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By Martin Keady · January 8, 2024
In a way, film noir is the great anti-genre of cinema, the one type of film that defiantly resists the medium’s tendency towards happy endings and pat conclusions. Even more than horror, film-noir movies are the virus in the cinematic bloodstream, causing disruption, deception, and ultimately death.
This script collection gathers together classic noirs, neo-noirs, and the finest (indeed, perhaps only) example of the third great manifestation of the genre, namely future noir, in which the classic elements of noir cinema were reanimated and reinvigorated for the age of sci-fi cinema. Finally, it includes the screenplay for a film that is not a noir at all, but in its co-opting of distinctly noirish elements, notably the near-impossibility of a happy ending in such an unhappy world (or even universe), it shows just how much those elements have pervaded other genres of cinema.
Double Indemnity might be the greatest of the first wave of film noirs. It was certainly the breakthrough film project for Billy Wilder, who was given a chance to resume the directing career that he had begun in Europe by Ernst Lubitsch. And after a couple of false starts, he hit paydirt with Double Indemnity.
Wilder had worked with his first great co-writer, Charles Brackett, on Ninotchka, but Brackett, a traditional and typically patrician East Coaster who often felt ill at ease in Hollywood, famously felt that the subject matter of Double Indemnity – the duping of an insurance agent by a classic femme fatale to murder her husband for a massive pay-out – was just too tawdry for him to be involved with. Instead, for what was really his major Hollywood debut, Wilder assembled what may have been the greatest screenwriting team ever to work on a movie.
The source novel was written by one of the masters of noir, James M. Cain. But to help him adapt it for the screen, Wilder hired probably the master of noir, namely “The Shakespeare of Crime Fiction”, Raymond Chandler. Together, Wilder and Chandler brilliantly, beautifully, and authentically adapted Cain’s scandalous tale for the big screen. It was an instant classic and became an eternal classic, as the picture that perhaps best embodies one of the most famous definitions of noir and its basic storyline: “A woman with a past meets a man with no future”.
Just as he had worked with Billy Wilder on Double Indemnity, Raymond Chandler worked with Alfred Hitchcock on Hitch’s great (indeed only) noir, Strangers On A Train. And once again, Chandler helped to adapt a murderously good novel by another great crime writer, Patricia Highsmith.
Highsmith was probably the first of the great female noir writers and Strangers On A Train was not only her debut but her breakthrough. Its central, almost crazed, conceit was that two strangers literally meet on a train and one of them (who eventually emerges as a psychopath) offers to “swap murders” with the other so that neither of them can be tracked down. The non-psychopath thinks it is all just a dreadful joke, but when the wife who he wanted rid of (because of her infidelity) is murdered, he realizes that the joke is not just dreadful but deadly, and firmly on him.
Strangers On A Train shows that noir is not just based on male-female relationships, as is often thought to be the case. Instead of a deadly femme fatale taking an unsuspecting man for all he’s got, it is two men who end up ensnaring each other.. It is one of Hitchcock’s great early American films.
Noir never went away completely, but its dark star undoubtedly dimmed in the 1960s. However, at the start of the following decade, there was a resurgence of interest in it, especially among those young directors (or “movie brats” as they were called) who had grown up watching the original “Detective (or Dimwit) and Dame” movies.
The Long Goodbye transplanted the original great literary and cinematic detective, Philip Marlowe, from 1930s LA to 1970s LA, to show how much had changed in California and indeed the world in the intervening four decades.
For what would now be called his rebooting of noir, Altman hired one of the original great noir screenwriters, Leigh Brackett (one of the greatest screenwriters ever), despite the fact that she only ever wrote or co-wrote fewer than a dozen films throughout her long career. Among them was The Big Sleep (1945), the most successful of the early screen adaptations of Chandler novels. And Brackett repeated the trick with The Long Goodbye, brilliantly and often hilariously updating Marlowe for the hippy era. In the process, she became the only great screenwriter to have written both classic noirs and neo-noirs. And she will also return later in this script collection, in the most surprising of circumstances.
Read More: Top 10 Neo-Noirs
If The Long Goodbye was arguably the first great neo-noir, then the greatest neo-noir is undoubtedly Chinatown, which was made the following year. Indeed, so darkly and desperately beautiful is Chinatown that it might be the greatest noir of them all. And its screenplay is an absolute must-read for any screenwriter.
The list of accolades laid at the door of Chinatown is long and varied, ranging from its being largely responsible for 1974 being considered the greatest year in screenwriting ever to its status as Spike Lee’s favorite film. Yet its most extraordinary accolade may just be that it is one of the few films that has had an afterlife that is as cinematic as any movie.
That extraordinary afterlife is set out in Sam Wasson’s book about its making, initial reception, and enduring influence, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood (2020). One of the greatest books about cinema ever written and especially about the New Hollywood of the 1970s, The Big Goodbye shows how “The Fab Four” involved in making Chinatown – Director Roman Polanski, Screenwriter Robert Towne, Star Jack Nicholson and Producer Robert Evans – were all effectively made by the film and then, to a degree at least, unmade by it.
However, for all the glory of the book about the film, it is the film itself that is the greater work of art. Dark, disturbed, and disturbing, Chinatown is an undoubted masterpiece, forensically examining all the dirt and death involved in the creation of LA and indeed the whole genre of noir.
First came film noir, then neo-noir — then… future noir. Blade Runner embodies this third great mutation of the genre. The defining elements of the noir genre – the chiaroscuro lighting, the hardboiled detective, the dangerously seductive femme fatale — were updated to the sci-fi genre in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
Scott had made two sci-fi classics that remain some of the best films he has ever made. The first, of course, was Alien (1979), famously described as “The Rolling Stones to Star Wars’ Beatles”, i.e. a much darker, grimier, and downright nastier addition to the sci-fi genre. However, if Alien displayed quintessential noir elements, Scott went full future-noir with Blade Runner (1982). It was not as immediately commercially successful as Alien had been, but arguably its influence has been even greater. In effect, it created future-noir and if, so far, it is the only really outstanding example of that genre, hopefully, that will change throughout the 21st century.
Joel and Ethan Coen’s film Blood Simple is an unconventional neo-noir — in fact, it revises it completely. The film has all the hallmarks you’d expect to see in this genre, including a murder plot, a love triangle, and many classic character archetypes (hardboiled detective, femme fatale, and the duped man).
However, while traditional noirs from the 40s and 50s feature stylishly polished lawmen and crooks hatching their schemes in dark alleys and cityscapes, Blood Simple subverts film noir setting and character tropes with a story set against a rural Texas backdrop featuring greasy (not slick, mind you), sleazy P.I.s and a simple, even likable femme fatale in Francis McDormand’s character, Abby.
Blood Simple was a film noir movie for the burgeoning independent film crowd who wanted to go to the movies to see something new, raw, and unpolished — something that reflected the lifestyles of moviegoers a little more than the highly-produced thrillers of the original film noir era. Instead of having to relate with the wife of a wealthy oil baron or a fast-talking detective, we can relate with a bartender or an unfulfilled housewife (which is probably closer to reality for most of us).
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The newest film noir movie on the list, The Killer stars Michael Fassbender, who plays a mysterious hitman, methodical and even robotic in the performance of his work. The film features a darkly chilling atmosphere that is not just a trope of the film noir genre but also a trademark of the film’s director, David Fincher.
But perhaps the most interesting noir characteristic found in The Killer is the film’s philosophy. Many film noir movies, especially more contemporary ones, are known for their dark, misanthropic, and nihilistic outlook on life. The bleakness of a morally declining world is captured in the cold, uncaring eyes of protagonists who have given up on trying to find light in the darkness. However, The Killer’s cynical and callous veneer begins to crack when he botches a job and comes home to find his girlfriend has been attacked by assassins, which leads him down a path of finding and killing all who were responsible.
Turns out even a cold-blooded hitman can feel love and empathy after all.
Full disclosure: the final entry in this Noir Script Collection is not the script for a noir film at all. However, because it features so many of the defining elements of noir — above all a shadowy view of the world, if not the entire universe — it demonstrates perfectly how the classic elements of noir have escaped the genre and permeated other genres, including sci-fi. The Empire Strikes Back is the darkest, most powerful, and most memorable Star Wars film of them all, to the extent that it can be thought of as being less Star Wars and more Noir Wars.
In large part, that must be down to the unlikely influence of the aforementioned Leigh Brackett. Having cut her teeth in original noir with The Big Sleep and then enjoyed a spectacular late-career renaissance in neo-noir with The Long Goodbye, she enjoyed arguably the greatest final act of any screenwriter in co-writing The Empire Strikes Back. George Lucas supplied the original storyline and Lawrence Kasdan worked on early drafts, but Brackett brought her uniquely dark and twisted view of the universe to bear on the final script and therefore the final film.
Darth Vader is the biggest, most famous baddy of them all; Luke Skywalker is the hapless “detective” trying to find out the truth about himself (and not liking what he finds); and even Princess Leia is a femme fatale of sorts, entrancing both Luke and Han Solo, even though we eventually learn (through Vader) that this is a love triangle with only two sides.
People often ask why the original Star Wars films are the best and why Empire is the very best of them. Well, that is surely down to the intoxicating elements of noir introduced to it by the great Leigh Brackett, who took George Lucas’s “space soap opera” and transformed it into a noir set in the endless darkness of space.
Read More: The Good Genre Guide: Noir
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