Geek Syndicate
What’s
Box?
In
The
So why is noir so
worthy of attention? It is almost
counter-intuitive
to like it. Plots are
either hackneyed or
non-existent. They
portray men as violent, weak and/or
easily manipulated
and the women are
scheming liars who
use their feminine
wiles to get what
they want.
There’s something
about the tropes
of noir that when
added to a normal
film, take it to a
new level of enjoyment. It’s like taking a good margherita pizza and
putting the finest
chillies and freshest herbs and cured
Italian ham on top.
Take Kiss Me Deadly
as a prime example. Without the
stylings of noir,
it would be a run
of the mill crime
drama or even
conspiracy thriller
at best. However,
when you look at
the
ingredients,
even if some aren’t
particularly palpable on their own,
they combine into
a fabulous whole.
It opens at night.
A barefoot woman runs down
a road trying to hitch a ride.
She’s almost run over by the
surly Mike Hammer. Then the
credits role.
He’s a violent misogynist.
She’s heading to LA. Yet he
helps her. He’s run off the road
and then she’s tortured and
murdered. She’s connected to
something big. The bad guys
are mysterious. The leader of
the gang is only shown from
the knees down until the final
scene. Hammer happily kills a
bad guy but quickly helps an
old man. He can’t help himself
do the right thing.
The dialogue itself explains
what is so great about noir. A
character talks about a thread
which leads to a string which
leads to a rope, and another
describes it as a riddle without
an answer. There are scenes of
tension, violence and plenty
of shadows. There is a sparkling naturalistic dialogue and
interesting insight, giving the
film more depth than you’d
want to believe. There is the dishevelled and drunken private
eye. There is even the untrustworthy dame, although not a
classically beautiful femme
fatale.
Then, when Hammer eventually finds what the key is for,
the film becomes something
else, something improbable.
And the moral, for there always is one in noir, of this story? Never open the box.
Oh, go on then...
Ian J Simpson
23