RARA-AVIS: Re: LA Noir

From: Carrie Pruett ( pruettc@hotmail.com)
Date: 07 Sep 2001


Colin wrote
>Not LA, nor really hardboiled but certainly film noir possibly of some
>relavance to this discussion especially as regards the cold war. >Vienna in
>the Third Man, a frontier city with lots and lots of >possibilities for
>naughtiness, very wild west in fact. >Frontiers/edges/boundaries I think
>its
>that meself.

Hey, I'll certainly give Graham Greene the HB label, at least some of the time. I don't think it's any stretch to call "The Third Man" a detective story. So, for that matter, is "The End of the Affair." Greene's spy stories have a definite HB feel, and "Brighton Rock" is a straight-out murder tale (can't recall how much it's actually a mystery but a lot of HB doesn't really a mystery), with a prototypical amoral psychopath hero. If Greene isn't hard-boiled, I dunno who is, and he's certainly an influence on contemporary HB writers (the references to "The Third Man" in, say, Lehane's
"Prayers for Rain" aren't exactly subtle - Patrick actually quotes a David Denby essay on the film).

Carrie

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