Certainly we have a femme fatale character. I'll admit that the look of the film isn't noirish though, which is what makes it a precursor as opposed to an example of noir.
Inevitability and lack of choice is NOT a characteristic of "noire." The characters in "noire" may be trapped, but they are because of the choices they have made, not because of choices that were made for them. In "noire," the good make the right choices, the bad the wrong choices.
I don't think so, Most descriptions of noir I've seen talk about how coincidence and fate play more of a role than the choices of the characters.
Here's a site I found pretty easily that mentions fate in film noir:
http://noiresque.com/sandrasite/WIFN.htmIt was a time of fascination with the inner psyche, but an acknowledgement of harsh reality. Film Noir married the two. Petty gangsters, poverty stricken no-hopers forced into a life of crime, good men trying to earn a living in a world set against them, all desperately fought a deadly combination of their pasts, their minds and an even stronger foe, Fate.
Film Noir turns coincidence into fate
Here's a site that talks about how one small misstep leads to a character's downfall. The engineer character in this film makes a small mistake when he claims he saw nobody walk by and that leads to his doomed relationship.
http://www.bighousefilm.com/noir_intro.htmA defining film noir characteristic (notably absent from many pseudo-noirs of modern times) is fatalism. One small misstep, such as a petty crime, minor evasion - even a ‘white lie’ - sends our doomed protagonist, typically an ‘ordinary Joe’ American male, into a quicksand of obliteration made only more intractable by his futile attempts to escape. A ‘spiderweb of deceit’ is how it’s often described. This is what happens in the noir underworld, but it tells us something of ordinary peoples’ attitudes and expectations. That such minor transgressions could lead to such out-of-control punishments suggests an air of hysteria, even moral panic.
What do you think of that? Admittedly, there is some ambiguity in this film about good and evil but I don't think every noir film is as clear cut in that way as you make it out to be.
In any case, I think even the femme fatale alone is enough to make this a precursor.
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13 years ago
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timmy_501
13 years ago
I think that what you say holds true for quite a few noir films but you've gone a step too far in rejecting the entire movement. For example, In a Lonely Place plays with the very convention you're talking about in that the female lead character insists on seeing Dix Steele as either a noble hero or a vicious murderer when the truth is he's somewhere in between-he has a vicious temper but he's also capable of doing good things.
Another example of a noir film with moral complexity is Rififi, which features characters that commit crimes yet also exhibit positive traits and attempt to set things right. In fact, I think some of the characters in Dassin's other films are similarly nuanced but it has been awhile since I've seen them.
Still, the more I think about it the more I come around to your point of view. This is definitely something to think about. Then again, it's often hard to have a lot of character development given the relatively short length of most films, so this may be a criticism which reaches beyond noir.
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activista
9 years ago
I just realized after reading the plot that this was remade into the 1953 film noir HUMAN REMAINS---sounds exactly like it----that was a really good film,too.
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