Film noir has come a long way…and that way hasn’t necessarily been a good one. The last great film noir was probably LA Confidential back in 1997 and I might actually be stretching the genre a bit to include that.
By definition, film noir was created during WWII when Americans were in a rather dark mood.
The films were heavily influenced by German expressionism and were full of shadows, hard men, harder women and mysteries whose solutions were barely the point. The point was that, no matter who the good guy was, no one ever truly won.
There have been a lot of attempts to rekindle the flame of the film noir candle, but few of them have been truly successful. The aforementioned LA Confidential and Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981) are probably the best.
What has been strangely successful are revisionist and parody film noir. The Big Lebowski is probably the most famous of these. It has everything that a classic film noir has (except maybe the shadows) along with a pot-smoking lead who has no clue that he’s stuck in the middle of a mystery. All he wants is his rug and to not listen to The Eagles.
But I’m not here to talk about that movie, as great as it is. I’m here to talk about a couple that you may not know much about.
THE LONG GOODBYE (1973)
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Leigh Brackett
Based on a novel by Raymond Chandler
Robert Altman was never known for being particularly straight forward. Most of his films has a very complex sound design that included a lot of dialogue spoken over other dialogue. You couldn’t always catch everything that was said, and that was by design.
The Long Goodbye, though, was maybe a bit more of an experiment that a lot of people were ready for in 1973. The sound design was like any other Altman film, but it took an age old genre, brought it into the present and turned it on its head. They updated the setting and script, but didn’t really update the lead character, Philip Marlowe, at all.
Elliot Gould plays him as a chain-smoking, no-nonsense private eye in a world that’s obsessed with its health and sex. (His next door neighbors are a couple of girls who walk around naked and have guys over all the time.) He actually seems to be the only sane person in the film. All he wants to do is find out what happened to his best friend and make sure that his cat is fed.
This film is sort of a lost treasure in Altman’s filmography. It’s fairly well-known, but it’s not at M*A*S*H levels of popularity, although it probably should be. It’s funny, horrifying (especially Henry Gibson’s creepy Dr. Verringer) and a great example of 70s cinema made by someone who loved the films that he was parodying.
Watch for a young Arnold Schwarzenegger as a thug.
PULP (1972)
Written and directed by Mike Hodges
Noir had its basis in the pulp novels of the 30s and 40s, many written by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M Cain. Those guys all went on to write for Hollywood with varying degrees of success, but it’s their classic books and hard-boiled characters that really molded the genre. Many of them were narrated by lead characters, who weren’t initially involved in the mystery, but got more entangled in it as time went on.
Pulp is about one of those mystery novelists (Michael Caine) who ends up getting caught up in the plot of what could have been one of his own books. Mickey King (Michael Caine) gets hired to ghost write the autobiography of a famous American actor, but he’s not told who this actor is. He’s just sent to Malta to meet the man. Instead, he meets a man who ends up dead in his bath tub. This is just the first mystery of the film.
King ends up meeting his mystery celeb: Preston Gilbert (Mickey Rooney in an amazing, over the top performance), an actor who was known for playing gangsters and murderers. Of course, he also cavorted with gangsters and murderers, so this could be a dangerous assignment for the young writer.
After working with Mike Hodges on the classic British crime film Get Carter (also pretty heavily influenced by those novels), Caine knew that he and the director has a good thing going. Might as well work with him again, right? This crazy quilt of a neo-noir is the result.
