RE: RARA-AVIS: Hardboiled Character Traits

From: Anthony Dauer ( anthony.dauer@verizon.net)
Date: 28 Apr 2002


What moral quality? Loyalty? Robert Mitchum's Coyle fails the toughness test then cause he rolls over on the guys he works with. I didn't say he couldn't be hardboiled cause he's a criminal. He isn't hardboiled because he isn't true and loyal to his criminality. Neither is he tough. Mel Gibson's Parker is hardboiled. He's tough and demands loyalty from his peers. He doesn't go to the cops and rat them out like that chicken-shit Coyle. He goes and takes them out one-by-one until he gets what's coming to him and nothing more. There ain't nothing more hardboiled than that.

--
Anthony Dauer
Alexandria, Virginia

2nd Annual Country Noir Issue ...
http://www.adau.net/judas_ezine/
... submit by 4 May 2002
-----Original Message----- From: Rene Ribic Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2002 10:29 PM
So being hardboiled is now a moral quality? I'm sorry folks but the more I read everyone's personal spin on "hardboiled" & "noir" the better Jim D's definitions look to me. It may be easy to poke holes through but so is every definition (e.g. the definition of life that was being used when I was going to school most definitely excluded viruses but if they aren't living organisms what are they?). Who were the original hardboiled authors & why were they labelled as such? "Tough & colloquial" looks pretty right to me. When we start including moral viewpoints as part of the definition it seems to me we're headed for swampland, metaphorically speaking.

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