When in July 1944 Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity hit American cinemas, it was only moderately successful. The movie performed well enough at the box office to be considered reasonably profitable, with estimated earnings between $2.2 and $2.6 million, which was sufficient to return a good profit for Paramount Studios. The film ranked 51st in box […]
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Tag: James M. Cain
Through a Noir Lens: Adapting Film Noir Visual Style by Sheri Chinen Biesen (2024)
Film noir productions generally are associated with dark settings, either because action takes place at night or in unlit rooms, where street light creeps through Venetian blinds and struggles all the way to hit the protagonists on the set. Originally, such an outcome on the set in part was caused by filming conditions during wartime, […]
Perplexing Plots. Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder by David Bordwell (2023)
Generally, storytelling, narratives, modes of presentation and the story behind them, define most works of fiction and movie plots alike. As those techniques changed over the decades (as did audiences who step by step were introduced to this), new and exiting ways of shooting film and presenting characters entered popular forms of entertainment. The simple, […]
The Essence of Film Noir: The Style and Themes of Cinema’s Dark Genre by Diana Royer (2022)
Part of the unique intensity of noir and neo-noir movies is rooted in the combination of masterful scripts, extraordinary directors and the skillful highlighting of the psychological aspects wherever a protagonist needs to take action. But often is sabotaged while trying, to simplify one of many film noir plots. By carefully investigating the genre, several […]
Film Noir by Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer (eds.) (2016)
Recent publications on film noir tell of the lively interest in the style/genre/cycle. And ever since film noir was subject to definition (and analysis) by French critics, the question of what exactly it is, a style, a genre, a cycle, a movement, has not been answered in total. “Film noir,” as reports Homer B. Pettey, […]
Pulp Fiction to Film Noir by William Hare (2012)
With the advent of the Great Depression, Hollywood discovered new characters and fresh labels of films that displayed the effects of the economic struggle on various types of individuals, be it the small-time crook, the innocent and wrongly accused businessman, the farmer or the simple secretary. All of them had to face new obstacles in […]