Ebert - Eberts essentials. 27 movies from the dark side

Other Books by Roger Ebert

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Roger Eberts Movie Home Companion (annually 19861993)

Roger Eberts Video Companion (annually 19941998)

Roger Eberts Movie Yearbook (annually 19992007, 20092012)

Questions for the Movie Answer Man

Roger Eberts Book of Film: From Tolstoy to Tarantino,the Finest Writing from a Century of Film

Eberts Bigger Little Movie Glossary

I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie

The Great Movies

The Great Movies II

Your Movie Sucks

Roger Eberts Four-Star Reviews 19672007

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Scorsese by Ebert

Life Itself: A Memoir

A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length

With Daniel Curley

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With Gene Siskel

The Future of the Movies: Interviews with Martin Scorsese,Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas

DVD Commentary Tracks

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Citizen Kane

Dark City

Casablanca

Crumb

Floating Weeds

Other Eberts Essentials

33 Movies to Restore Your Faith in Humanity

25 Movies to Mend a Broken Heart

25 Great French Films

27 Movies from the Dark Side copyright 2012 by Roger Ebert. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.
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The three great Hollywood genres are the western, the musical, and film noir. But hold on a moment. Why does one of the quintessentially American genres have a name in French? When we were making them, Robert Mitchum once told me, we just called them B movies. We were speaking at a tribute at the Virginia Festival of American Film, after a screening of Out of the Past, one of the noir classics included in this little collection.

American crime films of the 1930s and 1940s create great enthusiasm among French movies, and especially that generation of critics who created the auteur theory. One way of describing that theory: the director, not the writer, is the true author of a film, and its quality can be found in its visual strategies more than its words. Out of the Past is a perfectly ordinary pulp story, but it evokes a world in its images. Because of their work in a disreputable genre, such heroes were crowned as Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, John Huston, Otto Preminger, and Billy Wilder.

One of the pleasures of a noir film is the world it summons, usually in black and white, often indicated by images surrounded by shadows, tilt shots, and tough talk. Film noir, I wrote in a review once, often involves the way light falls on wet pavement stones, and how a neon sign glows in a darkened doorway. It is about the attitudes that men strike when they feel in control of a situation, and the way their shoulders slump when someone else takes power. It is about smoking. It is about cleavage. It is about the look on a mans face when someone is about to deliberately break his arm, and he knows it. And about the look on a womans face when she is waiting for a man she thinks she loves, and he is late, and she fears it is because he is dead.

It is also about lonely furnished rooms, and rain, and standing in the window at night looking out into the street, and signaling for someone across a crowded nightclub floor, and about saxophones, which are the instrument of the night. It is about the flat, masked expressions on the faces of bodyguards, and about the face of a man who is consumed by anger. And it is about kissing, and about the look in a womans eyes when she is about to kiss a man for the first time. And it is about high heels, and cleavage. I believe I already mentioned cleavage. Some images recur more naturally than others.

After people see enough movies, they begin to notice that in night scenes it always seems to have just rainedeven in usually dry places. That is the result of early noir cinematographers who found that many scenes were set at night, and pavement at night was extraordinarily hard to photograph. They found, however, if streets were wet down with fire hoses before filming, they would reflect street lamps, headlights, and shop windows, and the result would be beautiful, not murky. Two other things they loved were hats and cigarettes. Hats, on both women and men, introduced angles and shadows into an ordinary close-up. And curling cigarette smoke introduced movement into a static shot.

Sometimes a film can literally be built from such elements and the audience will forgive almost anything else. I draw your attention to Edgar G. Ulmers Detour, which in some senses is the worst film on this list. I think my review adequately explains its shortcomings. It was a product of Hollywoods so-called Poverty Row, low-rent studios specializing in quickie exploitation. The peculiar fascination of Detour is that it works despite its shortcomingsand maybe even because of them, because it is so bluntly what it is, unsoftened by style. At its center is the extraordinary power of Ann Savages performance; women in noir were routinely allowed to be more interesting, more independent, than in other genres. And although Tom Neal is a mediocre actor playing a loser, those are the qualities needed here. Otherwise, it is all lonely bars, phone booths, empty highways, bleak hotel rooms, fate... and noir.

Noir at its heart is a cynical genre. People are weak. They get trapped by their weaknesses. It is about sin and not virtue. Look at the demonstration of that in Billy Wilders Double Indemnity, which along with his Ace in the Hole and Sunset Boulevard is among the greatest of noirs. For an example of noir cinematography at its greatestthe nights, the shadows, the tilt shotsconsider Carol Reeds The Third Man.

The French, feeling they had discovered noir and done Americans the favor of pointing it out, were quick to make their own films in the genre, and their masters are included here: Jacques Becker with Touchez Pas au Grisbi and Le Samourai, and Bob le Flambeur, by Jean-Pierre Melville. And the Japanese have a richness of noir, of which I especially recommend Pale Flower, by Masahiro Shinoda. In such relatively recent films you can see how noir retains its fascination for filmmakers and audiences. For example, After Dark, My Sweet, by James Foley; Blood Simple, by the Coen brothers; and