One pattern we saw in terms of these films being presented to the public was that French noir from the 30s was given some amount of coverage in FRENCH 4 and FRENCH 5 1/2, with the dawn of noir covered in several Simenon adaptations--LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR (1932) and LA TETE D'UN HOMME (1933), along with works from a post-Germany/pre-Hollywood Siodmak--MOLLENARD (1938); Pierre Chenal (the "missing link" in noir's ongoing development in the 30s) with LA MAISON DU MALTAIS (1938); and noir-inflected films from Marcel L'Herbier--LA BONHEUR (1934), and one of the many Russian expatriates who contributed to the rise of noir in France during the 30s, Leonide Moguy, with JE T'ATTENDRAI (1939).
In international noir, we pushed into rare territory from the 1940s to the 1960s in the series that appeared a few months before the thread below, featuring such unusual films as KRAKATIT (1947), SEAGULLS ARE DYING IN THE HARBOR (1955), CASH CALLS HELL (1966) and THE HOUSEMAID (1960), which Eddie Muller later appropriated for his 50s and 60s inflected international noir series in 2020.
There is much, much more to put in front of audiences, and the thrust of this thread is to revisit the fact that noir was operating at 100% of its "aesthetic capacity" in the 1930s. Selling a full-on 1930s series may be up to an organization with greater reach and larger resources such as FNF; unfortunately, there are few indications that such an effort is forthcoming any time soon.
Be that as it many, this thread is still worth a revisit--questions, comments and suggestions are welcome.
On the Night of the Fire (1939)
Posted by Solomon on 9/28/2017, 5:21 am
For some reason and by some means unknown to me, this film has been retitled on IMDb as "The Fugitive".
Summary: Ralph Richardson snags himself in web of criminality
"On the Night of the Fire" (1939) is a splendid and early film noir, bearing an array of the hallmarks of that category. Sir Ralph Richardson (knighted in 1947) is simply terrific as a barber who steals 100 pounds and descends into one serious predicament after another as a consequence. This is a movie that takes a simple premise and explores it in detail. A good many scenes do not advance the action, but instead explore the psychological state of Richardson's journey through his interactions with other people around him who know him. This includes his wife, sister-in-law, customers, neighborhood people, the boy who works for him, and so on. The character Richardson plays is well-written. He shows us a spectrum of human qualities, not at all one-sided, and changing from one minute and one scene to the next. This gives Richardson ample opportunity to show what a truly great actor he was.
Coming in 1939, this film has been rather overlooked as an early noir. When the history of noir is fully examined, there will be found French and British examples occurring in the late 1930s, before the 1940 landmark American example "Stranger on the Third Floor" and the 1941 "I Wake Up Screaming".
Re: On the Night of the Fire (1939)
Posted by Dan Hodges on 9/29/2017, 10:51 am, in reply to "On the Night of the Fire (1939)"
It's a very good film.
Why do you say it's "rather overlooked as an early noir." The understanding of film noir as dating before Stranger and Screaming is already very well established, in the US as well as France and the UK.
Pick up any book with a filmography of British noir and On the Night of the Fire is listed:
John Grant's A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Film Noir
Michael F. Keaney's British Film Noir Guide
Spencer Selby's The Worldwide Tradition of Film Noir
Andrew Spicer's European Film Noir
Re: On the Night of the Fire (1939)
Posted by Solomon on 9/29/2017, 1:14 pm, in reply to "Re: On the Night of the Fire (1939)"
I had in mind the dvd availability status. A search on "On the Night of the Fire" dvd turns up only a few "personal" sources, not the established high quality kinds of sources.
The YouTube print that comes up in a search is quite bad.
Is film noir recognized as being a pre-1940 phenomenon via this pre-1940 film or any other such films so widely as to be "already very well established"?
Among whom? Blackboard members? Critics? Blog writers? Book writers? Film fans?
I'm sure that there is a degree of recognition, but how wide is it actually? I am going by the "popular" side, not the critical/academic side where these things first are discussed and where your observation may be accurate.
The FNF blurb on "What is noir?" doesn't even hint at this. And there are other sites that do not go into the 1930s material or else call it "pre-noir". If we search Google on "when did film noir begin", what pops up first is
"Many of the films during the 1930s and early 1940s were propaganda-type films that were designed to cheer people's bleak outlook during the hard times of the Depression and World War II. It was beginning in the early 1940s, that film noir, such as The Maltese Falcon and Laura, began to appear."
The Wiki article hasn't seen the pre-1940 light yet. Neither has Quora. In fact, site after site continue the same line as if Hollywood and 1940 were a birthdate for noir.
"On the Night of the Fire" is a full-fledged noir and it does appear in critic lists, properly, but does that mean it's recognized or that the true nature of noir development has been recognized and is now well-established? I have my doubts.
Re: On the Night of the Fire (1939)
Posted by Solomon on 9/29/2017, 3:07 pm, in reply to "Re: On the Night of the Fire (1939)"
Here's a nice list someone made of 103 noirs from the 30s, and it includes "On the Night of the Fire", so these movies are getting some recognition in some quarters:
http://www.imdb.com/list/ls073768347/
Re: On the Night of the Fire (1939)
Posted by Don Malcolm on 10/4/2017, 8:22 am, in reply to "Re: On the Night of the Fire (1939)"
The list is indeed nice and shows that at least a few people are beginning to connect those dots, though such remains sporadic and individualized (writers making claims for these films individually but not examining the evidence strongly indicating that noir really began in the early 30s).
The interesting thing about that list is how it bundles pre-code USA with out-and-out noir from France in the early portions of the decade. We don't tend to view those pre-codes as "out-and-out" noir, but some kind of inchoate precursor, while the French films are more and more being seen in such a light--perhaps due to that early flurry of Simenon adaptations which more definitively establish that combination of "hard-boiled plus strangeness" that is a key neon-light signifier for what we term "noir."
When we try to figure why the US crime films post-dating the Production Code (June '34) have been left out of the noir discussion for so long, we run up against the "hard-boiled paradigm" that Dan has taken after on many occasions. That'd be a good topic for someone to explore in greater detail and make some sense of--what is it about these films that seems to be lacking, and is it actually lacking in some way? Or is it just that the original scholars simply failed to dig deep enough into the past before concocting their theories?
The list would suggest that British noir is late to the party aside from the Hitchcock films--that would seem to be borne out by the filmography. My quick count was maybe five non-Hitch Brit films on the list...
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