Mario,
>
> Let's not forget that Marcel Carné ˇnd Jean Renoir
in
> France, as well as Thorold Dickinson, Carol Reed and
Alfred
> Hitchcock in England, used all the props that later
would
> be called noir. Hitchcock's The Lodger (1926) is
pure noir.
> The German expressionistic style has already
been
> mentioned; its influence was very
important.
>
> I don't see how Huston and Welles could claim credit
for
> inventing a cinematic style that was two decades
old. At
> least the tricks were old. The characters and
situations in
> Kane and Falcon are typically American.
Perhaps the embryonic style was European (German, French and
British), but Huston and Welles, to my knowledge, never
claimed to be "inventors" of any style, per se, but there
were things they did which had never been done before. Two
examples, one from each film: When Spade gets the call from
the cops that Archer is dead, the scene begins with the
camera in a set shot on the alarm clock on Spade's bedside
table, so we know what time it is. The phone rings, Spade
answers, and the camera stays fixed on that spot, with Spade
eventually moving into the scene, so we don't see his initial
reaction to the news, we only hear his side of the
conversation. In Kane, there is the shot of Kane standing in
his office, where Welles wanted the angle to be from below,
so he had the floor of the room torn up and a hole dug so he
could set his camera in it. It was the final shot he filmed,
and he ran it something like fifty times before he had it
exactly the way he wanted it.
Pure genius, for my money!
All the Best,
Brian
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