Noir?

Well, if you look at the lenses, shadows, and angles, they create the same mood as in the other films you mention.

Well, at the time most filmmakers who delivered films that are now labelled 'films noir' were making what used to be called 'suspense melodramas' or simple crime films... the label 'film noir' was applied later on, so there's a lot of flexibility in the types of films that could be called examples of the 'noir' style, and most noir pictures are suspense melodramas of some sort - although the label has come to signify certain visual characteristics (expressionistic use of light and shadow, the use of Dutch angle shots, etc) for many people.

'What does it matter what you say about people?'
Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958).

Interesting timing. The recent (January 09 premier) outstanding PBS documentary "Cinema Exiles" makes the case that the Cinema Noir/ (the French/Euro moniker popularized by Jay Leyda in The Film Til Now) Film Noir (the USC film school label) sub-genre is indeed a post-dictive compilation of the works of Lang, Lubitsch, Wilder and Zinneman--and their American proteges, admirers and imitators. Victor Trivas, who wrote the story for The Stranger with Wells, was also one of the emigres from Nazi Germany--moving first to France and then the U.S. in 1940.

Clearly, the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and M are book-ends of the pre-Hitler German-Austrian-Hungarian masterpieces that these Jewish directors and cinematographers produced in Europe. They introduced techniques of lighting, shot angles, montage, costume, set--that became the trademarks of American masterworks these and others later produced. The emigres arrived in Hollywood beginning in 1933. By the time Wells made Citizen Kane in 1940, their techniques were widely understood by the avant garde, and it was something Wells clearly admired, understood, adopted in Kane and advanced to what some call the epitome of the form in Touch of Evil.

Not only does this film qualify as Noir for its PSYCHOLOGICAL conformity, the mortician-chic couturier and a few choice shots (Loretta Young with her father in the dark at the top of the staircase, Wells sawing the ladder in the clock tower) lock it in from a visual perspective...I think as a piece of cinematography, this is capable of inclusion on a list of Noir, but more for reasons of pedigree than content. I think The Stranger is also all too often overlooked as an example of Wells' best, and definitely worth incorporating in the discussion of Noir.

Sidebar note is the apparent lack of research Trivas and Wells did on the details of the SS hierarchy. It may not yet have been easy in 1946 to identify Reinhard Heydrich--Himmler's amoral deputy ReichsMarshal-- as the convener of the Wannsee conference in 1942, adding texture to Robinson's expose of the Rankin/Kindler character, and Meinike as his faithful,
Eichmann lieutenant. Both the Jewish Agency (which soon after compiled a great deal of data in The Black Book) and the allied War Crimes Commission had published an enormous amount of evidence regarding the first tranche of defendants--but perhaps not quite by 1946. Heydrich had been assassinated during the war-in May of 1942, even before the first shipments of Zyklon B caught up with the first deportations of Moravian Jews to Treblinka and the other prototype camps.

I would include this film on a list of Noir films.

"She was a long, tall, authentic blonde. I loved her as much as I loved my .45..."

This is not a film noir. Welles always shot his movies with film noir lighting techniques, even though they weren't in that genre. (The Magnificent Ambersons is a perfect example.)

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