American Noir Film: From ‘The Maltese Falcon’ to ‘Gone Girl’

This perceptive history from Booker (Star Trek), an English professor at the University of Arkansas, traces film noir’s enduring influence on American cinema from its 1940s origins through the present. According to Booker, the genre drew from German expressionism’s “inventive use of light and shadows” to express wartime malaise and disillusionment with the American Dream. Tracing noir’s evolution through exegesis of Double Indemnity, Blue Velvet, Inherent Vice, and other films, Booker argues that 1941’s The Maltese Falcon aimed to rebut “saccharine” standard Hollywood fare by depicting life as a “ruthless dog-eat-dog pursuit of wealth.” The fall of the Motion Picture Production Code in the late ’60s produced a wave of “neo-noir” films (Chinatown and Body Heat principally among them) freed from restrictions on ridiculing the law or showing sympathy with criminals, allowing filmmakers to portray the world as even bleaker and more corrupt than the original noirs had. More recent films create meaning by toying with noir conventions, Booker contends, suggesting that by focusing Gone Girl on a femme fatale who ultimately prevails, director David Fincher implicitly indicts early noirs for their inability to envision a female character’s successful challenge to patriarchy. By putting noirs from across film history in conversation, Booker’s smart commentary sheds light on how the genre has been retooled and repurposed according to changing attitudes. Cinephiles will be enthralled. (Nov.)