You know you’ve been Noired when …
*The hero is a lonely middle-aged man with a bad attitude and a drink problem. His only other assets are a hat, a coat, a gun, and the ability to keep on getting up after any number of blows to the head. He has no friends, but many informants.
*Everybody smokes. Continuously. And the smoke is always backlit.
*Everything is murkily underlit, and drenched in shadows which, under the laws of physics as we presently understand them, no conceivable light source could possibly have cast.
*The weather is terrible, and it’s almost always raining, even in Southern California. Male characters favour fedoras (with optional trenchcoats) even on those rare occasions when the sun does consent to shine.
*Beautiful women can’t be trusted. Especially beautiful women with rich, elderly, ailing husbands.
*All institutions are corrupt. The cops have been bought off, usually by somebody very powerful who doesn’t like you. Private eyes will invariably be threatened with the loss of their licenses.
*At some point the hero will hide out in a grubby hotel room, on the run from cops, Mob, or both. It will, naturally, be raining. There will be a neon sign directly outside his window, so that it can flash on and off while he sits there drinking whisky, smoking a cigarette, cleaning his gun and wondering who’ll find him first.
*The only way the viewer knows that the hero is going to survive is that he is narrating the story in voice-over. It is, however, possible that we will find out at the end of the movie that he is either dying with a bullet in him and telling his story to the cops, or in a cell on Death Row confessing to a chaplain.
*The hero is always being set up. If he is a private detective, the setter-up is very possibly his client.
*The atmosphere suggests the injection of German expressionism into American urban life because, thanks to the large numbers of European directors who fled West to escape the Nazis in the ’30s, that’s pretty much the essence of Noir.
*Though ‘Tech Noir’ was the name of the nightclub where Arnold Schwarzenegger first attacks Linda Hamilton in The Terminator, the legit modern tech-noir movies are Blade Runner and the first — only the first! — of Tim Burton’s Batman movies. The latter’s credentials: hats, coats, weather, buildings, camera angles, corrupt cops … and Jack Palance.
Daily Telegraph, 1995
