- Detour
Noir City, the Music Box’s annual series of rare and nearly impossible-to-find film noir, is in full sway. (If you haven’t yet, make sure to read J.R. Jones’s rundown from this week’s paper.) This year the program features a selection of foreign titles, a welcome deviation from tradition that further supports the idea that noir wasn’t an exclusively American phenomenon. Among the most distinct film genres, noir isn’t defined in the same manner as the western or the melodrama—there’s something less tangible, more amorphous about noir—which explains why it’s sort of an umbrella category that unites various subgenres and seemingly divergent films. (It’s why such disparate films as They Live by Night and Sweet Smell of Success can both be considered noir.) Below, you can find my five favorite noir films.
- The Big Night (dir. Joseph Losey, 1951) Fresh off its Chicago premiere courtesy of the Northwest Chicago Film Society, Losey’s remake of Fritz Lang’s M (1951) is featured in this year’s Noir City slate. Though you shouldn’t hesitate to see that film (it screens on Thu 9/4 at 5 PM), The Big Night (made in the same year) is the pinnacle of Lang’s brief American period. This has all the makings of a classic noir: it’s stylish, pessimistic, and focused on the inevitability of violence, but it also benefits from Losey’s heightened social awareness. The critical, left-leaning comments on racism and sexism in his work put him on the blacklist, but thankfully, he left behind a powerful (albeit small) body of work that artfully illustrates the postwar, pre-Civil Rights America psyche.
