This year the annual film noir festival Noir City: Chicago (which begins Friday at the Music Box) is going back to basics. All 18 of the selections are American, and all but two were made during the golden era of noir—that is, the dozen or so years following the end of World War II. The programming differs from the past few years, which saw the festival organizers looking for films outside the U.S. and from after the 1950s. These previous Noir City lineups argued that the genre wasn’t defined by just a style or a thematic preoccupation with crime, but rather a pessimistic outlook, which can take root in any place or time. By comparison, this year’s edition focuses on the specific conditions that allowed noir to thrive in the first place.
The lineup also inspires one to ask to what extent film noir was shaped by directors. If there’s a definite auteur behind The Blue Dahlia (1946) or All My Sons (1948), it’s not the director, but the writer. Dahlia is based on the only original screenplay by Raymond Chandler, and the movie features the plot twists, brutality, and defeatist atmosphere one finds in his novels. George Marshall’s direction is generally flat and straightforward, but didn’t stop the great critic Manny Farber from finding a certain dynamism in the film. His writing on The Blue Dahlia is as stylized as any of Chandler’s dialogue. The film, he wrote “is filled as much with Chandler’s smartness (about Los Angeles county, its roads, its lush playgrounds; the looks and manners of high cops and low underworld yeggs; intimate views about gangsters that castrate them, make them weaker but more lovable), as it is with his Adrian-izing of Dashiell Hammett. Chandler makes the mayhem, drinking and talk stylized and arty; never allows his gangsters to lose their suavity, presence of mind, grace, sartorial elegance, wit in every kind of catastrophe; and turns everyone into a sophisticate—even the man in a union suit who operates a cut-throat flophouse.”
