Johnny,
Re your question below:
> But weren't the majority of noir directors
ex-pat
> Europeans?
Some were. Some weren't. Some American-born directors who
were movers and shakers in film noir include John Huston,
Edward Dmytryk (actually he was born in Canada, but that's
still the North American continent), Ted Tetzloff, Richard
Fleischer, and Anthony Mann.
They may have been influenced, directly or indrectly, by
things like German expressionism (certainly such German-born
noir directors as Fritz Lang or Robert Siodmak were; in fact,
I think Lang is often credited as the inventor of German
expressionism), but mainly they were trying to make tight,
gritty crime movies in an inexpensive way that LOOKED
expensive.
There's a great story about Edward Dmytryk lecturing a bunch
of college kids during the '70s. He figures they all want to
hear about the Hollywood blacklist, so he's surprised when
one of them raises his hand and asks him about something
called film noir.
"Film noir?" he says. "What the hell is film noir?"
"Well," says the college kid, "you should know. You invented
it."
Up to then Dmytryk, who was a professional filmmaker, not a
naval-contemplating film theorist, had never heard the
term.
JIM DOHERTY
__________________________________________________ Do You
Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - your guide to health and wellness http://health.yahoo.com
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 28 Apr 2002 EDT