I'm not as expert on the subject as some here (one reason I
lurk, rather than Post regularly), but I suggest that DESERT
FURY with Lisbeth Scott, John Hodiak and Burt Lancaster, as
well as co-written by A.I. Bezzerides, might qualify as Color
Noir.
At the very least, it's got to be borderline....??
Best an' all,
------------------ap
Jeff Vorzimmer <
jvorzimmer@austin.rr.com> wrote: I just finished
reading Leave Her to Heaven by Ben Ames Williams, which
I
mentioned having picked up at City Lights in SF. I
bought it thinking it
would be kind of a cross between Laura and Bedelia. In
fact it came out in
1944, the year between those two books and was the 7th
best-selling novel of
that year and although it shares a lot of the same plot
elements as the Vera
Caspary novels, I thought it superior to both. But I
think it's more
melodrama than noir. The only crime in the book could
be called manslaughter
at best and there was a lot of the Freudian psychology
in it that was
popular at the time. Though the femme fatale was a
cold-hearted bitch very
reminiscent of Caspary's Bedelia and as ruthless as any
in hardboiled crime
fiction.
Then I saw the movie. It would be had to classify it as
noir. It's been
argued here, I believe by Jim among others, that just
the simple fact of it
being in color disqualifies it from being noir and I
tend to agree with
that. If you do a search on IMDB for films tagged
(albeit loosely) with
"noir" you come up with 465 movies, of those only 14
are in color. That
means that 97% of the films tagged "noir" are black
& white. When you start
looking over the list of color films you realize that
films like Leave Her
to Heaven and A Kiss Before Dying really aren't noir,
so the percentage is
even higher. I've not actually seen a color film
pre-1958 that I think
stylistically fits in the genre.
Not being color is the least of the disqualifying
aspects of the movie
though. It's not urban. It's shot mostly in the
daylight outdoors and, the
most disqualifying point of all--it's not really a
crime film. The
screenwriter seemed to overlook the fact that the crime
for which one of the
characters goes to jail for at the end was actually
written out of the story
leaving many a viewer, I'm sure, scratching his head at
the end.
The movie was also badly miscast with Cornel Wilde and
Gene Tierney and
badly acted as well. It was if they were trying to cash
in on the success of
Laura, but didn't emulate any of its style. It
certainly could have been
made into a film noir, but ends up not even coming
close.
Jeff
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