Unlike the traditional genres, mystery, or detection, or thriller, noir is a form made for film. It’s in black and white, pursues good and evil, and features the shadows and fog that make it difficult to tell them apart.
Two of the three films in the series, Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), were written by great stylists — Thornton Wilder and Graham Greene, respectively, were recruited as film writers.
The third, Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), adapts the first of the great British chiller writer Patricia Highsmith’s series of five novels featuring the wily psychopath Thomas Ripley. They are novels of manners centred on a man brilliant at exploiting them.
If noir is a film form above all,
it might be fair to say
it’s what a film would be if it were literature.
The films make style and tone as important as the plot and characters. In traditional noir, the major figures are often just types — crusty detective, femme fatale, bad guys — while its plots are so convoluted they suggest a satire. It has a metatheatrical edge that mocks its own desire for simplicities — “hardboiled” is a wish.
At its best, and certainly in the three films in this series, noir offers a direct reflection of its cultural moment. It explores moral good and evil, and isolates evil. But does not always know what to do with it.
As we watch a strange kind of fascism tighten its grip in America, for many, WWII hovers in the background, a major, if terrifying, point of reference for what is happening. The first two films in this series are bookended by the moral chaos of WWII.
Take Shadow of a Doubt. Hitchcock asked Wilder to write the script after seeing the Pulitzer-winning Our Town. He wanted to make an American film, set in an iconic, idyllic small town of sunshine and light — but he wanted that town to represent American illusion.
The title summons shadows: doubt, dishonesty — the things that creep in with desire.
Charlie, the young heroine, starts the film bored, longing to grow up, to get out, to have more out of life than seems on offer at home. Uncle Charlie appears on a train belching black smoke, evil incarnate. He is so closely twinned with young Charlie, his niece, as to suggest her double. Unbeknownst to her, he is the Merry Widow Murderer, a serial killer who targets women who dare to enjoy life on their own terms.
Charlie’s love for her dashing Uncle dramatizes an inner struggle, over the choices that young women face, and all they stand to lose if they make the daring, courageous ones.
Wilder wrote the script in the five weeks he had left before he left to join the American war effort in Europe. The script clearly reflects his own struggle with courage, idealism, illusion, and despair.
Carol Reed’s The Third Man, which unfolds in a war-destroyed Vienna, continues this examination of the loss of American innocence. The big draw of this film is the way it features its setting, a Vienna divided among four world powers — France, Russia, Britain and America. If Shadow took apart the American small town, The Third Man is about the destruction of an entire world order: democracy, history, law, and, of course, character, are all under siege in a Vienna piled with rubble.
Post-war Vienna has its own currency; you cannot survive there unless you are prepared to deal in the black market to obtain it.
Our man, Holly, arrives to meet an old school friend, envisioning a few more undergraduate larks together. Holly is an American writer of Westerns — a genre known for its simplicity, for sorting good and evil. The inverse of noir.
A running joke pits writers of genre fiction — Graham Greene himself, of course, did not write “high” literature, he wrote spy thrillers — against “real” writers, like Henry James and Virginia Woolf.
The plot, meanwhile, careens on to catastrophe in a way that makes all such distinctions, and the cultures that prided themselves on making them, seem just arcane.
Both films remind of right now, a moment both on the brink of falling into a disaster — and looking ahead to crawling out of one.
And then there’s Ripley, who is perennial, for all times. A recent version of The Talented Mr. Ripley — called simply Ripley — screened on Netflix last year in a gorgeous black and white series. The story tracks a serial killer who exploits, over and over again, our desire to believe in the ascendancy of normal life.
Noir’s double edge assures that normal life will proceed — it is there to be taken advantage of.
The success of the psychopath Ripley — mirrored now in both Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the other, equally rapacious figures lurking behind them — depends on that ascendancy, on the regime of the generally acceptable. You cannot get the one without the other.
That must be the hope in times like these.
Passes and Individual tickets available here.
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