Movie Enthusiast Issue 16: Hats of Film Noir
Film noir is a subgenre built on dependability. The leading men are always world-weary, the dialogue is always snappy, the cinematography is always shadowy, the femmes are always fatales.
This is either good news or bad news. If you happen to like all the above features of noir, then you're in luck: classical Hollywood produced a couple hundred of this type of movie for you to enjoy. If, on the other hand, you're more like me—you appreciate a good noir when it hits you over the head with its peculiar blend of storytelling techniques, but otherwise feel pretty neutral about noir on average—the reliability of these tropes spells trouble.
Dutiful young film buff that I am, I've been working my way through the annals of noir since I first started seriously watching movies. Little did I know that by beginning with the likes of Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt, LA Confidential, Night of the Hunter and Touch of Evil I had frontloaded the whole enterprise. By the time I got to the comparatively mellower likes of Out of the Past, The Maltese Falcon, and (as recently as a few weeks ago) Double Indemnity, memories of more dazzling movies had worn out the genre's welcome. When individual plots become largely irrelevant to the mood, when characters are all interchangeable at a glance, when the camerawork isn't as showy as it was when Orson Welles or Alfred Hitchcock were sitting in the director's chair (though that's a tough bar for any movie of any genre to clear), my brain is more readily convinced that it's okay to tune out.
(“Tim, aren't you being a bit unfair here?” I suppose so, given how much I like detective fiction and the sorts of stories that provide the grist for the genre mill. Then again, it could be that a genre so steeped in cynicism is a poor fit for someone so staunchly anti-cynic.)
In any case, when push comes to shove I stay tuned in for the long haul. When all the other trappings of noir eventually blend together, there's one other dependable feature of the genre to keep me coming back: the hats.
Not only can you count on the characters in film noir movies to sit squarely in the pro-headgear camp, but you can count on their chapeaux to be marvelous no matter the era. Hats set a mood at the same time that they denote historicity and, not uncommonly, even serve important storytelling purposes. My admiration for Barbara Stanwyck's hats in Double Indemnity paid surprising dividends when a funereal shroud she dons at a key moment in the film (below) comes back to haunt her as a loose string that helps unravel her husband-murdering plot. Who knew! Watch enough movies and your fascination for the odd minor details may someday pay off.
By now you may be expecting me to present Tim's Grand Unified Theory of Film Noir Headgear. And…uh…well…I don't have one. Go scour the depths of JStor and I'm sure you'll find that someone has written about the Psychoanalytical Semiotics of Repression and Gendered Structures of Indifference in Late 1940s Hollywood Film Noir Costume Design, but all that huffing and hawing is a bit too much for my taste. Some people watch movies for the story; others watch movies for the characters. Some moviegoers just want to see big explosions; and I, on occasion, am just really in the mood to watch well-dressed people parade around onscreen in truly fabulous hats.
Articles, News, and Interviews.
September is just a month away, so you know what that means: Oscar movie season is almost upon us! As usual, the festivities will kick off at the Toronto and Venice International Film Festivals, which both just revealed their lineups last week. In competition? New movies by Terrence Malick (a documentary, not a narrative feature; calm yourselves), Derek Cianfrance, Denis Villeneuve, Damien Chazelle, Ana Lily Amirpour, and François Ozon. It would also appear that James Franco has finally moved on from making bad movies out of Faulkner novels to work his 'magic' touch on Steinbeck novels, although the less said about that the better.
Oprah (yes, that Oprah; what other Oprah is there?) has signed on to Ava DuVernay's production of A Wrinkle in Time as Mrs. Which. I'm still waiting on Quvenzhané Wallis to get cast as Meg.
The best black and white movies of the last 20 years: a listicle Tim largely agrees with!
Why does one of the best cinematographers of all time keep getting stuck making lousy movies?
Asghar Farhadi talks the evolution of Tehran, state censorship, and violence against women in Iran.
If you like supercuts and if you like Netflix's Stranger Things (which, N.B., I have not watched yet), I assume you'll like this mashup of all the show's 70s- and 80s-movie influences.
Poster of the Day
If there's one other dependably great thing about film noir, it's the movie poster taglines. ("From the moment they met it was MURDER!")