Recipe for Classic Noir

Classic film noir has many characteristics. The most important of these is the role of the protagonist. In early noir, this role was usually played as a hard-nosed man of the streets who “used his fists as often as his wits.” Other characteristics of film noir are plot twists, razor-sharp dialogue, dark or cynical characters, and moody lighting. Film noir was in its prime from the early 1940’s until the mid-1950’s.

Essentially, film noir was born in 1941 with the release of John Huston’s directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon. This film is widely accepted as the first bona fide film noir. Humphrey Bogart, fresh from playing gangsters in B movies, portrayed private detective Sam Spade, a devil-may-care-cut-him-and

-he-bleeds-ice-water, type of man. Early in the film, after his partner is killed, about which he barely batted an eye, he has the dead man’s desk removed from the office and his name expunged from the door. It’s barely 20 minutes into the movie, and we already see that not only did Spade not particularly like his partner, but he is a cold, hard man.

The femme fatale, played by Mary Astor, pathologically lies to Spade about her reasons for first, wanting to find a certain man, and then her part in the search for the mythical Maltese falcon. There are other characters- a shifty man in a trench coat, a fat, rich man willing to pay through the nose for the falcon, an odd little foreign man carrying a scented handkerchief and two police officers who want answers and are continuously held at bay by Bogart’s quick-witted fabrications. The story shifts in and out of shadowy doorways and dimly lit apartments and coils around these characters and their quest to find the falcon. Although the femme fatale doesn’t entirely bring the downfall of the protagonist Bogart, she does have him doubting both himself and her motives throughout the entire film. He realizes early in the film that she isn’t as blameless as she seems, and he directly tells her this when he says, ‘‘You're good. It's chiefly your eyes, I think--and that throb you get in your voice when you say things like, 'be generous, Mr. Spade.' '' However, as the movie goes on, he seems to trust her, and in his own cynical, pessimistic way, he probably does. But unfortunately, he uncovers that she is the person who killed his partner and even though Spade didn’t like the guy, he feels the need to make up for it. He turns her into the cops and sends her packing at the end, and he is therefore, redeemed in the eyes of the viewer as a hero. This film made B

Some topics in this essay:
Mary Astor, Anthony Anthony, Robert Walker, Sherlock Holmes, Maybe I’ll, Elsa Bannister, Sam Spade, Michael Welles, Confidential Chinatown, Orson Welles, film noir, femme fatale, classic film, private detective, plot twists, maltese falcon, classic film noir, law partner, greed murder,