rourke after she witnesses a crime and is placed in the Witness Protection Program.
Movie buffs know what film noir is. For those who don’t, here’s the trenchant definition offered by crime writer Ellroy in the fine documentary “Film Noir: Bringing Darkness to Light,” part of Warner Bros.’ otherwise mediocre new DVD set “Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 3.”
Ellroy correctly avers that noir’s great theme is: “‘You’re (expletive).’ You have just met a woman. You are inches away from the greatest sex of your life. But within six weeks of meeting the woman, you will be framed for a crime you did not commit and end up in the gas chamber. And as they strap you in and you are about to breathe the cyanide fumes, you will be grateful for the few weeks you had with her and grateful for your own death.”
A little cynicism with that cyanide? Beneath noir’s scabrous surface festers all manner of scumbag and bum rap, trashy dame and crooked cop. Noir presents a microcosm of moral confusion and thuggish behavior, with the everyman antihero caught in its rotten center. Blithe cigarette smoke twists around banter spat out like shrapnel. Visual cues – the oblique angle, wet streets, a violent shaft of dusty light – telegraph uneasy emotions and kneecap psychic stability. Style is half the equation.
When these elements are transplanted from black and white and tweaked for today’s Technicolor sensibilities, it goes by neo-noir. “Chinatown,” “Taxi Driver,” “Blade Runner,” “Body Heat,” “Blood Simple,” “Memento,” “Minority Report” and “Collateral” are some exemplary neo-noirs.
DVD shelves are positively groaning with quintessential movie classics from the ’40s and ’50s that defined the noir style, thanks to the encouraging efforts of Fox and Warner Bros., which are scraping their vaults for even the most runty B gangster pictures.
Noir lives. Born in somber times, it does more than reflect the national mood, though one could argue its subtextual relevance today. We return again and again to its lonely place for stylized misbehavior that challenges in its scorn for happy endings, while tickling the id. Dark as it is, it will never be lights out for black film.
