... cinema, such as Nick and Nora Charles, Charlie Chan, and Sherlock Holmes paved the way for their successors. With the 1940's arrived the emergence of a new genre of film. You take a man, turn him into some form of a hero, add a femme fatale, stir in a mysterious plot, complete with convolutions and turns ... "Maybe I"ll live so long I"ll forget her. Maybe I"ll die trying." This film, although not one of the most popular films in its genre, is noir at its best. The use of shadowy lighting, head-on camera angles, and plot twists exhibits the style wonderfully. Also, the seemingly ... noir...

• Word Count: 1239
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

... began to evolve that caught on with a public in search of dark thrills and hard bitten heroes. "The Big Sleep" has all the elements that define film noir, it contains the irreverent protagonist, the femme fatale, tough guys and an atmosphere saturated with shadows. Film noir is almost more of a ... mood and an atmosphere than a style or genre, it roots in both German Expressionism and the American hard boiled detective fiction of the 20's and 30's. Informed by the traditions of 30's gangster ... and social consciousness films, writers such as Chandler began to expand on the traditional ...

• Word Count: 727
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: High School

... as scriptwriter, Hitchcock was able to infuse what are, in some ways, characteristically dark stylistic and thematic tra! its with effective local colour, to produce an encyclopaedically playful gallop through "genre cinema".(1) In so doing, he achieved one of the most interesting and detailed portraits of a disappearing small-town American milieu. This complex rendering of what might appear to be simple ... as a subtle and humorous relation to both David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) and Tim Hunter's River's Edge (1987). It is also prescient of the stream of family-obsessed films which de...

• Word Count: 958
• Approx Pages: 4
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate